Professor demands Israel stop 'weaponizing the Holocaust' to justify violence

Israel is "weaponizing" the Holocaust to justify its "genocide" and "war crimes" against Palestinians, one Israel scholar and professor argued in the Guardian this week.

Raz Segal, an Israel expert and Associate Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Stockton University in New Jersey, criticized President Biden and Israel's leaders for "weaponizing the Holocaust" by comparing the atrocities against Jews to the October 7 attack by Hamas on Israeli civilians.

Segal acknowledged that the attack, which left at least 1,400 Israelis dead, was the single deadliest massacre of Jews since World War II. However, he argued the context was "completely different."

"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," the professor complained. 

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While both sides should be held accountable for their "war crimes," world leaders were "distort[ing]" reality by not putting the conflict in the context of Israel's "settler colonial violence against Palestinians since the 1948 Nakba," he argued.

 The "Nakba," meaning "catastrophe," is a term that Palestinians use to describe the 1948 establishment of the state of Israel.

"No justice is possible, not in the short term and certainly not in the long term, without a truthful reckoning of how we got here," Segal wrote.

He also suggested Israel was demonizing Palestinians in the same way that Nazis did to Jews, to justify their "genocide."

"The fantasy of 'fighting Nazis' drives such explicit language, because the image of Nazis is one of ‘pure, unadulterated evil’, which removes all laws and restrictions in the fight against it. Perpetrators of genocide always see their victims as evil and themselves as righteous. This is, indeed, how Nazis saw Jews," he wrote.

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Since the October 7 terror attacks, some college campuses have become hotbeds for anti-Israel activism. 

Several professors and student groups at universities across the country have participated in protests or rallies blaming Israel for genocide.

Russell Rickford, an associate professor of history at Cornell, said he was "exhilarated" by the Hamas attack on Israel at a pro-Palestinian rally on October 17.

"It was exhilarating, it was energizing. If they [the Palestinians] weren't exhilarated by this challenge to the monopoly of violence, by the shifting of this balance of power, they would not be human. I was exhilarated," he told the crowd, who responded with cheers. 

Rickford later apologized for his remarks, saying he made a "horrible choice of words." 

An associate professor of climate science at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago also apologized after denouncing Israelis as "pigs" and "savages" in a rant on social media.

Several pro-Palestinian student groups at Harvard University hosted a march and "die-in" last week on campus in protest of Israel’s "genocide" of Palestinians in Gaza, weeks after blaming Israel as "entirely responsible" for the October 7 attack.

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Fox News' Louis Casiano contributed to this report.