Israel’s main Holocaust museum on Sunday categorically rejected claims that Israel was perpetrating genocide as “dangerous distortions” of historical truth that “desecrate the memory of the victims” of the Nazi genocide.
An honorary chairman of the board of the executive of Germany’s Friends of Yad Vashem association, Stephan-Andreas Casdorff, had suggested last week that because of the Nazi genocide, modern Germany should stop sending weapons to Israel.
Yad Vashem, one of the world’s most prestigious and acclaimed institutions in the field of Holocaust and genocide studies, distanced itself from his remarks following a query from JNS, and a prominent leader of European Jewry, the CEO of the Conference of European Rabbis, suggested that Casdorff was unfit to carry out a role within Yad Vashem.
“As numerous scholars have emphasized, such misuse undermines the integrity of the concept and obscures real cases of genocide,” said a Yad Vashem spokesperson of the allegations that Israel was perpetrating genocide.
Israel, he added, “was forced into a just war against a terrorist organization that carried out a brutal massacre, still holds hostages, and is unrelenting in its aim of destroying the Jewish state. Israel is fighting Hamas, not the civilian population in Gaza, whose suffering cannot be ignored.”
The invocation of the Holocaust in criticism of Israel’s conduct is “equally troubling,” the spokesperson said. “Drawing false equivalencies between the Nazi genocide of the Jewish people and a contemporary armed conflict distorts historical truth, desecrates the memory of the victims, and inflames discourse rather than enlightening it.”
Yad Vashem stands “firmly against the instrumentalization of genocide-related language and Holocaust imagery for political purposes by anyone, including scholars and public figures in Israel and abroad,” he wrote.
Several Holocaust scholars have accused the Jewish state of committing a genocide in Gaza, where its forces have been fighting to dismantle Hamas since its terrorists invaded Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, murdering some 1,200 people and abducting another 251. Fifty of those hostages are thought still to be in Gaza.
Israel-born genocide scholar Omer Bartov said last week that “incitement, displacement and the destruction of civilian life” in Gaza, as he termed it, “can meet the legal bar for genocide even without gas chambers or shooting pits,” CNN reported.
In May, Martijn Eickhoff, director of the Dutch Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, accused Israel of “genocidal violence,” and Israeli professor Amos Goldberg has also accused Israel of genocide.
