n an over 3,000-word opinion piece in the New York Times of July 15, Brown University professor Omer Bartov concluded that Israel has committed genocide in the war in Gaza. His arguments are similar to those he has made since November 2023. Since then, together with many other historians of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, I have disputed his claims.

Describing Israel’s wars of self-defense as examples of genocide was a theme of the propaganda of the Soviet Union, and Soviet bloc, the Palestine Liberation Organization during the war in Lebanon in 1982, and recently from the government of South Africa. It has been a frequent theme in the demonstrations and encampments on American campuses after October 7. The contribution of Bartov, and some other historians of the Holocaust, has been to seek to lend academic respectability to what has, for decades, been an effective but false tool of political warfare.

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In rejecting the genocide accusation against Israel, we historians do not accuse its advocates of being themselves antisemites, though in the case of Hamas, hatred of the Jews is a point of pride, not embarrassment. Rather, we have argued that the arguments they make–the attribution of total responsibility to Israel and complete innocence to Hamas–represent a contemporary version of ancient libels against the Jews deeply embedded in Christian anti-Judaism, in Islamist visions of Jewish hostility to Islam, and in the secular antisemitic conspiracy theories of modern history. The genocide accusation resonates in world politics, in part, because it evokes these much older, religious fictions, and secular hatreds that resonate with hundreds of millions of people around the globe. It is the structure of the argument and its cultural themes, not necessarily the personal views of its advocates about Jews, that we have in mind.

Historians of Nazi Germany, World War II and the Holocaust have published works that document ideological affinities between the Nazi regime and Islamists during World War II, and of the aftereffects of their collaboration in the efforts by the Muslim Brotherhood and its Hamas offshoot to destroy the Jewish state. Ignoring that historical scholarship has led to an absence of discussion about the reactionary and virulent Jew-hatred of Hamas. Of course, we historians of the Holocaust hope that our work will serve as a warning to prevent its repetition. That is why we take the ideology and intent of both Hamas and its sponsor, the Islamic Republic of Iran, very seriously. Where there are continuities between the Jew-hatred of the 1940s and Hamas’ attacks on Israel, it is the historian’s responsibility to present that evidence, not to write as if those lineages did not exist.