Israel’s Engagement in Gaza: “Textbook Case of GENOCIDE” Says Holocaust Scholar

Raz Segal – an Israeli associate professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Stockton University in the US – is someone you need to listen to. When he uses the term ‘genocide’, it is not done lightly – it is with precision. Here he sets out the case that the Israeli state is committing an ongoing genocide in Gaza – and questions of intent, incitement, prevention and accountability.

Raz Segal wrote this on “The Gurdian”:

“The context of the Hamas attack on Israelis, however, is completely different from the context of the attack on Jews during the Holocaust. And without the historical context of Israeli settler colonialism since the 1948 Nakba, we cannot explain how we got here, nor imagine different futures; Biden offered us, instead, the decontextualized image of “pure, unadulterated evil.

President Joe Biden began his remarks in Israel with this: “Hamas committed atrocities that recall the worst ravages of Isis, unleashing pure unadulterated evil upon the world. There is no rationalizing it, no excusing it. Period. The brutality we saw would have cut deep anywhere in the world, but it cuts deeper here in Israel. October 7, which was a … sacred Jewish holiday, became the deadliest day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust

With this, Biden reinforced the rhetorical framework that the former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett expressed, in typically unashamed terms, in an interview on Sky News on 12 October: “We’re fighting Nazis.”

A powerful state, with powerful allies and a powerful army, engaged in a retaliatory attack against stateless Palestinians under Israeli-settler colonial rule, military occupation and siege, is thus portrayed as powerless Jews in a struggle against Nazis”

Dr. Raz Segal holds a Ph.D. in History from Clark University (the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 2013). He is Associate Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies and Endowed Professor in the Study of Modern Genocide at Stockton University, where he also serves as Director of the MA program in Holocaust and Genocide Studies.