The case against Israel before the International Court of Justice will affect how people understand the lessons of the Holocaust
High-profile trials have always been a major factor in promoting awareness of the Holocaust and in encouraging new understandings of its continuing significance.
The complaint brought by South Africa before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) can be expected to have a similar effect. It certainly complicates Israel’s use of the Holocaust as part of its reason of state and as a general justification for even Israel’s most dubious actions, not least of which is the current war on Gaza civilians which is turning into a wider Middle East war.
Trials that have been particularly significant in raising Holocaust awareness include:
Nuremberg war crimes trials (1945-46)
The various Auschwitz Trials over the decades in Poland, East and West Germany, Austria, and military tribunals by Britain France, and the US1
Dachau trials (1945-1948)
Mauthausen main trial (1946)
The “Kastner trial” in Israel (1954-55)2
Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Israel (1960), famously covered by Hannah Arendt in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963)
Franz Murer trial in Austria (1963)
Majdanek trial (1975-1981)
Klaus Barbie trial in France (1987)
Holocaust denier David Irving’s libel suit against historian Deborah Lipstadt, which was made into a movie, Denial (2016) starring Rachel Weisz as Lipstadt
John (Ivan) Demjanjuk trial in Germany (2009)
Understanding the Holocaust is not a static thing
John Mearsheimer after hearing South Africa’s oral presentation to the IJC commented:
No matter what happens in terms of the ruling or the decision of the court, this is a disaster for Israel. Because the evidence was presented ... all in one place in a very clear and compelling manner. And it is disastrous for Israel, there's just no question about it.
Anybody who sits down and watches the three hours and sixteen minutes of testimony can't help but think there's something fundamentally wrong in Israel. Just listening to what Israeli leaders are saying about the Palestinians, just looking at what they're doing, to the population, the civilian population in Gaza, it's horrible. So this is a huge problem.
But the more important point is: it's not going away. Its not like this is going to be resolved in the International Court of Justice, and then that’s the end of it. This is going to go on and on and on.3
This means that much of the world will hear Israeli narratives about Israel itself in a different way, including how Israel presents the meaning and significance of the Holocaust in justifying its own actions.
Trials have always played a significant role in the way the public understands the events of the Holocaust. Israeli historian Tom Segev focused on how Israeli views of the Holocaust and its significance for Israel itself evolved, and discusses the Kastner and Eichmann trials at some length in The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust (1993).
Norman Finkelstein also discusses the significance of the Holocaust for Israel and how that understanding evolved in the decades after 1945 in both Israel and the US in The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering (2000). The prominence of the Holocaust for Israel’s collective self-understanding and its use as a justification for contemporary Israeli policies increased significantly after the Six-Day War in 1967 and the 1973 war with Egypt. The same in true in the US, as Finkelstein explains, relying heavily on Nozick’s The Holocaust in American Life (1999).
The general historical and political understanding of the Holocaust has also been heavily influenced by the actual scholarly understanding of the event - also known as the Shoah - as well as by popular treatments of the topic.
One of the notable landmarks was the publication of Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews in 1961. It seems surprising today, but:
It is largely held to be the first comprehensive historical study of the Holocaust. According to Holocaust historian, Michael R. Marrus (The Holocaust in History), until the book appeared, little information about the genocide of the Jews by Nazi Germany had "reached the wider public" in both the West and the East, and even in pertinent scholarly studies it was "scarcely mentioned or only mentioned in passing as one more atrocity in a particularly cruel war".4 [my emphasis]
The 1978 TV mini-series Holocaust made a big impression on German audiences when it was broadcast there, and stimulated a new round of discussion of the event.
A third of West Germany's population, some 20 million people, watched at least some of the four-part series in 1979. …
[The] Holocaust [mini-series] tells the story of a fictional Jewish family - Josef Weiss, a successful Berlin doctor, and his wife and children - charting their tragic journey from bourgeois affluence to the gas chambers.
A parallel story focuses on Erik Dorf, an unemployed lawyer, who is initially apolitical, but gets a job with Hitler's SS and becomes part of the Nazi killing machine.
The series sparked a national debate. Surveys show that 86% of viewers discussed the Holocaust with friends or family after watching the programme.5
Schindler’s List (1993) also had the effect of increasing public interest and discussion of the actual history of the Holocaust in the US and Europe.
And there were controversies about academic works that attracted wider attention. What became known as the Historikerstreit (historian’s controversy) broke out over claims by German historian Ernest Nolte in 1986 that the Holocaust was actually caused by Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union because they set an example with the prison camps of the Gulag. Jürgen Habermas published an essay rightly criticizing Nolte’s claim as Holocaust revisionism. “Joe Stalin made the Nazis kill the Jews” would be at best a very small step away from outright justifying the Holocaust as necessary to stop the Bolshevik-Jewish conspiracy Hitler claimed to be fighting.
This dispute grew with prominent historians of Germany weighing in on the matter and dealing with such implications as how to understand German responsibility for the Holocaust and to what extent the Holocaust was a “singular” or “unique” event. The question of the correct approach to comparing the Holocaust to other instances of mass murder like the Armenian Genocide became and remains a particular touchy issue for academics, politicians, and the public.
In the 1990s, a book by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners (1996), set off a new round of impassioned discussion that came to be called the “Goldhagen controversy.” Although it set off a great deal of discussion, the book’s reputation did not fare well among other historians. Although it attracted an unusual amount of popular interest for such a book, his sweeping arguments about the nature of German “eliminationist” anti-Semitism didn’t hold up well to scrutiny. And his own quirky arguments in defending the book didn’t make his contentions more convincing.
It did generate a new round of analysis and discussion featuring scholars like Omer Bartov and Christopher Browning.6 I first became aware of Norman Finkelstein from his essay in A Nation on Trial: The Goldhagen Thesis and Historical Truth (1998). The book includes a separate essay by Ruth Bettina Birn, then a chief historian in the war-crimes division of Canada’s Department of Justice, who questioned Goldhagen’s methodology in analyzing source material in an archive with which she was intimately familiar:
In response to their book, Goldhagen sought a retraction and apology from Birn, threatening her at one point to sue her for libel, and, according to Slate, declaring Finkelstein "a supporter of Hamas". The force of the counterattacks against Birn and Finkelstein from Goldhagen's supporters was described by Israeli journalist Tom Segev as "bordering on cultural terrorism ... The Jewish establishment has embraced Goldhagen as if he were Mr Holocaust himself ... All this is absurd, because the criticism of Goldhagen is backed up so well."7
While it was not nearly so broad as the Goldhagen-related one, there was also a “Finkelstein controversy” over his Holocaust Industry book. The Jewish son of Holocaust survivors, who is also a sharp critic of the Zionist ideology itself, Finkelstein is not one to shy away from controversy. And he takes an unsentimental view of what he judges to be inappropriate instrumentalization of the Holocaust.
Postcolonialism, BDS, and “settler colonialism”
More recently, public disputes over the political demands of the BDS (boycott, divestment, sanctions) movement has been defined by some governmental bodies in Europe and the US as inherently antisemitic, even with penalties imposed on anyone who supports it. While BDS is referred to as a coherent movement, it’s actually a diverse collection of different groups which do not operate as a unified organization and who seek to pressure Israel to change discriminatory policies against Palestinians using the approach the South African anti-apartheid movement.
The anti-BDS position has also come to overlap with controversies over “postcolonial” critiques of Israel and the Zionist ideology. The Cameroonian scholar Achille Mbembe became the target of a controversy in Germany in 2020:
Achille Mbembe has been accused of anti-Semitism and hatred of Israel, allegations that are extremely serious in Germany.
The debate was triggered by the business-oriented Free Democratic Party (FDP) on March 25, when the group spokesperson of the party's North Rhine-Westphalian faction, Lorenz Deutsch, criticized Stefanie Carp, director of the Ruhrtriennale, for inviting Achille Mbembe to give a speech at the opening of the major international cultural festival held every year in Bochum.
Mbembe had signed a petition by the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, a pro-Palestinian campaign that has been declared anti-Semitic in Germany. Stefanie Carp was also put in the spotlight as a repeat offender, as she had made the same mistake two years earlier by inviting the Scottish band Young Fathers, official BDS supporters.8
History as an academic enterprise is not hermetically sealed off from politics or popular understandings of personal and social identity. But especially over the last two decades, historians have been giving increased emphasis to the history of colonialism and its lasting implication in both former colonies (the periphery) and the colonizing powers (metropoles). And other fields including philosophy have also been applying that perspective.
Ato Quayson defines the concept this way:
[Postcolonialism] involves a studied engagement with the experience of colonialism and its past and present effects at the levels of material culture and of representation. Postcolonialism often involves the discussion of experiences such as those of slavery, migration, suppression and resistance, difference, race, gender, place and analysis of the responses to the discourses of imperial Europe, such as history, philosophy, anthropology and linguistics. … [I]mperialism and colonialism proper are as much the subject of postcolonialism as those coming after the historical end of colonialism, postcolonialism allows for a wide range of applications and a constant interplay between the sense of a historical transition, a cultural location and an epochal condition. … Both are frequently linked to the continuing power and authority of the West in the global political, economic and symbolic spheres and the ways in which resistance to, appropriation of and negotiation with the West’s order are prosecuted. … Because it has its source in past and continuing oppression, postcolonialism furthermore has affinities with multicultural, feminist, and gay and lesbian studies.9 [my emphasis]
In other words, Western fans of the far right from Trumpistas to Orban fans immediately pigeonhole the whole idea of postcolonialism is a symptom of what they like to call Wokeness. Which they really don’t like.
Duncan Ivison defines the term this way:
Postcolonialism [is] the historical period or state of affairs representing the aftermath of Western colonialism; the term can also be used to describe the concurrent project to reclaim and rethink the history and agency of people subordinated under various forms of imperialism. Postcolonialism signals a possible future of overcoming colonialism, yet new forms of domination or subordination can come in the wake of such changes, including new forms of global empire. Postcolonialism should not be confused with the claim that the world we live in now is actually devoid of colonialism.
Postcolonial theorists and historians have been concerned with investigating the various trajectories of modernity as understood and experienced from a range of philosophical, cultural, and historical perspectives. They have been particularly concerned with engaging with the ambiguous legacy of the Enlightenment—as expressed in social, political, economic, scientific, legal, and cultural thought—beyond Europe itself. The legacy is ambiguous, according to postcolonial theorists, because the age of Enlightenment was also an age of empire, and the connection between those two historical epochs is more than incidental.10
Since the current hot war in Israel-Gaza began on October 7, we’ve heard quite a lot about how supporters of Netanyahu’s government really dislike the idea of looking at Israel as a “settler-colonial” project. This is actually an important concept in postcolonial studies. There were colonies in which the colonizing power only sought to control enclaves but weren’t focused on completely driving out the indigenous population. Much of the European colonial practice in the 19th and 20th centuries in Asia and Africa was of this type.
Historian Rashid Khalidi of Colombia University discusses the concept of settler colonialism as it relates to Israel in this presentation11:
In settler-colonialism, the colonizing power sought to displace or eliminate the autochthonous (native) population. Spain, England, and France largely took this approach in their conquests of the Americas, Australia, and New Zealand. So did the United States and Canada in their own westward expansions.
Israel’s settlement by Jews largely from Europe and also from other Middle Eastern countries eventually involved massive immediate displacement of Palestinian Arabs in the War of Independence in 1948 and the Nakba, the forcing of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes and territory. Netanyahu’s government has been given strong indications of their desire for another massive expulsion, this time of the two million Palestinians in Gaza. This is definitely a process that is part of settler colonialism.
One of the ironies of Netanyahu’s partisans objecting to calling Israel a “settler-colonial” nation is that the Jewish Israelis who move into the West Bank and take houses and land from Palestinian residents are called settlers by the Israeli government, the politicians, and the press. The areas where they live are called settlements.
Postcolonial perspectives also bring up comparisons of colonial practices with what happened in the Holocaust and look for continuities between those events. That then touches on issues raised in the Historikerstreit and the Goldhagen controversy about how to understand the uniqueness of the Holocaust itself. And raises concerns that other atrocities by colonial nations may be instrumentalized to feed into Holocaust-denier narratives by minimizing the actual significant of the Holocaust.
Just as with the Holocaust, history and philosophical perspective and the polemics of immediate political concerns can and do blend into one another. And sorting through what various statements made by contending parties mean can be a challenge. And it requires some understanding of the frameworks behind them.
Trials of SS men from the Auschwitz Concentration Camp garrison. Auschwitz*Birkenau Memorial and Museum n/d. <https://www.auschwitz.org/en/history/the-ss-garrison/trials-of-ss-men-from-the-auschwitz-concentration-camp-garrison/> Accessed: 2024-14-01).
Jones, Stacy (1997): Israeli trial colors political feelings more than 40 years later. Emory Report 50:5 09/22/1997.<https://www.emory.edu/EMORY_REPORT/erarchive/1997/September/erseptember.22/9_22_97Lahav.html> (Accessed: 2024-14-01).
Prof. John Mearsheimer: Not a war crime, but GENOCIDE. Judge Napolitan-Judging Freedom YouTube channel 01/11/2024 30:00ff in video). <https://www.youtube.com/live/n3GmgMa-4ac?si=5yLilV4SYl7WCWO5> (Accessed: 2024-14-01).
The Destruction of the European Jews. ++ 11/22/2023. <https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Destruction_of_the_European_Jews&oldid=1186296580> (Accessed: 2024-14-01).
Holocaust: How a US TV series changed Germany. BBC News 01/30/2019. <https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-47042244> (Accessed: 2024-14-01).
A number of essays are collected in: Shandley, Robert, ed. (1998): Unwilling Germany? The Goldhagen Debate. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Ruth Bettina Birn. Wikipedia 05/23/2022. <https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ruth_Bettina_Birn&oldid=1089367369> (Accessed: 2024-14-01).
Peschal, Sabine (2020): Why Achille Mbembe was accused of anti-Semitism. Deutsche Welle 04/30/2020. <https://www.dw.com/en/why-achille-mbembe-was-accused-of-anti-semitism/a-53293797> (Accessed: 2024-14-01).
Quayson, Ato (1998): Postcolonialism. Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. <https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/thematic/postcolonialism/v-1> (Accessed: 2024-14-01).
Ivison, Duncan (2023): Postcolonialism: Historical Period. Britannica Online 12/07/2023. <https://www.britannica.com/topic/postcolonialism> (Accessed: 2024-14-01).
The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017. Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs YouTube channel 03/06/2020. (Accessed: 2024-15-01).