The proposed lecture aims to understand the various debates taking place among academics who study and research the Holocaust and other genocides. What are their contributions to the massacres as of 7 October, what role does the Holocaust in their argumentation?

The aim is to analyze Holocaust-related discourses in press, on social media channels or on YouTube. The research will shed light on how Holocaust discourse is used but also weaponized for political aims. For example, in the wake of the Hamas-led massacres pogrom by Hamas in Israel, references to the Holocaust are used to accuse Israel of a “genocide in Gaza” which fuels Jew-hatred and antisemitism, or it is repeatedly insinuated, the memory of the Holocaust “obscures” a clear sight of the current war. The lecture will focus on several aspects of the genocide allegation:

1. Applying historical comparisons, analogies or terminology – while using an “I as…”-perspective – to explain the Israel-Hamas-War (while ignoring the genocidal character of 10/7);

2. lines of argumentation of the genocide allegation while using theory based approaches;

3. a certain, dichotomous perspective on Palestinian history. Sources are interviews in international press, social media posts, podcast or YouTube events.

On October 13, 2023, nearly one week after the devastating pogrom perpetrated in Israel from the Gaza Strip by Hamas on October 7, the Israel Defense Forces began ground operations against Hamas in Gaza. The war against Hamas and the casualty figures reported by Hamas and circulated in Western media quickly led to widespread and strident insistence that Israel is committing “genocide.” This charge has been a staple of anti-Israel activism in Europe and the US since October 7, and it underpins the ongoing legal case against Israel that the South African government brought before the International Criminal Court in December 2023. This genocide charge is challenged on empirical grounds (Illouz 2023 et al.) and shown (Tabarovsky 2022 et al.) to have a long history that begins decades before the current Israel-Hamas war. It is argued that the genocide charge is best understood as a form of Holocaust inversion (Gerstenfeld 2009; Klaff 2019) and a variant of the centuries-old blood libel or ritual murder charge against the Jews (Hirsh 2017; Illouz 2024). Previous scholarship that seeks to explain the blood libel (including the work of the historians Joshua Trachtenberg, Gavin Langmuir, and David Nirenberg) is revisited with the aim of determining whether and to what extent this scholarship can also help to shed light on the resurgence and popularity of the contemporary genocide libel.

Since 7/10, Holocaust memorials in Germany have reported an increase in vandalism and propaganda related to the current Gaza war. Guest books at the Sachsenhausen memorial had to be exchanged because of the rising amount of anti-Israeli comments. Smaller memorials have fallen victim to similar incidents. One of them is on Rosenstraße in Berlin. In August 2024, it was defaced with the slogans “Jews are committing genocide” and “Free Palestine”.rnrnTo understand, why Holocaust memorials have recently become the target of such politically motivated incidents, it is important to understand the broader societal functions of these sites. Memorials do not only educate about the past but play an important role in collective memory. With this in mind, the paper discusses incidents at German Holocaust memorials after 7/10. It argues that the phrase “Free Palestine” on its own should not be understood as antisemitic in general. Yet, it is necessary to take a closer look at the specific circumstances. This paper argues that the location indeed changes the implied meaning of the statement, transforming it into an antisemitic one. Factors such as the equation of Jews and Israel across time and space and the (un)intentionally communicated rejection of Jewish victims in the collective memory in Germany through the mentioned incidents will therefore be addressed among other factors.

Immediately after the genocidal assault  on Israel by Hamas on October 7, the claim began to be heard that the victim rather than the perpetrator was guilty of the crime of genocide. This claim has only gathered momentum since  October 8 and can be heard not only on demonstrations in many cities and on campuses across the world and in various media fora but has even been taken by a small number of states to the International Court of Justice. This is a remarkable and dismaying  development which has ominous implications not only for Jews but also for all victims of actual genocide and even for the legitimacy and future of international law itself, given that the crime of genocide sits at its apex, as the “crime of crimes”.  It needs to be understood both in the context of the ongoing history of antisemitism but also in the context of the histories of the concept of genocide and of genocide itself. In both contexts, what we are witnessing is a profoundly perverse inversion of reality, in which crimes and malevolent motives which are committed  and fantasised by perpetrators and would-be perpetrators are projected onto victims (once again Jews). Although this is not a wholly new phenomenon (it was identified at time of the Holocaust by some of the most thoughtful thinkers of the time, notably Horkheimer and Adorno) it has now reached a new level and threatens to undo all that was achieved ethically, legally and politically after the Holocaust. This paper examines how, when and why this development has taken place and what might be done to reverse it.