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Norman J. W. Goda is a professor of Holocaust studies at the University of Florida, and a widely recognized expert in his field. The author of numerous books about the Holocaust, Goda also consults for the National Archives as part of its efforts to organize documents relating to Nazi war criminals. Earlier this year, Goda wrote a long essay titled “The Genocide Libel,” in which he argues that the accusation that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza “is political, designed not so much to describe a crime, but to place Israel, its military, its citizens, and its supporters as outside the realm of decency and human values.” Recently, he wrote another piece, with the historian Jeffrey Herf, about “why it’s wrong to call Israel’s war in Gaza a ‘genocide.’ ”
Genocide is defined by the Genocide Convention of 1948 as the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” Some scholars of the Holocaust, most notably Omer Bartov, have argued that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, where more than sixty thousand Palestinians have been killed, and that it is the duty of Holocaust historians to speak out against the war. But Bartov has also argued that “the majority of academics engaged with the history of the Nazi genocide of the Jews have stayed remarkably silent, while some have openly denied Israel’s crimes in Gaza, or accused their more critical colleagues of incendiary speech, wild exaggeration, well-poisoning and antisemitism.” He specifically pointed to Goda as an example.
I wanted to speak with Goda about Bartov’s claims, and how he sees his own work. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed whether Holocaust historians have a duty to publicly condemn human-rights violations, what he thinks Israel’s aims are in this war, and why he is skeptical of the reported death toll in Gaza.
What is the job of a Holocaust historian?
In part, we teach courses having to do with the Holocaust. These can range from the Holocaust itself to courses on Holocaust memory to courses on Holocaust justice. And in terms of research, I think that Holocaust historians work very hard to uncover aspects of the Holocaust that we don’t understand or that we understand poorly. But also we situate the Holocaust within European and world history, because it was a global event. We research questions such as whether it was a particularly Jewish event, or whether it was a more universal event.
How do you think about that question?
There are aspects to the Holocaust that are distinctly Jewish. So many of the sources are in Yiddish and Hebrew, and Eastern European Jewish civilization was wiped out. But the Holocaust is also very much a global memory. It was coded as such by events like the Nuremberg trials, the Eichmann trial, museums, memorials, literature, and other things. And in that sense it’s a universal memory that can touch on issues of everything from democratic rights to issues of tolerance to how we treat minorities.
Antisemitism was obviously inextricable from the Holocaust, and the Holocaust was the single most infamous or one of the most infamous large-scale human-rights violations. It seems that Holocaust historians often feel it is important to address contemporary antisemitism and human-rights violations.
Yes, very much. The generation of Holocaust historians before mine took up the subject owing in part to their objections to the Vietnam War. There was a school of thought at the time that viewed Vietnam itself as a genocide, and believed that the United States, which was instrumental in the defeat of Nazi Germany and all that it stood for, was now fighting what was, in essence, a colonial war with mass civilian casualties.
The longer answer to this is that the Holocaust was seen at the time as a civilizational rupture. It was the premeditated murder of one European group by other European groups, and it took place in Europe. Faith in the Enlightenment and European progress was destroyed. The Holocaust became, as a result, the prototypical way that we think of genocide. In recent decades, scholars of European colonialism have pointed out that scenes of extreme mass violence, and even genocide, also took place in the colonial world. And that has raised questions that we are all trying to figure out. One is, has the Holocaust become a hegemonic narrative that crowds out our consciousness of race-based mass atrocity? Can we understand the Holocaust and colonial violence better by finding common elements? What is the relationship between antisemitism and racism?
And the thing that complicates all of those discussions is how one feels about Israel. The way one feels about Israel really lights a fire under all of these debates—about where the Holocaust fits into contemporary Israeli politics and the war in Gaza.
You wrote something about the war in Gaza with the title “The Genocide Libel.” What historical resonance was that title supposed to have?
In the world of antisemitism, “libel” refers to all of those antisemitic tropes by which Jews were charged with horrible things, whether it was the deliberate and gleeful ritual killing of non-Jewish children, or the accusation that Jews manipulated foreign governments, controlled the press, and ultimately strove to control the world.
In your paper you write, “Genocide accusations against Israel are different” from other such charges. Do you think charging Israel with genocide is antisemitic?
The accusation that Israel is committing genocide is the peak of a pretty broad mountain. We’ve had arguments over Israel for decades. Again, some questions: Was the return of Jews necessary, proper, and overdue after the Holocaust, or is Israel just another European racist colonial state, or even settler-colonial state? Did Israel’s existence as a settler-colonial state necessitate erasure of the Arabs who were in Palestine? Or were the Arabs in Palestine done in again and again by inflexible, wrongheaded, venal, and corrupt leadership?
I’m sensing what you believe given those adjectives.
Well, look, Palestinians have not had the best leaders, and one can make the argument that those leaders led the Palestinians down a very tragic and very dark alley.
Just to go back to my question, though: Considering that you talked about a “genocide libel,” is lobbing that accusation against Israel today antisemitic?
I do think that we need to look at it broadly. Is the accusation of genocide in keeping with the one legal definition of genocide that we have? Have these accusations been made before, and is there something peculiar about them in Israel’s case? Namely, do they weave in antisemitic tropes? Israel is fighting a war that in some ways is unprecedented. It’s a war against a dug-in enemy who has created fortifications underground, but also under civilian structures.
Israel is not denying aid to Gaza because Hamas is under buildings, correct?
The blockade is kind of a different issue.
It’s part of the case when people make these genocide charges against Israel.
Well, they focus on a lot of things, but I think it’s worth making the point that genocide accusations against Israel really go back to the nineteen-sixties.
I think most people making the accusation today either weren’t alive in the sixties or were not aware of those debates.
Nevertheless, in the U.N. and on the West European left, to say nothing of the Communist world, people made the same arguments back then that Israel was committing a genocide against the Palestinians, one that began in 1948. And that because this genocide was continuing, the Palestinians only had one option, and that was to resist. The problem was that the Palestine Liberation Organization didn’t really resist. It used terror operations again and again against civilians. The P.L.O. in the eighties and nineties charged the Israelis with dropping booby-trap toys on Palestinian refugee camps and Lebanon specifically to kill children. That was untrue. [Goda later clarified that he was referring to a Lebanese military communiqué in the 1970s. There is no evidence that Israel used booby-trapped toys, although there have been widespread reports over the decades of Lebanese children being killed or injured by Israeli munitions that they thought were toys.]
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Isaac Chotiner
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