Scholar Raz Segal recounts the strange experience of being attacked as an antisemite, despite being Jewish himself and studying the Holocaust and other genocides, for the high crime of opposing Israel’s slaughter in Gaza.
Raz Segal: Genocide Denial in Holocaust Studies There is no equivalence between the Holocaust and the Nakba, but both tragedies should be acknowledged and respected. This is the necessary premise for a fruitful memory politics, which requires equality and mutual comprehension. A struggle against antisemitism grounded on the denial of the Nakba and Palestinian suffering is both unethical and ineffective. Enzo Traverso Germany’s Reckoning With the Past Is No Longer a Model What lies at the core of the unconditional support Germany extends to Israel, including in the last sixteen months of Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza? This question remains relevant even if the current cease-fire will bring an end to the genocide: addressing it sheds light on the decades-long process of Israeli settler colonialism that led to the genocide, an ongoing Nakba that continues to unfold regardless of the cease-fire. Indeed, Israel’s attack on Palestinians has not ended, and in the occupied West Bank it has actually escalated since the cease-fire in Gaza began, with deadly attacks by Israeli settlers and the Israeli army. A close partnership between Israeli and German Holocaust scholars offers some troubling answers to this question. In an online event organized by the Holocaust Studies Program at the Israeli Western Galilee College (WGC) on December 19, 2024, three speakers — Alvin Rosenfeld, a professor of English and Jewish Studies at Indiana University; Verena Buser, a German historian who teaches online at the WGC; and Lars Rensmann, a professor of political science at the University of Passau in Germany — attacked Holocaust and genocide studies scholars who have written and talked about Israel’s genocide in Gaza, including me. Though the event was organized in honor of Yehuda Bauer, a founding figure of Holocaust studies who passed away on October 18, 2024, at the age of ninety-eight, the speakers barely mentioned Bauer or his work. Nor did they evaluate the mountain of evidence for the unfolding genocide in Gaza since October 7, 2023. Instead, they opted for outright genocide denial. Buser, for instance, claimed that scholars who characterize Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocide ignore “extensive international criticism” of the validity of Palestinian casualty figures that, she added, “do not distinguish between combatants and civilians.” The truth is that there is broad international consensus that Israel has killed more than 46,000 Palestinians. The actual figures, moreover, are likely far higher: a recent article in the Lancet argues that Israel had killed over 64,000 Palestinians by the end of June 2024, the majority of them noncombatants, including thousands of children. According to Save the Children, “the occupied Palestinian territory is now ranked as the deadliest place in the world for children: about 30% of the 11,300 identified children killed in Gaza [between October 2023 and August 2024] were younger than five.” Israel had killed, in addition, nearly three thousand Palestinian children in Gaza who remained unidentified by the end of August 2024. Buser’s genocide denial extended beyond the typical minimization of the number of victims, which has characterized Holocaust denial as well; she also referred to “reports that show that there is either no hunger [in Gaza] or that it is caused by the logistical challenges of the war.” She pointed to no specific report and gave no specific example of logistical challenges. This is not surprising, for there is also broad international consensus on Israel’s well-documented starvation policies, which Israeli military leaders have discussed openly. Most of the scholars in the sights of the WGC event panelists are Jews, including me, targeted for the way we understand and express our criticism of Israeli mass atrocities through the prism of our Jewish identities. Apparently, we are the wrong kind of Jews. But accusing us of antisemitism for the way we identify as Jews reproduces the antisemitic view that denies plural Jewish identities to cast all Jews as one and the same, “the Jews.” As such, the attacks against Jewish scholars are part of the broader racist worldview of the speakers at the WGC event, aimed primarily at denigrating Palestinians. Most outrageously, the respondent Israeli historian Dan Michman, who serves as head of the International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem, called in none other than Adolf Hitler to lend weight to the speakers’ attacks: Nobody finds a problem with the term Palestinian. . . . But if you go back a century, to Mein Kampf, for instance . . . Hitler says at a certain point that the Zionists want to establish a Palestinian state in order to have a basis for their criminal activities. Now a Palestinian state a century ago was a Jewish state. And the fact is that during the [British] Mandate period in Palestine, the Jewish inhabitants were called Palestinian Jews, the Arabs were Palestinian Arabs. . . . In 1948, Israel was established, and the Palestinian Jews became Israelis, so the term [Palestinian] was left open, and only since the 1950s [do] we start to hear about Palestinians. It seems that Michman aimed to echo Rensmann, who claimed in his talk at the beginning of the event that “the Nazis were openly, aggressively, since their very roots, since Hitler in 1920 . . . openly anti-Zionist and attacked the potential Zionist state.” The logic at work here is that if Hitler was an anti-Zionist, anti-Zionism can only be antisemitism — an assertion that the speakers made again and again. In doing so, they ignore the rich history of anti-Zionist Jews and anti-Zionist Jewish organizations and political parties, as well as the many anti-Zionist Jews and Jewish organizations around the world today. They offer instead a bizarre situation where a German professor claims to determine for Jews the legitimacy or illegitimacy of their Jewish identities, bolstered by an Israeli Holocaust scholar who ends up reproducing the logic of Hitler’s racism. Michman and Rensmann, furthermore, aim their criticism not at the neo-Nazis and related groups again on the rise in Germany and elsewhere but at anti-Zionist Jews. Michman and Rensmann have pushed themselves into this paradoxical corner for a reason. They cannot abide anti-Zionist Jews, including anti-Zionist Jewish scholars of the Holocaust and genocide who dare to argue that Israel’s attack on Gaza since October 2023 fits the crime of genocide in international law. Those Jewish scholars are not alone, however. William Schabas, one of the most important international law experts on genocide who comes from a family of Holocaust survivors, explained in an interview at the end of November 2024 that in Gaza . . . the infrastructure has been massively destroyed, people have been unable to escape — and then there were the awful statements made by [former Israeli defense minister] Yoav Gallant. . . . Statements came from ministers, government spokespersons, and military leaders, all of whom have influence over the troops. They are more frequent and more serious than in any other case before [the International Court of Justice] that I am aware of. . . . Together with the hunger and the lack of access to water and hygiene, the systematic destruction of homes, schools, and hospitals, an image emerges that could be interpreted as being the result of genocidal intent. For Rensmann, however, the “genocide claim [against Israel] is part and parcel of the history of twentieth- and now twenty-first-century antisemitism.” Buser built on Rensmann to wave away the Holocaust and genocide studies scholars, mostly Jews, whose work draws on the vast and growing body of sources on Israel’s genocide in Gaza. These include material from the charge of genocide that South Africa brought against Israel at the International Court of Justice; the many maps, testimonies of Palestinians, aerial photos, and other sources in the reports by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Forensic Architecture, and UN special rapporteur Francesca Albanese on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967; and the thousands of videos proudly uploaded to social media by Israeli soldiers and officers in which they documented their own violence and crimes. Denying this much-documented reality, Buser posits that the Holocaust and genocide studies scholars she aims to discredit use the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism (JDA), which “acquits anti-Zionism and Nazi comparisons of accusations of antisemitism.” The JDA, she continued, therefore allows those scholars to make anti-Zionist statements or suggest historical comparisons that she sees as antisemitic, including, in her words, that “the state of Israel is a white, colonizing, apartheid state that is committing genocide in Gaza.” The JDA indeed determines that “criticizing or opposing Zionism as a form of nationalism” is not antisemitic,” for “in general, the same norms of debate that apply to other states and to other conflicts over national self-determination apply in the case of Israel and Palestine.” In other words, if it is legitimate to criticize any political ideology or policy of a state — a protected constitutional right in the United States — it is also legitimate in the case of Zionism and Israel. The JDA therefore rightly concludes that “even if contentious, it is not antisemitic, in and of itself, to compare Israel with other historical cases, including settler-colonialism or apartheid.” Buser, however, like her fellow panelists in the WGC event, equates anti-Zionism with antisemitism, rendering in her eyes the scholars she targets antisemites. Her slides list the eleven most prominent of them in her view, eight of them Jews, including me. The Idea of the Holocaust’s Uniqueness What to make of this partnership of Israeli and German Holocaust scholars who attack Jews to deny Israeli genocide while also reproducing the eliminatory anti-Palestinian racism driving that genocide? We can begin to unpack this question by remembering that the WGC event aimed to honor Bauer, the Holocaust scholar most associated with the idea that the Holocaust is unique in human history. This idea, which has guided the work of Rosenfeld and Michman as well, has played a foundational role in the politics and societies of both Israel and Germany. The idea of the Holocaust’s uniqueness in human history was facilitated by the formulation of the concept of genocide in the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in 1948, as a result of which what we now call the Holocaust (no one used the term then) was characterized as more terrible than genocide. This hierarchy, which later came to embody the essence of the academic field Holocaust and genocide studies in its title, served a crucial interest for the victors of World War II: it separated Nazi mass violence from the long history of Western colonial genocides and the shorter history of Soviet genocides that preceded it. More immediately, it also deflected attention from the large-scale war crimes of the Western allies and the Soviets during World War II, including the dropping of atomic bombs on Japan by the United States, which genocide scholar Leo Kuper later described in his 1981 book Genocide: Its Political Use in the Twentieth Century as acts of genocide. The shared Soviet-Western interests on the new crime of genocide ended there. In the West, this hierarchy rendered Jews the purest victims, a move enabled by the foundational place of Jews in the Judeo-Christian world. As the late Holocaust historian Alon Confino argued in A World Without Jews, a brilliant book from 2014, the Nazis saw the destruction of Jews precisely in this way, as essential for the annihilation of the Judeo-Christian civilization in order to create a Nazi civilization instead. Holocaust uniqueness thus drew on and reinforced the idea that Jews are a unique people. Uncompromised victimhood then morphed into superior morality and joined a core element of the Zionist project: conflating a people, Jews, with a state, Israel. Thus emerged the common view in Israel and the West about the Israeli army as the most moral army in the world. Accordingly, it became unimaginable that Israel could perpetrate any crime under international law, let alone genocide. This impunity for Israel in the international legal system has blurred the reproduction of exclusionary nationalism and settler colonialism in the Israeli state from its origins in the 1948 Nakba, through the ongoing Nakba in decades of Israeli mass violence against Palestinians, culminating now in Israeli genocide in Gaza. The idea of Holocaust uniqueness has also shaped Germany’s commitment to Israel, what former German chancellor Angela Merkel famously described in a speech in the Israeli Knesset (parliament) in 2008 as Germany’s “reason of state.” The late German Social Democratic politician Rudolf Dressler — who had served as Germany’s ambassador in Israel from 2000 to 2005 — was the first to use this formulation in an essay in 2005, and current German chancellor Olaf Scholz repeated it in his speech in the German parliament on October 12, 2023. Five days later, now in Israel, Scholz added that “Germany’s history and the responsibility it had for the Holocaust requires us to maintain the security and existence of Israel.” But a unique Holocaust also functions in a deeper way in German politics and society. It renders Nazism unique as well and thus disconnects the Nazi period from the rest of German history, both before and after the Holocaust. This magic obscures the connections between Nazism and German settler-colonial genocide against the Herero and Nama in southwest Africa in the early twentieth century. Likewise, exclusionary German nationalism before and after the Nazis, including the contemporary explosion of racism against migrants and refugees, also disappears. At the extreme, such magic legitimizes racism against Palestinians at the very moment that Israel perpetrates genocide against them. The idea of Holocaust uniqueness thus reproduces rather than challenges the exclusionary nationalism and settler colonialism that led to the Holocaust and that continues to structure both the state of the perpetrators and the state of the survivors to this day. The WGC event, then, reflected what Bauer expressed a year before he passed away, in November 2023, in an article in Haaretz. Using colonial terminology, Bauer presented Israel’s attack on Gaza as protecting “a more or less civilized society” against “Hamas barbarism,” calling for “a relentless struggle” between “two world views . . . [that] appeal to different types of the human universe.” The Israeli-German Holocaust studies partnership at the WGC wields precisely this deeply racist worldview, a view that has put Jews in danger in the past and now targets Jews again — in support of Israeli atrocities in Gaza while denying that they constitute genocide. Raz Segal -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#34892): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/34892 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/110854070/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
