Thread by @dirkmoses

The Israeli scholars Alon Confino, Amos Goldberg & Raz Segal have published an important corrective to the dated views on the Holocaust, colonialism & Zionism by Yehuda Bauer and others. As it's in German, I offer an English translation in a long thread. berliner-zeitung.de/wochenende/isr…

The recent debate over the Holocaust, including Dirk Moses’ article on the “German Catechism,” continues. It centers, among other issues, around the relations of the Holocaust to colonialism, and the relations between antisemitism and the question of Israel-Palestine. 1

Yehuda Bauer responded on these pages to Dirk Moses on October 8, 2021. Bauer is one of the most eminent Holocaust historians and his article deserves serious consideration and response. Bauer claims that the Holocaust and colonial genocides are two separate phenomena … 2

because colonial genocides had in essence economic motivations, while the motivation for the Holocaust was not economic or pragmatic but ideological. It seems Bauer ignores the voluminous body of scholarship on genocide, colonialism, and the Holocaust in the last two decades 3

which shows that ideological motivations—with an undercurrent of fantasies, sentiments, and imagination—are key in any case of genocide. Even considering the practical reasons for colonial conflicts, the jump from conflict to genocide 4

always requires fantasy-thinking to justify the claim that the “enemy” includes women, children & the aged who need to be eradicated. It is established in current scholarship that genocidal violence always stems from a mixture of motivations incl economic & ideological elements 5

Spanish settlers in Sth & Ctrl America from late 15th C…obliterated villages & enslaved people, destroyed indigenous memory sites & constructed churches on their ruins, murdered religious leaders & intentionally neglected people who succumbed to diseases they brought with them 6

which resulted in the death of around 90% of the indigenous population. Todorov described it in 1999 as “the greatest genocide in human history,” undergirded by a ruthless colonial drive to dispossess based on dehumanization of indigenous people & on theological justifications 7

This policy was irrational, according to Bauer’s understanding of the term, because the Spanish colonialists continued to create conditions for mass death even when they needed the indigenous population as slave laborers 8

According to some historians such as @juergenzimmerer this was also true in the case of the Herero and the Nama genocide committed by Germany in 1904-1908, when the local population was needed for economic reasons 9

And that was also what the Nazis did when they murdered three million Soviet POWs (mostly by starvation) —two million of them in fall 1941, the largest group of victims of Nazi mass murder that year—even though they needed them as slave laborers 10

The picture is even more complex. Ch Gerlach showed that Nazi mass murder, also of Jews, mixed economic & ideological rationales. Eg destruction of Warsaw ghetto and the murder of most of its population of ½ a million Jews in summer 1942 saved Nazis significant amounts of food 11

This was a key factor in the Nazi war economy, esp following severe food shortages in spring 1942, due to harsh winter. Bauer disregards these discussions, which challenge his assertions, & insists on a binary view: 12

the motivation for genocide is either primarily economic or ideological. The document Bauer brings as proof of his views – Hitler’s memorandum to Goering from August 1936 – is open to an opposing interpretation. 13

First, economic and other “rational” considerations played a decisive role in the Nazi anti-Jewish policy in 1936. This continued also into the war. 14

As Christopher Browning argued, in early 1941 the Nazis still preferred a “rational” economic policy in the two largest ghettos in German-occupied Poland, Warsaw and Lodz, over an ideological annihilationist one. This policy only changed later. 15

Second, in this memorandum the Jews are referred to also in economic terms. To prepare the German economy for war, the memorandum proposes two laws 16

The second is “ein Gesetz, das das gesamte Judentum haftbar macht für alle Schäden, die durch einzelne Exemplare dieses Verbrechertums der deutschen Wirtschaft […]” 17

Second and most important, Hitler and other Nazis indeed believed that the victory of Judeo-Bolshevism will lead to Germany’s destruction as the memorandum asserts: 18

“Denn ein Sieg des Bolschewismus über Deutschland würde nicht zu einem 3 Versailler Vertrag führen, sondern zu einer endgültigen Vernichtung, ja Ausrottung des deutschen Volkes.” 19

Such security fantasies are not unique. As Moses and others have demonstrated, this applies in many if not most cases of mass violence, ethnic cleansings, and genocides (including the Armenian genocide and colonial genocides). 20

This is why Himmler wrote in office diary on Dec. 18, 41 that the Jews should be murdered as partisans, as he perceived them as an intolerable internal threat. This can also explain why the Final Solution was most likely decided in 120-41 (& not in June, as implied by Bauer. 21

Once the United States entered the war and Germany found itself in a war against all three superpowers, Hitler decided to kill what he perceived as an internal enemy that, according to his security fantasies, was an intolerable threat. 22

..Bauer emphasizes the “spezifisch” character of antisemitism, and by extension of the Holocaust. Bauer knows that every event has spezifisch characteristics; what he means is that antisemitism and the Holocaust have a spezifisch character opposite all other historical events. 23

This is another way of saying that the Holocaust is unique. Most scholars have abandoned the debate over the uniqueness of the Holocaust as unfruitful, recognizing that a claim that a given event is unique is a claim of identity, not scholarship. 24

In some respects, the notion of the uniqueness of the Holocaust, which is part of European history, belongs to a longer European tradition that views European culture and history as standing apart and above all other histories in the world. 25

This idea ... has been a precursor & enabler of colonialism. Bauer overlooks a recent & extensive body of work that has shown that, while antisemitism has certain distinctive features, it has historically been influenced by & tied to other forms of discrimination & racism 26

Here, too, the colonial context is essential. Nazi antisemitism—the idea of destroying Jews and the Jewish cultural world as a key in creating a better world—would be unimaginable without European ideas about race and racial science as a motor of progress 27

that drove Europeans to build empires around the world and, in the process, destroy societies they saw as backward, uncivilized, or a threat to the redemptive quality of the spread of European civilization on earth. 28

Jews during World War II were not the first nor the last group to face a concerted attack to annihilate them “in the name of and for the defense of a Superior Race born to rule the world,” as the African American intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois wrote in 1947. 29

As legal scholar James Whitman has recently shown, Nazi lawyers drew inspiration from American race laws, which targeted mostly Black, indigenous, and Asian people, in the drafting of the Nuremburg Laws 30

This debate about antisemitism is not, however, only about history; it is also about the contemporary relationship of antisemitism to the question of Israel-Palestine. In his “German Catechism” essay, Moses criticizes the view that anti-Zionism is antisemitism & the silencing 31

of Palestinian-German voices who criticize Israel. Bauer rebukes Moses for these views, for Moses’ argument is at odds with the position of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), of which Bauer is Honorary Chairman. 32

Bauer pushed for the IHRA working definition of antisemitism and, since its adoption in 2016, defended it in the face of mounting criticism. But there are good reasons to oppose the IHRA, as the consequence of this document, regardless of the initial intentions of its framers 33

has been to silence and incriminate critics of the Israeli occupation and violence against Palestinians. The IHRA definition of antisemitism has instrumentalized the fight against antisemitism into a weapon against Palestinians, Jews and others who argue for equal national, 34

political, civil, and human rights for all inhabitants of Israel-Palestine. In fact, according to the IHRA definition of antisemitism, the political ideas of equal rights and egalitarianism, which are key ideological pillars in European democratic and emancipatory traditions 35

are antisemitic in the context of Israel-Palestine. This alone should constitute a reason to abrogate the IHRA definition of antisemitism. Bauer defines Germany’s position on Israel as “healthy.” Indeed, Germany’s coming to terms with its past is admirable. 36

But in the case of Israel it has taken of late the wrong path We see nothing healthy in hollowing out the term antisemitism by wielding it against anyone who supports Palestinian civil and human rights. 37

We see nothing healthy in the fact that a respected scholar of Jewish Studies like Peter Schaefer had to resign from his position as the director of the Jewish Museum in Berlin after the museum’s spokesperson tweeted a positive reference to an open letter signed by 240 Jewish 38

scholars urging Angela Merkel not to accept the Bundestag motion equating BDS with antisemitism. Many Germans explain this inability to differentiate political disagreement from bigotry by saying that boycotting the state of Israel reminds them of the Nazi boycott of Jewish 39

businesses in the 1930s. But we see nothing healthy in the fact that so many Germans can’t distinguish b/w boycotting powerless Jews by a mighty & vicious Nazi regime to boycotting a regional superpower that deprives millions of Palestinians of basic human & political rights. 40

There is and has always been a debate within the Jewish world over the state of Israel and Zionism. In Germany the state and its institutions crudely intervene in this debate, siding with the nationalists. 41

In 2019 the bank account of the Jewish organization Jüdische Stimme für gerechten Frieden in Nahost was forcibly closed because of alleged antisemitism. A seminar initiated by Israeli Jews dealing with nationalist mythology was cancelled the following year. 42

And recently, the physician Dr. Nemi El-Hassan, a daughter of a Palestinian refugee and an example of migrant success (which is thorn in the eye of anti-immigrant populists), was fired from hosting a scientific show on German TV 43

because she liked posts of the American Jewish organization Jewish Voice for Peace, which has sixteen thousand members and tens if not hundreds of thousands of supporters in the Jewish world. 44

In today’s Germany, Hannah Arendt, Martin Buber, Marek Edelman (the antizionist Bund leader and deputy commander of the Warsaw ghetto uprising) and many others would have been labeled as antisemites and cancelled. We see nothing healthy in that. 45

The three of us have different views among ourselves, and some disagreements with Moses. But we strongly criticize the habit to portray, explicitly or implicitly, often by insinuation, as antisemites those like Moses who contextualize the Holocaust, 46

challenge the idea that it is unique, oppose the IHRA, Zionism. THE END