Julia Fischer-Mackey, PhD

Extraordinary text by Israeli historian Omer Bartov, a former IDF soldier who's now the world's leading scholar on genocide and the Holocaust: theguardian.com/world/articl… He directly compares the ideology in today's Israel to that of Nazi Germany, says Israel is committing genocide and that it might be headed towards "self-annihilation". Some extracts: "[Israel has adopted a] logic of endless violence, a logic that allows one to destroy entire populations and to feel totally justified in doing so. It is a logic of victimhood – we must kill them before they kill us, as they did before – and nothing empowers violence more than a righteous sense of victimhood. Look at what happened to us in 1918, German soldiers said in 1942, recalling the propagandistic “stab-in-the-back” myth, which attributed Germany’s catastrophic defeat in the first world war to Jewish and communist treason. Look at what happened to us in the Holocaust, when we trusted that others would come to our rescue, IDF troops say in 2024, thereby giving themselves licence for indiscriminate destruction based on a false analogy between Hamas and the Nazis... I told [some Zionist students] the story of how, in 1930, the German student union was democratically taken over by the Nazis. The students of that time felt betrayed by the loss of the first world war, the loss of opportunity because of the economic crisis, and the loss of land and prestige in the wake of the humiliating peace treaty of Versailles. They wanted to make Germany great again, and Hitler seemed able to fulfil that promise. Germany’s internal enemies were put away, its economy flourished, other nations feared it again, and then it went to war, conquered Europe and murdered millions of people. Finally, the country was utterly destroyed. I wondered aloud whether perhaps the few German students who survived those 15 years regretted their decision in 1930 to support nazism. But I do not think the young men and women at BGU understood the implications of what I had told them... By the time I travelled to Israel, I had become convinced that at least since the attack by the IDF on Rafah on 6 May 2024, it was no longer possible to deny that Israel was engaged in systematic war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocidal actions. It was not just that this attack against the last concentration of Gazans – most of them displaced already several times by the IDF, which now once again pushed them to a so-called safe zone – demonstrated a total disregard of any humanitarian standards. It also clearly indicated that the ultimate goal of this entire undertaking from the very beginning had been to make the entire Gaza Strip uninhabitable, and to debilitate its population to such a degree that it would either die out or seek all possible options to flee the territory. In other words, the rhetoric spouted by Israeli leaders since 7 October was now being translated into reality – namely, as the 1948 UN Genocide Convention puts it, that Israel was acting “with intent to destroy, in whole or in part”, the Palestinian population in Gaza, “as such, by killing, causing serious harm, or inflicting conditions of life meant to bring about the group’s destruction”."