Intent, Holocaust Studies and the Gaza Genocide w/ Amos Goldberg

For episodes 193 and 194, released on Patreon in full and on the public feeds as a two-parter, Elia Ayoub is joined by Amos Goldberg, Professor of Holocaust History at the Department of Jewish History and Contemporary Jewry at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Goldberg is among the most vocal Israeli historians of the Holocaust to have called Israel’s actions in Gaza genocide. In 2024, he wrote a paper for the Journal of Genocide Research exploring how the question of ‘intent’ is used in discussions around genocides, including the Gaza one. They also get into how genocide is often preceded by claims of self-defense. They then get into the crisis within Holocaust and Genocide Studies since the start of the Gaza genocide. Finally, they spoke about “The Holocaust and the Nakba: A New Grammar of Trauma and History”, which Goldberg co-edited, and argue for the necessity of new horizons in our imaginaries.

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Articles by Goldberg:

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Other Links:

Lee Mordechai: Witnessing the Gaza War
The Fire These Times: The Holocaust, the Nakba and Reparative Memory with Daniel Voskoboynik
The Fire These Times: Remembering the Nakba, Imagining the Future w/ Dana El Kurd
Read Abubaker Abed’s “The Unbearable Pain of Leaving Gaza”
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Credits

Elia Ayoub (host, producer, sound editor, episode design), ⁠⁠Rap and Revenge⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ (Music), ⁠⁠Wenyi Geng⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ (TFTT theme design), ⁠⁠Hisham Rifai⁠⁠⁠⁠ (FTP theme design) and ⁠⁠Molly Crabapple⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ (FTP team profile pics).

Transcript via Antidote Zine:

Instead of developing our historical sensitivity to violence, Holocaust memory actually blocked us from understanding history and being sensitive and cautious about political violence, because we say, “It’s not the Holocaust, so it’s not genocide.”

Amos Goldberg: Thank you very much for having me here, it’s an honor.

My name is Amos Goldberg, and I am a historian at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem specializing mostly on Holocaust and genocide studies. I have three main topics: the Jewish experience during the Holocaust, Holocaust memory, and debates in Holocaust and genocide studies on the integration between Holocaust and genocide, genocide and Holocaust. We might encounter those issues down the road.

Since January 2024, I became more and more vocal against the war and the genocide; I’ve written and interviewed about that in Hebrew and also in other languages. I’m also a fellow at the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem.

Elia J. Ayoub: Thank you so much for joining me for this conversation. It’s not going to be a light one, and I appreciate you taking the time to do this.

I’ve been familiar with your work since you co-edited The Holocaust and the Nakba, which is relevant to what we’re going to be discussing. I reached out to you after reading a paper you published last year in the Journal of Genocide Research entitled “The Problematic Return of Intent” as part of a broader forum on Israel-Palestine, the subtitle of which is “Atrocity, Crimes, and the Crisis of Holocaust and Genocide Studies.”

The question of intent is something I’ve seen brought up time and time again in conversations related to the genocide in Gaza. Can you start by telling us a bit about that paper? What was on your mind while you were writing? What was the intention?

AG: First of all we have to thank and appreciate the Journal of Genocide Research and its chief editor, professor Dirk Moses, for initiating this forum that now contains more than two dozen papers reflecting on the Gaza genocide and the events of October 7, 2023, the atrocities and the massacre, and what happened since, reflecting on the ways we understand this field and the way it functions, and what we can learn about it and its relation to what is called the “Palestinian-Israeli conflict.” Conflict,as we know, is not the right word, but for the sake of this conversation.

First of all, it’s about time that not only Gaza but the Palestinian Nakba will be integrated into this field. It’s an ongoing event of ethnic cleansing and mass atrocities, and maybe a special case but still a case of settler-colonialism and now full-scale genocide, as I and many others see it. It should be integrated, and somehow it was excluded from the field of genocide and mass atrocity studies—but it belongs there, and this was the first achievement of this forum; it already integrates it in relation to the competence of this field, the discourse and discussions. They are all short essays, and I really recommend to go and see, because all of them are really good.

There is a discrepancy between what we understand as genocide in disciplines of history and sociology, and how law views this. We all feel it, all those who work in the field. The word genocide actually comes from the legal field, because it’s a crime. A Jewish-Polish lawyer, who fled Poland after the invasion of the Nazis and ended up in America, coined it as a legal term. On the other hand, he himself was also a historian of this term and wrote quite a lot about previous genocides.

The legal term and the historical-sociological-political phenomenon are not the same—there is a gap between them. The legal term was discussed in various circles, particularly between 1946 and 1948, in the UN—until December 1948, when the Genocide Convention (the convention to prevent and punish the crime of genocide) was adopted by the UN general assembly. But in those two years of discussions, there were all kinds of understandings and suggestions how to define it, and they ended up on a pretty narrow definition, mostly because of political reasons. It was a power game, mostly between America and the Soviet Union: they had their interests, so they formed a definition which put great emphasis on intent.

I’ll quote exactly what Article 2 of the Convention says: “In the present convention, genocide means any of the following acts [and then there are five acts] committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group as such.” As we see, it puts special emphasis on the issue of intent. When we look historically at the annihilation of people or collectives, whether nations or even social groups not mentioned in the convention, we can say it’s not genocide because we can’t prove the intent to kill as such, as the convention says. We have the same historical phenomena, but maybe we didn’t find the documents to show special intent. It’s also not important—the political, historical, social phenomenon is quite the same, if we want to understand it.

In Holocaust history, there was a big debate in the eighties and nineties between two big schools. One put really special emphasis on antisemitic intent to understand the Nazis acting out of intent. The other was a functional school that didn’t put such great emphasis on intent but on functions of bureaucracy and other mechanisms, local initiatives that all together compiled into what we now call the Final Solution. Both were legitimate. Since then, we moved forward to develop very sophisticated explanations of various forms of mass violence, ethnic cleansing, and genocide, but boundaries between those phenomena are not very clear.

If we stick to the very high bar of the definition, I don’t know if we’d be able to talk about most of those events, because they do not necessarily fall within this very strict definition. Moreover, we will not understand the political, historical, social phenomenon. If we have to reduce the explanation and the understanding of this historical phenomenon to just intent in this strict way, we reduce the whole intellectual richness of the field.

I spoke about this tension between the legal and where it takes us, because now many of us are just looking at how to explain against “But where’s the intent in Gaza?” and we’re all focused more and more on intent because of the legal procedures that are taking place in the ICJ—and that will distort us from actually seeing and understanding what is happening in Gaza, and why genocide and such atrocities happen in our modern world.

EA: You make the distinction very eloquently in the piece between how the legal field talks about intent and how historians, including of the Holocaust and of genocides more broadly, talk about genocide. It caught my attention that in the paper, you start with a fairly infamous moment in history, Hitler’s Reichstag speech at the end of January 1939 where he talks about the destruction of European Jews.

As you mentioned, there have been two positions around that speech as an example; one that focuses a lot on intent (as in, This proves that as early as 1939 the Holocaust is on the way; that’s what they wanted to do and that’s it), and the other, the more functionalist school, focused more on how even if one can demonstrably prove intent that’s not necessarily the main question—it’s more like, What are the conditions that led to the Holocaust, the Final Solution?

What I find interesting is that you said you’ve noticed, especially since October, a shift among Israelis who you’ve talked to or witnessed. Before we get to the Israelis specifically, can you explain why that speech is so central to your argument?

AG: The question of when the Holocaust, or the Final Solution (which means the complete annihilation of the Jews in Europe), was decided on is a question that preoccupied the field for many decades. In the beginning, there was an intuition that already in the twenties, when Hitler wrote Mein Kampf and a second book, it was already on his mind after the First World War, and it developed, and he waited for the right moment to execute. But then when people started drilling more into it, we see that it is not true, because until they reached the Final Solution, there were many other solutions.

During the thirties in Germany, they tried to encourage Jews to emigrate, not to be killed. They didn’t want to keep them until the right moment and then kill them. No, they pushed them away. And then we see at the beginning of the war several territorial “solutions”—We will take them here or there, or to Madagascar, or deep into the Soviet Union. Those were all not what we know now as the Final Solution. There was no plan to kill the Jews until mid-1941 at the earliest.

In January 1939, Hitler made a big speech to celebrate six years of being in power, since 1933, in the Bundestag. It’s a very long speech, like two and a half hours. It’s a very antisemitic speech. But this is not even the main issue. He talks about all the achievements in foreign policy and reviving the nation, the army, and so on—making Germany great again. It is all very antisemitic, but at the end he comes to the Jewish issue, and says that if the Jews will push the nations into a world war again, not the annihilation of the world will be the outcome, but the annihilation of the Jewish race. That’s January 1939, and many say, Come on, here we have a clear intent, a planned intent to kill the Jews.

But you see, that’s January 1939, and only in June 1941, two and a half years later (which is quite a lot), is there the beginning of mass killing. And it will take a few more months, maybe a half year, until it is “crystallized” into what we call the Final Solution, the plan to kill each and every Jew in Europe and perhaps even beyond.

How can we put this together? It’s the first time, in January 1939, that Hitler talked publicly about annihilating the Jews. But we don’t see anything happening afterwards—on the contrary, the Nazis come up with territorial plans; nothing works for them at that point. So how can we put these two together? Historians try to confront this question, and one line of thought was, Yes, there was no plan, but it was the first time we see what was really in his head, the intent.

The other one says, No, it’s politics! Since 1938 they became very aggressive with the Jews, they tried to push them out of Germany and, with the Anschluss, also Austria. The Jews were identified as a refugee problem at that time, and they were negotiating, particularly with America, how many Jews they will accept. The cumulative radicalization came throughout the war, but it’s not serious—it’s vicious, it’s racist, I can’t say anything good, but it’s just a matter of him trying to raise the stakes in negotiations, raise the bar much higher in his rhetoric.

I’m paraphrasing of course. Those are two lines of thought, and usually when I bring it to class, Israeli Jewish students tend to identify with the first, because of Israeli education—and I am not saying anything bad about this line of thought—we tend to explain the Holocaust by the issue of antisemitism, which makes it unique; it’s a problem disconnected from other forms of racism and other forms of violence, mass violence, and genocide. The other explanation always seems kind of weird to my students: Why not take him at face value? He says what he thinks!

This year, it was not a class but a group of research students, and my impression was that they were much more willing to accept this kind of functionalist approach that says, No, you know, it’s just within the negotiations—yes, it’s a radicalization, and eight months down the road he will open the Second World War, but you don’t have to take him at his word. It’s just a matter of radicalizing rhetoric within the political context. I saw that many more were willing to accept that this year, and I connected it: I thought it was because this was actually the case in the ICJ, the Gaza genocide case, because of the countless genocidal expressions in Israel after October 7.

Israel, when it came to the ICJ, said, No, no, don’t take us at our word! Those are not intentional genocidal utterances. It’s an expression of anger and rage after such a blow! Don’t take words at face value! I thought that maybe because Israeli Jews don’t want to be accused of genocide, they are more willing to accept this kind of explanation, because it takes us off the hook. Nobody can deny there was such horrible dehumanization and genocidal rhetoric—but it didn’t mean anything except for rage and trauma and so on.

I thought that was an interesting anecdote. Maybe I’m wrong, but I had the impression that something had changed, that people are looking at history differently because of their subjective position and the existential unease with the accusation of genocide which they wanted to brush away. Ninety-nine percent of Israelis, even those who acknowledge atrocities, even now, would not say it’s a genocide. That was a way to say, Don’t take words seriously!

EA: I’ve had a similar impression—not necessarily through direct interactions, or not as much, but I do cultural and media studies, and looking at how media discourses have been covering the ongoing genocide since October, it seems like a lot of the discourse has revolved around this misunderstanding (or at times purposeful distortion) of the importance of intent.

The debate seems to be less about the actual acts committed by the Israeli government and its military—in my experience, most of the time they don’t even discuss the details of certain military acts; they keep it broad. They talk about, This is what the Israeli reports suggest, this is what the Israeli military has said; they claim this, they claim that. Unless they’re doing a very specific investigation, it’s kept very abstract, rather vague.

In that context, the notion of intent—it’s very easy to say, Well, this cannot be genocide because of X, Y, and Z. They can easily say things like, Israel has allowed aid from time to time—they wouldn’t do that if it was genocide! Or: They’ve said they do not want to harm civilians! If it were a genocide, they wouldn’t say that. This seems to work with many people. It seems to have the desired effect.

Part of the reason has to do with how genocides are usually imagined in the popular imagination, how they are usually talked about or conceptualized, especially in movies or TV series, which is the most readily available imagery for most people, more than reading the transcript of a speech or seeing historical footage. It’s a bit silly, but even Captain America or Indiana Jones punching Nazis, or the storm troopers in Star Wars, cartoonish characters—for the most part, it tends to be reduced to that, when a lot of people think about World War Two.

If you have that in mind, or if this is the easiest thing that one draws from one’s own imagination when they think about genocide, it’s much harder to think of the Armenian genocide—not because there weren’t cartoonishly evil characters in that story as well, there were. But it’s further back in the past, and there aren’t as many movies or media, or certain symbols of the Ottoman empire, that you can easily associate as readily as you would with a swastika, which is much more present in our imagination. This came with the advent of movies and documentaries—and the Nazis themselves did a lot of that for their own purposes as well.

The reason I’m bringing this up is, a lot of the time the argument that is made in order not to say This is genocide, or to downplay it, or to avoid the topic altogether—someone will bring it up on a panel, and you’ll see the host immediately feel uncomfortable and say something like, Well, the Israelis would dispute these allegations. Part of it is editorial policy, the politics of the BBC or whoever, but part of it is that functionally a lot of people just cannot imagine, or don’t have the tools to understand, genocides can also occur without the cartoonishly evil characters goose-stepping like the Nazis did in Germany.

Of course we have the Bosnian genocide, the Rwandan genocide, that would have these resonances and resemblances to the Holocaust—but you cannot necessarily tick all of the boxes, and yet they are still considered genocide. In your experience, with regards to the Gaza genocide specifically, how has it been talked about? Specifically in connection to this conversation—not just in terms of intent, but with comparisons to the Holocaust and how that can be very sensitive?

AG: In the minds of Israelis, October 7 has no context. It cannot be explained by anything—but it can explain anything afterward. That’s wrong! We have to understand the context. It doesn’t have a context and it’s the right context for understanding what came after? That’s a kind of self-deception.

October 7 had context of course. It was a huge blow to us Israelis. It was a trauma; it was heinous crimes. I always say it was also very personal. I knew people taken hostage, killed, their communities completely destroyed. And there was a sense of self-defense afterwards. I tried to write—and it took me almost half a year to find my words again—but I wanted to say then (and I didn’t publish it anywhere): Look, yes, we were hit very hard, and some eight hundred civilians were killed, and children were killed. That was a crime. But at this particular moment, history tells us and teaches us that in such moments, those are the most dangerous moments in history because you can very quickly become genocidal, because of revenge and self-righteousness and the right of self-defense.

This is what happens in almost all genocides. Most genocides—put the Holocaust aside; I will talk about the Holocaust in a second. If you look at Srebrenica or the atrocities in Bosnia within the many Yugoslavian wars, and also within Kosovo, and then Myanmar, or in Rwanda, or the Armenian genocide you just mentioned—these genocides or mass atrocities or crimes that were done by the stronger party were intrigued by this sense of self-defense.

Self-defense is not exclusionary of crimes, but it is a motive of crime. When you feel you must hit so hard—the stronger party allows itself, because it’s always a matter of life and death, and now you have to annihilate your enemy—then you reach levels of violence that were not foreseen before.

But we have this cartoonish image about the Holocaust that genocide must be enacted between two parties: one complete evil and one complete innocent. In the case of the Holocaust it’s pretty much true, because there was no real conflict between the Jews and the Germans; on the contrary, German Jews in Germany (and this can be extended to the whole of Europe) were very loyal, and wished to assimilate and contribute to this culture. They were patriots and fought in the First World War; there was no real dispute between them.

But if we take the Armenians and the Turks in the Ottoman empire, there was a dispute. Because the Armenian nationalists wanted some kind of self-defense, and since the end of the nineteenth century, there were also violent clashes between them. Most of the time, there is a dispute between those parties. Same for the Hutu and Tutsi in Rwanda. And actually, the Tutsi committed real atrocities and crimes against the Hutu in Rwanda and outside of Rwanda at that time. But this is when most genocides happen: when one is attacked and it has the capacity to annihilate and “solve the problem once and for all.”

In this sense, instead of developing our historical sensitivity to violence, Holocaust memory actually blocked us from understanding history and being sensitive and cautious about political violence, because we say, It’s not the Holocaust so it’s not genocide, it’s okay, we can go along with it. Then you put the intent. You don’t have a full-scale genocide in the sense that every Jew was to be annihilated, with antisemitic intent, by the Nazis? Ah! You don’t have that? That’s okay. We’ve seen this a lot and it’s not such a big deal. We can go on with our lives.

We always said, Look, we teach the Holocaust in order to be more sensitive to violence and human rights and the mechanism of violence so we can understand better and maybe prevent the next one! But in fact what happened: it blocks our understanding. If we compare it always to the Holocaust, and it’s not the Holocaust, we say it’s okay. But if you look at what historians—there’s a growing consensus among many legal scholars and the most prestigious human rights bodies and NGOs that the case of Gaza also adheres to the very strict Genocide Convention.

So maybe it’s not the Holocaust—it has its own features, it’s in a conflict, yes. But it is still a genocide according to what we understand in history as a genocide, and what we understand in legal studies as a genocide. This is my understanding. We can talk afterwards about historians who understood this problematic, someone like Dirk Moses, and suggested to drop the term “genocide” because of what you said: it distorts our understanding and we have to talk about some other term like “permanent security” in order to focus on when a state kills so many civilians, which is the crime. This is what we want to understand, and this is what we want to prevent.

EA: The Assad regime has been accused by many actors of committing genocide, but the term that was used in a 2016 report by the UN is “extermination as a crime against humanity.” This is the actual sentence: “These actions, in the pursuance of a state policy, amount to extermination as a crime against humanity.” That’s in the report. When it came down to it, one of the consequences of that report (this was part of a broader discourse in 2016; at the end of that year was the fall of eastern Aleppo, which was one of the bloodiest battles) is that it felt like as long as some action of a state cannot be described as genocide with a capital G, it’s not as severe, as serious—it’s not the ultimate crime.

So for me, as early as a decade or so ago, I started questioning why there is such an importance on attributing a crime against humanity (which is horrible enough) within a hierarchy of what is considered worse. I’m not saying there aren’t hierarchies of crimes—there are. But in terms of the label—if a crime against humanity, this “extermination,” as the UN called it, by the Assad regime up until its fall in December of 2024, that has a death toll reasonably in the hundreds of thousands, some reports put it in the higher hundreds of thousands (we’ll probably never have a final death toll), cannot be described as genocide with a capital G but can still be described as a “crime against humanity,” at what point is the term “genocide,” as the only thing that matters, very problematic?

I personally see a lot of reason to argue, as you do as well, that the actions of the Israeli military and state in Gaza is in fact a genocide. But there’s still a part of me that wonders: what if it wasn’t, but is “just” a crime against humanity, an extermination á la Assad? Would that be less serious in the international discourse and according to the international community? It leads to a very uncomfortable conclusion.

It’s these two things at the same time: on the one hand, the burden of proof to determine in legal terms whether something has “intent” is very high, quasi impossible in many cases, which already lets off the hook actors like the Israeli government. And even if there weren’t that entire conversation in the first place, like in the case of the Assad regime, it doubly lets it off the hook: It’s not even that, and therefore not even worth the attention it would get if we called it a genocide.

This is more philosophical I guess. But as a historian, how do you think about that?

AG: We can unpack this problem. On the one hand, this is something that was discussed before. There’s a kind of competition that in order to break into public opinion, into international diplomacy, into international courts, you have to elevate, in a way, the crime that was committed against you and compare it to the Holocaust and say it’s a genocide. While at the same time, many more killed—like in the Vietnam war, it is estimated that the United States killed two million civilians in southeast Asia; is that less severe, less punishable, less of a crime, if it could not adhere to the Convention in its legal definition of genocide?

This is a real problem. Because of that, one of the main historians in the field, Dirk Moses, recently wrote a book The Problems of Genocide, which means not only that genocide is a problem, of course—annihilating groups and killing so many people and so on—but the problem is of the very concept that, as you said, somehow makes hierarchy between crimes according to whether they fit some kind of definition that was decided upon in 1948 by some international political powers. Undoubtedly that’s a big problem.

I’m not familiar enough with the Syrian case, unfortunately, but since the amount of killing and annihilation, and also certain groups were targeted—I don’t want to be decisive, but it could certainly fall within this understanding of genocide, particularly if you think of genocide as a crime or an event or a process of annihilating groups. Not necessarily the entire group, but by annihilating some of it, destroying it. Therefore, perhaps the Syrian case is also relevant. I should say that whether it was a genocide or not a genocide, there was an exhibition for a pretty long time at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum on Syria because, whether it is or not a genocide, they understood the enormity of the crime; it’s the same family of crimes.

How do we cope with this “competition” for events to be considered a genocide because then they are the “crime of crimes?” That’s a question that we cannot completely solve. I don’t think we have to give up this term. In one of the most famous books in the field, by Samantha Power, a problem for her is she called it the “crime of crimes,” and some of the international legal tribunals discussed it also as the “crime of crimes”—like it’s a very special, very severe crime. But not all agree with that. It’s just a crime—a certain kind of crime—and it’s not worse than a crime against humanity on a big scale, and we should not hierarchize these crimes.

But we should not drop this term altogether, despite all the difficulties. We cannot solve all problems. It’s always a tradeoff, what you gain and what you lose when you use a term. I think it does focus us not only to crimes but to certain political processes of annihilating a group rather than many individuals. This is for me the essence, or the core. This was also the core for Raphael Lemkin, who I mentioned at the beginning of our talk. A very simple and common-sense way: genocide is an attempt, sometimes successful, to annihilate a group, not only many individuals.

And maybe it’s more severe, maybe it’s not, maybe it’s a crime of crimes, maybe it’s not, I don’t care about this. But it’s a special kind of dealing with your enemy in a conflict when you actually want to annihilate it—whether to kill all its members or to annihilate it as a group. Sometimes crimes against humanity on a huge scale may not be genocide, but they were even worse than genocide! But still, “genocide” enables us to focus on this kind of political violence that does not just want to beat the enemy or act in self-defense, but to annihilate the group completely.

I think it’s very important to keep this term, because it signifies this kind of radical violence, which is very common in modern times and particularly in certain political and historical contexts. There’s no good answer. In our world there are never clear-cut answers. When you use a term, you always have to ask what you win and what you lose. Of course you get into some conceptual and moral problems. But still I would keep it.

EA: I agree. It’s not so much that I think the term itself is not useful; it’s more the de facto hierarchy that is created when a crime can be described as everything-but-that.

Interestingly enough, this leads us pretty well to the next point. In the paper, there’s a warning that you make. I’ll quote parts of what you said: “At the heart of this forum lies the question of whether the field of Holocaust and Genocide Studies is currently in crisis, in light of the events in Gaza. If the question of intent, the dominance of which is rooted in legal discourse, takes over Holocaust and Genocide Studies, then it will push us back decades. And, indeed, in the current Israeli-Palestinian context, the historical seems to be collapsing into the legal.”

We’ve gotten into this already, but what I’m curious about is: this was published in October 2024. Is it fair to say that, as far as Holocaust and genocide studies as a field is concerned, things have gotten worse?

Part II

With this huge abyss between Jewish Israelis and Palestinians, that rivers of blood are streaming inside, how can we talk? Many are trying to find some kind of framework to talk about traumas and atrocities and genocides—the ongoing Nakba on the one hand, and the Holocaust and its reverberation in Israeli society on the other—somehow together.

AG: Very difficult to say, because the genocide is still going on. In many ways it becomes worse: it’s total starvation that Israel imposes on Gaza. I can’t describe the horrific scenes, the viciousness and sadism that is expressed in this. So we don’t know. We are still in the event, and academic fields develop.

Even now, when everything is online, it doesn’t catch the pace of the events. This Gaza genocide, which started with the atrocities of October 7 (I don’t compare; we should not put them on the same level, but it was still a foundational event for Israelis)—but certainly the genocide, the annihilation—you said people don’t read or go into details, and that’s too bad because there are so many details, and so many reports, and good media investigations. I really recommend some of my friends in the Hebrew University; one of them is Lee Mordechai, who has a very impressive synthesis of all the reports.

Yes, there are a lot of details. But we are still in it, and what I’m trying to say is it’s something that is called an epoch-making event. It has already changed our world. We don’t know yet how. Certainly, as a Jewish Israeli I say it is going to change Jewish history and it will haunt Jewish history for decades and centuries, maybe, to come.

So we don’t really know exactly how it will impact this field. I really recommend reading some of the essays in this forum that reflect on where there is a kind of chasm within the field—I hope it will now integrate the Israeli-Palestinian case into this field “naturally” now. But we don’t really know, so I can’t really answer your question, it’s too soon. Academic fields develop much slower, and post-facto. We still don’t have distance to talk about it and understand it. At least I can’t say anything intelligent on this.

EA: That makes sense. It’s fair to say that there is the crisis as you describe it, and we’re still in it.

You mention in the paper this open letter by historians in the New York Review of Books from December 2023 comparing Hamas’s massacre of October 7 to the Holocaust, and you pointed out that some of these scholars who have signed that open letter have previously argued “that the Holocaust is unique and must not be compared to any other event.”

The way I’ve interpreted such a letter—we’ve seen a few of them along those lines; if not open letters then interventions in various platforms—is that many people have been willing to compromise on a lot of what they previously believed in, to defend or downplay Israel’s actions in Gaza. And the irony is that you are in the field of comparative genocide studies, and you’ve always argued that comparing the Holocaust to other genocides is not the same as relativizing and therefore downplaying the severity of the Holocaust—and yet it was those who did argue that it’s unique and cannot be compared to anything else who have, since October 2023, seemingly been willing to make an exception for the first time, to say that Israel is effectively fighting the new Nazis, or something along those lines.

I don’t even have a question here. I’m just curious about your reflections on that.

AG: We can analyze it or unpack it on two different levels. On the academic level, I think it’s a good question; the events of October 7 and the Gaza genocide will bring the issue of analogies. Because we can’t do without them, but analogies are always weak.

In the philosophy of rhetoric, when they analyze analogy—we always do analogy, we can’t think outside of analogies, because language is, in a way, analogical. Analogy, on the one hand, is an important tool, but it’s weak, because two events—whatever you analogize or compare—you always compare different things and you say the similarities are enough to draw analogy from one to the other, but the opponent would say, No! Even if I could recognize some similarity, the differences are much more important, and therefore you cannot make the analogy.

There’s a moral problematic in analogizing, because you somehow dilute the uniqueness of each event—and with such extreme suffering, its particular totality. When I’m talking about uniqueness of the event, I’m not talking about the uniqueness of the Holocaust, I’m talking about the uniqueness of each event and the totality of each event, particularly of mass violence. The suffering of each group and every individual is something that should not be reduced to analogy.

We should look at Gaza and see what’s happening in Gaza, not trying to say whether there’s an analogy or not. We just have to look at the atrocities of Gaza and acknowledge. The whole issue of analogy is coming now to the fore, and what is a valid analogy and what is not, and there is no balance. You don’t have to negate one analogy and then negate all analogy. Some analogies are good and some analogies are bad, and we have to debate them and discuss them in the public sphere and in the academic sphere and between these spheres.

This is on one level. On the other level (and I will get back to this letter you mentioned), in public and colloquial discourse, we always make analogies in our daily life, in our experiences. And many Israelis, really authentically, because the Holocaust is so present in our consciousness, in the first instance of this traumatic blow, that was the historical metaphor ready for use and we used it. But then, more than a year and half later, we have to make distinctions and understand that no, Hamas are not the Nazis, we can’t compare them whatsoever, because they are not killing us because we are Jews, they are killing us because we are occupiers.

There is a real political war between us on this land, and within the settler-colonial context (not the only context, but one of the contexts). So yes, of course after the apartheid, the siege, the ongoing Nakba, and now the ongoing genocide, what do you want? They fight. And sometimes they fight in a dirty way and commit crimes, even crimes against humanity! But this doesn’t make them the Nazis, and they are also not this superpower that Nazi Germany was. No, it’s one of the poorest and most crowded and small places on planet Earth.

It’s a wrong analogy, it’s a foolish analogy, it’s a propaganda analogy. That doesn’t mean that any analogy which is more precise shouldn’t be used; yes, it should be used, because this is how we think. When we think of genocide, we think of a family of crimes, or a family of events or processes or political happenings that have something in common—that means you can make some analogy between them. That’s the nature of this concept.

They said they are antisemitic. Certainly the 1988 charter of Hamas is antisemitic in some of its paragraphs, but then came the 2017 document, which is allegedly not. And yes, you can still hear antisemitic utterances. But not every group that uses antisemitic rhetoric are Nazis! And certainly it completely distorts things to put the emphasis on that instead of the real fight, and the oppression, and the apartheid that Israel commits.

Some analogies are complete distortion, but some analogies are very good. For example, with all the differences, in my article in April 2024 that was published in Hebrew and then translated to other languages including English, I say yes it is a genocide, and I explain why it is a genocide on the level of self-defense, that this is one of the major causes of genocide, and how we can make analogies to other cases within this same group under the term genocide.

But I think those scholars are really dishonest. Because as you said, they always claimed that the Holocaust is unique, but then when it comes to the enemies of Israel, suddenly you can make analogies. They were so cautious—if, God forbid, you compare or even hint at some kind of connection, even a moral connection and not a historical connection, between the Holocaust and what is happening in Gaza, then you are a Holocaust denier, an antisemite!

I’ll give you an example very briefly. In March 2022, [then US secretary of state Anthony] Blinken came to the Holocaust Museum in Washington—there specifically (the Museum hosted him)—in order to declare, I came here particularly to declare that we acknowledge what is happening in Myanmar is a genocide. So this association—maybe analogy, maybe association—was completely legitimate, and it somehow bestowed some kind of moral authority on what he said, because he said it in the Holocaust Museum. But if you dare say, I want to come to Yad Vashem and declare we acknowledge the Gaza genocide—my God. You can’t. This is beyond our imagination, something like that.

Maybe it might happen in five, ten years’ time, at least partially and in certain places, that the Gaza genocide will really integrate into this field of Holocaust and genocide studies.

EA: You co-edited the book The Holocaust and the Nakba: A New Gramma of Trauma and History with Bashir Bashir, notably also forwarded by the late Lebanese intellectual Elias Khoury. In the book there is a passage from his novel, Bab al-Shams (Gate of the Sun).

There’s two questions to this. In that story, the narrator warns: “We [the Palestinians] mustn’t see ourselves only in their mirror, for they [the Zionists] are prisoners of one story, as though the story had abbreviated and ossified them. Please, we mustn’t become just one story. Believe me, this is the only way if we’re not to become ossified and die.”

I’ve done a few episodes on the Palestinian story on this podcast, including one with Dana El Kurd, my friend and colleague, called “Remembering the Nakba, Imagining the Future,” so we won’t get into that specific bit as much now. But I am wondering how you would assess the Israeli story in terms of “ossification?” We’ve clearly seen a lot of examples of Israelis being very willing, seemingly, to dehumanize Palestinians and become what James Baldwin called “moral monsters.” I saw a video of IDF soldiers blowing up a house in Gaza, with blue smoke coming out of the fumes of that explosion—because it was a gender reveal party. They were laughing and all of that stuff.

There are so many examples of that, which truly shock people watching them—understandably so. As a historian who looks at these things, you’ve intervened in the public domain a number of times. But how would you assess Israeli politics today, based on your own readings of history?

AG: All of what you mention is true, and when you look at those things—Al Jazeera made a documentary out of them—we have to not only see the atrocities in Gaza, but first of all the suffering of the victims. Unbearable scenes come every day from Gaza in reports. But then we also have the Israeli soldiers’ side, which is not only shock, but also shame: How do we become those monsters?

For me as an Israeli, I don’t dissociate myself from this society. I am part of this society. And there’s nothing to say. I knew—this process of denial and dehumanization started long ago. But it escalated, with such monstrous peaks, in this war and genocide. For example, there was recently a documentary released on Shireen Abu Akleh. If you remember her funeral, the coffin almost fell because they were so aggressive. What kind of dehumanization—and now it’s a light thing compared to what we see and what you just mentioned.

I don’t know how to explain it yet, beyond the obvious explanation: that in order to kill so many people, you have to dehumanize them. To annihilate the whole place, to commit such a genocide—how can you bomb a hospital if you think human beings are there? So you have to either justify retroactively or explain and justify in advance. And the bigger the crimes are, and the more continuous, the more you need to dehumanize, because otherwise how can you live with this?

I don’t read Arabic well enough—I read most of Elias Khoury’s books and novels either in English or in Hebrew. Many of the recent ones were translated to Hebrew by a beautiful binational project translating Arab literature to Hebrew, groups of Palestinians and Israelis working together under the great intellectual Yehouda Shenhav-Shahrabani, who was a very good friend of Elias (I also had the chance to meet him twice). If you read Elias Khoury, this ossification—you stop the movement of life, the movement of narration, the movement of narrative changing.

You ossify; it’s like an internal death. This is something that comes up again and again; it’s kind of a Lacanian metonym, that you move from one signifier to another in order to pursue your object of desire and shape your identity. He warned against that, and unfortunately, Israel is really ossified, in such a dehumanizing way; it’s dichotomizing completely: We are the sons of light and they are the sons of death! They like death, we like life! All this propaganda; in the end they have ossified and simplified our collective narrative in the most brutal way.

But I should say that I’ve sensed changed now in Jewish Israeli society. Things start to change because of the hostages, but not only because of the hostages. We understand that something went wrong, and we start reflecting internally on what we actually committed in Israel. And of course the forces of denial are very strong. But I hope through this major trauma and atrocities and crimes and genocide, maybe it will break in a few years’ time.

I’m not talking about the Palestinians—I don’t know how the Palestinians do it. I’m not a Palestinian; I have many Palestinian friends and colleagues but I can’t talk for them. I can talk for Israelis: maybe something in the long run will change and pull us out of this dehumanizing ossification. Because it also reduces us to such poor human beings. I hope that this major crisis that we are facing and experiencing might change course, opening (though in such a violent and genocidal way) new ways to tell our stories in a more humane, more egalitarian way.

I don’t say that it will happen, but I see pockets where these discussions take place. It’s not a source of optimism, not at all. But you see change. At least we are not completely ossified. Those forces are still very weak compared to the very strong forces of evil in our society, of sadism, of hyper-nationalism and fascism, and of death, of killing, of revenge, of dehumanization. Those forces are still much stronger, but you can see pockets of exactly what Elias Khoury was describing so eloquently in his novels.

Maybe, maybe they will expand. I see them expanding. They are still in the minority, but they are expanding; more people come to reflect and rethink the ossified narrative of identity.

EA: Thanks for that. It’s a perfect segue to an open-ended last question; we’ll see where it leads us, maybe to end on a hopeful note—I do make the distinction between optimism and hope, in the sense that hope is more of a “discipline,” to quote [Mariame Kaba].

This book you co-edited with Bashir Bashir, The Holocaust and the Nakba—even before we started recording today you mentioned how at the time it was received in a very specific way, but since then its relevance has grown more and more important.

Can you talk to us a bit about the book? As far as I’m concerned, it’s pretty unique. It should be less unique; there should be more and more works along these lines. I do see pockets of that here and there, but certainly for its time, I don’t know many that are like that.

AG: Gladly. First I would say my work and very close friendship that developed with Bashir Bashir, who is a Palestinian political theorist, has so enriched me over the years. We worked for more than a decade on this project; we wrote articles and edited some books, and had many talks about it, and it’s still an ongoing project. On a personal level, it’s a way to say, Okay, I understand your ossified, cruel narrative; I want to live a little bit different. We found a way to keep not only our friendship but our intellectual work ongoing, even in this crisis, and I’m grateful and thankful and appreciative of Bashir, and learn a lot from him.

As you said, when we came out with the book in Hebrew—a different book; we co-edited two books, one in Hebrew and then in English, with very similar names. When it came out in Hebrew in 2015 or 2016, it made a huge splash, but we got such pushback. Very critical: How can you put them together?! I understand this reaction, because those are not the same events—and for both sides. It’s very difficult to put them together, for both sides.

Jews usually think it’s only their problem—How can you compare or put together and analyze the Holocaust and the Nakba? The Holocaust was the biggest crime in modern history and the Nakba was an outcome of the war [this is reductive, of course].

Then it came out in English in 2018, and also there was a lot of pushback, by many. And as I said to Bashir—at that time, we were the problem. How dare you? It was also How dare you? from the Palestinians. Why do we have to care about the Holocaust? We have enough of our own problems and we have to care about the Holocaust?

Today we’re kind of a solution, in the sense that with this huge abyss between Jewish Israelis and Palestinians, that rivers of blood are streaming inside, how can we talk? Many are trying to find some kind of framework to talk about traumas and atrocities and genocides—the ongoing Nakba on the one hand, and the Holocaust and its reverberation in the Israeli society and its ongoing traumas—somehow together. And not only Israelis, but Jews and non-Jews and Palestinians and Arabs and Muslims in the diaspora who are looking for some kind of historical and theoretical framework to talk about them together, to start some kind of conversation to bridge those abysses.

We said, Of course there are differences between the events. Even now we say it. The genocide in Gaza and the Holocaust are not the same; there’s no Treblinka, and there’s no Auschwitz, there’s no gas chambers, there’s no complete annihilation in terms of killing each and every Palestinian. On the other hand, there are asymmetries in the power relations, and the Palestinians have really no responsibility whatsoever for the Holocaust, while the Israelis have full responsibility, or the major part in bearing responsibility for the Nakba, the ongoing Nakba, and certainly the genocide now in Gaza.

There are a lot of asymmetries; nonetheless we have to put them together, because they are so interconnected. They are interconnected in so many ways, I don’t know how we can talk about them separately. They are connected historically; it’s one historical continuum. They are connected in the minds of people. Both are the foundational traumatic events of both nations, of the Palestinians and the Israelis (and Jews at large), and maybe beyond that.

They are so interconnected, and our histories are interconnected, and it’s not right to talk about them separately because they are so interconnected. And we talk about “empathic unsettlement,” a term we borrowed from Dominick LaCapra, who was my teacher (who is still my teacher, I would say). If we bring them together—which is difficult to say in our time, but it’s still essential—it takes us each out of his own narrative capsule; he has to reach out and understand others and not be immersed completely in his own narrative. It somehow destabilizes in a good way—it has a positive destructive element that opens the discourse of both sides to be changed.

We use Khoury’s literature quite a lot; this is exactly what Khoury meant. Don’t ossify on your own narrative. Find mechanisms to open it to other possibilities, to other options, because otherwise you will be caught in it until a tragic end. This has a kind of unsettlement, but in an empathic way, putting them together—and explaining how, historically, culturally, and theoretically, and psychologically.

But it has a second phase, which is what Bashir called “egalitarian binationalism.” It’s not only a matter of history or culture or psychology or group psychology; it’s about politics. And the outcome is what he calls egalitarian binationalism, which means we are so interconnected that we have to think about both, we are a binational unit: two nations that are combined, intertwined in many ways, now also geographically, and we have to find an egalitarian solution to this.

This can take many shapes and forms—one state, two states (not the Oslo two-state vision, but co-federation). There are all kinds of political settings we can think of. But the principles are that because we are intertwined, and because there should be no supremacy whatsoever, no Jewish supremacy whatsoever, each group has to have its own completeness within those frameworks, which are against a complete separation but also a complete conflation of the two parties. Both have to have full collective, individual, and civil rights—not as it is now, that one half of the population between the river and the sea has full rights and one doesn’t have rights at all, or only partial rights.

The outcome is a political agenda of what he calls egalitarian binationalism, that acknowledges two national groups that cannot be completely separated. Even now, we have to think about how we can live together, not separately—this vicious and brutal symbol of the wall of separation should be taken down—and in a way that we do not conflate into one another, but we are not completely disconnected, and we all have complete equal rights on all levels. This is the political outcome.

Today, it’s almost science fiction to think along those lines. Sometimes I even feel it is obscene, when the rivers of blood are flowing all over. But still, it can provide, even in a dialectical way of negating it, some kind of a discursive framework to imagine and to create small groups that discuss a completely different way of living together. Maybe ten, twenty years down the road, we will be more hopeful. Right now, as you said, I’m not an optimist, I don’t have hope right now, I can’t see hope. But I see obligation to continue this discourse even though it’s a kind of sumud to our humanity, to imagine some way of re-humanizing both sides.

But I can’t say more than that. If we become commercial and materialistic: the book is reprinted and reprinted because people are looking for something like this framework. Good people, people who do want to imagine and think different, politically.

EA: That was my experience as well. Almost ten years ago I did my master’s at the University of London, at SOAS, and the topic was the politics of language. As part of that, I looked at how Hebrew and Yiddish were used and talked about politically, especially when it comes to Zionism. There were the Bundists, of course, who were Yiddishists, and a lot of Zionists who were Hebraists—it was more complicated, but that was part of what one person called the “kulturkampf” in Yiddish.

One thing that led me down that path—as a Lebanese-Palestinian, doing that sort of research is not exactly encouraged, and was the topic of quite a few uncomfortable conversations at family lunches—is James Baldwin. He is someone who, when interviewed during the civil rights movement, a lot of times was accused of doing too much to talk to white people or try and convince white people. The way he framed it was that he did not want their story of him to dominate his life.

If someone like him, who was the grandson of an actual enslaved person, who can trace his lineage centuries into the past to conditions that are so horrific that most of us who are not in Gaza cannot even fathom circumstances as horrible as chattel slavery in the US—if someone like him, with that legacy, was still able, through a lot of struggle, to not even just see the humanity in the oppressor, but recognize if he doesn’t do that he is the one who is at risk of being “ossified,” to use Elias Khoury’s term…

AG: Some of the major works in post-colonial theory talk precisely about that. Despite the abyss between the colonized and the colonizer, they are so interconnected. Think of Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks. Think of Homi Bhabha on mimicry. Think of many others! Both sides are mirroring each other in a distorted way, and we influence each other, and we internalize and externalize each other.

We have to acknowledge that, and work with it for the good, not for the bad.

EA: That was really the end of my thought anyway. There has to be that work, regardless of the conditions. I do understand and I of course empathize with those who say “mish wa’ta,” (now is not the time)—I get that. It’s just that functionally speaking, there is very rarely any time that could be said to be the right time. And if we’re talking about seventy-plus, almost eighty years since the Nakba, my grandfather was born and raised in Haifa and exiled, and he passed away a few years ago—at what point will there be time?

AG: Undoubtedly. As a descendant of a Nakba refugee, I can’t tell you anything. I can tell you with humility this is how I suggest to move forward. If someone like you accepts it, I am honored and happy. And if not, I can truly understand it. If someone in Gaza says it’s obscene now—Look, just stop the genocide—I can understand that of course as well.

Nonetheless, I feel we should not abandon language altogether. Silence is an even worse option.

EA: For me it’s whether I allow “them” (the Israeli state, not the people) to dominate my story, or what they determine should be my reaction to something they are doing. In Gaza there is more than enough reason to hyperfocus on just stopping the genocide, this is completely understandable. But in my personal capacity, in terms of stopping something like that, I can do my best, and I platform people, I talk to people, I share their stories—ultimately that’s the best I can do. There is an additional responsibility because I do have the resources, mentally speaking especially, because I’m not in such a situation.

And you mention yourself: there is a history to that. I’m not reinventing the wheel here. Elias Khoury of course talked about this himself; he was born in ’48, the year of the Nakba, and he grew up with that. But when we think of the big names of Palestinian literature, or intellectual movements, whether it’s [Edward] Said, or Mahmoud Darwish, or even [Ghassan] Kanafani, they understood this to various extents, that there has to be some kind of reckoning. Not because it’s “the right thing to do,” but because there doesn’t seem to be any other options anyway. The discomfort that this causes can lead to different horizons than the ones we’re currently limited by.

With such a platform as this one, a very privileged one, it gives us tools to explore these things. That’s why I wanted to have this conversation. I want to give you the final words, if you have anything to share.

AG: I just second you: all our energies should be to stop the genocide. That’s number one, whatever we can do—because this is part of our era, that we are powerless against those dark forces that erupted. But if we can also create some new words—the subtitle of The Holocaust and the Nakba is A New Grammar of Trauma and History—that may give some new spaces for discussion. To counter the rhetoric of evil, this is also an obligation we should consider seriously.

EA: On that note, Amos Goldberg, thank you a lot for being on The Fire These Times.

AG: Thank you very much for having me, Elia.

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