One thing I did not expect amid these shifts was that arguments on behalf of Israel would themselves stray from Shoah exceptionalism by arguing that Hamas is worse than the Nazis. But maybe it makes sense, as response to the diminished memory of the Holocaust, that there would be uppings of the rhetorical ante along with invocations of the past.
The conservative writer Douglas Murray offered a version of this case in an interview a couple of weeks ago, and then the historian Andrew Roberts offered the argument at length in an essay for The Washington Free Beacon. Here’s an excerpt:
For whereas the Nazis went to great lengths to hide their crimes from the world, because they knew they were crimes, Hamas has done the exact opposite, because they do not consider them to be so.
In October 1943 Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, delivered a notorious speech to 50 of his senior lieutenants in Posen. “I want to speak frankly to you about an extremely grave matter,” he said. “We can talk about it among ourselves, yet we will never speak of it in public. … I am referring to the evacuation of the Jews, the extermination of the Jewish people. … It is a page of glory in our history that has never been written and is never to be written.”
By total contrast, the Hamas killers 80 years later attached GoPro cameras to their helmets so they could livestream their atrocities over social media. Although the Nazis burnt Jews alive in barns on their retreat in 1945, they did not film themselves doing it. There are plenty of photographs of Nazis standing around death-pits full of Jewish corpses, but these were taken for private delectation rather than public consumption.
… The sheer glee with which Hamas, by contrast, killed parents in front of their children and of children in front of their parents, was broadcast to the world. Nazi sadism was routine and widespread, but it wasn’t built into their actual operational plans in the way that Hamas’s sadism has been.
This argument not only did not convince me, it reminded me of the strength of the case for Holocaust exceptionalism, and why the Nazi genocide is likely to retain some crucial distinction in the annals of evil, even as the world changes and the 20th century fades.
Roberts emphasizes Hamas’s public savagery as against Nazi attempts to hide their crimes from the civilized world. But those expressions of barbarism, like the terrible crimes of the Islamic State to which they’ve been compared, are notable precisely because they’re throwbacks to a dreadful but also entirely historically familiar way of war, in which brutality and humiliation and rape are part of the arsenal of combat, and berserker passions are deliberately embraced.
It’s the way of war depicted, for instance, in the darkest scenes in Robert Eggers’s 2022 Viking film, “The Northman,” where taking a village means killing the men, raping the women and herding the children into a building to be burned alive — and I’d bet that if the Vikings had access to GoPro cameras, many would have happily broadcast those atrocities to friends and enemies alike.
Now you can argue that whether for Hamas or the Islamic State, there is still a special evil in embracing this way of war under 21st century conditions, in the gaze of the internet, that goes beyond those medieval reavers — a performativity to the atavism that adds an extra layer of depravity, especially when you factor in all the logistical planning required for the Hamas assault to work.