Genocide denial in Holocaust studies
Displaced Palestinians walk back to northern Gaza on 19 January 2025
Raz Segal writes in Jacobin on 27 January 2025:
What lies at the core of the unconditional support Germany extends to Israel, including in the last sixteen months of Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza? This question remains relevant even if the current cease-fire will bring an end to the genocide: addressing it sheds light on the decades-long process of Israeli settler colonialism that led to the genocide, an ongoing Nakba that continues to unfold regardless of the cease-fire. Indeed, Israel’s attack on Palestinians has not ended, and in the occupied West Bank it has actually escalated since the cease-fire in Gaza began, with deadly attacks by Israeli settlers and the Israeli army.
A close partnership between Israeli and German Holocaust scholars offers some troubling answers to this question. In an online event organized by the Holocaust Studies Program at the Israeli Western Galilee College (WGC) on December 19, 2024, three speakers — Alvin Rosenfeld, a professor of English and Jewish Studies at Indiana University; Verena Buser, a German historian who teaches online at the WGC; and Lars Rensmann, a professor of political science at the University of Passau in Germany — attacked Holocaust and genocide studies scholars who have written and talked about Israel’s genocide in Gaza, including me.
Though the event was organized in honor of Yehuda Bauer, a founding figure of Holocaust studies who passed away on October 18, 2024, at the age of ninety-eight, the speakers barely mentioned Bauer or his work. Nor did they evaluate the mountain of evidence for the unfolding genocide in Gaza since October 7, 2023. Instead, they opted for outright genocide denial.
Buser, for instance, claimed that scholars who characterize Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocide ignore “extensive international criticism” of the validity of Palestinian casualty figures that, she added, “do not distinguish between combatants and civilians.” The truth is that there is broad international consensus that Israel has killed more than 46,000 Palestinians. The actual figures, moreover, are likely far higher: a recent article in the Lancet argues that Israel had killed over 64,000 Palestinians by the end of June 2024, the majority of them noncombatants, including thousands of children. According to Save the Children, “the occupied Palestinian territory is now ranked as the deadliest place in the world for children: about 30% of the 11,300 identified children killed in Gaza [between October 2023 and August 2024] were younger than five.” Israel had killed, in addition, nearly three thousand Palestinian children in Gaza who remained unidentified by the end of August 2024.
Buser’s genocide denial extended beyond the typical minimization of the number of victims, which has characterized Holocaust denial as well; she also referred to “reports that show that there is either no hunger [in Gaza] or that it is caused by the logistical challenges of the war.” She pointed to no specific report and gave no specific example of logistical challenges. This is not surprising, for there is also broad international consensus on Israel’s well-documented starvation policies, which Israeli military leaders have discussed openly.