The Brooklyn Rail

How could the genocide of the Jews of Europe have happened? In the aftermath of the war it was generally explained as due to some moral or political peculiarity of the Germans. Indeed, when Hannah Arendt coined the phrase “the banality of evil” to describe the work of the bureaucrat Adolf Eichmann, many objected to what seemed a downplaying of the special darkness of the German soul. In 1992, however, historian Christopher Browning published Ordinary Men, a study of a German killing battalion that, basically, showed that its participants were less fanatical, antisemitic Nazis than regular guys following orders. Browning’s explanation rested on Stanley Milgram’s “obedience” experiment for evidence of a modern human tendency—exemplified in this case by American college students—to obey orders, however repulsive, given by authorities. Four years later, Daniel Goldhagen replied with Hitler’s Willing Executioners, claiming that genocidal antisemitism was an historically unique feature of German identity, a secularization of medieval Christian prejudice. Goldhagen received a Harvard professorship for his contribution, but Browning (and many others) remained unconvinced.

Perhaps one reason we’ve heard less about this scholarly disagreement lately (although like all such academic quarrels it continues) is the widening awareness of the history of genocide and its place in social and economic history. Even in the case of the Germans, medieval prejudice seems irrelevant to explaining their near-extermination of the Herero and Nama of southwest Africa in the early twentieth century. This example, though only recently a topic of historical discussion and (minimal) official recognition by the German state, has joined a widening list of ethnic cleansings and killings, with the Armenian genocide, the mass killings of the Tutsi in 1994, and the mutual atrocities perpetrated by the groups into which the former Yugoslavia fell apart. In the meantime, it had been widely recognized that the extermination of Native American peoples in the course of the nineteenth-century expansion of the United States was, in terms of sheer numbers, perhaps the greatest genocide of all time—something long known to the peoples concerned, of course. Even many of the world’s Holocaust Museums and Centers, originally dedicated to the cult of the Shoah, have come to include some of these other historical genocides in their exhibits and websites.

Still, the German assault on the Jews has remained “the” Holocaust. Hence the particular power of the example given by the Israel Defense Forces as they proceed methodically to the total destruction of Gaza and Palestinian-occupied areas of the West Bank. Now it is the official chief victims of World War II—an event long reduced in American primary-school education, for example, to the story of Anne Frank—who are playing the Nazi role. Right-wing creeps like New York Times opinion writer Bret Stephens can go on about the tragedy of civilian deaths in all wars (even the deaths of Germans and Japanese in World War II, sadly required for the defense of freedom).¹ But this won’t fly in the face of the scale and strategic intention of the killing in Gaza, largely of women and children; the total destruction of housing, infrastructure, medical, and cultural institutions; and now the purposeful mass starvation of the remains of the population, forcibly concentrated in the south of the Strip, with hundreds shot to death as they queue for food. Stephens complains that the Israelis aren’t killing enough people for it to count as a “real” genocide, adding his bit to the ongoing dispute about the correct term for the Israelis’ atrocities, as if the correct nomenclature might alter the significance of events. It seems truer to say that they’re just getting started. The Nazis took years, after all, to organize and carry out the deaths of millions of Jews, Roma, homosexuals, Communists, and others; the concentration camp promised for south Gaza by the US- and Israeli-financed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation hasn’t even been built yet, and the official talk is still of expulsion, though—as with the European Jews of yesterday—no one wants to take the Palestinians in.

On the governmental level, this state of affairs has led to meaningless equivocations, as in UK Prime Minster Kier Starmer’s declaration that Britain will recognize a Palestinian government if a truce is not declared in the near future (thus doing his part to promote the fiction that what is going on is basically a war between Israel and Hamas). At the same time, the Starmer government has criminalized anti-genocide protest as “terrorism,” handing down stiff sentences for activists of the group Palestine Action who have invaded British military installations and attempted to interfere with war materiel manufactured in England for the use of the IDF. Merely voicing support for Palestine Action has been declared an act of terrorism, with appropriate sanctions, and quite a few people have been arrested for this crime.²

Anyone interested in Western nations’ complicity with Israel’s actions should consult the well-researched report by Francesca Albanese, the UN Human Rights Council’s special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, “From Economy of Occupation to Economy of Genocide.”³ It details both the use made of the occupied territories in the development of the Israeli economy since 1967, and the vast sums being collected by corporations around the world for supplying Israel with the means of death and destruction. Along with the makers of tanks, warplanes, drones, and other military goods, they include ostensibly non-military businesses such as Microsoft, IBM, Alphabet, Amazon, and old-fashioned companies like Caterpillar, whose machines are put to work demolishing Palestinian homes and public buildings.⁴ Albanese’s detailing of the role of American universities in the obliteration of Palestine provides at least some of the explanation for the vicious reaction of academic authorities to anti-genocide protests. The world is not just standing by as Israel pursues its murderous course—it is making money.

The intended Final Solution was carried out in the relative isolation of occupied Poland during a World War; internationally, few knew about it, and the governments that had been informed largely ignored the systematic destruction of the Jews and other groups until the last moment. The Allied troops who came upon Auschwitz and Treblinka were shocked by conditions they had not anticipated and could not have imagined. In contrast, Israel’s campaign of ethnic cleansing and mass killing is being carried on in the open, reported on daily (though in the US with nothing like the bracing frankness of Haaretz). It is the first livestreamed genocide, readily available on social media, rendering it exponentially more present to the eye and mind than even the televised war in Vietnam. One cheering result has been the constant and now spreading protest throughout the “free world”—of which Israel has been such an exemplary part—despite the efforts of governments and other social authorities to repress it. As often, the protestors speak for a wider group of people; in the US, the customary, reflexively—if superficially—pro-Israel sentiments of the population have given way to critical views.⁵ If under the right circumstances ordinary men and women can be induced to carry out genocidal policies, other equally ordinary people, it turns out, don’t go for the deliberate starvation of children and the bombing of hospitals.

Something like Milgram’s point is again confirmed: people require some official authority to be induced to participate, with whatever degree of enthusiasm, in the now-banal evils demanded by the modern nation-state. There is food for hope in this as well as for despair.