Why does the repository of Holocaust remembrance stay silent in the assault on the meaning of the term “genocide”? The determination to defame Israel has been continuous during its prosecution of a war that it didn’t seek or prepare for.
The resolution passed on September 1 by the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) is a red-flag moment. Notwithstanding the attempt by IAGS to change the accepted definition of genocide, that not all of its members are scholars, and only 129 of its 500 members voted, it is yet another attack on Israel’s dwindling moral capital in the eyes of an unforgiving world opinion.
One might have expected Yad Vashem – through either its chairman Dani Dayan or its senior academic adviser Prof. Dina Porat – to make a powerful rebuttal, but no such statement has been made.
An unnamed Yad Vashem spokesperson was quoted on July 28 in response to a claim made by an honorary chairman of Germany’s Friends of Yad Vashem that because of the Nazi genocide, modern Germany should stop sending weapons to Israel.
The unnamed Yad Vashem spokesperson categorically rejected claims that Israel was perpetrating a genocide as “dangerous distortion” of historical truth that “desecrate the memory of the victim” of the Nazi genocide.
The spokesperson added that the invocation of the Holocaust in criticism is troubling and that “drawing false equivalences between the Nazi genocide of the Jewish people and a contemporary armed conflict distorts historical truth, desecrates the memory of the victims and inflames discourse rather than enlightening it.”
Expectations of Yad Vashem
That’s wholly inadequate for educating the average reader who doesn’t understand what genocide is or isn’t and why the Nazi genocide primarily conducted against European Jewry is properly called the Holocaust and was perpetrated by Germany and its accomplices.
Why is there no such statement on Yad Vashem’s home page on its website?
First and foremost, Yad Vashem should point out that the Holocaust was and remains an unprecedented act of genocide. The term “genocide” – coined by Raphael Lemkin in 1942 as literally race killing, which he defined as a “coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves” – has been appropriated and used widely by Israel’s critics and enemies against it.
Nothing that Israel has undertaken since October 7 bears any similarity with the definition set out above. Lemkin, a Polish Jew who managed to escape the genocide, recognized that for Jews like himself, the mass murder was for no other reason than their common faith.
Yad Vashem should be reminding us that the perpetrators weren’t just the Germans and the Austrians but were found amongst the communities of all those countries that were occupied by Germany.
Most importantly, Yad Vashem needs to explain that there were two characteristics that make the Holocaust an unprecedented act of genocide: the use of gas chambers and crematoria, and Germany availing itself of the trans-European railway network, which enabled the victims to be murdered hundreds and, in some cases, thousands of miles from where they lived. These two characteristics demonstrate the industrialized nature of the Holocaust, which is absent in any other case of genocide.
Connection to the war in Gaza
None of these facts have any relevance to the events after October 7, 2023. The events of that day itself bear similarity with many of the pogroms suffered by Jews over their long history. For example, the Hebron massacre in 1929 and the Farhud in Baghdad in 1941 are just two vivid cases of the frenzied brutality carried out by radicalized Muslims.
This is not to understate the sadistic savagery of those who invaded the kibbutzim and southern Israel. The terrorists and opportunists perpetrated acts of such depredation not seen since either side of the Wannsee Conference in January 1942 when the Holocaust by bullets was turned into the Holocaust by use of Zyklon B and gas chambers.
Yad Vashem needs to step up and make the distinction clear between what happened during the Holocaust and the prosecution of a war to prevent a terrorist organization from fulfilling the terms of its charter, namely the destruction of Israel and its Jews.
Those who claim to be experts in international law will advise you that although Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad had genocidal intent on October 7, because their fellow members of Iran’s ring of fire didn’t respond as anticipated, their acts wouldn’t meet the criteria required by the international community. Yet the IDF, which goes out of its way to protect noncombatants, is the one accused of genocide.
As the doyen of Holocaust historians, Raul Hilberg explained in his book The Destruction of the European Jews, which was written some 65 years ago, that the Holocaust took place in four stages: demonization, delegitimization, despoiling, and destruction.
Ironically, it is Israel that is suffering from demonization and delegitimization by the willingness of liberal Western democracies to bow under the pressure of the cynical use of social media and the United Nations and its affiliated agencies.
Only by applying a holistic approach to educating the Holocaust in the style of Hilberg’s schematic and seminal method will a proactive Yad Vashem be properly carrying out its primary obligation.
The writer is an independent researcher on the politics of Holocaust remembrance.