Holocaust Museums and October 7

The following are excerpts from a talk delivered to the annual meeting of the American Association of Holocaust Organizations, June 9, 2024, YIVO Institute in New York City.

When the first Holocaust museums, and courses on the history of the Holocaust were developed, many of us entertained what turned out to be an illusion. It consisted in the belief and hope that conveying the truth about the Holocaust would be sufficient to undermine the persistence of antisemitism in world politics today. As we observe Iran’s encirclement of Israel, and the attack of October 7, it has become clear that the phrase “never again” is an incomplete slogan unless it addresses the Islamist forms of antisemitism. The time is long overdue for Holocaust Museums to recall that the Holocaust was the most extreme chapter of a much longer history of antisemitism, and that this history did not end in 1945 not only in the form of neo-Nazism but also in leftist and Islamist forms of antisemitism.

Education about the Holocaust, while essential and necessary, is no longer sufficient if one aspect of doing so is to oppose antisemitism, and especially its genocidal variants that culminate in mass murder against the Jews. Accordingly, Holocaust museums should expand their scope to address forms of Jew-hatred that are aftereffects of Nazism and that also have different cultural roots, whether those of Soviet and post-Communist leftists, or those of Islamist antisemites in the government of Iran or organizations such as Hamas.

My central point this afternoon is the following: Research, publication, documentary films, memoirs, and museums devoted to presenting the history of the Holocaust are necessary. Yet they are not sufficient efforts either to combat antisemitism in our own time, and to fight against the possibility of a “second Holocaust” in the form of efforts to destroy the state of Israel by force of arms. To be sure, antisemitism of the far right, and from unreconstructed forms of Christianity remain an enduring possibility in overwhelmingly Christian societies. Yet these forms of antisemitism have no respectability in the universities, and among their graduates in the press and media. A museum devoted to the accurate presentation of the facts of the Holocaust examines a crime committed by a regime that is defeated and whose Nazi legacy in most of the world is beyond the bounds of moral respectability.

Yet there is one part of the world in which, since the 1930s, Nazism and its Jew-hatred found intellectual, and moral respectability, and political presence. That is in nationalist and Islamist circles within the Arab states, and among Islamists in Iran and other Moslem majority societies. This afternoon, I am urging directors of museums devoted to examination and presentation of the facts of the Holocaust, to examine as well, the leftist and especially Islamist forms of Jew-hatred that remain potent factors in world politics, and now within our universities. Of course, it is necessary to present the truth about the Holocaust. Indeed, my own work as a historian has contributed to that effort. Yet doing so also requires examining its aftereffects. Those aftereffects include Jew-hatred in its Islamist forms coming from the Islamic Republic of Iran, and the offshoots of the Moslem Brotherhood, now most famously, Hamas in Gaza. Actually, the fusion of Nazism and Islamism during the Holocaust was evident in the decision of the Palestine Arabs to wage war to prevent the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. The history of the Holocaust includes Nazi Germany’s efforts to extend it to the Jews of North Africa, the Middle East, and Iran. Though the defeat of German armed forces in 1942 prevented those efforts from being implemented, the wartime collaboration of Nazi Germany with Islamist propagandists left behind residue to sympathy for Nazism and agreement with its hatred of Jews. The events of October 7, and the resulting war with Hamas offer yet further evidence that museums devoted to the history of the Holocaust should include materials on its aftereffects in North Africa, the Middle East and Iran…

In the aftermath of the mass murders of October 7, activists chanting “free Palestine, from the river to the sea,” justified the attacks by placing them into a historical context of Zionist oppression, repression and expulsion, and thereby, in effect, arguing that once again, the Jews, or rather the Zionists, were guilty and got what they deserved. In the universities, in the press, and the famous human rights organizations, one heard less about another historical context , the one I will mention this afternoon. It is the context of the core ideological beliefs of Hamas and of the now more than almost ninety-year history of Islamism.

That history that began in the late 1930s. Islamists attained global attention when they collaborated with Nazi Germany during World War II and the Holocaust. They were crucial to the Arab decision to reject the United Nations Partition Resolution of 1947, launch the war of 1948, and reject every effort at compromise since. In its Charter or Covenant of 1988, Hamas expressed the blend of Islamist Jew-hatred with the modern conspiracy theories of Nazism. It’s terrorist attacks in the 1990s, seizure of power in Gaza in 2007, establishment of a mini-dictatorship that turned the Gaza strip into a fortress to wage war on Israel, the thousands of rockets fired at Israel since, and the mass murders of October 7 were all translations of its core beliefs into policy and action.

[In the lecture I then discussed key texts including Haj Amin el-Husseini’s 1937 text “Islam and the Jews”, Hassan al-Banna’s welcome home statement about Husseini in June 1946, the Hamas Charter of 1988, and the Hamas Statement of 2017. All make very clear that these Islamist leaders believed that the conflict with the Zionists remains only the most recent in a centuries long religious battle that allowed of no compromise at all. The Hamas Charter asserted that “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it.” Al-Banna referred to Husseini as a “hero who challenged an empire and fought Zionism, with the help of Hitler and Germany. German and Hitler are gone but Amin El-Husseini will continue the struggle.” In 2017, far from revising its uncompromising determination to try to destroy Israel, Hamas rejected “any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea.”] I hope you have read these texts, and if not, will do so now.
There is an abundant scholarship about these issues including my own Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World (2009), and most recently my essays in Three Faces of Antisemitism: Right, Left and Islamist (2024), and Matthias Küntzel’s, Nazis, Islamic Antisemitism and the Middle East and Meir Litvak’s works on the Islamization of Palestinian politics. These, and others, are available in print books and essays, and online as well. I urge you to read this scholarship and incorporate it into your permanent exhibitions. It is not, as some have claimed, a misuse of the memory of the Holocaust to examine the historical origins of Hamas or to cast an unflinching gaze at Islamist ideologies whether in Tehran or in Gaza. Doing so is certainly not a case of “Islamophobia.” Rather, it is looking at historical facts, facts which do not fit easily into contemporary American discussions of race and racism, or, for that matter, of antisemitism, as well.
Israel’s adversaries have long had a ready answer for why the Islamist hatred persists. It is that Zionism is a sin of oppression that provokes justified “resistance.” The Jews, or Zionists, in other words, are again guilty. This afternoon I have pointed to another context, and an additional causal factor, namely the Islamist interpretation of the religion of Islam. There exists a body of scholarship of the past quarter century which offers a sound foundation for understanding the ideas and politics which led to the massacres of October 7 and the terrible war that followed. You have the ability to bring that scholarship to a broader audience. You have the opportunity to present to a broad public the source of the greatest threat to the people and the state of Israel. I hope you will do so.

Jeffrey Herf is Distinguished University Professor, University of Maryland, College Park, Emeritus. His most recent book is Three Faces of Antisemitism: Right, Left, and Islamist (London: Routledge, 2024)