Erasing Israel Again: The Bureaucracy of Exclusion

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Recently,  UNESCO inscribed Ancient Samaria-Sebastia as a World Heritage property under the State of Palestine. Qumran, inseparable from the Dead Sea Scrolls and Second Temple Judaism, is on Palestine’s tentative list. So is Jabal al-Fureidis/Herodium, the monumental complex built by Herod the Great.

The archaeology has not changed. Ancient Samaria remains the capital of the northern Kingdom of Israel. Qumran remains central to the history of Judaism. Herodium remains Herod’s creation in Judea. What has changed is the framework in which these places are classified.

David M. Weinberg recently described this process in The Jerusalem Post as “cultural genocide.” I think he is right. His argument sent me back, however, not only to archaeology but to the word Israel itself.

On August 17, 1938, Nazi Germany issued a decree concerning Jewish names. Jewish men who did not already bear a name the regime regarded as recognisably Jewish were required to add Israel to their first name. Jewish women had to add Sara. From January 1939, the additional names had to be registered and used in official and business dealings.

Israel was not yet the name of a modern state. It was the ancient name of a people. In Genesis, Jacob receives the name Israel after wrestling through the night. His descendants become the Children of Israel, Bnei Yisrael. Kingdoms bearing that name rose and fell, but the name outlived them. Through conquest, exile and dispersion, Jews continued to understand themselves as part of Am Yisrael, the People of Israel.

That makes the Nazi choice of the name particularly sinister. The regime did not invent Israel as a label for Jews. It took one of the oldest names by which Jews understood themselves and converted it into compulsory identification. A name that had carried Jewish continuity for millennia became a mark imposed by the persecutor.

The decree belonged to an expanding bureaucracy of separation. Passports were marked. Professions were closed. Property rights contracted. The administrative state learned to identify the Jew before the regime proceeded to dispossess, deport and murder him. Israel became a mark of separation, a bureaucratic nametag attached to people who would soon be marked for destruction.

Nothing happening in contemporary Europe is equivalent to Nazi persecution, still less to the Holocaust. As a Holocaust historian, I reject that equivalence. The murder of six million Jews was a specific historical crime. Historical comparison has another purpose: it allows us to examine ideas and mechanisms across time without pretending that their intentions or consequences are the same. The idea that concerns me is simpler. Israel has again become something whose removal can be imagined as desirable.

Long before 1948, Israel was the name of a people. It is now also the name of a state. Behind both lies a civilisation whose history remains embedded in texts, language, coins, religious practice, architecture, burial places and archaeology.

UNESCO’s own documentation does not simply deny that history. It identifies Sebastia with ancient Samaria and describes it as the capital of the northern kingdom during the Iron Age. Its description of Qumran acknowledges the importance of the Dead Sea Scrolls for the history of Judaism. Herodium remains inseparable from Herod and Judea.

That makes the problem more subtle. The evidence survives while the framework surrounding it changes. An ancient Israelite capital, a site central to Second Temple Judaism and a monumental complex built by the king of Judea enter a modern national heritage framework that can acquire political authority of its own. The stones remain. The classification changes.

UNESCO itself stresses that these classifications do not determine the legal status of the territory or its boundaries. That disclaimer matters. But it does not make classification culturally meaningless. Institutions organise memory not only through what they deny, but through the categories under which they preserve.  History is not retroactive property. Places accumulate histories. Recognising later histories does not require weakening the relationship between an ancient civilisation and the people who inherited its language, texts, traditions and memory.

The intellectual conditions for such a shift are familiar. Western scholarship has spent decades attending to the role of language, identity and power in the construction of historical narratives. Much valuable work followed. Forgotten voices returned to the archive and supposedly neutral histories were exposed as anything but neutral.

Yet there is a point at which suspicion of historical authority becomes suspicion of historical fact. When history is treated principally as a contest between narratives, the question of what happened can yield to the question of who is entitled to define what happened. The evidence remains in place while the institutional frame through which it is encountered changes. Bureaucracy supplies a remarkably efficient instrument for that change.

I encountered an example in Dutch government correspondence from July 2025. Utrecht University was considering withdrawal from PARC, a major European research partnership, because of “the participation of an Israeli party.” Other universities were reportedly considering similar action. One official suggested a “possible solution”: perhaps the Israeli partner could withdraw voluntarily. Coordination with two ministries was proposed before the matter proceeded further.

The wording matters. Nobody needed to write: remove the Israelis. A political choice could become an administrative solution. The Israeli participant could withdraw “voluntarily.” Procedure allowed everyone involved to remain within the language of institutional management.

The same pattern appears elsewhere, although the legal circumstances differ. In May 2026 the European Union placed the Israeli NGO Regavim and its director general, Meir Deutsch, under its Global Human Rights Sanctions Regime. The EU says Regavim’s litigation and lobbying facilitate coercive acts, demolitions, forced displacement and serious human-rights abuses. That allegation should be stated accurately. What remains notable is that litigation and advocacy form part of the conduct through which an Israeli civil-society organisation entered a sanctions architecture built for grave human-rights violations.

Two months later the Netherlands introduced a measure, effective September 22, prohibiting the import, purchase and sale of goods originating in Israeli settlements covered by the measure. The Dutch government stresses that this is not a general boycott of Israeli products. The legal distinction matters. So does the administrative form: origin becomes a regulated category, businesses must establish it, and sanctions law gives the distinction force.

These cases are not identical, and they should not be made identical. Their interest lies in the ease with which profound political judgements can be translated into neutral administrative language. A site is classified. A partnership is reviewed. An organisation is designated. Goods are separated by origin. Each institution can say that it has simply followed the relevant procedure.

In the Netherlands, almost anything seems possible, provided the procedure is correct. A Holocaust historian has particular reason to distrust the proposition that procedure confers morality. The decree of August 17, 1938 was itself a legal and administrative measure. It killed nobody. It classified people. Jewish men became Israel, Jewish women Sara. We understand its sinister significance because we know the history into which that bureaucracy developed.

The lesson is not that every discriminatory procedure leads to Auschwitz. Plainly it does not. The lesson is that respectable procedure can make an indefensible idea appear ordinary. This is why Weinberg’s phrase “cultural genocide” is useful. Cultural genocide and physical genocide are not interchangeable concepts. Murdering people and attacking the continuity through which a people understands itself are categorically different acts. Yet erasure belongs to the latter. A civilisation can remain visible in the ground while the relationship between that civilisation, its descendants and its history is progressively weakened by the institutions that classify the past.

The problem does not remain in archaeology or administration. It eventually reaches people. In November 2024, Israelis visiting Amsterdam for the Ajax-Maccabi Tel Aviv match were pursued and assaulted. Dutch police later described opponents actively searching for Israeli supporters and hit-and-run attacks directed at them. Less than two years later, during the European Universities Debating Championship in Utrecht, the name, photograph and presence of an Israeli participant were circulated publicly. A poster called him an “Israeli genocider” and urged people to watch the streets and call the police if they saw him. Separate material around the campaign included a call for a citizen’s arrest.

During WorldPride in Amsterdam, a photographed poster warned visitors to “Watch out for war criminals during WorldPride” and displayed photographs and names of Israelis beside marked locations. It carried Amsterdam City and WorldPride branding, although the available evidence does not establish who authorised the use of those logos.

There is no single organisation coordinating UNESCO heritage decisions, European sanctions, Dutch university policy and street activism. Claiming otherwise would require evidence that does not exist. Nor are these acts morally equivalent. What interests me is the changing status of Israel across them.

A historical connection becomes negotiable. An Israeli institution becomes a reason to reconsider cooperation. An Israeli organisation enters a sanctions regime. An Israeli participant becomes someone whose presence is publicly tracked. The vocabulary changes from case to case, but Israel increasingly appears as a category from which distance is to be created.

Europe’s extraordinary investment in Holocaust remembrance makes this development harder to comprehend. Europe has become remarkably comfortable commemorating Jews in the past tense. Stolpersteine mark the homes of murdered Jews. Deportation lists are digitised. Synagogues whose congregations were destroyed are restored. Museums reconstruct vanished Jewish communities. Political leaders attend commemorations and repeat Never Again.

I have spent much of my professional life studying precisely those histories. I value that work enormously. But commemoration becomes strangely hollow when the murdered Jew is detached from the living people to whom he belonged. The Jews murdered in the Holocaust did not belong to an extinct civilisation. Their descendants live. Their traditions survived. The ancient texts survived. Hebrew survived. Jewish learning survived. Jewish families survived. Jewish memory survived. Am Yisrael survived. Three years after the Holocaust ended, the State of Israel was established.

Acknowledging that continuity does not settle contemporary political disputes. It does something more elementary. It recognises that the Jews commemorated in European museums, cemeteries and memorials belonged to a people that did not disappear when Europe tried to destroy it.

Europe cannot meaningfully commemorate Jewish destruction while treating Jewish continuity as an embarrassment. It can mourn a deported Jewish child while regarding an Israeli student with suspicion. It can restore an empty synagogue while an Israeli institution becomes a problem of cooperation. It can preserve an archaeological site while moving the Jewish civilisation that produced it towards the margins of the site’s modern political identity.

That is cultural erasure. The deepest lesson of the Holocaust was never merely that Europeans should remember murdered Jews. It was also that they should recognise the processes by which living Jews become a category for whom ordinary assumptions cease to apply.

History teaches another uncomfortable lesson. Bureaucratic normality is no guarantee of moral innocence. In 1938, Israel became a mark of separation, a bureaucratic nametag attached to people who would soon be marked for destruction. Eighty-eight years later, Israel is again becoming a target of erasure. The means are different. The consequences are incomparable. The intellectual habit deserves recognition: Israel increasingly appears as something whose absence would constitute moral progress.

Europe remembers what happened after Jews were marked. It should pay considerably more attention when Israel becomes the mark again.