The Five Ways Germany Denies #Genocide
▻https://hannohauenstein.substack.com/p/on-forms-of-denial
In genocide studies, denial is understood as a constitutive part of violence – a “constant feature of the genocidal process.” […]
The coexistence of different types points to a layered structure of denial. A new layer emerges whenever a concession is made vis-à-vis the previous one – acknowledging aspects of the violence taking place. This also helps explain how denial and justification, ignorance and legitimation of Israeli violence can exist simultaneously in German discourse. At the same time, these patterns can also be read diachronically: as a repertoire that allows for incremental concessions over time, each concession giving way to yet another form of denial.
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Type 1 / Moral Denial: The Principled Impossibility of an Israeli Genocide
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To preserve this immunity, the taboo surrounding the genocide question is reinforced through practices of defamation and repression. Central to this is the ever-broadening invocation of antisemitism, which in some cases extends to the spectre of a global conspiracy hostile to Israel – and thus, by extension in Type 1 logic, hostile to Jews.
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Type 2 / Epistemological Denial: The Insurmountable Unknowability of Mass Violence
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Attempts to dispel such doubt are, in turn, recast as overt “resolve” and folded into accusations of antisemitism. Images of alleged violence are themselves dismissed as instruments of warfare – serving propagandistic purposes, particularly for Hamas – and are therefore stripped of any evidentiary value.
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This strategy is all the more striking given its mirror image. For simultaneously, the Israeli military – an interested party to the conflict and accused of gravest crimes – is treated as epistemically reliable. That reliability is assumed by reference to its purportedly “democratic” or “moral” character; and to a shared belonging to “Western civilization.” […]
Type 3 / Ontological Denial: Bilateralising Unilateral Violence
Faced with mounting evidence and formal investigative procedures, Type 3 no longer insists that the reality of events in Gaza is, in principle, unknowable. Satellite imagery or reports by expert colleagues endowed with epistemic authority are not rejected anymore. Instead, this defensive line of genocide denial shifts to an ontological claim: what appears in images and reports as one-sided violence against civilians in Gaza must instead be understood as two-sided violence between the Israeli armed forces and Hamas. Accordingly, all military violence is reframed as counter-violence – and thus as necessary.
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Type 4 / Methodological Denial: The Uninvestigability of Intent
Type 4 marks a further shift. Unlike previous variants, it concedes the empirical possibility of mass violence against civilians and civilian infrastructure in #Gaza, including one-sided violence. Within this framework, Israel is accused not only of war crimes but also of ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. Support is expressed for the International Criminal Court and for enforcing arrest warrants against Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant. The far right within the Israeli government is explicitly criticised. Type 4 acknowledges the serial nature of individual cases and, with it, the systematic character of Israeli violence. What it continues to deny, however, is the existence of an intent to destroy the Palestinians “in whole or in part” – the legal threshold required to demonstrate in order to establish genocide.
In this view, the extraordinarily high death toll and the scale of destruction are interpreted as collateral damage. […]
Type 5 / Authoritative Denial: Exclusive Legal Jurisdiction over Genocide Determination
Unlike Type 4, Type 5 treats everything as theoretically possible, but nothing as already established. Israel may well harbour an intent to destroy the Palestinians. Yet this can only be considered proven once the International Court of Justice (ICJ) has reached a corresponding judgment under the Genocide Convention. Type 5 thus declares all epistemic authorities beyond the ICJ to be incompetent on the question of genocide. The position rests on a radical – and largely uncritical – form of legal positivism.
This monopolization of judgment goes hand in hand with a devaluation of entire fields of academic knowledge. The existing body of research – developed across political science, sociology, anthropology, and the historical, comparative, and normative study of genocide – is effectively negated. In this respect, Type 5 mirrors Type 4’s prohibition on comparison, insofar as it treats accumulated knowledge as non-transferable to the present case.
As a result, the rich extensive debates in international journals that apply interdisciplinary genocide research to Gaza remain largely ignored in Germany. Type 5 also borrows from Type 1, insofar as any research on genocide in Gaza is suspected of being driven by an antisemitic obsession with Israel – again understood as a stand-in representation of Jews. According to this logic, such scrutiny would not be applied to other instances of mass violence.
Across all five types, a shared demand emerges: strict restraint when it comes to the question of genocide in Gaza. Each, on its own premises, insists that judgment on this issue – genocide: yes or no? – must be deferred. One consequence of this is that investigation of Israeli violence is discouraged: neither within the specialised field of genocide studies nor within the broader disciplines of violence and conflict research. The appropriate response to mass violence in Gaza is thus framed as epistemic and moral abstinence, extending – at times – to outright silence. This structural preference is also reflected in the programmes of German social science conferences, where few topics of comparable urgency are so conspicuously absent from academic discussion.
Only gradually are spaces emerging in Germany for the debates that are urgently needed: empirically grounded, academically informed, and openly contested discussions of genocide and other forms of violence in Gaza – beyond denial and generalised moral suspicion. As with other pressing questions of security and peace in our time, the corresponding well-founded and controversial arguments are a prerequisite for a functioning scholarly discourse – and thus also for a democratic engagement with “existential problems.”
Hanna Pfeifer is a political scientist and head of the research area “Societal Peace and Internal Security” at the Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy (IFSH).