On genocide – Omer Bartov in NYT:

‘At that point it appeared no longer possible to deny that the pattern of I.D.F. operations was consistent with the statements denoting genocidal intent made by Israeli leaders in the days after the Hamas attack. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had promised that the enemy would pay a “huge price” for the attack and that the I.D.F. would turn parts of Gaza, where Hamas was operating, “into rubble,” and he called on “the residents of Gaza” to “leave now because we will operate forcefully everywhere.”’

(…)

‘My inescapable conclusion has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people. Having grown up in a Zionist home, lived the first half of my life in Israel, served in the I.D.F. as a soldier and officer and spent most of my career researching and writing on war crimes and the Holocaust, this was a painful conclusion to reach, and one that I resisted as long as I could. But I have been teaching classes on genocide for a quarter of a century. I can recognize one when I see one.
This is not just my conclusion. A growing number of experts in genocide studies and international law have concluded that Israel’s actions in Gaza can only be defined as genocide. So has Francesca Albanese, the U.N. special rapporteur for the West Bank and Gaza, and Amnesty International. South Africa has brought a genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice.’

(…)

‘Yet as Mr. Lemkin recognized, and as the United Nations later agreed, it is crucial to be able to distinguish the attempt to destroy a particular group of people from other crimes under international law, such as war crimes and crimes against humanity. This is because, while other crimes entail indiscriminate or deliberate killing of civilians as individuals, genocide denotes the killing of people as members of a group, geared at irreparably destroying the group itself so that it would never be able to reconstitute itself as a political, social or cultural entity. And, as the international community signaled by adopting the convention, it is incumbent upon all signatory states to prevent such an attempt, to do all they can to stop it while it is occurring and to subsequently punish those who were engaged in this crime of crimes — even if it occurred within the borders of a sovereign state.’

(…)

‘According to a recent investigation by Haaretz, an estimated174,000 buildings have been destroyed or damaged, accounting for up to 70 percent of all structures in the Strip. So far, more than 58,000 people have been killed, according to Gazan health authorities, including more than 17,000 children, who make up nearly a third of the total fatality count. More than 870 of those children were less than a year old.
More than 2,000 families have been wiped out, the health authorities said. In addition, 5,600 families now count only one survivor. At least 10,000 people are believed to still be buried under the ruins of their homes. More than 138,000 have been wounded and maimed.
Gaza now has the grim distinction of having the highest number of amputee children per capita in the world. An entire generation of children subjected to ongoing military attacks, loss of parents and long-term malnutrition will suffer severe physical and mental repercussions for the rest of their lives. Untold additional thousands of chronically ill persons have had little access to hospital care.’

(…)

‘To this day, only a few scholars of the Holocaust, and no institution dedicated to researching and commemorating it, has issued a warning that Israel could be accused of carrying out war crimes, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing or genocide. This silence has made a mockery of the slogan “Never again,” transforming its meaning from an assertion of resistance to inhumanity wherever it is perpetrated to an excuse, an apology, indeed, even a carte blanche for destroying others by invoking one’s own past victimhood.
This is another of the many incalculable costs of the current catastrophe. As Israel is literally trying to wipe out Palestinian existence in Gaza and is exercising increasing violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, the moral and historical credit which the Jewish State has drawn on until now is running out.
Israel, created in the wake of the Holocaust as the answer to the Nazi genocide of the Jews, has always insisted that any threat to its security must be seen as potentially leading to another Auschwitz. This provides Israel with license to portray those it perceives as its enemies as Nazis — a term used repeatedly by Israeli media figures to depict Hamas and, by extension, all Gazans, based on the popular assertion that none of them are “uninvolved,” not even the infants, who would grow up to be militants.
This is not a new phenomenon. As early as Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982, Prime Minister Menachem Begin compared Yasir Arafat, then hunkered down in Beirut, to Adolf Hitler in his Berlin bunker. This time, the analogy is being used in connection with a policy aimed at uprooting and removing the entire population of Gaza.’

(…)

‘What consequences will Israel’s moral reversal have for the culture of Holocaust commemoration, and the politics of memory, education and scholarship, when so many of its intellectual and administrative leaders have up to now refused to face up to their responsibility to denounce inhumanity and genocide wherever they occur? Those engaged in the worldwide culture of commemoration and remembrance built around the Holocaust will have to confront a moral reckoning. The wider community of genocide scholars — those engaged in the study of comparative genocide or of any one of the many other genocides that have marred human history — is now edging ever closer toward a consensus over describing events in Gaza as a genocide.
In November, a little more than a year into the war, the Israeli genocide scholar Shmuel Lederman joined the growing chorus of opinion that Israel was engaged in genocidal actions. The Canadian international lawyer William Schabas came to the same conclusion last year and has recently described Israel’s military campaign in Gaza as “absolutely” a genocide.
Other genocide experts, such as Melanie O’Brien, president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, and the British specialist Martin Shaw (who has also said that the Hamas attack was genocidal), have reached the same conclusion, while the Australian scholar A. Dirk Moses of the City University of New York described these events in the Dutch publication NRC as a “mix of genocidal and military logic.” In the same article, Uğur Ümit Üngör, a professor at the Amsterdam-based NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, said there are probably scholars who still do not think it’s genocide, but “I don’t know them.”’

(…)

‘By the same token, when those who have dedicated their careers to teaching and commemorating the Holocaust insist on ignoring or denying Israel’s genocidal actions in Gaza, they threaten to undermine everything that Holocaust scholarship and commemoration have stood for in the past several decades. That is, the dignity of every human being, respect for the rule of law and the urgent need never to let inhumanity take over the hearts of people and steer the actions of nations in the name of security, national interest and sheer vengeance.’

(…)

‘Perhaps the only light at the end of this very dark tunnel is the possibility that a new generation of Israelis will face their future without sheltering in the shadow of the Holocaust, even as they will have to bear the stain of the genocide in Gaza perpetrated in their name. Israel will have to learn to live without falling back on the Holocaust as justification for inhumanity. That, despite all the horrific suffering we are currently watching, is a valuable thing, and may, in the long run, help Israel face the future in a healthier, more rational and less fearful and violent manner.
This will do nothing to compensate for the staggering amount of death and suffering of Palestinians. But an Israel liberated from the overwhelming burden of the Holocaust may finally come to terms with the inescapable need for its seven million Jewish citizens to share the land with the seven million Palestinians living in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank in peace, equality and dignity. That will be the only just reckoning.’

Read the article here.

Political messianism in Israel will cause a rift in Judaism, is already causing a rift. Messianism has always been catastrophic, this time probably more catastrophic than before.

The culture of remembrance will never be the same again, for good reasons. I’m not sure if we should shed many tears on the grave of culture of remembrance.
Yes, antisemitism still exist, more than before, but the memory of the Holocaust is, as Bartov rightly argues, not a useful weapon anymore in the battle against Jew-hatred.
Not only Israel but the Jewish people should liberate themselves from the burden of the memory of the Holocaust.

Where Auschwitz is invoked as an excuse for genocide and war crimes, Auschwitz as a symbol of injustice and suffering of the Jewish and other people is dying, is already dead.