Zivilisationsbruch – the Holocaust, 9/11, and October 7
In the late 1980s, amid the fierce academic debates of the German Historikerstreit (Historians’ Debate), the German-Israeli historian Dan Diner introduced the concept of Zivilisationsbruch – the civilizational break. Diner’s theory argues that the Holocaust was not merely a tragic apex of historical antisemitic violence but a fundamental rupture in human reason, defying the basic rules of modern utility, logic, and self-preservation. The Nazi regime’s extermination of European Jews was destruction for the sake of destruction, even at the cost of its own war effort, diverting military trains and vital resources to send Jews to death camps.
But the civilizational break was not merely that a regime engages in irrational killing. It was that the Nazis used modern tools to orchestrate a factory-line genocide, and that an Enlightenment-grounded society widely accepted mass extermination as a rational and worthwhile goal. The Nazis weaponized bureaucracy, industrial efficiency, scientific classification, and highly organized state power for mass murder, justified by an appeal to Western standards of hygiene, morality, and propriety. The ardor for the Final Solution burned even more intensely than that for a total military victory, as it was deemed a higher ideological good. Under the Nazis, the Jews – along with other “antisocial” elements – had come to represent all the ills that had befallen German society: defeat, humiliation, economic crisis. The extermination of these groups, by Nazi logic, would lead to something resembling utopia.
When Al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked planes and struck the United States on September 11, 2001, the world confronted a different kind of catastrophic violence. 9/11 was not a civilizational break: it did not represent the internal collapse of a system of logic or ideals. Instead, it revealed the frailty and limited acceptance of Western ideals. The attack was shocking not only because of its grandiose brutality and intentional targeting of civilians in an open, diverse, and cosmopolitan city, but also due to its shattering of the prevailing Western worldview that the global arc of history inevitably converges toward liberal, secular, Enlightenment democracies. If the Holocaust shattered the West’s faith in the inherent moral superiority of liberal Western principles, 9/11 shattered faith in their historical inevitability.
The Hamas massacre on October 7 presents a synthesis of these two phenomena: First, the attack was a clear act of terror by a deeply conservative, reactionary Islamic group whose aim was widespread physical and long-term psychological harm above all else. Hamas sought to destabilize Israel and the broader Western order, invite a destructive military response that would reinforce its victim narrative, and draw international support and new recruits. The group makes no secret of its ultimate goal: to destroy Israel, cleanse it of Jews, and replace it with a conservative, dictatorial, Sharia-governed regime.
Second, the strategic blueprint of the attack mirrored both the self-destructive ideology and the symbiosis of barbarism and modernity outlined in Diner’s original thesis. German reporters and institutions have invoked Zivilisationsbruch to describe Hamas’ October 7 attack, pointing to an uninhibited brutality which spread indiscriminate mass terror through rape, torture, and execution as militants filmed themselves and broadcast the attack live.
The civilizational break was not limited to the act itself, but in its welcome acceptance by elements of Western society. After the Holocaust, people marveled at how German intellectuals, artists and professionals – including doctors who had presumably taken the Hippocratic oath – could have enthusiastically supported the Nazi racial program. After October 7, it was not just university students and professors who celebrated, justified or downplayed the Hamas attack, but lawyers, doctors, progressive politicians and professionals in international human rights organizations, among others.
Despite the fact that Hamas proudly documented and disseminated its acts online in real time, leveraging social networks to maximally amplify the horror, a phenomenon of active denialism has emerged across digital spaces that attempts to scrub or rewrite the historical reality of the massacre. This phenomenon exists alongside a parallel movement to “contextualize,” justify, and downplay the massacre as excusable “resistance” to oppression and poor living conditions, or justify the brutality retroactively due to Israel’s military response. The fragmentation of truth – where a barbaric massacre is simultaneously celebrated, rationalized, and denied – marks a profound distortion of public reason and the purported commitment to rationality and universal human rights norms.
Comparing these historical horrors does not flatten their profound differences in scale or context. The Holocaust demonstrated how the tools of modern industrial progress could be perverted to commit genocide perpetrated by a nation heretofore lauded as a cradle of Western Enlightenment. 9/11 revealed that the inevitability of the spread of Western liberal ideals was an illusion that many would kill and die to destroy. October 7 has presented us with a horrifying blend: a civilizational break brought about by unprecedented Western support for a brutal massacre by an anti-Western militia that leverages modern technology to amplify its agenda.
Civilizational breaks are immense, destabilizing, and incomprehensible. Almost a year after the cease-fire in Gaza, the civilizational break caused by October 7 is ongoing. The Netanyahu government – which insisted on financially backing Hamas and ignored warnings of an imminent attack – extended the war in Gaza, including a disastrous ground invasion, beyond military necessity and with too little heed for civilian casualties. Simultaneously, that government funneled money to violent religious-nationalist settlers in the West Bank and encouraged corruption and racism inside Israel proper. Moreover, its failure to launch a state commission of inquiry or otherwise face accountability has intensified this break. Meanwhile, Jews, Israelis and allies worldwide struggle to combat incessant denials of the scale of the Hamas massacre, and face increasing hostility from Western countries whose initial sympathy has faded under pressure from populations awash in algorithm-fueled anti-Israel outrage.
In prevailing progressive discourse, Israel now represents what Jews represented to Nazi Germany. Israel, progressives argue, is the source of endless sociological ills: warfare, racism, poverty, oppression of minority groups. It has become a reliable scapegoat around the world. Only in the past few months, outgoing Colombian President Gustavo Petro blamed Israel for his election loss, as well as for casualties following Colombia’s earthquake, while Spain’s Pedro Sanchez claimed it was responsible for misinformation surrounding the Ceuta migrant crisis. The Venice Biennale was marked by vocal protests and strikes against Israel’s participation, and signs were posted around Venice reading, “Palestine is the future of the world.” Meaning: the erasure of Israel – the triumph of a “river to the sea” Palestine – will somehow bring about a better world. Meaning: anyone who cares about “the future of the world” – who wishes for equality, peace, and tolerance – should settle for nothing less than Israel’s elimination.
It is impossible to yet ascertain the ramifications of the civilizational break brought upon by the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023. The international psychosis over Israel is currently excused, even by Israelis themselves, by its destructive outgoing administration. But it is hard to believe that it will recede under a more responsible government. At a bare minimum, the international community must arrive at a reasonable, fact-based consensus over the events of the massacre and its aftermath. We are still far from that point.
