What is the Shoah after Gaza?
27 January 2025 – – Speaking at the Green Party convention in Berlin yesterday, the current German Economy Minister and Chancellor candidate Robert Habeck warned about a possible resurgence of the far right in the upcoming election after Elon Musk, earlier in the weekend, appeared on a giant screen to voice his support for the Alternative for Germany (AfD). Musk has gone all-in to support AfD leader Alice Weidel, telling her supporters at a campaign event via video link that “the AfD is the best hope for Germany”, going on to urge them to “preserve German culture” and “protect the German people”.
In an apparent reference to the country’s Nazi history, Musk added: “Children should not be guilty of the sins of their parents, let alone their great-grandparents”.
This is all reminiscent of current Austrian politics. Habeck said Germany’s federal election on February 23rd could produce the sort of result for the far right that put the Austrian hardliner Herbert Kickl on the brink of power in Vienna. “If it can happen in Austria, it can also happen in Germany,” he said. He continued:
Because they are just like us. Austria is very close to us in culture and political tradition. In Austria, it has not been possible for a coalition of conservative Social Democrats and a progressive, liberal party to form a government, although they knew that a right-wing extremist party could then take over the government.
According to a YouGov poll from last week, the conservative CDU leader Friedrich Merz is still on course to win the most votes in next month’s election and to become chancellor. But polls can be wrong, and recent European elections have shown this is especially true when measuring support for controversial candidates.
Coming two days before today’s 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp, Musk’s AfD outreach has set alarm bells ringing. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk described the rhetoric from the rally as “all too familiar and ominous”. Add to that the ongoing controversy about Musk’s arm gesture after Donald Trump’s inauguration — almost every German commentator called it a Nazi salute — and anxiety is running high.
The true extent of Musk’s impact on European politics needs another, separate post. Today, a few words on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Gaza and genocide.
International Holocaust Remembrance Day (or the International Day in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust) is an international memorial day designated by the United Nations to be the 27th of January, the anniversary of the liberation of the German Nazi concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz in 1945. Today marks the 80th anniversary of that liberation.
It is a day for everyone to reflect on and honor and remember the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust, and also the genocides in Armenia, Bosnia, Cambodia, Chechnya, Darfur, Myanmar, Palestine, Rwanda, Ukraine, Yemen … etc., etc., etc., etc. ….
There is a full program at Auschwitz today. The main theme today is “Holocaust Remembrance for Dignity and Human Rights”.
Kings and queens, presidents, prime ministers and dignitaries from 54 countries have assembled at Auschwitz today to mark the day, but the world’s focus will be firmly on its few remaining survivors. About 50 former inmates are expected to attend the ceremony at the complex in southern Poland where Nazi Germany murdered more than a million people, most of them Jews, but also Poles, Roma and Sinti, Soviet prisoners of war and gay people.
An audience including Britain’s King Charles III, King Felipe VI of Spain and King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands, as well as France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, and the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, will hear their voices.
“This year, we are focusing on the survivors and their message,” said Pawel Sawicki, the Auschwitz museum spokesperson. “We all know that for the 90th anniversary, it will not be possible to have a large group. There will not be any speeches by politicians.”
The commemoration has added significance not just because most survivors are in their 90s and will not be able to tell their stories for much longer, but because today’s continuing wars, and increasingly polarised politics, make their testimony as relevant as ever.
Nazi German authorities established the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1940 in former barracks in the Polish town of Oświęcim, using it at first to hold Polish prisoners, including Catholic priests and members of the resistance.
They later established about 40 other camps in the area, including Birkenau, used for mass killings in gas chambers. Of the estimated 1.3 million people sent to the site from 1940 to 1945, about 1.1 million were murdered there, 1 million of them Jews.
Auschwitz-Birkenau has become an abiding symbol of Nazi Germany’s genocide of 6 million European Jews, looming large in the world’s collective memory as the embodiment of where hatred, racism and antisemitism can lead.
It is difficult to find the words that capture the experience of visiting such a place as Auschwitz. It is humanity’s most depraved and shameful exhibit towards the capacity of evil to take shape and form. There is a feeling in the air – a malevolence and smoldering evil – that fills the spaces where the giant crematorium and gas chambers once stood at Birkenau.
It is a chilling place. Auschwitz was a sprawling and interconnected series of slave labor camps that were built up around the main camp, which is remembered today as Auschwitz 1. This is where the only surviving gas chamber remains at the death camp, as well as scores of barracks, cells and torture chambers where Jews, political prisoners, gays, and other enemies of the state were held, tortured and enslaved.
As most of my regular readers know, over the last 7 years I have been involved in a film project that has been the most challenging of my career: a deep dive into the political uses of genocide and massacre. Part 1, “GENOCIDE: The bitter fight over its meaning“, will be completed this spring. You can watch my video summary here:
Genocide has existed in all periods of human history, but prior to the contemporary period it was rare except as an aspect of war, or, in the 16th and 19th centuries, as an aspect of development.
To a large extent genocide also appeared in a form specific to a given period – conquest, religious persecution, colonial domination. In the 20th century, however, genocide has been a common occurrence; moreover, the forms it has taken are diverse and spring from different motives: there has been a convergence of destructive forces in our period.
Albert Camus, the French philosopher and writer, called the 20th century an age of murder. But it is, more precisely, an age of politically sanctioned mass murder, of collective, premeditated death intended to serve the ends of the state.
It is an age of genocide in which 60 million men, women, and children, coming from many different races, religions, ethnic groups, nationalities, and social classes, and living in many different countries, on most of the continents of the earth, have had their lives taken because the state thought this desirable.
Such an age should perhaps be condemned out of hand, but it must also be understood: for we have to live as well as die in that world, and, to be realistic, a great many persons alive today have contributed to that genocide, mainly through passivity, but often through more active involvement.
That is the purpose of my films: to explore the meaning and use of genocide as we face it today in Afghanistan, China, Darfur, Gaza, Palestine, Syria, Yemen and so, so, so many other places.
My work has involved 100+ hours of video interview time with Jacques Semelin, plus numerous other key genocide authorities such as Serge Klarsfeld, Jean-Marc Dreyfus and Edyta Gawron. It has also allowed me unfettered access to the two Holocaust memorials in Paris, the Holocaust memorial in Washington D.C., a trip to the death camps at Auschwitz and Dachau, and the “Topography of Terror” – an outdoor and indoor history museum in Berlin, Germany that is located on the remains of Nazi regime’s security entities: the Sicherheitspolizei, the Einsatzgruppen and the Gestapo. But my work also includes study of the genocides in Yugoslavia and Rwanda. What started as one film has now resulted in two main films, plus a series of videos on my Youtube channel.
But besides Elon Mark as noted at the top of this post, there is a darker, more brutal stain today.
A policy of systematic war crimes intending to bring about the physical destruction of a people, partly or fully, is genocidal, per the 1948 Genocide Convention’s Article II. For many genocide scholars, although what is happening in Gaza is not Auschwitz, it is still the same family – a crime of genocide.
Amos Goldberg, Professor of Genocide Studies at The Hebrew University in Jerusalem, has been at the forefront of this view. He recently said:
Yes, it is genocide. It’s so difficult and painful to admit it, but we can no longer avoid this conclusion. Jewish history will henceforth be stained.
In April, Professor Goldberg published an article in the online magazine Local Call (Siha Mekomit, in Hebrew) accusing Israel of committing “genocide” in Gaza. I will have more from Professor Goldberg in my film but for now a few bits from a long interview he conducted with Le Monde last month. I’ve added a few [explainers] for context:
In April, you accused your country of committing a “genocide” in Gaza. How did you come to this conclusion, six months after the start of the war?
It took me time. October 7 was a shock, a tragedy, a horrendous attack. It was painful, criminal. It was of a magnitude we never experienced in Israel. Some 850 civilians [1,200 people in total] were killed in one day. Men, women, children, even babies and elderly were taken hostage. Some kibbutzim were completely destroyed. And the testimonies started flowing about cruelty, sexual violence, destruction by Hamas. I personally know people, some of them very close, affected by the attack. Some killed, some taken hostages, some barely survived. I had no words to explain the situation, to digest it, to mourn it. It was outrageous, traumatizing, personal.
I understood the context of occupation, of the siege [of Gaza], of apartheid [in the West Bank], but even if that could have explained why that happened, it could not have justified such atrocities. Immediately afterward, heavy Israeli bombings started, and within weeks thousands of civilians died in Gaza. And there were not only bombings. Genocidal rhetoric erupted and dominated the media, the political and public spheres: “We are fighting human animals” [Yoav Gallant, minister of defense, October 10, 2023]; “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible” [Isaac Herzog, president of Israel, October 14, 2023]; “We should drop a nuclear bomb on Gaza” [Amihai Eliyahu, minister of heritage, November 5, 2023]. “Gaza Nakba 2023” [Avi Dichter, minister of agriculture, on November 11, 2023, in reference to the forced displacement and expulsion of 700,000 Palestinians during the 1948 war, after the creation of Israel.] And that was so shocking that I had no words for that either. In January, I signed an open letter with 50 other Holocaust and Jewish studies Israeli researchers, asking Yad Vashem [the Israeli national memorial for the victims of the Holocaust in Jerusalem] to condemn explicit or implicit Israeli discourse calling for genocide in Gaza. If it’s not something we learned from the Holocaust, then what did we learn? One of the first Israeli laws after its creation, in 1948, was adopting the Genocide Convention into Israeli law [December 9, 1948]. And one of its clauses specifies that genocide is not only about the crimes committed, the convention also criminalizes the incitement to commit genocide. And it was clearly the case. And by the way, Yad Vashem refused to condemn this discourse.
Then I started writing, understanding that a huge human and political disaster was unfolding in front of our eyes. And, in April, I wrote, in Hebrew, “Yes it is a genocide.” It was then translated to English and was read by many around the world.
How did you come to make this accusation against a country which, as you point out, was created in response to the Holocaust?
First of all, I want to say that it is very painful because I accuse my own society, and myself. I have been fighting the occupation and apartheid for many years and am very well aware that Israel has committed severe war crimes in the occupied territories, but I never imagined that we could reach such a level of bloodshed and cruelty, even after October 7.
There is a legal definition of genocide that the UN adopted in the Genocide Convention. And although I am not a legal expert, I have the impression that many legal experts around the world are convinced that Israel has crossed the threshold of genocide and I agree with them. The most known examples are: In January, the International Court of Justice [ICJ] indicated that it is indeed “plausible” that Israel is committing genocide. And in March, Francesca Albanese, [the United Nations special rapporteur on the occupied territories] concluded in her report that there are reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating Israel’s commission of genocide is met. Several open letters signed by many hundreds of scholars including many legal scholars voiced the same concern.
In my mind, Israel has an absolute right to self-defense after October 7, but it criminally overreacted. What is the basic idea of a genocide? According to the Genocide Convention, it is the deliberate annihilation of a national, ethnical, religious or racial group or a part of it. There is an emphasis on the destruction of the group but not on the killing of all its members. One does not have to kill the entire group for it to become a genocide. What happened in Srebrenica, where “only” 8,000 men were killed, was recognized as a genocide by the ICT for former Yugoslavia. The United States acknowledged in March 2023 that what Myanmar does to the Rohingyas is a genocide, even if most of them were “only” expelled and even if “only” 10,000 were killed according to the State Department. Those examples are very different from the Holocaust or the Armenian genocide, when there was an attempt to kill all or almost all of the group’s members, but they are still a genocide. Israelis and many others mistakenly think that all genocides have to look like the Holocaust but this is not true.
What is happening in Gaza is a genocide because Gaza does not exist anymore. It was completely destroyed. The level and pace of indiscriminate killing of a huge amount of innocent people, including in what Israel designated as a safe zone, destruction of houses, infrastructures, almost all the hospitals and universities, mass displacement, deliberate famine, the crushing of elites (including the killing of journalists, doctors, professors, civil servants…) and the sweeping dehumanization of Palestinians, create an overall picture of genocide.
So we have the destruction, the intent and a recurring pattern of extreme violence against civilians. We still don’t know what the ICJ will rule in the case of South Africa against Israel, but if you read Raphael Lemkin [1900-1959] – the Jewish Polish legal scholar who coined the term and was the major driving force behind the UN Genocide Convention – this is exactly what he had in mind when he spoke about genocide.
Is this debate possible in Israel?
Not yet. But even if they don’t use the term genocide and they don’t think that a genocide is committed, an increasing number of people have doubts about the logic and purpose of this war. Many also oppose the continuation of the war because they understand that this is a condition for the return of the hostages. Only a very small minority opposes the war for moral reasons, but there might be now a little more space for isolated voices like mine. But I might prove to be wrong.
The war has to be stopped. Now. Extending the war to Lebanon is disastrous for both sides. It is a death sentence to the hostages and to many thousands in the region.
State and settlers’ violence in the West Bank has also become as cruel and lethal as ever. Israel has no solution to any of its problems but brute force and that is no solution for anything. The only solution that Israel refuses is acknowledging the Palestinians and their rights. We can’t wait for the decision of the ICJ. For the Palestinians in Gaza, for the Israelis, the people of Lebanon and for the hostages, it’s going to be too late. When we have so much evidence we have to take the risk to say it is a genocide even before the ruling of the court, because otherwise, what is the point of learning about genocide if only retroactively we can say, “Ah yes it was a genocide”? This is how history will judge what is happening.
Personally, I believe that there are good chances that the ICJ eventually will indeed approve that the crime of genocide or at least genocidal acts, such as the attack on the hospital Al Shifa or the deliberate starvation of hundreds of thousands of people, were committed. And for those who don’t think it’s a genocide, I would like to add: even if it is not a genocide undoubtedly severe war crimes and crimes against humanity were committed. That is bad enough!
Since October 7, existential fears have been rekindled on both sides: the Holocaust for the Jews, the Nakba for the Palestinians. Are they justified?
There is no symmetry here. It’s not a Holocaust for Jews because Israel has one of the most powerful armies in the world. It’s a huge blow, a huge trauma to Israel, and it undoubtedly generates great anxieties, but it is not a threat like the Holocaust. For Palestinians, the Nakba has been ongoing since 1948. And it will take generations to recover from this assault in Gaza.
This is indeed a second Nakba as some Israeli politicians explicitly stated at the beginning of the war. The Palestinians are experiencing something very traumatic that is threatening their very existence. We, Israelis, are experiencing something very traumatic too, but to my mind not an existential threat.
The violence of the crimes committed on October 7 was unprecedented. So was the scale of the Israeli response. How can we explain this dehumanization on both sides?
I am not a Palestinian society expert, I can’t answer for this side. But wars always bring dehumanization of the other side. And we have been at war for decades, at least since 1948. Israel cannot justify the Nakba, the occupation, apartheid and now the genocidal war on Gaza without dehumanizing the Palestinians. If we acknowledge that they are human beings like us, we can’t do this to them. We will not be able to justify all this. Because of its cruelty and shocking proportions, October 7 accelerated this process.
By dehumanizing others, you dehumanize yourself because you allow yourself to act inhumanely. And this phenomenon is worse among young people. Several generations were born after 1967 and have only known Israel with the occupation (including myself: I was born in 1966). But to those born after the second intifada (2000-2005) the idea of peace is completely alien. There were not even serious peace talks or negotiations in their adult lifetime, a separation wall was literally built. And after so many years of right-wing government mostly led by Netanyahu, you see the consequences.
There is also the sense that Israel is strong – at least until October – so why should it make compromises and give up our privileges? In 2018, Israel initiated the “nation-state bill” [which says that the right to exercise national self-determination in the state of Israel is unique to the Jewish people] which makes it only about us [Jewish people]. Palestinians don’t belong to the nation to which the state belongs, and therefore will always be discriminated against even within the state of Israel. In this context, it’s difficult for young people to humanize Palestinians and it’s a huge tragedy.
In your book “Holocaust and the Nakba: A New Grammar of Trauma and History”, co-written with political scientist Bashir Bashir (Columbia Press 2018), you argue for mutual empathy between Israelis and Palestinians. Is this still possible?
With my friend Bashir Bashir, we suggest a vision: “egalitarian binationalism,” in which Jews and Palestinians could live together between the River and the Sea on the basis of full equality, in which both also have full individual rights and the right to self-determination and reconciliation. No side will enjoy privileges as is the case now regarding the Jews in Israel. We don’t need simple empathy but what we call “empathic unsettlement” in which your empathy for the tragedy of others makes you reconsider your own fundamentals. In this bloodshed, such ideas seem like science fiction.
What do expect to happen in the next few years?
Blood, blood, blood. I don’t see anything else than a dire future. But we have to stick to our shared humanity and hope that one day which is not foreseeable at our current moment, things would change.
Note to my readers: Marie Cohen picks up this thread in the current issue of Jewish Currents which you can read here: “Can Genocide Studies Survive a Genocide in Gaza?“
My own short postscript
To address all of these issues in a short post like this is impossible. I will go into more detail in my films, although even that has become a challenge.
But it is worth remembering that many such re-examinations of Zionism and anxieties about the perception of Jews in the world were incited among survivors and witnesses of the Shoah by Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory and its manipulative new mythology. Yeshayahu Leibowitz, a theologian who won the Israel Prize in 1993, was already warning in 1969 against the “Nazification” of Israel. In 1980, the Israeli columnist Boaz Evron carefully described the stages of this moral corrosion: the tactic of conflating Palestinians with Nazis and shouting that another Shoah is imminent was, he feared, liberating ordinary Israelis from “any moral restrictions, since one who is in danger of annihilation sees himself exempted from any moral considerations which might restrict his efforts to save himself”. Jews, Evron wrote, could end up treating “non-Jews as subhuman” and replicating “racist Nazi attitudes”.
Evron urged caution, too, against Israel’s (then new and ardent) supporters in the Jewish American population. For them, he argued, championing Israel had become “necessary because of the loss of any other focal point to their Jewish identity” – indeed, so great was their existential lack, according to Evron, that they did not wish Israel to become free of its mounting dependence on Jewish American support.
Israel’s clamorous accusers today seem to aim at little more. Against the acts of savagery, and the propaganda by omission and obfuscation, countless millions now proclaim, in public spaces and on digital media, their furious resentments. In the process, they risk permanently embittering their lives. But, perhaps, their outrage alone will alleviate, for now, the Palestinian feeling of absolute loneliness … and go some way towards redeeming the memory of the Shoah.
To mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day, I offer one item, a poem by Matilda Olkinaitė from an anthology in my library, Poetry of the Holocaust (2019). Matilda Olkinaitė, aged nineteen, was shot by local Nazi collaborators, together with other members of the two Jewish families in the Lithuanian village Panemunėlis. Poems such as this enable us to hear the voices of those who were murdered because they were Jewish, or disabled, or who opposed the Nazis on religious or political grounds.
ALL THE SKIFFS HAVE FOUNDERED
Matilda Olkinaitė
All the skiffs have foundered
And mine will sink as well.
Death is wading
Through troubled waters.
And Death bade me
Sing my final hymn.
And Death bade me
Dance my final dance.
And so I sing my hymn
To the seagulls and the swells.
The azure heavens listen,
And I sing to them too.
And the sea carries my skiff
Through a window,
Carries me away to sleep,
And will pull me under.
Tonight Death wanders
Through restless waters.
The sun has sunk already
And my skiff will sink as well.
Translated from Lithuanian by Laima Vincė