What is a “genocide”? Some scholary remarks
There are massive war crimes in Gaza, committed by the IDF, including hunger policies and the intentional shooting of civilians. However, this is still not a “genocide” as all anti-Semites from Australia to Germany and New York City claim. Let us listen for a minute or two to the scholarship of genocide.
Why are there outside of Israel truly nowhere rallies against Hamas AND against the current Israeli government, the War and for a better Zionist Israel?
Then, remember, most antisemitic activists used the slur “genocide” against Israel as early as October 2023, immediately after the genocidal massacres of Oct. 7, where the intention was to kill as many Jews as possible and to humiliate them in the worst way. If Hamas had enough weaponry, they would have killed tens of thousands of Israeli.
Today, I had two conversations with two scholars, professors from Hebrew University in Jerusalem. One of whom is my oldest friend and ally in Israel. One conversation was via e-mail, the other one via phone. While the one denied the war crimes committed by the IDF in Gaza, my friend is shocked about these events. Both are liberal Zionists and secular, though, and both are anti-Netanyahu.
We have proof of war crimes committed by the IDF, take IDF soldiers who speak out (“‘It’s a Killing Field’: IDF Soldiers Ordered to Shoot Deliberately at Unarmed Gazans Waiting for Humanitarian Aid“, Haaretz, 27 June, 2025; „Israeli soldier describes arbitrary killing of civilians in Gaza“, Sky News, 7 July, 2025).
Today, I want to scholarly refute the dramatic term “genocide”, when it comes to Israel in general and to this war in particular.
This was a just war against Hamas.
This has very long ago become a – militarily seen – useless war.
Give Hamas and Islamic Jihad a real blow. That is what the IDF did. But it went way too far and targeted intentionally just civilians. And that is not Zionism anymore, that is not self-defense.
One cannot defeat a guerilla group. Never.
Look at Algeria. Look at Vietnam. Look at Afghanistan and the Soviets.
Israel did not learn this lesson.
Worse, the current, right-wing extremist government hat a messianic religious drive, which is the biggest threat to Israel as a Jewish AND democratic state.
Already in 2013, I wrote in my book Antisemitism: A Specific Phenomenon about the inflation of the term “genocide”. This not just the cast in post-colonial literature and activism, but also among anti-communist scholars and activists who intentionally equate Red and Brown in order to defame Communism and to downplay or deny the uniqueness of the Shoah:
There is much more to say about the inflation of genocide and about the use and abuse of the term Holocaust. Philosopher Leonidas Donskis (1962-2016), who was a Professor of political science in Kaunas (Lithuania) and a Member of the European Parliament (2009–2014). He was shocked about the “inflation of genocide” already years ago.
He analyzed the use of language, concepts, and history. In 2011, he wrote:
“In my experience, the pinnacle of concept inflation was reached ten years ago when I came across articles in the American press describing the ‘holocaust’ of turkeys in the run-up to the Thanksgiving holiday. This was probably not a simple case of a word being used unthinkingly or irresponsibly. Disrespect for concepts and language only temporarily masks disrespect for others; and this disrespect eventually bubbles to the surface.”[1]
Indeed, scholarship often has become a spectacle and ‘real scholarship’ on difficult topics has more and more replaced with prize-winning bestsellers. Well-written Holocaust distortion is trendy. Donskis tried to analyze this phenomenon:
“[T]he Holocaust is perceived as a successful pattern of the politics of memory. Cynically speaking, it is treated as a success story in our world of comparative martyrology. Therefore the pie is expected to be sliced and shared equally among all victimized actors of history – Jews, Palestinian Arabs, African Americans, Native Americans, Latin Americans, Muslims, and Eastern Europeans alike. This is to say that a convincing martyrology or a plausible account of suffering becomes a password through the gates of power and recognition. We have to become a celebrity or a victim in our fluid modern times to get more attention and, therefore, to be granted visibility, which is the same as social and political existence nowadays”.[2]
In 2009, Donskis defined what genocide is – and what it is not:
“Whether we like it or not, the Holocaust was the one and only bona fide genocide in human history. It was unique not only because of its scale, its praxis and its industrial methods of annihilation, but because of its determination never to call a halt to the Final Solution as long as a single Jew remained alive. Ultimately, it was not a garden-variety mass killing; it was a policy decision taken by an industrial and civilised state; one into which the country’s entire economic and an industrial machinery was plugged in, bolstered by military might and a political propaganda apparatus. Which is why other genocides of the 20th century need to be discussed with provisos, although this does not in any way diminish the scale of these other tragedies, nor does it diminish the culpability of the perpetrators in the eyes of God and humanity. Although they were more sporadic and involved less forward thinking, the other 20th century mass killings of nations which exhibited genocidal features, beyond any shadow of a doubt, were no less sickening. The massacre of Armenians during the First World War; the slaughter of Roma during the Second World War; Stalin’s Holodomor, which unleashed mass starvation on the Ukrainian populace; the killing spree that saw millions of Tutsis cut down in Rwanda; and, lastly, the ethnic cleansing of Bosniaks and Albanians in the former Yugoslavia – all of these macabre 20th century events can be considered mass killings with genocidal traits. Compared with the Holocaust, these mass murders were smaller in scale, were not as global and were somewhat less international in their ideological reach and practical scope, but they were nonetheless horrific and were certainly crimes against humanity of a genocidal type. Their aim was not to destroy isolated groups or social strata among the enemy, but to liquidate as many members of an ethnic group as possible.”[3]
Donskis argumentation is tremendously accurate and important.
There is a specific German antisemitism and German ideology, distinct from other antisemitic legacies in Europe as in France, England, Spain, or Poland. I argued, for example, that the religious dimension has to be taken more seriously, too. Germany has a history of both Catholic and Protestant, like no other European country.
In addition, neo-Paganism and anti-monotheistic antisemitism was also a core element in Nazi ideology. Without the German initiative, the Holocaust wouldn’t have been possible. Collaborators in most European countries the Germans conquered were helpful for the Germans, but the very idea for the Holocaust was a purely German idea and project.
Other countries have a history of antisemitic ideology and pogroms (or expulsions of the Jews in England, Spain, and Italy), but none of these countries developed the concept of murdering all of the Jews in Europe.
This was a specific German project, the Holocaust.
Official remembrance of the Shoah in the Western world did not start on a large scale until the 1970s, and by now, the distortion of the Holocaust has long become mainstream. This chapter will analyze in detail as well as in the broader perspective what this means for the memory of this unprecedented crime in world history and also what this means for Israel.
Recent bestselling books like Blood & Soil from Yale’s Ben Kiernan,[4] or Bloodlands from Yale’s Timothy Snyder (the “bible of Holocaust distorters in post-Communist Eastern Europe”[5]) are problematic. Snyder ignores Auschwitz and downplays its crucial role in the understanding of what the Holocaust was, contrary to completely unspecific, non-racially or ethnically motivated policies of Stalin.
Finally, Samantha Power’s Pulitzer Prize winning book A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide[6] is indicating that the term genocide is highly fashionable. In 2009, Power was appointed by President Obama as director of the “Office of Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights.”
She was an eye-witness in Bosnia in the early 1990s; however, her analysis of that war is highly incorrect. There was never the intention to kill the entire (Muslim) non-Serbian Bosnian population. But Power’s propaganda seems disingenuous. Is she merely asking why is it more accurate if one shouts “genocide” than if one treats the Shoah as one major disaster among others?[7] There were horrible wars in ex-Yugoslavia, ‘thanks’ to the nationalism of the parties involved (Serbs, Croats, Bosnians), and also ‘thanks’ to Islamist and Jihadi terrorists in Bosnia.
Today the Holocaust is more and more embedded in the supposedly generic sense in an ongoing history of “genocide,” as in Bosnia. But not every mass murder is genocide. There is always a tone in the debate, which indicates that many authors, scholars, activists, politicians, philosophers etc. are eager to de-Judaize the history of the Shoah and to deny the uniqueness of the Holocaust.
The short period of time when the Holocaust was more or less accurately remembered – I would say, from the late 1970s until the early 1990s in particular – seems to be ending and has already ended in many parts of scholarship, activist groups, and politics. This is also the conclusion of Alvin H. Rosenfeld.[8]
Holocaust remembrance only began in a serious way in the 1970s, particularly after the screening of the American TV series “Holocaust” in 1978. Since the 1990s, though, a highly politicization of Holocaust remembrance started when high-profile figures like Joschka Fischer, then foreign minister in Germany, used the term “Never again Auschwitz” when talking about contemporary politics in 1999, obviously[9] aiming at the situation in Serbia/former Yugoslavia and Kosovo.[10]
Germany attacked Yugoslavia before: during the Second World War. Regardless what kind of problematic, nationalistic or human rights abusing policies Serbia conducted: it was not in the slightest comparable with the Holocaust. Minister of Defense Rudolf Scharping said that the German army will operate “to prohibit another Auschwitz.”[11]
In a lecture on January 26, 2007 in Kassel to remember the liberation of Auschwitz on January 27, 1945, Auschwitz and Holocaust survivor and historian Arno Lustiger (1924–2012) said[12] that these kinds of comparisons to Auschwitz constitute a kind of “Holocaust denial,” because it denies the unprecedented character of the Holocaust.
The French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy emphasizes the uniqueness of the Holocaust and points in particular to the fact that Germany was a highly industrialized nation and that the destruction of European Jews was without purpose – there was no cui bono in the killing of the Jews. It had no political, military, land-seeking, economic, social or any other aim than killing the Jews. The killing of Jews as Jews was the core of the Shoah; this is a basic element of the uniqueness of the Holocaust:
“And you could take the time, with those who wonder, sometimes in good faith, about the uniqueness of the Holocaust, you could take the time to explain that this uniqueness has nothing to do with body count but with a whole range of characteristics that, strange as it may seem, coincide nowhere else in all the crimes human memory recalls. The industrialization of death is one such: the gas chamber. The irrationality, the absolute madness of the project, is the second: the Turks had the feeling, well founded or not, and mostly, of course, unfounded, that they were killing, in the Armenians, a fifth column that was weakening them in their war against the Russians – there was no point in killing the Jews; none of the Nazis took the trouble to claim that there was any point to it at all; and such was the irrationality, I almost said gratuitousness, of the process that when, by chance, the need to exterminate coincided with another imperative that actually did have a point, when, in the last months of the war, when all the railways had been bombed by the Allies, the Nazis could choose between letting through a train full of fresh troops for the eastern front or a trainload of Jews bound to be transformed into Polish smoke in Auschwitz, it was the second train that had priority, since nothing was more absurd or more urgent, crazier or more vital, than killing the greatest number of Jews.
And the third characteristic that, finally, makes the Holocaust unique: the project of killing the Jews down to the last one, to wipe out any trace of them on this earth where they had made the mistake of being born, to proceed to an extermination that left no survivors. A Cambodian could, theoretically at least, flee Cambodia; a Tutsi could flee Rwanda, and outside Rwanda, at least ideally, would be out of range of the machetes; the Armenians who managed to escape the forces of the Young Turk government were only rarely chased all the way to Paris, Budapest, Rome, or Warsaw (…).”[13]
Scholars and public intellectuals like Donskis, Lévy, Efraim Zuroff, Dovid Katz, among others, have been engaged in criticizing Holocaust distortion for the last couple of years, too, due to the threat in documents like the Prague Declaration.
Others like Holocaust historian Yehuda Bauer (1926-2024) have been dealing with the uniqueness of the Holocaust since the late 1970s, when a vibrant debate (mostly among Jewish scholars) occurred.[14]
In the mid 1990s the debate was quite heated, including an article by David E. Stannard based on his book American Holocaust, where he equates the history of “native people” in America with “Jews.”[15] Stannard is applying a typical antisemitic trope: Israel uses the uniqueness of the Holocaust for national purposes and legitimization for its own “territorial expansionism and suppression of the Palestinian people.”[16]
Framing Jews and Israeli as really bad people who use their own destruction for national gain is a typical antisemitic argumentation after the Shoah.
Today, the accusation of genocide is an intentional exaggeration of specific war crimes by Israel in Gaza. While the Israeli government denies these crimes, some like Smotrich or Ben Gvir are even celebrating them, as do other messianic religious fascist in Israel, those who use the term “genocide” are most often driven by hatred of Israel. Those tens of thousands who rallied today in Australia are for sure driven by hatred of Israel – because they do not differentiate between a criminal government and army, and the very idea of the state of Israel. Did the very same tens of thousands in Australia – or any other western country, including Germany, where a big pro-Gaza rally will be held next Saturday in the City of Frankfurt – rally against Hamas and the worst massacre against Jews since the Holocaust on Oct. 7, 2023? They did not.
In Germany, this silence after Oct. 7 was the worst shock for all Jews since the Shoah.
Most left-wingers were rather silent or complacent with the crimes by Hamas and Islamic Jihad. A good example are massive rallies against right-wing extremism in Germany in January 2024 with hundreds of thousands participants in the entire country. In the lovely city of Heidelberg alone, where I teach at the University, some 15.000 people rallied against right-wing extremism. After Oct. 7, though, in Heidelberg, the tiny number of 400 people mourned the dead, burned, tortured, raped Jews.
You see? Dead Jews do not count, as long as they are Israeli citizens, while the dead Jews of the Holocaust are very well received in Germany among most parts of society. Therefore, I framed it like this during my first talk at an international conference in Israel in December 2002:
Germans just like dead Jews, Islamists do not like any Jews.
However, the situation today is very troubling and extremely complex. We need to stop this war NOW, immediately – and Hamas needs to release all hostages, dead and alive, NOW.
The Israeli government, though, intends to block even this last possible ‘deal’, as it looks like.
I listened to this podcast – unholy, made be UK based Guardian’s liberal Zionist Jonathan Freedland and Israel’s Channel 12 Yonit Levi – and it’s latest series: “Occupying Gaza, the Draft Bill, and Being Jewish in Germany – with guest co-host Ruth Margalit“.
Here, journalist Ruth Margalit and Freedland both agree that the fact is, there is starvation in Gaza. That is a fact.
If I listened correctly, Margalit mentions polls in Israel which say that some 47 per cent deny that there is hunger in Gaza, 18 per cent say yes there is hunger, and we do not care and just 23 per cent are shocked about the hunger and want to change Israel’s policy.
Also, there have been hundreds of aid seeking people killed by gunfire, by IDF soldiers.
In the podcast one can also hear and see the sharp difference between the criticism of Israel by an Israeli journalist like Ruth Margalit and the uncritical support of anything the IDF does by German-Jewish journalist Ilanit Spinner, by the way. Spinner is shocked by the wave of antisemitism in Germany, like among Uber-drivers, who are often – at least in Berlin – anti-Jewish Palestinians or Arabs. That is indeed shocking. The unbelievable rise of antisemitism among the Left and in the mainstream is a threat to Jews in all of Europe, including Germany. I can very well understand the outrage of Ilanit. We have to fight antisemitism on a daily basis.
However: That may not result in ignoring the crimes committed by the IDF, though. Here, I see a truly sharp difference between mainstream journalists like German-Jewish-Israeli Ilanit Spinner on the one side and Ruth Margalit on the other side. Take this podcast as proof for this, if you listen carefully…
No Israeli government has done so much damage to Jews, Israel and the very idea of Zionism than the current government under Benjamin Netanyahu. Period.
When Freedland and Margalit talk about David Grossmann, it becomes emotional. Margalit gets still tears in her eyes, when she talks about „genocide“, the very wrong term Grossmann used – with „a broken heart“ as he said a few weeks ago to an Italian newspaper. What he wanted to say is: Israel is committing war crimes. Starvation as a war tactics is a war crime. And Israel is doing so.
Shooting civilians as the IDF did and does, is a war crime, but still not a genocide.
To intentionally not using the 400 distribution centers for aid which existed prior, and replacing them with 4 distribution centers for over 2 million people, is a crime in itself. That is what Margalit means and rightfully so.
But the term „genocide“ is simply wrong, David Grossmann, as I have shown, based on the scholarship on that term.
I can very much understand the very good intentions by David Grossmann, the great writer and lovely Zionist, and I embrace that intention – to safe Israel from within, to safe Zionism by crying out loud that something has completely gone wrong with this war. The term “genocide” is nevertheless wrong. Look at Sobibor and the killing fields in Ponar, Lithuania. That was genocide.
The war against Hamas was a justified war and has long become a useless war.
Listen to MK Gilad Kariv, as I do on an almost daily basis, thanks to his WhatsApp group.
The typical German supposedly pro-Israel people ignore the crimes of the IDF or say “let us keep that among us, do not talk publicly about it”.
This is anti-Zionism without framing it like this.
These people treat me like a “traitor” if I am talking about these shocking tendencies in Israel, be it the killing of aid seeking people, the starvation, the religious fanaticism of substantial (mainly Sephardic?) parts of the IDF, the E1-project, settler violence, anti-feminist actions like attacking praying women at the Western Wall, homophobia, transphobia and hatred of the left in mainstream media and among leading politicians etc. pp.
Zionism means talking about difficult times – because remaining human means to treat even an enemy like a human being. Listen to Professor Dan Turner, if you want to understand what that means in Israel today and even long before Oct. 7.
Zionism means to stick to the reality and the truth and not to follow uncritically ideological statements by the IDF or the Israeli Government.
Israel is committing war crimes in Gaza and has to take responsibility for that.
The War has to end.
But there is no genocide in Gaza. It is shocking what happens there and it has to end TODAY.
Finally, look at history what genocide truly looks like. Look at Babyn Yar, Auschwitz and Treblinka.
Antisemites, though, us the term “genocide” to defame Israel and to downplay the unprecedented crimes of the Holocaust.
Dr. Clemens Heni teaches at Heidelberg University.
[1] Leonidas Donskis (2011): “Foreword,” in: Robert van Voren (2011), Undigested Past. The Holocaust in Lithuania, Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, vii–xi, vii.
[2] Donskis 2011, vii–viii.
[3] Leonidas Donskis (2009): “The inflation of genocide,” July 24, 2009, https://web.archive.org/web/20091001231631/http://www.europeanvoice.com:80/article/2009/07/the-inflation-of-genocide/65613.aspx.
[4] Ben Kiernan (2007): Blood and Soil. A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur, New Haven: Yale University Press. The title is absurd and a complete distortion via universalization of National Socialism. Only people with “German blood” or “true Germans” could be German peasants, due to the blood and soil (“Blut-und-Boden,” or “Blubo”) topos, which was a well- known slogan of Nazi Germany. This is just one remark about this absurd title, because in Sparta (and all other places he refers to) it was not about “blood” in the German racial, eliminationist antisemitic sense. The inflation of genocide is outstanding in this work. Kiernan intentionally dismisses the argumentation that “intention” has to be part of genocide, the intention to kill a specific entire people, Kiernan 2007, 18. This is crucial for his concept of including all kinds of mass murder in one single historical line where the Holocaust is nothing special or unprecedented. He is logically rejecting the analysis that the Holocaust was unique: “The Holocaust was one of the first historical examples of attempted physical ‘racial’ extermination, a campaign to murder an entire people. Yet it was not the only one. Part 2 of this book demonstrates that earlier, on a smaller scale, such a fate had already befallen some indigenous peoples, while later, ethnic Vietnamese in Cambodia and Tutsi in Rwanda suffered similar devastation,” Kiernan 2007, 10. His main focus on “Richard Walther Darré” and “[a]gricultural and racial policies,” Kiernan 2007, 442 is a reminder of German scholars Götz Aly and Susanne Heim, among others who put the economy and the cui bono as the main reason for the Holocaust. That argument is completely misleading as it distorts the fact that the Shoah was a senseless killing of Jews just because they were Jews. Kiernan is ignorant of most high caliber scholarship on the Shoah in general and of research on antisemitism and the Holocaust in particular (see his references in Kiernan 2007, 671–677).
[5] See the critical review of Snyder by Efraim Zuroff (2011): “The equivalency canard. An innovative historical approach lumps Nazi and Soviet murder campaigns together, ignoring the implacable ideological roots behind the Shoah and giving Holocaust collaborators a free ride,” Ha’aretz (edition on new Books), May 2011. Snyder puts starvation in Ukraine in the early 1930s, political terror under Stalin, mass murder under Hitler and the Holocaust in one huge box, claiming that these some 14 million victims who died or have been killed during the time 1932 until 1945 were victims of – Bloodlands (a territory which derives from the imagination of Snyder and which is not at all a real territory). Snyder confuses the cui bono, terror and the intention to kill an entire people (the Holocaust). To put the starvation of Ukraine in one box with the Shoah is a well-known topos of neo-Nazis and Holocaust distorters in Eastern Europe, Snyder is not even innovative in the field, though he has become famous for playing down antisemitism. For my analysis of Snyder and the international debate about his controversial book Bloodlands see chapter six.
[6] Samantha Power (2002): “A problem from hell”: America and the age of genocide, New York: Basis Books.
[7] A typical example of Power’s influence on the public and scholarship alike is a theater play from 2008, entitled: “Upstanders. A reader’s theater piece about genocide by Teresa Docherty, Kathryn Nelson, Luke Walker, and Dr. Ellen Kennedy, University of Minnesota, Spring 2008,” where the Holocaust is just one genocide among several others. The play refers literally to Samantha Power, http://www.chgs.umn.edu/educational/pdf/Upstanders,%207-08.pdf (visited May 23, 2012).
[8] Rosenfeld 2011.
[9] http://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/fischer-ich-habe-gelernt-nie-wieder-auschwitz-1.915701.
[10] Interview with Joschka Fischer (1999), April 18, 1999, https://web.archive.org/web/20111115010138/http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/1999/04/18/we-have-to-win-this.html ; “[Q]You see a direct parallel to the Nazi era? [A] I see a parallel to that primitive fascism. Obviously, the ’30s are back, and we cannot accept that.”
[11] https://www.ndr.de/geschichte/chronologie/Auschwitz-Das-Symbol-des-Holocausts-schlechthin,verbrechen112.html
[12] Arno Lustiger (2007): “Rede bei der Gedenkveranstaltung des Hessischen Landtags für die Opfer des Nationalsozialismus am 26. Januar 2007 in Kassel,”, the German reads: “Seit dem 24. März 1999 bombardierte die NATO Jugoslawien unter Mitwirkung der Bundeswehr in einem von der UNO nicht sanktioniertem Krieg. Das Ziel war, die Bewohner von Kosovo zu schützen. Bei einem Bundeswehrbesuch in Auschwitz sagte Verteidigungsminister Scharping: ‘Die Bundeswehr operiert in Kosovo um ein neues Auschwitz zu verhindern.’ Am 7. April 1999 erklärte der Außenminister Fischer: ‘Ich habe nicht nur gelernt: Nie wieder Krieg. Ich habe auch gelernt: Nie wieder Auschwitz.’ Die Instrumentalisierung von Auschwitz stellt eine Verharmlosung der Verbrechen des Naziregimes dar. Die Opfer der Nazis mußten die Parallelisierung ‘Kosovo=Auschwitz‘ als eine neue Art der Auschwitz-Lüge betrachten, denn dies ist die Leugnung der Einmaligkeit des Verbrechens und des mit Auschwitz verbundenen Zivilisationsbruches. Es war eine Funktionalisierung und Instrumentalisierung von Auschwitz für anderweitige Zwecke.”
[13] Bernard-Henri Lévy (2008): Left in Dark Times. A Stand against the New Barbarism. Translated by Benjamin Moser, New York: Random House, 159.
[14] For an overview see Gavriel D. Rosenfeld (1999): “The Politics of Uniqueness: Reflections on the Recent Polemical Turn in Holocaust and Genocide Scholarship,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Vol. 13, No. 1, 28–61.
[15] David E. Stannard (1996): “Uniqueness as Denial: The Politics of Genocide Scholarship,” in: Alan S. Rosenbaum (ed.), Is the Holocaust Unique? Perspectives on Comparative Genocide. With a Foreword by Israel W. Charny, Boulder (Col.): Westview Press, 163–208, 174–175.
[16] Stannard 1996, 194.