The German government’s response to the war and genocide in Gaza is not entirely surprising. It aligns with the memory policies Germany has pursued for many years.

In this context, the Gaza crisis serves as a revealing test, highlighting a troubling shift in how Holocaust memory is approached in Germany that undermines the exemplary work Germany has done over several decades in addressing and coming to terms with its past. I say this not as a detached observer, but as an Italian — someone from a country that has failed to fully recognize or take responsibility for its fascist and colonial past. As an Italian, I have often looked to Germany — not necessarily as a perfect model, but as a country that managed to engage with and confront its own history in a way my own country has not.

In the mid-1980s, Germany undertook a difficult and painful process of rethinking its past. For at least two generations, the memory of Nazi crimes became a cornerstone of German historical consciousness, and I saw this as an enormous step forward. Germany succeeded in redefining its concept of citizenship, transitioning from an identity grounded in purely ethnic roots to a political community that included all citizens, regardless of their ethnic origins or beliefs. This remarkable achievement was made possible largely, if not primarily, through the work of Holocaust memory.

However, over time, Holocaust memory in Germany progressively transformed into a policy of unconditional support for Israel. What was once an example of historical reckoning has become a framework that, in my view, contributes to the erasure of critical perspectives and enables actions that contradict the very principles of justice and accountability that this memory was meant to uphold. The deplorable outcome of this process is that today international law can be transgressed or ignored to support Israel unconditionally.

In many ways, these premises were already present in the creation of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1949. I believe this shift occurred progressively, as the seeds for such a change were embedded in Holocaust memory from the outset. Some of the inherent contradictions in this development can be traced back to moments like Jürgen Habermas’s critique of Ernst Nolte, where he argued that Germany’s integration into the West was achieved through the memory of Auschwitz. This alignment of Holocaust memory with Western values laid the foundation for Germany’s unwavering support for Israel.

These differences weren’t very apparent in the 1950s, during the discussions about the reparation laws to compensate the Jewish victims of the Nazi regime, but the underlying premises were already present. At the moment of the historical turning point, the confrontation was between one Germany that sought to recognize the Holocaust and the Nazi crimes as a cornerstone of German historical consciousness, and another Germany that clearly favored an apologetic approach to the Nazi past. In that context, it was clear that Habermas must be supported, particularly against Nolte and German revisionism.

For many years, these dangers seemed relatively contained, appearing marginal compared to the significant strides Germany had made in advancing democratic rights. Now, however, we find ourselves in a paradoxical situation. Germany, which has evolved into a multiethnic, multicultural, and multireligious nation, demands unconditional support for Israel from all its citizens, including those with postcolonial and Palestinian origins. This development could be seen as a strikingly ironic consequence of the earlier alignment of Holocaust memory with Western identity.

I believe that postwar Germany, like many other European countries, developed a memory of the Holocaust and Nazi crimes that often neglected or marginalized the necessary work of addressing colonial history. The focus on the Holocaust, while important, has overshadowed or minimized the memory of colonialism, creating a tension that became more apparent after October 7.

This “aporetic” memory politics is the premise for ignoring the colonial dimension of Israel’s occupation of Gaza and the West Bank. In the German and Western European discourse, Netanyahu is depicted as the representative of the Jews as victims. Therefore, Palestinians are not a dispossessed people, but a new embodiment of antisemitism. This is the argument behind the German decision (followed by other Western leaders) not to implement the ICC arrest warrant.

I’m not a legal expert, but what I can say is that, after the United States, which provides the primary financial and military support to Israel, Germany is the second most important military supporter of Israel. Without US support, Israel wouldn’t have been able to carry out the destruction in Gaza and the killing of tens of thousands of Palestinians. But after the United States, Germany plays a crucial role in providing military support to Israel.

This means that Germany is today complicit in the genocide in Gaza, just like France, Italy, and the UK. However, Germany’s involvement is particularly significant, both in terms of its role and its symbolic weight. In the eyes of most of the world population, this means the Holocaust memory has become a political tool of colonial policies: while the Jewish victims of Nazism must be commemorated, Palestinian lives can be erased.

First of all, I think the international image of Israel has been irreversibly changed. For public opinion in the so-called Global South, Israel has long symbolized oppression, colonialism, and now genocide. However, that image has shifted in the West as well. There is now a clear discrepancy between the official stance of the Western political establishment and the growing public skepticism toward the policy of unconditional support for Israel.

Germany, in a certain way, admitted the hypocrisy of its official position by framing it as a matter of Staatsräson. The concept of Staatsräson is highly ambiguous. In my essay, I traced its genealogy from early modern Europe to the present. Staatsräson reveals a contradiction within the rule of law: the law can be questioned, denied, or transgressed due to a higher duty — Staatsräson.

In this case, that duty is the unconditional defense of Israel, even if Israel is clearly committing war crimes or genocide. The implicit meaning: yes, Israel is committing war crimes, oppressing the Palestinians, and probably perpetrating a genocide, but we accept this in the name of an overriding state interest.

What is happening today in Gaza forces us to rethink our approach to memory politics. We need to articulate a more balanced relationship between the different dimensions of collective memory. This is what I meant earlier. We have to include not only the memory of fascism, the Nazi crimes, and the Holocaust, but also the memory of imperialism and colonialism, which are also critical aspects of Europe’s past. We cannot afford to focus exclusively on one aspect of collective memory while neglecting the others.

This is especially important as the European Union has become a realm of immigration. Millions of immigrants, most of them with postcolonial origins, are now part of Europe. This applies to all European countries, including Italy, which historically has been both a country of emigration and, for decades now, a country of immigration. Our memory policies in many cases have simply been a corollary to the rhetoric of human rights, often serving as a justification for imperial and neocolonial policies. It’s time to put an end to that.

The concept of historical guilt is valuable if it is contextualized. There is no eternal, immutable, transhistorical guilt.

We could refer to the famous debate that took place in Germany in 1945 after the publication of Karl Jaspers’s essay “The Question of German Guilt.” Jaspers distinguished between different types of guilt: criminal guilt, political guilt, moral guilt, and metaphysical guilt. The concept of guilt must be nuanced, rethought, and redefined.

Rather than speaking of historical guilt, I would speak of historical responsibility. I was born more than twenty years after the Ethiopian genocide perpetrated by Italian Fascism in 1935–36. I am not guilty of that Fascist genocide, but I think I would be guilty if, as an Italian citizen, I ignored my country’s past and refused to assume the historical responsibilities tied to it. As a responsible Italian citizen, I cannot ignore the crimes that belong to my country’s history.

In this sense, the relationship between guilt and responsibility is a dialectical one. There is a historical responsibility that should guide responsible foreign policies. A responsible foreign policy today would mean, first and foremost, stopping the genocide in Gaza.

I write in my book that the concept of genocide is a juridical one. It’s a legalistic concept. I also emphasize that, as a historian, I sometimes have many doubts and need to exercise caution before using this term, as it doesn’t belong to the social sciences or historical scholarship.

There is a normative definition of genocide, which is a legalistic, juridical definition. I believe this definition perfectly corresponds to the situation in Gaza today. However, genocides are not all equivalent or interchangeable. Gaza is not Auschwitz — for its scale, its motivations, its phenomenology, and so on — this is obvious and very clear. Many people (especially in Germany) think that speaking of Gaza genocide means “relativizing” the Holocaust. This is shameful. Laying claim to the memory of one genocide in order to justify another genocide is morally and politically unacceptable. The memory of Auschwitz should be mobilized to impede new genocides, not to justify them.

Historical comparisons are not historical homologies; they are analogies that help us interpret the present. Of course, the images of not only the SS but also the Wehrmacht soldiers perpetrating crimes on the Eastern Front during World War II can be compared to the war crimes committed by the IDF today in Gaza and in the West Bank. The hundreds of videos and podcasts showing Israeli soldiers smiling next to humiliated Palestinians, or beside the corpses of Palestinian victims, or targeting civilians, are reminiscent of the images of the war and genocidal crimes committed by German soldiers during World War II; by Italian soldiers in Ethiopia, the Balkans and Greece; and by the French Army in Algeria in the late 1950s.

I believe that these comparisons clearly highlight the phenomenological affinities that exist in all colonial and fascist imperial crimes. It’s crucial to make these comparisons because they serve as a warning, and this warning is salutary.

We need to be very clear here: I don’t compare Gaza with the Holocaust. I don’t claim that what is happening in Gaza today is a repetition of the Holocaust. I simply say that what is happening in Gaza today is genocide.

The Holocaust was a genocide. The extermination of the Armenians was a genocide. The extermination of the Hereros was also a genocide. Genocides can vary greatly in their phenomenology, the means of destruction, and the populations targeted.

Of course, we have to acknowledge the existence of antisemitic tropes, which claim that Jews have always portrayed themselves as victims and now are acting exactly like the Nazis. This is a typical antisemitic argument, as well as an apologetic one. The genocide in Gaza, for example, is often used to trivialize Nazism and its crimes. We must reject such demagoguery.

However, we cannot censor or overlook the genocide in Gaza simply because we fear this kind of reaction. This is unacceptable. We cannot say to the Palestinians: we regret, but we cannot act against, the violence and oppression you are suffering because this could become the pretext for exhuming an old antisemitic tropes. The struggle against antisemitism is not incompatible with the struggle against the colonial oppression of Palestine.

Israel is part of the international community and must be judged according to the same political and legal criteria applied to all states and members of that community. If we fail to do this, we risk creating a perverse situation where antisemitism is indirectly legitimized. If Europeans, especially Germans, feel their duty is to defend Israel unconditionally to fight antisemitism and racism, the conclusion many people might draw is that antisemitism isn’t so bad. If criticizing Israel’s actions in Gaza is labeled as antisemitism, the logical consequence would be that, to stop a genocide, one must be antisemitic.

The premise behind the entire discourse of supporting Israel unconditionally, regardless of the circumstances, is entirely irrational. This is the outcome of a strange idea that posits the ontological innocence of Israel. In the past, an antisemitic prejudice explained that the Jews were harmful by nature, not because of their behaviors but simply because of their existence; today a similarly foolish and irresponsible discourse pretends that the Jews are innocent or beneficial by nature: they are victims and cannot become perpetrators. This the reversed version of an old obscurantist prejudice.

I have written several essays trying to explain that the most relevant and significant form of racism in Europe today is no longer antisemitism, but rather Islamophobia. In Italy, the head of government, Giorgia Meloni, comes from a postfascist movement. Before becoming prime minister, she was proud of her political roots in this tradition, which includes the fascist regime that enacted antisemitic laws in 1938. Similarly, in France, Marine Le Pen represents an antisemitic political heritage. However, today movements like the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in Germany do not openly promote antisemitism in their official rhetoric, and they maintain strong relations with Israel. At the same time, we cannot ignore the rise of Islamophobia in the Western world, which targets refugees and immigrants, especially Muslims, framing them as a threat to Europe’s “Jewish-Christian” identity.

This shift in the dynamics of racism means that antisemitism is no longer the primary form of racism in contemporary Europe. In the twenty-first century, racism has been reconfigured, and focusing solely on antisemitism risks being used as a pretext to justify Islamophobic and racist policies. This is particularly evident in Germany, where the AfD fiercely defends Israel while pushing anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim measures. While antisemitism must still be opposed, it’s clear that the fight against it is increasingly being instrumentalized.

A cease-fire has been approved — a temporary truce, but far from a lasting or peaceful solution. This genocidal war has irreparably tarnished Israel’s global image, transforming it from a nation once seen as a response to the Holocaust into an oppressive, colonial state, reminiscent of Apartheid-era South Africa. Today, the Palestinian cause has become central for anyone committed to the principles of freedom, justice, and equality, even if that cause cannot be identified either with Hamas or the completely discredited Palestinian Authority.

Germany is accountable for the Holocaust, not for the Nakba. This is the reason for the asymmetry you mention, and this explains why in the postwar years the historical consciousness and collective memory of the Federal Republic of Germany was built around the Holocaust.

Today, however, the context has changed. On the one hand, because Germany has become a multiethnic and multicultural society including many citizens with postcolonial or even Palestinian origins; on the other hand, because Israel justifies its oppressive and genocidal policies by invoking the Holocaust and the struggle against antisemitism. In such a situation, this asymmetry is no longer acceptable.

There is no equivalence between the Holocaust and the Nakba, but both tragedies should be acknowledged and respected. This is the necessary premise for a fruitful memory politics, which requires equality and mutual comprehension. A struggle against antisemitism grounded on the denial of the Nakba and Palestinian suffering is both unethical and ineffective.