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- [00:01]
Martin DeCaro
History as it happens January 6, 2026 Hollowing out Holocaust Memory the murder mill.
- [00:08]
Dirk Moses
At Ordu brings out the full horror and bestiality of the Nazi scum. The Nazis kept the occupants of Buchenwald.
- [00:14]
Omar MacDoom
In filth and disease.
- [00:15]
Dirk Moses
Of the quarter of the prison population left alive when rescued by the Americans, thousands were beyond human aid.
- [00:22]
Omar MacDoom
President Silva has disgraced the memory of 6 million Jews murdered by the Nazis and he's demonized the Jewish state like the most virulent anti Semite.
- [00:31]
Dirk Moses
He should be ashamed.
- [00:33]
Omar MacDoom
The way that the Israeli government is using the memory of the Holocaust in order to justify what they are doing to the Gazans is a complete insult to the memory of the Holocaust. Because Hamas is Hitler and Khamenei is Hitler.
- [00:49]
Dirk Moses
Everyone is Hitler and therefore Hamas is Hitler. Khamenei is Hitler.
- [00:53]
Martin DeCaro
Is Holocaust memory over One historian's asking this question because he says political and media classes are hollowing out the lessons of history by invoking the Holocaust to justify Israel's campaign in Gaza. This issue has led to strife on college campuses, media shouting matches and craven political cowardice as Palestinian society's been pummeled. That's next, as we report history as it happens. I'm Martin DeCaro.
- [01:21]
Dirk Moses
Young people don't see it that way anymore. For them, the absolute evil in world history is no longer the Holocaust, it's what's happening in Gaza. Gaza concentrates or congeals a whole range of pathologies in the global system from their perspective. And there's a lot of evidence, I think, to support that proposition. And it's therefore emblematic of a broader problem which is sometimes summarized in a slogan like way in the term settler colonialism.
- [01:59]
Martin DeCaro
In an essay for the Diasporist, historian Dirk Moses writes that he's observed in many media that the younger generation's been so shocked by Israel's genocidal campaign in Gaza, by the support of Western states and by parts of their press's partisan stance on the carnage, that it is concluded that this war, rather than the Holocaust, represents the absolute evil of the age. What is more, he says, young people observe that this evil is justified with an elite understanding of Holocaust memory as never again a genocide of Jewish people in particular and not of people in general. In other words, younger people argue Holocaust memory, which was designed to prevent the worst, is being used to motivate and justify the worst, and they feel outraged and betrayed. Dirk Moses, writing in the diasporist well, since October 7, 2023, the day Hamas guerilla slaughtered more than a thousand Israelis. The Holocaust has been invoked by people to either defend Israel's conduct or or condemn it. To defenders of Israel, such as Prime Minister Netanyahu, accusing Israel of genocide in Gaza is a smear because as he sees it, Hamas are the modern day Nazis.
- [03:10]
Omar MacDoom
You fought the Nazis 80 years ago, resolutely, and the entire world supported your action. President Biden called Hamas worse than isis. He's right, too. Hamas are the new Nazis. They're the new isis. And we have to fight them together. Just as the world, the civilized world, united to fight the Nazis and united to fight Hamas.
- [03:33]
Martin DeCaro
And this debate often sounds like this segment on the Piers Morgan show in Britain, an Israeli military spokesman shouting down the journalist Gideon Levy.
- [03:41]
Dirk Moses
If it was 1939 Giron, you would.
- [03:44]
Omar MacDoom
Be making peace with Hitler.
- [03:45]
Dirk Moses
You would be giving into Hitler's terms.
- [03:46]
Omar MacDoom
You don't have the courage to stand.
- [03:48]
Dirk Moses
Up and fight our enemies. You don't have the courage to stand up and protect the Israeli people. You should be ashamed to call yourself Israeli.
- [03:55]
Omar MacDoom
Wow. Sure.
- [03:56]
Dirk Moses
I was waiting.
- [03:57]
Omar MacDoom
When will Hitler come into the picture?
- [03:59]
Dirk Moses
It took this time more than usual.
- [04:01]
Omar MacDoom
Because usually the Israeli propaganda uses Hitler just in the beginning. This time it's 50 minutes now until.
- [04:09]
Dirk Moses
Hitler got in the picture, because Hamas.
- [04:11]
Omar MacDoom
Is Hitler and Khamenei is Hitler.
- [04:14]
Dirk Moses
Everyone is Hitler and therefore Khamenei is Hitler.
- [04:18]
Martin DeCaro
So, as you can tell, this is an emotional issue and it's difficult to study it calmly. But we have to try because history and memory are critical to understanding our world today. Aren't we supposed to learn from the past rather than use it to defend the indefensible? It took decades for ordinary Germans and the American public for that matter, to fully comprehend the enormity of what we now call the Holocaust, a term that wasn't frequently used until the 1970s and now, says historian Dirk Moses, holocaust memory could be self destructing. Dirk Moses teaches international relations at the City College of New York. He is the author of the Problems of Genocide. Also joining us in this episode, genocide scholar Omar MacDoom at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Both men edit the Journal of genocide research. Ware McDoom has a new essay, It's Hamas fault. You're an anti Semite and we had no choice. Techniques of Genocide Denial in Gaza is the title. I will share a link to this and other recommended readings in the show notes our conversation next. But remember, you can help make this podcast sustainable by subscribing@historyasithappens.com through Supercast. You'll be able to listen to new episodes in the same place you're listening right now. It is very easy and only $5 a month ad free listening bonus content and 24. 7 access to the entire catalog of more than 500 episodes. Go to historyasithappens.com or tap subscribe now in the show Notes. Dirk Moses, welcome back to the podcast.
- [05:55]
Dirk Moses
Good to be here with you.
- [05:56]
Martin DeCaro
And Omar MacDoom, welcome back. It has been a couple of years. Hello from Washington. You are in London. Hello.
- [06:03]
Omar MacDoom
Good to see you again, Martin. Thank you for the invitation.
- [06:06]
Martin DeCaro
Yes, and Happy New Year to both of you. Although there are plenty of reasons not to be very happy these days, at least with the state of international relations. So, Dirk Moses, you wrote this essay about Holocaust memory and how it is being damaged severely, clearly, in the current discourse around Israel's conduct in Gaza, in Germany, in the United States as well. And this is important because history and memory are part of who we are as people and they're always being invoked to justify or criticize this action or that action. So before we get to that, however, Dirk, I just want to begin, I guess, at the beginning, when knowledge of the Holocaust, Holocaust historiography as well as memory started in Germany. It wasn't right after 1945, as Ian Kershaw put it in his terrific book the Global Age, about Europe after 1950, where there was not outright silence, there was implicit or even explicit apologia. He also talks about a conspiracy of silence, a desire to blot out the past. It took decades for Germans to confront the truth of the Holocaust. Why was that? Can you pick it up from there, Sir?
- [07:17]
Dirk Moses
Ian is right. This is well known in the literature and in German public culture. There was, of course, a situation in which Germany, West Germany was occupied, East Germany was occupied by the Soviets. You had a population that until then had been behind the Nazi regime. And you won't expect a population like that to change its mind and its settings overnight. So they continued to regard themselves as the primary victims of the war because of, you know, German cities were flattened. Millions of ethnic Germans were expelled from East Central Europe, from Poland and so forth, and were refugees within Germany, West Germany. Of course, there were many soldiers in German soldiers in Russian captivity, et cetera. So many German families regarded themselves as victims, although they were aware that Germany had started the war and it inflicted enormous suffering on other people. I mean, no one denied that. But they regarded themselves if not as equal victims, then as somehow also victims and were unwilling to hear the news that they were complicit in what was increasingly apparent to be a crime of world historical proportions. No one in the 1940s and 50s used the term Holocaust. That's a term that really only breaks through as a metaphor. In the 1970s and 80s, people talked about Auschwitz or the camps and so forth. So Ian is right. It took decades for public debate about the Nazi past to change, which is one aspect, you know how the press and politicians and speeches are given and annual dates. Another aspect is you know what the average German thinks. And that's what opinion poll surveys were capturing. And you did get a distinction there. Your average citizen was not particularly interested in hearing about what we now call the Holocaust, more interested in just getting by or anxious that Germany would be seen as a pariah among the nations. Increasingly, the German political class through the 1950s understood that its international rehabilitation, and I'm talking about West Germany here, its international rehabilitation depended on the reparations agreement with the Jewish Claims Conference with the State of Israel and a general sort of NATO orientation. They understood that even if they didn't like it. So it's a complex field.
- [09:44]
Martin DeCaro
And Omar, you just wrote an essay about genocide denial, the modes or the techniques of genocide denial in Germany after the Second World War. As Kershaw puts it, as I mentioned before, apologia, the German people had been seduced by propaganda and taken to ruin by Hitler and a clique of Nazi gangsters. But most of the population had actually opposed the regime, but had been powerless to act in a totalitarian police state. No one other than the Nazi leaders had wanted war. The German army had fought honorably and carried out its patriotic duty to the end. So there are these modes or these justifications false, as we now know. Don't blame us. Yeah, we know that something happened here. It's not like no one knew what happened. Right. But it was our government's fault what happened to the Jews. You want to take that on and maybe link it to what you've been writing about recently with Gaza?
- [10:36]
Omar MacDoom
Right. I mean, we're calling this in the context of an ongoing war for want of another term. And despite the ostensible peace deal struck between Hamas and the Israeli government, people are still dying in Gaza. And we are witnessing in real time, as it were, a strategic attempt to deny what is happening there as either legally or ethically transgressive in any way. But this should not be surprising to anyone who studies the history of atrocity or the history of genocide, that populations that are engaged in what they see as defensive wars have a hard time coming to terms with the actions. And it is, as you pointed out, and as Dirk pointed out, it takes time for a society to come to terms with its actions. It may even be that it's generational change. We're seeing that at the moment in the numbers of young people, particularly who view what is happening in Gaza as problematic.
- [11:41]
Martin DeCaro
Well, Hillary Clinton says kids have to stop looking at those things. You saw that comment she made. Well educated young people from our own country, from around the world. Where were they getting their information? They were getting their information from social media, particularly TikTok. That is where they were learning about what happened on October 7, what happened.
- [12:03]
Omar MacDoom
In the days, weeks and months to follow.
- [12:07]
Martin DeCaro
That's a serious problem. It's a serious problem for democracy, whether.
- [12:12]
Dirk Moses
It'S Israel or the United States.
- [12:13]
Omar MacDoom
And it's a serious problem for our young people. Yes. I mean, that in itself is highly insightful into the way that generation views this conflict. Right. You know, Stan Cohen, the late South African and Jewish sociologist, is one of his most favorite famous works is his book in 2001, States of Denial. Most people know it for his three types of denial, literal, implicatory, and interpretive. But he also talks about the psychology of denial. So people who consciously deny, so they know that something is happening is wrong, that they deliberately misrepresent or deny that it's happening. You have people who unconsciously deny simply because they do not know. And then you have, and I think this is the most interesting psychological and conditional of denial. You have those individuals for whom the information is there, but they inhabit some sort of ambivalent space where they know the information is there, but they choose not to believe the facts. So, and we have phrases, you know, we have language to kind of describe this, you know, selective believing, turning a blind eye, blocking out, not wanting to know. But this cognitive filtering, I think, is something that I think we are seeing certainly in that generation, like Hillary Clinton, and also in elements of Israeli society as well.
- [13:37]
Martin DeCaro
So, Dirk, I want to just return to Kershaw one more time and have you comment on it, because I do think this process of how Holocaust historiography and memory developed is important because you've been writing about how it's now under attack and being damaged and maybe erased. So Kershaw says here in the late 70s until the end of the 1970s, so that's a quarter century after the war, until the end of the 1970s, the terrible events during the Second World War that had culminated in the Holocaust had not penetrated far into general public consciousness. Think of that quarter Century later, it still hadn't really penetrated far into the public consciousness. He goes on to say historians had of course, written about it, but their scholarly analysis had not reached a wide public. Kershaw says the breakthrough, and you'll find this interesting, as a historian, you probably already know this, Dirk, was a TV show, 1978, major breakthrough into the general consciousness of US citizens. And then later in Germany, a four part TV series entitled Holocaust, which was watched by 100 million Americans and then 20 million viewers in West Germany. It's important to make that distinction. East Germany was different. Dirk, pick it up from there, my friend.
- [14:52]
Dirk Moses
Yes, Ian is right again and again. This is also very well known in the literature. I mean, people have been writing about how Germans, West Germans came to terms with the Nazi past for decades. So Ian's book here is a work of synthesis. He's picking up what others have written and spread the news about long ago. By the late 70s, you had this breakthrough for the Holocaust miniseries. I actually watched it as a student in German translation when I was in Germany in the late 90s, so it's sort of a 20 year anniversary. My fellow PhD students were impressed by how good it was in terms of its scholarly accuracy, you know, in depicting the way the Holocaust unfolded. But of course then with these very empathetic Weiss family figures who your ordinary Germans could identify with because they looked like them and sounded like them. So that was the beginning of a process which has been also reinforced by a very impressive network of memorial and monument sites that you have in Germany based on former camp facilities. Not just concentration camps or death camps which are in Eastern Europe, but camps in which all kinds of people were held, including Jews from Communists and so forth. And they spread throughout Germany because people were locked up throughout Germany by the Gestapo, the SS and the police. And these sites have been turned into memorial sites with exhibitions and so forth. And school children are taken there as part of their curriculum while they're at high school. And that's how Holocaust memory is inculcated in Germany to the people, to the public at large. Whereas Holocaust historiography, you know what, the books that historians write only really reach a very small number of people in the end. So there needs to be a dissemination of information via these kind of memorial sites which play a very important role in Germany. And people have written quite a lot about their impact. Now, interestingly, some of those are under attack, the ones that, that are in the eastern states of Germany, by members of the far right AfD party and people even further from the Right. You know, neo Nazis, they're denouncing them as sites of national shame. You know, it's the old German nationalism from the 1940s and 50s, if you like, spreading graffiti on them. And if and when the AfD comes to power, they will try to strangle them in terms of the local funding. So there is that kind of attack on Holocaust memory from the right in Germany. But that's not what I wrote my essay at. And the essay is not about an attack on Holocaust memory. It's about its self destruction in one mode at the hands of the German political class, sort of going back to what Omar said. It's conscription, the moral imperative of never again which comes out of the Holocaust. It's conscription into support for the destruction of Gaza, which is clearly disgusted and dismayed tens of millions of Germans, judging by the opinion polls, and particularly younger Germans, just like younger people throughout the world.
- [17:53]
Omar MacDoom
Kirk's got it spot on there. I mean, stepping back and thinking about the invocation of the Holocaust in the context of what we're seeing in Gaza, obviously it has become a very powerful emotional symbol, clearly constructed, but it is also very emotional because it invokes particularly the emotions of compassion and empathy for the victims of the Holocaust. But it's more than that. It is, as Dirk commented, it's also about shame and guilt. So that's why references to the Holocaust in relation to the events of 7 and 7 have so much emotional and political salience. It's rhetorical pathos. And perhaps one of the most commonly heard statements after 77 was that this was the single largest killing of Jewish civilians since the Holocaust. That's where the explicit reference is made. Just as a matter of historical accuracy. I have been corrected, actually. I'm not a historian, but I've been told, in fact, this is not strictly correct. Benny Morris, in his 2008 book on the First Arab Israeli War, did say that in 1948 he estimated about 5,800 Jewish individuals were killed. About one quarter of them were civilians. So October 7th wasn't the single largest killing of Jewish civilians since the Holocaust. But the point is, though, that it is very powerful. And as Dirk pointed out, the way that this has become powerful, it isn't just in historical scholarship, it isn't just the actions of historians who have brought about this change in attitude. I mean, it is also more broadly in cultural discourse as well. If you think about Hollywood, think about the number of films, for example, that have also been made in Hollywood studios. You know, whether Schindler's List Dia Van Frank, Sophie's Choice, and compare that, for example, to the stark absence of anything about the Nakba about 1948. What we do have about the Palestinians is Munich. We also have Lewis Nuis's book, the Exodus. But this is also part of the construction and the embedding of the Holocaust as a significant world historical event in the public consciousness.
- [20:12]
Martin DeCaro
Sure, and it was unique, but that doesn't mean there aren't other genocides after it. Dirk, I mean, this I think gets to the heart of what you're arguing now about Holocaust memory might be over. Whether it's over or not, you can tell us right now it's not because people are simply forgetting about the Holocaust, right? It's that the Holocaust or its memory is being wal off as an event and any comparisons to it are not allowed. Whereas I come away from visiting the Holocaust Museum, the memorial here in Washington, not far from where I live, I come away with that as a universal value. Never again, not just to the Jewish people, never again to anyone else.
- [20:51]
Dirk Moses
Well, you raise a number of important issues there.
- [20:53]
Martin DeCaro
One of my typical 25 part questions.
- [20:56]
Dirk Moses
Sorry, Dirk, As Omar said, analogies were made from the outset by saying that this was like, like a second Holocaust, a Holocaust in a day, a mini Holocaust, Holocaust 2.0, or the largest massacre of Jewish civilians since the Holocaust. I mean, I've heard all these versions, whatever version you use, a direct link is made between the Holocaust and the 7th of October in order to narrate it into sort of an ongoing historical catastrophe, not only for Jewish people, but for everyone. So the Holocaust is of universal significance. And so when I talk about Holocaust memory being over, I don't mean that it's over for Jewish people or for anyone who really cares about the Holocaust. I'm talking about its public significance as a world historical, a positive world historical event of universal significance. Now that mode of Holocaust memory, I think is over. It's over because young people, and this is where generational change is important, which I might mention before, young people don't see it that way anymore. For them, the absolute evil in world history is no longer the Holocaust, it's what's happening in Gaza. Gaza concentrates or congeals a whole range of pathologies in the global system from their perspective. And there's a lot of evidence, I think, to support that proposition and is therefore emblematic of, of a broader problem which is sometimes summarized in a slogan like way in the term settler colonialism. There's a different take on world history here. So the Primal sin is imperial expansion and the settler replacement of indigenous people. Not only Europeans have engaged in that. The Japanese and other expansionist powers have done that over the years. And that indigenous people have a right to resist that. And that the latest episode in the sort of long term narrative is Gaza and the west bank obviously as well. And so, you know, Zionism has gotten caught up in this and in activist circles is seen as a dirty word. Now I know there's a lot of alarm about that on the other side. And I observed this as an academic on a campus where, you know, these struggles were taking place last year in particular. I mean, I think all these narratives are somewhat simplistic. Right. And in my own work I've tried to integrate the Holocaust into these narratives of imperial expansion. It's not just another version of it, it's a very particular version. I don't like using the word unique because that's a theological category we don't use in history, but it has its own particularities. But in any event, what we're seeing now, I think is the replacement of one image of the absolute evil with another image of the absolute evil. An issue about morality in international relations.
- [23:45]
Martin DeCaro
Sure, that's important. I was going to ask you. So why does this matter? As I'm reading your essay here, what do I mean by the slow death of Holocaust memory? Is one of the consequences that what's happening in Gaza, Israel's conduct in Gaza can continue.
- [24:01]
Dirk Moses
That has its own, that's own geopolitical dynamics which are separate from this question, even if they touch on it. But in terms of Holocaust memory which is subject today, the institutions are still in the hands of believers in the uniqueness of the Holocaust as well as its universal significance. The Generation X and baby boomers are running and older millennials are running. These institutions, centers for Holocaust and genocide studies, Holocaust museums, various government related institutions that are there to propagate Holocaust memory in the population. For example, related to the International Holocaust Remembrance Authority, which has a task to undertake according to EU policy. Right. That is going to continue. But younger people are switched off. They're not interested in this anymore and they don't buy it. And not only that, as I say in the essay, not only do they not buy that the Holocaust is determinative for the way they view politics, they see the Holocaust as being abused in its conscription. Holocaust memory, yes, in being abused in its conscription, in trying to morally pressure them into supporting the destruction of Gaza, which they call genocide. So they see one genocide justifying another. These are the Arguments I hear among younger people. As an academic, I'm an observer. I'm less a participant observer than an observer. Like I'm watching this take place. I'm reading the pulse of 20 to 25 year olds in particular because they're the ones I teach and I'm hearing what they say in my classrooms. It's no longer the 1990s and 2000s, let alone 80s, where the dramas that Omar mentioned that are in these films like Schindler's List, where the object of empathy is a Jewish child like Anna Frank, is no longer the case. The object of empathy, of absolute innocence, is Hindrab. This is Palestinian girl who was shot to death with 355 tank rounds or tank bullets in her car while she's making a telephone call pleading for help. Millions of people have listened to that telephone call and they cry.
- [26:25]
Omar MacDoom
After this salvo of bullets.
- [26:29]
Dirk Moses
Leanne went quiet.
- [26:32]
Omar MacDoom
A few moments later, her six year old cousin Hind Rajab picked up the.
- [26:39]
Martin DeCaro
Phone that was actually presented at the United nations there.
- [26:43]
Dirk Moses
For them, she is The Anna Frank of 225, 226.
- [26:48]
Omar MacDoom
Dirk put it very eloquently and very powerfully, the way that the current generation of young people see this. I want to come back to the question you posed, which is about the distinctiveness of the Holocaust. And what does that mean? What is the significance of that?
- [27:04]
Martin DeCaro
Shielding Israel from criticism for its content.
- [27:08]
Omar MacDoom
Right? I mean, as a genocide scholar, we should obviously have a commitment to scholarly objectivity and impartiality. And for me personally, there is no reason why we should not seek to compare the Holocaust with other cases of genocide or other cases of mass atrocity. For sure, there are aspects of the Holocaust that are distinctive and possibly unique. The industrial scale of the slaughter, the complicity of so many countries in the destruction of the Jewish population. These are indeed distinctive features. But I could say the same thing about other genocides as well. I'm a scholar of the Rwandan genocide. Features that distinguish that are the scale of civilian participation, how quickly the violence took place. But at the same time, there are aspects of the Holocaust and aspects of other genocide that do have similarities. You think about the motivations for the killing, the dehumanization, the lack of empathy for the victims, the use of extremist ideology to justify the killing, the framing of the violence as defensive, as justified. These are aspects of genocides which you can compare the Holocaust with. So the reason I mention all of that is because there is a tension. Maybe I'll go further. Maybe there's A contradiction between the desire to protect the Holocaust and by extension, Israel, which is the response to the Holocaust in part as a safe haven for Jews after World War II. There is this tension between that and then the claim that Israel is being unfairly targeted by those on the other side, the advocates or the defenders of Israel, who argue that Israel has been unfairly singled out and that this is anti Israel and maybe even antisemitic in its motivation to want to focus on what Israel is doing when. If you were to look at what other countries have done in other places, then why are we not talking the whataboutism? What about Myanmar? What about Sudan? What about China? There's obviously a response to that, which is that there is an exceptional level of shielding by Western liberal democracies of Israel that probably justifies or at least explains why there is so much attention on Israel's conduct in that war. But I did want to highlight, though, this tension between wanting to see the Holocaust as distinctive, but then wanting to claim that Israel should not be unfairly singled out.
- [29:51]
Martin DeCaro
Yeah, and there's another thing here, too. You alluded to it. I'm an American taxpayer. My money goes towards $4 billion a year in military aid to Israel and weapons that have been used to kill civilians in violation of US law and international law. Another reason why people are so upset. If the US was supporting the rapid support forces in Sudan, I'd be irritated at that as well. Dirk, we may have discussed this on a past podcast, but not everyone, despite what I think, not everyone listens to every show. How is this still affecting the historical profession, this debate? Because that is important. Eventually what historians write does trickle down into the general consciousness, public consciousness.
- [30:35]
Dirk Moses
A number of Holocaust historians have been very vocal in defending Israel's conduct and shielding it from the charge of genocide. So, like Norman Goda, Jeffrey Herf and others in the Washington Post and in other outlets, notoriously, an interview in the New Yorker with Isaac Chortiner, with Goda, where Chortiner really presses him on what he perceived to be a cavalier attitude towards the civilian death toll, particularly of children in Gaza. And Shira Klein in the journal that Omar and I edit, the Journal of Genocide Research, wrote an article about the position of Holocaust scholars in relation to Gaza, also in the lead up to the last couple of decades, which has about 40,000 downloads in a year, which is an extraordinary number for an academic article. They usually get 50 to 100 a year, not 40,000.
- [31:27]
Martin DeCaro
Wow.
- [31:29]
Dirk Moses
One by Shira Klein is one I can commend to your listeners. And I think it's open access on Journal of Genocide Research's website. But the way we've reacted at the journal with the other editors is to say that in genocide studies, it's important that the field respond to the situation in Gaza, not by publishing like a hanging judge, more like a recording angel. So not publishing articles which seek to prosecute Israel or to defend Israel, but to explore what this conflict means for genocide studies and the way that the rhetoric of genocide or the category of genocide is mobilized and what this means for it. Now, why is this a conundrum for many people? It's because people are unsure what to call this. And why is that? Well, it's because the way the genocide concept is defined in law, with this very lofty intent threshold that's being used by Israel defenders to say, well, this is not a genocide, it's a war. And then on the other side you have Palestinian advocates saying this is a genocide and what Hamas engaged in was a legitimate act of resistance. So all these issues are in flux or at play. And so we've initiated a forum and invited scholars to contribute to thinking about these issues. Now, my own contribution has been on this artificial distinction between war and genocide, which is the defining dichotomy, which lets those that can argue that they're engaging in legitimate warfare off the hook. Because they can say, well, we may have destroyed an entire strip and killed maybe hundreds of thousands of people and made a life unlivable for them, destroyed all their infrastructure quite deliberately, and yet this is not a genocide. This is not an attempt to destroy a group or to destroy enough of the group so the rest self deport, which seems to be the intention. It's actually a legitimate act of warfare with some unfortunate collateral damage. And that damage can be attributed to the hiding tactics of a terrorist group which has embedded itself in the civilian population. So all the deaths of the civilian population can be attributed to the terrorist group. Now that kind of argumentation is actually quite old. It's not just confined to the current Gaza situation, but it's really come to the fore and it's being tested beyond the realm of academics because South Africa has issued a complaint or filed a suit before the International Court of Justice, the UN Court, against Israel. So now the international lawyers have been mobilized and are poring over these documents and they're trying to nut out. How do you determine what a state intention is? Is it the cabinet? Is it Cabinet ministers? Is it just the military, the chain of command? Omar knows more about these things as a lawyer than I do. But there's now an intense and ongoing conversation about what is genocide, how you prove it, where do you locate this intent? And my own interest is in why is there obsession with nailing down this intent to destroy and hold or impart ethnic, racial, religious group as such, as it says in the Convention. Rather than looking more at the effects of the war, which is genocidal, its outcome, and clearly not an accident, we have to ask ourselves what is intention more broadly in these situations? So I'm very interested in joining war and genocide rather than distinguishing them surgically, because in many ways, when you look at the outcome of Gaza, it's a distinction without difference.
- [35:16]
Martin DeCaro
Genocide or not, what Israel has done is destroy or attempt to destroy Palestinian society in Gaza, while on the west bank, settler terrorists are rampaging with the support of the state, the idf, people who do deny a genocide reset history. It all started on October 7, 2023, where, when you look at the totality of what's happening right now, what's happened to Gaza? Martin Shah has written about this. It's really part of a long pattern of destroying Palestinian autonomy, denying Palestinians their rights to achieve national liberation.
- [35:53]
Omar MacDoom
Dirk's point about the distinction between war and genocide, let me just speak to that for a moment. He's absolutely right that the lawyers have got themselves got their knickers in a twist, if you like, around that distinction among scholars of genocide, it is well known that genocides often occur in the context of wars. But to come back to your question about what is sort of the long term strategy here and maybe what also what are the long term implications of what we're seeing take place in Gaza and the West Bank? For myself, looking at it, obviously there are some very obvious implications for Israelis and for Palestinians. But for myself, the implications are much wider and much more pernicious in nature because they go to the very basis of the rules based order that we constructed after the Holocaust and after World War II. And I worry very much about what this means for our commitments to the rule of law. Equality before the law and universalism. As a human being and also as a scholar, the implications of what we are seeing there for international humanitarian law, particularly for civilian protections, are very worrying. These principles of distinction and precaution and proportionality, they're really being tested, if not broken, by the way that the IDF has interpreted some of these. It also raises question about the status of R2P and is it really a principled doctrine or is it really simply instrumental? The attacks on the icc, on the prosecutor and the judges who issued those arrest warrants, the sanctions on the UN Special laboratory of Francesca Albanese, the attacks on humanitarian organizations like UNRWA, and the attacks, the military attacks on the Red Crescent. All of this calls into question the moral authority and the entire framework that we set up, that was set up after World War II to prevent genocides from occurring and to make sure that this commitment to never again wasn't something that was very hollow. For me, what I see happening, the Israeli Palestinian conflict, it's this broader anachronism almost because perhaps if this was happening before World War II, it would have been seen as less problematic. But it's happening at a time when norms and values and ideas about what is acceptable internationally have changed quite significantly.
- [38:29]
Martin DeCaro
Yeah, you know, there's a lot of talk these days, and we can wrap up on this, have you both address this about whether we're entering a new period of lawlessness or a new order post 1945. The rules based international order that's coming to an end post 1991, after the cold War. And there's always continuities between eras, between orders. I guess Thucydides put it best, the powerful do what they want and the rest of us just take it on the chin. That's not exactly what he said, but you get the point. But I don't know, Dirk. I do sense things are changing, or maybe just getting worse. The check on brutality perpetrated against civilians was drummed into my head. We were talking at the beginning here about the origins of Holocaust memory. By the time I started going to school and to college and reading serious books, I just took this stuff for granted. I didn't realize that it took decades for Germans to confront what actually happened. Right. So whether we're moving into a new era, I'll ask a question. Jerk. Hang in there. Or things just getting worse. It does seem to me that brutality against civilians is becoming normalized.
- [39:39]
Dirk Moses
Well, if you look at public opinion in any state, you will find, I think, a consensus that, that, you know, civilian life should be protected. I was just looking at statistics now of your average German's view of the war in Gaza or the genocide is 59% of them think it is. And it's clear that the German population is very unhappy the way their government supports Israel, right or wrong, and delivers them weapons and gives them diplomatic cover. At the same time, 68% of them say that Hamas committed war crimes on 7 October, 65% of them say that the Israel army is committing war crimes in Gaza. As I said, 59% think it's genocide. So what you're seeing, there is a general consensus that civilian life should be protected. It doesn't matter who they are. So these statistics show that the population's not anti Israel. There's a general principle commitment to the protection of civilian life and opposition to genocidal wars. The German re education process has been quite successful because you now have this consensus in the population. It's the political class which is willing to ship weapons to Israel and give them diplomatic cover so they can continue the genocidal war. That has, I think, learned the wrong lessons. And now, let's put it this way, they've learned lessons or drawn lessons from the Holocaust, which are different from the general population. That's what I mean. By the basis of the proposition that Holocaust memory is over, the version of Holocaust memory, its conscription into genocidal warfare by the German state and by other states as well, has been discredited. Now, whether a particular state engages in flagrant crimes against humanity and so forth depends very much on the circumstances. I don't think you're going to see Western European states openly do that. Okay. They indirectly, by supporting state, you know, proxy. Proxy wars or so forth, but normatively they can't do it to their own populations. They can't justify it. Russia is obviously a different story. China ostensibly abides by international law and criticizes states that don't. Whether it would abide by the principles of distinction that Omar mentioned is an open question. I seriously doubt it, frankly, given their treatment of Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang. That wasn't an armed conflict. But the ruthlessness in which they treated that and are treating that minority population in Xinjiang raised alarm bells across the world. So it depends very much on which government you have and in what part of the world we're dealing with, where you've got weak states and powerful militias without command discipline and responsibility, likely to see more war crimes and so forth on the coal face of conflict. But the Africa expert here is Omar, not me.
- [42:34]
Martin DeCaro
Yeah, there was never a golden age here. Even in the 1990s, those heady, optimistic days after the Cold War, the Rwanda genocide, which I discussed with Omar first time he was on the podcast, February of 2024. No, there was no golden age here. And whether we're moving into a new period, things are actually getting worse or just staying the same. I just get the sense. And Dirk took this on. You can take it on now, too. That brutality against civilians being normalized, maybe not among publics, general publics, don't support this.
- [43:05]
Omar MacDoom
Dirk is right to point out the disconnect between the political class and the general public in Western liberal democracies. And I think that that is becoming increasingly empowered. Some of this will bring about generational change. The many college students who have paid a very high personal price for their principals for coming out onto campuses in the face of considerable headwinds against them will remember this. And I think that will be part of the long term change that we will see. Maybe I will end by talking a little bit about this from the perspective of those who see Israel still as a country that should be a safe haven for Jews and sort of speak to the risks of what is happening, to go uncriticized or to be no accountability for it, if you like. So denial of what is happening has obvious implications for prolonging the war because it just weakens the resolve for intervention and it shields perpetrators for injustice. You know, it also may embolden perpetrators to believe that they can commit crimes like this again in the future. Those are some of the obvious implications of allowing the status quo to continue. But there's perhaps an ironic and less obvious one, which is that it strengthens the anti Israel and anti Semitic sentiment that the very defenders of Israel worry about most. Because if you have growing credible, independent, expert opinion and evidence that what we are seeing happening in Gaza is at the very least war crimes, possibly more, then continued denial that any wrong is being committed makes those who deny it seem complicit in that situation, complicit in the violence. So for the Jews in the Diaspora, and we have seen this, you know, attacks in Manchester, attacks in Sydney, it is not in the interests of the Jewish Diaspora for organizations and for individuals to continue to deny that what is happening there is problematic. It is a risk for them.
- [45:26]
Martin DeCaro
Yeah, well, Netanyahu says this is being done on behalf of Jews all over the world.
- [45:30]
Omar MacDoom
Calls for a ceasefire are calls for Israel to surrender to Hamas, to surrender to terrorism, to surrender to barbarism. That will not happen. Well, yes, yes, they exactly are saying this. It is also not in Israel's interests itself, I would argue, because, you know, Dirk was citing statistics about German public opinion. Statistics on Israeli public opinion are also very troubling. We know that the majority of Israelis, now Israeli Jews believe that ethnic cleansing is acceptable. The transfer of Gazans from Gaza. And about half of them also have said that it is okay to kill civilians in a war entirely destroy a civilian population in a war. That is the radicalization of a society. And Michael Walzer claims that the exodus from Israel of Israeli Jews who no longer feel comfortable with the beliefs, the values, with the rhetoric that is coming out of Israeli society, that this is an existential threat to Israel itself. So for myself, I feel that the message should be that the commitment to universalism means that we call out violence that is transgressive, no matter who's committing it and no matter where it's being. And if we don't do that, as I say, I believe that that poses risk not just for the international order, but very directly for Israel and Israeli society. But the Palestinian people's right to self determination, their right to justice, must also be recognized. And put yourself in their shoes. Look at the world through their eyes. It is not fair that a Palestinian child cannot grow up in a state of their own, Living their entire lives with the presence of a foreign army that controls the movements, not just of those young people, but their parents, their grandparents, every single day. It's not just when settler violence against Palestinians goes unpunished. It's not right to prevent Palestinians from farming their lands or restricting a student's ability to move around the west bank or displace Palestinian families from their home.
- [48:11]
Dirk Moses
Holmes.
- [48:15]
Omar MacDoom
Neither occupation nor expulsion is the answer.
- [48:24]
Martin DeCaro
On upcoming episodes of History As It Happens, we'll return to the subject of Venezuela and Nicolas Maduro. What about the oil? What does it mean when the Trump administration says the U.S. will run the country? What was life like under the Maduro regime? Those topics and more coming up on History As It Happens. And make sure to sign up for my weekly newsletter. Just go to Substack and search for History As It Happens. And if you are a subscriber already, you can refer a friend and get a $20 credit. Refer three friends or family members and you'll get a $40 credit. And if you haven't subscribed already, what are you waiting for? Just $5 a month to help keep this podcast going. Go to history as it happens.com Marketing is hard, but I'll tell you a little secret. It doesn't have to be. Let me point something out. You're listening to a podcast right now and it's great. You love the host. You seek it out and download it. You listen to it while driving, working out, cooking, even going to the bathroom. Podcasts are a pretty close companion. And this is a podcast ad. Did I get your attention? You can reach great listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Libsyn Ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements or run a pre produced ad like this one across thousands of shows. To reach your target audience in their favorite podcasts with Libsyn ads, go to libsynads. Com. That's L, I B S Y N ads. Com Today.