The New Yorker:

How the war in Gaza is dividing scholars of Nazi Germany.

By Isaac Chotiner

Norman J. W. Goda is a professor of Holocaust studies at the University of Florida, and a widely recognized expert in his field. The author of numerous books about the Holocaust, Goda also consults for the National Archives as part of its efforts to organize documents relating to Nazi war criminals. Earlier this year, Goda wrote a long essay titled “The Genocide Libel,” in which he argues that the accusation that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza “is political, designed not so much to describe a crime, but to place Israel, its military, its citizens, and its supporters as outside the realm of decency and human values.” Recently, he wrote another piece, with the historian Jeffrey Herf, about “why it’s wrong to call Israel’s war in Gaza a ‘genocide.’ ”

Genocide is defined by the Genocide Convention of 1948 as the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” Some scholars of the Holocaust, most notably Omer Bartov, have argued that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, where more than sixty thousand Palestinians have been killed, and that it is the duty of Holocaust historians to speak out against the war. But Bartov has also argued that “the majority of academics engaged with the history of the Nazi genocide of the Jews have stayed remarkably silent, while some have openly denied Israel’s crimes in Gaza, or accused their more critical colleagues of incendiary speech, wild exaggeration, well-poisoning and antisemitism.” He specifically pointed to Goda as an example.

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