Amos Goldberg, Professor of Jewish History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a renowned historian of the Holocaust, explains why he believes Israel is committing genocide in Gaza and weighs in on the role of historians and public intellectuals in addressing it.
The episode is sponsored by the Sady and Ludwig Kahn Chair in Jewish History at UCLA and co-hosted by Prof David N. Myers.
To name the Israeli reaction as genocide and say that October 7th was NOT a genocide is a huge absurd ! Also to compare IDF attempts to protect civilians to nazis feeding concentration camps inhabitants is a show of how ridiculous are Amos analysis.
Shame on TAU to have him as a teacher – I can only imagine the damage of his influence …
I listened attentively and with interest. There is no space to discuss adequately the podcast, so let me be brief.
“Settler colonialism” is an easy way out. For reasons I will try to argue more extensively elsewhere, I believe it is generally and inadequate concept.
In the case of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, I think it is a way of mislabelling what is, in fact, a national conflict, a conflict between nationalist movement. Who ever said nationalist conflicts were easy? Perhaps some of you did. That is your problem; it is not a conceptual problem of nationalism.
None of this statement makes any difference to one’s evaluation of the present horrors. But ‘less is more’, as the poet said.
The misuse of the word genocide, or rather the abuse of this term in reference to Israel’s just war in Gaza, is stunning, especially coming from a professor at Hebrew University. Israel is making unprecedented efforts (obviously not always successful) to minimize civilian casualties in its campaign against Islamist forces that initiated hostilities with an invasion and mass slaughter while exposing their own population deliberately to the perils of war. Far from being a matter of “calling a spade a spade”, the genocide charge leveled against Israel is preposterous.