Tornado Alley (PROG)

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Att: brooklyn13 - The Growing Rift between Holocaust Scholars over Israel/Palestine

Two Israeli human rights groups say their country is committing genocide in Gaza
"Still roughly 50-100-120 killed /day --
Death toll from starvation in Gaza rises to 115 as Israeli attacks continue"

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Related: brooklyn13, Whether or not antisemitism is not on the rise in the USA is arguable, but criticism of Israel genocidal policy is on the rise. And that is being promoted as antisemitism. And Trump's friend, the Heritage Foundation, is pushing much of that. You should understand more that is what you are being sucked into to support:
[...]A conservative project to allegedly counter anti-Semitism is using a pro-Israel stance to mask white nationalist goals.
[...]
The conservative think tank is the same force behind Project 2025, a blueprint for consolidating executive power in the US and forging the best-ever right-wing dystopia. The “national strategy” proposed by Project Esther .. https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2024/11/15/project-esther-a-trumpian-blueprint-to-crush-anticolonial-resistance – which is named for the biblical queen credited with saving the Jews from extermination in ancient Persia – basically consists of criminalising opposition to Israel’s current genocide and exterminating freedoms of speech and thought along with a whole lot of other rights.

The first “key takeaway” listed in the report is that “America’s virulently anti-Israel, anti-Zionist, and anti-American ‘pro-Palestinian movement’ is part of a global Hamas Support Network (HSN)”. Never mind that, in reality, there is no such thing as a “global Hamas Support Network” – just as there is no such thing as the HSN’s alleged “affiliated Hamas Support Organizations (HSOs)” that the Heritage Foundation has also taken the liberty of inventing. Among these alleged HSOs are prominent American Jewish organisations such as Jewish Voice for Peace.
[...]
Now, if the Trump administration seems to be taking Project Esther and running with it, it is more out of concern for propagating a white Christian nationalist agenda that utilises Zionism and anti-Semitism charges to its own extremist ends. And this, unfortunately, is just the beginning of a far more elaborate project.
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=176493090
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Forum: Israel-Palestine: Atrocity Crimes and the Crisis of Holocaust and Genocide Studies

Shira Klein
ORCID Icon
Published online: 08 Jan 2025

Cite this article https://doi.org/10.1080/14623528.2024.2448061 CrossMark Logo CrossMark

In this article

Holocaust Scholars in Defense of Israel
Holocaust Scholars in Defense of Palestinians
After 7 October
Additional information
Footnotes

A chasm has formed between Holocaust scholars concerning Israel/Palestine, deepening immeasurably since 7 October 2023. Unlike previous controversies in the field, the divide is not just historical or methodological; it revolves around academics’ role in the world today, particularly the public stand they choose to take on Palestine/Israel and Zionism. Two main camps have formed. Put reductively, one camp defends Israel, while the other defends Palestinians, although differences between individual scholars within each camp make for more of a spectrum than a clear-cut divide. How, despite a diversity of ideas and foci within each camp, did two academic-political antipodes solidify over several decades, and how have 7 October and the ensuing war widened the rift between them?

At one end of the spectrum are scholars who have defended Israeli policies. Their approach often rests on an understanding of the Holocaust as an exceptional event, which makes Israel an exceptional case by extension. In their interpretation, attacks on Israel constitute the latest trend in antisemitism. Since 7 October, they have taken a public stand justifying Israel’s military offensive against Gazans. On the other side of the spectrum are scholars who have critiqued Israeli policies and practices harming millions of Palestinians. For many of these scholars, their stand on Israel relates to a perception of the Holocaust as a case of genocide among other genocides, and a concurrent view that Israel, far from being exceptional, developed within a settler colonial framework. Since 7 October, these individuals have harnessed their expertise on racism and state violence to protest Israel’s assault on Gaza. The months since 7 October have hardened the divide, both in volume, with scholars speaking out on events in the Middle East more than ever before, and in substance, as they offer commentary on genocide, war crimes, antisemitism, and Zionism. This article focuses on scholars in the United States and Israel. How Holocaust scholars in Europe approach Palestine/Israel, is a question for future researchers.

Why does it matter what Holocaust scholars say about Israel/Palestine, one might ask? With the allegation of war crimes and genocide on the table, many are keen to know what Holocaust scholars think. Their opinion, as people who have devoted their careers to study war crimes and genocide, gives moral and academic gravitas to the question of how to classify what is happening in Israel/Palestine. Holocaust scholars are sought after by the media for op-eds and interviews, as the many examples below attest. They command authority, especially among Jews; Jews care deeply about the Holocaust, so they care about what Holocaust scholars have to say. As Hasia Diner has pointed out, “few issues loom as large or carry as much valence in the performance of Jewish identity as the Holocaust.”Footnote1 Jews’ approach to their catastrophe has reached the point of “sanctifying the Holocaust,” as Adi Ophir described. “A central altar has arisen, forms of pilgrimage are taking hold, and already a thin layer of Holocaust-priests, keepers of the flame, is growing and institutionalizing,” he wrote, a statement that rings as true today as it did forty years ago.Footnote2 In the post-7 October world, the voice of Holocaust scholars counts even more, considering the panic among many Jews that “it’s starting to feel like the 1930s again.”Footnote3 Holocaust scholars, as experts on violence towards Jews, therefore have a megaphone on all matters Jewish. How they choose to use it is the question at hand.

Holocaust Scholars in Defense of Israel

Long before 7 October, indeed ever since the formation of Holocaust studies as a field of research, many prominent scholars staunchly supported Israel. The earliest Holocaust scholars in the 1960s and 1970s advanced the idea that Israel was the epitome of tekuma, meaning rebirth or revival, a redemption that followed the shoah or churban, destruction. In this telling, Israel was the ultimate victim and hero, never the aggressor; there were no Palestinians, only Arabs. As early scholars depicted it, Jews in the newly proclaimed state had not expelled anyone in 1948, but only defended themselves, a courageous David in the face of the Arab Goliath. Some questioned these axioms, as shown below in the case of Hannah Arendt, but they were the rare exception.

Leading the way in defending Israel was Raul Hilberg, dubbed the founding father of Holocaust studies.Footnote4 He lavished praise on Israel in his 1961 opus, The Destruction of the European Jews. Hilberg extolled the virtues of Israeli military might, comparing their courage with the alleged passivity of the Holocaust’s victims. “The European Jews surrendered to their fate only a few years before Palestine Jewry hurled back Arab invaders by force of arms,” he wrote.Footnote5 “The Jews in Israel had acquired a state of their own. […] They no longer had to bury their feelings.” He regarded “Israel [as] Jewry’s great consolation,” an achievement he described as “one of the greatest in all of history,” and regarded those who opposed Israeli statehood as “Jewry’s primary enemy.”Footnote6

Holocaust scholars in the years following Hilberg, continued to shield Israel from its critics, with perhaps less melodramatic language, but defend it they did. In 1975, for example, eight years after Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza and annexed East Jerusalem, Holocaust theologian Emil Fackenheim opined that it was the responsibility of every Jew and every decent person to be a Zionist.Footnote7 Richard Rubenstein, in the same field, claimed that same year that “as a result of the Holocaust, Jews can only strive for power by going to Israel.”Footnote8 In 1983, not long after Israel’s invasion into Lebanon and the ensuant IDF-supported massacre of Sabra and Shatila, Saul Friedman, a professor of Holocaust and Jewish history, demanded the Vatican show more support for Israel.Footnote9 Elie Wiesel, an Auschwitz survivor, Boston University professor, acclaimed writer, and for years the head of the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, was a vocal ally of Israel. “I trust Israel,” he said in 1986.Footnote10 “I consider Israel’s destiny mine,” he added fifteen years later. Wiesel dismissed Palestinians’ claim to Jerusalem when he wrote, “Jerusalem is the third holiest city in Islam. But for Jews, it remains the first. Not just the first; the only.” He accepted Israel’s skewed retelling of 1948, both declaring that Palestinian refugees left at the behest of their leaders, and undercounting the number of refugees.Footnote11 On the backdrop of the Israeli government’s forced eviction of Palestinian residents from the East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah, Elie Wiesel wrote to President Obama, insisting that “Jews, Christians and Muslims are allowed to build their homes anywhere in the city.”Footnote12 Lucy Dawidowicz, another early Holocaust scholar, joined the chorus of support in the 1990s, describing the 1967 war as a “miracle,” deriding Zionist-critical Jews like Arendt, and slamming an Israeli human rights lawyer who defended Palestinian political prisoners in Israel.Footnote13

Holocaust scholars’ praise for Israel abounded, as did their assertions that criticism of Israel constituted another strand of antisemitism. This narrative gained momentum during the “war on terror” atmosphere that followed the 11 September 2001 attack, and the Second Intifada (2000-2005), which claimed the lives of 1000 Israelis and 3000 Palestinians. In 2003, political scientist Daniel Goldhagen, whose arguments on the Holocaust had been regarded by some as sensationalist, wrote that “the internet and television's biased stories and inflammatory images of Palestinian suffering” were nothing but “globalised anti-semitism.”Footnote14 According to Goldhagen, a direct line connected Palestinians to Nazi Germany: “Europe had exported its classical racist and Nazi anti-semitism to Arab countries, which they applied to Israel and Jews in general.” European and other international critics of Israel were no better, Goldhagen stated, charging them all with antisemitism: “Then the Arab countries re-exported the new hybrid demonology back to Europe and, using the United Nations and other international institutions, to other countries around the world.”Footnote15 In 2006, while Israel was curtailing Palestinians’ movement with a massive separation barrier, Goldhagen contended that “hostility to Israel is not, and never was, based on Israel’s policies.”Footnote16

For Holocaust scholars defending Israel, their stand intertwined with their understanding of the Holocaust itself. The individuals defending Israel tended to take the approach of “Holocaust exceptionalism” – the idea that the Shoah, the destruction of Europe’s Jews, differed from any other genocide in history. The Holocaust’s alleged uniqueness defined the approach of prominent scholars from the late 1970s onwards, including Yehuda Bauer, Emil Fackenheim, Saul Friedlander, Steven Katz, Deborah Lipstadt, Daniel Goldhagen, Lucy Dawidowicz, and Henry Feingold.Footnote17 Katz’s words best represented this mode of thinking when he described the Holocaust as “an event without real precedent or parallel in modern history.”Footnote18 By the late 1980s, philosopher Adi Ophir could remark, “To what lengths Jewish historians, educators, and politicians go to remind us over and over of the difference between the destruction of the Jews of Europe and all other types of disasters, misfortunes, and mass murders! Biafra was only hunger; Cambodia was only a civil war; the destruction of the Kurds was not systematic; death in the Gulag lacked national identification marks.”Footnote19 This was exactly the tone of Yehuda Bauer’s insistence that neither the mass murder of Sinti and Roma nor that of the disabled could be grouped together with the genocide of the Jews, because “the Holocaust is very much a unique case.”Footnote20 Although the rise of the field of genocide studies in the 1990s challenged the idea of the Holocaust’s uniqueness, these scholars continued to tout it.

Holocaust exceptionalism lent itself to a sort of Israel exceptionalism, which absolved Israel of any potential wrongdoing. According to this narrative, just as the Holocaust was uniquely terrible, so Israel, the state of Holocaust survivors and representative of the Jewish people, had to be uniquely good and uniquely protected. This kind of thinking was evident in a 2013 book by professor of American Jewish History and Holocaust Studies Henry Feingold. Feingold stated that “history had made an exception of the Jews, whose need for a homeland was a matter of life and death. Subsequently […] the Jewish state assumed a democratic form and demonstrated exemplary concern for social justice.” In this approach, Israel could only ever be a victim, never a perpetrator, and when criticism arose, it simply had to be antisemitism. To Feingold, Israel served as “a buttress against an Islamic anti-Semitism reminiscent of the very Christian European variety.” He acknowledged “the excesses of occupation and the need for a Palestinian state,” but concurrently praised the separation barrier and opposed Israel’s withdrawal from the West Bank. Feingold described such a withdrawal as a bad idea, in which Israel would be “voluntarily embarking on a slippery slope by surrendering almost one third of land [that Israel] claims, against the wishes of a majority of its citizens.”Footnote21 Dalia Ofer, another historian of the Holocaust, suggested a similar equivalence between criticism of Israel and antisemitism. The phenomenon of “significant European intellectuals who blamed Israel for human right abuses in connection of its policy in the occupied territories,” she wrote, proved that “a wave of new antisemitism was emerging.”Footnote22 Elhanan Yakira, a philosopher who also researched the Holocaust and its memory, similarly conflated between critiquing Israel and hating Jews. “Anti-Israelism has the same structure and the same moral import as antisemitism,” stated Yakira. “Both are basically a license to kill, and specifically to kill Jews.”Footnote23

Scholar after scholar equated critiques of Zionism and Israel with antisemitism. Jeffrey Herf did just that when he remarked that “the secular anti-Zionism of the radical left is making common cause with the religiously inspired anti-Semitism of the radical Islamists.” With this statement, Herf described hostility towards Israel as simply the latest fashion within antisemitism, dismissing out of hand the possibility that it had anything to do with the country’s treatment of Palestinians.Footnote24 Similar insights surface in Lipstadt’s writing. In her 2007 review of Jimmy Carter’s book Palestine: Peace not Apartheid, she opined that the book, “while exceptionally sensitive to Palestinian suffering, ignores a legacy of mistreatment, expulsion and murder committed against Jews.” By juxtaposing Palestinian victimhood to the victimhood of Jews in the Holocaust, she suggested a zero sum game between the two, and implied Israel’s immunity from censure.Footnote25

This practice of harnessing of the Holocaust to legitimize Israeli policies was not unique to scholars. It echoed and reinforced an approach long taken by the Israeli state, that of instrumentalizing the Holocaust to oppress Palestinians. As Idith Zertal and others have shown, Israel made widespread use of the Holocaust and antisemitism to contextualize and justify its actions towards Palestinians.Footnote26 The same goes for international Jewish organizations, who understand the Holocaust as inextricably connected to defending Israel. The Holocaust has been ubiquitous in the pamphlets and publications of Jewish organizations. Take an AIPAC member solicitation from the 1990s, drawing a clear connection between pro-Israel donations and the Holocaust: “For American Jews of conscience, Israel is a solemn pledge to six million Jews who perished in the Holocaust?…?Defending Israel is an honor and a responsibility.”Footnote27 The American Jewish Committee (AJC) fashioned a similar connection between the Holocaust and praise of Israel’s “wholehearted embrace of democracy and the rule of law” when it wrote in 2016: “Look at the light-years traveled since the darkness of the Holocaust, and marvel at the miracle of a decimated people returning to a tiny sliver of land – the land of our ancestors, the land of Zion and Jerusalem – and successfully building a modern, vibrant state.”Footnote28 In a British Stand With Us booklet, the Holocaust appears just before the claim that Israel seeks “values of justice, democracy, equal rights, and peace.”Footnote29 Felix Klein, Germany’s “Federal Government Commissioner for Jewish Life in Germany and the Fight against Antisemitism,” has used the Holocaust even more blatantly, arguing that the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement replicates Nazi-era boycotts. BDS “cannot be treated separately from the National Socialist ‘Don’t buy from Jews,’” he opined in 2021.Footnote30

Holocaust scholars’ defense of Israel has also found expression in their adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, which conflates antisemitism with criticism of Israel. This definition – which would come to play a central role after 7 October – was first published in 2005 on the website of the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia. Its authors were Kenneth Stern, an attorney, and Andrew Baker, a rabbi, both representing the AJC. Mark Weitzman, Director of Government Affairs at the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, brought the definition to IHRA, an intergovernmental agency with representatives from over 30 member countries, among them Holocaust scholars. In 2016 IHRA officially adopted the definition, which consists of a short core definition and 11 examples. Since seven of these pertain to Israel, it can be – and has been – used to equate criticism of Israel with antisemitism. The IHRA definition has been endorsed by hundreds of organizations and agencies, including governments and universities around the world.Footnote31 To quote Derek Penslar: “With avid support from organizations such as the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the United Kingdom’s Community Security Trust, […] the definition has assumed iconic status and an air of permanence, if not inviolability.”Footnote32 Holocaust scholars defending the IHRA definition included Jeffrey Herf, Yehuda Bauer (who then served as IHRA’s honorary president), and Dina Porat.Footnote33 Porat argued it was antisemitic to “describe Israel as systematically violating international standards to cause the Palestinians to abandon their national aspirations.”Footnote34

The scholars in this group are by no means homogenous in their politics. The late Bauer, for example, publicly criticized Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and its siege on Gaza, lambasting right-wing political parties.Footnote35 Jeffrey Herf, in contrast, praised Israel’s rule in the West Bank. In 2016 he helped block a resolution by the American Historical Association condemning Israeli violence towards Palestinian researchers, and in 2018 he opined that West Bank Palestinians’ life had improved under Israeli rule.Footnote36 Still, despite their differences, both ended up defending Israel from its most avid critics, among them Holocaust scholars.

Holocaust Scholars in Defense of Palestinians

While many Holocaust historians and theologians vociferously defended Israel, others have taken the reverse position. In the early years, such scholars represented only a tiny minority. Among the few who spoke out in the earlier decades were Hannah Arendt, the famous German Jewish historian, philosopher, and theorist. Arendt linked Israel to imperial domination when she wrote in her iconic Origins of Totalitarianism that Israel had “colonized and then conquered” Palestine. She expressed sympathy for Palestinian refugees, writing that Israel’s birth, while attempting to help Jews, “merely produced a new category of refugees, the Arabs, thereby increasing the number of stateless and rightless by another 700,000–800,000 people.”Footnote37 She supported the right of return for Palestinian refugees, joining American and foreign scholars and diplomats in a 1958 statement saying that “the solution must be acceptable to the Arab refugees in acknowledging the justice of their claim?…?to determine for themselves whether to give up or to preserve their birthright.”Footnote38

A decade would pass until a scholar who had devoted his career to studying the Holocaust would continue Arendt’s critique. Saul Friedländer, who would become one of the best-known historians of the Holocaust, also criticized Israel. In 1969, he urged Israel to avoid an occupation of the territories conquered two years earlier, because to keep them, he said, would destroy Israeli values. In 1972, he warned that if Israel would annex the West Bank and Gaza, it would devolve into “a regime of ‘apartheid.’” He also chided Israelis for harbouring “a feeling of superiority over the Arabs,” although unlike Arendt, he rejected Palestinian refugees’ right to return.Footnote39

Another scholar who voiced criticism of Israel was John K. Roth, an author of numerous books on the Holocaust. He sparked controversy when he commented in a 1988 Los Angeles Times op-ed that the desire of Israeli right-wingers to expel Palestinians resembled Nazi ambitions. Just as “Kristallnacht happened because a political state decided to be rid of people unwanted within its borders,” he stated, so “Israel would prefer to rid itself of Palestinians if it could do so.” Palestinians “are being forced into a tragic part too much like the one played by the European Jews 50 years ago,” he argued, and asked readers to read the words “Never again” in a universal sense, as “a cry to forestall tragedy wherever people are unwanted.”Footnote40

The 1990s heralded the start of a more substantial critique of Israel. This decade witnessed the Oslo Accords, which brought temporary hope that the enmity between Palestinians and Israelis was about to end, along with Israel’s occupation and Palestinians’ violent resistance. The 1990s also ushered in the New Historians, who challenged traditional Zionist narratives of Israel’s founding, especially Israel’s role in the expulsion of Palestinians in 1948. Just as importantly, this decade brought a shift in Holocaust historiography, as the nascent field of genocide studies began to challenge the idea of the Shoah’s uniqueness. Dirk Moses, a genocide and Holocaust scholar, took such a stand when he asked rhetorically in 1998, “Should the Holocaust be narrated into a Zionist story of Jewish vulnerability in the diaspora?”Footnote41 Increasingly, scholars questioned whether the Holocaust really diverged so radically from other cases of mass killing. By 2008, Dan Stone could comment on an entire “empirical historiography that […?argues] that there are important links between colonial genocide and the Holocaust, as well as meaningful conceptual gains to be made by thinking of the Holocaust in terms of comparative genocide.” Gradually, the idea that scholars could “study the Holocaust alongside other cases of genocide and ethnic cleansing” became widespread.Footnote42

Scholars who challenged the thesis of Holocaust uniqueness showed more openness to condemn Israel’s actions, just as adherents of Holocaust exceptionalism joined the pro-Israel chorus. Tom Segev, author of a book on Nazi concentration camps, observed in 1993 that “the unique character of the Holocaust […] conforms to the Zionist movement’s fundamental assumption: that only an independent Israel could guarantee the safety of the Jews.” While Segev didn’t explicitly negate this assumption, he did point out the myriad ways Israelis used the Holocaust, including to justify force against the Palestinians.Footnote43 Moshe Zuckermann, who has studied Germany and the Holocaust, was more explicit when he argued in 1996 in favour of a “universalist lesson of the Holocaust,” explaining that the particularist alternative served to “justify the occupation and brutal, oppressive Israeli acts” towards Palestinians.Footnote44 In 2011 Moses echoed Zertal’s findings that “the Israeli state has exploited and manipulated Holocaust memories to serve its partisan ends,” including, in the case of the religious Right, “for the continuing occupation of Palestinian land.” Moses, like other genocide scholars,Footnote45 contextualized Israel’s history and policies within a framework of settler colonial violence, recalling Arendt’s earlier observations. “Blind to their own subject position as recent settlers in a country with a massive Palestinian Arab majority,” wrote Moses, “many Zionists ascribed (and many still ascribe) the hostility of the locals to the age-old anti-Semitism experienced in Europe […] rather than recognizing that their very presence and intention to form a rapid demographic majority, and their expulsion of most of the Arabs after 1947, was the source of provocation.”Footnote46 For Moses, rejecting the Holocaust’s alleged exceptionalism went hand in hand with pointing out Zionism’s imperialist history.

During the 2010s, more and more Holocaust researchers offered ever-focused critical commentary on Israel and Palestine, setting in motion what would become a true rift in the field. These scholars made it a point to connect their work on the Holocaust to the fate of Palestinians. They included Michael Rothberg, for example, a literary scholar whose work brought together Holocaust studies and postcolonial studies. In 2011, he examined claims of equivalence between Gaza and the Warsaw ghetto. Rothberg advised against equating the two, stating that “occupation and blockade [are?…] distinct from industrialized genocide,” but took a clear stand against Israel’s destruction of Palestinian life, especially during the 2008–2009 offensive that killed 1,400 Palestinians in three weeks. Rothberg also critiqued Israel’s misuse of the Holocaust to legitimize oppression of Palestinians. He called this “the morally justified originary position of victim that frequently justifies violence.”Footnote47 That same year, Holocaust scholar Amos Goldberg, author of Trauma in First Person: Diary Writing during the Holocaust, connected the genocide of the Herrero in German-colonized Namibia to Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. The first, he said, was a case in which “colonial domination, based on a sense of cultural and racial superiority, could spill over into horrific crimes such as mass expulsion, ethnic cleansing, and genocide in the face of local revolt.” He saw a worrying parallel in Israel. “The case of the Herrero revolt should serve as a horrific warning sign for us here in Israel,” he said, “which has already known one Nakba in its history.”Footnote48 A year later Goldberg argued that Yad Vashem, Israel's official Holocaust memorial museum, helped cultivate a “victimized identity” which served as “an extremely powerful and useful diplomatic tool […] in maintaining the occupation in Palestine.”Footnote49 Moshe Zimmermann, a historian of German Jewry, slammed the Israeli government for its treatment of Palestinians, and for charging Palestine solidarity activists like Nelson Mandela with antisemitism.Footnote50

Israel-critical Holocaust scholars quickly faced backlash from their Israel-supportive peers. Nowhere was this clearer than in attacks on the Journal of Genocide Research (JGR), which became a venue for scholars to question both the Holocaust’s uniqueness and Israel’s misuse of it. In 2016, Israel Charny, a psychologist and scholar of genocide, published a 28-page attack on the journal, accusing it of “minimization of the significance of the Holocaust, anti-Israel motifs, [and] anti-Semitic meanings.”Footnote51 The accused authors at JGR issued a rebuttal, and 60 scholars signed a statement in their support.Footnote52

Despite Charny’s chilling critique, Israel-critical scholars continued their work. Daniel Blatman, a historian of the Holocaust specializing in Nazi-occupied Poland, protested in 2016 against Israeli denialism of the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948,Footnote53 and several years later called for Israelis to recognize the brutality of the occupation. He, too, opposed using the Holocaust to justify present-day oppression. The state of Israel, he wrote, was “taking advantage of the terrible destruction that the Holocaust brought upon the Jewish people.” He critiqued Israel’s tendency to “wave the permanent victim card” when facing “criticism […] regarding its treatment of the Palestinians.”Footnote54

A 2018 book edited by Goldberg and Palestinian scholar Bashir Bashir, The Holocaust and the Nakba, highlighted still more Israel-critical Holocaust scholars, alongside scholars of Palestine. The book reflected on two catastrophes – the Holocaust, an extreme genocide of six million Jews, and the Nakba, an ethnic cleansing and destruction of culture which continues to this day through colonial practices such as Jewish settlements, land grabs, and sieges on Gaza.Footnote55 One article by Holocaust scholar Alon Confino centred on a married couple, Holocaust survivors Genya and Henryk Kowalski, who were offered a Palestinian home on their arrival in Israel in 1949. Seeing a table still set with plates, evidence that the former residents had fled in terror, the couple decided they could never live there, explaining, “it reminded us how we had to leave the house and everything behind when the Germans arrived and threw us into the ghetto.”Footnote56

Confino harnessed the Kowalskis’ exceptional caseFootnote57 to imagine a “counterfactual history,” a “historical alternative to the history of Palestinian dispossession,” one where Jews’ experience of the Holocaust prompted them to empathize with Palestinian refugees. He argued against the zero-sum game where acknowledging Palestinian suffering meant minimizing Jewish suffering, and criticized Israelis for “denying Jewish responsibility for [Palestinian] dispossession and refusing to offer an apology, material compensation, or Palestinian self-determination.” Confino further urged readers to “resist the claims made in the name of the Holocaust about the singularity of Jewish suffering, the eternity of Jewish victimhood, and the pristine, immaculate birth of the State of Israel.”Footnote58

Critiques of Israel continued steadily, several in 2020 alone. Ofer Ashkenazi, an expert on Weimar and Nazi Germany, published an article on Israelis’ silencing of the 1948 expulsion of Palestinians. Surveying the contributions of the “New Historians” of the 1980s who challenged Zionist historiography, Ashkenazi slammed Benny Morris, a “New Historian” who famously turned from documenting Zionist atrocities to justifying Israeli violence towards Palestinians as a necessary evil. Ashkenazi also criticized the Nakba Law (which withholds state funding from bodies that commemorate the Nakba) and the censorship of Teddy Katz, an MA student who had written about a massacre in the village of Tantura in 1948. Ashkenazi wrote of the need for a “historiography based on empathy and on comparative frameworks that interweave Jewish and Arab suffering.”Footnote59 Also that year, Zimmermann challenged the Israeli state’s “all the world is against us” narrative, as he called it, especially its overemphasis on the Mufti’s closeness to Hitler.Footnote60 Still more academics came to the defense of African philosopher Achille Mbembe, attacked for his critical views of Israel, such as calling Israel an apartheid state.Footnote61 In response to Felix Klein, who accused the philosopher of antisemitism, multiple Holocaust scholars joined a letter charging Klein with “weaponizing antisemitism against critics of the Israeli government.”Footnote62

Holocaust scholars gained momentum in their activism, and by early 2021, embarked on a massive organizing that resulted in the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism (JDA). Challenging the IHRA definition, the JDA firmly decoupled antisemitism from criticism of Israel. It defined antisemitism as “discrimination, prejudice, hostility or violence against Jews as Jews (or Jewish institutions as Jewish).” Aiming to “protect a space for an open debate about the vexed question of the future of Israel/Palestine,” the JDA provided ten guidelines related to Israel and Palestine. Actions that, “on the face of it, are not antisemitic” included “Supporting the Palestinian demand for justice,” “Criticizing or opposing Zionism as a form of nationalism,” “Evidence-based criticism of Israel as a state,” and supporting boycott, divestment, or sanctions against Israel (BDS). The JDA was signed by 367 scholars, a good number of them specialists on the Holocaust, antisemitism, or genocide.

The JDA provided scholars of antisemitism an anchor to voice their reservations on Israel. In one opinion piece published right after the JDA’s publication, entitled “Criticism of Israel and its policies isn’t antisemitism,” Holocaust historian Omer Bartov wrote that “The Israeli government and its supporters […] paint any substantive, harsh criticism of Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians as antisemitic.”Footnote63 When Amnesty International’s report on Israeli apartheid sparked charges of antisemitism,Footnote64 David Feldman, director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Study of Antisemitism, recommended the JDA’s definition.Footnote65

A further instance of organizing by Holocaust scholars, again together with experts on genocide, mass violence, and human rights, occurred in May 2021, following Israel’s deadly attack on Gaza. “We study and teach about a wide range of processes and cases of mass atrocities and state violence,” wrote the scholars in a statement published in Jadaliyya. “Unfortunately, Israel – like many other modern states – also commits state violence, and we must not remain silent about it.”Footnote66 The onset of Israel’s most right-wing government in January 2023 prompted still more Holocaust scholars to raise their voices in defense of Palestinians. When the Israeli military attacked Jenin, faculty at Stockton University protested, two of them experts on the Holocaust: Raz Segal, author of Days of Ruin: The Jews of Munkacs during the Holocaust, and Michael Hayse, author of Physicians between Nazism and Democracy. As scholars “devoted to the study of mass atrocities,” they wrote, “rooted in our commitment to Holocaust scholarship and remembrance; to the struggle against state violence; to the voices of victims and survivors – we cannot stay silent regarding the ongoing Israeli assault against Palestinians.”Footnote67

The sharp increase in settler and army violence in spring-summer 2023, along with the judicial coup and the Jewish-led demonstrations that followed it, catalyzed ever more Holocaust scholars into action. In August 2023, a group of Holocaust historians and scholars of the Middle East co-organized a petition entitled the “Elephant in the Room.” This statement pointed out that while hundreds of thousands of Israelis were taking to the streets to protest the erosion of democracy, millions of Palestinians were living with no democracy whatsoever, under a regime of apartheid. “Palestinian people lack almost all basic rights, including the right to vote and protest,” read the statement. “There cannot be democracy for Jews in Israel as long as Palestinians live under a regime of apartheid, as Israeli legal experts have described it.”Footnote68 While over 3000 individuals (the majority university professors) signed the petition, it was the signatures of prominent Holocaust scholars that caught the media’s attention: Haaretz mentioned David Feldman,Footnote69 Al Jazeera mentioned Amos Goldberg,Footnote70 taz in Berlin mentioned Omer Bartov.Footnote71 When Felix Klein countered that anyone accusing Israel of apartheid was delegitimizing the Jewish state, Goldberg harnessed the authority of Holocaust (and other) scholars: “Does Klein want to seriously accuse highly distinguished scholars such as Omer Bartov, Dan Diner, Saul Friedländer, Avishai Margalit, Shulamit Volkov, Yfaat Weiss or the more than a dozen signatory rabbis that they are trying to delegitimize the State of Israel? Saul Friedländer, the Holocaust survivor and author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning work “The Third Reich and the Jews” – is he too an anti-Semite according to Klein?”

After 7 October

After Hamas’s killing of over 1,000 individuals on 7 October and Israel’s ensuant assaults on Gaza and the West Bank, the rift between the two camps of scholars became a veritable chasm. The levels of violence, the sheer scope of human loss, and the international spillover of these events – whether through livestreamed media coverage, demonstrations, government hearings, proceedings in the Hague, student encampments, or new laws on freedom of speech and antisemitism – all launched Holocaust scholars into the public eye more than ever before.

Holocaust scholars were on the forefront of calling for Israeli restraint, alongside, of course, denouncing the Hamas attacks. Scholars in the Israel-critical camp swiftly condemned Israel’s brutal response, above all its indiscriminate bombing of entire neighbourhoods, accompanied by promises of politicians and army generals to wreak destruction. Holocaust experts called attention to Israel’s war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. As early as 13 October, Raz Segal penned a piece in Jewish Currents arguing that “the assault on Gaza can?…?be understood?…?as a textbook case of genocide unfolding in front of our eyes.” Segal added, “I say this as a scholar of genocide, who has spent many years writing about Israeli mass violence against Palestinians.”Footnote72 Segal would later co-author an article in the insert-text-here highlighting not only the crime of genocide, but the connection between Holocaust exceptionalism and the belief that Israel could not commit heinous crimes. With his co-author Luigi Daniele, he pointed out “the exceptional status accorded to Israel as a foundational element in the field, that is, the idea that Israel, the state of Holocaust survivors, can never perpetrate genocide.”Footnote73

During the year that followed 7 October, scholar after scholar joined Segal in his diagnosis, creating a formidable consensus that Israel was perpetrating war crimes at best, and genocide at worst. On 10 November 2023 Bartov published a piece warning that “war crimes, and even crimes against humanity, are happening,” and that “there is genocidal intent, which can easily tip into genocidal action.”Footnote74 That same month, two additional scholars who work on the Holocaust condemned Israeli violence. Dirk Moses, coeditor of the book The Holocaust in Greece, harshly denounced Hamas’s attack, but wrote that Israel was “subjecting two million Palestinians to serial war crimes and mass expulsion,” and that when Western states called the 7 October attack “unprovoked,” they failed to recognize “any of the history that led to it.”Footnote75 Samuel Moyn, author of the book A Holocaust Controversy, co-wrote an op-ed in The Guardian, which quoted Bartov. “We must heed [his] warning,” he and others wrote, “and not close down the space for debate and reflection about the possibility of genocide.”Footnote76 Moyn described Israel as a settler colonial power when he wrote, in December 2023, that “the undoubted turpitude of Hamas’s acts could not negate the colonial history that produced the Gazan situation.”Footnote77

[Insert: It Is Important to Call a Genocide a Genocide,’ Consider Suspending Israel’s
Credential as UN Member State, Experts Tell Palestinian Rights Committee
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=175677711]

Scholars continued to condemn Israeli violence throughout the winter and spring that followed 7 October. In late November 2023, Christopher Browning, Jane Caplan, Deborah Dwork, David Feldman, Omer Bartov, Allon Confino, Atina Grossmann, and others penned an open letter in the New York Review of Books, warning against comparing Hamas’s attacks to the Holocaust. They stressed Israel’s decades-long injustices that formed the background to the 7 October massacres. They emphasized “the context out of which it [7 October] 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.”Footnote78 In December 2023, Barry Trachtenberg delivered a webinar on the “ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.” Trachtenberg acknowledged and decried the growth and danger of antisemitism, but asked viewers to resist the “logic of an eternal antisemitism,” which served as “an endless justification” to identify critics of Zionism “as enem[ies] of the Jewish people.”Footnote79 Trachtenberg also testified on behalf of Palestinian Americans in a lawsuit filed in a federal court in Oakland in January 2024. The Oakland plaintiffs, some of whom had lost more than 100 members of their family to Israel’s bombs, argued that the United States, by helping Israel, had violated the international law binding the United States to the Genocide Convention. “We are watching the genocide unfold as we speak,” Trachtenberg said as the plaintiffs’ witness. “We are in this incredibly unique position where we can intervene to stop it, using the mechanisms of international law that are available to us.”Footnote80 (The federal judge had little power to do anything about the case, given the executive branch’s control over foreign policy).

Publications proliferated, bearing the same warnings, the same message. In April 2024, Omar Shahabudin McDoom, a scholar of comparative genocide, opined that using the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s three hallmarks of genocide, “the Israeli government’s actions are genocidal,” although he also made the point that whether it was genocide or not mattered less than the bottom line: that large numbers of civilians were being killed.Footnote81 Goldberg wrote in April 2024 a piece entitled “Yes, this is genocide,” explaining why. “Genocide is the deliberate destruction of a collective or part of it,” he wrote, “And this is what is happening in Gaza. The result is undoubtedly genocidal.” Goldberg harnessed his authority as a Holocaust scholar when he wrote, “Israelis are wrong to think that genocide should look like the Holocaust. They imagine trains, gas chambers, […] extermination camps, and a systematic persecution of all members of the victim group until the last one.” Clear dissimilarities between events in 1940s Europe and 2024 Gaza, he stressed, did not make the latter any less of a genocide.Footnote82 Goldberg repeated this point in July, adding, “A radical atmosphere of dehumanization of the Palestinians prevails in Israeli society to an extent that I can’t remember in my fifty-eight years of living here.”Footnote83 A month later, Omer Bartov’s op-ed in the Guardian was the first piece by a Holocaust historian to make explicit comparisons to Nazi Germany. The mindset of IDF soldiers in Gaza, Bartov stated, reminded him of Wehrmacht soldiers in Russia: “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.”Footnote84 In October 2024, Blatman’s op ed slammed Israel’s “Generals Plan,” calling it “a terrible war crime that ranges from ethnic cleansing to genocide.”Footnote85 A month later, Nitzan Lebovic, Chair of Holocaust Studies and Ethical Values, gave a talk entitled “One Year of Genocide in Gaza” on his home campus, Lehigh University.Footnote86

Alongside these individual responses, the months after 7 October also saw collective protests by Holocaust scholars. One statement from 9 December, led by Segal and signed by 55 colleagues, read, “We, scholars of the Holocaust, genocide, and mass violence, feel compelled to warn of the danger of genocide in Israel’s attack on Gaza.” The statement denounced the Hamas-led massacres of 7 October, but asserted they occurred “within the context of Israeli settler colonialism, Israeli military occupation violence against Palestinians since 1967, the sixteen-year siege on the Gaza Strip since 2007, and the rise to power in Israel in the last year of a government made up of politicians who speak proudly about Jewish supremacy and exclusionary nationalism.” The scholars added, “Explaining is not justifying, and this context in no way excuses the targeting of Israeli civilians and migrant workers by Palestinians on 7 October.” The statement discussed Israel’s large-scale war crimes, the clear intent of its leaders to destroy Palestinians, the dehumanizing language used by Israeli ministers and generals, the intensification of settler violence since 7 October, and the need for an arms embargo on Israel.Footnote87

A similar statement, addressed to President Biden, also signed by numerous scholars of the Holocaust, came out in March 2024. “Genocide is plausible,” warned the letter, citing the ICJ's finding that South Africa’s allegation, that Israel was engaged in genocide, was plausible. The letter pointed out the prediction of public health experts, that by the end of 2024, far many more people would die as a result of Israel’s actions, and called on the US to “stop transfer of all offensive arms and related funds to Israel.”Footnote88 When the Jewish press reported on the petition, the signatories emphasized were Holocaust scholars and Nobel Prize winners.Footnote89 In October 2024, Holocaust scholars joined a highly visible call for sanctions against Israel, signed by over 3,000 Israeli citizens. The statement asked the international community to “implement every possible sanction” to stop “the constant massacres and destruction.”Footnote90

Holocaust scholars also lent their voice to protecting colleagues who faced persecution for condemning Israeli violence. Letters of support proliferated in Spring 2024 when Hebrew University professor Nadera Shelhoub-Kevorkian was reprimanded, suspended, and eventually arrested for critical remarks she made on a podcast.Footnote91 Among the over 700 academics demanding the Hebrew University lift her suspension were multiple Holocaust scholars.Footnote92 The same occurred after the University of Minnesota cancelled the appointment of Raz Segal to direct its centre for Holocaust and Genocide Studies following his outspokenness on Israel. Defending Segal were many Holocaust scholars.Footnote93

More activity took place in May 2024, after the House passed the Antisemitism Awareness Act, a bill which, if it passed the Senate, would mandate the Department of Education to use the IHRA definition. Holocaust scholars joined 1,200 Jewish academics in opposing the law. Their statement read, “Criticism of the state of Israel, the Israeli government, policies of the Israeli government, or Zionist ideology is not – in and of itself – antisemitic […] By stifling criticism of Israel, the IHRA definition hardens the dangerous notion that Jewish identity is inextricably linked to every decision of Israel’s government. Far from combating antisemitism, this dynamic promises to amplify the real threats Jewish Americans already face.”Footnote94 Concurrently, Omer Bartov published an op ed in Moment Magazine, where he argued that the Antisemitism Awareness Act was “a cynical, or at best naïve move that will only lend a hand to opponents of free speech and undermine democracy in the service of twenty-first century authoritarianism – the same kind of authoritarianism that only seven decades ago engaged in the labeling, persecution and mass murder of Jews and other minorities in Europe.”Footnote95 Soon after, Segal initiated a new definition of antisemitism, entitled the “New Jersey Statement on Antisemitism and Islamophobia.”Footnote96 Its goal was to offer an alternative not just to the IHRA definition, but also to other definitions that treat antisemitism in isolation. In contrast, the New Jersey Statement's focus was on antisemitism and Islamophobia, their entanglement, and anti-Palestinian racism.

Perhaps the most compelling response to the Antisemitism Awareness Act was Confino and Goldberg’s article in the Israeli leftist online +972 Magazine.Footnote97 Confino and Goldberg explained why the IHRA definition was so problematic. In what they called a “psycho-discursive mechanism of inversion and projection,” the IHRA definition “allows Israel and its supporters […] to deny Israel’s own crimes and violent discourse by inverting and projecting them onto the Palestinians and their supporters, and calling it antisemitism.” The IHRA definition states, for instance, that denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination is antisemitic. Yet Israel’s policy of occupation and displacement has denied the Palestinian people their right to self-determination for decades. Through inversion and projection, explained Confino and Goldberg, IHRA made it permissible for Israel to thwart Palestinian self-determination, but when others did so to Jews, IHRA called it antisemitism. Providing another example, Confino and Goldberg drew attention to the IHRA clause that “Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis” is antisemitic. Ironically, said Confino and Goldberg, Israel and its supporters continuously link Arabs and especially Palestinians to the Nazis.

Organizing among Holocaust scholars went beyond the traditional forms of op-eds, petitions, and webinars. For the first time ever, academics embraced TikTok and Instagram as a means of educating the public on antisemitism and Israel, producing reels (short-form videos) to explain and historicize current events. Their videos went viral, with Segal’s video, “Is Israel committing genocide?” attracting close to half a million views, 45,000 “likes,” and 5,000 shares. Bartov’s reel, entitled “Is the IDF the most moral army in the world?” examined the IDF’s war crimes, while Frances Tanzer, Holocaust historian at Clark University, explained the interrelatedness of antisemitism and Islamophobia.Footnote98

The other camp, Holocaust scholars defending Israel, responded just as publicly. In the first few months after 7 October, scholars justified Israel’s massive military offensive against Gazans, whether by saying so explicitly, or by choosing to focus solely on Hamas’s brutality and saying little to nothing about Israeli violence. Among the first to chime in was Yehuda Bauer, who penned an article on 5 November 2023. Bauer argued that the region’s violence boiled down to a clash of civilizations. Hamas represented “barbarism,” wrote Bauer, while “Israel and its supporters, adher[ing] to the traditions of a relatively liberal West,” abided by “humanistic conventions,” and strove for a “civilized society.”Footnote99

Holocaust scholars in the mainstream camp broadcast their support for Israel’s actions. On 7 November, Michael Berenbaum delivered a webinar in which he commended Israel for its “very important strategy” to “reestablish its own sense of deterrence.” He claimed that reports that Israel “appear[ed] to be wantonly destroying segments of Gaza” were “false.” He dismissed out of hand the idea that Israel was committing genocide, assuring his listeners, “I know a little bit about genocide, I’ve only studied it for the bulk of my professional life.” He went on to point out the growing population in the West Bank and Gaza, explaining that a society that “is increasing and reproducing in numbers […?where] 60 percent of the population are children” could not be undergoing a genocide, because, “in cases in which a society is the victim of genocide or about to be the victim of genocide, there’s a deterioration and a dramatic drop in the birth rate because parents don’t dare to bring children into such a world. And that’s material evidence that genocide is not being committed.” Berenbaum denied any “disproportionate use of force” by Israel, reasoning, “Israel is issuing warnings by dropping leaflets, by making telephone calls, by indicating what buildings it will be attacking.”Footnote100 Echoing Berenbaum were also Holocaust scholars Polly Zavadivker from the University of Delaware, and Richard Libowitz, retired from Temple University. Zavadivker slammed Segal’s warnings on genocide as “damaging to the legitimacy of Holocaust and Genocide Studies as a field,” and accused him of making “false claims […] in the guise of scholarly expertise.”Footnote101

Time and again, Holocaust scholars focused on Hamas’s cruelty, while omitting any mention of Israeli brutality. A statement from 17 November, signed by over 150 scholars, framed 7 October within the context of the Holocaust, stating that the atrocities that day “unavoidably br[ought] to mind the mindset and the methods of the perpetrators of the pogroms that paved the way to the Final Solution.” The authors did mention Palestinians – “We deplore the humanitarian catastrophe of the Palestinian people in Gaza” – but placed all responsibility for Palestinian casualties with Hamas – “it derives directly from the use of civilians as human shields by the Hamas.”Footnote102

Holocaust scholars portrayed a simple binary of Israeli victims and Palestinian perpetrators. In late November 2023, Holocaust historians Avinoam Patt, Liat Steir-Livny, Laura Jokusch, and Tuvia Friling argued that “charging Israel with genocide [was] inflammatory and dangerous,” and claimed that Bartov had no evidence for his claims. In early December 2023, Patt and Steir-Livny drew “comparisons between the 7 October massacres and the Shoah,” listing multiple ways in which Hamas paralleled the Nazis, including in ideology, indoctrination, killing methods, and terminology.Footnote103 That same month, two additional Holocaust historians, Jeffrey Herf and Norman Goda, compared Hamas to the Nazis and 7 October to the Holocaust. In a counter-statement to Browning, Caplan, and others, they wrote, “Hamas has had a state in Gaza for seventeen years,” just like Germany had a state, and that “antisemitism of extermination, whether in 1941 or in 2023, includes dehumanization of Jews.”Footnote104

Multiple institutions of Holocaust research, certainly the best known among them, either joined in the chorus defending Israel, or remained silent bystanders. (This predated 7 October; it is telling that of Yad Vashem’s and the USC Shoah Foundation’s multiple researchers, only one scholar from each of those institutions signed their name to the Jerusalem Declaration.) Yad Vashem led the way in defending Israel’s assault on Gaza, not surprisingly, both given the fact that it is a state institution, but also considering that its chairman, Dani Dayan, is a settler and past chairman of “Yesha Council,” the federation of Jewish settlement municipalities in the West Bank. On 25 October, Yad Vashem issued a press release slamming UN Secretary General António Guterres. A day earlier, Guterres had said that “the attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum” but after “56 years of suffocating occupation,” though he also “condemned unequivocally the horrifying and unprecedented 7 October acts of terror by Hamas.”Footnote105 Dayan responded that Guterres had “failed the test,” like all “those who seek to ‘understand,’ look for a justifying context, [and] do not categorically condemn the perpetrators.”Footnote106

Yad Vashem continued to support the war on Gaza in the months that followed. In late November 2023, following pro-ceasefire demonstrations around the world (many led by Jews), Yad Vashem quoted Dayan’s warning of “a horrific antisemitic assault,” indeed, “a ferocious contemporary expression of the persistently insidious hatred against Jews that has plagued human civilization for centuries, for millennia.”Footnote107 By January 2024, dozens of scholars pleaded with Yad Vashem to condemn genocidal rhetoric in Israel, warning that “incitement to extermination […], using language that creates dehumanization […], are in many cases a first step in committing crimes that can reach the stage of genocide.”Footnote108 Dayan rejected this appeal, saying it was based on a “narrow and partial prism” that overlooked “genocidal expressions against the Jewish people and the citizens of Israel.”Footnote109 In May 2024, Yad Vashem hosted Netanyahu, whose speech – predictably framing the assault on Gaza as Israel’s self-defense against a second Holocaust – got 1.3 million views on X.Footnote110

Other institutions of Holocaust research have been less outspoken, the little they have said focusing exclusively on Israeli victimization. The USC Shoah Foundation condemned the Hamas attack, but said nothing on Israel’s counter-attack.Footnote111 It undertook to form a collection of testimonies for survivors of 7 October,Footnote112 but not for survivors in Gaza. In April 2024, the Shoah Foundation distanced itself from USC’s valedictorian speaker, South Asian American Muslim Asna Tabassum, cancelled by the university for her defense of Palestinians.Footnote113 The Holocaust Education Foundation at Northwestern University (HEFNU), another centre, held a webinar in April 2024, entitled “Holocaust, Terror, and War,” which included a question on teaching the Holocaust after 7 October. One speaker, Alexandra Zapruder, mentioned that a teenager had confronted her with the claim that Israel was committing genocide. Zapruder implied it was a far-fetched notion heard on social media, remarking “how much these kids are getting from TikTok and Instagram.”Footnote114

Instances of individual Holocaust scholars defending Israel persisted throughout 2024, although their frequency ebbed somewhat. Charny stated in March 2024 that “Israel is fighting back legitimately in self-defense,” and that even should a ceasefire happen, “Israel should underscore its readiness to return to massive destruction of Gaza in response to any further bombings or invasions by Hamas.”Footnote115 In June 2024, Holocaust historian Jan Grabowski acknowledged the “horrible situation in Gaza,” but suggested that student demonstrations against Israel’s attacks were antisemitic. “It’s not really the state of Israel they protest against,” he said. “They protest against the Jews.” He expressed dismay that words like “apartheid” were used to talk about the “after all, democratic state of Israel.”Footnote116 In December 2024, Goda opined that “Genocide charges like this have long been used as a fig-leaf for broader challenges to Israel’s legitimacy […?and] have cheapened the gravity of the word genocide itself,” while Herf told The Guardian that he “fundamentally rejects” the idea that Israel was committing genocide.Footnote117

Given the tense exchanges recounted above, it remains to be seen if scholars across the divide will be willing to collaborate, or whether they will continue to silo off into separate conferences, workshops, and journals, as has already begun.Footnote118 Just how the balance of influence between the opposing sides will shift in the future also remains unclear. The Israel-supportive side certainly has more institutional backing, government support, and donors. Scholars who criticize Israel endanger their careers, exposing themselves to what Emmaia Gelman has called “conservative antisemitism watchdogs” like ADL, and risking lawsuits from groups like Brandeis Centre, StandWithUs, and others. The ADL-supported Academic Engagement Network, which “educates and empowers US university and college faculty and staff to oppose efforts to delegitimize Israel” and now works on 300 campuses, further marginalizes academics who criticize Israel.Footnote119 Despite all these, as the above examples suggests, the Israel-critical camp has grown considerably louder in the last year.

This rift between Holocaust scholars is looking to be the new dominant divide within the discipline. Its intensity recalls arguments between intentionalists and functionalists in the 1980s and later debates regarding the Holocaust’s uniqueness.Footnote120 In some ways, the current dispute resembles previous divides in the field, with their just-as-bitter and public exchanges. Unlike past disagreements, however, scholars are now going far beyond methodology and interpretations of the past. The present debate has real-life consequences, especially since 7 October, as Holocaust scholars have a hand in shaping public opinion about what governments should do. With genocide and war crimes on the table, the stakes have never been higher.

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Notes on contributors

Shira Klein, Associate Professor and Chair of the History Department at Chapman University, works on historical and current antisemitism. She is the author of Italy’s Jews from Emancipation to Fascism (2018), a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award and forthcoming in Hebrew. She is co-author of the article “Wikipedia’s Intentional Distortion of the History of the Holocaust,” translated into Hebrew and Polish.

Notes .. 120 references -- https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14623528.2024.2448061#infos-holder