In our „Holocaust and Nakba“ project, Bashir and I are suggesting a different way to remember the Holocaust –together with the Nakba and now also with the genocide in Gaza. In my view, this is the only moral way to think about the Holocaust in Israel today.
Can you tell us about your family background?
I was born and lived all my life in Jerusalem. I was born to a moderate observant Modern Orthodox Jewish Zionist family. My parents and their siblings were born before 1948 in Mandatory Palestine. On my father‘s side, parts of the family can be traced back to Palestine for 6 generations. My maternal grand-mother and grand-father were born respectively in Berlin and in St. Petersburg. He was the son of the chief rabbi of St. Petersburg, he fled some years after the Russian revolution. They met in Berlin and migrated to Palestine in 1933 right after Hitler came to power.
What is your professional expertise?
I am a Holocaust cultural historian. I am currently finalising a book on the Jewish experience in the Warsaw ghetto from a cultural history perspective. I also address Holocaust historiography and memory. Both these branches are within a more general context of genocide studies. When I teach about the Holocaust it is always in relation to other genocides, e.g. colonial. In 2018, my friend and colleague Bashir Bashir, from the open University of Israel, and I co-edited a book „The Holocaust and the Nakba: A new grammar of trauma and history.” Its aim is to create a historical, theoretical and political framework to engage with both memories. It was translated in several languages. Today, what preoccupies me most is what it means to teach, research and remember the Holocaust when a campaign to so-called fight anti-semitism, and Holocaust memory have been mobilised to enable and support a genocide against the Palestinians.
Following the 7 Oct. Hamas attack, the Israeli state and a significant majority of the Israeli Jewish public, to the right and left, have supported Israel‘s extremely violent response in Gaza. What would you have done?
History did not start on the 7th of October. For decades, some of us have been saying what should be done –reach a fully egalitarian solution and give full collective and individual rights to the Palestinians. But Israel‘s aim has been to suppress, delegitimise and eliminate Palestinians from the diplomatic map. It has been deepening the occupation and apartheid with a view to achieving annexation of the West Bank, while maintaining Gaza under a blockade. We have reached a point where more than 50% of the people, Palestinians, between the river and the sea have no or partial rights, while the remainder, Jews, enjoy full rights. We warned that this was utterly immoral, extremely violent and also unsustainable. It led to Palestinian extreme violence in order to have the world and Israel pay attention. The attack on the 7th of Oct. happened when Israel was changing the status quo on Haram al Sharif / Temple Mount in Jerusalem and when Saudi Arabia was being cajoled into joining the Abraham Accords which would have erased the Palestinian cause, which is Netaniyahu‘s aim. But, even Yitzakh Rabin, who signed the Oslo Accords, never intended for the Palestinians to get a fully sovereign state. I am in no way justifying what happened on Oct. 7th, which was a heinous crime. I am pointing out this is what happens when a people is treated so cruelly. Israel had the right to self-defense, proportional, but not unlimited, to hit Hamas hard, but not to conduct a genocide against the Palestinians. Then, negotiate a settlement based on full equality for everyone from the River to the Sea.
In April 2024, you wrote an article referring to Israels war on Gaza entitled „Yes, it is a genocide.” Can you explain how you came to this conclusion?
It took me half a year. Oct. 7th was traumatic for all of us, including myself. I have long been aware of the eliminatory element of Zionism, but I had difficulties in acknowledging that Israel had fallen so low and came to conducting a genocidal campaign. The decisive moment was not when the ICJ in Jan. 2024 issued its interim ruling stating that genocide was plausible, but in March 2024 when Yuval Avraham exposed the use of AI to identify through algorithms Hamas members, which led to a middle level operative being targeted in his home, 300 other people were killed when his neighborhood was struck. I then understood this was mass killing that amounts to genocide. In response, a colleague, one of the biggest denialists of the genocide in the academic field, urged my students not to attend my classes. There were some harsh reactions, hate mails. But there were also positive responses. Some said “you made me think”. But nothing compared to what Prof. Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, a Palestinian colleague, endured at the university and the police. She eventually had to resign because she dared speak openly about the genocide. Anyhow, we should learn from the Holocaust, this is what the Genocide Convention clearly states: We have the obligation to prevent it or to stop it -this is why I have become vocal about it.
In view of the fact that you consider Israel‘s actions against the Palestinian people as genocide, do you support Israeli Jews who refuse to join the Israeli Defense Forces?
This is a very personal decision, not least because of its consequences, going to prison and social, family isolation. The IDF is not a defensive force, it is committing the worst of crimes under international law and breaches all human ethics. One should not participate in this organisation. Yes, I support those who refuse, but this a decision everyone should make for themselves.
Do you support those responsible for a genocide, for any crime against humanity or war crime, be tried in an appropriate court of law?
Yes, of course. Particularly the military and political leaders. The Israeli military and civil judicial systems have been completely corrupted and serve the state and its genocidal goals. You cannot count on them to do justice. I hope they will face justice in international courts.
Is Israel‘s on-going violence against Palestinians, its recent destruction of Syria‘s military equipment and, after having annexed Syria‘s Golan Heights in 1981, its current occupation of parts of Syria’s southern territory, regardless of the fact that Syria‘s new leader stated Syria did not want war with Israel, its on-going destruction of southern Lebanon and aim to take control of its territory up to the Litani river, its war to crush Iran, part of a historical expansionist plan or self-defense?
Today the religious Zionists are the dominant elite group in Israel. Though a minority, they have significant influence and are present in all institutions. They are a force pushing for occupation and expansion. They believe Israel ideally should expand from the Euphrates to the Nile. But there is another factor here. There is a Jewish yearning to come to the land of Israel, it is prominent in our culture and religion. However, when you come to settle in a land that is already inhabited in order to transform its demography and political systems, you will not be accepted by the indigenous population that does not want to give up its land. It will therefore try to push the intruder out. This leads to permanent war. In most cases, the colonisers have advantage over the colonised. They will try to eliminate them in order to eliminate the problem of not being wanted. This has led to different outcomes: in Algeria, the colonisers were thrown out; in North America the indigenous population was almost completely eliminated; in South Africa, a new political entity was formed. Israel is a profoundly eliminatory kind of settler colonial entity. The Oslo Accords were a potential opportunity that both sides missed, especially Israel, to change course. Israel is not willing to give up the land, it wants total domination and wants to establish what the historian Dirk Moss called “permanent security”, rather than share the land and power with the Palestinians. Rather than compromise and acknowledge the other, Israel time and again wants to solve the problem „once and for all” by force. This leads to an ever growing escalation that resulted in a push-back as on Oct. 7th. It opened the door to ethnic cleansing as we witness in the West Bank and a full fledged genocide as in Gaza. It spirals out of control, because Israel wants to dominate, for its so called “security”, not just the Palestinians, its neighbors, the Persian Gulf, but the whole of the Middle East.
Can you explain what Jehuda Elkana‘s 1988 essay „The need to forget” is about.
Jehuda Elkana was a great Israeli intellectual, the first rector of the Central European University, and a Holocaust survivor. The first Palestinian popular uprising in 1988 in Gaza the West Bank and East Jerusalem was for the most part a popular non-armed uprising. It consisted of mass popular protests. This made it clear that there is no benign occupation. Palestinians challenged Israeli domination. Israel’s response was hateful, dehumanising, extremely violent, and fearful -it was not rational. In this context Elkana asserted that there were two potential lessons to the Holocaust. One is “never again for all” and the other is “never again for us”. And since Israel adopted the latter over the former, it made us a paranoid nation feeling always as victims, wielding violence and dehumanizing the Palestinians, while being unable to reach peace with them. Hence, he suggested, we should reduce the dominance of Holocaust memory in our public life. He thought Holocaust memory was toxic and counter-productive to the Jewish Israeli society.
I will add that almost 40 years later he proved to be right. Israeli society has become a very sick society. We have lost ethical norms. A society in which everything is permissible and possible, where many individuals have no internal limits. A society that becomes psychotic, delusional. As Hannah Arendt asserted: totalitarian violence emerges from the sense that everything is possible and everything is permissible. Holocaust memory in Israel supports and encourages this. In our “Holocaust and Nakba” project, Bashir and I are suggesting a different way to remember the Holocaust –together with the Nakba and now also with the genocide in Gaza. In my view, this is the only moral way to think about the Holocaust in Israel today.
Does the Israeli Jewish population hold some responsibility for the crimes perpetrated against Palestinians during the Israeli 60-year occupation?
As a society, yes, we bear responsibility for it. Particularly as all public surveys have shown that a huge majority supports what is being done to the Palestinians in Gaza and are currently supporting the wars against Iran and against Lebanon. As a society, we take collective decisions. We enjoy the privileges of Jewish supremacy. Even those who resist the status quo, bear responsibility for what is done in their name. Precisely because of this responsibility, there is at least a minority of us that resist, protest and work toward change. This resistance should not be underestimated.
Does the Western world and the world at large hold any responsibility for Israel‘s actions?
It is not only the Western world, it is also some of the Arab regimes. There has been no international pressure on Israel. Actually, Germany‘s Chancellor Merz has even lauded Israel for attacking Iran in June 2025 saying it was „doing the dirty work for all of us.” Israel‘s strongest enabler materially, militarily and diplomatically is the US, it has given it a „carte blanche“. As you know Serbia is one of Israel’s best allies. Much of the ammunition for all current wars comes from Serbia or transits through Serbian airports.
What do you think can be done toward a resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli issue?
If we continue like this, I believe that it might have catastrophic consequences also for us. There may be another greater push-back involving the wider Muslim and Arab world in the Middle East of over 300 million people, an Armagedon, somewhere along the line. We must immediately stop the genocidal violence against Palestinians all over Palestine, the violence in Lebanon, in Syria and in Iran. Then start talking with Palestinians to negotiate a settlement based on full equality for all including the Palestinian refugees’ right of return. Currently, this may be beyond science fiction. In the meantime, some of us, Jews and Palestinians in Israel are creating small intellectual and political communities. For example, in the West Bank we create partnerships through protective presence, which consists of using our privileges as Jewish Israeli citizens to be physically present acting as a shield for Palestinians Shepards and farmers against settler and IDF violence. In such joint circles we hope for accountability for the crimes committed by Israel and its supporters; we also articulate new ideas about the future, such as the decolonisation of historic Palestine to create an egalitarian society in which we can all co-exist with full collective and individual rights for all. What my friend Bashir Bashir calls “egalitarian bi-nationalism”