What lies at the core of the unconditional support Germany extends to Israel, including in the last sixteen months of Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza? This question remains relevant even if the current cease-fire will bring an end to the genocide: addressing it sheds light on the decades-long process of Israeli settler colonialism that led to the genocide, an ongoing Nakba that continues to unfold regardless of the cease-fire. Indeed, Israel’s attack on Palestinians has not ended, and in the occupied West Bank it has actually escalated since the cease-fire in Gaza began, with deadly attacks by Israeli settlers and the Israeli army.

A close partnership between Israeli and German Holocaust scholars offers some troubling answers to this question. In an online event organized by the Holocaust Studies Program at the Israeli Western Galilee College (WGC) on December 19, 2024, three speakers — Alvin Rosenfeld, a professor of English and Jewish Studies at Indiana University; Verena Buser, a German historian who teaches online at the WGC; and Lars Rensmann, a professor of political science at the University of Passau in Germany — attacked Holocaust and genocide studies scholars who have written and talked about Israel’s genocide in Gaza, including me.

Though the event was organized in honor of Yehuda Bauer, a founding figure of Holocaust studies who passed away on October 18, 2024, at the age of ninety-eight, the speakers barely mentioned Bauer or his work. Nor did they evaluate the mountain of evidence for the unfolding genocide in Gaza since October 7, 2023. Instead, they opted for outright genocide denial.

Buser, for instance, claimed that scholars who characterize Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocide ignore “extensive international criticism” of the validity of Palestinian casualty figures that, she added, “do not distinguish between combatants and civilians.” The truth is that there is broad international consensus that Israel has killed more than 46,000 Palestinians. The actual figures, moreover, are likely far higher: a recent article in the Lancet argues that Israel had killed over 64,000 Palestinians by the end of June 2024, the majority of them noncombatants, including thousands of children. According to Save the Children, “the occupied Palestinian territory is now ranked as the deadliest place in the world for children: about 30% of the 11,300 identified children killed in Gaza [between October 2023 and August 2024] were younger than five.” Israel had killed, in addition, nearly three thousand Palestinian children in Gaza who remained unidentified by the end of August 2024.

Buser’s genocide denial extended beyond the typical minimization of the number of victims, which has characterized Holocaust denial as well; she also referred to “reports that show that there is either no hunger [in Gaza] or that it is caused by the logistical challenges of the war.” She pointed to no specific report and gave no specific example of logistical challenges. This is not surprising, for there is also broad international consensus on Israel’s well-documented starvation policies, which Israeli military leaders have discussed openly.

Most of the scholars in the sights of the WGC event panelists are Jews, including me, targeted for the way we understand and express our criticism of Israeli mass atrocities through the prism of our Jewish identities. Apparently, we are the wrong kind of Jews. But accusing us of antisemitism for the way we identify as Jews reproduces the antisemitic view that denies plural Jewish identities to cast all Jews as one and the same, “the Jews.” As such, the attacks against Jewish scholars are part of the broader racist worldview of the speakers at the WGC event, aimed primarily at denigrating Palestinians.

Most outrageously, the respondent Israeli historian Dan Michman, who serves as head of the International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem, called in none other than Adolf Hitler to lend weight to the speakers’ attacks:

Nobody finds a problem with the term Palestinian. . . . But if you go back a century, to Mein Kampf, for instance . . . Hitler says at a certain point that the Zionists want to establish a Palestinian state in order to have a basis for their criminal activities. Now a Palestinian state a century ago was a Jewish state. And the fact is that during the [British] Mandate period in Palestine, the Jewish inhabitants were called Palestinian Jews, the Arabs were Palestinian Arabs. . . . In 1948, Israel was established, and the Palestinian Jews became Israelis, so the term [Palestinian] was left open, and only since the 1950s [do] we start to hear about Palestinians.

It seems that Michman aimed to echo Rensmann, who claimed in his talk at the beginning of the event that “the Nazis were openly, aggressively, since their very roots, since Hitler in 1920 . . . openly anti-Zionist and attacked the potential Zionist state.” The logic at work here is that if Hitler was an anti-Zionist, anti-Zionism can only be antisemitism — an assertion that the speakers made again and again. In doing so, they ignore the rich history of anti-Zionist Jews and anti-Zionist Jewish organizations and political parties, as well as the many anti-Zionist Jews and Jewish organizations around the world today. They offer instead a bizarre situation where a German professor claims to determine for Jews the legitimacy or illegitimacy of their Jewish identities, bolstered by an Israeli Holocaust scholar who ends up reproducing the logic of Hitler’s racism.

Michman and Rensmann, furthermore, aim their criticism not at the neo-Nazis and related groups again on the rise in Germany and elsewhere but at anti-Zionist Jews. Michman and Rensmann have pushed themselves into this paradoxical corner for a reason. They cannot abide anti-Zionist Jews, including anti-Zionist Jewish scholars of the Holocaust and genocide who dare to argue that Israel’s attack on Gaza since October 2023 fits the crime of genocide in international law.

Those Jewish scholars are not alone, however. William Schabas, one of the most important international law experts on genocide who comes from a family of Holocaust survivors, explained in an interview at the end of November 2024 that

in Gaza . . . the infrastructure has been massively destroyed, people have been unable to escape — and then there were the awful statements made by [former Israeli defense minister] Yoav Gallant. . . . Statements came from ministers, government spokespersons, and military leaders, all of whom have influence over the troops. They are more frequent and more serious than in any other case before [the International Court of Justice] that I am aware of. . . . Together with the hunger and the lack of access to water and hygiene, the systematic destruction of homes, schools, and hospitals, an image emerges that could be interpreted as being the result of genocidal intent.

For Rensmann, however, the “genocide claim [against Israel] is part and parcel of the history of twentieth- and now twenty-first-century antisemitism.”

Buser built on Rensmann to wave away the Holocaust and genocide studies scholars, mostly Jews, whose work draws on the vast and growing body of sources on Israel’s genocide in Gaza. These include material from the charge of genocide that South Africa brought against Israel at the International Court of Justice; the many maps, testimonies of Palestinians, aerial photos, and other sources in the reports by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Forensic Architecture, and UN special rapporteur Francesca Albanese on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967; and the thousands of videos proudly uploaded to social media by Israeli soldiers and officers in which they documented their own violence and crimes.

Denying this much-documented reality, Buser posits that the Holocaust and genocide studies scholars she aims to discredit use the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism (JDA), which “acquits anti-Zionism and Nazi comparisons of accusations of antisemitism.” The JDA, she continued, therefore allows those scholars to make anti-Zionist statements or suggest historical comparisons that she sees as antisemitic, including, in her words, that “the state of Israel is a white, colonizing, apartheid state that is committing genocide in Gaza.”

The JDA indeed determines that “criticizing or opposing Zionism as a form of nationalism” is not antisemitic,” for “in general, the same norms of debate that apply to other states and to other conflicts over national self-determination apply in the case of Israel and Palestine.” In other words, if it is legitimate to criticize any political ideology or policy of a state — a protected constitutional right in the United States — it is also legitimate in the case of Zionism and Israel.

The JDA therefore rightly concludes that “even if contentious, it is not antisemitic, in and of itself, to compare Israel with other historical cases, including settler-colonialism or apartheid.” Buser, however, like her fellow panelists in the WGC event, equates anti-Zionism with antisemitism, rendering in her eyes the scholars she targets antisemites. Her slides list the eleven most prominent of them in her view, eight of them Jews, including me.