Omer Bartov on #Gaza: “It’s a Misnomer to Call It a War”
▻https://jacobin.com/2025/04/bartov-israel-gaza-holocaust-genocide
It has been especially difficult for scholars within the subdiscipline of Holocaust studies to write about or even engage with what is happening in Gaza. Because if you accept that part of identifying genocide involves empathizing with the victims, what do you do when the state carrying it out is one that sees and presents itself as the answer to the Holocaust — a state that has positioned itself as the guardian of Holocaust memory, as having drawn the right lessons from it, and yet has engaged in a genocidal undertaking?
It has been impossible for most Holocaust scholars — not all, I can think of some exceptions, including myself — to square that circle. They have either tried to avoid it altogether or, even worse, have joined the chorus heard in Germany, the United States, and Israel, asserting that what Hamas did was not just a massacre and a crime — which, of course, it was — but that it was comparable to the Holocaust, and therefore, the only possible response is total destruction. In other words, the supposed answer to a perceived #genocide is genocide — which is exactly the wrong lesson to take from the Holocaust.
For me, this moment reveals that the very historians who initiated the move toward writing with empathy about genocide, and specifically about the Holocaust, now find it impossible to empathize with the victims of another genocide — one being carried out by a state that presents itself as the outcome of the Holocaust, as its answer.