“What Israel is doing in Gaza is a genocide” – Interview with Professor Amos Goldberg

“What Israel is doing in Gaza is a genocide”. Amos Goldberg is a Professor of Holocaust History at the Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. “I was drawn to the study of genocide because I believe that, by learning about genocide, we could better understand the dangers and threats facing us as individuals, societies, and cultures—especially in a modern world where genocides and mass violence seem alarmingly frequent. Let’s put the Holocaust aside for a moment: genocides almost always happen, from the perspective of the perpetrators, as acts of self-defence in response to a real or imagined threat.

Now, and this is very important to stress: October 7th was a catastrophe. It was a deep trauma—a heinous crime—that impacted people very close to me. We were all shocked; it felt like an existential threat. We couldn’t even grieve. But even that crime must be understood – not justified- in context: the Nakba, the occupation, the siege, apartheid… What Israel did in response was completely disproportionate, and no crime, even as heinous as the seventh of October, justifies genocide.

How does it meet the definition of genocide? Genocide is hard to define, but the UN’s 1948 Genocide Convention offers a widely accepted definition. It doesn’t just mean killing many people. Instead, it refers to the intent to destroy, whole or in part, an ethnic, national, racial, or religious group. And, as the very name of the convention indicates, it also contains an obligation to prevent it.

That special intent to destroy is clear in Gaza. Gaza, as a society, no longer exists. For months, top-down incitement to genocide has been broadcast openly in Israel—from government officials, generals, media celebrities, rabbis etc, across the media, on social media including by soldiers. This has been documented extensively. The patterns of annihilation are undeniable: mass killing, destruction of most houses, starvation, snipers targeting innocent people (including children), and the systematic destruction of hospitals, infrastructure, religious buildings, universities, and institutions. These actions annihilate the conditions of possibility of a society—destroying a collective while dehumanizing an entire population. Some 45.000 dead, 10.000 more estimated under the rubble, more than 100 thousand injured. Many more die because of lack of medical facilities and materials. The entire population is displaced Gaza does not exist anymore.

But the term genocide carries the heaviest burden. Its association with the Holocaust still impacts Germany. Associating Israel, a country born out of the Holocaust, with a genocide, is unspeakable for many.

Yes, because when we think of a genocide we only think of the Holocaust. So if it’s not Auschwitz and Treblinka, it’s not a genocide. Maybe it’s not nice, but it’s okay… On the other hand, , Europeans and mostly Germans feel guilt feeling and responsibility to protect Israel, even if it is the most powerful state in the Middle East. Even if it crosses the threshold of the most horrendous crime in international law, if you blame Israel too much, you are immediately considered an antisemite.

Take Tony Blinken, a genocide denier regarding Gaza, who unconditionally supports Israel. On March 21, 2022, not long before October 7th, he visited the Holocaust Museum in Washington in order to acknowledge there the atrocities in Myanmar as genocide. Just change the words in his statement to Gaza and Israel and you will get a very close analogy. So, he could draw moral authority from the Holocaust, to talk about the genocide in Myanmar which is also very different from the Holocaust. But Israel is where all rules don’t count. I understand the sensitivity regarding words like the Holocaust and genocide and I really share it. We have to be cautious and sensitive. But we also have to prevent genocides. It’s not only about violating memory, destabilizing identity, or hurting feelings. It’s about people being killed daily by dozens, and children starved to death. We must stop it. Why do we study the Holocaust if we cannot learn from it?

You are posing the question of the legacy of the Holocaust… Yehuda Elkana was a prestigious Israeli scholar and Holocaust survivor. In 1988, in the first year of the first Intifada, he wrote: “There are two lessons that could be drawn from the Holocaust. ‘Never again’ and ‘never again to us’. Israel decided to learn the latter and therefore he suggested to forget and not to remember. Germany allegedly learned ‘never again’ for all, but as time passes it seems to mean, “never again should we feel guilt”. They don’t want to feel bad about themselves. Defending Israel has become such a major part of their identity. I appreciate their memory culture. I don’t appreciate that they support a current genocide in the memory of a previous, more extreme genocide that they perpetrated. It has become an excuse to be racist. You can be a racist, support genocide but still hold the high moral ground by excusing it as a “fight against antisemitism”.

But Israel is indeed in an exceptional position, both for its history and for the unique polarisation it attracts. Yes, for many reasons. But also because it gets protection that no other nation gets. What is really exceptional about Israel is that it violates each and every rule in international law, and gets away with it.

You are one of the many Jews exposing it… do you still feel part of it in some way?

Not in some way. I am completely part of it. This is my society. They do it in my name. I am teaching at the university. It’s my tax,. We are complicit. We let it happen. We didn’t prevent it. It took me a half a year to understand. I should have understood this earlier. Protesting comes at a personal risk, particularly for Palestinians – including those with Israeli citizenship. They really have to shut up completely or get detained, so Palestinian voices are almost not heard in Israel. But this is the time to insist on Palestinian voices, even if they are speaking, very painful truth to us Israelis and you Europeans, because you are also complicit. As my friend Alon Confino always insisted, one of the moral and political, imperatives of the Holocaust is that we always need to listen to the victims’ voice.