Writing History After Gaza — with Omer Bartov

00:00:00: Hi, my name is Tobias Haberkorn and you're listening to the Berlin Review Podcast.

00:00:09: In early October, we invited the Holocaust and genocide scholar Oma Bartow

00:00:12: to Germany.

00:00:14: He was a much-demoted speaker at events in Frankfurt and Hamburg.

00:00:17: He gave a keynote at a genocide conference at Humboldt University.

00:00:21: And together with a Palestinian human rights lawyer, Ahmed Abu Foul, he sold out Houth Theatre with a talk on international law and the destruction of Gaza.

00:00:29: Eventually I also wanted to take a moment and talk to Omer about his personal trajectory as an Israeli historian of the Holocaust who has become in the last two years one of the most influential and decisive international voices against genocide in Gaza.

00:00:46: I'm glad that Literaturhaus Berlin hosted us publicly and I want to share our conversation with you.

00:00:54: If this is the first time you hear about Berlin Review please check out our website blnreview.de and see the original writing we published there.

00:01:05: We're an independent magazine for book reviews and political commentary.

00:01:09: We publish in German and in English.

00:01:12: And you'll also find two of Omer's recent pieces there.

00:01:16: His latest is on denialism.

00:01:18: and on how German and Israeli post-Holocaust, post-Nakba psychologies map onto their current relation to Gaza.

00:01:28: This, of course, was also a topic of our conversation at Literaturhaus, so please listen in and enjoy.

00:01:38: Omer is a professor at Brown University in the United States of Holocaust and Genocide Studies.

00:01:45: Omer was born in Israel in.

00:01:50: I think we can say we're a proudly Zionist and that's also part of your history and we can talk about that later.

00:01:57: And he did his military service during the Yom Kippur War in nineteen seventy-three and had some shelling experience first hand in the trenches near the Golan Heights, you told me.

00:02:10: And maybe also because of that he first became a military historian and he made his name in the field of history.

00:02:19: in the nineteen eighties and nineties where he was very important very important specialist for the military history of the Second World War in the Wehrmacht and did his part to debunk the myth of the moral purity of the Wehrmacht because the ordinary soldiers and the ordinary German army was way more implicated in war crimes and genocidal action than was many Germans wanted to believe at the time.

00:02:48: Omer has an extremely important bibliography of published books, which I will not recite.

00:02:54: The two most recent ones that were published at Zurkamp are a study on the hometown of his mother's family.

00:03:03: His mother was born in Galicia in a town named Buchach, and Omer wrote a sort of social history of how it was possible that people had cohabitated.

00:03:17: for centuries suddenly set out to deport or even in some cases slaughter their neighbors because they were Jewish.

00:03:27: So this is a very important book and another one he published recently and that's reflective of your most recent turn in your work with Zoukamp Falak, Ginozid Holocaust and Israel-Palestina.

00:03:39: So for a couple of years now you've been concerned with the history of Israel and Palestine and of course a lot of news happened about Gaza since you landed in Germany, so the entire past week was quite intense.

00:04:03: The ceasefire seems to hold, the IDF seems to withdraw to the demarcation line and My first question to you to set out is what does the historian maybe see today in the current situation that the political observers and human rights activists maybe do not see?

00:04:30: Thank you and first of all thank you all for being here.

00:04:34: Thank you for hosting this event.

00:04:36: Thank you Tobias has been hosting me in more than one event.

00:04:42: Very grateful for your own participation in this.

00:04:47: It's an honor.

00:04:50: Yeah, it's a good question.

00:04:56: We obviously don't know where this is heading.

00:04:59: We do know that most of the people involved in this particular plan are not really good faith actors.

00:05:12: President Trump is not necessarily particularly concerned with the fate of Palestinians.

00:05:21: Prime Minister Netanyahu, by all reports, was forced into this agreement, did not want it.

00:05:30: There are people on the team, such as Jared Kushner, who may well be more interested in real estate than in peace.

00:05:39: So in that sense, What you're seeing is a very good first result, meaning that the killing is stopped, and that's the most important thing.

00:05:54: And that there is some vague plan, but a plan not simply to cease the killing and the shooting, but also to potentially change the political paradigm.

00:06:11: and yet one where the actors themselves highly suspect.

00:06:19: And if you try to think about it historically, it's certainly not the first time that good things may be accomplished by not particularly good actors and at times against the will.

00:06:37: And I think... When I think about that, I think that you have two layers here.

00:06:45: One is of people who have been trying to change this, who have been active in Europe, in the United States, in part in Israel, to stop the killing, to draw attention to the horrors in Gaza, and that they played a role in bringing this about.

00:07:07: And then you have... political actors who have their own motivations which usually have nothing to do with that and in part are swayed by that public to do the right thing at this particular moment.

00:07:25: But we can't expect them to continue without ongoing pressure on them.

00:07:32: We can't be sure that at any moment this whole thing will either collapse that Netanyahu will try to sabotage it.

00:07:43: He certainly will try.

00:07:47: The fighting will return.

00:07:48: So this is a moment that can be used to begin a much more greater transformation or it can be merely a welcome but very temporary pause.

00:08:03: Yeah.

00:08:05: I forgot to... say something about the technical aspect of tonight.

00:08:08: We will have like a small hour of discussion between Omer and I and I think every one of you has received a QR code where you can type in questions because we will take questions at the end of the panel, I shall say that.

00:08:23: So in regard to the pressure aspect that you mentioned, eventually it was or is Donald Trump not a particularly benevolent actor on the world stage who is pushing this, who seems to be pushing this through.

00:08:43: What is the lesson?

00:08:45: maybe to learn about that?

00:08:48: Well, you know, I have been living in the United States for a long time.

00:08:55: President Trump is causing extraordinary damage.

00:09:03: in the United States of the kind that even after he leaves office will have long-term repercussions.

00:09:14: He is wrecking the university system in the United States.

00:09:18: He's attacking universities including my own.

00:09:21: He's causing major damage to the legal system.

00:09:26: He's hijacked the Justice Department in ways that have not happened at least since President Nixon.

00:09:35: And so the irony here is that someone of his character, which in many ways is this sort of mafioso type of politics, can become at a particular moment in a particular region very effective and more effective than the kinds of people who have been American presidents who could never quite put their foot down to get it right.

00:10:11: Now again, he has a very short attention span, so we don't know whether he will continue this.

00:10:17: He may just forget about it.

00:10:20: After all, Only a few months ago he met with Netanyahu and said well we have to remove the population of Gaza Entirely so we can rebuild it and maybe they'll be able to come back or not?

00:10:31: So he basically licensed ethnic cleansing which was picked up by the Israeli government and its supporters in Israel right away.

00:10:39: Yeah, and now he's talking in very different terms.

00:10:45: So It is a lesson that you can have someone like Trump who, because of his nature, can come to Netanyahu and tell him what President Biden could have told him in November or December, and did not.

00:11:03: That is, you have to stop this in the next two weeks, and if you don't, you're on your own.

00:11:10: Meaning, you will have no more arms, you will have no more economic support, and most importantly, you will not have the US veto power in the Security Council.

00:11:21: He could have done that, and he could have stopped it, and he didn't.

00:11:25: And Trump, because of his nature, because Netanyahu knows that, could come to Netanyahu and say, obviously that's what he did.

00:11:35: You have to stop now.

00:11:37: Yeah, and speaking of that, you've been writing for the New York Times and all the... many important English-speaking outlets, I believe since November, on the question of whether or not this is a genocide that is preparing or maybe already happening in Gaza.

00:11:59: And then you came to the conclusion, I believe, in May, when there was the attack and when the IDF was moving into Rafah, where hundreds of thousands of Gazans at this point were... taking shelter and being displaced.

00:12:16: and now we're one and a half years after that offensive.

00:12:21: so you've been you've been claiming and saying that this is in your judgment as a historian and as an expert at genocide for one and a half years now and this debate of course is extremely heated everywhere but especially here and as late as early September very important commentator, staff writer of the Süddeutsche Zeitung, his name is Ronin Steinke.

00:12:49: And he's a band who speaks with some authority.

00:12:52: He's a great expert on antisemitism in Germany, published several books.

00:12:57: He's German-Jewish.

00:12:58: He has a PhD in international law, I think.

00:13:03: And he concluded his article that... You know, there's this uncertainty about the eventual judgment of the International Court of Justice, who will then one day decide whether this was a genocide.

00:13:20: And he concluded that those activists who think that you should use the term, if only to put maximum pressure for the killing to stop, that's how activists speak, but that should not be how journalists or scientists speak.

00:13:37: What would you respond to him?

00:13:41: Look, I mean, the man, as he says, an expert and he's definitely entitled to his opinion.

00:13:49: You have to understand, the ICJ, whatever it will rule, could take another year or two.

00:13:58: The genocide convention is called the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.

00:14:07: and all state signatories, including Germany, Israel, and the United States, when they sign that, what they committed themselves to do is that if they see a threat of genocide, or they see genocide unfolding, they do not have to wait for the ICJ, which obviously will rule only after everything happened, they have to act right away.

00:14:33: In fact, the Genocide Convention is a very peculiar legal part of international law because, first of all, it's about protection of groups and not of individuals.

00:14:52: And the whole drift of international law after World War II was about protection of individuals, partly because of the experience with Nazi Germany in the interwar period.

00:15:03: The Nazi Germany said they wanted to protect ethnic Germans in other countries, and that gave it license to go and invade other countries.

00:15:11: And therefore, there was a reluctance to continue with the protection of groups.

00:15:18: But Rafa Lemkin, who had come up with the concept of genocide in the nineteen thirties, thinking about the genocide of the Armenians, claimed and persuaded.

00:15:29: eventually the international community that that attempt to destroy a particular group as such is something that has to be legislated in international, as an international convention.

00:15:43: It's also peculiar this convention in that it allows states to interfere in the affairs of other states, of sovereign states, because genocide does not have to happen in an international war.

00:15:57: it can happen within your own country.

00:16:00: That is what most countries do know.

00:16:02: what to accept, that another country could become involved in their affairs because it is killing members of its own population.

00:16:11: And in fact, President Putin used that very idea to try and justify his invasion, completely illegal invasion, of Ukraine by saying, well, the Ukrainians were committing genocide against ethnic Russians in Ukraine.

00:16:27: And yet the convention allows for intervention of states in the affairs of other states if they are committing such a crime.

00:16:37: So if you wait for the ICJ or as President Macron said, he had another version of saying that let's wait for the historians to judge.

00:16:49: You're basically reneging on your own responsibility, whether it's a politician or someone if this particular individual has a public voice on drawing attention to the responsibility of countries to act.

00:17:06: Acting only after the event, the most that you can do is to punish the culprits.

00:17:12: But the event itself will happen.

00:17:14: So I don't think it's a matter of activists.

00:17:19: And I have to say that when I wrote that what I understood was genocide, that what I understood was that Israel was carrying out genocide in Gaza.

00:17:30: I wrote that in August of twenty twenty four.

00:17:33: At the time, this was a disputed opinion.

00:17:36: There were those who agreed and those who did not agree.

00:17:39: By the end of twenty twenty four, this was becoming a consensus among genocide scholars and experts in international law by now.

00:17:50: It's very hard, you find one, but it's very hard to find experts in genocide and international law who would make that statement.

00:18:01: Yeah, and in terms of the history of the term genocide, there's also those who say war crimes, yes, crimes against humanity, yes, those are two legal concepts that are older than the concept of genocide.

00:18:14: The concept of war crimes was even formed and coded before the First World War in the Geneva Convention.

00:18:22: And crimes against humanity, meaning mass killings of civilians outside the context of war, was a concept that was very important and was first codified legally in the charter of the Nuremberg trials.

00:18:39: But genocide, although the concept was laid out by Lemkin in nineteen forty-four, was not part of the Nuremberg trials and in fact has a interesting legal history since because it was only used in cases against either states or individuals after the fall of the Soviet Union in the nineteen nineties.

00:19:01: Can you speak a little bit about Maybe the reasons why genocide was not part of Nuremberg and how this notion evolved up to this day?

00:19:12: Yes, so so it is.

00:19:14: you know I kind of go through the whole history because we'll spend the entire evening talking about this but it is true that already in the in the Hague in nineteen oh seven and actually even in Eighteen ninety nine their agreements about the treatment of prisoners of war and later of civilian populations and that later gets codified also in the Geneva Convention of twenty nine and forty nine.

00:19:43: So these are first attempts to regulate warfare.

00:19:48: They obviously, because we're talking about war crimes, they can happen only at a time of war and war crimes are severe breaches of the rules and customs of war.

00:20:01: The most important element in war crimes when we speak about, say, what's happening or what had been happening in Gaza is two elements.

00:20:12: One is disproportionate use of force.

00:20:16: And that does not have to be in the general picture of things.

00:20:19: It can be very specific.

00:20:21: If you identify school, and that school now is being used to house displaced people that you as an army told to go there saying to them that's a safe zone go take shelter there leave your homes and then you decide that under that school there's a tunnel and in that tunnel there may be three or four or five operatives of Hamas and you drop a two thousand bomb two thousand pound bomb on that school and you kill two hundred people and maybe also kill the two or three or five operatives that may be judged a war crime because it's disproportionate in relationship to what you were trying to accomplish.

00:21:02: How many civilians can you kill in order to kill your enemies?

00:21:07: The second element, and that of course can be a general thing or a very specific one.

00:21:13: The second thing has to do with forcible displacement.

00:21:17: You can displace people, you can tell them, look, This area is going to be an area of operations.

00:21:25: Get out of here, because otherwise you'll die.

00:21:26: Which happened numerous times.

00:21:28: Or

00:21:28: numerous times.

00:21:31: And then after you displaced them, say to Rafah, where by May of twenty twenty-four there were a million people, so half of the population of Gaza was concentrated in the southernmost city of Rafah on the Egyptian border.

00:21:47: Once you displaced them, you can also blow their homes up.

00:21:52: which is also what happened.

00:21:54: To the extent that in May, May, May, May, May, May, May, May, May, May, May, May, May, May, May, May, May, May, May, May, May, May, May, May, May, May, May, May, May, May, May, May, May, May, May, May, May, May, May, May, May, May, May, May, May, May, May, May, May, May, May, May, May, May, May, May, May, May, May, May, May, May, May, May, May, May, May, May, May, May, May, May, May, May, May, May, May, May, May, May, May, May, May, May,

00:22:14: May, May, May, May, May,

00:22:15: May, May, May, May, May, May, May, May, May, May, May, May, May, May, May, May, May, May.

00:22:19: that is that you displace people forcibly with the intent not of protecting them, but of taking over their homes and territory and destroying it.

00:22:29: So that's war crimes.

00:22:32: And war crimes are codified in international law, international humanitarian law.

00:22:38: Crimes against humanity was, as you said, part of the Nuremberg Charter.

00:22:43: It's changed since in the sense that in Nuremberg, crimes against humanity could be applied also only under the general heading of crimes against the peace.

00:23:00: Or if you like war of aggression, which is illegal.

00:23:04: So that, for instance, what the German government did to its own Jewish population in the nineteen thirties, say, Kristallnacht.

00:23:12: could not be adjudicated by Nuremberg.

00:23:15: You had to wait for the moment in which Germany attacked Poland in an illegal war.

00:23:21: Everything that happened before was not counted, could not be adjudicated.

00:23:26: And this was for the reason the states don't like being judged for what they do to their own populations, as I explained before.

00:23:35: Now, since then, this has changed.

00:23:38: And now, crimes against humanity can be adjudicated even at a time of peace.

00:23:45: It does not have to be during a time of war.

00:23:48: But what you don't need for crimes against humanity is intent.

00:23:53: If you can show that a particular country, organization, military exterminated large numbers of civilians, you don't have to show what their intent was.

00:24:04: It's enough to show that they did it.

00:24:07: Forcible displacement is also part of that, part of crimes against humanity.

00:24:13: The important thing about the genocide convention is that it caused to show intent.

00:24:20: And the intent is to destroy a particular group, an ethnic or national or religious or racial group in whole or in part as such.

00:24:33: So you're not killing people because you either want to kill people Or you don't care about killing people discriminately or not.

00:24:42: You are killing people or doing other things in order to destroy the group as a group.

00:24:48: And you don't have to care all of them for that.

00:24:50: There are other ways that you can destroy a group as a group.

00:24:55: And what is important here is that this is a convention.

00:25:01: Crimes against humanity, there is no convention on crimes against humanity.

00:25:06: And I'll explain one last thing.

00:25:10: If you come to the conclusion that a particular country or organization is engaged in genocide, then war crimes and crimes against humanity, if they are under the overall... heading of genocide can become genocide or crimes.

00:25:31: That is, if you commit war crimes, but you are committing them under the general intent of destroying that group as a group, then they become part of genocide as well.

00:25:44: Now, you are asking what happened in Nuremberg.

00:25:48: In Nuremberg, the term genocide shows up a couple of times in the trials.

00:25:55: But there was no convention yet.

00:25:57: The convention was agreed on, was adopted by the UN only in nineteen forty-eight and came into force only in nineteen fifty-one when there was a sufficient number of signatory states.

00:26:10: So it could not be used as part of the of the general indictment in Nuremberg.

00:26:18: Yeah, Germany adopted that convention in the early fifties included then I think in nineteen fifty four In its own Legal system the notion of genocide.

00:26:36: however The Auschwitz processor that happened in the nineteen sixties when several individuals were tried and convicted.

00:26:44: they were convicted for murder.

00:26:47: They were not convicted for genocide And the first time we see genocide actually showing up in convictions is in the nineteen nineties, I think, in front of the international courts that were created to judge the crimes in Rwanda and later in Bosnia, Serbia and the Srebrenica massacre.

00:27:08: So what happens at that time and why is it so important that genocide became that?

00:27:15: legal concept and then maybe also something that's not much talked about.

00:27:18: There were some convictions for genocide against Serbian generals, for example, but Serbia's estate was not convicted.

00:27:28: So to this day, no state has ever been convicted in its entirety to have committed a genocide.

00:27:35: So there are two elements here that you talked about.

00:27:39: They're related, but they're not the same.

00:27:42: Germany, as a signatory of the Genocide Convention, had an obligation to include genocide also in its national law.

00:27:52: That's part of the obligation of becoming a signatory.

00:27:56: And so all countries that signed the Genocide Convention, including Israel, then passed their own laws on genocide.

00:28:06: But Germany refused to use that expo factor.

00:28:11: So German jurists in the nineteen fifties and onward when they were trying for minorities Decided that they cannot use their own law on genocide because that law was passed after those crimes were committed and That created all kinds of very strange situations.

00:28:31: I write about it a bit in this book whereby you could only convert people of murder, of first degree murder, if you showed that they had subjective motivation, according to the German criminal law of eighteen ninety.

00:28:50: That meant that when you were trying people say for the Auschwitz trial, but there were many, many other trials, the result of that was that if somebody organized, if somebody say, as I write about them here, one individual was head of the Auschwitzstelle, of the Zishaites politsai in Fodar town and he arranged the killing of sixty thousand people.

00:29:16: You had to show that he individually killed someone and if you could not show that he died in his bed which he did.

00:29:23: You had to show that there was a killing by someone of another person and you had sufficient evidence that he pulled out his gun and shot somebody in the head.

00:29:33: And so That created a particular understanding of the Holocaust, which was that it was carried out by people who had all kinds of sadistic motivations, base motives.

00:29:46: This is what the law asked for, the criminal law, sexual lust, or lust for property, or something that was defined by German courts as anti-Semitism.

00:29:59: But if you asked a German former German perpetrator where you motivated by anti-Semitism, it was unlikely that he would say so because his lawyer would say, if you say you were motivated by anti-Semitism, you could be found guilty.

00:30:14: So in that sense, Germany made a choice.

00:30:17: Not all countries made their choice.

00:30:19: In fact, Israel passed a law on genocide after the establishment of the state, obviously.

00:30:28: It was a law against Nazis and their collaborators.

00:30:32: And it tried Adolf Eichmann on that law.

00:30:36: But the law existed only after Adolf Eichmann already committed all those crimes and hanged him for that.

00:30:43: So this was a legal choice in Germany.

00:30:46: And that has to be understood.

00:30:47: It was a choice made by people who not surprisingly themselves, judges and lawyers, who were active in the Third Reich themselves.

00:30:56: And usually the line that they used in those trials was that although if they found somebody guilty, and as you know, very, very few people ended up in jail, and if they did for very short periods and twenty years after the events, it was a very, very delayed justice, the line was usually at the same time, we would like to say that this individual was a victim of the circumstances of the time.

00:31:22: This was the line that was repeatedly used in German trials.

00:31:26: So Then has to be factored in now.

00:31:30: regarding genocide itself The genocide convention is international law.

00:31:35: international law is international.

00:31:38: So it has to come into effect when there's a consensus when states agree.

00:31:43: if states don't agree it doesn't happen between of course, when he comes into force.

00:31:52: And in nineteen ninety one, there is no international agreement because there's there's a cold war.

00:31:58: Yeah.

00:31:58: So only after the Soviet Union falls, we are immediately blessed by two genocides, one in Bosnia in the begins in nineteen ninety two and one in Rwanda in nineteen ninety four.

00:32:13: There were genocides before, but these two genocides then can actually be adjudicated not by a permanent international tribunal that doesn't exist yet, but by the ICTY and ICTR, which now have been succeeded by the International Criminal Court.

00:32:36: That International Criminal Court that is created in two thousand and two, deals with individuals, not with states.

00:32:44: That's why there are now arrest warrants.

00:32:47: by the ICC, by the International Criminal Court against Benjamin Netanyahu and Joav Garland, the former Minister of Defense.

00:32:57: These are individual cases and they kick in only if your national courts are unable or unwilling to take the matter themselves.

00:33:08: And then it goes up to international courts.

00:33:12: States, and you're right, states have never been found guilty of genocide within international courts.

00:33:19: But for that, you have a different court.

00:33:21: That's the International Court of Justice.

00:33:24: And that, again, these courts are international courts.

00:33:28: The ICJ has representatives of all regions of the world.

00:33:32: That's the way they choose the justices.

00:33:36: And up to this point, if Estro is found guilty of genocide, it will be the first time that it ever happened since the Genocide Convention was agreed on.

00:33:49: So of course, if we abstract from the military action on the ground and the incredible unspeakable suffering,

00:33:56: etc.,

00:33:56: we are also talking in terms of like a longer view we take on things.

00:34:02: We speak about something that is extremely highly symbolic, and that's also why it's so charged.

00:34:07: because of course Israel is a country founded in in in nineteen forty eight and many say that had the Holocaust not happened and was it not known at that time how Jews were exterminated in in Europe probably the United United Nations would not have come up with a petition plan and plan for statehood for Israel.

00:34:32: So as the country of Holocaust survivors to some extent Israel is now being tried and potentially could be the first country that is within the framework of international law convicted of genocide in whole.

00:34:49: So this is extremely charged and many people get mad about all sorts of equivalences that are being made and you've always been very cautious about making too easy let's say equivalences or comparisons between Nazi crimes and and other crimes.

00:35:13: there's the long-winded and important substantial debate also to what extent the Holocaust is exceptional and different from other genocides.

00:35:23: and Now it seems that you've taken.

00:35:26: well you take you've taken your gloves off in a way and you do make a number of comparisons.

00:35:35: For example, on the psychological level, you've published last week, it was in Prospect Magazine, we published the translation just yesterday, a long text on denialism, and you compare the psychology of today's Israelis.

00:35:54: who do not recognize or have a very hard time recognizing the IDF sections on the ground.

00:36:00: You make a comparison to the Germans in the nineteen eighties and nineties who had to come to terms and yet fully understand that their army had committed genocide.

00:36:11: So do you want to talk about the denialism aspect?

00:36:14: Maybe how you worked on that with regard to Germany in the eighties and nineties and how it translates into today.

00:36:23: Sure, look, you raised a lot of points.

00:36:26: I will try to remember them all.

00:36:32: One thing that is really important to understand, and we don't talk about it enough, is that there have been many genocide since nineteen forty five.

00:36:43: But this one in Gaza is the only time that a state that is allied with Western countries with Germany, with Britain, with France, with Italy, with the Netherlands, and of course with the United States.

00:37:01: States that were those that created the system of international law after the war in response to the crimes of the Nazis, the genocide of the Jews, and many other crimes that the Nazis committed.

00:37:16: This was not the only one.

00:37:20: States that have presented themselves consistently as the protectors of human rights and international law around the world that see themselves as the representatives of the civilized world that these states have not only allowed Israel impunity for two years to completely eradicate Gaza but have facilitated it, have supplied it with arms.

00:37:47: have supplied it with economic help and have supplied it with diplomatic cover.

00:37:53: This is actually unprecedented.

00:37:55: This has never happened since nineteen forty-five.

00:37:58: There are other countries, terrible countries, that did terrible things, but they were not so directly linked with those Western countries.

00:38:08: Okay, so to bring it home and to make it also local, this is so blatantly obvious.

00:38:15: According to your judgment and the judgment of a high number of experts, as you referred, how do you explain yourself that the discourse in Germany, for example, has been so stale and so... I mean, Germany to this day is taking all sorts of precautions to avoid the strong language that... Spain, Ireland, other countries are increasingly taking.

00:38:45: What's your explanation for that?

00:38:47: So I get to that, but I'll just respond to your previous question, which was about analogies.

00:38:55: So I have consistently said that I don't think the making analogies to the crimes of the Nazis, and particularly to the Holocaust, is a good thing.

00:39:09: Because the Nazis always went out.

00:39:12: Because when you compare anything horrible that has happened to the Holocaust, the Holocaust comes from top.

00:39:22: It was the largest genocide of the modern era.

00:39:27: It covered a huge territory.

00:39:29: It included millions of victims and hundreds of thousands of people engaged, numerous states engaged in various ways.

00:39:39: So comparing other genocides to that, not that there's anything wrong with doing that, but you usually end up saying, well, it's not quite the Holocaust.

00:39:53: And when you say that, it's like saying, well, it's only war crimes or it's only crimes against humanity.

00:40:00: None of these things should be justified by saying that it's not exactly the Holocaust.

00:40:06: So I'm not in favor of making these analogies.

00:40:09: You can, however, make other kinds of analogies, and I've made two of them, and they can be made in the case of Germany or in the case of many other countries that were engaged in genocide.

00:40:22: One is how soldiers, and that's what I wrote about in summer of twenty-twenty-four, how soldiers explain to themselves what they're doing.

00:40:35: And we have to know that genocide always happens, at least modern genocide, always happens in war or under the cover of war.

00:40:44: And people carrying our genocide like wearing uniforms, having military hierarchy, and believing that they are conducting a war against enemies, that they're not just killing innocents.

00:40:55: Because even the worst people would like to think that what they're doing is not murder, that it's something else.

00:41:03: And I was interested in this question of how soldiers justify to themselves what they're doing.

00:41:10: And in this case, I pointed out similarities between the way German soldiers with letters and communications and reports from the Eastern Front, I investigated a long time ago, and reports that were coming out from Israel about how Israeli soldiers saw what they were doing.

00:41:29: For instance, if you kill innocent civilians, you say, well, I may have killed them, but I'm not guilty of that.

00:41:35: Hamas is guilty of that, because they're using them as human shields.

00:41:39: So if you shoot a child, it's not you.

00:41:43: It's the people who use them so to speak.

00:41:47: It's also the the idea that if you If if you see what your own forces have carried out you see signs that your unit or another unit Carried out an atrocity you not only attribute it to the enemy, but you say Now that we have done that, we can imagine to ourselves what kind of revenge they would take upon us if we let them do that.

00:42:24: If we kill entire families and only children are left, what will these children do when they grow up?

00:42:33: That gives you license to kill children.

00:42:36: And I've seen that kind of evidence saying you have to kill those Palestinian children when they're small.

00:42:43: Because otherwise there will be supporters of

00:42:45: Hamas.

00:42:46: You mean statements or

00:42:48: social media posts.

00:42:48: Oh yeah, social media everywhere.

00:42:50: Yes, and talking heads on TV.

00:42:54: On the Israeli media, on open Israeli media.

00:42:57: which I've subjected myself to on a daily basis, just to follow up how people speak about that.

00:43:03: Just an interest.

00:43:05: Is this, for example, also evidence that will be gathered and will count

00:43:10: in the

00:43:10: rulings?

00:43:11: Of course, it has been.

00:43:12: Of course.

00:43:13: It was already presented by South Africa.

00:43:16: You know, Philip Sands, who is a well-known lawyer, professor of law, teachers at Cambridge University wrote a beautiful book called East West Street, which is about the tension between genocide and crimes against humanity.

00:43:34: And it's very, he's one of the people most reluctant to call what's happening genocide.

00:43:39: He said, every day that passes, and he said that a few months ago, the IDF is providing the International Court of Justice with more evidence to find the guilty of genocide.

00:43:52: All of this is being collected, of course.

00:43:54: That's part of it.

00:43:56: The second analogy that I think you can make with Germany and with many other countries that I can think of, Poland comes to mind, is this notion of denial within the population.

00:44:11: That is that what happens is that people say, this is not happening, and if it is happening, then we are not at fault.

00:44:30: And if it is happening and we are not at fault, it has to be completed.

00:44:36: That is that the thing that is not happening that we are not responsible for is something that we should complete so that it would never be remembered.

00:44:46: And you find that kind of logic.

00:44:51: For instance, when this city was being bombed in nineteen forty-four, nineteen forty-five, people said that this is Judenvergeltung.

00:45:04: This is revenge by the Jews.

00:45:08: Now, why would people have said that if at the same time they were saying, we don't know what happened to the Jews.

00:45:13: They went to the east.

00:45:18: How come?

00:45:19: So this is this kind of denial that is affirmation at the same time, and motivation.

00:45:26: And that you find in many cases, and that is actually analogous.

00:45:32: You can learn from that about how populations, they don't have to be evil, they don't have to be deeply indoctrinated, but they become complicit.

00:45:42: And regimes, certainly the Nazi regime did that.

00:45:46: But you have seen and there's been writing about that in Israel regimes try to make their own population complicit in what they're doing.

00:45:55: They want to spread the guilt.

00:45:57: So they both hide what is happening, they deny what is happening, and they tell it at the same time.

00:46:05: So that nobody can say, I didn't know.

00:46:09: even as they're denying it.

00:46:11: This is very typical of a kind of genocide of discourse.

00:46:15: And let me say one last thing before I forget on the sort of difference between different crimes.

00:46:22: All these crimes, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and of course genocide, are horrific crimes.

00:46:28: And there's no, you can't say that one is worse or better than the other.

00:46:33: But there's something important about the crime of genocide, which is that it's a social event.

00:46:39: You can say that there was a particular military unit that had a rogue commander, and he and his soldiers did terrible things.

00:46:48: And you can catch them, you imprison them, put them on trial and say, this is terrible, what kind of military culture was created here?

00:46:56: and so forth.

00:46:57: But it's isolated.

00:47:00: Genocide is a social condition.

00:47:03: Everyone becomes complicit in genocide.

00:47:06: When a state is committing genocide, everyone is complicit.

00:47:10: Just think about what the doctors association is saying in Israel.

00:47:16: What the bar association is saying in Israel.

00:47:19: What presidents of universities are saying in Israel.

00:47:23: All those people are saying nothing.

00:47:25: All those people who say doctors who get Palestinian presence brought to them because their physical condition has greatly deteriorated and they give them an aspirin and they tie them up and then they send them back to the torture facilities from which they came completely against their physician's oath.

00:47:46: All those people are made to be complicit in the system which is why most societies in general get away with genocide.

00:47:57: Nuremberg was about a few men.

00:48:00: There were thousands and thousands of people, hundreds of thousands of people who should have been tried, but it was impossible.

00:48:07: You can't do that.

00:48:09: And so in that sense, genocide is something very different from these other crimes.

00:48:14: It involves the whole society in that, and that's why it leaves such a deep and long-lasting stain on societies for several generations.

00:48:25: Speaking about long lines of history also, in another piece you wrote in April that we also translated Infinite License, which by the way is printed in our print copy.

00:48:41: You speak a whole lot about the Nakba also.

00:48:45: And another very, very contested analogy or link.

00:48:53: let's say between the Holocaust of the Jews of Europe and the Nakabah.

00:48:58: that happens in nineteen forty eight forty nine in Palestine Israel and there are many activists or people on the left who would say that look genocide now in Gaza this and that Zionism as a state project in Palestine has always been against and potentially it's a very strong word but some people say that has always been tinged with you know a genocidal principle because it's land without people for people without land.

00:49:36: so those who are there need to be removed.

00:49:40: What do you say to that?

00:49:42: to that point of view?

00:49:45: Why is it important to keep maybe that argument at bay?

00:49:54: Look, I mean, again, there are two issues here.

00:49:57: One is the connection between the Nakba and the Holocaust.

00:50:02: The Nakba and the Holocaust are not analogous.

00:50:05: They're not similar.

00:50:06: I wouldn't think at all of comparing them.

00:50:11: The Nakba was ethnic cleansing at a time of war, of course, and the Holocaust we've spoken about.

00:50:22: So I don't think that comparing the two is particularly useful, and I certainly don't do that.

00:50:28: However, they're linked, and that link is important to understand.

00:50:33: Even if you look at it simply in the terms of historiography, how we deal with this.

00:50:39: So you have historians writing about the Holocaust and about East European Jewry and about Nazi Germany.

00:50:45: And we saw him writing about Zionism, and writing about the Middle East, and writing about Palestinian history.

00:50:51: And it's as if the two things are happening at a different time and a different place.

00:50:56: But in fact, a vast number, let's say, of the soldiers, Israeli soldiers, who fight in the war of nineteen forty-eight, came from the DP camps.

00:51:13: A vast number of people who move into what is called in Israel, Rechush Natush, into abandoned property, are people who were displaced from Europe, are people who lost everything they had, and they move into homes often where there's still warm food on the table of people who had just been displaced.

00:51:37: The links between one event and another on a personal, on a psychological, on a political level are clear.

00:51:48: And to separate the two and not understand that they are inextricably bound to each other is an artificial separation between the two events.

00:52:04: You know, Golda Mayer was visiting Haifa.

00:52:10: after the Arab population was removed from it, was intimidated into escape from it.

00:52:17: And she walked into a home and she saw food on the table.

00:52:24: And she, who grew up as a child in Ukraine, said that this reminded her of what happened to the Jews in the pogroms.

00:52:34: Did it elicit from her than any empathy about the Palestinians?

00:52:38: No, because a week later, at a party meeting, she joined the vote which said we should never allow them back, which was that the real Nakba was not simply expelling people, but telling them that they can't come back and either blowing up their homes, which happened in between four and five hundred villages that were destroyed, or taking over their homes, especially in urban centers.

00:53:03: So the links that people made were obvious, right?

00:53:08: And it's really important to understand that.

00:53:14: Your second question, remind me, was...

00:53:17: I had another question about Germany.

00:53:20: No, no, no, but there was something about the Nakba and...

00:53:23: Well, I mean, what do you say to put it simply in defense of Zionism?

00:53:27: Oh, yes.

00:53:28: Okay, so look, I mean, at the risk of self-advertising, I just wrote a book that tries to think this through.

00:53:42: It's a complicated matter.

00:53:44: As you know, a few days ago when we were on stage with Ahmed, he made that statement.

00:53:58: I don't think that you can boil down Zionism to saying it's a genocidal ideology.

00:54:06: I don't agree with that.

00:54:08: I also don't agree with the statement that Zionism is all about settler colonialism, that that's all it is about.

00:54:18: And I don't agree with it because as a historian I know that Zionism had many other faces.

00:54:27: And to me it's important to identify at least the two main aspects of Zionism.

00:54:36: Zionism is born in the late nineteenth century out of the reality of Jewish life, particularly in Central, especially in Eastern Europe, of increasing persecution, increasing anti-Semitism, and increasing violence.

00:54:54: And it's responding in large part to ethno-nationalism among groups that say, you guys don't belong here.

00:55:03: The slogan in Poland in the nineteen thirties is go to Palestine.

00:55:08: It's not because the post suddenly becomes honest but because they don't want the Jews in their midst and they say go to where you came from.

00:55:16: So that's where it is born.

00:55:21: Jews respond in many different ways.

00:55:23: Some become commoners, some try to assimilate, some go to the United States, and some become Zionists.

00:55:29: And Zionism becomes more powerful in the nineteen twenties and thirties in part because Jews have no other place to go to.

00:55:39: And so in a sense, Zionism in its core, at its beginning, is a movement of emancipation.

00:55:48: of liberation and of appeal to humanitarianism.

00:55:52: However, when it starts implementing its own ideology that is of settling the historic land of Palestine, of shrinking history in two thousand years, of going back to Jewish sovereignty in antiquity, it becomes functionally settler colonialism.

00:56:17: And Jews talk about it openly.

00:56:19: It's not, they're building colonies.

00:56:21: And they bring with them many of the European, much of the European imaginary, about the Orient.

00:56:28: They know that there are people there.

00:56:30: Yes, there is that slogan.

00:56:31: But they all know that there are people there.

00:56:33: They see the people there.

00:56:35: Initially, they learn their language.

00:56:37: They live side by side with Palestinians or Arabs, as they call them then.

00:56:43: But in their minds, they are coming home.

00:56:47: And in their minds, the people who live there, well, they come and they go.

00:56:54: They belong there, but they belong to the region.

00:56:59: In the twenties and thirties, as there is more and more persecution of Jews in Europe, obviously in Germany or so in Poland, there is a growing sense of need for the Jews to have their community in Palestine, the place that should become, you know, the Jewish state at some point.

00:57:22: And at the same time, as the numbers of Jews grow in Palestine, the tension between the Jewish community and the Palestinian community grows.

00:57:32: And so there is constant friction between the two.

00:57:36: And you have these two aspects of it all the way to nineteen forty eight.

00:57:43: Now the goal of Zionism is to create a Jewish majority state and the idea is that eventually all the millions of Jews who live in Eastern Europe would come and settle that area and the Jews would come in majority because you have millions of Jews in Eastern Europe.

00:58:02: But in nineteen forty five it turns out that most of those millions have been murdered.

00:58:08: And so what happens in nineteen forty eight?

00:58:10: is that the other choice is made.

00:58:12: If you can't bring the Jews in and Palestine then has sixty percent of the population are Palestinian and forty percent are Jews.

00:58:22: So in the war that ensues in nineteen forty-eight the Jews expel the Palestinians, the vast majority of the Palestinians of seven hundred and fifty thousand are expelled and the state that becomes the state of Israel has a minority of only twenty percent Palestinians.

00:58:44: and which is the ratio to this day?

00:58:45: by the way the ratio itself has never changed and it's at that point that as I Understand it a decision could have been made.

00:58:57: The state of Israel just formed had promised to have a constitution and the constitution was supposed to be in the spirit of the declaration of independence which was about equality for all, no matter race, no matter religion and ethnicity, but the state does not adopt a constitution then or now.

00:59:21: There's still no constitution.

00:59:23: Instead of putting Zionism in the archive and saying, now we've created the state, now let's make a good state out of that state, Zionism becomes the state ideology.

00:59:35: And as the state ideology, it's other part of liberation and emancipation and humanitarianism with us.

00:59:43: And what grows is its more violent aspect, its centralized aspect, its militaristic aspect, and as time goes by it becomes increasingly racist.

00:59:55: And at this point in time, it has also become genocidal.

00:59:59: That's designism that no person who believes in human rights and humanitarianism should support.

01:00:06: That's a regime that has to go, not the country, not the state, but that regime and that ideology has become genocidal.

01:00:18: I would have more questions, but I feel like it's a good moment to open my computer and see what the audience... wants to contribute during this for the second time.

01:00:40: We have a number of good questions, I think.

01:00:51: Okay, this relates, it's an anonymous person.

01:00:56: This relates to what we were just saying.

01:00:59: Could things have developed differently?

01:01:01: Or how could things have developed differently?

01:01:04: With the logic of elimination of the native inherent to settler colonialism.

01:01:10: is genocide in the sense of destruction of a group as such, not necessarily only by killing every member of the group, not predetermined.

01:01:19: I guess we can rephrase that question, yeah.

01:01:21: So, I mean, your book is called Israel, What Went Wrong?

01:01:26: When or how did it go off the rails?

01:01:32: Look, I mean, I don't believe in predetermined history, and I think after .

01:01:36: .

01:01:36: .

01:01:36: there were also many folks on the road.

01:01:40: Usually the wrong choice was made, but other choices could have been made.

01:01:47: I remember very well the early nineteen nineties.

01:01:50: And in the early nineteen nineties, there was a very lively discourse in Israel among Israeli Jews and Palestinian citizens of Israel about making Israel into a state of all its citizens.

01:02:02: This was the term that was used.

01:02:06: And we have to remember that with all the growing racism and brutalities, especially of the occupation, the population of a hundred and fifty thousand Palestinians who remained in what became the state of Israel became a population of two million people.

01:02:23: And a population that, while it is not treated fairly by the state, and they're not co-equal citizens, as they by law should be, has also becoming many ways integrated in Israeli society.

01:02:38: You know, the joke in Israel is that if there was strike by Palestinians, then the medical system would collapse because there's so many doctors and nurses and pharmacists who are Palestinian.

01:02:49: And that's something that has happened only in the last few decades.

01:02:53: So I think choices could have been made, but more importantly, I think choices can be made.

01:02:59: I think that if we accept that logic, that, okay, Zionism is a settler colonial ideology and its goal and ultimate purpose and inevitable end is genocide, that we're accepting the logic of the genocidal.

01:03:18: We are actually playing into the hands of the extremists.

01:03:23: We have to say that this can be changed.

01:03:26: In nineteen ninety five, Rabin was assassinated.

01:03:30: Now, Rabin was not a great humanitarian, he was a general and all that, but he, in the early nineties, reached the conclusion that the occupation should not continue.

01:03:43: He thought that this was something that was ruining the state of Israel, that was deforming Zionism.

01:03:53: And while the Oslo agreements had many problems that we can talk about, the goal was to stop what people like myself and a few teenagers already when we were in high school in the early nineteen seventies said in our little slogans, there were about five of us, occupation corrupts.

01:04:20: He understood by the nineteen nineties after the first intifada that occupation corrupt.

01:04:27: It corrupted Israeli society, but it can be changed.

01:04:34: Look, I mean, think about it this way.

01:04:38: We're here in Berlin.

01:04:41: Berlin was one great big pile of ruins in nineteen forty five.

01:04:45: There was nothing standing, right?

01:04:47: Germany had been under a genocidal regime, which majority of Germans at some point embraced for twelve years.

01:05:01: Nobody would have thought that that society could be healed.

01:05:06: It seemed like a fantasy.

01:05:08: How would it be possible?

01:05:10: And it was.

01:05:11: It took a very long time, but it was possible.

01:05:14: So I don't like this notion that we already know everything.

01:05:24: how things will work out, and we discern the logic of history or the logic of particular movements.

01:05:30: That's a kind of either commonist or fascist thinking that you already know where things are going.

01:05:37: We don't.

01:05:37: We can actually influence them.

01:05:40: We can change the course of history, but we have to believe in that potential.

01:05:45: And if we don't, then, well, we will become subjected.

01:05:51: to the logic that we agreed to accept.

01:05:55: Speaking of Germany, there's a question posed by Rebecca that relates to something I also wanted to ask.

01:06:04: It seems to be the case that apart from the United States, no country has actual leverage on the Netanyahu government.

01:06:14: Do you agree with that?

01:06:16: And what could Germany do?

01:06:21: No, I don't agree at all.

01:06:23: And this sort of relates to a question that you asked earlier, and I didn't respond to.

01:06:29: That is why was Israel allowed to get away with what it was doing for two years?

01:06:37: There were many people in Israel who, including myself, who said years ago that under certain circumstances, if there were a trigger, something we didn't imagine October seventh, but some kind of trigger, certain powers would be unleashed in Israel that would try to carry out ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.

01:06:58: This was sort of spoken about.

01:07:01: And the question was how long would Israel have to do that?

01:07:06: And the assumption even by the far right in Israel was maybe a few weeks.

01:07:11: So the whole idea was that it would have to be done very quickly and very violently because the international community, so-called international community, would kick in.

01:07:22: And it didn't kick in for two years.

01:07:24: And when it kicked in, it was Trump who kicked in, who, as I said before, has all kinds of other motivations.

01:07:30: It's certainly not lives of Palestinians that matter to him a great deal.

01:07:34: So why is that?

01:07:37: First of all, Israel can be very easily influenced.

01:07:41: That's what I found so frustrating.

01:07:45: This is not like the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

01:07:48: The Russian invasion of Ukraine is more difficult to stop because Russia is not being supplied with American arms.

01:07:54: It's not being supported economically well, a little bit by Europeans buying some of its oil and gas, but mostly it can survive.

01:08:03: It has huge resources, huge land.

01:08:06: Israel is a small country.

01:08:09: which is totally dependent on armed supplies.

01:08:14: Netanyahu made a speech known as the Sparta speech when he said, we have to become self-reliant.

01:08:19: It's nonsense.

01:08:20: Israel can't be self-reliant in terms of its own military supplies.

01:08:25: It needs those military supplies.

01:08:27: It's relied economically on all its agreements with Europe more than the United States.

01:08:33: the largest trading partner of Israel is not the United States but the EU and the EU has done nothing about it and it's reliant politically on Europe and on the United States and certainly on the veto power of the United States and of Britain and of France.

01:08:52: so in that sense things could as I said before Biden could have stopped Israel easily.

01:09:00: so the question is why not?

01:09:02: And that's a bit more difficult to answer because nobody expected that to be the case.

01:09:08: And I think partly in Europe, it does have to do with the legacy of the Holocaust.

01:09:13: It's very difficult for European politicians, for European academics, certainly in Germany, but not only in Germany, to even believe that it's possible that a country that was created in the wake of the Holocaust, on the ashes of the Holocaust, created in the same year as the Genocide Convention in nineteen forty-eight and for the same reason in a sense is the response to the Holocaust within itself engaged in genocide.

01:09:42: I think it's morally so outrageous to even elevate that thought that people have been very resistant to it.

01:09:51: So I think there is a kind of difficulty in saying that but I don't think it's the only reason.

01:09:57: I think another reason is what Chancellor Met sort of said in passing when he said the Israelis are doing the dirty work for us.

01:10:08: So what on earth did he mean by that?

01:10:10: The Israelis are doing the dirty work for us.

01:10:12: And he didn't mean just Iran.

01:10:14: He meant much more than that.

01:10:17: So first of all he was using an anti-Semitic phrase that he seems not to have been aware of because if you say the Jews are doing the dirty work for us that has a history.

01:10:25: But what he meant was something else.

01:10:27: What he meant was that the Israelis were working against Arabs and Muslims, against people who large sectors of the population, in Germany, in France, in Italy, in Britain, countries where now the far right is rising, see as outsiders.

01:10:50: And the Israelis are showing us the way.

01:10:53: How do you deal with those people?

01:10:55: Maybe not so brutally, maybe they're exaggerating.

01:10:58: But nonetheless, they're doing some of the work for us.

01:11:02: So there is an appeal in sectors of these populations of Western Europe, and of course in the United States, that sounds like something.

01:11:14: And the third thing I would say is that Israel has become Although it is a small country, it has become so inextricably connected to technologies of warfare.

01:11:29: We know that there are countries that are both banning the sale of arms to Israel and buying arms from Israel, buying technology from Israel because they think now they need anti-missile missiles, interceptors because of Russia.

01:11:45: Israel has managed to become so much part of this incredibly profitable sector of the military industrial complex at universities, with AI, with whatever comes to mind, that it's actually not in the interest of many people who have an influence of politics, meaning money, to divorce themselves from Israel.

01:12:11: And I think that too is an issue that has to be addressed and has not been covered enough.

01:12:16: by the media or by people who should expose it much more to the public?

01:12:25: I think we take one more question and there are many questions but I think also some of them we have already covered.

01:12:35: Here's one that I like because it relates to your personal work situation in a way.

01:12:43: A lot is made of the advantage of hindsight for a historian.

01:12:48: So, of course, you know, judging element events that go back decades and you go to the archive and you take your time and you work through the material.

01:12:57: So, this is not what you can do during a quote-unquote, live-streamed genocide.

01:13:04: How has this different media situation, media consumption, changed your work or affected your work as a historian?

01:13:14: I mean, that's a good question.

01:13:18: So this sort of usual thing that people say that historians are much better about predicting the past than predicting the future.

01:13:25: And at the same time, as Benedetto Croce said, all history is contemporary history.

01:13:34: So whatever we write about the past, we write from the present.

01:13:37: So we're always in the present.

01:13:38: We always understand the past through what we see and what we know.

01:13:43: But I think that there's a point, at least I feel that quite strongly.

01:13:46: And this is not the first point in time.

01:13:49: where people who have accumulated some knowledge and maybe some authority and some analytical ability cannot just sit back and say, well, we'll write about this five years from now when we have enough perspective.

01:14:08: Yes, maybe we will write about it in five years when we have enough perspective.

01:14:12: But then we'll also have to write that while it was happening, we weren't saying nothing.

01:14:18: And I think, in fact, I've been somewhat disenchanted with many of my colleagues who know at least as much as I do, if not more, who have chosen to say nothing, who have said, well, that's not exactly our fach.

01:14:40: We don't know everything about this.

01:14:42: We have to wait.

01:14:44: We don't want to get involved.

01:14:47: Historically, academics and intellectuals in the nineteenth or twentieth century have been coward.

01:14:56: And I'm part of their profession.

01:15:00: They have betrayed the truth often.

01:15:04: They have been, as we know in Germany, they were quite quickly gleichgeschaltet.

01:15:11: And I'm not thinking of myself as being particularly brave.

01:15:14: I have colleagues in Israel, a few who are under much more risk and tension than I am who have spoken out.

01:15:22: But I wonder about colleagues in Germany, in Britain, in the United States who won't say a word.

01:15:29: And I'll just say, you know the story.

01:15:32: I was on the editorial board of Yad Vashem Studies.

01:15:36: And the editorial board is made up of people who don't get paid for this.

01:15:40: They just volunteer.

01:15:43: And most of them are foreigners, not Israelis.

01:15:47: And last summer, at a meeting, I said, look, we have to say something.

01:15:54: We are on the editorial board of a journal published by Ad Vashem, which speaks about never again.

01:16:03: And we are saying nothing about what's going on.

01:16:05: We have to make some kind of statement.

01:16:08: And my colleagues, who were German, French, British, American, and Israeli, said nothing.

01:16:20: I resigned because I felt that I could not continue with the silence.

01:16:28: And what we've seen, the majority of historians writing about the Holocaust and the majority of institutions, museums, archives dedicated to commemorating the Holocaust to the culture of remembrance that was created.

01:16:47: in Germany, created in Israel, created in the United States, that was supposed to be not just about the Holocaust, but about no more inhumanity, about the never again, was not never again the Holocaust, because the Holocaust happened already.

01:17:04: It was never again anything like that.

01:17:07: That those institutions have said nothing is, to me, it's not just a personal thing.

01:17:14: I think that it will be very hard to justify the continuity of these institutions after they were silent in the face of what the state of Israel was doing.

01:17:29: Thank you, Omer.

01:17:32: I think this is a good place to end.

01:17:35: I want to say another personal word.

01:17:40: So, Omer, we've listened to him and he's extremely competent, but I shall say he's also a very nice... person a very nice fellow and ever since I first contacted you and asked you if you were allowed to translate your work you said yes and it's been yes ever since.

01:17:59: I asked you do you want to come to Berlin?

01:18:01: and you said of course I want to.

01:18:03: I just have to teach on Wednesdays.

01:18:04: so can we do it between a Thursday and a Tuesday?

01:18:10: I mean, you missed your class last Wednesday because it turned out there was such a high demand for you and we organized the talks that I mentioned before.

01:18:20: So you've had a long week.

01:18:22: This was your last talk.

01:18:24: You have a day off tomorrow and then you fly back to teach.

01:18:30: So I want to say thank you with all my heart.

01:18:33: I mean, translating your work, publishing it.

01:18:37: Now hosting you has been an honor and you've been a guiding light I think to many of us in the in the past two years.

01:18:48: and I think Yeah, you're very brave and extremely composed and very Bright and brilliant and we admire you.

01:18:57: And I think that deserves a warm round of applause.

01:19:01: and whoever wants to stick out I mean Sonya mentioned.

01:19:05: we want to be a space for conversation.

01:19:07: I think there will be possibilities to chat.

01:19:10: But now, that will be it from the stage.

01:19:13: And please, a warm applause for Omer.

01:19:17: Thank you very much.