Controversy over the accusation that “Hamas” is a Nazi organization and questions about whether Gaza is witnessing genocide

At a time when the majority of Israeli citizens support their army in its insane war on the Gaza Strip, and accept the official narrative that it came in response to Hamas’s “brutal attack” on civilians in Jewish towns in the Gaza Strip on October 7, Israeli historians are divided among themselves. Some of them sided with the official story, while the other group stood sharply against it, refusing to compare anything to Nazism and warning of the consequences of the disasters that Israel is causing to the people of the Gaza Strip.

Researcher Ofer Aderet, writing in Haaretz newspaper on Thursday, considered this discussion vital even though the war has not yet ended, as dozens of senior historians are participating in it and conducting their discussions in English, in front of the whole world. The discussions revolve mainly, at this stage, about the level of Israel's responsibility for the war, or whether it is committing genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza, or whether Hamas can actually be compared to the Nazis or the October 7 massacre to the Nazi Holocaust.

The debate among historians was opened with a letter published last month in the American magazine “New York Review of Books” entitled “An Open Letter on the Misuse of the Memory of the Holocaust,” in which the signatories of the letter rejected official Israeli statements describing “Hamas” and its attack as Nazism.

The letter stated: “We are writing to express dissatisfaction and disappointment with prominent leaders and prominent public figures who invoke the memory of the Holocaust to explain the current crisis in Gaza and in Israel.” By these figures, as it later became clear in the letter, they meant Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Gilad Erdan, who placed a yellow patch (a patch that was placed to distinguish Jews during the time of German Nazism), on which he wrote, “This will not be repeated forever” in the General Assembly. US President Joe Biden, who said: “Hamas has committed unprecedented, horrific acts since the disaster,” and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who constantly repeats that “Hamas are neo-Nazis.”

These historians call for refraining from referring to Hamas' crimes as a disaster and Hamas as Nazism. They said: “The effect of such statements is an escalation of political discourse, dehumanization of the Palestinians, and taking the historical situation out of its context.” They added: “In the current disproportionate confrontation in Gaza, these statements are being used to justify the commission of war crimes. If the current war is considered a battle between “the Sons of Light” and “the Sons of Darkness,” between “the Illuminati” and “the barbarians,” between “the Jews” and “the Nazis,” then any violent act will be justified on the grounds that it came to prevent another catastrophe.” According to them, this rhetoric encourages Israel to “kill thousands of innocent people, systematically destroy cities and refugee camps, and turn most of the population in Gaza into refugees.” The authors of the article warned that using certain language against Hamas and the Palestinians could incite racism and Islamophobia. They said: Attaching the “neo-Nazi” slogan to Hamas men attributes harsh anti-Semitic motives to those who defend the rights of Palestinians.

Prominent among the signatories of the letter was Professor Omer Bartov (69 years old), who was born in Israel and obtained a doctorate from Oxford. Since 2000 he has been teaching history at Brown University on Long Island. The article was also signed by Professor Amos Goldberg, Head of the Institute for Research in Contemporary Judaism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Professor Alon Confino, Director of the Institute for the Study of Holocaust and Genocide at the University of Massachusetts Amherst (grandson of Ida Cerny, one of the heads of the Mossad, which was appointed by the Prime Minister, Levi Eshkol, in 1967, the mission to displace the people of Gaza to Jordan), and American historian Christopher Browning, author of the book “Ordinary People.”

The letter also stated that comparing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with the extermination of the Jewish people at the hands of Nazi Germany is “an intellectual and moral failure with serious consequences.” Among other things, it erases the historical relevance of the conflict: 75 years of displacement, 56 years of occupation, and 16 years of siege on Gaza. They stressed the difference, in their opinion, between “Hamas” and Nazism, pointing out that “the Third Reich was a state built on an extremist terrorist system, and for a long period it was the most powerful military superpower in Europe, which controlled a land empire and adopted a policy of absolute destruction against the Jews. The Jews in Europe and North Africa did not pose any military threat to Germany in any way, but rather they were a fragile minority with no effective ability to defend themselves,” they wrote. They described Hamas, on the other hand, as “a completely different phenomenon.” They explained: “The Gaza Strip is one of the most crowded and poorest places in the world, which according to most international institutions remains under occupation. It is subject to siege and completely dependent on Israel.”

The signatories of the letter implicitly said: A more correct comparison could place Israel ahead of Nazi Germany. “Israel is the most powerful country in the region.” They added: “The attack on October 7, despite its brutality, did not pose any existential threat to the State of Israel.”

This letter sparked anger, and 33 other historians were recruited to write a response letter, headed by Jeffrey Herf and Norman Gooda, which they published under the title: “Is the history of Nazism and the Holocaust a useful comparison point for Hamas’ crimes, or is it a false analogy?” They began the article as follows: “On October 7, Hamas committed a deliberate campaign of mass murder, rape, torture, and kidnapping against Israel. This was not the Holocaust, but this was the most mass and significant killing of Jews since the Holocaust. Finding common characteristics and differences between historical events has always been vital to understanding the past and present. The claim that Hamas is a current expression of ideas behind a long legacy of Jew hatred, racism, and terrorism is not exaggerated and does not involve any misuse, whether of history or the memory of the Holocaust.

In contrast to their friends who completely reject the comparison between “Hamas” and Nazism, they wrote explicitly in this article that “from an intellectual standpoint, there is a Nazi connection to (Hamas).” They talked about the leakage of anti-Semitic Nazism into the Middle East before and during the disaster, and about the cooperation that the Nazis obtained from Muslim officers. They talked about “the confusion between Jewish-Islamic and European hatred” and said: “This began with the (Muslim Brotherhood) and Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini, and it continues with (Hamas), which is itself an extension of the (Muslim Brotherhood) movement.” The researchers quoted from the Hamas charter about “the elimination of the Jewish state.” They described it as “full of the vicious hatred of Jews by the Muslim Brotherhood on the one hand, and full of Nazi conspiracy theories on the other hand.”

They also criticized the historical narrative behind the article written by their comrades, which presents the Nakba and occupation as the background to the October 7 massacre. “None of us is saying that Israeli governments have had no role in making bad decisions in recent years,” as they wrote. But whoever searches the archives for the history of Israel and the Arab-Israeli conflict cannot claim that only Israel is guilty of this situation.” The authors of the article used the concept of “barbarians” about “Hamas” after October 7. They explained that it correctly describes Hamas' crimes on that day.

The letter attacked Bartuf and his colleagues’ claim that it is not possible to compare Hamas with the Nazis. Because the Nazis, unlike Hamas, had a state. They wrote: “Hamas has had a state in Gaza for 17 years, five years longer than the Nazis ruled in Germany. Like any dictatorship, Hamas has a monopoly on legislation, media, and the use of force. Gaza is a civil society also threatened by Hamas. But there are also supporters of Hamas. According to the basic documents of Hamas, Israel is an intolerable minority in the Islamic world.

As a result, Israeli researchers into the disaster, including Professor Yehuda Bauer, Professor Hafi Dreyfus, and Professor David Zilberkling from Yad Wasim, contributed to the discussion. They published a letter in the Jewish Chronicle newspaper and wrote: “History does not repeat itself. The events of October 7, no matter how terrible, are different from a Hamas disaster, whatever its murderous ideology and the unconscionable atrocities it has committed, should not be considered a modern clone of the Nazis.”

But these researchers disagreed with Bartuf and his colleagues on other points, and wrote that there are fundamental differences between Hamas and Israel. Hamas deliberately attacks civilians, while the other side wants to reduce the number of civilian casualties, even if, unfortunately, its efforts are not always successful, they said.

Bartov returned to publish another article in the New York Times in which he called on institutions researching the Holocaust, such as Yad Vashem and the Holocaust Museum in Washington, to warn against “rhetoric full of anger and revenge,” which leads to the demonization of the Palestinians, and to warn against Israel’s involvement in War “crimes” war, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing and the genocide of a people.” The article concluded with, “So far we have time to stop Israel from turning these actions into the genocide of a people.”

Source: Alsharq Alawsat