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History As It Happens
The Question of Genocide, Revisited
00:55:07
Israel's destruction of Gaza has caused a rift among Holocaust historians and genocide scholars. They're at odds with one another over what to call it. Is it genocide? Another category of war crime? Or are Israel's actions justified under...
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Martin DeCaro
History as it happens January 28, 2025 the question of genocide revisited Fury in.
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Dirk Moses
Israel after the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for the Prime Minister accusing Israel of overseeing the forced mass displacement.
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Martin DeCaro
Of Palestinians in Gaza.
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Navi Pillay
The crimes describe starvation of civilians as a method of warfare, willfully causing great suffering, serious injury to BOD, creating a.
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Chancellor Kohl
Moral equivalence after September 11 between President Bush and Osama bin Laden, or during World War II between FDR and Hitler.
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Martin DeCaro
Historians of the Holocaust and genocide scholars are at odds with one another over whether Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. Genocide, the crime of crimes synonymous with the Nazis extermination of 6 million Jews. The definition of genocide has always been contested and controversial at Nuremberg, as it is today, and as our guest in this episode will argue, not very helpful in preventing or punishing the destruction of nations. That's next as we report history as it happens. I'm Martin DeCaro.
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Otto Ohlendorf
Against their opponents, including Jews, Catholics and free labor. The Nazis directed such a campaign of arrogance and brutality and annihilation.
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Dirk Moses
And that's also the distinction between genocide and warfare. Warfare is not illegitimate. If it's done according to the UN Charter, it's only in self defence. It's Article 51, I think, of the UN Charter. Whereas genocide is inherently criminal intention, and that's of course something that no state can abide, whether Turkey, Israel, the US or Australia. They're never going to admit their intentions were criminal. And we're dealing here with international criminal law.
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Otto Ohlendorf
At Nuremberg. The Hitler Gang has gone on trial for the first time. Criminal war leaders are being judged by an international court by mankind.
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Martin DeCaro
Nuremberg, October 1946.
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Otto Ohlendorf
Flags of the victorious Allies sitting in judgment on the international military tribunal fly over the court building. They took from the German people all those dignities and freedoms that we hold natural and inalienable rights in every human being. The people were compensated by inflaming and gratifying hatreds towards those who were marked as scapegoats against their opponents, including Jews, Catholics and free Labor. The Nazis directed such a campaign of arrogance and brutality and annihilation as the world has not witnessed since the pre Christian era.
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Martin DeCaro
After 216 court sessions, the tribunal convicted 22 Nazi defendants. Three were acquitted. 12 were sentenced to death by hanging. 10 met the hangman. None of these men was charged with genocide as an independent crime. As the historian Dirk Moses writes in his 2021 book the Problems of Permanent Security in the language of transgression, the accusation of genocide peppered the trials of the major war criminals and also the subsequent Nuremberg military tribunals of 185 lesser Nazis run by the US military from October 1946 to January 1949. Far from signaling the concept's breakthrough, its usage was intended to amplify the indictments of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Neither the prosecutors nor the judges recognized genocide as an independent crime. Despite Raphael Lemkin's best efforts, trial references to genocide increasingly took it as a synonym for physical destruction of national groups. Lemkin was crestfallen. He had failed to get his concept legally recognized. The judgment did not mention genocide and did not deem the pre war persecution of German Jews as a crime against humanity. Anticipating this outcome months before, Lemkin had written an article advocating an international treaty which would formulate genocide as an international crime, providing for its prevention and punishment in time of peace and war. So maybe you found what Dirk Moses wrote there surprising, because no sane person today doubts the Nazis committed genocide. But in 1946, as a legal term, it was still in development and a conceptual incoherence followed it to the United nations, where the diplomats and lawyers of the world wrangled over how to define genocide in the UN Convention. As Moses writes about these post war debates, the relationship between persecution and the cultural and biological in the destruction of nations was never clearly articulated. Another piece of the history of the genocide concept is relevant now too. Genocide was depoliticized, as Moses writes on page 226. After intense lobbying and debate, political groups were removed from the UN Convention. Political motivation suffered the same fate. Ultimately, genocide was defined narrowly to exclude the possibility that states could repress domestic political opposition with impunity. Anti communists for communist states and Communists for most Latin American states in particular. So the outcome was that genocide would pertain to racial, ethnic or biological motives of perpetrators, meaning a state pursuing its security through violence against internal or external enemies. Even violence that kills a lot of civilians could not be charged with genocide or other equally horrible war crimes. Now, the Nazis were of course motivated by their racial hatred and paranoia of Jews. They viewed the mere existence of Jews as a biological threat to their Aryan race. But as Moses points out, in the dock at Nuremberg, was Otto Ollendorf of the ss, the leader of Eisense Group D, responsible for the murder of 90,000 Soviet Jews, Roma and Communists.
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Otto Ohlendorf
I wish to call as a witness for the prosecution Mr. Otto Ollendor Otto.
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Martin DeCaro
Ohlendorf, as Moses details on page 233 after his capture, Ollendorff had been initially happy to cooperate with British authorities because he did not believe he had committed any crimes. Indeed, he regarded the murders as militarily defensible in the name of security. They were certainly not motivated by racial hatred, in his view. He said that the German goal aimed at an immediate and permanent security of our own realm against the realm which the belligerent conflict is taking place. What did this mean? Ollendorff was asked whether executing civilians served this goal, to which he replied with the familiar Judeo Bolshevik mantra of the Nazis and anti Semites generally. For us it was obvious, he said, that Jewry in Bolshevist Russia actually played a disproportionately important role. For Ollendorff, Moses says executing Jews and Bolsheviks was a legitimate anti partisan policy. As might be expected, the prosecution cross examined him about killing those who could pose no military threat. Jewish children.
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Otto Ohlendorf
Did you personally supervise mass executions of these individuals? Will you explain to the tribunal in detail how an individual mass execution was carried out? In what positions were the victims shot?
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Martin DeCaro
Moses details the exchange between the prosecutors and Ohlendorf. The prosecutor asked will you agree there is absolutely no rational basis for killing children except genocide and the killing of races? I believe that it's very simple to explain if one starts from the fact that this order did not only try to achieve security, but also permanent security because the children would grow up and surely being the children of parents who had been killed, they would constitute a danger no smaller than that of the parents. So there it was, a Nazi openly admitting he was killing Jewish children for security reasons in his warped worldview. So the point here is racial or ethnic hatred can coexist or be intertwined with what the perpetrators view as military necessity. Genocide can occur in war, whether it's just or not. Meaning a war can be just, but the way it is persecuted is illegal. And this point has been made time and again since Israel began retaliating for the Hamas atrocities on October 7, 2023. Another point I'm getting at here. The concept of genocide is as if not more contentious today as it was back in the late 1940s. Historians now are bickering over whether Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. The mere suggestion has enraged defenders of Israel. And we should point out that the International Criminal Court charged neither Israeli leaders nor Hamas leaders with genocid. The charges dealt with other horrendous crimes.
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Navi Pillay
It's alleged that these crimes were committed in the context of the ongoing armed conflict and as part of a widespread and systematic attack against the civilian population of Gaza, pursuant to a state policy.
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Martin DeCaro
Same for the United Nations Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Its report on Gaza did not mention genocide, but rather other war crimes. Navi Pillay was the chair of the commission.
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Navi Pillay
Intentionally directing attacks against civilians and civilian objects, murder or willful killing, using starvation as a method of war, forcible transfer, gender persecution targeting Palestinian men and boys, sexual and gender based violence amounting to torture and cruel or inhuman treatment.
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Martin DeCaro
Because it's so narrowly defined in the UN Convention, relying on proving intent to destroy, genocide is difficult to prosecute. So as these legal, historical and political debates rage on, Gaza lies in ruins, tens of thousands dead, including thousands of Palestinian children. Thousands are maimed. Nearly the entire population of 2 million people temporarily displaced. Homes, schools, mosques, museums, hospitals destroyed. The suffering will continue even if the ceasefire holds. Historian Dirk Moses is an expert in genocide studies and international relations at City College of New York. He is the author of the aforementioned the Problems of Genocide. Dirk Moses, welcome back.
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Dirk Moses
Good to be with you again.
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Martin DeCaro
It was great meeting you here in Washington recently at an event where I bought your book. No one can accuse me of dodging depressing subjects. And what I learned from reading your book. Perhaps not surprising, the debates, the issues, the questions that are being raised now echo the debates, the controversies, the legalisms that surrounded the fundamental issues in the immediate post war period over how to define genocide.
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Dirk Moses
You know, the book was written over the last 10, 15 years in bits and pieces and then finally came together in 2019, so well before Ukraine, which we shouldn't forget, and Gaza, but you know, Myanmar and the Rohingya case was underway and we were receiving reports of what was happening to the Uyghurs in China and Xinjiang province. But in the end, it's an intellectual history, a history of a concept. Where did we get this notion of genocide from? Why does it even exist as a key word in international relations and in our imagination of evil? So I set out to write that book. It hadn't been done before in this way. People had taken the concept for granted as reflecting a reality out there. You know, the conventional view was that Raphael Lemkin, the Polish Jewish jurist in the 1940s during the Second World War, finally invented a term that needed to be invented because people hadn't come up with words or concepts to denote an empirical reality. The destruction of nations, which is effectively what he meant, or people's races, ethnicities. Now, of course, people had used words before like destruction or extermination and so forth. But he was also entering a legal debate, in particular the debate in the early 40s about which laws would apply if and when war crimes trials after the Second World War, you know, the defeat of the Nazis finally came to pass. What laws are there internationally to prosecute individuals, particularly state leaders, for massive crimes against civilians? That's been an ongoing debate for 100 years. You are right. The issues that are on the table with Ukraine and Gaza today were played out during the negotiations for the genocide convention in 1947 and 48, and then in subsequent armed conflicts, particularly in the wake of decolonization, where this vexed relationship between war and genocide comes up.
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Martin DeCaro
There is no consensus now, there is no consensus then on how to define genocide. Why is this concept even necessary legally? Because as you point out in your book, at the Nuremberg trials after World War II, genocide is not named as an independent crime. It is underneath other categories. The key Nazis who survived the war and were put on trial were not charged independently with genocide, but it still covered the most important things, wouldn't you say?
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Dirk Moses
Yes. The acts which constitute genocide, the actus reus, as the lawyers say, with their recourse to Latin terms, are covered by crimes against humanity and war crimes, which applied in Nuremberg. The extra and superordinate indictment was the crime of aggression or crimes against peace. The reasoning being that it's the outbreak of war that enables these other crimes to take place.
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Martin DeCaro
And there were debates over whether the German leadership could be prosecuted for what they did to their own people, namely Jews, inside their own borders, prior to the outbreak of war. I want to return to the history here, but in a little bit. Let's start though with, as I said at the top, this current disagreement or controversy over Gaza that is raising all these issues. What is genocide? If not genocide, then what do we call it? How do we prosecute it? How do we punish it? Of course there are people on the other side of that issue who would say Israel is following the law and they're practicing self defense and they should not be held accountable for what they're doing in Gaza. What's at stake in this disagreement, in your view, between scholars who on the one hand, say Israel is not only breaking the laws, committing genocide, and those on the other side of the issue, which you might say are in two camps, maybe some who say they oppose what Israel's doing, it's wrong, it's just not genocide. But there are also people who, as I mentioned, are clearing Israel of wrongdoing almost entirely.
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Dirk Moses
It's true. There's a spectrum there on those that are defending Israel from the charge of genocide include liberals like Fania Ol Salzberger, the recently departed Yehuda Bauer, who would concede that it's a dirty war in which there are war crimes, possibly crimes against humanity, but definitely not genocide. That's a vehemently argued position. Then you get those further to the right who say Israel is not guilty of any international crimes. Okay, but let's focus on these liberals. Why is it that genocide is so vehemently contested? Why on the other side is genocide so vehemently asserted? Let's not forget that six days after the 7th of October, there were already two articles by two scholars who I know, Ras Siegel and Martin Shor, alleging that genocide was taking place or that least genocidal rhetoric was motivating this six days. Now, that means they were written actually after four or five days because it takes a little while to get an article online. These were accompanied by many other protestations by Palestinians, obviously, including the Palestinian mission at the un, I think, made an allegation that genocide is taking place in the immediate aftermath of the 7th of October. So why this recourse to genocide and not, say, crimes against humanity are war crimes, which are atrocity crimes according to the United nations and battle enough. And as you say, as you remind us, were the main indictments at Nuremberg back then, to call someone a war criminal was the worst thing possible. Now that's been superseded by being a genocide, being a genocidal perpetrator. In light of that, being a war criminal or a perpetrator of crimes against humanity is seen as not so bad. Now, I think that's an appalling situation, and that's what we've come to with the insertion of the genocide concept into international law and vocabulary, our vocabulary of evil since the Second World War. So my own view is that the creation of the genocide concept and law has actually been quite detrimental to international justice rather than a great progress, which is the conventional view. So here we are, not just you and me, but, you know, the whole international community quibbling over is it genocide or not, rather than talking about the facts that are staring us in the face. Yeah.
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Martin DeCaro
I mean, there's a fissure among scholars and that wouldn't happen over just narrow disagreements. Yeah, there's something more at stake here.
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Dirk Moses
Yeah, it's true, and I'm going to get to that. But, you know, instead of quibbling, there's a kind of a legalistic quibbling rather than looking at the facts on the ground, which is that Gaza has been laid waste, it's been utterly destroyed. It's easy to infer the intention to make life uninhabitable there so that there can be permanent security solution for Israel, possibly a recolonization of parts of it. Now, why is it that genocide is being alleged and then vehemently contested or rebutted? It's because genocide is related to the Holocaust in the sense that the Holocaust is genocide's archetype or ideal type. When people think, what does a genocide look like? They think of the Holocaust. That may not be how the lawyers reason, but that's how popular imagination works. And I think it's actually in the background for international lawyers, too. They just don't understand it. These archetypes are really sedimented into our consciousness and they're deep down in the DNA of how we imagine what the ultimate evil looks like. Now, for various reasons, the Holocaust has become the ultimate evil, the ultimate secular evil since the Second World War, not only in the west, but globally in many ways. I mean, there's a UN International Holocaust Remembrance Day, for example. You know, it's a UN project. It's not just a Western project. This is something that, you know, most states in the world have signed onto one way or the other. Once you make the Holocaust, the absolute evil with a capital A for absolute, you know, almost as a religious aura, a negative aura, a stigmatic aura, then genocide, which is related to the Holocaust in the sense that the Holocaust is, you know, the largest genocide in history, then genocide incorporates or borrows for that stigmatic aura and therefore is seen as the crime of crimes. That's a term that's often bandied around about with genocide. This is the crime of crimes. And therefore special guardrails are legally implemented to make sure that, you know, when it's alleged, then only in very special cases, a very special crime. In many ways, that's the imagination. So that's one aspect. The other aspect is that, you know, no state wants to be accused of that. As a result, you know, the idea is that, well, that's what barbaric states do, not civilized states.
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Martin DeCaro
Just briefly, though, it seems to me, then A terrible irony is here that if nothing can compare to the Holocaust.
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Dirk Moses
Yeah, it doesn't fit the archetype. So this is. Or the analogy doesn't work. This has been the constant issue, friction or tension in the post war period, where you've got now an international convention on genocide and this unacknowledged or disavowed archetype of the Holocaust. Of course, the word Holocaust and so forth does not appear in the Genocide Convention, but the view is that many of its articles, synonyms for what the Nazis did, like placing people in conditions calculated to ensure their destruction, Holder apart is a synonym for the death camps and concentration camps, for example. The idea is that it's generic, which means it applies everywhere. But making the analogy stick is very difficult. So, for example, in the the Biafra, Nigeria civil war in the late 1960s, where there was an attempted secession of the Igbo area, armed conflict ensued for a number of years and maybe 3 million people died, mostly through starvation because of a blockade, which has come up again in Gaza. But let's think of the numbers, millions, not tens of thousands. There was a concerted effort, like today, to make it genocide by Biafra supporters. Biafrans did it, the Igbo leadership did it, and their supporters outside said, this is genocide, this is genocide. But then the war ended, they were defeated, and there was an effort, at least rhetorically, to integrate these surviving remnants and not to continue with the killing. And people said, oh, this is not a genocide. This was just a messy civil war. And there were a number of other cases like that. For example, a year later in 1971, with the East Pakistan secession to create Bangladesh, where genocide was also alleged in large international campaigns, very much like we see today. At the end, Bangladesh succeeded, becoming independent, unlike Biafra. And the genocide rhetoric was seen by many people to be hollow because despite the killing of countless civilians by the Pakistani army and its counterinsurgency, this was seen as a civil war and not a genocide. And when you look at the debates at the time, you will see that those that were alleging genocide were constantly analogizing to the Holocaust. And then it's up to third parties, the people who are witnessing this, to say, well, the analogy sticks or it doesn't stick. So that's how the operation works. At the very same time, you had a debate about the Americans in Vietnam, where the genocide claim was advanced by left wing intellectuals like Jean Paul Sartre. It didn't stick. Again, people said, the Americans may be committing many crimes, but it doesn't look like what the Nazis were doing. So the Nazis were constantly held as the ideal type, the most pure form of what genocide needed to resemble, irrespective of what the law is. It's embedded in there, in the law in the following way. Martin so genocide is the intent to destroy now, whatever that means as such, ethnic, racial, religious group as such, just for being who they are, not for anything they've done.
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Martin DeCaro
Like a biological aspect to it that Lemkin focused on.
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Dirk Moses
Whereas military logic, by contrast, is the intent to defeat, not to destroy as such. There is destruction in the course of prosecuting a military campaign to defeat the enemy, but it's not done as an end in itself, whereas genocide is done as an end in itself. So what the. According to this reasoning, which I think is flawed, and we'll get to that next. According to this reasoning, Israel has been waging an armed conflict, a defensive armed conflict in Gaza and has not been attacking Palestinian civilians as such, but only incidentally. They've been killed collaterally, incidentally, in the effort to target militants, you know, armed combatants, you know, that's up for the lawyers to decide now at the International Court of Justice. By contrast, the South African case is that there was a specific intent to destroy Palestinians as such, and that's evidenced by the countless blood curdling, genocidal statements by Israeli leaders. So you've got this archetypes of warfare on the one hand and genocide on the other are pitted against each other as they have been now for 70 years in that ICJ case. And we'll see what the lawyers come up with. My own view is that this reasoning is flawed because in practice these logics are entwined and that one military campaign can entail both, both the intent to defeat and the intent to destroy.
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Martin DeCaro
Because intent changes over time. It develops over time.
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Dirk Moses
Well, that's one thing, but why can't it be two things at the same time rather than morphing from one to the other? That's the rhetoric of the lawyers. When you read the various ICJ cases, ICC cases, and the cases of the International Criminal Tribunals for Rwanda and and Yugoslavia, which precede the ICC from the 1990s, you will see that they argue in the following terms. They'll say at this point of the military campaign there was a military intent which was focused on armed combatants and so forth. But at the next stage, it then becomes a genocidal tension. For example, with Szrebrenica, my view is that why can't it be both at the same time, empirically These military conflicts are much messier than the lawyers are willing to admit.
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Martin DeCaro
Well, maybe what prevents that intertwining is what you call permanent security. States pursue this aim because they are a sovereign nation and they can defend their people. Part two of that point is when it's political, it's not genocide. Something I didn't know until reading your book about how genocide was made a non political crime. From the very beginning, there was very little support for making it a political crime. Even terrorism at the time was not considered political, which is kind of crazy.
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Dirk Moses
If it's political, then it's somehow legitimate, even if it utilizes illegitimate aims. But if something has a criminal motivation, then it's illegitimate. And that's also the distinction between genocide and warfare. Warfare is not illegitimate if it's done according to the UN charter, it's only in self defense. It's Article 51, I think, of the UN charter. Whereas genocide is inherently a criminal intention. And that's of course something that no state can abide. Whether Turkey, Israel, the US or Australia, they're never going to admit their intentions were criminal. And we're dealing here with international criminal law, whereas those that are indicting the Israelis will say their intentions were from the outset criminal. And I actually think that the ICJ is going to find it very difficult to, based on its previous jurisprudence, to conclude that the campaign was genocidal, although empirically. And this is what I was getting at before when I said we need to look sort of quibbling with legalism. We need to look at what's happened. Gaza is utterly destroyed along with many of its people. And it's going to have destructive effects on the people henceforth because you have, you know, tens of thousands of mutilated people, especially children, who are utterly traumatized. You know, agriculture's been destroyed deliberately. There's this buffer zone around the place now or inside Gaza, which incorporates much of the agricultural treasure. All the trees have been destroyed. It has been deliberately made uninhabitable. So a lot of the mortality is going to be in the future.
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Martin DeCaro
Exactly. And that raises a contradiction existed in Lemkin's mind and his own definition at the time. On the one hand, he focused on this biological element, physical extermination of a people because of who they are as such. But he also proposed that genocide should include what you're describing here, cultural genocide, destruction of the means to live, flattening entire neighborhoods, schools, mosques, hospitals, et cetera. But that didn't make it in to the definition of genocide.
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Dirk Moses
No, it was restricted to its biological elements, and all these other dimensions were excluded. So now people are coming up with these new words like herbicides, galasticide, eco side, to plug the gaps. They were there in the original broad definition of genocide that Lemkin wrote about in his book Axis Rule and Occupied Europe. Book was written in 1942, 43, but only published in late 1944, and had this extraordinarily broad definition of genocide, which I think is incoherent in many ways because it tried to marry the experience of Jews and Christians in Europe in order to create and sense a popular front of victims of Nazis so that the Allies would include European Jews in their understanding of Nazi criminality. If you go back and look at the sources at the time, strange as it may seem to people today, but American and Allied leaders understood the Nazi occupation of Europe as crimes against the Christian nations of Europe, the Czechoslovaks, the Poles and so forth, which were, you know, vastly Christian countries. While they were aware of the persecution of Jews, though not the extent of it until after 1942 or late later into 1942, they didn't see the Holocaust taking place. And they certainly didn't regard it as the central drama of the Second World War, where, of course, Lemkin did because, you know, his family was being murdered. He was a refugee. The Nazi intent to destroy Jews as a people across Europe and not just as citizens of individual states like Poland and so forth, was pretty obvious now. We can see it now, and certainly was obvious to people then, if you were prepared to look. The World Jewish Congress, whose papers I studied carefully for this book, was informing the Allies, based on the many sources of information that they had, that this was going on in Poland and Czechoslovakia and other occupied parts of Europe. And the Allies were more interested in finishing the war than in trying to stop what we now know as the Holocaust.
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Martin DeCaro
That was based on the idea, though, that the best way to end the suffering of all people was to end the war as fast as possible. But go ahead.
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Dirk Moses
Yeah. Lemkin was interested in, understandably, in reminding Allied leaders that there was a genocide going on that targeted Jews and Christians. But inventing this new word and making it the crime of crimes, his idea was that the Allies would end the genocide of everyone very soon. At the time, what we now know as the Holocaust, you know, wasn't in the consciousness of Americans, Brits and so forth. They were concerned with, you know, A, ending the war and B, the Nazi occupation of Christian nations like Czechoslovaks.
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Martin DeCaro
That's right. There was a reluctance to single out Jews as a special group of victims, even though of course they were. Than.
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Dirk Moses
Well, yeah, there's a fair bit of anti Semitism sloshing around Western powers, Western states. I mean, if anything, it was a blindness, an apathy, not really caring.
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Martin DeCaro
So when it comes to the centrality of the Holocaust here and how its place in the early debates over how to define genocide prevented other forms of violence from being included in that definition. You write Here on page 227 of how many pages were in your book? 14,000? No, around 500. Page 227. The Soviets were stung by accusations of genocide leveled by emigre Baltic organizations who complained about the takeover of their countries after the war. Their proposition closely mirrored that of Lemkin and the World Jewish Congress, namely that genocide is organically bound up with the fascism, Nazism and other similar race theories which preach national and racial hatred, the domination of the so called higher races and the extermination of the so called lower races. You say this is what the Soviet representative called the scientific definition of genocide. Conveniently, the Soviet attack on social groups like kulaks, rich peasants in the 1930s would thereby not be classified as genocide, but not for love of the Soviet Union. Did the Uruguayan representative support it when he agreed that the concept of genocide was indeed the outcome of the Nazi theories of race superiority which were at the basis of the Hitlerian ideology? The exclusion of political groups from the list of protected groups would make it easier for unstable states to put down domestic dissent. And some of them plainly admitted it.
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Dirk Moses
Correct. So some of what you read out were quotations from those representatives, as you made clear. Right, but it's important for your listeners to appreciate that. So here you have communists and anti communists agreeing that we don't want political groups, whether communist or anti communist forces within your state as protected groups in the Genocide Convention. So we can exterminate them, we can destroy them. That is how states operate when they negotiate international treaties. They want to make sure that they don't apply to them.
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Martin DeCaro
And there's another issue here. You've raised this before. All right, so maybe these things aren't genocide. Whatever the definition is, they're still horrendous.
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Dirk Moses
Exactly.
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Martin DeCaro
So what are we talking about? Well, here's a quote from Norman Goda, quoted in the Guardian, an article about this rift among scholars, a rift caused by the debate over Gaza. Norman Goda, professor of Holocaust Studies at the University of Florida, who has rejected accusations Israel is committing genocide. He said Oct. 7, and Israel's response had brought to the surface Unresolved problems about the language of antisemitism, terrorism, colonialism, and of course, genocide. He thinks the conclusion reached by many of his colleagues masks an agenda. He says genocide charges like this have long been used as a fig leaf for broader challenges to Israel's legitimacy. In this sense, he says, they have cheapened the gravity of the word genocide itself. What do you think of Ed?
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Dirk Moses
Well, Norman's a very fine historian of the Holocaust, but here he's wading into sort of political territory which is outside his area of expertise. Who is to know what the motivations are of people who are alleging that genocide is taking place? There's now an international legal discussion about this because of the South African case, and many serious international lawyers think there's a good case to be made. Are they advancing antisemitic arguments? Are they motivated by anti Semitism? I mean, who's to say what a fig leaf is? I find these kind of speculations unhelpful. It is true that there's now a very productive debate about this relationship between warfare and genocide which we've been circling around in our discussion so far. Martin, I think it's more helpful to talk about that.
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Martin DeCaro
Sure, I do. Meander as my listener.
- [35:56]
Dirk Moses
No, it's not you. It's not your question to me. It's Professor Goda now in the Journal of Genocide Research, which I edit. We're running an extensive forum on Gaza with a variety of voices, quite a few Israeli scholars. One article we published in early January by Shira Klein, who teaches at Chapman University in California, is on this very debate among Holocaust scholars regarding the quotation, if you like the issues raised in the quotation from Professor Norman Goda. But there, over 12,000 words, is a detailed elaboration of the dispute about what's going on and is it related to antisemitism. But more importantly, what is the role of Holocaust memory as many of these scholars work on Holocaust memory and run centers for Holocaust and genocide studies in relation to Israel? And Sheira Klein manages to unearth quite a few, let's say, high spirited quotations from major Holocaust historians and cultural studies scholars saying that, well, the point of Holocaust memory is to protect Israel's diplomatic reputation and to, you know, highlight certain aspects in the literature which benefit Israel and rather than detrimental. I have no dog in this fight. I'm interested in curating high quality empirical research in the Journal. This article is free to wear because it's open access. Anyone could just Google it and download it and make up their own mind. The article doesn't have a big argument. It just lays out the different positions. But the key is the richness of the quotations where people tell you what they think. What is the purpose of Holocaust memory and Holocaust scholarship and all these centers of Holocaust and genocide studies which are not funded by universities but by outside donors, what is their purpose? And some of them say quite openly, well, the purpose is political. I found that somewhat disappointing. I thought the purpose was academic. I thought we were researchers.
- [38:01]
Martin DeCaro
Yeah. The slogan never again is just a slogan because nothing will. I don't want to say nothing ever, but you know what I mean. It's hard to imagine anything reaching if that's the right term, what the Nazis did to the Jews. Right. But that doesn't mean other things aren't horrendous.
- [38:18]
Dirk Moses
Yeah, that's the issue with the uniqueness discourse or even the language of unprecedentedness, which is somewhat replaced the notion that the Holocaust is unique, that was a popular notion in 70s 80s and the early 90s. But then scholars came to see, well, you know, historically it makes no sense because everything's unique in its own way.
- [38:35]
Martin DeCaro
Yeah. I mean, there are no gas chambers in Gaza, but we can judge each case on its own.
- [38:40]
Dirk Moses
But people still were anxious to underline the distinct aspects of the Holocaust, which empirically, I think, verifiable. The Holocaust is distinct in many ways. The language of, of uniqueness, though, has all kinds of theological entailments. I don't think it's very useful for scholars. So people like Yehuda Bawas replaced the language of uniqueness with one of unprecedentedness. It was unprecedented, but of course, as he said, and he was very interested in genocide prevention, if something's unprecedented, it means that this case, it means that it could recur. So the point of genocide prevention and Holocaust memory, according to this line of thinking, was to prevent genocides from occurring again. The problem, the model, I think, is that as you raised in your question, Martin, because the Holocaust is distinct in many ways, and that's something that Bauer and others like Norman Goder underline constantly, then it's very difficult to make those analogies. In effect, it never again becomes sort of hollow if well intentioned. But analogies at the same time can be very mischievous and instrumentalize or weaponize. For example, I signed a petition or a letter that was in the New York Review of Books late 2023 against these reckless analogies about the 7th of October as Holocaust in a day, Holocaust 2.0, a pogrom, a genocide, and so forth. So I mean, I've no doubt that Hamas committed crimes against humanity and war crimes. And in fact, the ICC indictment says that that broke all kinds of international laws. But invoking Holocaust language isn't helpful.
- [40:14]
Martin DeCaro
Netanyahu says Hamas is Nazis. And since we've been discussing the connection between the Second World War, the Nazis crimes, the Holocaust, and what we're dealing with today, Netanyahu publicly has talked about this on interview shows. He has said that In World War II, the Allies carpet bombed European and Japanese cities. We don't punish the Allies, we punish the Nazis. I'm paraphrasing what he said.
- [40:40]
Chancellor Kohl
It's like In World War II, the Allies are fighting the Nazis. Okay? Chancellor Kohl of Germany said that Hamas are the new Nazis. So imagine now the Allies are fighting the Nazis. They've invaded France after they were attacked by the Nazis. They go into the cities of Germany. Obviously the Nazis are fighting within civilian quarters and civilians get killed. In fact, many of them were killed. Millions were killed. Who do you protest against? Do you protest against the Nazis or do you protest against the Allies?
- [41:11]
Martin DeCaro
He even told this to President Biden. President Biden gave an interview to MSNBC shortly before leaving office, where Biden relayed or related a meeting he had with Netanyahu, where Biden says Netanyahu brought up World War II. So that goes to the permanent security. A sinister notion. I'm borrowing your term.
- [41:30]
Dirk Moses
Yeah. And it also underlines the Israeli position that this was an armed conflict, this was a war, and that there are precedents to the way we're waging this war, but that the intention is one of defeat, even if through messy means, not one of destruction. That's genocide. It's not a criminal intention. It's a legitimate intention of self defense, which Biden agreed with, mind you, and I think many Americans agree with, even if they're unhappy with the mode of its execution. Let's not forget that's what the ICC position is as well. Karim Khan has issued warrants for two Israeli leaders, Gallant and Netanyahu, for war crimes and crimes against humanity and not for genocide. Now, we don't know why we've not been in those deliberations inside the staff room, their seminar room. But I can surmise that they see that genocide is very difficult to prove in international law, by design. That's one of the arguments in the book, that it's been made to resemble the Holocaust as much as possible in order to make it impossible to prove, because no states want to support a convention that could apply to them proving intent. The intent to destroy is a criminal intent where the intent to defend your state against a threat of some kind is not a criminal intent, although it can be. It can be executed in a criminal way. And then you have war crimes and crimes against humanity. Okay, but it's in a separate domain.
- [42:58]
Martin DeCaro
Well, even some Nazis said they were killing Jews for security reasons, not for racial ones.
- [43:02]
Dirk Moses
The Nazis did say that. The Nazis did think that, and that I think accounts for their demented campaign. But at Nuremberg, the prosecutors rightly said you can't take the paranoid threat perceptions of perpetrators as real in terms of applying the law. So they themselves were then tied up in knots by various lines of defense by some of the Nazis, which we don't have time to get into. But I write about in the book, you've mentioned this term permanent security once or twice. And I want to elaborate that for your listeners. So all states are interested in the security, whether of their borders, food security, energy security has all kinds of applications. That obviously is not a criminal motivation and nor is putting down, say an insurgency or separatist movement within your borders. Every state is entitled to do that. There have been separatist movements underway or are underway now in many parts of the world. And then you have the counterinsurgencies. Some of them are called anti terror operations by those states. Now in some cases they exceed the limits of proportionality. For example, In Myanmar in 2017, what used to be called Burma, where there was a minor rebellion by separatist rebellion by Sambrohing militants. Now in response, rather than just neutralize them, you know, capture them, put them on trial, what have you, the authorities resolved that never again will we allow the possibility of a separatist movement and a secession in this sort of sensitive border region. So we're going to boot out virtually the entire Rohingya population, which is ethnically different to the rest, into mainly Bangladesh, where there's like 700,000 rahing, are languishing in refugee camps and terrible conditions and they're not going to be allowed back. I'm arguing that the authorities reasoned and operated in terms not just of security, but an illegitimate notion of, of permanent security. Now, because they're thinking of permanence of the future, never again will we allow this threat to exist in this sensitive border area. So in this case it was a logic of violent expulsion. You had a similar logic underway of permanent security with the Uyghur case, which was going on at the same time in Xinjiang province. So once again, it's a massive province of the People's Republic, but it's a sensitive border area. There's many minerals there. And there is a secessionist entity that wants to create West Turkestan among the Uyghur population. Now they've been diluted in terms of demography by the Chinese immigration policies and there's understandable resentment about that. Now there was some minor incidents about 15 years ago. Several hundred people were killed. Now in response to Chinese authorities again rather than and address the particular perpetrators decided that the population as a whole, that is the Uyghur population, is the problem because the secessionists emerge from them, come from them and claim to speak in their name. And so we're going to, rather than expel them like in Myanmar, we're going to incarcerate them and re educate them in violent and illegal ways. So that's what's been happening there. And some people have called that genocide. Certainly Uyghur advocates have for various reasons. Others, like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have used the term crimes against humanity in their various reports which you can download from their websites. In addition to the legalism of the genocide claim. Right. Which in the end we have to defer to the International Court of Justice. What is Israel up to in Gaza and now the west bank and southern Lebanon? Is it a case of security which is legitimate under international law, or is it engaged in a permanent security project which leads it to engage in all kinds of illegal activity destroying the schools, the mosques, the universities, the sanitation, the agricultural things that vastly exceed the strictures of military necessity? So I think you can see the outlines of a greater ambition. One ambition is just responding immediately to Hamas to make sure they can't fire missiles and attack Israel. Right. But what we're seeing is something far greater than that. It's one to ensure that never again can this territory be a launching pad for an attack on Israel. Although it's not Israeli territory, it's Palestinian territory and it's occupied by Israel.
- [47:41]
Martin DeCaro
Yes. I've been watching videos that have been taken as Palestinians have returned to what's left of their neighborhoods. These are online.
- [47:48]
Dirk Moses
Yeah. So I've seen them too.
- [47:49]
Martin DeCaro
Yeah. This act has been recorded in real time. It's not hard to find videos of Palestinian parents with blood stained shrouds covering their children who have been blown to pieces by US munitions launched by Israel almost every single day. Plus images of cities that do look like what we saw in World War II. Basically no building is standing. That's not an accident. That is done deliberately and maliciously. And so it does lead into my next question. To you, Dirk Moses. There's something else at work here, something that Ernesto Verdeja wrote about in an article called the Gaza Genocide and Five Crises that you shared online. And I'll share a link to this article in my weekly newsletter as well, and that is seeing Palestinians as unworthy victims. He writes the crisis reflects more profound normative disagreements among scholars. He says the crisis reflects more profound normative disagreements over who is the legitimate victim worth grieving, how and when, if at all, mass violence can be justified, and over the exceptional moral status of the State of Israel.
- [48:58]
Dirk Moses
Of course, Israeli advocates deny that their intentions were malicious. Okay, so this will all come out of the ether when the ICJ judges the merits of the issue in a couple of years. Now, that article you're referring to by Nessa Vodea appeared in the journal that I edit, the Journal of Genocide Research, and I commissioned it for from him. So I accompanied it through its various drafts, had it peer reviewed and so forth. And I was very glad to see it online a couple of days ago. It's a tremendous piece of work and an extreme, extremely ethical article because he's concerned with civilian life more generally, whether Israeli or Palestinian, he's not taking sides. And Ernesto is a scholar at Notre Dame, is very interested in humanitarian intervention or the responsibility to protect doctrine, which became normative in the UN 20 years ago. He, like others, have been wondering, where are the humanitarian intervention proponents today who are making a lot of noise about, say, preventing atrocities in Libya? Samantha Power is a case in point. Right now she's working for, you know, USAID and doesn't have much to say about these issues other than humanitarian aid questions, but not ones of justice and not ones about that or anything critical of the Israeli campaign. And people have noticed, if you look on social media, she's subject to constant ridicule. Actually, I think Ernesto Verdeilla's point about racial hierarchies or racism, frankly, is well made and entirely convincing. There's no doubt that there's a hierarchy of grievability, to use Judith Butler's term, in our perception of the victims in these conflicts. And that goes not just for Gaza, but for other ones as well. But if we're sticking to the Western sphere where we operate, just look at the difference in the valuing of Ukrainian and Palestinian lives. Now, there's a subtext to that as well. I mean, within European discourse, Ukrainians historically have been quite low on the totem pole of grievability. There was sort of subtle racism against Eastern Europeans, among Western Europeans, and Ukrainians were not high on the list. And that's changed all of a sudden because of the Soviet campaign and the nature of its campaign. So the valuation of Ukrainian life is actually quite new in Western discourse.
- [51:25]
Martin DeCaro
And one important difference, sorry to interject there, Derek, is also that Ukraine, the invasion of Ukraine was entirely unprovoked. It was an act of aggression. Whereas Israel did have a right to defend itself, or I should say did have a right to respond to Hamas from where it had attacked it. It did not have a right to 450 days of utter devastation, in my opinion.
- [51:48]
Dirk Moses
Well, that's the distinction in what the jurists call jus in bella and jus ad bellum. I may have gotten those Latin terms quietly wrong, but one is the justice of the conflict, the other one is the justice of how you conduct the conflict. So the way international lawyers reason is that even if an international armed conflict is not motivated by a just cause like self defense, all parties still need to abide by the modes of armed conflict. How you wage the war is a separate body of law. That's something that applies to all parties, whether the Russians or the Ukrainians and so forth. So these things can get very technical in the law journals and discussions, but the distinction you make between the cases is certainly been one that's framed the reactions in the us, Australia, America and so forth. I think deep down a lot of people are saying, well, yeah, the Israelis went a bit far, but Hamas started it. And you can't blame the Israelis for overreacting given what happened on the 7th of October. So of course there are responses to that as well. The history didn't begin on the 7th of October. You have this sort of illegal occupation and blockade that's been going on for a long time and that the Palestinians were suffering a slow death and that was going to be exacerbated by the Abraham Accords and Arab normalization. So let's reshuffle the deck here. Let's explode the situation and start again and make sure that the Palestinian causes on front and center in international debates. Now, I'm not taking sides in this debate, I'm just sharing information. But what I can observe is that, you know, the Hamas calculation has led to mass death on their side. The destruction of Gaza, of course, all the illegal killings of Israeli and other civilians, the schlepping off of hundreds of hostages, which is an appalling crime. I mean, I just can't imagine the experiences of those hostages and their families. I'm glad they're being reunited. But what's forgotten in all this, of course, is the thousands and thousands of of de facto Palestinian hostages, those that are arrested under spurious laws or spurious pretexts and held in administrative detention, including lots of children. So before the 7th of October, you had intolerable conditions for Palestinians. But that's not recognized in the west. And that's what Ernesto Zvadeo is getting at. Why is it not recognized? Well, because there's a racist blindness at the very best for the conditions of people under occupation.
- [54:18]
Ernesto Verdeja
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 homes. Neither occupation nor expulsion is the answer.
- [55:19]
Martin DeCaro
On the next episode of History as It Happens, Donald Trump, birthright citizenship and the 14th amendment. Our guest will be Eric Foner. That's next. As we report, History As It Happens happens. New episodes every Tuesday and Friday. My newsletter every Friday. Go to historyasithappens.com and sign up. It's free.