On two letters:

Excerpts from one letter, published in NYRB:

‘The undersigned are scholars of Nazi Germany, of the Holocaust, of Israel, and of antisemitism. We express our disagreement with the statement by some of our fellow scholars in their “Open Letter on the Misuse of Holocaust Memory” of November 20, 2023, in TheNew York Review of Books. In the letter they express “dismay and disappointment at political leaders and notable public figures invoking Holocaust memory to explain the current crisis in Gaza and Israel.” The use of Holocaust memory in this way, they suggest, amounts to distortion of the present moment to advance political agendas.
On October 7 Hamas carried out in Israel a deliberate campaign of mass murder, rape, torture, and kidnapping. This was not the Holocaust, but it was the most important mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust. Finding commonalities and differences between historical events has always been essential to understanding the past and the present.’

(…)
‘Our colleagues similarly charge that misapplication of the term “antisemitism” stifles legitimate calls for Palestinian rights. Yet the linkage by many people of the chant “free Palestine” to approbation of the crimes of October 7 fits any definition of antisemitism. Our fellow scholars also characterize Israel’s relationship with Palestinians as “seventy-five years of displacement, fifty-six years of occupation, and sixteen years of the Gaza blockade.” This, they say, has made impossible a political solution with Palestinian organizations. None of us would argue that Israeli governments have not made their share of poor decisions in recent years. But again, there are large bodies of archivally based scholarship concerning Israel’s history and the Arab-Israeli conflict. The notion of constant Israeli perfidy going back to 1948 does not stand up to scholarly scrutiny.’

Signed by, among others: ‘Jeffrey Herf Distinguished University Professor, Emeritus, University of Maryland, College Park

Norman J. W. Goda Norman and Irma Braman Professor of Holocaust Studies, University of Florida’

‘Karyn Ball, Omer Bartov, Christopher R. Browning, Jane Caplan, Alon Confino, Debórah Dwork, David Feldman, Amos Goldberg, Atina Grossmann, John-Paul Himka, Marianne Hirsch, A. Dirk Moses, Michael Rothberg, Raz Segal, Stefanie Schüler-Springorum, and Barry Trachtenberg reply: We have carefully read our colleagues’ response to the open letter we signed on the misuse of Holocaust memory and find no reason to revise our arguments or our position.
We share our critics’ shock and revulsion at Hamas’s heinous and criminal attack on October 7, yet their response to our letter fails to engage with our main point: namely, that political leaders and figures in the media should avoid referring to those attacks as a Holocaust and to Hamas as Nazis.’

(…)

‘As historians we seek meanings within contexts, and the contexts for Nazism and Hamas differ greatly. The Third Reich was a state built on a system of radical terror, and for a period it was the strongest military power in Europe, which ruled over a continental empire and pursued a policy of total annihilation of the Jews. Jews in Europe and North Africa did not pose a military threat to Germany in any way, but were instead a vulnerable minority lacking any effective ability to defend themselves.
Hamas is a completely different phenomenon. The writers’ claim that “Hamas has had a state in Gaza for seventeen years, five years longer than the Nazis controlled Germany” is specious and tendentious. The Gaza Strip is one of the most densely populated and poorest pieces of land in the world, which, according to most international bodies, remains under occupation. It has been under siege for sixteen years and depends completely on Israel—from control of the population registry to the amount of water, gas, and even pasta allowed in. Forty-five percent of its residents were unemployed before the war and 81 percent lived under the poverty line. Most of its residents are refugees or descendants of refugees who were expelled or who fled during the Nakba of 1948. How can a comparison to the Third Reich possibly illuminate social and political conditions in this territory?’

(…)

‘Our original letter recognizes the foundational symbolic meaning of the Holocaust for Jewish people, in Israel and around the world. Acknowledging this foundational meaning, we warned against invoking Holocaust memory and history as a way to perceive and support the current war. As we write this reply, the renewal of fighting and its spread to the south of the Gaza Strip are inflicting massive death and destruction on the people of Gaza. This resumption, inevitably, has been accompanied by the abandonment of negotiations to free the Israeli hostages. Today we think our warning is more urgent than ever.’

Read the letters here.

Constant Israeli perfidy since 1948 is a step too far, and what do we mean perfidy?

Comparisons with the Holocaust could better be avoided altogether. Here’s was my [argument(https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2023/11/24/het-unieke-ultieme-kwaad-duikt-telkens-weer-op-a4182209) a couple of weeks ago in the Dutch newspaper.

Ian Buruma reached in the same newspaper a similar conclusion.

The historian Frank van Vree happened to disagree with us. His main argument was that it was useless to state that people didn’t die in gas chambers so that they could become cannon fodder in a propaganda war 80 years later.

Hamas is not the same as Nazism, the Israeli army is not the SS, Gaza is not the same as Auschwitz, Nakba and Holocaust are two different catastrophes et cetera.
Of course, comparisons can shed a new light on events, on things, (Hills like white elephants) but the Nazi-comparison rarely sheds any new light on anything. It’s just meant to state that certain people, certain institutions are absolute evil, are basically beyond repair. The Nazi-metaphor stops the discussion.

It's tempting and it was once, many decades, ago provocative, this metaphor, but maybe then the provocation was already trite, nowadays it’s a sign of cheap propaganda. Wherever you come across the Nazi metaphor you can be sure to be stepped into cheap propaganda. There’s also less cheap, let’s say more expensive propaganda, but that’s another story.