Holocaust historian defends Israel’s genocide charges

Norman JW Goda is a professor of Holocaust Studies at the University of Florida and a well-known expert in his field. Authors of many Goda’s books also consulted with the National Archives as part of their efforts to organize documents related to Nazi war criminals. Earlier this year, Godard wrote Long article His title, “Genocide Slander,” he argues that the allegations of Israel’s genocide in Gaza “is politically, not designed to describe crime, but rather puts Israel, military, its citizens, its citizens and their supporters outside the realm of specific and human values.” Recently, he wrote another articlealong with historian Jeffrey Herf, talks about why it is wrong to call Israel’s war in Gaza a “genocide”.

Genocide is defined by the 1948 Genocide Convention and is “the intention of undermining the nation, race, race or religious group in its entirety or part.” Some of the Holocaust scholars are most famous Omer BartovIt was believed that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza, where 60,000 Palestinians were killed, and Holocaust historians had the responsibility to oppose the war. But Batov also has it debate “Most scholars related to the history of Jewish Nazi genocide have been silent, while some have publicly denied Israeli crimes in Gaza or accused them of more important inflammatory rhetoric, wild exaggeration, goodness, robbery and anti-Semitism.” He specifically took Godard as an example.

I want to talk to Goda about Batov’s claims and how he sees his work. In our conversation, after editing time and clarity, we discuss whether Holocaust historians have the responsibility to publicly condemn human rights violations, who argues that Israel’s target is in this war and why he is skeptical of the number of reported deaths in Gaza.

What is the job of Holocaust historians?

To some extent, we teach courses related to the Holocaust. These range from the Holocaust itself to the courses of Holocaust memory to the courses of Holocaust justice. In terms of research, I think Holocaust historians work very hard to reveal aspects of Holocaust that we don’t understand or we don’t understand. But we also place the Holocaust in European and world history because it is a global event. We study events such as whether this is a particular Jewish event or more common one.

How do you view this issue?

There were obvious Jews in the Holocaust. In Yiddish and Hebrew, Jewish civilization in Eastern Europe was wiped out. But the Holocaust is also a global memory. It is encoded by events such as the Nuremberg Trial, Eichmann Trialmuseums, memorials, literature and other things. In this sense, it is a universal memory that can involve issues ranging from democratic rights to issues of tolerance to everything we treat minorities.

Anti-Semitism is clearly not related to the Holocaust, one of the most notorious or notorious large-scale human rights violations. It seems that Holocaust historians often believe that it is important to address contemporary anti-Semitism and human rights violations.

Yes, very. My Holocaust historians before my subjects a generation was due to their dissent to the Vietnam War. There was a school of thought at the time that regarded Vietnam itself as genocide and that the United States, which helped the defeat of Nazi Germany and everything it represented, was now fighting a colonial war of massive civilian casualties.

The longer the answer to this, the Holocaust was seen as a rupture of civilization. This is the premeditated murder of a European organization by other European groups, which took place in Europe. Faith in Enlightenment and European progress was destroyed. As a result, the Holocaust became the prototype way we think of genocide. In recent decades, European colonialist scholars have pointed out that extreme mass violence and even genocide scenes have also taken place in the colonial world. This raises the problem we are all working hard to solve. One is, did the Holocaust become a hegemonic narrative that fills our awareness of mass atrocities based on race? Can we better understand Holocaust and colonial violence by finding common elements? What is the relationship between anti-Semitism and racism?

What complicates all of these discussions is how people feel about Israel. In all these debates, the feeling of Israel did ignite the fires – about the wars that fit in contemporary Israeli politics and Gaza in the Holocaust.

You wrote something about the Gaza war in the title “Genocide Slander.” What historical resonance should this title have?

In an anti-Semitism world, “slander” refers to all the anti-Semitism of Jews accused of committing horrible things, whether it is the ritual of intentional and gentle killing of non-Jewish children, or the allegations of Jewish manipulation of foreign governments,_,,,,, And ultimately work to control the world.

In your paper, you write: “The genocide allegations against Israel are different”. Do you think it is anti-Semitic to collect genocide in Israel?

The allegations of Israel committing genocide are at the peak of a rather wide mountain. We have had disputes over Israel for decades. Similarly, some questions: Is the return of Jews necessary, appropriate and overdue after the Holocaust, or is Israel just another European racist colonial state, or even settler colonial state? Does the existence of Israel as a settler colony state require the eradication of the Palestinian Arabs? Or is it that Palestinian Arabs can accomplish it again and again through rigidity, error, attitude and corrupt leadership?

I feel the feeling of these adjectives.

Well, look, Palestinians don’t have the best leaders yet, and one can propose those leaders leading the Palestinians down a very miserable and very dark alley.

Go back to my question, though: Are the allegations against Israel today anti-Semitism considering you are talking about “genocide slander”?

I do think we need to study it extensively. Are allegations of genocide consistent with a legal definition of genocide we have? Have these allegations been special about them in the Israeli situation? That is, are they weaving in an anti-Semitism direction? Israel is fighting a war, which is unprecedented in some ways. It was a war against an excavation of the enemy, which built fortifications underground, also under civilian buildings.

Israel does not deny Hamas’ aid to Gaza under buildings, right?

Blockade is a different problem.

This is part of the genocide allegations against Israel.

Well, they focus on a lot of things, but I think it’s worth pointing out that the genocide allegations against Israel do date back to the nineteenth and sixth century.

I think most people today didn’t live in the sixties or didn’t know about these debates.

However, to the left of the United Nations and Western Europe, there was nothing to know about the communist world, and people at that time made the same argument that Israel was genocide against the Palestinians, which began in 1948. And because genocide continues, there is only one option for Palestinians, and it is one option that can be resisted. The problem is that the Palestine Liberation Organization did not really boycott it. It uses terrorist operations time and time again to fight against civilians. The PLO in the 1980s and 1990s accused the Israelis of losing fool toys in Palestine refugee camps and in Lebanon, specifically killing children. That is not true. [Goda later clarified that he was referring to a Lebanese military communiqué in the 1970s. There is no evidence that Israel used booby-trapped toys, although there have been widespread reports over the decades of Lebanese children being killed or injured by Israeli munitions that they thought were toys.]