oatmealNot only are Holocaust analogies not impermissible – sometimes they are required (Holocaust scholar Prof. Amos Goldberg’s expert court testimony)
Goldberg published his expert court testimony on Local Call (in Hebrew) after a judge ruled against Prof. Alon Harel, who had called settler Uri Kirschenbaum “a faithful student of Alfred Rosenberg” on Facebook.
Three reasons why Goldberg is publishing this now: First, the judge’s ruling reflects what he sees as a mythical, ahistorical understanding of the Holocaust that must be challenged. Second, violence against Palestinians in the occupied territories – the very violence Kirschenbaum was defending – has reached levels not seen before. Third, and most significantly: Goldberg says he partially agrees with Kirschenbaum’s own logic. Kirschenbaum argues that the #IDF operated in Gaza according to the same murderous security doctrine he advocates, and therefore sees hypocrisy in condemning identical violence in the West Bank.
Goldberg concurs – and draws the consequence Kirschenbaum will not: the analogy extends beyond settler violence to Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
The judge dismissed his testimony by separating “security doctrine” from “ideology” – but Goldberg shows these are inseparable in Nazi practice. Kirschenbaum’s framework maps point by point onto documented Nazi operational doctrine: collective guilt attributed to an entire people; civilians as primary targets rather than incidental casualties; dehumanisation as moral preparation for mass killing; extra-state paramilitary violence filling the state’s perceived “failures”; and the Dresden/Hiroshima comparison used to normalise atrocity, the same argument Ohlendorf made at #Nuremberg.
IDF, he concludes, conduct in Gaza operated under the same security doctrine Kirschenbaum describes and endorses, making the analogy applicable not only to settler violence in the West Bank but to what Goldberg calls Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
