The past three months have witnessed the bloodiest slaughter of Jews since World War II and the largest mass killing of Palestinian civilians since the onset of the Israel-Palestine conflict. The horror of these events has been so profound – and so viscerally felt, with live-streamed executions and explosions littering social media feeds – that they’ve generated widespread allusions to the 20st century’s most infamous crime. To no small extent, the debate over the war in Gaza has turned into an argument about the meaning of the Holocaust; which is to say, about precisely what the exhortation “Never again” requires the world community to do in the wake of October 7 and its aftermath.
This dispute has been especially intense within the Jewish community. For many Jews, October 7, and various celebrations of it on Western streets and campuses, affirmed the Zionist answer to the problem of the Holocaust: The safety of the Jewish people can only be assured through national self-determination and military prowess. In this view, the nightmare of October 7 was born out of Israel’s quixotic attempt to appease genocidal antisemites. It had given coexistence with Hamas a chance. In response, Hamas had put more than 1,000 Jews in the ground, and chased 200,000 more from their homes in southern Israel. Now, there is nothing to do but destroy Hamas.
Most in this camp do not deny that the consequences of Israel’s war have been tragic for the people of Gaza. But they insist that responsibility for the civilian dead lies overwhelmingly with the terrorist organization that started the war, and which embeds itself in civilian infrastructure. No country on Earth would tolerate the existence of a neighboring government that ceaselessly lobbed rockets at its cities, or killed .01 percent of its population in a single day. That so much of the world is hellbent on demonizing Israel for doing what any other nation would do in its place, they insist, only underscores the ubiquity of Jew hatred, and the attendant necessity of Jewish statehood and self-reliance.
But other Jews take a different view. To them, the devastation in Gaza City is as redolent of the Holocaust as the horrors in Kibbutz Be’eri. The lesson of the death camps, meanwhile, is that ethnic chauvinism is poison. All human life is equally valuable. And only the widespread adoption of such egalitarian, universalist ideals can ensure the safety of all Jewish people. Further, such ideals serve to keep Jews vigilant against our own capacity for evil. If all peoples are made from the same human material, then it was mere circumstance that made the Germans into historic villains, and Jews into victims. The point of Holocaust remembrance, therefore, is not only to preserve awareness for what was done to us, but also of what we – like all people – are potentially capable of doing to others.
From this vantage point, all ethno-states look suspect. And Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians – from their ethnic cleansing in 1948 to today’s occupation of the West Bank and bombardment of Gaza – look like betrayals of Holocaust memory. For this group, the supposed antisemitism of Israel’s detractors is less acutely alarming than the weaponization of spurious allegations of antisemitism by its apologists. More alarming still is the spectacle of Jews intoning “Never again,” while rationalizing the mass murder of a despised ethnic group.
In a recent essay for the New Yorker, the Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen gave eloquent expression to this latter outlook. Gessen’s piece examines the uses and abuses of Holocaust memory in Germany, Israel, and Eastern Europe, and the suppression of dissent against the Israeli government. Their essay makes a variety of arguments, the most controversial of which is that contemporary Gaza resembles a Jewish ghetto during World War 2. That idea earned the ire of Germany’s Heinrich Böll Foundation, which had been slated to honor Gessen with the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought at Bremen city hall this month. Following the publication of Gessen’s essay, the foundation canceled that ceremony, and Gessen ultimately received the prize at a smaller venue.
To further elucidate Gessen’s perspective on Israel, Gaza, Holocaust memory, and related subjects, I spoke with them this week. Our conversation has been edited for concision and clarity.
In your essay, you argued that Gaza should be understood as a ghetto akin to a “Jewish ghetto in an Eastern European country occupied by Nazi Germany.” That analogy has obviously been controversial. And it isn’t difficult to think of significant distinctions between the Warsaw Ghetto and Gaza. For one thing, as you acknowledge in the piece, Israel’s blockade of Gaza is justified with reference to “actual and repeated acts of violence,” whereas the Nazis’ isolation of the Jews had an utterly fraudulent public health rationale. What’s more, the Nazis strove to prevent Eastern Europe’s Jews from seeking refuge in foreign countries because it was committed to exterminating them. Israel, by contrast, seems if anything too eager to facilitate the exit of Palestinian refugees from Gaza.
So, given these distinctions, why do you think the analogy is nevertheless a useful one?
Actually, I’m not sure that your point about the Nazis interfering with Eastern European Jews seeking refuge in other countries is correct. Once people were in ghettos, they were not allowed out, it’s true, but the Final Solution was preceded by a years-long search for a resettlement solution for European Jews. That was seen as one way of getting rid of them. So I don’t even think that’s a distinction at all.
I take the point that the Nazis sought a resettlement solution before the final one. But as you say, once Jews were in the ghettos, the Nazis did systematically try to prevent their escape. This was how my great aunt was intercepted on an outbound train from Poland and ultimately killed. So there is a distinction, even if it did not apply at the outset of the Nazi project. Would that be fair?
It’s fair but utterly meaningless. Are we seriously going to argue that the pretext that’s used – or even, let’s call it the reason – for committing crimes against humanity matters, and that the reason for doing something that we consider a crime changes its definition from crime to non-crime?
But anyway, there’s no such thing as a one-to-one comparison. I think the fact that we so quickly went to, “Wait a second, but this thing happened at a different point in the chronology than it’s happening now,” actually suggests that this is a pretty close comparison. Not a one-to-one. Nothing is one-to-one, but I can’t think of a better historical analogy for Gaza. Can you?
I’m not sure. Personally, I have some sympathy with the analogy. But I suppose, with respect to Gaza’s current condition, some of Israel’s defenders have preferred the historical analogy of the allied bombing of German and Japanese cities during World War 2. Their argument being that Israel’s fundamental goal is not the destruction of a national or ethnic group, but the defeat of a genocidal military enemy. And this has some terrible human costs, like the bombing of Dresden. But unlike with the Nazi project, the deaths of civilians are not the mission’s aim, but its collateral consequence.
Wait a second. What are you talking about? I mean, we know that the bombing of Dresden by the Allies, and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were war crimes. You’re literally making the argument made by people who justify war crimes. You think it’s better to compare Gaza to a different war crime. But I wasn’t making a comparison between what’s happening in Gaza now. I was making a comparison with Gaza pre-October 7th. So can you think of a better comparison?
None comes immediately to mind. And to be clear, I was not endorsing the Dresden analogy, much less the bombing of Dresden itself. I was just describing that analogy, as it has proven popular with some Israeli commentators and officials. In any case, it seems to me that some of the opposition to your analogy is rooted in this broader ideological tendency that your essay critiques, which might be called “Holocaust exceptionalism.” By this, I mean the idea that the Nazi genocide of the Jews was a singular atrocity without any real precedent or analog, and that likening it to other instances of mass killing is tantamount to minimizing its horror. Why do you think that idea is misguided?
Every atrocity is, in fact, singular. Some people claim erroneously that the Holocaust was the largest genocide in history. It’s not, but it is the largest fastest genocide in history. It is the only time that humans have built factories to kill other humans. But if the whole rationale for maintaining Holocaust memory is the promise of “never again,” – is the pledge to learn from history – then how in the world do you learn from history if you place an event outside of history, if you say that it cannot be compared to anything that is going on now?
In fact, I would argue that the only way to learn from history is to constantly be checking back to see if that thing that we swore we would never do again, that thing that we swore we would recognize the warning signs off, is happening again. Or if we’re seeing the warning signs, the beginning of it.
What do you think motivates this impulse to place the Holocaust outside of history?
I’m utterly uninterested in motivation. I haven’t thought about it. I’m just not interested in it.
I see. In my reading, your essay suggested that Holocaust exceptionalism served an ideological function for the German state.
It’s instrumentalized by the German state. And at this point, similar tropes have been instrumentalized by right-wing politicians in this country. But I don’t think there’s any substantive attraction. I think that the thing about contemporary right-wing politics is that it’s cynical through and through. So there isn’t anything about the particular thing that they use that attracts them to it, beyond the fact that it’s an effective political tool.
One specific tool, which you write about, is the conflation of opposition to the Israeli government with anti-Semitism. In Germany, this conflation has led to artists and intellectuals losing state funding as a result of criticizing Israel. What do you see as most dangerous about that conflation?
It is an assault on free speech. It is an assault on legitimate and necessary political criticism. And these are the primary aspects of the conflation and exactly the reasons why it is being weaponized. It originates with a concerted campaign by the state of Israel to make sure that this conflation was operative.
But I also think that it’s basically antisemitic to conflate Jews with Israel or Israel with Jews. It actually plays into the age-old antisemitic trope of double loyalty. If to criticize Israel is to be against all Jews, then all Jews, no matter what their citizenship or their chosen national allegiance, are Israelis.That’s an actual anti-Semitic trope.
It is also very dangerous for the Jews in the way that actual antisemitism is dangerous for the Jews. I think this is a particularly important moment to be discussing this, because we may be witnessing an actual rise in anti-Semitism around the world. Yet these organizations that lump together criticism of Israel and actual anti-Semitic incidents obscure our view of anti-Semitism and get in the way of our being able to know whether, in fact, anti-Semitism is on the rise and what we can do about it. Because, of course, it’s much easier to do something about people who criticize Israel than it is about people who are actually threatening Jews.
The Russian government recently opened a criminal case against you, ostensibly for spreading false information about the Russian army, but actually for discussing war crimes that Russia committed in Ukraine. You’ve also recently written about Israel’s suppression of dissent against its military operation in Gaza. Obviously, Israel is a democracy for its citizens within the Green Line while no subset of the Russian population enjoys democratic rights. But do you see broad similarities between the attempts to police dissent in both countries?
Yes. Israelis are substantially more free than the Russian people. But I’ve been talking to Israeli peace activists for many, many years now about the similarities between the tactics that the Netanyahu government and the Putin government have used for exerting pressure and silencing civil society. For example, Israel passed a foreign agents law that was basically a mirror image of Russia’s foreign agents law.
What does that law entail?
I know the Russian law better than the Israeli law. But it’s a crazy, convoluted system where the government can brand an organization or an individual as a foreign agent, and that requires the person or the organization to continuously identify themselves in any public statements as a foreign agent. It’s sort of literally dehumanizing. It requires a person to turn themselves into a corporation. But the point, regardless of the specific provisions, is to position somebody as outside of society by branding them as literally other. These are citizens of these countries who are doing activism or journalism that is critical of the government, and for that, they’re effectively branded, officially branded as disloyal citizens or disloyal others, as enemy agents.
And Israeli right-wing parties have run campaigns identifying civil society activists as traitors in exactly the same style as Russia’s pro-government parties have done. I’ve spoken with Israeli activists about the effect of this rhetoric. And the first people who reached out to me after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, asking whether they could help anti-war voices in Russia, were Israeli anti-occupation activists who very clearly see the parallels.
Germany’s reckoning with its own Nazi-era crimes is often cited as an ideal that other societies culpable of profound historic crimes might pursue. As you note, in many other European countries complicit in the Holocaust, there is a tendency to minimize or deny that complicity. And yet, in your account, Germany’s approach to historic accountability is now abetting discrimination against Muslim immigrants and the suppression of dissent against the mass killing of Palestinian civilians. Should this make us despair for the possibility of nation-states reckoning with their historic crimes in a truly honest and productive way? Will such reckoning inevitably be colored by national and geopolitical imperatives?
I think you should have just ended that sentence at “nation-states.”
What do you mean?
I think we should despair for nation-states. They’re the fundamental problem. So, I’m not actually comfortable answering the question in the framework of nation-states because it sort of naturalizes the idea of a nation-state, which I find hugely problematic. So, let’s ask, “Can societies deal with their past?”
I mean, the fact is that we don’t know. But we also know that they have to. I think in Germany, there was a period that was genuinely illuminating, and it was what Hannah Arendt would’ve praised as inventing something new. A very important idea for Arendt was that political space, or every new life, created the possibility of people acting in concert, creating something new. So I think German memory culture, at a certain point, was an example of that kind of invention, but then it turned from ideas to ideology.
It ossified, and the difference between ideas and ideology is that ideology doesn’t require thinking. It actually lends itself to not thinking, and that, in turn, lends itself to being weaponized by bad actors. I think that’s what’s happened in Germany. The really vibrant, alive ideas that created German memory culture turned at a certain point. They stopped being alive. They turned into an ideology, and ideology can always be used against people who make others uncomfortable, who are weaker, who are other. But an ideology that positions itself as being anti-anti-Semitic is particularly convenient, and we’re seeing that both in Germany and in the United States.
It’s like the ultimate political trump card in these countries. Whoever uses the word antisemitism first has won. We saw that when the far-right party in Germany proposed this fairly ludicrous resolution against BDS. On the one hand, mainstream parties did not cooperate with it because their compact forbids cooperation. On the other hand, they couldn’t not act on fighting antisemitism. So immediately after voting down the resolution, they voted in an almost identical resolution of their own.
Now, we’re seeing a different – but fundamentally similar – scenario playing out in the U.S. Congress, where the anti-Semitic, white supremacist politicians, such as Representative [Elise] Stefanik, are weaponizing anti-Semitism against the things that they hate most, which is liberal universities, “woke culture,” and particularly, of course, women leaders of those universities.
I don’t think this is inherent in an attempt to reckon with the past. It is inherent in what Arendt might’ve called thoughtlessness. She used the word thoughtlessness a little differently in Eichmann in Jerusalem. But to her, thoughtlessness was kind of the ultimate political crime, acting not in the name of ideas but solely with the goal of one’s own advancement. This was what she saw in Eichmann. I think that that’s what we’re seeing now, and memory culture and the fight against anti-Semitism are nothing but convenient tools.
I wonder if part of the difficulty of keeping Holocaust memory from ossifying into ideology, or into a political weapon, is the difficulty of a more universalistic understanding of that genocide. It seems more psychologically challenging to posit that none of us are immune to this propensity for evil by virtue of our current position in time or our group identity. I think, among Jews, there’s often a conception of our people as being inherently incapable of such evil by virtue of being Jews. It seems much more unsettling to believe that this isn’t true; that these terrible atrocities don’t just tell us what our enemies are capable of, but also what we too – as members of the same species as the Nazis – are capable of doing.
Absolutely. I think you’re basically elaborating on the idea of thoughtlessness. How wonderful it is to be able to just say, once and for all, “We’ve remembered it. We’ve memorialized it. It has nothing to do with us in the present.” And how comforting it is to claim the place of perpetual victim, right? And to have this idea that we know is counterfactual but incredibly appealing, which is that some people are just all victims all the time and can’t be committing crimes against humanity by definition, because they’ve had crimes against humanity committed against them.
Of course, we know that this isn’t true. We know if we look outside of the history of the Second World War, we will easily find examples of people who avenged crimes with crimes. That seems only natural. Take the example of Azerbaijan and Armenia. Armenians are also, I think, convinced that they’re perpetual victims, because 30 years ago, Azerbaijan committed crimes against humanity in its battle with Nagorno-Karabakh. Then, in the early nineties, Armenians committed crimes against humanity against Azeris in Nagorno-Karabakh.
Now, Azeris have come back and carried out an ethnic cleansing of Nagorno-Karabakh. That’s actually kind of the pretty normal flow of history. If we abstract ourselves from the Jewish question, we will see it very clearly, and it won’t surprise us that that’s how it goes. But again, by insisting on the absolute exceptionality of the Holocaust, we create this myth of the infallible Jewish people, and Israel has used the myth very well by creating, also, the myth of the most moral army in the world.
How has your own Jewish identity and familial history shaped your understanding of the Israel-Palestine conflict? And has that understanding changed over time?
Yes. I grew up in the Soviet Union, experiencing anti-Semitism daily in various ways, some of them violent, but most of them just structural. All my documents said that I was Jewish, including the ledger that any teacher had in front of them when they were teaching class, including my medical records, whatever. It was an essential characteristic that was noted down everywhere and that called forth harassment, violence, and systematic discrimination.
So, when my parents wanted to emigrate, I, first as a preteen, then as a teenager, really wanted to go to Israel. I wanted to go to a place where Jews were in the majority because I really couldn’t imagine that there could be a place where Jews were in the minority where I wouldn’t have some of the same experiences. For me, the idea of a Jewish homeland was life-saving, no exaggeration. But my parents wanted to come to the States. And it took years of getting familiar with Israel, and its politics, and particularly the occupation to bring me to where I’m now. It was not a painless process.
In a recent interview, you suggested that humanity is not “any better or smarter or morally more solid” than it was in the 1930s. And thus, the only thing that makes us potentially less likely to perpetrate a holocaust than the people of that era is our knowledge that such evil is possible, and our memory of how it came about.
And yet, it seems to me that humanity has made moral progress since the 1930s; that people have become more inclined to recognize the social equality of women, LGBT people, and racial minorities than they were then. Is your view that human beings’ basic capacities for morality are in some sense fixed, and so progress is not possible on that front? Or else, that moral progress is possible but that it has not happened in the last 90 years?
I think you’re conflating morality with the way we’ve organized societies. I agree with you that we organize some societies, many societies, better than we used to 90 years ago. I think that’s true of American society. I think it’s true of many Western European societies. Although depending on what point in German history you pick, that claim actually starts becoming more difficult to make. And I think that shows us how non-linear progress is. So I would amend that to say that it’s not that I don’t believe in progress necessarily, it’s that I don’t believe in linear progress.
I think that democracy is fragile, whatever we’re calling democracy. Most broadly, I’m not even talking about democratic institutions. I’m talking about states of expansion of the franchise, states of a society consciously working toward creating a government of the governed. That’s a fragile state. And I think that right now in the United States, we’re actually observing just how fragile it is. And we’re observing it all over Europe, unfortunately as well.
Yes, if you take absolute indicators and compare them to American society of 100 years ago or 50 years ago, you’ll come out with much better indicators. For a lot of people, for me, even if you compare things now to the state of things a decade ago, they are much better now for me as a trans person. But also look at how fragile it is. Look at how potent the backlash is. Look at how real the danger of losing all of these gains is, and how many gains have been lost in terms of bodily autonomy of women in this country, in terms of the right to vote for black people and any number of other groups, in terms of the rights of people seeking international protection. We’re so much worse off than we were 40 years ago when I came to this country, or even 15 years ago.
And I think that these things teach us that there isn’t an inherent morality that expands and becomes more robust over the decades. If there were, we couldn’t possibly live with what we’re doing to people crossing the border in this country right now, or people attempting to cross the border. We would curl up and die from moral horror, but we don’t. And so in any area to which we’re not actively paying attention, unspeakable evil, can very easily take root.
In other words, institutional progress is possible. But human nature – or our capacity as creatures for immorality – stays the same. And the social institutions that keep our worst impulses in check are fragile?
No. I’m not saying that the morality of institutions is growing. Over the quarter century during which the United States extended the franchise to LGBT people, it also built an institution known as DHS, which is fundamentally one of the most immoral institutions that this country has ever created. There’s no morality on the institutional level. Institutions are instruments. Morality happens where there’s politics. And by politics, I mean people actually acting together to figure out how we live together justly. And where it’s not happening, unspeakable evil can take root, not because we’re fundamentally some sort of Hobbesian immoral creature, but because justice requires intention and thoughtfulness.
But doesn’t that imply that there is an innate tendency toward thoughtlessness that humans must struggle against?
I think you’re right. There’s an inherent vulnerability. I also think that people have an inherent tendency to be inspired and to actually love creating political space in which it’s possible to act together and to act intentionally. So it’s not like you have to herd them into this space. It just has to be made possible.
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