Holocaust Denial = Genocide Denial

Holocaust Denial = Genocide Denial H. Scott Prosterman Informed Comment Holocaust denial is a horrible dynamic of the far-far right, which seeks to justify National Socialist (Nazi) philosophy, and deny that millions were killed because of who they are. It is an unconscionable “school of thought,” popular among people who didn’t get much out of school. Now an ugly parallel dynamic has arisen in the form of Gaza genocide denial. Both are signs of poisoned minds and cowardly denial. Much of Jewish history has been characterized by persecution, pogroms and ultimately the Holocaust. Now, many mainstream Jewish spiritual and community leaders are trying to argue, “Israel can’t be guilty of genocide, because that’s what happened to us.” Let’s begin with a controversial value judgement: Though Israel has been important to Jewish identity, since its creation, Israel no longer represents the Jewish people as a whole. As Israel has become more subsumed by the Israeli MAGA movement, aka the Likud Party; millions of Jews worldwide have divorced their religious practice of Judaism from Zionism. Under the leadership of PM Benjamin Netanyahu, Zionism has devolved 180 degrees away from its original secular, agrarian origins, which had NO pretense of Biblical prophecy. Now, these Judeo-MAGA tendencies are alienating millions of Jews away from Israel and Zionism, with genocide in Gaza and pogroms in the West Bank. The recent commemoration of Tisha B’av, on which a number of disasters that befell the Jewish people are mourned, sparked an avalanche of arguments by right wing Zionists that Gaza is NOT genocide. I feel like pointing out how Israel’s actions since October 7 2023 are, in fact genocide is like arguing that the Holocaust DID happen, or that Trump lost the 2020 Election. U.S. and Israeli Jews are packaging some tortured syllogisms to argue that Likud government actions since October 7, 2023 are righteous and justified. Many rabbis are selling those fictions to their congregations, and spreading this toxic myth. These days echo chambers persist throughout social media, across the full political spectrum. So we have to begin with what IS genocide: According to Article II of the 1948 Genocide Convention: “Genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such: • Killing members of the group; • Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; • Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; • Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; • Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. This definition does not require that all or even most members of a group be killed, only that the killing be pursued with the specific goal of making the group’s continued identity difficult to perpetuate. Destroying maternity clinics and inflicting malnutrition and infectious disease from poor sanitation on toddlers would count. The Cambodian genocide killed 25 percent of the population. A July 2024 correspondence piece published in The Lancet estimated that the eventual combined direct and indirect death toll of the conflict in Gaza might exceed 186,000 persons. The projection applied a conservative ratio of four indirect deaths (caused by things like malnutrition, lack of medication, disease, and the collapse of sanitation and healthcare infrastructure) for every one direct death caused by military violence. If this projected toll is eventually reached, nearly 10 percent of Palestinians in Gaza will have been murdered by Netanyahu and co., 83% to 86% of