The Deafening Silence of the ‘Holocaust Industry’ on Israel’s Genocide in Gaza

TRANSCEND MEMBERS, 15 Sep 2025

Maung Zarni | FORSEA – TRANSCEND Media Service

For nearly two years, the world watched in silence as the Jewish state went about massacring thousands of unarmed Palestinians and laying waste to their homeland.

10 Sep 2025 – On September 1, the International Association of Genocide Scholars adopted a resolution that told the world what it already knows: Israel is committing genocide in Palestine.

The association declared that Israel is engaged in all the crimes encoded in post-Holocaust international law, specifically, breaching the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide of 1948, to which Tel Aviv is also a signatory (or “state party”).

The UN adopted the convention the same year Israel was established as an independent state, ironically, by perpetrating a Holocaust of its own, the Nakba, as Palestinians call it.

That the association of scholars finding Israel’s acts – the policy of annihilating Palestinians in Gaza – to meet the legal definition of “genocide” comes as no surprise. But what surprises me is the fact that it took nearly two years for this professional society to belabour this obvious conclusion.

Others had done it 24 years before.

As early as September 3, 2001, representatives of international non-governmental organisations and other civil society groups gathered in South Africa’s Durban had called out Israel for its “acts of genocide”.

Five years later, in 2006, Ilan Pape, a world-renowned German Jewish Israeli historian, had begun calling Israel’s actions against Palestinians “an incremental genocide”, not dissimilar to the criminal policy adopted by my native Myanmar against the Rohingya, which my scholar colleague Natalie Brinham and I call “the slow-burning genocide”.

Irrefutable proof

Since October 2023, Israel has capitalised on the Hamas attack to engage in a combination of Hitlerite liquidation of a primarily civilian population and Stalinist-induced famine in the then-USSR, known as Holodomor (extermination via induced famine).

From a scholarly perspective known as “path dependence”, Israel’s policies and actions against the Palestinian people in Gaza were wholly predictable.

On October 7, 2023, upon waking up to the news of Hamas’s violent jailbreak – similar to Jewish inmates’ violent revolt at the Nazi-run Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp on October 7, 1944 – I chatted via email with my friend, Professor Penny Green, Director of the International State Crime Initiative at Queen Mary University of London.

She responded instantly: “It is going to be an apocalypse (in Gaza).” Her expertly projection has proved prophetic.

This January, the Palestinian liberation theologian Rev. Dr Munther Isaac told a visiting delegation of international scholars that “Israel is a terrorist entity built on the Palestinian land by ethnic cleansing of the indigenous populations”.

According to Zochrot, the Jaffa-based organisation that promotes educational tours about Al-Nakba of 1948, the Nakba is “an ongoing process of disfranchisement of the Palestinian people from their land and assets for the exclusive Jewish usage.”

In founding Israel as an ethno-nationalist state, marauding gangs of so-called “liberation fighters” of the embryonic state demolished over 500 native Palestinian villages, 11 cities and roughly 1,000 mosques and churches. These Zionist militia groups, which subsequently became the Israeli Defence Force, perpetrated a series of genocidal rapes and mass killings of unarmed Palestinians in various locations. Deir Yassin near the land-locked Jerusalem and Tantura on the coast are the two most infamous cases.

They slaughtered an estimated 15,000 in the several weeks leading up to the founding of Israel on 14 May 1948. That’s twice the number of Bosnian Muslims (7,000+) mass-executed in Srebrenica by the Bosnian Serb troops in mid-July 1995, something which the International Court of Justice ruled as “acts of genocide”.

If anything, the genocide scholars’ official resolution is an attempt to redeem the morally paralysed professional society, reflecting the decisive shift against Israel among the world’s moral majority, including, importantly, in the United States, where 60 percent of Gen Z Americans openly support Hamas over Israel.

On the profoundly moral crisis of the influential Western organisations, the silence of what has been described as the Holocaust industry is most deafening and profoundly troubling.

On July 30, Amos Goldberg, a professor of Holocaust History at The Hebrew University in Jerusalem, directed his scathing criticism at a global web of highly connected and influential institutions, including Holocaust museums and scholarly organisations with a specific focus on the study of the Shoah.

He wrote, “Holocaust memory not only failed to generate any criticism of Israel, but it also actively served to justify the genocide in Gaza and blocked any effective critique of it.”

Professor Goldberg’s piece is definitely worth a read for questioning why these Holocaust memorial museums even exist if they are not prepared to embrace the universal fellowship of humans and, perversely, serve as a “discursive iron dome” of Israel.

Here the Hollywood, which has long effectively globalized the Holocaust memory via such box office hit as Schindler’s List, an Oscar winner, is largely complicit in Israel’s ongoing genocide. Beyond making box-office hits on the Shoah and Israel (e.g., Munich), Stephen Speilberg has generously patronized the study of genocides, in the form of the USC Shoah Foundation at the University of Southern California. But since Israel has unfurled its own Final Solution in Gaza, with unconcealed intent, since 8 October 2023, the critically acclaimed director has gone completely missing. It is as though Never again! excludes Israel’s principal victims of genocide, apartheid and colonial occupation.

And all the while, the Jewish state and its society behave in the same way Nazi Germany did between 1935, when the Nuremberg race laws were adopted and 1945, when the SS were forcing Jewish and other victims on death marches.

It is no longer perverse – let alone antisemitic – to compare Israel and Nazi Germany. Only three days ago, Katie Halper, the American Jewish talk-show host and journalist, released her 12-minutes video-documentary wherein she pointed out the common features of Nazi genocide 80 years ago and Israel’s ongoing genocide in its 23rd month. In the YouTube which has received nearly a quarter million views, Ms Halper showed a videoclip of ex-General Moshe Ya’alon, former Chief of Staff of IDF and ex-Defence Minister, openly stating, in Hebrew, that his Israel is pursuing “Mein Kempf in reverse” against Palestinians.

The apartheid wall and the sniper tower (the total wall length of 520 kilometre) in Aida Refugee camp set up in 1948 after the first wave of ethnic cleansing of Palestinians called the Nakba, photo by Zarni.

Milking the Holocaust

I remember how quick the iconic institution of Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Poland was in joining other Holocaust remembrance institutions – such as the US Holocaust Memorial Museum – in condemning the Hamas attack on Israel two years ago.

Aren’t they designed to keep alive the painful Holocaust memory while promoting “Never Again!” as a guiding moral light to prevent the repeat of the Nazi genocide anywhere in the world?

I visited Auschwitz four times since I travelled there in March 2017 to make a two-minute video, appealing to Europe to help stop my own native country’s genocide against the Rohingya people.

During the Covid lockdown several years ago, I spoke on the closing panel on genocides – including Rohingya, Bosniak, and Roma – at a conference organised and hosted by the Auschwitz museum and presided over by its director and Polish scholar Piotr Cywinski.

During our pre-conference meeting, the director assured me that Auschwitz is not merely about the past but also seeks to be a force for good in the future.

In other words, Auschwitz was meant to serve as a reminder about the harm that could befall human populations when an ethnonationalist state and Pavlovian public turn genocidal against a vulnerable population.

Alas, Auschwitz and all other holocaust memorial museums worldwide are complete and utter failures in serving as preventive institutions. For they too are anchored in the Jewish supremacy and the Holocaust exceptionalism.

Milan Kundera once observed that “forgetting (of past atrocities and repression) is a crime”.

But he did not live long enough to see that Israel and its appendage of the Holocaust industry have turned an act of remembering into a political ideology, a discursive defence, a (presumed) license to perpetrate exactly the same type of group destruction one has suffered, all in the name of “self-defence” and against the weaker and vulnerable ethnic, racial, religious or national group.

That’s not remembrance, but milking one’s past sufferings while inflicting the same atrocities on a different group.

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A Buddhist humanist from Burma (Myanmar), Maung Zarni, nominated for the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize, is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment, former Visiting Lecturer with Harvard Medical School, specializing in racism and violence in Burma and Sri Lanka, and Non-resident Scholar in Genocide Studies with Documentation Center – Cambodia. Zarni is the co-founder of FORSEA, a grass-roots organization of Southeast Asian human rights defenders, coordinator for Strategic Affairs for Free Rohingya Coalition, and an adviser to the European Centre for the Study of Extremism, Cambridge. Zarni holds a PhD (U Wisconsin at Madison) and a MA (U California), and has held various teaching, research and visiting fellowships at the universities in Asia, Europe and USA including Oxford, LSE, UCL Institute of Education, National-Louis, Malaya, and Brunei. He is the recipient of the “Cultivation of Harmony” award from the Parliament of the World’s Religions (2015). His analyses have appeared in leading newspapers including the New York Times, The Guardian and the Times. Among his academic publications on Rohingya genocide are The Slow-Burning Genocide of Myanmar’s Rohingyas (Pacific Rim Law and Policy Journal), An Evolution of Rohingya Persecution in Myanmar: From Strategic Embrace to Genocide, (Middle East Institute, American University), and Myanmar’s State-directed Persecution of Rohingyas and Other Muslims (Brown World Affairs Journal). He co-authored, with Natalie Brinham, Essays on Myanmar Genocide.

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