Norman J. W. Goda is a professor of Holocaust studies at the University of Florida, and a widely recognized expert in his field. The author of numerous books about the Holocaust, Goda also consults for the National Archives as part of its efforts to organize documents relating to Nazi war criminals. Earlier this year, Goda wrote a long essay titled “The Genocide Libel,” in which he argues that the accusation that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza “is political, designed not so much to describe a crime, but to place Israel, its military, its citizens, and its supporters as outside the realm of decency and human values.” Recently, he wrote another piece, with the historian Jeffrey Herf, about “why it’s wrong to call Israel’s war in Gaza a ‘genocide.’ ”
Genocide is defined by the Genocide Convention of 1948 as the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” Some scholars of the Holocaust, most notably Omer Bartov, have argued that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, where more than sixty thousand Palestinians have been killed, and that it is the duty of Holocaust historians to speak out against the war. But Bartov has also argued that “the majority of academics engaged with the history of the Nazi genocide of the Jews have stayed remarkably silent, while some have openly denied Israel’s crimes in Gaza, or accused their more critical colleagues of incendiary speech, wild exaggeration, well-poisoning and antisemitism.” He specifically pointed to Goda as an example.
I wanted to speak with Goda about Bartov’s claims, and how he sees his own work. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed whether Holocaust historians have a duty to publicly condemn human-rights violations, what he thinks Israel’s aims are in this war, and why he is skeptical of the reported death toll in Gaza.
What is the job of a Holocaust historian?
In part, we teach courses having to do with the Holocaust. These can range from the Holocaust itself to courses on Holocaust memory to courses on Holocaust justice. And in terms of research, I think that Holocaust historians work very hard to uncover aspects of the Holocaust that we don’t understand or that we understand poorly. But also we situate the Holocaust within European and world history, because it was a global event. We research questions such as whether it was a particularly Jewish event, or whether it was a more universal event.
How do you think about that question?
There are aspects to the Holocaust that are distinctly Jewish. So many of the sources are in Yiddish and Hebrew, and Eastern European Jewish civilization was wiped out. But the Holocaust is also very much a global memory. It was coded as such by events like the Nuremberg trials, the Eichmann trial, museums, memorials, literature, and other things. And in that sense it’s a universal memory that can touch on issues of everything from democratic rights to issues of tolerance to how we treat minorities.
Antisemitism was obviously inextricable from the Holocaust, and the Holocaust was the single most infamous or one of the most infamous large-scale human-rights violations. It seems that Holocaust historians often feel it is important to address contemporary antisemitism and human-rights violations.
Yes, very much. The generation of Holocaust historians before mine took up the subject owing in part to their objections to the Vietnam War. There was a school of thought at the time that viewed Vietnam itself as a genocide, and believed that the United States, which was instrumental in the defeat of Nazi Germany and all that it stood for, was now fighting what was, in essence, a colonial war with mass civilian casualties.
The longer answer to this is that the Holocaust was seen at the time as a civilizational rupture. It was the premeditated murder of one European group by other European groups, and it took place in Europe. Faith in the Enlightenment and European progress was destroyed. The Holocaust became, as a result, the prototypical way that we think of genocide. In recent decades, scholars of European colonialism have pointed out that scenes of extreme mass violence, and even genocide, also took place in the colonial world. And that has raised questions that we are all trying to figure out. One is, has the Holocaust become a hegemonic narrative that crowds out our consciousness of race-based mass atrocity? Can we understand the Holocaust and colonial violence better by finding common elements? What is the relationship between antisemitism and racism?
And the thing that complicates all of those discussions is how one feels about Israel. The way one feels about Israel really lights a fire under all of these debates—about where the Holocaust fits into contemporary Israeli politics and the war in Gaza.
You wrote something about the war in Gaza with the title “The Genocide Libel.” What historical resonance was that title supposed to have?
In the world of antisemitism, “libel” refers to all of those antisemitic tropes by which Jews were charged with horrible things, whether it was the deliberate and gleeful ritual killing of non-Jewish children, or the accusation that Jews manipulated foreign governments, controlled the press, and ultimately strove to control the world.
In your paper you write, “Genocide accusations against Israel are different” from other such charges. Do you think charging Israel with genocide is antisemitic?
The accusation that Israel is committing genocide is the peak of a pretty broad mountain. We’ve had arguments over Israel for decades. Again, some questions: Was the return of Jews necessary, proper, and overdue after the Holocaust, or is Israel just another European racist colonial state, or even settler-colonial state? Did Israel’s existence as a settler-colonial state necessitate erasure of the Arabs who were in Palestine? Or were the Arabs in Palestine done in again and again by inflexible, wrongheaded, venal, and corrupt leadership?
I’m sensing what you believe given those adjectives.
Well, look, Palestinians have not had the best leaders, and one can make the argument that those leaders led the Palestinians down a very tragic and very dark alley.
Just to go back to my question, though: Considering that you talked about a “genocide libel,” is lobbing that accusation against Israel today antisemitic?
I do think that we need to look at it broadly. Is the accusation of genocide in keeping with the one legal definition of genocide that we have? Have these accusations been made before, and is there something peculiar about them in Israel’s case? Namely, do they weave in antisemitic tropes? Israel is fighting a war that in some ways is unprecedented. It’s a war against a dug-in enemy who has created fortifications underground, but also under civilian structures.
Israel is not denying aid to Gaza because Hamas is under buildings, correct?
The blockade is kind of a different issue.
It’s part of the case when people make these genocide charges against Israel.
Well, they focus on a lot of things, but I think it’s worth making the point that genocide accusations against Israel really go back to the nineteen-sixties.
I think most people making the accusation today either weren’t alive in the sixties or were not aware of those debates.
Nevertheless, in the U.N. and on the West European left, to say nothing of the Communist world, people made the same arguments back then that Israel was committing a genocide against the Palestinians, one that began in 1948. And that because this genocide was continuing, the Palestinians only had one option, and that was to resist. The problem was that the Palestine Liberation Organization didn’t really resist. It used terror operations again and again against civilians. The P.L.O. in the eighties and nineties charged the Israelis with dropping booby-trap toys on Palestinian refugee camps and Lebanon specifically to kill children. That was untrue. [Goda later clarified that he was referring to a Lebanese military communiqué in the nineteen-seventies. There is no evidence that Israel used booby-trapped toys, although there have been widespread reports over the decades of Lebanese children being killed or injured by Israeli munitions that they thought were toys.]
The Israelis did kill a ton of innocent people in Lebanon, though.
Yes, but the P.L.O. also inflated the numbers substantially, much like Hamas does today.
Which numbers are inflated?
The numbers coming from the Gaza Health Ministry. You have the raw figure, I think, of sixty thousand today.
And you know that’s inflated?
I am not necessarily contesting the number, although they get those from a lot of different sources. I am contesting the fact that they do not count combatants as anything other than innocent civilians, and that the Gaza Health Ministry has said that seventy-two per cent of all deaths were women and children. They walked that back by April of 2024.
The Biden Administration, which was a big supporter of Israel, relied upon Gaza Health Ministry figures, and in some cases thought they might be an undercount.
Look, I mean, the numbers are contentious.
It would be easier if there were international journalists allowed into Gaza.
I think it’s a mistake not to let independent media in.
One of the horrible things you see Holocaust deniers do is dispute the number of people who died in it. And so I imagine you’re very careful about figures. You said that the figures at the Gaza Ministry of Health are inflated, but you don’t actually know that, correct?
In terms of the raw figures, nobody knows. In terms of the number of civilians, the Gaza Health Ministry has inflated the numbers.
There’ve been people in government in Israel and close to the government using phrases like “ethnic cleansing” to refer to what the country is doing. There are widespread reports of war crimes committed by Israeli forces, and of intentional attacks on innocent civilians, and of starvation. Does the argument about genocide feel different now than when people were accusing Israel of it in the past?
Well, there’s no doubt that there are war crimes that the Israeli government or the Israeli military will have to investigate. “Genocide” is a very different term. Normal countries commit war crimes. Genocidal countries are something else. They are rendered illegitimate, and they are rendered illegitimate permanently.
Not permanently, right? Germany’s a beloved member of the family of nations now, or whatever clichéd phrase you want to use.
But the Nazis hopefully are never coming back to power, and the Hutus are never coming back to power in Rwanda.
So the people who committed it are permanently delegitimatized? Is that what you mean?
When you say Israel is a genocidal state, and Zionism is a genocidal doctrine, you’re saying that Israel as a Jewish state is not only committing genocide but is genocidal as such.
Let’s say hypothetically that Israel was committing genocide. How would you talk about it? Or are you saying it could not be discussed?
I’m not the one who’s obsessing over the term “genocide.” There have been numerous people who have said that “genocide” is the only term to use here, and that was said very shortly after October 7th. You’re talking about the recent problems with food distribution and that sort of thing. It’s worth remembering that within days of October 7th, there were articles being published calling the war, which had barely got under way, a textbook case of genocide.
I think part of that resulted from comments that people in the Israeli establishment had made about their intentions.
And yet those comments were all doctored, O.K.? There was Defense Minister Yoav Gallant’s comments about “human animals.” Yair Rosenberg wrote in The Atlantic about how Gallant was clearly referring to Hamas. [Two days after October 7th, Gallant referred to a fight against human animals, and a day later he said that Hamas, ‘the ISIS of Gaza,’ are human animals. In the October 9th remarks, he also called for a “complete siege,” including cutting off food and aid.]
There were President Isaac Herzog’s comments about how all people in Gaza were responsible for October 7th. Herzog was answering a very specific question, but, if you looked at his entire speech, he was saying, “We will scrupulously follow the laws and customs of war and try to minimize civilian casualties.” [Herzog has claimed that his quote was taken out of context because in the same press conference he rejected the idea of harming innocent civilians. He did however say that “it’s an entire nation out there that is responsible.”] In every genocide accusation, they all use the shortened edited comments in order to try and prove genocidal intent. [After we spoke, I asked Goda about Aharon Haliva, the former head of Israeli military intelligence who left his post in 2024. In recently released leaked audio, he stated, “The fact that there are already fifty thousand dead in Gaza is necessary and required for future generations,” and “For everything that happened on October 7, for every person who was killed on October 7th, fifty Palestinians must die.” Goda responded that these comments “are different” from the other controversial statements we had discussed, adding “in retrospect they openly justify the idea of blind mass reprisal while assuming that blind mass reprisal was Israeli policy all along.” (Haliva made a statement saying that “the leaked recordings were published from things said in a closed forum, and I can only regret that.”)]
Many of the debated aspects of comments made early in the war by Israeli leaders have come to pass. There are endless reports of Gazans being forced to move from one area to the other. There have been reports of soldiers following orders to fire on civilians, which the I.D.F. denies. There have been complete aid cutoffs. And now we have children starving. It is striking that so much of this has actually turned out to be, broadly speaking, accurate, even if all the quotes were doctored.
Well, O.K. Gallant talked about eliminating Hamas, and that’s clearly the primary aim of the war.
You think that’s the primary aim of the war?
There’s simply no question.
I assume you saw the New York Times story a few weeks ago with Netanyahu more or less admitting more than a year ago that the war was being continued for political purposes.
Listen, there’s a dynamic going on right now, which is not a savory dynamic, because we don’t know the extent to which the war right now is being driven by Netanyahu’s odd relationship in the Cabinet.
I remember Rosenberg’s piece, and I remember him showing that a Netanyahu quote from more than a year ago, about deporting Gazans, was inaccurate, and, in fact, Netanyahu was referring to the Hamas leadership. And, of course, quotes should be accurately reported. It’s just that we’re now in a situation where Trump has proposed removing Gazans from Gaza and not letting them return, and Netanyahu lavishly praised the plan. Does this mean that every single quote from Israeli officials early in the war was reported entirely accurately? No. But it feels like that focus misses the forest for the trees.
I don’t think there’s going to be a mass deportation of Gazans, and neither do you, and neither does Trump. These are pie-in-the-sky things that people say. [After we initially spoke, the Wall Street Journal reported that Israel was in talks with countries and territories, including South Sudan, about taking in relocated Gazans. When asked about this, Goda told me, “Removing all Gazans is impractical and immoral, and most fully understand this. The negotiations with South Sudan are, in any event, opaque. The Sudanese deny that such a thing was ever discussed.”]
You’ve been accused by Omer Bartov, who’s a prominent Holocaust historian, of essentially letting down the larger idea behind Holocaust studies, which he believes should not just be about studying that horrific event but also about imparting certain lessons. And so he is critical of historians like you who are more concerned with criticizing the people calling the current war a genocide than focussing on the human-rights violations that are occurring. How do you feel about that argument?
Well, I have a lot of respect for Omer Bartov. The relationship between Holocaust studies and the war in Gaza is very fraught. I don’t think that saying that this is not a genocide is letting down the entire field of Holocaust studies. I can name many, many Holocaust historians who do not believe that this is a genocide. Is it the deliberate attempt to destroy an entire people in whole or in part? No, it’s simply not. It just isn’t.
It just isn’t, you said?
Well, look, I mean, listen, when the war started, there were people who insisted that this be called a genocide right from the start. Francesca Albanese, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, asked, “Why do I insist on calling it a genocide? Because it’s a genocide.” That’s not a legal opinion.
You said “It just isn’t” to me.
The definition of genocide has not changed since 1948. The definition of war crimes has changed based on different weapons and different tactics.
You called October 7th a genocide, right?
I would agree with Jeffrey Herf that it was an interrupted genocide. All one has to do is read the Hamas charter to see that this is fundamentally a genocidal movement. They launched the war with the intention of destroying the Israeli state, unless we believe that Hamas wanted a one-state solution in which Jews and Arabs would live happily side by side.
You think the people ruling Israel now want Jews and Muslims living side by side in peace?
The people ruling Israel now? No, I don’t think they do.
They are the people waging this war.
I think that [right-wing government ministers] Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich and others have a fundamentalist, ethnocentric view of Israel that most Jews won’t agree with, but, if you look at polls conducted of most Israelis in 2023 and 2024, the desire is for a secure border more than annexation.
You weren’t quoting polls of Palestinians earlier. You were saying what you said Hamas wanted to do, which includes killing Israelis. It seems to me that Netanyahu may want to drive Palestinians out of Gaza.
Netanyahu for a long time has been an opponent of the two-state solution. He’s been in legal trouble for several years. He pieced together a coalition where he was beholden to the right wing.
But then why the good assumptions about his motives fighting this war rather than his own political troubles and the dislike of Palestinians?
Look, it’s a tangle, isn’t it? Part of it may be his political troubles. Part of it may be that they’re still trying to destroy Hamas, destroy tunnels, and get the hostages back. The question as to why Netanyahu is continuing the war can always be answered with the answer that the war could end tomorrow if only Hamas would start thinking a little bit more about the people of Gaza and a little bit less about themselves.
That seems unlikely.
Of course, it’s unlikely. Because this is who they are.
Right, but it also seems like Netanyahu could have had a hostage deal to end the war and didn’t want one.
Well, I’m not a fan of Netanyahu, but the Philadelphi corridor is tremendously important. That’s what prevents more weapons from coming into Gaza, and so holding the Philadelphi Corridor is not a crazy condition. [This area, along Gaza’s border with Egypt, has been a sticking point in negotiations to end the war.]
I want to set aside the conversation about whether Israel’s conduct in this war reaches the literal definition of genocide. It still seems like what’s going on is pretty horrific, and I’m a little bit surprised that you, as someone who studies the Holocaust and is such an important voice in those conversations, would focus more on people who are outraged about this, even if you think they’re using the wrong word, than on just the actual situation going on in Gaza today, and the images of starving children.
The last image of a starving child we saw was Muhammad Al-Motawaq, the child with cerebral palsy, in a picture that was clearly staged. I’m not unsympathetic. [There is no evidence that the photo was staged. The child was born with preëxisting conditions that were not revealed in some of the pieces and photo captions about him. But there is extensive reporting that shows that he was nevertheless suffering from severe malnutrition, and that his condition had worsened because of the lack of food in Gaza.]
You’re not denying that children have died of starvation in Gaza, correct?
I’m not denying that children . . . First of all, I’m not denying that people have died of starvation, but we don’t know how many.
This is what I’m a little struck by—that as a Holocaust historian this is what your focus is.
What do you think my focus is?
The specific word people use to talk about significant crimes.
You’re acting like I’m splitting hairs over the word “genocide.” The word “genocide” has been ricocheting around the internet and around social media.
It is. I’m saying whether this is genocide or whether it’s ethnic cleansing or whether it’s daily war crimes, I would just think that the focus of a Holocaust historian would be these horrors. I would also just think when I brought up starving children that the first comment wouldn’t have been something about a photo that was supposedly inaccurate.
O.K., Isaac, listen closely. Nobody wants children to be casualties of war. Images of children suffering affect us all. I don’t want you to misunderstand that, but what’s very clear is that the children are being used as propaganda by the power that is governing Gaza. You simply can’t deny that. Various N.G.O.s make the argument that Israel is deliberately targeting children as part of a genocidal strategy. The framing of the war matters for how we understand it. The way you fight a war is determined by the way your enemy fights. Do we call it a war and see it for what it is—a brutal fight between two enemies, one of whom is going to destroy the other if it’s not destroyed first, or do we see it as a genocide, which is the deliberate murder of an entire people in whole or in part? It simply isn’t the latter. It’s not a genocide. ♦
