Another scholar who voiced criticism of Israel was John K. Roth, an author of numerous books on the Holocaust. He sparked controversy when he commented in a 1988 Los Angeles Times op-ed that the desire of Israeli right-wingers to expel Palestinians resembled Nazi ambitions. Just as “Kristallnacht happened because a political state decided to be rid of people unwanted within its borders,” he stated, so “Israel would prefer to rid itself of Palestinians if it could do so.” Palestinians “are being forced into a tragic part too much like the one played by the European Jews 50 years ago,” he argued, and asked readers to read the words “Never again” in a universal sense, as “a cry to forestall tragedy wherever people are unwanted.”⁴⁰

The 1990s heralded the start of a more substantial critique of Israel. This decade witnessed the Oslo Accords, which brought temporary hope that the enmity between Palestinians and Israelis was about to end, along with [the] occupation and Palestinians’ violent resistance. The 1990s also ushered in the New Historians, who challenged traditional Zionist narratives of Israel’s founding, especially [its] rôle in the expulsion of Palestinians in 1948.

Just as importantly, this decade brought a shift in Holocaust historiography, as the nascent field of genocide studies began to challenge the idea of the Shoah’s uniqueness. Dirk Moses, a genocide and Holocaust scholar, took such a stand when he asked rhetorically in 1998, “Should the Holocaust be narrated into a Zionist story of Jewish vulnerability in the diaspora?”⁴¹

Increasingly, scholars questioned whether the Holocaust really diverged so radically from other cases of mass killing. By 2008, Dan Stone could comment on an entire “empirical historiography that [argues] that there are important links between colonial genocide and the Holocaust, as well as meaningful conceptual gains to be made by thinking of the Holocaust in terms of comparative genocide.” Gradually, the idea that scholars could “study the Holocaust alongside other cases of genocide and ethnic cleansing” became widespread.⁴²

Scholars who challenged the thesis of Holocaust uniqueness showed more openness to condemn Israel’s actions, just as adherents of Holocaust exceptionalism joined the pro-Israel chorus. Tom Segev, author of a book on Nazi concentration camps, observed in 1993 that “the unique character of the Holocaust […] conforms to the Zionist movement’s fundamental assumption: that only an independent Israel could guarantee the safety of the Jews.” While Segev didn’t explicitly negate this assumption, he did point out the myriad ways Israelis used the Holocaust, including to justify force against the Palestinians.⁴³

Moshe Zuckermann, who has studied Germany and the Holocaust, was more explicit when he argued in 1996 in favour of a “universalist lesson of the Holocaust,” explaining that the particularist alternative served to “justify the occupation and brutal, oppressive Israeli acts” towards Palestinians.⁴⁴ In 2011 Moses echoed Zertal’s findings that “the Israeli state has exploited and manipulated Holocaust memories to serve its partisan ends,” including, in the case of the religious Right, “for the continuing occupation of Palestinian land.”

Moses, like other genocide scholars,⁴⁵ contextualized Israel’s history and policies within a framework of settler colonial violence, recalling Arendt’s earlier observations. “Blind to their own subject position as recent settlers in a country with a massive Palestinian Arab majority,” wrote Moses, “many Zionists ascribed (and many still ascribe) the hostility of the locals to the age-old anti-Semitism experienced in Europe […] rather than recognizing that their very presence and intention to form a rapid demographic majority, and their expulsion of most of the Arabs after 1947, was the source of provocation.”⁴⁶ For Moses, rejecting the Holocaust’s alleged exceptionalism went hand in hand with pointing out Zionism’s imperialist history.

During the 2010s, more and more Holocaust researchers offered ever-focused critical commentary on Israel and Palestine, setting in motion what would become a true rift in the field. These scholars made it a point to connect their work on the Holocaust to the fate of Palestinians. They included Michael Rothberg, for example, a literary scholar whose work brought together Holocaust studies and postcolonial studies.

In 2011, he examined claims of equivalence between Gaza and the Warsaw ghetto. Rothberg advised against equating the two, stating that “occupation and blockade [are] distinct from industrialized genocide,” but took a clear stand against Israel’s destruction of Palestinian life, especially during the 2008–2009 offensive that killed 1,400 Palestinians in three weeks. Rothberg also critiqued Israel’s misuse of the Holocaust to legitimize oppression of Palestinians. He called this “the morally justified originary position of victim that frequently justifies violence.”⁴⁷

That same year, Holocaust scholar Amos Goldberg, author of Trauma in First Person: Diary Writing during the Holocaust, connected the genocide of the Herero in German-colonized Namibia to Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. The first, he said, was a case in which “colonial domination, based on a sense of cultural and racial superiority, could spill over into horrific crimes such as mass expulsion, ethnic cleansing, and genocide in the face of local revolt.” He saw a worrying parallel in Israel. “The case of the Herrero revolt should serve as a horrific warning sign for us here in Israel,” he said, “which has already known one Nakba in its history.”⁴⁸

A year later Goldberg argued that Yad Vashem, Israel’s official Holocaust memorial museum, helped cultivate a “victimized identity” which served as “an extremely powerful and useful diplomatic tool […] in maintaining the occupation in Palestine.”⁴⁹ Moshe Zimmermann, a historian of German Jewry, slammed the Israeli government for its treatment of Palestinians, and for charging Palestine solidarity activists like Nelson Mandela with antisemitism.⁵⁰

(Emphasis added.)