While Yad Vashem continues to display opaque indifference, a prominent Holocaust researcher, Omer Bartov, sprang into action. Bartov is already a complete American. He was born in Israel, the son of a well-known writer who also wrote a biography of the '73 chief of staff, Dado. But today he is already calling on Yad Vashem, and other institutions around the world dedicated to Holocaust remembrance, to denounce Israel and warn of a possible genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza.
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The researcher who hijacked the Holocaust for the sake of his politics notes that this is not yet genocide, of course, but warns: This is the moment to stop Israel, which is heading in the direction of committing genocide. He is unfazed by a 96-year-old woman who watched her granddaughter rape. For Omer Bartov, a professor at Brown University, which is now Birzeit's twin university, it is enough that Prime Minister Netanyahu mentioned Amalek in one of his appearances. Or that Giora Eiland said that it was necessary to make sure that it would not be possible to exist in the Gaza Strip. It excites him more.
Hall of Names at Yad Vashem, Photo: AP
"They grew up in a world where you can take a concept and change its definition," says Prof. Anna Geifman of Bar-Ilan University, an expert on terrorism since the days of anarchists and revolutionaries in Russia before the Bolshevik revolution. If it is possible to replace a definition of sex, then what is already "genocide", genocide. And that's what Bartov does, whose main research was the mass massacres of units in the German army – not necessarily SS or Nazi men, but every Fritz and Siegfried with the family at home. Since his article was published a few days ago in The New York Times, this has worrying significance. Maybe not genocide, but on the way there. Maybe it's ethnic cleansing already?
Omer Bartov, Photo: Yehoshua Yosef
Behind this article lies the great failure of Holocaust researchers, and not only Bartov or Daniel Blatman or second-generation researchers. According to Bartov's way of thinking, which currently dominates research, genocide begins when war begins. It inevitably deteriorates into brutalization that gradually leads to genocide. In other words, it is possible to attack Israel freely with both conventional military and terror, and even show a model of genocide against the Jews.
Historian Niall Ferguson defined it as "a trailer for a second Holocaust, babies in the oven, the spirit of Nazism." But the moment Israel collects itself for a counter-strike, which proportionately corresponds to the magnitude of the crime committed against us, it is already genocide. Bartov, of course, is not alone. The U.S. government itself constantly hints that Israel is the problem: it has the right to self-defense, but wait a minute! We are implied that everything it does within the "right of self-defense" is suspected of being a "war crime."
Instead of creating barriers - ideas for youth
At Yad Vashem, the "never again" apparently refers only to the fact that the Germans would not murder any more Jews between 1939 and 1945. True, that mass murder is closed. One gets the impression that most of the Holocaust research of the past generation is aimed at favoring politics that reject any war, especially one waged by Israel. Why? Because war by itself is already the beginning of genocide, and the Holocaust itself has been reduced to just one more instance of genocide among many that Blatman and Noah Harari know how to count.
Thirteen years ago, when I interviewed Prof. Robert Wistrich, an expert on modern anti-Semitism, he expressed doubts about the results of promoting Holocaust education in European schools. Instead of creating barriers and reluctance as a result of studying the Holocaust and Nazism, it gives ideas to youth in Germany, Sweden, and other experiment sites of Holocaust studies – especially when there are Muslim students among the youth.
Preoccupation with the "lessons" of the Holocaust, instead of creating protection for the Jewish people, reverses the meaning of the Holocaust when the very concept of meaning loses its meaning. In Israeli academia, this is certainly perceived in the form of a reversal of meaning.
Students in an extermination camp, photo: Yossi Zeliger
Shlomo Sand wrote in History at Twilight that Holocaust consciousness "contributed to Jewish normalization in the West (really?). In Israel, on the other hand... The ideological functioning of the Holocaust... Justifies ethnocentric separatism and unrestrained behavior towards what is perceived as a threat, even if imaginary. It also justifies, indirectly, ugly politics towards indigenous Palestinians, and prevents recognition of the insight that history is an arena in which the roles of victims and executioners are constantly replaced."
It's a classic of an Israeli intellectual. The first generation of Israeli legal scholars saw Arab terrorism as a crime against humanity, and Ben-Gurion even wrote a large, scholarly article that Palestinian terrorists should be prosecuted under the Nazis and their collaborators law for crimes against humanity and crimes against the Jewish people.
Omar Bartov does not deny that there was a massacre on 7 October, but in asserting the de facto denial of Israel's right to self-defense, he joins the battalion of Hamas defenders.
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