05.03.25
Editorial Note
A new report on the conference at Brown University Cogut Institute for the Humanities, titled “Non-Zionist Jewish Traditions,” was published. Maya Rackoff offered her impressions. She is a student at Brown who is proud and open Jewish Zionist and also “deeply sympathetic to the plight of ordinary Palestinians.”
According to Rackoff, during a panel titled “Roundtable: Anti-Zionism, Anti-Semitism and the Stakes of the Debate,” Beshara Doumani, a professor of Palestinian studies at Brown, remarked that “Global Israel” has become “the north star of the rise of fascism all over the world.” Maya noted that the audience responded to this proclamation “with head nods and snaps.” Doumani made another remark in agreement with Adi Ophir, visiting professor of humanities and Middle East studies, asserting that “in order to pursue a liberatory imagination of what it means to be a Jew, the first move is to become an Anti-Zionist.”
Rackoff noted that “the anti-Zionist perspective monopolized the discussions that I attended. The characterization of Zionism as inherently racist and genocidal went unchallenged, creating a hostile environment… This hostility became clear to me during a question I posed about antisemitism. During the same panel, the speakers discussed how the pro-Israel lobby suppresses anti-Zionist speech, especially at universities. While I agree that some Zionist groups mischaracterize any criticism of Israel as antisemitic, I also know that antisemitism is often part and parcel of anti-Zionist activity. In response to the panelists’ points about free speech, I asked: How should administrators engage with the real concerns on behalf of Jewish students that anti-Zionist protests are often entangled with antisemitism? When I finished my question, many in the room laughed, and one of the panelists audibly scoffed.”
Rackoff pointed out that “This conference highlights the ever-deepening polarization surrounding conversations about Zionism and Israel. Professors did not merely criticize the Jewish state, they attacked the founders of Zionism and their adherents as genocidal, Jewish supremacists. The issue with this conference was not that academics spoke vehemently against Zionism but rather that no voices offered opposing perspectives. Brown is not lacking in Zionist professors, particularly in our outstanding Judaic Studies department, yet none of them were present at the event… If our mission is to examine Zionism, non-Zionism and anti-Zionism in a rigorous, academic manner, it is imperative to include professors who do not consider Zionism a fundamentally fascist, genocidal and Jewish supremacist movement, and who are willing to speak to this effect.”
As IAM noted before, Brown University has a serious problem, it recruits anti-Zionists. Last month, Dr. Jack Frank Sigman, an expert in Holocaust and Genocide Studies, wrote a critique titled “Simply Unbelievable: Holocaust Scholar Dr Omer Bartov comparing IDF soldiers to Hitler’s Wehrmacht.” Sigman discussed how Omer Bartov, an expert on the Holocaust at Brown University, asserts that “Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.” This is outrageous, according to Sigman, because in the current Israel-Gaza War, “there is a 99% Gazan civilian survival rate.”
In particular, Sigman discussed Bartov’s August 2024 article, titled “As a former IDF soldier and historian of genocide, I was deeply disturbed by my recent visit to Israel.” Published in the British paper, The Guardian, Bartov portrayed the IDF soldiers as being “the same, ideologically, as the men of Hitler’s army preparing to invade the Soviet Union, betraying the non-aggression pact Nazi Germany signed with the USSR that would eventually result in the deaths of 20-30 million Soviets.” According to Bartov, like Nazi soldiers, IDF soldiers are being fed “propaganda” and “incitement” by the Israeli political and military leaderships.
Responding to Sigman, Luis Fleischman, Professor of Sociology at Palm Beach State College, noted that “Bartov also complains about lack of sympathy with Palestinian victims in Israeli media. He does not mention lack of sympathy with Israeli victims at all among Palestinians. He does not mention the hatred with which young Palestinians have been indoctrinated. Either Bartov is anti-Zionist, or he is blinded by his contempt for the Likud Government. Some Israelis and Jews do not understand the magnitude of cruelty and ruthlessness of our enemies.”
But then, worth noting that Bartov contradicts himself. In his article, “He Meant What He Said,” published in the New Republic, in 2004, Bartov stated that “most explicit and frightening link between Hitler’s anti-Semitism and the contemporary wave of violence, hatred, paranoia, and conspiracy theories can be found, first, in the testimony given by the perpetrators of the September 11 terrorist attacks, and, second, in the official charter of the Palestinian Hamas movement.”
Bartov argued, “The charter of the Hamas movement, issued in 1988 as the fundamental document of this Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, must be read to be believed. It contains, among its fundamentalist Islamic preachings, the most blatant anti-Semitic statements made in a publicly available document since Hitler’s own pronouncements.” Hamas promises that “Israel will rise and will remain erect until Islam eliminates it as it had eliminated its predecessors.” The Islamic Resistance Movement has “raised the banner of Jihad in the face of the oppressors in order to extricate the country and the people from the [oppressors’] desecration, filth and evil.”
Bartov added that in Islamic teachings, the Prophet said “the time will not come until Muslims will fight the Jews (and kill them); until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees, which will cry: O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, come on and kill him!”
According to Bartov, the Hamas charter states that “the so-called peaceful solutions, and the international conferences to resolve the Palestinian problem, are all contrary to the beliefs of the Islamic Resistance Movement. For renouncing any part of Palestine means renouncing part of the religion… The initiatives, proposals, and International Conferences are but a waste of time, an exercise in futility.”
Bartov cited the Hamas charter, stating that Jews “accumulated a huge and influential material wealth… [which] permitted them to take over control of the world media such as news agencies, the press, publication houses, broadcasting and the like. [They also used this] wealth to stir revolutions in various parts of the globe, in order to fulfill their interests and pick the fruits. They stood behind the French and the Communist Revolutions and behind most of the revolutions we hear about here and there. They also used the money to establish clandestine organizations which are spreading around the world, in order to destroy societies and carry out Zionist interests.”
Concerning the Hamas Charter, Bartov stated that “Hitler could not have put it better. So Hitler is dead, but there is a Hitlerite quality to the new anti-Semitism,” Bartov ended his piece by stating, “If a self-proclaimed liberation organization calls for the extermination of the Jewish state, do not pretend that it is calling for anything else.”
But then, in a striking contrast, in an article titled “The Hamas attack and Israel’s War on Gaza: ‘a place where no human being can exist’,” which Bartov published on November 24, 2023, he wrote, “There were those who called the events of 7 Oct a pogrom. This is a false, misleading, and ideologically overdetermined use of the term. The term pogrom was initially applied to attacks on Jewish communities, especially in southern Russia and Ukraine, by incited mobs, sometimes with the support of the authorities. It has since been also used to denote mob attacks on other minorities in other places… Hence using this term for the terrorist attack by Hamas is entirely anachronistic. But the reason it is being employed now has to do with the intentional or subconscious evocation of anti-Jewish violence and specifically of the Holocaust, the very event which led most directly to the establishment of the state of Israel. By saying “pogrom,” one attributes to Hamas, and by extension to all other Palestinian organisations, or even Palestinians in general, an unrelenting antisemitism characterised by a vicious, irrational and murderous predilection to violence, whose only goal is to kill Jews.”
Moreover, Bartov also co-authored “An Open Letter on the Misuse of Holocaust Memory,“ where he stated, “comparisons of the crisis unfolding in Israel-Palestine to Nazism and the Holocaust—above all when they come from political leaders and others who can sway public opinion—are intellectual and moral failings.”
In response, Political Scientist and Historian Matthias Küntzel argued on Bartov, that “20 years later, however, in relation to October 7, Bartov has decided to forget what he once knew.”
As IAM noted, Brown has a policy of hiring anti-Zionist scholars. While some of the others, including Adi Ophir and Ariella Azoulay (who added an Arabic middle name Aysha), Bartov is a real winner among the hires; he is Israeli-American, a historian of the Holocaust, and an IDF veteran. Of course, Bartov flaunts this trifecta whenever he accuses Israel of waging a “genocide war” on the Palestinians in Gaza.
Brown needs to fix its antisemitic problem; hiring a bunch of Israeli delegitimizers that parrot the talking points of Hamas is shameful.
REFERENCES:
Rackoff ’25: Reflections from an anti-Zionist academic echo chamber
By Maya Rackoff
Op-ed Contributor
March 3, 2025 | 11:38pm EST
Last month, I attended the “Non-Zionist Jewish Traditions” conference hosted by the Cogut Institute for the Humanities. The conference consisted of five panels and two roundtable discussions across two days. I attended one each day. While I, unfortunately, did not experience the full program, the combined four hours I spent at the conference provided me with an eye-opening window into the world of anti-Zionist academia and the danger of an echo chamber. I remain convinced that to pursue truth and not ideology, anti-Zionist and Zionist academics must seriously engage with counter-narratives.
Before the conference, I naively believed the event would simply examine the fascinating stories of non-Zionist Jews through history. What I instead saw was an extreme portrayal of Israel as the pinnacle of evil in the world. Though I’ve encountered this position amongst my peers at protests, I have never heard it so explicitly stated by faculty members.
During the final panel titled “Roundtable: Anti-Zionism, Anti-Semitism and the Stakes of the Debate,” Beshara Doumani, a professor of Palestinian studies at Brown, remarked that “Global Israel” has become “the north star of the rise of fascism all over the world.” The room responded to this proclamation with head nods and snaps.
Doumani made another remark that prompted me to whip open my notebook. In agreement with Adi Ophir, visiting professor of humanities and Middle East studies, Doumani asserted “that in order to pursue a liberatory imagination of what it means to be a Jew, the first move is to become an Anti-Zionist,” a questionable characterization from someone who is not themselves Jewish.
I am wary of mischaracterizing this gathering as monolithic, given that the conference was open to everyone — apparently, some attendees identified as liberal Zionists. However, the anti-Zionist perspective monopolized the discussions that I attended. The characterization of Zionism as inherently racist and genocidal went unchallenged, creating a hostile environment for anyone inclined to “own up” to their Zionism, even if it included fierce criticism of contemporary Israeli policy. This hostility became clear to me during a question I posed about antisemitism.
During the same panel, the speakers discussed how the pro-Israel lobby suppresses anti-Zionist speech, especially at universities. While I agree that some Zionist groups mischaracterize any criticism of Israel as antisemitic, I also know that antisemitism is often part and parcel of anti-Zionist activity. In response to the panelists’ points about free speech, I asked: How should administrators engage with the real concerns on behalf of Jewish students that anti-Zionist protests are often entangled with antisemitism? When I finished my question, many in the room laughed, and one of the panelists audibly scoffed.
This conference highlights the ever-deepening polarization surrounding conversations about Zionism and Israel. Professors did not merely criticize the Jewish state, they attacked the founders of Zionism and their adherents as genocidal, Jewish supremacists.
The issue with this conference was not that academics spoke vehemently against Zionism but rather that no voices offered opposing perspectives. Brown is not lacking in Zionist professors, particularly in our outstanding Judaic Studies department, yet none of them were present at the event. Whether their absence is attributable to themselves or that of the conference organizers, I cannot know. But it was an absence that I felt poignantly.
The Cogut Institute received more than 1,500 emails in protest of the conference. Although many Zionist students and alumni pressured the administration to cancel the event, this would have been a mistake. Counteracting extreme distortions of Zionism does not require shutting down conferences. After all, suppressing false and skewed narratives does not eliminate the beliefs underlying them, and restricting the free exchange of ideas contradicts the University’s epistemic mission. An honest pursuit of truth demands that we allow for the expression of ideas that might be perceived by some as uncomfortable or even dangerous.
When I attended the “Non-Zionist Jewish Traditions” conference, I stepped into an echo chamber. Though I do not expect Zionist professors to sway their fellow academics, their mere presence at a conference like this would signify that anti-Zionism is not a mandate within the academy. If our mission is to examine Zionism, non-Zionism and anti-Zionism in a rigorous, academic manner, it is imperative to include professors who do not consider Zionism a fundamentally fascist, genocidal and Jewish supremacist movement, and who are willing to speak to this effect.
I am thankful that those who sought to cancel the conference failed; I am also hopeful that next time around, such gatherings will resemble more of a scholarly dialectic than a party convention.
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Simply Unbelievable: Holocaust Scholar Dr Omer Bartov comparing IDF soldiers to Hitler’s Wehrmacht
Dr. Jack Frank Sigman, Ph.D., Holocaust and Genocide Studies
February 7, 2025
I have to admit, I was shocked when I saw Dr. Bartov’s two interviews with tabloid operations, Democracy Now and Busboys and Poets, wherein he took off the gloves and declared Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. This was the man who had taken on genocide scholar Dr. Martin Shaw in a legendary email debate, later published in The Journal of Genocide Research in 2010, wherein Dr. Bartov defended Israel against the absurd accusation it had committed genocide in 1948.
However, Dr. Bartov, now asserting that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, a war in which there is a 99% Gazan civilian survival rate, is minor when compared to his article published The Guardian in August of 2024 wherein he portrayed the men and women of the IDF as being the same, ideologically, as the men of Hitler’s army preparing to invade the Soviet Union, betraying the non-aggression pact Nazi Germany signed with the USSR that would eventually result in the deaths of 20-30 million Soviets and the murder of over a million Soviet prisoners of war.
Dr. Bartov wrote: “Having internalised certain views of the enemy – the Bolsheviks as Untermenschen; Hamas as human animals – and of the wider population as less than human and undeserving of rights, soldiers observing or perpetrating atrocities tend to ascribe them not to their own military, or to themselves, but to the enemy.” He also quoted a German Nazi soldier writing home, “The German people owe a great debt to our Führer, for had these beasts, who are our enemies here, come to Germany, such murders would have taken place that the world has never seen before.” This is the soldier Dr. Bartov said was like soldiers of the IDF after being fed “propaganda” and “incitement” By Israel’s political and military leadership. It gets worse.
Dr. Bartov continued, “Look at what happened to us in 1918, German soldiers said in 1942, recalling the propagandistic “stab-in-the-back” myth, which attributed Germany’s catastrophic defeat in the first world war to Jewish and communist treason. Look at what happened to us in the Holocaust, when we trusted that others would come to our rescue, IDF troops say in 2024, thereby giving themselves licence for indiscriminate destruction based on a false analogy between Hamas and the Nazis.” Is there really a false analogy between Hamas and Nazis other than the German Nazis’ concern for the safety and well being of its German citizens? Did Dr. Bartov really indicate he thinks the Holocaust was a “propagandistic ‘stab-in-the-back’ myth?” equivalent to just one of the ways the Nazis stoked antisemitism to a fever pitch?
Ilan Pappe made a similar comment in The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine regarding the nascent Israeli government’s need to use propaganda in 1948 in that “the attempt to portray Palestinians, and Arabs in general, as Nazis was a deliberate public relations ploy to ensure that, three years after the Holocaust, Jewish soldiers would not lose heart when ordered to cleanse, kill and destroy other human beings.” Despite Pappe’s compliment of the delicate nature of Jewish soldiers, three short years after the Holocaust, two short years after the subsequent Polish pogroms, and immediately following the “displaced persons” environment in German and Polish concentration camps and British Cyprus, is ridiculous. The Jews had no problem fighting for their freedom, the freedom and safety of their families, and believing the Arab leaders that threatened genocide should the Jews lose.
Ilan Pappe, a longtime critic of Israel, whose critique often borders on antisemitism, has a reputation that makes his criticism expected. On the other hand, Dr. Bartov’s accusations seem ludicrous and traitorous, as unlike Pappe, he is not an Israeli expatriate, nor does he routinely condemn Israel. However, his recent activity in print and in podcasts and Youtube comparing Israeli soldiers to German Nazis and accusing Israel of committing genocide with the flimsiest of evidence is simply unbelievable.
Apologies to Robert Palmer
How can it be permissible
He’s compromised the principle
That kind of hate is mythical
He’s anything but typical
He’s a craze some endorse, he’s a powerful force obliged to conform when there’s no other course
Bartov used to look good to me, but now I find him:
Simply Unbelievable.
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Bartov also complains about lack of sympathy with Palestinian victims in Israeli media. He does not mention lack of sympathy with Israeli victims at all among Palestinians. He does not mention the hatred with which young Palestinians have been indoctrinated. Either Bartov is anti-Zionist, or he is blinded by his contempt for the Likud Government. Some Israelis and Jews do not understand the magnitude of cruelty and ruthlessness of our enemies. I have zero understanding and zero love for people like these. The antisemites then say that the likes of Bartov and Pappe are the good Jews, and we should learn from them. An Argentinean intellectual once brought Spinoza as a good example to me not because of his contribution to universal philosophy but because he challenged the Jewish community, and the “bad” Jews excommunicated him. Try to imagine I began to make distinctions between good Christians and bad Christians, or between good gentiles and bad gentiles by stressing that those who are enemies of Christianity are the good Christians. Likewise with regard to Muslims, Arabs, Indians or any other group.
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Dear colleagues and friends,
In an essay of 2004, renowned historian Omer Bartov described the Charter of Hamas as “the most explicit and frightening link between Hitler’s antisemitism and the contemporary wave of … conspiracy theories”. He emphasizes: “The charter of the Hamas movement … contains … the most blatant antisemitic statements made in a publicly available document since Hitler’s own pronouncements … There is a Hitlerite quality of the new antisemitism.”
20 years later, however, in relation to October 7, Bartov has decided to forget what he once knew. He criticized any attempt to compare Hamas‘ terrorism and the Holocaust as „false, erroneous, and ideologically driven“ and published – together with Christopher R. Browning and others – „An Open Letter on the Misuse of Holocaust Memory“ that calls such comparisons „intellectual and moral failings.“
Shortly afterwards, historians Jeffrey Herf and Norman J.W. Goda published (together with 29 other scholars) „An Open Letter on Hamas, Antisemitism and Holocaust Memory“ that criticized the dogma of discontinuity, i.e. the thesis that there is no connection between Hitler’s hatred of Jews and Islamist hatred of Israel. After a brief reply by Bartov et. al. this discussion fell silent.
My essay “October 7th and the Shoah” aims to continue this debate and, if possible, develop it further. It reports on lines of continuity between the anti-Jewish terror of the Nazis with that of Hamas and discusses what conclusions should be drawn from October 7th for Holocaust education.
I am grateful and pleased that Indiana University’s „Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism“, led by Prof. Alvin Rosenfeld and Prof. Günther Jikeli, have published my text as “ISCA Research Paper 2024-5”. You can find it here:
And also on my homepage:
http://www.matthiaskuentzel.de/contents/october-7th-and-the-shoah
My 35-minutes lecture on “October 7th and the Shoah”, which I gave as part of an ISCA webinar series, can be found here:
Best regards,
Matthias Küntzel
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The Hamas attack and Israel’s War on Gaza: ‘a place where no human being can exist’
By Omer Bartov
24 Nov
Like many other people in Israel and across the world, my first reaction to the attack on 7 Oct was of shock and horror. But that initial reaction was accompanied by rage, not only at the massacre perpetrated by Hamas, but also at those who could have prevented this act of violence, many that preceded it and the brutal retaliation that has come in its wake.
Two months before the attack, several colleagues and I launched a petition titled “The Elephant in the Room.” Signed by close to 3,000 people, many of them distinguished scholars, religious leaders, and public figures, the petition came in response to the protests in Israel against the attempted legal “overhaul” – a governmental coup intended to weaken the judiciary and strengthen the executive branch. The “elephant in the room,” we warned, was the occupation of millions of Palestinians, and the alleged legal reform was being pushed by an extreme right-wing settler faction whose goal was to annex the West Bank. Yet the impressive protest movement that had sprung up in Israel against the judicial coup had almost entirely refused to confront this question.
On 7 Oct, the repressed reality of Palestinians under direct or indirect Israeli rule literally exploded in the country’s face. From this perspective, while I was shocked and horrified by the brutality of the Hamas attack, I was not surprised at all that it occurred. This was an event waiting to happen. If you keep over 2m people under siege for 16 years, cramped in a narrow strip of land, without enough work, proper sanitation, food, water, energy and education, with no hope or future prospects, you cannot but expect outbreaks of ever more desperate and brutal violence.
There were those who called the events of 7 Oct a pogrom. This is a false, misleading, and ideologically overdetermined use of the term. The term pogrom was initially applied to attacks on Jewish communities, especially in southern Russia and Ukraine, by incited mobs, sometimes with the support of the authorities. It has since been also used to denote mob attacks on other minorities in other places. One reason for the birth of Zionism, alongside the rise of ethno-nationalism, was precisely these pogroms, which began in the early 1880s and heralded the first secular settlements in Ottoman Palestine.
Zionism was intended to create a majority Jewish state where pogroms would by definition no longer be possible, since the political, military and police authorities would all be Jewish. Hence using this term for the terrorist attack by Hamas is entirely anachronistic. But the reason it is being employed now has to do with the intentional or subconscious evocation of anti-Jewish violence and specifically of the Holocaust, the very event which led most directly to the establishment of the state of Israel. By saying “pogrom,” one attributes to Hamas, and by extension to all other Palestinian organisations, or even Palestinians in general, an unrelenting antisemitism characterised by a vicious, irrational and murderous predilection to violence, whose only goal is to kill Jews. In other words, according to this logic, there is no room for negotiations with Palestinians. Either they kill us, or we kill them, or at least fence them off behind walls and barbed wire.
Another analogy has been made between the Hamas attack and the one 50 years earlier by the Egyptian and Syrian armies on 6 Oct 1973, in which I served as a soldier. There are similarities and differences between these two events. In both cases Israel was caught unprepared because of a strategic “conception,” according to which it could easily handle military threats without the need for any political and territorial concessions. President Anwar Sadat of Egypt had been trying to persuade Israel to hand back the Sinai Peninsula, captured in 1967, in return for peace. But Israel’s policy, as Defence Minister Moshe Dayan infamously put it at the time, was that “it’s better to keep Sharm el-Sheikh [the southern tip of the peninsula] without peace, than to have peace without Sharm el-Sheikh.” This euphoria of power, born of the stunning victory in the Six Days War, cost the lives of 3,000 Israeli soldiers, some of whom were my classmates.
No settlement with the Palestinians was possible
Similarly, before the Hamas attack, Israeli politicians and generals believed that they could “manage the conflict” with the Palestinians rather than try to resolve it. In Gaza, this would be accomplished by occasionally “mowing the grass,” that is, raining destruction from the air to keep Hamas in its place. Indeed, Netanyahu’s many administrations chose to maintain Hamas just strong enough, and keep the Palestinian authority in the West Bank weak and unpopular enough, so as to be able to argue that no political settlement with the Palestinians was possible; meanwhile settlements kept proliferating in the occupied territories, making any territorial compromise increasingly unfeasible.
In other words, in both cases, violence was the result of a political stalemate chosen by Israel in the belief of having overwhelming military superiority. The main difference between these two events is that in 1973 Israel was attacked by two major armies, complete with armour, artillery and fighter planes, whereas this time it was attacked by insurgents armed only with light weapons and rockets. Unlike in 1973, Israel faces no existential threat from Hamas. But because of its inability to envision a political resolution to the conflict of the sort that it was forced to accept after 1973, it is dragging itself into a regional conflict that may have major ramifications both for its security and for its internal stability.
Israel’s current incursion into Gaza, and the heavy fighting, destruction and population displacement that operation has entailed, may at any point bring about an even greater involvement of Hesbollah in the north than we have seen up to now. This Iran-supported Lebanese Shiite militia is a far more potent military force than Hamas, and is armed with some 150,000 rockets and missiles. Iranian militias in Syria may also get involved, and as we have seen recently, the Yemenite Shiite Houthis, also supported by Iran, have similarly begun engaging Israel with long-range missiles and seizure of a cargo ship.
Meanwhile, in the occupied West Bank, growing settler violence, often backed up by local military units, may ignite another Intifada, thereby accelerating Jewish settler attempts to ethnically cleanse those territories. This, in turn, may lead to growing violence in Israel’s “mixed” cities, where Jewish and Palestinian citizens live side by side, as already happened in May 2021. Israel will thus experience and employ long term violence and destruction on a scale not experienced since 1948, with unpredictable but surely profound regional and internal consequences.
American President Joe Biden has recently made yet another analogy, which Israel was happy to embrace, between the war in Ukraine and the events following 7 Oct. Allegedly, as he suggested, Israel and Ukraine are two democracies that the United States is obliged to support against dark, authoritarian or religiously fanatic forces. In fact, the two situations are reversed. Ukraine, an independent, sovereign, and democratic country, was invaded by its neighbour Russia, an autocratic state with an imperial history and expansionist goals. Conversely, while Israel is a democracy as far as its 7m Jewish citizens are concerned, on the eve of the Hamas attack it was undergoing an attempted judicial coup by its own government, intended to transform it into at best an illiberal democracy on the model of Hungary. Moreover, the country’s 2m Palestinian citizens have never enjoyed full democratic rights. As for the 3m Palestinians living under a 56-year-long Israeli occupation in the West Bank, they have almost no rights at all. And the 2m Palestinians in Gaza have lived under an Israeli siege for more than a decade and a half.
In other words, while parts of Ukraine have been occupied by Russia, Israel has been occupying the West Bank and Gaza since 1967 and has been a full democracy only for Jews since its foundation in 1948 (Palestinian citizens of Israel lived under military rule until 1966, facilitating the takeover by the Israeli authorities of much of their lands). Hence the analogy between the two situations is false. The attack by Hamas, horrifying and barbarous as it was, must be seen as a response to Israel’s policies of occupation and siege, and to the utter refusal for the last couple of decades by Netanyahu’s governments to find a political solution to the conflict. We should be able to condemn Hamas terrorism and to condemn Israeli intransigence and violence vis-à-vis Palestinians at the same time, and to grasp that the former is a response to the latter, even if Hamas, specifically, is an organisation dedicated to the violent replacement of Israel by an Islamic Palestinian regime.
Israel on a precipice of regional conflict
For me, as a historian, it is important to put the current events in the correct historical context and to diagnose as best we can their deeper causes. A misdiagnosis of such causes, or a denial of them altogether, will only make things worse. It would appear that precisely because of this misdiagnosis or denial, Israel is currently balanced on a precipice. The potential for a regional, if not worldwide conflict, is growing. Making things worse is Israel’s forced displacement of over a million civilians—the majority of whom are Palestinian refugees of the 1948 Nakba and their descendants—from their homes in the northern part of Gaza to the southern part, even as the IDF is now reducing much of that northern part to rubble. By most accounts it has already killed 10 times as many Palestinians, including numerous children (who make up 50 per cent of the overall population there), as those killed by Hamas. Most recently, displaced Gazans in the eastern part of the southern Strip have been ordered to move to its western part, adding even more to the congestion. This military policy is creating an untenable humanitarian crisis, which will only worsen over time. The population of Gaza has nowhere to go, and its infrastructure is being demolished.
In justifying these actions, Israeli leaders and generals have made terrifying pronouncements. On 7 Oct, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Gazans would pay a “huge price” for the attack by Hamas, and that the IDF would turn parts of Gaza’s densely populated urban centres “into rubble.” On 28 Oct, he added, citing Deuteronomy, “You must remember what Amalek did to you.” As many Israelis know, in revenge for the attack by Amalek, the Bible calls to “kill alike men and women, babes and sucklings.” Israeli President Yitzhak Herzog condemned all Palestinians in Gaza: “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible. It is not true this rhetoric about civilians not being aware, not involved. It’s absolutely not true.”
Israeli Minister of Energy and Infrastructure Israel Katz similarly stated: “No electrical switch will be turned on, no water hydrant will be opened and no fuel truck will enter, until the abductees return home.” Member of Knesset Ariel Kallner wrote on social media on 7 Oct: “Right now, one goal: Nakba! A Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of ‘48. Nakba in Gaza and Nakba to anyone who dares to join!” No one in the government denounced that statement. Instead, on 11 Nov, security cabinet member and Agriculture Minister Avi Dichter reiterated: “We are now rolling out the Gaza Nakba.”
Israel’s defence minister, Yoav Gallant, stated on 9 Oct: “we are fighting human animals and we will act accordingly,” a statement indicating a dehumanisation of people that has genocidal echoes. He later announced that he had “removed every restriction” on Israeli forces, and that “Gaza won’t return to what it was before. We will eliminate everything.” On 10 Oct, the head of the Israeli army’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), Major General Ghassan Alian, addressed the population of Gaza in Arabic, stating: “Human animals must be treated as such. There will be no electricity and no water, there will only be destruction. You wanted hell, you will get hell.” The same day, Israeli army spokesperson Daniel Hagari announced that in the bombing campaign in Gaza, “the emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy.” Also on 10 Oct, Major General Giora Eiland wrote in the mass circulation daily Yedioth Ahronoth: “The State of Israel has no choice but to turn Gaza into a place that is temporarily or permanently impossible to live in,” adding that “creating a severe humanitarian crisis in Gaza is a necessary means to achieving the goal,” and that “Gaza will become a place where no human being can exist.”
In another article in the same newspaper, on November 19, Eiland wrote: “Israel is not fighting against a terrorist organisation but against the state of Gaza.” Hamas, he argued, “managed to mobilise… the support of most of its state’s inhabitants… with full support of its ideology. In this sense, Gaza is very similar to Nazi Germany.” This led him to conclude that “the fighting should be conducted accordingly.”
To his mind, “the way to win this war faster and at a lower cost to us necessitates the collapse of the systems on the other side, not the killing of more Hamas fighters. The international community warns us of a humanitarian disaster in Gaza and of severe epidemics. We must not be deterred by that.” Indeed, “severe epidemics in the southern Strip will bring victory closer and diminish the number of IDF casualties.” Eiland insisted that “when senior Israeli officials say to the media ‘it’s either us or them,’ we should clarify who ‘they’ are. ‘They’ are not only the armed Hamas fighters but… all the Gazan population that enthusiastically supported Hamas and cheered the atrocities that occurred on 7 Oct.”
The ground is prepared for what may become genocide
Again, no army spokesperson or politician has denounced these genocidal statements. I could quote many more. When asked by Sky News “What about those Palestinians in hospital who are on life support and babies in incubators whose life support and incubator will have to be turned off because the Israelis have cut the power to Gaza?” former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett shouted back: “Are you seriously… asking me about Palestinian civilians? What’s wrong with you? Have you not seen what happened? We’re fighting Nazis.”
In brief, Israeli rhetoric and actions are preparing the ground for what may well become mass killing, ethnic cleansing, and genocide, followed by annexation and settlement of the territory. In that spirit, the Kohelet Policy Forum, an arch-conservative think-tank with deep roots in the United States, which was closely engaged in the judicial overhaul plans launched by Netanyahu’s government in February 2023, is now refashioning itself as part of a supposedly humanitarian effort to “relocate” Palestinian refugees from Gaza to other countries around the world where they will, it suggests, live much better lives, thereby leaving the Gaza Strip to Jewish settlers. In the same spirit, one IDF Captain was filmed on 9 Nov on a beach in Gaza proclaiming to young officers: “We returned, we were expelled from here almost 20 years ago [when Israel unilaterally evacuated its settlements in the Gaza Strip]. We started this battle divided and ended it united. We are fighting for the Land of Israel. This is our land! And that is the victory, to return to our lands.”
There are many other members of the government, the Knesset and the military who would like to see the Palestinian people, as such, disappear from the map and from consciousness. This has not happened yet and can be prevented. The United States is still pushing for a two-state solution. But under the circumstances, it is crucial to keep warning against the potential for genocide before it happens, rather than belatedly condemning it after it has already taken place.
Since the full-scale invasion of Gaza by the IDF, losses among the civilian population have constantly risen. And while the military has initially made faster progress than anticipated, the likelihood of it becoming bogged down in Gaza remains considerable. Hesbollah is using this as an opportunity to intensify its attacks in the north. This may mean that Israel will face not only a military but also a growing economic crisis with hundreds of thousands of men and women in reserve service rather than at their work places, and international support rapidly eroding.
While it is desirable to remove Hamas from Gaza as the political and military hegemon, it is far from certain that Israel will be able to entirely “root it out,” described as the main goal of the war. Hamas is both a militant organisation that uses terror against civilians for political ends, and a social organisation that runs the entire infrastructure of Gaza, from schools to health services to sanitation to law enforcement. But even if Hamas is removed from Gaza as the PLO was removed from Beirut, there is no known plan by the Israeli government as to what would happen next. Who would take over? The Israelis do not want to take care of the territory and even if they try, as they did in the past, they will not be able to do so for long. Egypt does not want to have direct responsibility for the Strip. And the Palestinian Authority has been greatly weakened by Israel and will be seen as its agent if it is brought to Gaza. In brief, Israel seems to have no political plan and a very hazardous military one. It can only blame itself – not least Netanyahu, but also the military leadership – for having arrived at this point.
As the great Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz wrote almost 200 years ago, war is the extension of politics by other means. War without clearly defined political goals will devolve into absolute war, which means a war of destruction and annihilation. In the case of Israel’s invasion of Gaza, a strict adherence by the IDF to the laws and customs of war as defined in the 1949 Geneva Conventions and subsequent protocols would have probably made military progress very difficult. That was not the chosen course, and available evidence indicates that the IDF is in serious breach of these agreements, of which Israel is a signatory. No wonder that it is encountering growing international censure and is rapidly losing support in the United States, a circumstance that is bound to be reflected eventually also in responses and actions by the American administration.
The only way out of this conundrum is for Israel to clearly declare that it has a political end in mind: a peaceful resolution of the conflict with an appropriate and willing Palestinian leadership. Making such a statement would instantaneously transform the situation and open up the way for intermediate steps to be taken on the ground, the first of which would be a halt to the killing and a return of all surviving hostages.
Yet such a policy course by Israel appears highly unlikely now, especially under the current political leadership, which is just as extreme as it is incompetent. At this point, not least because of the heated rhetoric in Israel, even from quite a few left-wing commentators appalled by the massacre of 7 Oct, it is crucial for moral pressure to be brought to bear on Israeli policymakers and the public to desist from ever more actions that are bound to result in war crimes, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing, and even genocide.
In the decades after World War II and the defeat of Nazism and fascism, historians and other intellectuals often berated their predecessors for having lacked the courage to stand up to their governments and popular sentiments and to have failed to warn against what they clearly saw was about to happen. As a historian of the Holocaust, I have called upon the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, and Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, to stand in the forefront of those warning against Israeli breaches of human rights and international law, currently being legitimised by Israeli political and military leaders, talking heads on television and social media. I have urged those who dedicate themselves to researching and commemorating the Holocaust to warn against the dehumanising rhetoric in Israel directed at the population of Gaza that literally calls for its extinction. I have also called upon them to condemn the escalating violence on the West Bank, perpetrated by incited settlers and IDF troops, which is similarly inclining toward ethnic cleansing under the cover of the war in Gaza. But for now, all we hear from these scholars is silence.
It must also be said that the current atmosphere on American campuses regarding the Palestinian question and Israel is another cause for concern. Some self-styled leftists and supporters of Palestine have praised the killings carried out by Hamas and have entirely rejected Israel’s right to defend its citizens by attacking Hamas, which is sheltering among civilians in the densely populated Gaza Strip. Others have shown a remarkable lack of empathy with the hundreds of Jewish victims and hostages. Indeed, condemnations of the Israeli bombing of Gaza often do not even mention the attack of 7 Oct.
Conversely, supporters of Israel, mostly Jews, while they feel deeply betrayed by liberal colleagues who show no sympathy for the victims of 7 Oct and may be ambivalent about the immense destruction being visited by Israeli forces on Gaza, generally refuse to recognise the deeper political causes of this state of affairs. Indeed, they often slip into familiar clichés, all too common in Israel, of Palestinian, Arab and Muslim barbarity, and of eternal and universal antisemitism, which they also detect among some of their own liberal colleagues.
What appears to be lacking is a conversation between these two groups, neither of which are, after all, directly impacted by the violence; instead, they appear to mirror the same inability to communicate that characterizes the region itself. Indeed, the general academic predilection to strike postures of supporting a just cause while paying a minimal price for it, a lamentable type of self-righteousness on the cheap, has reached new heights since the current breakout of violence. Rather than educating their students about the complex realities of the region, some professors appear to incite anger and rage, while the equivocations of university presidents, including my own, afraid to displease their donors or to enrage one side or another among faculty and students, have satisfied no one. It is a sad spectacle.
The beginning of the end of this conflict and the return of politics may actually start with negotiations to free the hostages, as seems to be happening at the moment. The argument that linking military strategy to the hostages would only encourage Hamas and others to keep them, or even to take others, is false on a number of counts. First, it is clear that Hamas wants to exchange hostages for its own prisoners, many of whom are elderly and have been kept in Israeli jails for decades, while others are very young. Second, it is unthinkable that Israel will simply ignore the fate of the hostages, who include elderly and ill people, children and even babies; the delay in negotiations to this point demonstrates a certain callousness in the Israeli government that has characterised it in other spheres as well.
Statements made by some military figures and other observers, that the hostage issue should be addressed only at the end of the war, by which point, of course, most of the hostages would almost certainly be dead, have already had a tremendously demoralising effect on the families of the hostages and the Israeli population as a whole, not least the many families whose sons and daughters would be sent to fight and might be captured. Even for this uniquely heartless and inept government, choosing such a policy can only be described as both inhuman and stupid. Every effort must be made to free the hostages right now. Moreover, such efforts may signal the beginning of negotiations on other aspects of the conflict, rather than a sign of defeat.
Despite the terrifying violence and the destructive intransigence of both sides and their supporters, the objective must be a peace settlement. There are equal numbers of Jews and Palestinians in the territory between the Jordan and the sea. Neither group is going away. They can either keep killing each other or find a way to live together. That must be the goal. All dreams of making the other side disappear or submit to being oppressed from one generation to another will only produce more violence and growing brutalisation of both groups. The very assertion of a will to reach an agreement has the potential to transform the paradigm. The ongoing killing will only make it worse. No internal governmental coup, and no external political deal – such as relations with the Gulf states or peace with Saudi Arabia – will succeed in pushing the need for a political settlement between Palestinians and Israelis under the rug.
For now, all we can do it to plead with our own governments to use this moment of deep crisis and horrifying bloodshed as a lever to compel Israel to end its policy of occupation and oppression of another people and to seek creative solutions for coexistence, be it in two states, one state or a federative structure, that will ensure human dignity, equality and liberty for all.
OMER BARTOV is Co-Chair, Genocide, Holocaust and Disaster Studies, CGC; and author of Genocide, the Holocaust and Israel-Palestine: First-Person History in Times of Crisis.
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A Holocaust Scholar Meets with Israeli Reservists
Omer Bartov on his experience speaking with right-wing students who had just returned from military service in Gaza.
Omer Bartov is one of the preëminent historians of the Third Reich. In the course of his four-decade career, he has written numerous books and articles examining Hitler’s regime, with a specific focus on how Nazi ideology functioned in institutions such as the German Army. Bartov was born in Israel, and served in the military during the country’s war in 1973, against several of its neighbors, including Egypt and Syria. He currently teaches at Brown University.
After the Hamas attacks of October 7th, Israel began its military campaign in the Gaza Strip, where more than thirty-eight thousand Palestinians have been killed. Bartov quickly became a vocal critic of the war: he accused Israel of committing crimes against humanity and raised the question of whether its conduct constituted genocide. I recently called Bartov, because I heard that he had visited Ben-Gurion University, in Beersheba, and met with a number of right-wing students who had returned from military service in Gaza. I wanted to learn about what exactly had occurred, and what he took away from the experience. Our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, is below. In it, we also talk about how he thinks Israeli society is refusing to face up to what’s happening in Gaza, and what he learned talking to former soldiers in the German Army after the Second World War.
Can you tell us about what you were doing at Ben-Gurion University?
A friend and a colleague of mine, a geographer named Oren Yiftachel, who teaches at Ben-Gurion, heard that I was coming to Israel to see my new grandkids, and he said, “Why don’t you come over to Ben-Gurion to give a talk?” He was interested in hearing more about what’s happening on Americancampuses, and all these allegations of antisemitism and the encampments and so forth. So I came, but about a day or two before that he got some information that there would be a protest by local students. I think most of them were from a movement called If You Want, which is a very right-wing student organization that is associated with the minister of national security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, and his party.
I’m assuming that this is because, since October 7th, you’ve criticized the Israeli campaign in Gaza.
Correct. And, of course, these students hadn’t actually read any of this, but there was some kind of analysis that they received that I had signed some petition in which the possibility of genocide was mentioned. And there was a call there on President Biden to reconsider sending arms to Israel.
We informed security at the school, and then we arrived, and there were a few older professors sitting in the hall. Outside the hall, there were a few muscular security guys, and there was a group of students, and they were very excited.
I assume you do not mean excited to hear you speak.
That’s correct. Oren started to introduce the talk, and they began banging on the doors, banging on the walls, shouting that this should not happen at Ben-Gurion University, that it should not be allowed, that they’re being accused of genocide, and that they’re not murderers.
And the security people weren’t doing anything. Subsequently, they told us that they can’t arrest anybody. If we wanted that, we’d have to call the police. Obviously, nobody wanted to call the police, but the protesters were extremely disruptive. It was impossible to do anything. And that lasted for a while. And then Oren suggested, and I certainly agreed, that we ask the students if they want to come in as long as they agreed to actually talk with us. And most of them—I can’t say if it was all of them, but most of them—said, “O.K.,” and they walked in.
There was one who was extremely destructive, was standing at the door, and wouldn’t let anybody close the door. But eventually that fellow was persuaded to leave. It took a while. I mean, the whole thing took about three hours. So we are talking about a lengthy process and with a lot of tension in the air.
Finally, they sat down. But there was no way that you could lecture. They were too excited, too angry. It appeared like they actually wanted to ask questions and also to just say what they think, and so we sat down and we started talking with them, and that was, to me, in retrospect, quite interesting.
What can you tell us about the conversation?
Quite a number of the students, including at least two women, had served in Gaza. They had just come back from service. And my sense was that they felt that they were being accused of all kinds of crimes, and that the accusations were not true, and that they were doing the right thing. And one interesting point was that they shared photographs with me. One of them shared a photograph on his phone where he showed a bunch of Palestinian children, and he said, “Oh, you say that there’s hunger in Gaza. There’s no hunger in Gaza at all. And, look, here are a bunch of Palestinian kids. And we gave them all the food that our unit had.” This, of course, probably meant that the kids were hungry. But he wanted to show that they cared about these children.
Another told a story that, when he was there, he was approached by a girl, obviously a Palestinian girl, whose leg had been severely injured. He didn’t say how, he didn’t give the context, but one can imagine. He said, “And we immediately gave her all the medical help we could. Everything that we needed for our unit was used to take care of her.” So they were trying to say, “We really care about the children and we are not beasts.” But there were these contradictions.
I began talking about the I.D.F.’s use of these giant bombs, and that if you drop a bomb like this to kill some people in a tunnel beneath a school where there are many people sheltered because they were told that they should shelter there, you’re going to kill many of them. And one of them said, “Oh, no, no, no, that’s not at all true. That’s not true. We came to these schools. These schools are full of Hamas people.” And the interesting thing was that there was another fellow sitting there, and he said, “Well, we were also there. We didn’t see so many Hamas people.”
They got angry at me and were saying, “Well, what do you know? You just sit in your air-conditioned room in the United States.” At some point, I said to them, “Actually, I was also a soldier. I was a company commander. I was wounded. It was a different war and a different time, but it’s not like I don’t know anything about this.” That slightly calmed them down.
But then I told them that, for my dissertation, I investigated the crimes of the German Army and that, in subsequent years, I used to go to Germany and lecture about it. And usually the first two or three rows would be filled with Wehrmacht veterans. As I was talking, they would also become very excited. And one of them would get up and say, “Nothing like this happened in my unit.” And another guy would get up and say, “Maybe not in yours. But in mine it did.” So there was some parallel to what I was seeing there.
There was a young woman at Ben-Gurion—she jumped on the stage and started shouting. She was very angry, and said that they were fighting for the people who were murdered on October 7th, that comrades of theirs had been killed and friends of theirs had been killed. And, as she was talking and shouting, she started crying. I, at least, had a distinct feeling—not to excuse what they were doing, but I had a distinct feeling that many of them maybe had P.T.S.D.
You mentioned the contradictions, and one thing that I’ve really noticed just following the news from Israel is what I would characterize as a broad contradiction: Israelis are saying, “We’re not Hamas. We’re a democracy. We respect laws. We’re not terrorists,” and so on and so forth. And, at the same time, “We are fighting a horrible enemy. We have to do what needs to be done. We’re not even going to pretend that we care that much about things like allowing aid for starving civilians.” And various politicians have made really grotesque comments about Palestinians.
So, first of all, yes, I think that’s true. I think you could distill it by pointing out that, on the one hand, people call the I.D.F. the most moral Army in the world. You will actually hear people saying that. And, on the other side, they will say, “Well, Hamas are animals, look what they did to us, and we have to destroy them. They’re using these Palestinians as human shields. And, in any case, these Palestinians supported them. Why did they let them do that? And they were cheering. At the time of October 7th, they were so glad, and therefore they just have to be wiped out. And we don’t want to know too much about how this is being done.”
But there are two other things I would say. Much of this discourse is not by the soldiers. There are people in the media, but they’re not actually there. At Ben-Gurion, I was talking with young men and women who spent months in Gaza, so they see exactly what’s going on and they have to filter it somehow. And they are looking at things through a particular prism. They want to think that they’re doing the right thing. They want to think that it’s not just revenge, and that they’re fighting a just war, but they’re also seeing things and they can’t admit to themselves that they’re seeing. They’re seeing the vast destruction, the suffering there, the lack of food, the numbers of innocents who were killed. They see that and they have to somehow rationalize it. Some of them were rationalizing it by saying, “But we’re actually taking care of them. We care about them. It’s not that we are there to do that. We are there only to kill the Hamas people.”
Another thing I want to say is that it’s very difficult being in Israel right now. It’s a very strange experience. What sort of people do I know in Israel? They’re mostly, so to speak, left, liberal, however we define it. I don’t know too many right-wingers there. But even people on the left—they’re tense just about meeting you. You can feel there’s tension in the air.
And it’s not just me. They know that I’ve written various things, but it’s more that they feel that, because I did not experience it, I may say things that they can’t quite process.
October 7th, you mean?
Yes. They feel so traumatized and so confused that they have no way of speaking about it. They don’t actually want to speak in a reasonable, analytical manner about what happened onOctober 7th. They don’t even want to speak about it at all. In a sense, they feel that your presence as someone who’s come from the outside is destructive to their understanding among themselves—that they have been terribly hurt and that somehow the only thing they can talk about is how they feel and what has happened to their society, what has happened to people they know. People were killed, people were displaced, and they have absolutely no ability to speak about people in Gaza. It’s absolutely striking.I don’t want to say too much about it, but I know a woman, an old friend, who had, in a different context, written and worked on issues of sexual abuse and exploitation and rape. And I met her and she spoke for about two hours with real rage about what she believed was the complete denial of the rape of Jewish women on October 7th. She had no room whatsoever to really think about anything else but that. Of course, violence against women is something that she’d worked on, and feels very strongly about, but it was also a kind of filter. If you say that thousands of kids were also killed since then, it doesn’t get through.
The Israeli media has been broadly very supportive of the war, and there has not been sufficient coverage of the situation in Gaza. I’ve heard lots of people say Israelis aren’t seeing the same war that everyone else is seeing. Did you sense that people you were talking to were having their views shaped by the Israeli media, or is it more that the Israeli media is just a reflection of how people feel?
Look, it’s hard to say, but I think it’s both. I think the media is catering to a particular sentiment in the public, yes. But I also think the media is just not doing its job. It’s not reporting about what’s going on in Gaza. And so people have to watch, say, Al Jazeera. And most people don’t. You can’t actually watch it now in Israel on TV anymore. [Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet voted to ban Al Jazeera broadcasts in Israel after a law passed by the Knesset, in April, gave the government the power to close news outlets that were deemed threats to national security.] You have a bunch of military correspondents on all the major news outlets, and they go all the time to Gaza. They’re attached to various military units, and they speak with generals. And they give you exactly the Army’s version of what’s going on. They rarely ask any critical questions.Now, there are, of course, a lot of people in Israel who are protesting. I went to a protest on a recent Saturday night. There are those who are protesting to change the government. There are those who want to stop the war. There are those who want to exchange the hostages. And so there are protests. I don’t think they’re going to make a difference, but there are protests by different groups—but they’re not really about what’s going on in Gaza. They are about the sense that this government is leading us nowhere (which is, of course, true), and that things can get much worse in a really big hurry in Lebanon. There’s a lot of fear in Israel about that. But there’s no talk about the situation in Gaza, specifically.
To return to the students who told you that they were in Gaza for the right reasons and acting ethically: Did you feel that they were sincere?
First of all, let’s say again that these people I met are not representative, of course, because they are members of a right-wing organization.
One of them said to me, “I’m going to be called up again and I really don’t want to go.” But they feel, first of all, that they’re doing the right thing, and it’s very important for them to stress that. My sense is that, underneath all of that, there was a lingering sense of guilt. These people had just stood outside and shouted that I was a traitor; but, at the same time, they actually wanted to come in and they wanted to talk. I think that they saw a whole lot [in Gaza] that they themselves have not processed. So I don’t think that they’re lying, but I think that, unfortunately, there is a distortion of reality.
They know what they’re seeing, but then they have to interpret it in a way that does not put them in a particularly bad light. And so they can say all kinds of things. They can say, “We took care of them.” They can also say, “But they’re animals.” And they can say, “They all support Hamas.” People who are in that state of mind will say a whole lot of things that are contradictory; I think they believe them, but there’s something underlying all of this, which is that they are in denial. They’re actually denying to themselves, and not just to me, some of what they saw and experienced.
Right, and, just to go back to the contradictions, you said that these students are from a political movement that is aligned with Ben-Gvir. People in that movement talk pretty openly about fighting essentially a religious war and repopulating Gaza with settlers, right?
Yes. I don’t know what the religious practices were for the students there, but they weren’t carrying any signs of religion. I don’t think there was a single one who even had a yarmulke. And they did not use that language. That doesn’t mean that they have not been exposed to it. It doesn’t mean that they don’t go to such rallies. I suspect they do. And it doesn’t mean that they don’t believe in all those things. But it’s curious why they weren’t speaking in that manner with me.
I’ve been saying a lot of very critical things about what Israel is doing in Gaza, and now I’ve met some of the people who are engaged in it. And I think it’s worthwhile trying to think through what this kind of war is doing to a generation of young men and women. It’s not at all to justify what they’re doing. On the contrary, it’s to say that this is a shattering psychological experience. When you’re at a rally and when you are in a battle, shooting a civilian—it’s different.
In 1930, the German Student Union was taken over by the National Socialists. That was three years before Hitler came to power, and German students had endorsed National Socialism. They were doing it, in large part, because of the memory of the First World War: how they lost the war and how they’d been betrayed and stabbed in the back, and all the Jews and the Socialists did not allow the Army to win. And now they were electing, promoting, fighting for someone who promised to make Germany great again. And he did. Germany became powerful, and Germany conquered all of Europe, and Germany killed millions of people. And then it launched a war and it was totally destroyed. And only then these young people started seeing the world through different eyes.
The majority of Jews in Israel right now are right-wing, and they support people like Ben-Gvir and [the finance minister, Bezalel] Smotrich and various other right-wing tendencies. And they are already beginning to pay the price for what they believe in.
How did the conversation end?
It went on for three hours. And, even as we were walking out, they were still talking with me. They were angry. It wasn’t friendly, but they wanted to talk.
I really felt that one problem we have—you can think back to various American wars too, of course—is that you need to talk with soldiers. We don’t do that. We talk about them. In Israel now, everybody’s a hero. Anybody who puts on a uniform or is killed or wounded—they’re a hero. This kind of language was not used to the same degree when I was a soldier. But, at the same time, nobody actually talks to them or listens to them. You just send them to do things, and you don’t want them to tell you exactly what they did, and then you don’t even provide enough psychological help. This will have really severe repercussions in the future. 
Isaac Chotiner is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where he is the principal contributor to Q. & A., a series of interviews with public figures in politics, media, books, business, technology, and more
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https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20240110-lesson-in-genocide-an-israeli-historian-speaks-out-about-gaza-memo-in-conversation-with-omer-bartov/Lesson in Genocide, an Israeli historian speaks out about Gaza: MEMO in Conversation with Omer BartovDoes Israel have a right to use the Holocaust to justify its bombing of Gaza? And how is the global silence towards its crimes hindering the establishment of a Palestinian state and halting Tel Aviv’s plan to annex the occupied territories? Join us as we discuss the ongoing genocide in Gaza ahead of the ICJ hearing.
January 10, 2024 at 4:00 pm
In this week’s MEMO in Conversation we speak to renowned historian Professor Omer Bartov, the author of Genocide, the Holocaust and Israel-Palestine: First-Person History in Times of Crisis, Professor Bartov offers invaluable insights into the ongoing genocide, challenging perspectives on Israel’s actions. We explore pressing questions including the impact of South Africa’s genocide proceedings at the ICJ.
Professor Bartov delves into the exploitation of the Holocaust in justifying policies, the role of international pressure for a just resolution and the potential future for Palestinians amidst annexation and forced displacement. Don’t miss this eye-opening conversation on accountability, power dynamics and the path to ending Israel’s illegal occupation.
Born in Israel and educated at Tel Aviv University and St. Antony’s College, Oxford, Omer Bartov’s early research concerned the Nazi indoctrination of the Wehrmacht and the crimes it committed in World War II. He is Samuel Pisar Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University in the US and has been published numerous times, including Israel-Palestine: Lands and Peoples.
Transcript
Conversation with the Middle East Monitor I spoke to Professor Omer Bartov heis an 0:05 Israeli born historian professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown 0:11 University where he has taught since 2000 Bartov is the author of genocide the 0:18 Holocaust and Israel Palestine first person history in times of 0:23 Crisis during our conversation I asked Professor Bartov to share his insightson 0:29 Israel’s ongoing military operation in Gaza we discuss the recent legal 0:35 action against Israel at the IC filed by South Africa accusing 0:41 Israel of the crime of genocide we I get his views on that 0:48 we talk about the role of the Holocaust in shaping Israel’s policies and thepervasive demonization 0:56 of Palestinians within Israeli society and how that’s fueling the kind of 1:02 radical policies we see in Israel Bartov’s insight into the cost of impunity 1:09 in how to hold Israel accountable for its illegal occupation andsubjugation is also I think worth uh 1:16 listening to and also we spoke about the future how the conflict may end withan 1:25 eye on the future we look at what a positive Judgment at the Isis J could meanfor the Palestinians and Israel uh 1:33 while also considering the need for external pressure to change the 1:39 incentive structures which has allowed Israel to enjoy the level of 1:44 impunity it has and the cost preoccupation that he has enjoyed all thesedecades so I hope you enjoyed the 1:51 conversation and speak to you for another conversation with the Middle EastMonitor welcome to the show and 1:58 thank you for joining us Professor Bartov thank you very much for having meI’ll call you Omer if that’s okay 2:06 yeah please okay Omer so let’s just’s jump straight into your book actually um 2:12 what is your book about I mentioned it [Music] the Holocaust Israel andPalestine 2:19 first person history in times of Crisis what is your book about I think it waspublished last year and what do you 2:26 think are the most valuable insights from your book that can help inform ourunderstanding of what’s happening 2:33 over the last 3 weeks yes sorry three months yeah 2:39 thank you for this question you know the book was written 2:46 before all of this happened but in some ways at least for me it helps me 2:55 understand some of what we are watching right now it does several things he 3:01 tries to talk about the relationship between the Holocaust as a particular 3:07 event and the phenomenon of genocide more generally and we have heard as you 3:12 know now there been a great deal of talk about genocide and a great deal of 3:18 talk about the Holocaust and so what is the relationship between them that’sone discussion another discussion has to do 3:25 with the relationship between Jewish history in Eastern Europe and the 3:31 history of Zionism and of Palestinians in Palestine Israel and how those are 3:38 connected not only historically and not only by analogy but also by the fact 3:44 that many Jews came from Eastern Europe to Palestine and created what becamethe 3:51 state of Israel and were also among other things as a displaced 3:57 population themselves those who displaced others that is those who displacedPalestinians in vast 4:04 numbers in 1948 and finally the book talks about 4:10 what I am very interested in is the question of firsters history that when 4:16 you tell history from the level of individuals when you see it through 4:22 their eyes and when you listen to them carefully and empathize with what theysay whether you agree with them or not 4:29 but you just see them as human beings then you begin to understand histories ofconflict very differently you 4:37 begin to come to I would say a level of empathy that is possibly the first step 4:45 toward some kind of reconciliation so I I’d say that’s the three most importantinsights of that 4:53 book certainly as regards the current conflict I I was looking at a book today 5:01 I actually read it a number of years ago Arab and the Holocaust by a professorfrom s University I think he has since 5:08 retired actar I think his name is and it’s interesting how this book dispels a 5:15 lot of the myths about you know one of the common tropes about the Israeli 5:22 um Zionist narrative is that the Arab helped in the genocide and Holocaust of 5:27 Jews and Netanyahu went as far as to say that you know Hitler did not want to 5:32 kill the Jews it was Husseini who convinced him which was one of the mostshocking thing You’ ever hear from an 5:38 Israeli Prime Minister but there we go he said he said that and the book basicallyshows how the Arabs were very 5:47 sympathetic towards the plight of the Jews in Europe he covered all the majornewspapers all the Arab leaders by Li 5:54 they were all very sympathetic and hostile to Nazi Germany but that doesn’treally get shown within the 6:01 Israeli narrative so I was wondering is that story never told and are we it are 6:08 Israelis focused on simply one aspect of the genocide or Holocaust which isthat 6:13 the whole world’s kind of came together to you know kill the Jews or 6:21 align annihilate the Jews is that a story that’s is a beneficial for going 6:28 forward is that in in your point of view are we telling this wrong story of theHolocaust so to 6:35 speak you know that’s a very good question and it’s a very complicated questionthe I think that for many 6:44 Israelis the Holocaust is the main justification for the state of Israel uh 6:52 they understand the history of the Holocaust is one in which there were 6:58 Jews persecuted in Europe who were trying to get out and nobody would let themin so that sense of betrayal the 7:07 sense that when you don’t have your own country and you’re a minority in acontinent that is trying to either to 7:17 exterminate you or just to get rid of you in one way or another you’re notwanted but you cannot go anywhere else 7:24 uh that is very deep within an Israeli Collective sense of history of memory 7:32 and of identity and it’s not entirely false of course and so Israel sees 7:37 itself and presents itself as the safe haven for Jews soafter the 7:43 establishment of the state if Jews are persecuted anywhere they could alwayscome to Israel be protected by that 7:50 country so that’s one side of it the other side of it is that I would say 7:57 since especially the 1980s the Holocaust has become a kind of 8:02 instrument for Israeli politicians particularly on the right as a 8:09 toolto ward off any criticism of Israel claiming that any criticism of 8:18 Israeli policies policies of settlement of expansion of Oppression is by 8:24 definition anti-semitic and that any threat to is isi security be it the 8:32 first or the second or any other war is a threat to the existence of the very 8:38 state that is it is a threat of potential Holocaust and if you think 8:45 about your own history your own reality through that kind of prism you are 8:52 imprisoned by it that is you see your enemies not as people that you can 8:58 negotiate with that you can compromise with but rather as potential Genocidethere 9:03 as potential people who are commit genocide against you and therefore the 9:09 only way to deal with them is to fight them off or to kill them and that has 9:15 made I’d say the The View by Israelis of their own reality greatly 9:22 distorted and it has had since October 7th it has come up often that 9:30 sense that we have to do everything to protect ourselves from massacres and 9:35 therefore we have licensed to do whatever we need as we Define it and 9:41 nobody can tell us how to behave and we saw that playing out here in the UK aswell a number of 9:49 pro-israeli commentators were sympathetic to Israel like Douglas Murray they’vegone to Great Lengths to 9:56 make the argument that Hamas is worsethan the Nazis that’s another form of 10:01 genocide Denial in my point of view when you say something like that that Hamasis worse than Hitler to which kind of 10:09 as you said gives license to do and say anything you want With the Enemy 10:14 but on that conflict itself do you think I know you take slightly differentview to some of the other people I interviewed like rev seagull 10:24 who said that what we’re seeing in Gaza is a textbook case of genocide andother have mentioned that as well I 10:30 think you take a slightly different view to that so can you explain your viewon that and is it accurate to describe 10:37 what’s happening in Gaza what’s been happening over the last three months is 10:42 genocide look again this is a very complicated issue and I’m trying 10:49 to understand what is going on the ground as things evolve over time 10:56 based on whatever information we have and information is incomplete of course 11:02 um I warned already in early November that Israeli actions in Gaza could 11:09 develop into genocide I think that if we look atat what has happened since wecan 11:17 reach some conclusions they are of course you know dependent on facts 11:24 coming out but my sense is the following that the kind of policy that 11:30 the or tactics that the Israeli that the IDF has been using have caused uh 11:39 major destruction in Gaza and particularly Northern Gaza much of which has been 11:45 flattened has brought about enormous population displacement uh 11:53 that is about 85% of the population that’s been displaced and has beenconcentrated in a very small more part 11:59 of Gaza now this is not a coincidence this is part of a policy of a tactics by 12:06 the Israeli Army and that can be interpreted in two different ways it can 12:11 be interpreted as so to speak humanitarian actions that is you remove 12:17 the population from areas of operations of military operations so as to protect 12:24 them and that’s what the Israeli Army is claiming it is doing or or you can 12:29 say it is a policy of intentional displacement and destruction of the 12:34 areas from which the population is being displaced with the goal of neverletting them back in and potentially removing 12:42 them entirely from the Gaza Strip or from large parts of it which appears to 12:48 be what is actually going on so what does that mean in terms ofyou know 12:54 crime International crimes or crimes under international law I think there’s 12:59 good evidence that Israel has been involved the IDF has been involved in warcrimes and because of the very high 13:06 numbers of civilians killed it’s now around 23,000 at least 2third of whom are 13:14 civilians half of whom are children that it’s also crimes against 13:19 humanity whether it’s genocide as far as I can say right now it depends on the 13:27 next few weeks because if this policy that is carried out right now by theIsraeli military 13:34 and the state continues it means that there’s now a humanitarian crisis inthese camps where 13:41 now internal refugees internally displaced people find themselves the deathrate 13:48 may rise very quickly it is of course already very high and there may be anattempt to push them out that will look 13:55 like ethnic cleansing or forcible remove displacement of population which 14:02 comes under could come under crimes against humanity and or 14:08 genocide if that is stopped and things are 14:13 reversed which I don’t predict happening but may happen because of externalpressures especially 14:20 by the us then things will look different so I think we are right now 14:26 right on the verge of of this becoming a clear policy of ethnic 14:33 cleansing which can result in genocide and of course we know that 14:40 this is now has been handed over to the International court of justice and 14:48 will be deliberated by a panel of Judges there which may give us also some more 14:54 clarity at least as to how a group of distinguish jurist understand 15:02 this yeah we we we’ll speak about that the icj case that’s been lodged by 15:07 South Africa I mean it is interesting what you said I mean in 3 weeks time it’be more clarity I mean I myself at the 15:15 beginning I I observed my My Views as well of course we very critical of 15:21 Israel and I saw how my perspectives have changed based on what happened on theground I I did not envisage this 15:28 level of bombardment and to me it seemed like it was a clear intent to 15:35 ethnically cleanse or even commit genocide right from the beginning based onwhat the Israeli leaders were 15:40 saying and some of the figures that came out and I did a historical comparisonI found it quite shocking one of them 15:47 being you know Palestinians are being killed at a higher rate by the Israelis inthe so-called targeted 15:54 bombing of Gaza then Brits that were being killed by Germany during the um 16:00 during Nazi bombing and I found that quite shocking at that time in the eightmonths of bombing by the luta German 16:06 luta 40,000 civilians were killed during that war in eight months and if 16:14 Israel was to continue its current rate of Destruction on Gaza there would be 16:20 more than 880,000 Palestinians killed so even though Israel claims to be 16:27 carrying out its bombing a targeted way whereas the German bombing was seen asbeing indiscriminate so I I found those 16:33 kind of figures to be wow quite shocking and it kind of changed my view prettyquickly that let me say just you 16:40 know I mean I think that there’s no question by now that Israeli bombing 16:46 has been indiscriminate and not only indiscriminate but in quite a number 16:51 of cases intentional bombing of 16:57 civilians and intentional destruction of Civilian structures including schoolsand hospitals and so forth I don’t think 17:04 there’s any question about that the problem with the definition of 17:10 genocide is that it’s not a question of numbers now numbers of course matter 17:17 they matter a great deal and one should not you know dismiss that but 17:23 it’s not necessarily a matter of numbers the the Allied bombing of German 17:29 in World War II not the German bombingof Britain but the British and American bombing of Germany of Open 17:34 Cities intentional bombing of civilians killed about 600,000 German civilians butit would 17:43 probably not come under genocide because there was no intention to destroy theGerman people as such which is part of 17:51 the definition of genocide cause to show an intention to destroy a group assuch 17:58 it is possible that you could show now that what Israel is doing in Gaza 18:05 is the intention is already been expressed is an attempt to destroy thePalestinian people as such in whole or 18:12 in part so at least it’s part in Gaza if that can be shown then this would be 18:18 genocide and there have been statements by Israeli politicians and by 18:24 Israeli generals indicating that but that’s a difficult thing to show because 18:31 you can claim that many of these statements were done In the Heat of the Momentthey are for propaganda purposes 18:37 but the actual policies not that so unfortunately even if the numbers go up 18:45 that is not what would necessarily mean that it’s genocide but I think that we 18:51 are very close to that because the policy appears increasingly to be a 18:57 policy of removal of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip and that could come 19:02 under genocide so talking about the I I was wondering if I can get your viewson 19:09 that the international court of justice case lodged by South Africa accusing 19:14 Israel of genocide and basically trying to get restraining order on Israel andtrying 19:22 to stop the current campaign as seems to be as you said it’s not a slum dunk 19:28 because there are 15 judges not all willbe U judging on the basis of the 19:33 Merit of the case there’ll be lots of political calculations there so just 19:38 give us your thought on that do you think this we could see or we could expecta positive judgment by the icj 19:45 judges in favor of Palestinians given difficulties you just mentioned and alsogiven how the judges are 19:54 representing their own specific countries and the politics of their country Ican’t can’t expect for example a German judge to judge in favor of 20:02 the Palestinian and say there is genocide or an American judge to do the sameso given the proportion of the 20:08 judges and what we know of the case what are your thoughts on that well listenI mean I’ve 20:17 thought a fair amount about this and I think first of all the move by South 20:22 Africa to file this with the icj was very important and as you know very 20:29 quite unique I mean this is a very rare case and there are two 20:38 levels to this one is whether the icj would umpronounce an injunction 20:46 on Israel to stop military action while it deliberates this question of jde 20:52 because the Deliberations themselves could take years but the call to stopIsrael 20:59 from continuing its campaign in Gaza and potentially from leaving Gaza that 21:06 can come quickly now the icj has no way to 21:13 enforce that so this would go to the security Council and the security 21:19 Council it is possible although not certain that the US would then veto this 21:27 uh however the very fact that you have the icj deliberating this question and 21:34 the potential that it would then that there would be a a call by the icj for a 21:40 at least a temporary h on operations and that it would go to the securityCouncil 21:46 all of that has major implications for what is going on it’s I think one 21:54 of the most important things is that Israel is highly dependent on both 21:59 diplomatic cover by Israel and other count by the US and other countries and 22:04 Military supplies and a huge amount of supplies streaming from the United 22:09 States to Israel many countries have their own laws that say you cannot 22:17 Supply arms to countries that are suspect of breaches of Human Rights uh 22:23 and Israel would be at least a suspect of that because would have been uh 22:29 lodged with the icj and therefore this this can have both a sort of in the 22:35 international arena in general and specifically regarding assistance to Israelthis can 22:43 and probably will have a major impact on whatever happens on the ground so 22:50 I think while it also shows that you know International humanitarian law is 22:56 international and therefore States decide and States decide according to theirown national interests the fact 23:04 that it has come to that will already have an impact will it change things 23:10 altogether I don’t know but I can tell you that in Israel people who 23:16 are in the military and in various politicians are very worried about this 23:22 and one indication of it is that Netanyahu has a point prime minister 23:28 nany has appointed Aharon Barak who he saw as his enemy the former Chief 23:35 Justice in the Supreme Court as the judge who would be the Israeli judge on 23:40 the icj according to the icj the country lodging the complaint that the country 23:46 that the complaint is against can have a judge of their own there and Barakwill be the Israeli judge there that means 23:53 that netan is very worried about what will become of that so I think it is an 23:59 important move it won’t be a game Cher but it will havean effect and 24:05 probably a substantial effect Yeah you mentioned it yah and a lot of 24:12 times it’s we’ve seen politicians here in in UK for 24:19 example it’s easy to blame Netanyahu from where I’m sitting and we know 24:26 that he had has been the longest serving Israeli Prime Minister and recentpolls 24:32 I’ve seen a number of polls coming out showing that israeli’s themselves theythink that the government is not 24:39 going hard enough on the Palestinians on Gaza so I think the question I’m 24:45 asking is going back to what we started off with the memory of the Holocaustand seeing your enemy constantly as the 24:53 Nazis is there something in the psyche which makes Israel feel that or 25:01 there’s a real ethos within Israel that sees enemies as something that 25:06 needs to be obliterated destroyed or at least section or 25:12 factions within the Israeli Society to view military conflict in such a 25:18 way because polls are say suggesting that Netanyahu is not going far 25:23 enough he should be more aggressive towards the Palestinians so it’s 25:29 doesn’t seem to be simply a case on Netanyahu’s problem Netanyahu is doing it’ssomething which is something 25:34 more ingrained within sections of Israeli Society so look I mean I think youcan 25:41 uh talk about this on three levels the first is we do have to remember 25:47 that what happened on October 7th was totally shocking to isra society uh 25:53 nothing like that had happened before not even in 1948 which Israeli certainly 25:59 remember as a kind of War of existence that close to a thousand 26:04 civilians were killed murdered old people babies children there were many 26:12 documented rapes and the Israeli Army didn’t show up for hours and hours and 26:18 hours took eight hours nine hours 12 hours that created both a sense of 26:26 deep insecurity that Hamas militants could just 26:31 walk into the country and take over an entire part of Southern Israel with 26:37 the IDF incapable of responding in time and a powerful urge for Revenge 26:46 revenge is never a good motivation foranything not for personal 26:52 Behavior not for war and not for politics but it does exist and an 26:58 urge by the IDF which let’s be clear screwed up big time to show 27:07 that it can win over again the Israeli public and its own honor and 27:13 there’s a lot of talk about honor there so that’s one thing and we have toremember that that’s very different from 27:19 anything else and the response to it therefore has also been very different thesecond thing is the issue with Nan n 27:28 is probably the most unpopular man in Israel today if there were electionstoday he he’s he would probably get 15% 27:36 of the vote or something like that if he’s lucky and not only because of 27:41 what happened on October 7th but because of what happened before October 7th uh 27:46 where he tried to carry out a Judicial coup to basically weaken the Supreme 27:52 Court and to expand the power of the executive meaning himself because 27:57 because he’s indicted and he’s known to be deeply involved in corruption and 28:02 because of the incredible incompetance of the Israeli government after October 28:08 7thmuch of you know about 150,000 Israeli citizens have been displaced in 28:15 the north and in the south on the Lebanon border and on the Gaza border and whowho is taking care of those 28:21 displaced people it’s mostly volunteers who were those who were protestingagainst Netanyahu before October 7 28:29 because the government can’t get its act together so Netanyahu is highlyunpopular 28:34 now the last issue I think yes I think right now in 28:40 Israel including in those who perceive themselves as being more liberal more inthe left there is a real strong 28:51 urge if not to for Revenge certainly as Israeli see it to destroy 28:58 whatever that means and whatever it takes and a kind of indifference to 29:05 what is happening in Gaza much of which is not being reported on the Israelimedia you’d be hard put to find any 29:11 actual reports on Israeli media about the mass killing of civilians in Gaza 29:16 they’re reporting about heroic soldiers but not about what they’re actuallydoing 29:22 there I think that is I mean to me of course it’s it’s 29:28 deeply saddening to see this but I think that that can and probably is 29:35 already changing and the reason it’s changing is that it it is becoming clear 29:42 that the IDF did not only have a fiasco on October 7th it’s 29:49 actual military operation it’s attempt to win over now a sense that it can 29:55 do things well has not worked the operation itself from the military point 30:02 of view from the point of view of how the Israeli government and the IDF definedtheir goals to release the 30:10 hostages and there’s still 136 hostages being held now for three months byHamas 30:17 uh has failed and the their the second stated goal of destroying 30:25 Hamas as a political military organization has also failed they’re still fightingthem and the 30:32 number of Israeli casualties is growing so I think that if the current 30:39 political leadership and one has to understand nany wants the war to continueas long as the war continues he 30:46 stays in power so he is a main obstacle not because Israelis like him or not 30:53 because Israelis don’t want revenge but he is a main obstacle because he wantsthe war to go on he and he doesn’t care 31:01 about the hostages or anything he wants this to continue and the war now may 31:06 well evolve into a war also in Lebanon and also with Iranian militias in Syria 31:12 and also with the Huthis it can become you know a regional War he doesn’t care 31:17 because he can stay in power if nany is removed and Israel has a more rational 31:23 it it won’t be a liberal government but a more rational government actuallylooks to the interest of the state of 31:31 Israel then that war will change its nature and the Israeli public will be 31:37 happy about it but right now under his leadership I think this kind of constant 31:44 incitement from the government itself is only making things worse so I 31:51 think you know I’m not optimistic I don’t know what the 31:57 mechanism will be to change the government but from my point of view if 32:03 major International pressure particularly American pressure is put on theIsraeli government it can eventually 32:10 also bring about the downfall of the Netanyahu 32:15 administration I think that’s what the Americans would want and I think netan 32:21 would not be able to make concessions which the Americans should insist on 32:26 without losing his Coalition going back to October 7th what 32:32 kind of what level of scrutiny from your course you follow the Israeli press 32:37 quite closely and you before October 7 you headed a group 32:44 to sign a letter public letter condemning Netanyahu’s attempt to overhaul theJudiciary and in that you 32:54 described Israel as being practicing the crime of aparthide and ethic cleansing 32:59 and you got a lot of support for that letter so there is of course 33:05 resistance and opposition to Netanyahu what kind of resistance and 33:10 scrutiny are we seeing on October 7 itself because one of the questions 33:16 lot of people are asking is how can Israel Army have taken 6 hours to respondto something like that 33:23 so are there more probing questions like that and also the Israeli allegations 33:28 the Israeli soldiers themselves shot down and killed Israelis in in some of 33:34 the settlements is that something that is being asked these kind of 33:40 questions probing questions within the society at the moment yes there are andagain you know 33:46 you you touching on two on two issues one is that you know a number of 33:54 colleagues and myself issued that statement on August 4th so two months 34:00 before the Hamas attack and what we said we see the elephant 34:08 in the room and what we said was that the attempted judicial 34:14 overhaul meaning judicial coup by the government was not simply to in order to 34:20 increase the power of the executive andweaken the Judiciary but actually it was about the occupation 34:29 that the occupation was the elephant in the room and most of the protest inIsrael at the time was not refused to 34:35 talk about that those who were protesting against the judicial overhaul did notwant to talk about the 34:41 occupation they said that’s another issue and we said no it’s not another issueit is the issue that the 34:48 government under nany and with the more even more radical settler ministers uh 34:54 to his right want to enhance the settlement in the West Bank want to 35:01 ethnically cleanse as much as they can the West Bank and want to Annex largeparts of the West Bank and that’s why 35:08 they want to remove any judicial oversight of these policies 35:13 that is what it was about and at the core of everything we are seeing now is 35:19 the occupation that is the main engine of everything we are seeing now without 35:25 dealing with that issue nothing can be resolved so that’s crucial to 35:31 understand now is the scrutiny of October 7th in Israel 35:37 there are two sides of it on the one hand October 7th is constantly 35:42 being recycled in the Israeli media every day there are different stories of 35:47 what happened there and that so triggers all the emotions in the Israeli public 35:53 about the horrors that occur there and that in a sense gives more sort 36:00 of time for operations in Gaza because it’s saying look what they did to us buton the other hand more and more 36:07 information is coming out about how badly the Army conducted itself how 36:13 unprepared he was there were of course many you know individual cases of heroic 36:20 actions and so forth as they’re reported in the Israeli media but also several 36:26 first of all the entire framework of the lack of response and secondly all kindof particular actions one of them is 36:33 an action that happened in a kibutz where I actually have relatives myself inkibutz 36:39 Beeri a tank was ordered by a commander by a general to 36:46 fire probably at least two tank shells at a house where there were both 36:52 Hamas militants and hostages and that now is known as has been reported theremay have been 36:58 some other cases I would say that shows incompetence a lack of preparation this 37:05 was reported also in the New York Times in a very important sort ofinvestigative journalism that they did I 37:11 don’t think it takes Hamas of the hook though and I don’t think that Hamas willbe taken off the hook and just as I’d 37:19 like to see Israeli generals and other officers and politicians put in 37:24 front of a an international Court I would like to see it’s unlikely that 37:29 it’ll happen some of these Hamas militants who raped and mutilated uh 37:35 also charged with crimes against humanity and war crimes but again we 37:40 have to think about the context of this to me the context is important it does 37:46 not condone what Hamas did but it’s important to understand the context of thisis that Gaza had been under Israeli 37:54 siege for 16 years that people are being brutalized by The Siege that Hamas inits own wayU 38:05 prepared to make a statement so that the Palestinian issue would not be swept 38:11 under the rug and it succeeded in doing that it succeeded in bringing back the 38:16 Palestinian issue to the four at a huge cost enormous cost to everyone but 38:22 especially to Palestinian civilians in Gaza and that leads us neatly to a final 38:30 question onon the on the context and the incentive structures let’s just say 38:36 that has created the cycle of violence that we’ve seen over the 38:41 decades and the occupation so given the situation given the power imbalance um 38:47 can you see Israel ending its occupation especially given that it has shifted 38:53 more and more to the right and you and Israel’s major allies the US and UK have 39:01 uh been almost indifferent and allowed this impunity to go on without sayinganything doing anything and on top of 39:08 that we’ve seen Arab regimes Arab countries who have normalized relationshipdespite the fact that you 39:14 know the occupation still exist Israel is illegally occupying West Bank andGazathere doesn’t seem to be any 39:21 push back against that so do you think that will we we’ll see the kind ofincentives that’s required to break the 39:27 status quo and create a situation an impetus for the ending of the occupation 39:35 and Palestinians given the right to self-determination I think we have now 39:43 um unfortunately under horrific circumstances we have now the best 39:48 opportunity to do so in decades and the question is whether this opportunity 39:54 will be seized so in Israel yes Israel has been moving to the right and 39:59 possibly it’s moved even more to the right since October 7th but Israel also isfilled with a huge sense of fragility 40:07 and insecurity no one feels secure in Israel right now this is a completely 40:13 different Israel from what he was before October 7th where people could simplyignore what was happening in Gaza what 40:19 was happening in the West Bank and live their own comfortable lives this haschanged it’s a completely different 40:25 world and chance of it getting even worse with you know 40:31 hundreds of thousands of reservist coming back from Reserve service and findingthat they don’t have their jobs 40:37 that the state is not helping them there is a sort of I would say a potential 40:44 political and social earthquake in itself so that is one thing that that 40:49 we have to take into account yes a sort of shift to the right but also a great 40:54 fragility in the society but the change will not come from 41:00 within it won’t come from within not among Israelis and unfortunately also 41:05 not from Palestinians it has to come from the outside and this is anopportunity now for the United States 41:13 together with its major allies with Germany with France with the UK to 41:18 understand what is happening now is that can spin out of control entirely the 41:24 entire Middle East now is is no one knows what’s going to happen and once 41:30 things start rolling they may get out of control entirely what the UnitedStates 41:36 has to do now is to devise a strategic plan which includes 41:41 negotiations toward a settlement of the conflict between Israel and Palestine 41:46 that has to happen now and they’re talking about it but they’re not actuallyfollowing up on their own 41:52 rhetoric which is weak and not quite decisive this is known by the way this isbeing 41:59 said by some circles in Israel itself that Anthony blinkin is traveling around 42:04 the Middle East with an empty suitcase he has nothing to provide what he has to 42:10 provide is force what he has to provide is sanctions Israel depends now more 42:17 than at any other time since 1948 on the United States it depends on it for 42:23 political cover it depends on it for war the United States has to use that not 42:29 simply to force its hands and not simply for a ceasefire because the ceasefirewould be good but it’s not is hardly 42:37 sufficient but to devise a plan which is not very hard to come up with reallyto 42:43 solve this issue once and for all it won’t happen from today to tomorrow but 42:49 there has to be a political Horizon toward it if that happens I think 42:55 Israeli Society because it is so fragile and insecure right now will be willing 43:03 to and in many ways forced to accept that and I think Palestinian society 43:10 which is undergoing horrendous suffering will also be open I’m hoping will be 43:17 open to looking at a positive political Horizon rather than an ongoing 43:24 intransigence on both sides and ongoing violence which each time there’s acycle 43:30 gets even worse I think it’s an opportunity and it has to be ceased thank youfor that Professor Bartov 43:37 and let’s end on that optimistic note I want to thank you and also the viewersat home for joining see you for 43:43 another conversation with the Middle East Monitor thank you very much bye-byethank you [Music] 43:55
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An Open Letter on the Misuse of Holocaust Memory
Omer Bartov, Christopher R. Browning, Jane Caplan, Debórah Dwork,
David Feldman, et al.
Appealing to the memory of the Holocaust obscures our understanding of the antisemitism Jews face today and dangerously misrepresents the causes of violence in Israel-Palestine.
November 20, 2023
We the undersigned are scholars of the Holocaust and antisemitism from different institutions. We write to express our dismay and disappointment at political leaders and notable public figures invoking Holocaust memory to explain the current crisis in Gaza and Israel.
Particular examples have ranged from Israeli Ambassador to the UN Gilad Erdan donning a yellow star featuring the words “Never Again” while addressing the UN General Assembly, to US President Joe Biden saying that Hamas had “engaged in barbarism that is as consequential as the Holocaust,” while Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told German Chancellor Olaf Scholz that “Hamas are the new Nazis.” US Representative Brian Mast, a Republican from Florida, speaking on the House floor, questioned the idea that there are “innocent Palestinian civilians,” claiming, “I don’t think we would so lightly throw around the term ‘innocent Nazi civilians’ during World War II.”
Antisemitism often increases at times of heightened crisis in Israel-Palestine, as do Islamophobia and anti-Arab racism. The unconscionable violence of the October 7 attacks and the ongoing aerial bombardment and invasion of Gaza are devastating, and are generating pain and fear among Jewish and Palestinian communities around the world. We reiterate that everyone has the right to feel safe wherever they live, and that addressing racism, antisemitism, and Islamophobia must be a priority.
It is understandable why many in the Jewish community recall the Holocaust and earlier pogroms when trying to comprehend what happened on October 7—the massacres, and the images that came out in the aftermath, have tapped into deep-seated collective memory of genocidal antisemitism, driven by all-too-recent Jewish history.
However, appealing to the memory of the Holocaust obscures our understanding of the antisemitism Jews face today, and dangerously misrepresents the causes of violence in Israel-Palestine. The Nazi genocide involved a state—and its willing civil society—attacking a tiny minority, which then escalated to a continent-wide genocide. Indeed, comparisons of the crisis unfolding in Israel-Palestine to Nazism and the Holocaust—above all when they come from political leaders and others who can sway public opinion—are intellectual and moral failings. At a moment when emotions are running high, political leaders have a responsibility to act calmly and avoid stoking the flames of distress and division. And, as academics, we have a duty to uphold the intellectual integrity of our profession and support others around the world in making sense of this moment.
Israeli leaders and others are using the Holocaust framing to portray Israel’s collective punishment of Gaza as a battle for civilization in the face of barbarism, thereby promoting racist narratives about Palestinians. This rhetoric encourages us to separate this current crisis from the context out of which it has arisen. Seventy-five years of displacement, fifty-six years of occupation, and sixteen years of the Gaza blockade have generated an ever-deteriorating spiral of violence that can only be arrested by a political solution. There is no military solution in Israel-Palestine, and deploying a Holocaust narrative in which an “evil” must be vanquished by force will only perpetuate an oppressive state of affairs that has already lasted far too long.
Insisting that “Hamas are the new Nazis”—while holding Palestinians collectively responsible for Hamas’s actions—attributes hardened, antisemitic motivations to those who defend Palestinian rights. It also positions the protection of Jewish people against the upholding of international human rights and laws, implying that the current assault on Gaza is a necessity. And invoking the Holocaust to dismiss demonstrators calling for a “free Palestine” fuels the repression of Palestinian human rights advocacy and the conflation of antisemitism with criticism of Israel.
In this climate of growing insecurity, we need clarity about antisemitism so that we can properly identify and combat it. We also need clear thinking as we grapple with and respond to what is unfolding in Gaza and the West Bank. And we need to be forthright in dealing with these simultaneous realities—of resurgent antisemitism and widespread killing in Gaza, as well as escalating expulsions in the West Bank—as we engage with the public discourse.
We encourage those who have so readily invoked comparisons to Nazi Germany to listen to the rhetoric coming from Israel’s political leadership. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the Israeli parliament that “this is a struggle between the children of light and the children of darkness” (a tweet from his office with the same phrase was later deleted). Defense Minister Yoav Gallant proclaimed, “We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly.” Such comments, along with a widespread and frequently cited argument that there are no innocent Palestinians in Gaza, do indeed bring to mind echoes of historical mass violence. But those resonances should serve as an injunction against wide-scale killing, not as a call to extend it.
As academics we have a responsibility to use our words, and our expertise, with judgment and sensitivity—to try and dial down inciteful language that is liable to provoke further discord, and instead to prioritize speech and action aimed at preventing further loss of life. This is why when invoking the past, we must do so in ways that illuminate the present and do not distort it. This is the necessary basis for establishing peace and justice in Palestine and Israel. This is why we urge public figures, including the media, to stop using these kinds of comparisons.
Karyn Ball
Professor of English and Film Studies, University of Alberta
Omer Bartov
Samuel Pisar Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Brown University
Christopher R. Browning
Professor of History Emeritus, UNC-Chapel Hill
Jane Caplan
Emeritus Professor of Modern European History, University of Oxford
Alon Confino
Professor of History and Jewish Studies, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Debórah Dwork
Director of the Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Crimes Against Humanity, Graduate Center—City University of New York
David Feldman
Director, Birkbeck Institute for the Study of Antisemitism, University of London
Amos Goldberg
The Jonah M. Machover Chair in Holocaust Studies, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Atina Grossmann
Professor of History, Cooper Union, New York
John-Paul Himka
Professor Emeritus, University of Alberta
Marianne Hirsch
Professor Emerita, Comparative Literature and Gender Studies, Columbia University
A. Dirk Moses
Spitzer Professor of International Relations, City College of New York
Michael Rothberg
Professor of English, Comparative Literature, and Holocaust Studies, UCLA
Raz Segal
Associate Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Stockton University
Stefanie Schüler-Springorum
Director, Center for Research on Antisemitism, Technische Universität Berlin
Barry Trachtenberg
Rubin Presidential Chair of Jewish History, Wake Forest University
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Omer Bartov
February 2, 2004He Meant What He Said
Did Hitlerism die with Hitler?
I.
Adolf Hitler’s so-called second book was not published in his lifetime. Written, as Gerhard Weinberg convincingly speculates, in late June and early July 1928, the book’s publication was postponed because Mein Kampf, Hitler’s first massive text, was selling very badly and could hardly stand competition with another publication by the same author. Later, after Hitler was appointed chancellor and Mein Kampf became one of the greatest (and allegedly most unread) best-sellers of all times, the second book was apparently seen as disclosing his foreign policy plans too explicitly to allow publication. It was locked away, only to be discovered by Weinberg in 1958. Published in German three years later, the second book came out in a pirated and unreliable English edition in 1962. It is only now that the public can read this text in an authoritative translation, accompanied by extensive and updated notes by Weinberg.
Must we read another ranting book by Hitler? This book is certainly as close to the heart of darkness as a book can be. But it should have been read in its time, and it should be read now. It was an explicit warning to the world of what could be expected from the Fuhrer of what was to become for twelve terrible years the Third Reich. When Hitler wrote it, no one could tell whether his plans and fantasies would ever be transformed into reality.Much of what Hitler put together in this book could already be found in Mein Kampf, if anyone had bothered to read it, and other ideas were expressed unambiguously in his speeches. Yet it was difficult to believe that anyone in his right mind would try to translate such rhetoric into policy. It was generally thought that in power Hitler would be constrained by the realities of diplomacy, the limits of Germany’s power, the national interests of the Reich, and the military, economic, and political partners with whom he had to make policy.
Today we know that this was a fatal misunderstanding, rooted more in wishful thinking than in the kind of realism on which contemporary observers prided themselves and expected would eventually keep Hitler, too, in his place. Today we know that Hitler said precisely what he meant to say. We can also note, with the benefit of hindsight, that Hitler was neither insane, nor irrational, nor a fool. Several decades ago A.J.P. Taylor wrote that Hitler may have been mad or criminal as far as his plans and policies for world conquest and genocide were concerned, but in the conduct of his diplomacy in the 1930s he acted very much like everyone else, seizing opportunities and moving gradually toward the goals he had set himself. Reading this second book, I tend to agree. Hitler’s rhetoric here is not more empty-headed than that of many of his contemporaries; his use of cliches hardly exceeds what one encountered in the newspapers; his knowledge of history, his psychological observations, his criticism of his rivals, are in many respects typical of his place and time.
But of course Hitler was about much more than this. He was also a pathological mass murderer who caused the death of millions and the destruction of Europe, and so it is important to know that he did precisely what he promised to do. For we still do not seem to have learned a simple crucial lesson that Hitler taught us more definitively than anyone else in history: some people, some regimes, some ideologies, some political programs, and, yes, some religious groups, must be taken at their word. Some people mean what they say, and say what they will do, and do what they said.
Most liberal-minded, optimistic, well-meaning people are loath to believe this. They would rather think that fanaticism is merely an “epiphenomenal” facade for politics, that opinions can be changed, that everyone can be corrected and improved. In many cases, this is true—but not in all cases, and not in the most dangerous ones. There are those who practice what they preach and are proud of it. They view those who act otherwise, who compromise and pull back from ultimate conclusions, as opportunists, as weaklings, as targets to be easily conquered and subdued by their own greater determination, hardness, and ruthlessness. When they say they will kill you, they will kill you–if you do not kill them first.
Reading Hitler’s second book is useful, of course, for students of Nazism. But they will have already read it in part or in whole, and nothing that Hitler says here will come to them as much of a surprise. This is a book that should be read, rather, by contemporary journalists, political observers, and all concerned people who have the stomach to recognize evil when they confront it. For one of the most frightening aspects of Hitler’s book is not that he said what he said at the time, but that much of what he said can be found today in innumerable places: on Internet sites, propaganda brochures, political speeches, protest placards, academic publications, religious sermons, you name it. As long as it does not have Hitler’s name attached to it, this deranged discourse will be ignored or allowed to pass. The voices that express these opinions do not belong to a single political or ideological current, and they are much less easy to distinguish than in the 1930s. They belong to the right and the left, to the religious and the secular, to the West and the East, to the rabble and the leaders, to terrorists and intellectuals, students and peasants, pacifists and militants, expansionists and anti-globalization activists. The diplomacy advocated by Hitler is no longer relevant, but his reason for it, his legitimization of his “worldview,” is alive and kicking, and it may still kick us.
II.
HITLER NEVER HAD a particularly complicated ideology. He painted a clear picture of the world, distinguishing between the bad and the good, the sinful and the righteous, the guilty and the innocent, the dirty and the clean, the inferior and the superior. He articulated clear goals, as follows. The Aryan race needs domestic unity and freedom from polluting racial elements, and so it must expand into an undefined and likely limitless “living space” in the East. Germany’s most important short-term enemy is France, for historical reasons and because it has become “negroized.” Germany’s most likely allies are Italy and Britain, with whom the Reich should have no quarrel since they also seek to expand in different directions. The greatest long-term enemy is the United States, not least because it is made up of healthy Aryan stock that has turned its back on the fatherland. The Slav states and the nations to Germany’s east are to be taken over. The Slavs, and especially the Poles and Russians, are not worthy of ruling themselves, for whatever is great and worthy in the East was created by German colonizers and rulers. The greatest danger to the world are the Jews, who have taken control of the Soviet Union and are behind all the Marxist parties in Europe, and at the same time are the bosses and the manipulators of international capitalism. The Jews rule the world through a global conspiracy, and it is Germany’s duty to destroy them before they subjugate humanity forever.
Hitler made no bones about the direct link between his “analysis” of world history and his plans for Germany’s policies. For him, as he wrote,
politics is not just the struggle of a people for its survival as such; rather, for us humans it is the art of the implementation of this struggle.… Politics is always the leader of the struggle for survival—its organizer—and regardless of how it is formally designated, its effectiveness will determine the life or death of a people.… The two concepts of a peace policy or a war policy thus immediately become meaningless. Because the stake that is struggled for through politics is always life.…
Promoting economic autarky and opposing the ills of a global capitalistic economy, Hitler was similarly swift in identifying the agents of globalization whose goal it was to “kill the others through peaceful industry,” by way of depriving people of the necessary Lebensraum that would ensure their healthy development. The urban centers created by the global industrial economy were “hotbeds of blood-mixing and bastardization, usually ensuring the degeneration of the race and resulting in that purulent herd in which the maggots of the international Jewish community flourish and cause the ultimate decay of the people.” For Hitler, the “Jew” was directly identified with anything international, and internationalism was directly associated with the degeneration of the race, with immorality and corruption. Once a people loses its “genetically conditioned cultural expression of the life of its own soul,” he wrote, it will “descend into the confusion of international perceptions and the cultural chaos that springs from them. Then the Jew can move in, and not rest until he has completely uprooted and thereby corrupted such a people.”
WHILE HE STRENUOUSLY opposed “internationalism” as a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world and to corrupt the nobler races, Hitler saw no limits to his own aspirations for expansion. As he noted, “Wherever our success ends, that will always be the starting point of a new battle.” And as Hitler never tired of emphasizing, he was opposed to a policy of returning to the borders of 1914—that is, of revising the Versailles agreement in which the Reich had been “robbed” of its territories. That restitution would hardly suffice. Hitler argues that
the foreign policy of the bourgeois world is in truth always only focused on borders, whereas the National Socialist movement, in contrast, will pursue a policy focused on space. The German bourgeoisie will, with its boldest plans, perhaps attain unification of the German nation, but in reality it usually ends in bungling border adjustments. The National Socialist movement … knows no Germanization … but only the expansion of our own people.… The national conception will not be determined by previous patriotic notions of state, but rather by ethnic and racial conceptions.… The German borders of 1914 … represented something just as unfinished as peoples’ borders always are. The division of territory on the earth is always the momentary result of a struggle and an evolution that is in no way finished, but that naturally continues to progress.
So much for the idea of appeasement, of letting Hitler have what he had already declared would never suffice. The racial state that Hitler outlined had certain duties. It could “under absolutely no circumstances annex Poles.” It would “have to decide either to isolate these alien racial elements in order to prevent the repeated contamination of one’s own people, or it would have to immediately remove them entirely, transferring the land and territory that thus became free to members of one’s own ethnic community.” Here again we hear Hitler saying quite clearly that he would undertake the kind of demographic re-structuring of Eastern Europe that was indeed managed by Heinrich Himmler after 1939. And whatever might have been the contributions of various German technocrats in the 1930s to molding this policy, as suggested by some historians, Hitler unequivocally and ruthlessly expressed it five years before he became chancellor.
Moreover, Hitler made it clear that in the distant future “the only state that would be able to stand up to North America will be the state that has understood how … to raise the racial value of its people.… It is, again, the duty of the National Socialist movement to strengthen and prepare our own fatherland to the greatest degree possible for this task.” If Hitler did not end up trying to conquer the United States, we now know that he made plans for producing the kinds of aircraft and ships that would have facilitated such aggressive action.
Ultimately, as Hitler saw it, there could have been only one worthwhile goal in World War I, and the same goal would eventually have to guide the conduct of any future war: the conquest of “living space.” The “only area in Europe that could be considered for such a territorial policy was Russia.” This was also the only kind of war aim that would motivate Germans and justify the sacrifices entailed in accomplishing it:
The only war aim that would have been worthy of these enormous casualties [in World War I] would have been to promise the German troops that so many hundreds of thousands of square kilometers of land would be allotted to the frontline soldiers as property or made available for colonization by Germans.
This is precisely what Hitler did upon the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941.
The instrument of such a war would be a new German army, and in his second book Hitler outlines how he would use the Weimar Republic’s one hundred thousand-man Reichswehr as the framework for the creation of a massive new military machine based on universal conscription. By 1935 Hitler was already well on his way to accomplishing this task, having both purged the SA, which hoped to become an alternative military organization, and declared universal conscription in total defiance of the Versailles Treaty.
BUT GERMANY’S MOST pernicious enemies were the Jews and those who had collaborated with them in stabbing the army in the back and bringing about the collapse of the German Empire in November 1918. “No enemy,” declared Hitler, “had reviled the German army like the representatives of the November knavery defiled it.” Hence, he warned,
Anyone who today wants to act in the name of German honor must first announce the most relentless fight against the intolerable defilers of German honor … the representatives of the November crime. That collection [of] Marxist, democratic-pacifist, and Centrist traitors that pushed our people into its current state of powerlessness.… I admit most frankly that I could reconcile myself with every one of those old enemies, but that my hate for the traitors in our own ranks is unforgiving and will remain.
These traitors not only brought the old Reich crashing down, they were now plotting to establish a “global economy” and a pan-European movement whose consequences would be “a Jewishinstigated systematic bastardization with lower-quality human material.” The reason was obvious:
The Jew particularly welcomes such a concept; in its consistent observance it leads to racial chaos and confusion, to a bastardization and niggerization of civilized humanity, and finally to such a deterioration in its racial value that the Hebrew who keeps himself free from it can gradually rise to be masters [sic] of the world.
Most dangerously, the Jews had taken over Russia. Hitler opposed any “German-Russian understanding … as long as a government that is preoccupied with the sole effort to transmit the Bolshevist poison to Germany rules in Russia.” For “it goes without saying that if such an alliance were to materialize today, its results would be the complete dominance of Judaism in Germany, just as in Russia.” Interestingly, while the Jews dominated Russia, they were in Hitler’s view not true communists but greedy capitalists. Hence “it is precisely the Jewish press organs of the most noted stock market interests that advocate a German-Russian alliance in Germany. Do people really believe that” these Jewish papers “speak more or less openly for Bolshevist Russia because it is an anticapitalist state?” No, Hitler insisted, this was in fact nothing but a “Jewish-capitalist Bolshevik Russia”—Jewish-controlled capitalism posing as Russian communism.
HITLER DID NOT share the hope that he attributed to nationalist German circles that, if Russia were to be liberated from the Jews and reverted to “nationalist, anticapitalist communism,” it might be a good coalition partner for Germany. For Hitler, Germans and Russians constituted “two ethnic souls that have very little in common.” The Russian people could never rule themselves, but were rather first under the control of superior “Nordic-German elements” and, following the Revolution, under the Jews who successfully “exterminated the previous foreign upper class … with the help of the Slavic racial instinct.” But as Hitler saw it, this Jewish takeover would eventually serve Germany’s objectives, since “the overall tendency of Judaism, which is ultimately only destructive,” would in time lead to “the destruction of Jewry.” This in turn would facilitate the realization of “the goal of German foreign policy in the one and only place possible: space in the East.”
After explaining why the question of the German minority in South Tyrol, which came under Italian rule after World War I, was a minor issue compared with the need to “gain further space and feeding of our people” in the East, Hitler ended his second book with the same pronouncements that concluded the political testament that he dictated before his suicide seventeen years later. For Hitler’s entire political career was guided by a single central obsession with “the Jew.” Blaming those who criticized his policies toward Italy for ignoring the domestic “syphilitization by Jews and Negroes” of the Fatherland, and for persecuting those Germans who “resist the de-Germanization, niggerization, and Judaization of our people,” Hitler finally explained what had always been at the root of all evil and misfortune in the world.
Repeating much of the anti-Semitic verbiage of the previous decades, but giving it a much more threatening tone thanks to his position as a political leader on the verge of becoming a major figure on the world scene, Hitler summarized his views on the Jews in the following manner. First, this was “a people with certain essential particularities that distinguish it from all other peoples living on earth.” Second, while Judaism was not a religion but “a real state … the essence of the Jewish people lacks the productive forces to build and sustain a territorial state.” Third, because of this inability, “the existence of the Jew himself … becomes a parasitic existence within the life of other peoples.” Fourth, the “ultimate goal of the Jewish struggle for survival is the enslavement of productively active peoples.”
This goal is sought by fighting “for equality and then for superiority” in domestic policies, whereas in foreign policy the Jews will “hurl [other peoples] into wars with one another, and thus gradually—with the help of the power of money and propaganda—become their masters.” Ultimately, the Jew seeks “the denationalization and chaotic bastardization of the other peoples, the lowering of the racial level of the highest, and domination over this racial mush through the eradication of these peoples’ intelligentsias and their replacement with the members of his own race.” Tragically, “Jewish domination always ends with the decline of all culture and ultimately the insanity of the Jew himself. Because he is a parasite on the peoples, and his victory means his own end just as much as the death of his victim.” The allies of the Jew are “Freemasonry … the press … [and] Marxism.” Having accomplished the “economic conquest of Europe,” the Jew “begins with securing it politically … in the form of revolutions” and by “systematically agitating for world war.” The victims of Jewish “inhuman torture and barbarity” in Russia “totaled twenty-eight million dead,” and meanwhile the Jew “tore away all the ties of orderliness, morality, custom … and proclaimed … universal licentiousness.” But finally, declares Hitler, an end will be put to all this, for “the National Socialist movement … has taken up the fight against this execrable crime against humanity.”
It is truly astonishing to see how every sin that Hitler ascribed to “the Jew” became part of his own policies as he himself outlined them in his second book and later implemented them: the destruction of entire nations by the elimination of their elites, their mass deportation, and in the case of the Jews, their outright genocide. And it is just as mind-boggling to note that the endless depravity attributed by Hitler to the Jews became the reality of German conduct under his rule, which deprived the Reich of every remnant of moral constraint and finally drove it into an insane storm of self-destruction. What Hitler said would be done to Germany, he did unto others; and he and his people became victims of the nemesis that he prophesied for his enemies. When Hitler wrote his second book, he was staring into a mirror.
III.
But those who have followed the current wave of anti-Semitism emanating from the most disparate sources in the last few years may sense that they, too, are staring into a mirror, a distorted mirror of a resurrected past, a mutilated, transplanted, transformed, contorted, monstrous specter whose allegedly exhausted powers seem to be increasing day by day.
Hitler is dead, as Leon Wieseltier rightly proclaimed in these pages. What alarmed Wieseltier was the frequent predilection to view every threat as the ultimate threat, every anti-Semitic harangue as the gateway to another Final Solution. Clearly we are not facing the danger of a second Auschwitz. The hysterics need to remember that Hitler and the Third Reich are history. Germany apologized and paid generous restitution. The Nazis were tried, or they hid, or they metamorphosed into good democrats. The state of Israel was established. The Jews have never been more prosperous and more successful and more safe than they are in the United States. (The same could even be said about the nervous Jews of Western Europe.) The last remnants of communist anti-Semitism vanished with the fall of that “evil empire.” Jews in our day have reasons to feel much more secure than their ancestors.
But all is not well, not by a long shot. Criticism of Israeli policies against the Palestinians has long been attached to anti-Americanism, and the United States was said already by the Nazis in World War II to be dominated by the Jews. And criticism of American imperialism is often associated with its support for Israel, allegedly a colonial outpost populated by Jews in the heart of Arab and Islamic civilization. Of course, one should never confuse the legitimate criticism of Israeli policies with what all reasonable people agree is the despicable ideology of anti-Semitism. The policies of the current Israeli government in the territories are indeed contrary to the strategic and moral interests of the Jewish state. So there is every reason in the world to reject attempts to justify objectionable Israeli policies by reference to the Holocaust.
But this does not mean that we should refuse to see the writing on the wall when anti-Israeli sentiments are transformed into blatant and virulent anti-Semitism. This was precisely the argument made in the report “Manifestations of anti-Semitism in the European Union,” as submitted by the Center for Research on Anti-Semitism in Berlin to the European Monitoring Center on Racism and Xenophobia, which had originally commissioned it. The monitoring center tried to suppress its own report, because it gave a measure of anti-Semitic violence by Muslims in Europe, and because its definition of anti-Semitism included those who call for the destruction of Israel. And these grim truths were politically incorrect. The Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip is stupid and destructive, and it should be ended through the creation of a Palestinian state, but those who preach the destruction of the Jewish state should not be allowed to hide behind Sharon’s unfortunate policies. It is one thing to support the cause of Palestinian nationhood, and quite another to deny the Jews the right to live in their own state.
WHAT WE ARE WITNESSING today is a broad front of opinion, spanning the entire spectrum of the political and religious scene, whose criticism of American and Israeli policies, and whose fears and phobias about present conditions, utopian dreams of a better future, and nostalgic fantasies of a mythical past, all converge in a bizarre and increasingly frightening way on a single figure, a single cause: “the Jew.” I have long believed that it is pointless, and dishonorable, to debate anti-Semites. Such an exchange of “ideas” only confers legitimacy upon them. But there are times when absurdities become political facts and cannot be ignored. They must, instead, be directly challenged—not by explaining their violent ideas and feelings away, but by putting limits to them through all available means, political, judicial, and, if necessary, by the use of legitimate force. For these are people who mean what they say. If you do not destroy them, they will destroy you. There are precedents for this.
Consider again what Hitler wrote in 1928. Yes, it is insane; but take out the word “race” and replace it, say, with “Zionism” or “American imperialism,” and replace the references to the Soviet Union with references to the United States, and suddenly the discourse is not only crazy but also quite common. The “soft core” of this poisonous rhetoric is to be found among some sectors of European and American intellectuals and academics. It tends to identify Israelis as culprits, and Jews as potential Israelis. It is obsessed with the influence of Jews on culture, politics, and economics around the world. The partially successful boycott of Israeli academics in recent years is a case in point, not least because it tends to affect precisely those who number among the most determined and articulate opponents of the current Israeli government’s policies. The divestment campaign, calling on American and European universities to desist from any investments in Israel, is another example; this campaign provides cover, and even immunity, for all the regimes around the world that have never recognized academic freedom. The sympathetic understanding expressed in academic settings, and in liberal and left-wing publications, for suicide bombers who blow up innocent civilians in Israel creates a climate of tolerance for murder that is cleverly couched in the righteous language of liberation and justice.
SOME ALLEGATIONS OF of an apparent takeover by Jews, or by Jewish themes, of this or that cultural sphere seem to have nothing to do with Israel. In October 2001, The Chronicle of Higher Education published an article by Mark Anderson, a professor of Germanic languages at Columbia University. Anderson expressed fears about “the way in which American scholars have distorted the study of German culture” by reducing “the canon of German literature to a tiny handful of teachable authors who often have a Jewish background.” This “excessive focus on German-Jewish authors,” he argued, “relied on the subtext of Jewish suffering.” This “has undermined intellectual freedom in American universities” and is “testimony to an ongoing intellectual paralysis that could and should be relieved.”
It is not clear from Anderson’s argument who is to blame, apart from an ill-defined “pressure from American culture to focus on minority issues, as well as our fascination with Hitler and the Holocaust.” It is also somewhat ironic that Anderson himself edited a volume called Hitler’s Exiles: Personal Stories of the Flight from Nazi Germany to America, which testifies to his own fascination with this topic, if not to his recognition of its importance. But one cannot help but detect here a clear connection between the alleged over-emphasis on Jewish authors and Jewish themes “identified” by Anderson and its distorting effects both on the study of German literature and on American intellectual freedom. Somehow the focus on Jewish victims seems to have that effect.
Sometimes this sort of intellectual-academic-journalistic obsession with Jews becomes intimately linked with antiAmericanism. Several best-selling books published in France and Germany by academics, politicians, and journalists have “confirmed” the already widespread belief (held by 19 percent of the German population according to a recent poll, and apparently by a majority in many Arab and Islamic countries) that the September 11 attacks on the United States were orchestrated by the CIA and the Mossad, and that the latter warned the Jews working in the World Trade Center not to come to work that day. Indeed, the United States, attacked by Europeans for its support of Israel, has been repeatedly depicted as controlled by the Jews, whose lobbies, financial and electoral levers of power, and key figures in the White House and Pentagon, are manipulating both the American public and world politics.
At the same time Israel has been portrayed as the perpetrator of Nazi-like crimes even as these very same portrayals carry echoes of the Nazi representation of Jews. Thus the European media, especially its more highbrow representatives, were as keen to portray the Israeli operation in Jenin last year as a war crime and a massacre as they were reluctant to admit that they had been fooled by Palestinian propaganda and in turn misinformed their publics about the nature of the operation, greatly inflating the number of Palestinian civilians killed in order to justify its description as a massacre. The Israeli prime minister was depicted in a cartoon published in The Independent in London in the shape of a bloody ogre devouring Palestinian children, his features eerily reminiscent of those popularized by Der Sturmer.
Anyone who has access (that is, anyone on the Internet) to racist, antiSemitic, and neo-Nazi publications in the United States and elsewhere will find almost precisely the same opinions and depictions. These hateful representations are normally not much remarked upon. But there are some important exceptions. Most striking was the speech made by Martin Hohmann, a parliamentary representative of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in the German Bundestag, to an audience of one hundred thirty people, on October 3, 2003. Hohmann argued that one had no right to speak of the Germans as a “people of perpetrators” (Tatervolk) because the Jews–presumably those making that argument–were themselves a “people of perpetrators,” considering their high representation among the murderous Bolsheviks. This was the first time since the end of Nazism that a member of the Bundestag made an anti-Semitic argument based on the very logic of Hitler’s rationalization for war against the Soviet Union. And an elite Bundeswehr general expressed agreement with Hohmann’s speech. Under much public pressure, Hohmann was eventually ejected from the parliamentary fraction of the CDU–but 20 percent of his colleagues opposed his removal. And Hohmann knew, like so many fascists before him who said what he said, what many others were thinking. In a poll recently conducted by the University of Bielefeld, it was found that 70 percent of Germans resent being blamed for the Holocaust, and 25 percent believe that the Jews are trying to make political capital out of their own genocide (and another 30 percent say that there is a measure of truth in this assertion), and three-quarters believe that there are too many foreigners in Germany.
MUCH MORE PUBLICITY has been given to anti-Israeli protests on American campuses, and these have demonstrated a troubling trend. A group calling itself “New Jersey Solidarity: Activists for the Destruction of Israel” called for an “anti-Israel hate-fest” to be held on the campus of Rutgers University, New Brunswick, in October 2003. The group’s website declares itself “opposed to the existence of the apartheid colonial settler state of Israel, as it is based on the racist ideology of Zionism and is an expression of colonialism and imperialism.”
Richard McCormick, the president of Rutgers University and a former member of its history department, where I also taught during the 1990s, issued an open letter on the planned meeting. He stated that he found “abhorrent some elements of NJ Solidarity’s mission.” But he went on to say that “intrinsic to Rutgers’ own mission is the free exchange of ideas and discourse on a variety of issues, including those that are controversial. This university must remain a model of debate, dialogue and education … we encourage our students to express their beliefs and analyze the difficult issues of the day.” So some may think that destroying Israel is legitimate and some may think otherwise. Some may think that Israel is an apartheid colonial settler state based on a racist ideology, and some may have a different opinion. There are two sides to the question. Through such a “free exchange of ideas” we will all prosper intellectually. This brings to mind Hannah Arendt’s observation, when she visited Germany in 1950, for the first time since she fled the Nazis, that the Germans viewed the extermination of the Jews as a matter of opinion: some said it happened, some said it had not happened. Who could tell? The average German, she wrote, considered this “nihilistic relativism” about the facts as an essential expression of democracy.
Throughout campuses in the United States, students associated with Arab and Islamic organizations, Christian groups, and the left carried flags, banners, and posters that were mostly focused on one theme: the equation between Zionism, or Israel, and Nazism. Banners portrayed a swastika joined by an equal sign to a Star of David and an Israeli flag featuring a swastika instead of a Star of David. Placards issued the call to “End the Holocaust,” and proclaimed that “Zionism = racism = ethnic cleansing,” and that “Zionism is Ethnic Cleansing,” and that “Sharon = Hitler.” A particularly ingenious sign asserted: “1943: Warsaw 2002: Jenin.” While some summarized their views with the slogan “Zionazis,” others warned, “First Jesus Now Arafat.”
What makes this virulent antiSemitism respectable is that it presents itself as anti-Nazism. To accomplish this sinister exculpatory purpose it needs only to declare that Zionism equals Nazism, just as the old canard of a Jewish conspiracy to take over the world is legitimized by its association with American imperialism, capitalism, and globalization. That the vocabulary of this rhetoric is taken directly (whether consciously or not) from Nazi texts is so clear that one wonders why there is such a reluctance to recognize it. In part this is owed to ignorance, which is as rampant today in journalism and political commentary as it always was. In part this is owed to the fact that those who would most readily identify the provenance of these words and ideas are largely liberals, some of whom also happen to be Jewish, and thus are likely to be most harmed, both personally and ideologically, by making this identification. By exposing the anti-Semitic underbelly of this phenomenon, they would expose themselves as Jews and friends of Jews, and would open themselves to the argument that precisely their opposition to this phenomenon is the best proof of Jewish domination in the world.
IV.
WHICH, INCIDENTALLY, is precisely what Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad of Malaysia said following the Western protests against his warmly received pronouncement to the Organization of the Islamic Conference in October that the Jews control the world: “The reaction of the world shows that they [the Jews] control the world.” Mahathir’s speech was genuinely astonishing. This was the first time since World War II that a major head of state made a speech—to no fewer than fifty-seven other heads of state and well over two thousand journalists—whose fundamental argument was that the Jews are to blame for all the ills that have beset Islamic civilization. And not a single person left the room in protest.
For Paul Krugman, writing in The New York Times on October 21, Mahathir’s anti-Semitic remarks were both “inexcusable” and “calculated,” made by a “cagey politician, who is neither ignorant nor foolish.” Krugman did not elaborate on why such remarks are “inexcusable.” Instead he preferred to see them as reflecting “how badly things are going for U.S. foreign policy.” Mahathir may be “guilty of serious abuses of power,” but he is also, said Krugman, “as forward-looking a Muslim leader as we’re likely to find.” Hence he should be encouraged, not denounced. His anti-Semitism is merely “part of Mr. Mahathir’s domestic balancing act.”
Progressive modernizer that he is, in other words, Mahathir cannot possibly be stupid enough to believe what he spouts, and because he does not believe it, and uses it merely as a tool for the good cause of modernizing Malaysia and combating the Muslim clerics who oppose the acquisition of knowledge, his anti-Semitism is in some way understandable. This is reminiscent of what many said about Hitler’s anti-Semitism in the 1930s: it was inexcusable but calculated, and thus it was ultimately both excusable and in the service of a good cause, the modernization of Germany and its reintegration into the community of nations.
For Krugman, Mahathir’s “hateful words” serve only to “cover his domestic flank.” They do not tell you anything about his own thinking, but they tell you “more accurately than any poll, just how strong the rising tide of anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism among Muslims in Southeast Asia has become.” And what is the cause of this tide? It is America’s “war in Iraq and its unconditional support for Ariel Sharon.” Just as Mahathir is not anti-Semitic, but merely a good reader of his people’s collective mind, so, too, his people are not antiSemitic, but merely outraged by the same things that outrage Krugman: Ariel Sharon and George W. Bush.
The Malaysian prime minister’s speech was both more offensive and more interesting than most commentators (including Krugman) have observed. In many ways it was a restatement of the urge to modernize, and the will to power, and the fantasies of destruction, that characterized fascism. Mahathir proposes to “disprove the perception of Islam as a religion of backwardness and terror.” He wants to “restore the honor of Islam and of the Muslims” and “to free their brothers and sisters from the oppression and humiliation from which they suffer today.” What sort of action does Mahathir propose? In part, as Krugman pointed out, he was indeed critical of the intellectual and political decline of Islam. He thus insisted that, although according to Islam “we are enjoined … to acquire knowledge,” it was due to “intellectual regression” that “the great Muslim civilization began to falter and wither,” causing it to miss entirely the Industrial Revolution. Yet other influences from the West actually subverted Islam, among which he counts “the Western democratic system” that “divided us.” Moreover, it was thanks to this democratically induced division that the Europeans “could excise Muslim land to create the state of Israel to solve their Jewish problem.” Thus the West both denied the Muslims the means to defend themselves through modern technology and industry and divided them by the introduction of democracy, all with the goal of solving a European “Jewish problem” at the expense of Islamic lands.
This “Jewish problem” is not at all peripheral to Mahathir’s argument, a sort of tithe to the masses and the clerics so as to push his program of modernization. It is central to his thinking. Modernization is justified, in his account, by the necessity of destroying the entity that has penetrated the Muslim world and polluted its soul. For, as he says, “we are all oppressed. We are all being humiliated.” And thus the numerical and economic strength of Muslims must be complemented by military prowess: “We are now 1.3 billion strong. We have the biggest oil reserve in the world. We have great wealth.… We control 57 out of 180 countries in world. Our votes can make or break international organizations.… [But] we need guns and rockets, bombs and warplanes, tanks and warships for our defense.” Hitler used to mock those who were obsessed with obscure Germanic traditions, who were filled with rage at the defeat of 1918 and dreamed up all sorts of harebrained conspiracies in marginal militant fraternities. He wanted to build a powerful modern military. He was, in this way, a modernizer.
Mahathir, for his part, notes that
today we, the whole Muslim ummah are treated with contempt and dishonor.… Our only reaction is to become more and more angry. Angry people cannot think properly. And so we find people reacting irrationally. They launch their own attacks, killing just about anybody … to vent their anger and frustration.… But the attacks solve nothing. The Muslims simply get more oppressed.… The Muslims will forever be oppressed and dominated by the Europeans and the Jews.… Is there no other way than to ask our young people to blow themselves up and kill people and invite the massacre of more of our own people?
This is the voice of the rational politician. This is not an Arab preaching an endless cycle of revenge, but an Asian Muslim calling for patience and calculation. Suicide bombers will never win the war. There must be another way. After all, “1.3 billion Muslims cannot be defeated by a few million Jews.” Hence we need “to think, to assess our weaknesses and our strength, to plan, to strategize and then to counter attack.… [To] devise a plan, a strategy that can win us final victory.… It is winning the struggle that is important, not angry retaliation, not revenge.” Is this merely a subtle way of calling on Muslims to focus on their own societies rather than waste their energies on the struggle with Israel? Perhaps. But it is just as possible that Mahathir, like so many before him, means what he says. And Mahathir paints the Jewish enemy in colors taken directly from Hitler’s diabolical palette:
The enemy will probably welcome these proposals and we will conclude that the promoters are working for the enemy. But think. We are up against a people who think. They survived 2000 years of pogroms not by hitting back, but by thinking. They invented and successfully promoted Socialism, Communism, human rights and democracy so that persecuting them would appear to be wrong, so they may enjoy equal rights with others. With these they have now gained control of the most powerful countries and they, this tiny community, have become a world power. We cannot fight them through brawn alone. We must use our brains also.
THE ISLAMISTS NEED none of the fancy extenuations offered by certain European and American intellectuals. For they have a direct link with anti-Semitism going all the way back to the Nazis. Mahathir’s anti-Semitic pronouncement was not simply triggered by frustration with the lack of development in Islamic countries, or by rage at American and Israeli policies, or by some deep-seated traditional Muslim anti-Semitism. The analysis that he presented reflects, rather, the continuing impact of a relatively new and pernicious phenomenon, whose roots can be traced back to the foundation of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in 1928 and its success in launching Islamism as a mass movement. As the German political scientist Matthias Kuntzel has recently shown in his book on “jihad and Jewhatred”, Islamism quickly became a primarily anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic movement that was greatly influenced by European anti-Semitism and directly influenced by Nazism. Indeed, as anti-Semitism lost its impetus as a revolutionary political movement in Europe in the wake of World War II, it was transplanted to the Middle East and from there to other parts of the Muslim world.
This development was responsible for the slaughter of Daniel Pearl in Pakistan, which was explicitly anti-Semitic in its motivation. The reluctance of the Western media to concede that Pearl was not murdered as an American, a journalist, a “spy,” or as someone who might have uncovered connections between the Pakistani secret service and Al Qaeda, but first and foremost as a Jew—in what was after all a highly ritualized act of killing recorded on videotape—merely manifests the embarrassment that European and American observers feel upon discovering that one of the dirtiest “secrets” of Christian civilization has been so seamlessly transplanted into the Islamic world. After all, it is more difficult to empathize with the plight of those who are still largely victims of Western economic exploitation if they turn out to be led by murderous bigots flaunting slogans that recall Europe’s own genocidal past.
BUT THE MOST EXPLICIT and frightening link between Hitler’s anti-Semitism and the contemporary wave of violence, hatred, paranoia, and conspiracy theories can be found, first, in the testimony given by the perpetrators of the September 11 terrorist attacks, and, second, in the official charter of the Palestinian Hamas movement.
As Küntzel writes, citing the Reuters reporter Christian Eggers, during the trial of Mounir el Motassadeq, a core member of the Al Qaeda cell in Hamburg that planned the attacks of September 11, the motivation of the perpetrators was amply documented, but the media have not reported much of what was said at the trial, which took place in Hamburg, Germany, between October 2002 and February 2003. The witness Shahid Nickels, a member of Mohammed Atta’s core group, insisted that “Atta’s worldview was based on a National Socialist way of thinking. He was convinced that ‘the Jews’ are determined to achieve world domination. He considered New York City to be the center of world Jewry, which was, in his opinion, Enemy Number One.” Nickels said that Atta’s group was “convinced that Jews control the American government as well as the media and the economy of the United States… that a world-wide conspiracy of Jews exists… [that] America wants to dominate the world so that Jews can pile up capital.”
Similarly, the witness Ahmed Maglad, who participated in the group’s meetings, testified that “for us, Israel didn’t have any right to exist as a state. We believed … the USA … to be the mother of Israel.” And Ralf Gotsche, who shared the student dormitory with Motassadeq, testified that the accused had said: “What Hitler did to the Jews was not at all bad,” and commented that “Motassadeq’s attitude was blatantly anti-Semitic.”
THERE IS A HISTORY to such statements, which connects the anti-Semitism of Al Qaeda members planning mass murder in Hamburg in the 1990s to the anti-Semitism of Hitler fantasizing about mass murder in Munich in the 1920s. It is not difficult to find. The charter of the Hamas movement, issued in 1988 as the fundamental document of this Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, must be read to be believed. It contains, among its fundamentalist Islamic preachings, the most blatant anti-Semitic statements made in a publicly available document since Hitler’s own pronouncements. Citing an array of Islamic sources, Hamas promises that “Israel will rise and will remain erect until Islam eliminates it as it had eliminated its predecessors.” The Islamic Resistance Movement has “raised the banner of Jihad in the face of the oppressors in order to extricate the country and the people from the [oppressors’] desecration, filth and evil.” The Prophet, remember, said that “the time will not come until Muslims will fight the Jews (and kill them); until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees, which will cry: O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, come on and kill him!” Here there is no talk of compromise or reconciliation. The document states plainly that “the so-called peaceful solutions, and the international conferences to resolve the Palestinian problem, are all contrary to the beliefs of the Islamic Resistance Movement. For renouncing any part of Palestine means renouncing part of the religion.… The initiatives, proposals, and International Conferences are but a waste of time, an exercise in futility.”
The opposition expressed by Hamas to any compromise over Palestine is also intimately linked with its view of the Jewish-Zionist enemy. These enemies, according to the charter,
have been scheming for a long time.… They accumulated a huge and influential material wealth … [which] permitted them to take over control of the world media such as news agencies, the press, publication houses, broadcasting and the like. [They also used this] wealth to stir revolutions in various parts of the globe, in order to fulfill their interests and pick the fruits. They stood behind the French and the Communist Revolutions and behind most of the revolutions we hear about here and there. They also used the money to establish clandestine organizations which are spreading around the world, in order to destroy societies and carry out Zionist interests. Such organizations are: the Freemasons, Rotary Clubs, Lions Clubs, B’nai B’rith and the like. All of them are destructive spying organizations. They also used the money to take over control of the Imperialist states and made them colonize many countries in order to exploit the wealth of those countries and spread their corruption therein … they stood behind World War I … and took control of many sources of wealth. They obtained the Balfour Declaration and established the League of Nations in order to rule the world.… They also stood behind World War II, where they collected immense benefits from trading with war materials and prepared for the establishment of their state. They inspired the United Nations and the Security Council … in order to rule the world.… There was no war that broke out anywhere without their fingerprints on it.… The forces of Imperialism in both the Capitalist West and the Communist East support the enemy with all their might, in material and human terms…
This international Jewish conspiracy to take over the world has also a moral goal.Zionism “stands behind the diffusion of drugs and toxics of all kinds in order to facilitate its control and expansion.” To be sure, Hamas has its own expansionist goals, for it plans to control the entire region of the Middle East, promising in turn “safety and security … for the members of the three religions” as long as they agree to live “under the shadow of Islam.” But Hamas “is only hostile to those who are hostile towards it, or stand in its way in order to disturb its moves or to frustrate its efforts” to dominate the region. Meanwhile “Zionist scheming has no end, and after Palestine they will covet expansion from the Nile to the Euphrates.… Their scheme has been laid out in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and their present [conduct] is the best proof of what is said there.” Hitler could not have put it better.
SO HITLER IS DEAD, but there is a Hitlerite quality to the new anti-Semitism, which now legitimizes not only opposition to Zionism but also the resurrection of the myth of Jewish world domination. And those who foolishly think that doing away with Israel, not least in a “one-state solution,” would remove anti-Semitism had better look more closely at the language of these enemies. For they—I mean the enemies—insist that the Jews are everywhere, and so they must be uprooted everywhere. Their outpost may be Israel, but their “power center” is in America, and their synagogues and intellectuals are in Germany and France, and their academics are in Russia and Britain. Since they are the cause of all evil and misfortune, the world will be a happier place without them, whether it is dominated by the Aryan Master Race or by the ideological soldiers of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Hitler taught humanity an important lesson. It is that when you see a Nazi, a fascist, a bigot, or an anti-Semite, say what you see. If you want to justify it or excuse it away, describe accurately what it is that you are trying to excuse away. If a British newspaper publishes an anti-Semitic cartoon, call it anti-Semitic. If the attacks on the Twin Towers were animated by anti-Semitic arguments, say so. If a Malaysian prime minister expresses anti-Semitic views, do not try to excuse the inexcusable. If a self-proclaimed liberation organization calls for the extermination of the Jewish state, do not pretend that it is calling for anything else. The absence of clarity is the beginning of complicity.
israel-academia-monitor.com 
I very much appreciate your efforts. Thank you. I am a Brown graduate, Class of 1969, and the parent of a Brown graduate, Class of 1999. Each of us loved our four years there; for many years I was proud to say that Brown had not fallen into the anti-Zionist/anti-Semitic/anti-intellectual/ahistorical nonsense about Israel that had long dominated places like Columbia. There were some early signs of Brown faculty ignorance and unwillingness to address Middle East issues in a sensible, intellectual way. But the final nail in the coffin of rational discourse and analysis about Israel/Palestinians was driven home by Brown’s incomprehensible decision to hire Beshara Doumani in 2012. I started writing on substack in August of 2021 about Doumani – willisjgoldsmith.substack.com – and Brown’s horrific Middle East/Palestinian Studies propaganda vehicle he leads. My most recent substack piece was posted today, March 13. Omer Bartov, with whom I once had rational exchanges, was again a focus of my comments along with the truly disturbed Adi Ophir and his partner in life and crime Ariella Azoulay. Please continue to track and bring attention to the academic and anti-Semitic wasteland represented by places like Brown.
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