The Genocide Allegation: Amnesty, UN and Holocaust and Genocide Scholars

The publication of Amnesty International’s report “You feel like you are subhuman” on Dec. 5, 2024 is further proof of how tirelessly the genocide propaganda machine works. Amnesty (which does not regard Hamas as a terror organization) with its German branch follows the tradition of the German press to allow left-wing anti-Zionist Israelis to speak in criticism of Israel, in this case Holocaust researchers Omer Bartov, Amos Goldberg and Raz Segal, who have also testified continuously to the so-called genocide in Gaza since Oct. 7 2023.

Their expertise is taken as authority per se; it is most often expressed in the first person “I” perspective, which stylizes opinion as fact and, as the Amnesty report now shows, is uncritically accepted. They are not the only Holocaust researchers who continuously feed the genocide allegation.

Six days after the Hamas massacres of Oct. 7—and weeks before the start of the Israeli ground offensive in Gaza—Segal, a historian at Stockton University in New Jersey, attested to an Israeli “textbook genocide.” In the coming weeks and months, he was followed by academics such as genocide sociologist Martin Shaw, who in his research argues that the expulsions and flight of Palestinians in the course of the founding of the State of Israel (Nakba) in May 1948 already fulfilled the elements of genocide and calls to drop the intent required to prove genocide. Also following were Australian genocide scholar A. Dirk Moses, Holocaust researchers Bartov and Goldberg, literary scholar Michael Rothberg and others.

What they have in common is their claim that the massacres and hostage-taking of Oct. 7 took place in the context of a Palestinian “resistance” or “uprising” against the Israeli occupation, the “colonial power” that has supposedly been characterized by oppression and occupation since the creation of the state in 1948. In their attempts to explain Oct. 7, they legitimize and downplay the violence of Hamas, regard Palestinians as a people with neither responsibility nor agency (one of the key categories in Holocaust research), and assign only a subordinate or marginal role to the hatred of Jews and antisemitism among Muslim communities worldwide that has grown strongly also in Palestine over the centuries—as well as its current manifestations.

Their analysis is an uncritical, one-sided approach to information from Gaza. And it is no coincidence that Bartov, Segal and Goldberg draw comparisons with the German genocide of the Herero and Nama in German South West Africa as a historical analogy that kills several birds with one stone: The creation of the state of Israel is framed by the concept of settler colonialism (the concept is also used by Francesca Albanese as a “historical background”), which has an inherent tendency to commit genocide. This is followed by a statement about Oct. 7, when an indigenous population rose up against the settlers. And in this “logic” finally, the state of Israel is allegedly responding with genocide in Gaza. At the same time, they deny any subject status to the Islamist Hamas and its supporters, who acted on Oct. 7 in the manner of the Islamic State, which also caused fear among Yazidis and Kurds. As a result, arguing from the motive of “decolonization” legitimizes distorted patterns of interpretation of the war and manifests historical images that stylize Israel as the “root cause” of the region and strictly divide the conflict parties into victims and perpetrators. This interpretation corresponds to a supposedly progressive view that often thinks and argues in black and white, ignores history and sources, and projects its own political goals onto the Middle East conflict.

Holocaust scholars such as Bartov, Goldberg and Moses regularly express their views in interviews and articles in the international press, as well as on social media, and are among the initiators and supporters of the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism (JDA), which was drafted in 2021 to replace the IHRA working definition of antisemitism and absolves anti-Zionism and Nazi comparisons from accusations of antisemitism. The JDA helps also to absolves their anti-Israel and anti-Zionist arguments from being defined as antisemitic. In recent years, they have published regularly in the Journal of Genocide Research, a mouthpiece of the International Network of Genocide Scholars (INoGS), founded in Berlin in 2005. The journal has in the past taken a decidedly anti-Israel stance and is committed to a post-colonial view of history. Such a view of history—as can be read in the book co-written by political scientist Stephan Grigat on the (re)interpretation of the Holocaust—always includes a reinterpretation of the Holocaust as a quasi-colonial genocide, in which antisemitism is interpreted as a sub-form of racism, as for example the antisemitism researcher Steffen Klävers points out in his study “Decolonising Auschwitz?”

The JDA helps also to absolves their anti-Israel and anti-Zionist arguments from being defined as antisemitic.

Postcolonial interpretations of the Holocaust regularly accuse German remembrance culture of focusing “too much” on the Holocaust, ignoring historical and contemporary (colonial) mass crimes and genocidal violence in the Global South, and “tabooing” comparisons with the Holocaust. This false view is based primarily on the perspectives of the respective researchers and always lacks empirical evidence. This is also the case with the continuity thesis put forward by genocide researchers such as Moses and Jürgen Zimmerer. Moreover, these statements are heard too often at the moment when it comes to “silenced” pro-Palestinian activists—a reality that does not exist, neither in Germany nor elsewhere.

The Journal of Genocide Research, whose editor-in-chief is Moses, invited scholars to debate the war and the events in Gaza at an “Israel-Palestine Forum” shortly after Oct. 7. It remains questionable why the title “Israel-Palestine” was chosen for the forum, especially since the majority of the contributions were intended to prove the alleged genocide in Gaza while applying Moses’s concept of “permanent security” from a clearly anti-Israeli perspective. Further, in the forum the film “The Zone of Interest” stood as a metaphor for Gaza, and a “crisis” in Holocaust and genocide studies was also attested.

The historian Moses’s concept of “permanent security” is intended to replace the UN’s concept of genocide and is said to use the instruments of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity to murder countless civilians, especially in the Global South and in the name of human rights. According to Moses’s argument, this mass violence is classified as morally lower or is hardly discussed “in the West.” However, “permanent security” is also linked to “settler colonialism,” as its core component is genocide because the indigenous population is perceived as a threat and therefore must be destroyed. The network honored Moses with its Impact Award in 2023 for “his insightful research on durable security and his leadership as editor of the Journal of Genocide Research.”

Implicit Holocaust analogies or inversions to an Israeli army portrayed as a homogeneous mass engaged in “acts of genocide” against Palestinians (stylized as “new Jews”) are ahistorical, as the conversation between Bartov and soldiers at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in June 2024 demonstrates. In this conversation, Bartov drew on findings from his research on the Wehrmacht to draw similarities between the mindset of Israeli soldiers and German Wehrmacht soldiers of the time. Meanwhile, he talks of a cumulative radicalization of Israeli warfare, the aim of which was from the outset to make Gaza uninhabitable. The thesis that genocide in Gaza is difficult to prove due to the lack of a top-down order nevertheless assumes that there must have been at least a predetermined plan to achieve this goal. Without mentioning the Holocaust, facts from Holocaust research are applied to the war in Gaza, analogous to research on the lack of a Führer order for the genocide of European Jews.

The German genocide of the Herero and Nama (in the context of an indigenous uprising against the colonial power) is also repeatedly used as an explanatory model for Oct. 7 and the war in Gaza. Comparisons with the genocide of the Herero and Nama can also be read as an exonerating strategy for the Hamas massacres, since the genocide of the indigenous population in present-day Namibia has been proven to be a “retaliatory genocide,” and additionally they “prove” that Palestinians are the indigenous people of Palestine. Shaw, like Bartov, followed the “counter-genocide” thesis, as did Goldberg.

Lack of Source Criticism in the Argument

 The opinions by Holocaust and genocide scholars are misleading as they are taken as facts and they lack source criticism, for example with regard to Palestinian deaths in Gaza, provided by the Hamas-led Health ministry, which are uncritically spread by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). Both accepted these figures without question, even though they do not distinguish between combatants and civilians. Another fact is the proven crimes committed by Hamas and its supporters against the civilian population of Gaza, including the use of human shields or armed attacks on aid deliveries, but also reports that there is either no hunger or that it is caused by the logistical challenges of the war. The Hamas leadership itself has repeatedly stated that it is not responsible for protecting civilians. This is reflected in the misuse of these same civilian facilities such as mosques, schools or civilian infrastructure. In particular, the Hamas tunnel system, which the terrorist organization and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad also use for violent hostage-taking, and the funds stolen for this purpose from international aid organizations and Arab governments, are missing from a critical discussion. The eliminatory antizionism/antisemitism formulated in the Hamas charter, which claims Islamic supremacy over the territory of historic Palestine, is also not part of the political discourse of Holocaust and genocide scholars who claim to present historical lines of development leading up to Oct. 7. Last but not least, all the aforementioned scholars ignore critical Palestinian activists who despite the danger to their lives and bodies, including those of their families living in Gaza or Egypt, are taking a third path beyond the familiar, polarizing narratives instead of the “resistance narrative.”

The opinions by Holocaust and genocide scholars are misleading as they are taken as facts and they lack source criticism…

The textbook propaganda of genocide took on dangerous features after Oct. 7. At the same time, history is being rewritten. Now Amnesty has cemented its participation in the propaganda machine. Moreover, above mentioned scholars who are representatives of a certain school of thought within Holocaust and Genocide Studies who dissolve accepted scholarly definitions of the Holocaust, antisemitism, and genocide in order to fuel anti-Zionist and anti-Israel propaganda.

Dr. Verena Buser is a historian living in Berlin. She researches childhood during and after the Holocaust.