October 7th and the Holocaust Transcript

Disclaimer: This transcript is an edited version version of a transcript created using AI technology and may not reflect 100% accuracy.

The video can be found here.

Sarah: Good afternoon, and welcome to this special EMET commemoration of Yom HaShoah. Yom HaShoah memorializes the six million Jews killed in the last century by the Nazis and their enablers. Dr. Raffi Medoff, a foremost Holocaust historian, has written more than 20 books on the Holocaust, American Jewish History, and Zionism. His first book was The Deafening Silence, American Jewish Leaders, and The Holocaust. The Association of Jewish Libraries labeled it, ”A damning book that cannot be ignored and an important contribution to the study of the Holocaust period.” Dr. Medoff received his PhD from Yeshiva University in 1991, and he has had essays and scholarly articles published in multiple journals. He has taught Jewish history at Ohio State University, Purchase College, State University of New York, and elsewhere.

Raffi served on the editorial boards of American Jewish History, Southern Jewish History, Shofar, and Menorah Review. He has contributed to the Academic Council and the American Jewish Historical Society for many years. He served on the Academic council since 1995 and has provided installments of its chapters in American Jewish History. Raffi has also contributed to several Holocaust movies and television series. It is indeed a profound honor and privilege to welcome Dr. Raffi Medoff, who will talk about his new book The Road to October, Hamas, the Holocaust, and The Eternal War Against the Jews. Raffi, tell us about your book.

Rafael Medoff: Thank you, Sarah. It is good to be with you. I appreciate the invitation to share some thoughts with you today, especially in view of all the good work that EMET does for Israel and the Jewish people. My upcoming book will be published in time for the anniversary of the October attack, so it will be coming out at the beginning of October. I am going to share my screen so everyone can see a copy of the cover because it can be ordered in advance. The pre-orders are being accepted by the publisher, the Jewish Publication Society of America at jps.org.

I would like to start by telling you a little bit about the discussion around what to put on the cover of this book. As you know, a cover can reveal a great deal about the contents of a book. Since October 7^th, the Holocaust has been mentioned in countless newspaper articles and other media dealing with the Hamas attack. Almost invariably, the references to the Holocaust are simply numerical comparisons. A typical sentence might read, Hamas killed 1200 Israelis on October 7^th, the single largest number of Jews killed in any one attack since the Holocaust. Of course, technically that is true. However, as a historian, I know that the history of the Jewish people did not begin with the Holocaust. We, Jews have long memories and much of our faith and practice relate to historical memories. We have just concluded the holiday of Passover. Passover is built completely around our historical memories and documentation of the enslavement of the Jews in Egypt, their persecution, their liberation and the exodus from Egypt.

So, with our long memories, we understand that Jewish history does not simply encompass the period between the Holocaust and October 7^th. In studying Jewish history, we find that the events of October 7^th 2023, have their predecessors and their precedents going back much further than the Holocaust. In country after country, Jews have experienced more than a thousand years of pogroms, mass killings and crusades. So, in composing this book, I considered the ways in which October 7^th resembles what I call, the eternal war against the Jews. This never-ending war has been waged for many centuries. In light of this history, there was a question as to what to put on the cover of the new book.

The obvious choice was a scene from October 7^th. However, there was also a discussion about whether or not to show a split screen with an October 7^th scene placed next to one from an earlier period. The photographs of the attacks on 22 Israeli towns in Kibbutzim on October 7^th depict burned out houses, bodies on the ground and massive destruction. These scenes are eerily similar to so many earlier attacks within modern history and we have photographic evidence documenting them.

An obvious example comes from Russia in 1881. The charred and burnt buildings we saw after the October 7^th attacks are very similar to those from Russia in the late 19^th century. The similarities between these two images illustrate to us that this is indeed an eternal war against the Jews. The parallels between the actions of Palestinian Arab jihadists on October 7^th, and pogroms in Tsarist Russia 100 years earlier, are inescapable. In showing a scene from Russia in 1881, I am not trying to bombard you with grizzly images of all the horrors that we know about already. Rather, I aim to highlight the similarity between October 7^th and an event in Tsarist Russia in the late 1800s.

In my remarks today, I want to focus on three particular areas in which there are parallels between the events of October 7^th and those that occurred centuries before. I elaborate on these in the course of the book, The Road to October 7. The first is what we might call the methodology, the mass burning of Jewish homes and buildings, the murders, the tortures and the sexual atrocities. Everything we have read about on October 7^th finds its precedent decades, and sometimes centuries, earlier.

The next scene, I am about to show, depicts what occurred 60 years later than the Russian image I showed from 1881. This image is from a different country with different perpetrators but with the same victims. I am showing an image of Lithuania in 1941. There are so many of these terrible images available that it is all too easy to find such scenes. This image depicts a massacre of Jews by Lithuanians. In 1941, Lithuania was under German Nazi occupation. However, as soon as antisemitic Lithuanians had the opportunity, they began slaughtering Jews in a public setting. In this case, the Nazis stood off to the side, taking pictures for their own amusement. We must remember that the Holocaust was perpetrated, first and foremost by the Germans but their collaborators were legion. This was true in every country they occupied.

Many of you are familiar with the book, Hitler’s Willing Executioners by Daniel Goldhagen. It was published in 1996. The book was especially important for two reasons. The first had to do with the question of the nature of German antisemitism. In other words, why did the Holocaust happen in Germany as opposed to anywhere else? I am actually building a case that it did happen everywhere else. Nonetheless, professor Goldhagen made a very important contribution in this regard. He came to the conclusion that German antisemitism was what he called an eliminationist type of antisemitism. Professor Goldhagen argued that it differed in its severity and its scope from the antisemitism typically found in other countries in Europe and elsewhere. In The Road to October 7^th, I argue that the term ‘eliminationist antisemitism’ should also apply to the violence that Palestinian Arab terrorists have been waging against Jews in Israel and sometimes around the world, for more than 100 years. It is an unusually lethal type of antisemitism but I would argue it is not unique to Germany.

The second important way in which Hitler’s Willing Executioners contributes to our understanding of the period, is Professor Goldhagen’s very close examination of the killing process. Again, I am referring here to the question of methodology. I am considering the similarity between the methods used by Hamas and its allies and those used by killers of Jews during the Holocaust, and many centuries before that.

Today, we call the first phase of the Holocaust, the Holocaust by bullets. More than one million Jews were murdered by bullets before the Germans perfected the technique of mass gassing in death camps. It is hard to estimate the exact number, but around 1.5 million Jews were killed this way. Jews in German conquered Western Russia were massacred in 1941 and 1942, by bullets. Professor Goldhagen shows that many of those killings took place in very close up encounters. In these cases, the executioner stood within inches of his victim and shot the Jewish man or woman or child point blank. This meant they had time to look into the eyes of the victim. In many cases they escorted the victim from one point to another and this gave the executioner opportunity to reflect on what he was about to do.

This was a very up close and personal way of committing murder. Mass gassings, which came later, were very impersonal and therefore easier to commit in some senses. Very, very few of these German executioners had any qualms of conscience and they were comfortable carrying out these kinds of brutal killings. We do not know if this was because they were antisemitic or because they were just following orders, as Adolf Eichmann infamously claimed.

We saw the same Nazi style killings on October 7^th. I use the term ‘Nazi style’ advisedly. As a historian of the Holocaust, I do not use that term around unless it is warranted. That said, we saw Nazi style torture and up-close murders of individual Israeli Jews by Palestinian Arab terrorists on October 7^th. When the terrorists were not able to enter a house or drag the victims from the house, they threw fire bombs into the homes, setting them on fire and driving the Jews out. This is a specific type of horror that was widespread during the Holocaust. The Germans and their collaborators often tried to root Jews out of hiding places in exactly the same way. This was true in the Warsaw ghetto and in many other locations.

We have spoken a good deal about the parallels between the Holocaust and the October 7^th attacks and I have shown you scenes from some of the pogroms in Tsarist Russia. It is also important to remember that the eternal war against the Jews includes a century-long hurricane of anti-Jewish violence committed specifically by Palestinian Arab terrorists. On October 7^th, 2023, they claimed the largest number of victims of any Arab terrorist attack, but the number killed is simply a reflection of the logistics on the ground that day. They have been trying to do the exact same thing to Israeli Jews since the early 1900s. The 1929 massacre in Hebron is among the most infamous examples of the earlier Palestinian Arab version of their war against the Jews.

I said before that I am going to be focusing on three areas of commonality between the October 7^th attack and its predecessors. Methodology was the first. I am now moving into ideology, the second area of commonality. The similarity in the ideology of Jew killers goes back many centuries. At first glance, one might contest the thought that these murderers had similar ideologies. The Christian crusaders in medieval times and the Muslim attackers in Hebron in 1929 were different peoples with different religious backgrounds. The Nazis in the 1930s and ’40s had their own Nazi religion. Yet, there is a very important ideological link between them.

We are now looking at a scene from Hebron in 1929. We are viewing an attack on the Abraham Avinu Synagogue, part of the centuries old Jewish community in Hebron. At the time Hebron was part of the British Mandate Palestine. On that day, Arabs massacred, tortured, and sexually abused hundreds of Jews in Hebron. They killed 67 people and left many others grievously wounded. Some were even crippled for life. To me, the interesting thing about this scene is it that the attackers were not simply content to slaughter Jews. What we see here is that they felt it necessary to rampage through the most prominent synagogue in the city. They destroyed the tourist scrolls, hurled prayer books and desecrated the synagogue as much as possible. They did this because the Muslim Palestinian, Arab Muslim War against the Jews was very much an ideological struggle from their point of view. They were not simply trying to kill as many Jews as possible. Their acts of violence were wrapped in a religious ideology. So, attacking a synagogue is very much a part of their jihad or their contribution to the war against the Jews. That was what happened in 1929.

I will share a much more recent scene from another Palestinian Arab attack with you. This will illustrate the ideological parallels that are so important to understand and which undergird the entire Arab war against the Jews. This is a scene from the year 2000. We have just fast forwarded eight decades. We have a photo captured by a photographer for the Washington Post on Rosh Hashanah. The attackers picked a sacred Jewish holiday which is no coincidence. They ravaged a Jewish holy site in the city of Nablus, which Israelis call Shechem and which is the site of the tomb of the Biblical patriarch, Joseph. Notice what they are doing here. They are not focusing their violence on trying to find Jews and Israelis to attack. They have taken out time from their vicious assault to stomp on Jewish religious symbols and beat them with clubs. On the ground is what we call a Mizrakh, a large poster with religious inscriptions and with God’s name in Hebrew. You can see it near the foot of that terrorist who is stomping on it. Through this, they are making a strong ideological statement that their war against the Jews is also a war against Judaism, and is ultimately rooted in ideology.

Ideological based anti-Jewish violence reaches back many centuries. Throughout history, killers of Jews have been praised and honored in various ways. This is among the most fascinating aspects of the continuity between past and present antisemitism.

I am going to show you images of monuments erected in medieval times for the purpose of inciting hatred against Jews and glorifying antisemitism. Some of these monuments still exist, even though they go back many centuries. One would have expected they would have all been eliminated in modern Europe, but there are still anti-Jewish carvings and monuments in various places in Europe. This image is from Germany. It can be traced back to the Middle Ages and to a well-known anti-Semitic image known as the Judensau. In this image, Jews are shown interacting with a large pig in various obscene ways.

 Whether we are looking at events from the 14th century, or those from 700 years later, we still see the same kinds of public glorification of antisemitism and of anti-Semites. I want to share a photo of a monument still standing in Germany. I imagine not many people in modern Germany know what this represents, but that is not the point. The point is that it was created in the 1330s to glorify and honor a pogrom leader named Arnold von Uissigheim, one of the most notorious mass killers of Jews in that era. His followers and his many sympathizers were so impressed by the scope of his anti-Jewish atrocities that they built this rather large monument. This monument still stands to this day.

The phenomenon of publicly honoring killers of Jews did not end in medieval times. I am going to display an image of a much more modern and more contemporary example. It is one of many pictures showing the glorification of killers of Jews in Palestinian Arab society. We are now moving to the city of Ramallah, the capital of the Palestinian Authority (PA). This image is provided courtesy of the organization, Palestinian Media Watch. We are seeing a photograph of a street sign being hoisted to honor Dalal Mughrabi, one of the most notorious Palestinian Arab terrorists in history. Notice the date under the Arabic writing. That date is not the date of her birth. Rather, it is the 11th of March, 1978, an important occasion on the PA’s National Calendar. The 11th of March, 1978, was the date of the most horrific killing of Jews since the Holocaust. It refers to an attack which took place on Israel’s coast.

Dalal Mughrabi was the young woman after whom the street was named and whose picture you just saw on the street sign. She was the leader of a group of 11 Palestinian Arab terrorists who came ashore in Northern Israel. They encountered a Jewish American nature photographer named Gail Rubin who happened to be the niece of a US Senator, Abraham Ribicoff of Connecticut. She was out on the beach front, taking pictures of rare birds. Dalal Mughrabi shot her point blank in a scene very reminiscent of the kinds of executions we discussed earlier, and which are described in Daniel Goldhagen’s book. Mughrabi shot Gail Rubin point blank and left her dead body on the beach.

The group then went to the nearby coastal road running north to south along Israel’s coast and they hijacked a bus. In the image on the screen, we can see the aftermath of what Dalal Mughrabi and her colleagues did on that bus. They tortured and executed passengers on the bus and set it on fire. Nine, of the 11 terrorists were killed. One of the two survivors smiled at his trial as witnesses described the horrors of this attack. One of the witnesses mentioned that Dalal Mughrabi had grabbed a Jewish child and threw them into the flaming part of the bus. This scene is similar to many accounts of the Holocaust.

Today, Dalal Mughrabi is a hero in the PA governed territories. There are at least six different schools named after Dalal Mughrabi. There are national Palestinian celebrations on March 11^th for the 37 Jews who were massacred that day. There are programs on PA television and PA radio celebrating the attack and heaping praise on Dalal Mughrabi as a national hero. In PA schools, children learn from their textbooks that Mughrabi is someone whom they should admire and emulate. Palestinian Arab leaders give speeches to commemorate the occasion. They speak of Mughrabi as a star, a heroine and a martyr. She is lauded as someone who is the greatest example of a Palestinian Arab hero. I deal with the question of how people get to this point in my book, the Road to October 7^th.

Jews were massacred in medieval times in Europe, and in the 1920s in Hebron. They were burned alive in a bus on the Tel Aviv coastal road in 1978. What links these three incidents? It is my contention that a combination of a religious and nationalist ideology links these three cases. Obviously, there are different flavors of this, but they ultimately have a lot in common.

The medieval massacres of the crusades were motivated by a religious ideology that punished the Jews for not accepting Christianity. Children were educated to believe Jews were guilty of killing Jesus. They were taught Jews were collectively guilty for all time, and therefore deserved to have violence done to them. That was the common denominator for children growing up in the Middle Ages. Some of those children put that ideology into practice as teenagers and adults, using the weapons available to them at that time. They committed horrific massacres in community after community.

Palestinian Arabs have also been raised on a diet of Jew-hatred. This is not restricted to a hatred of Israel or Zionism, but includes all Jews and Judaism.  This hatred has persisted for centuries. Palestinian children have been taught since a young age that Jews are evil, that they are a danger, and that they deserve to be killed. Jew killers like Dalal Mughrabi, are the role models for Palestinian Arab society. In that sense, very little has changed in the more than 100 years of the Palestinian Arab war against the Jews.

The terrorists who carried out the October 7^th massacres, tortures, and sexual atrocities, were all educated in Palestinian Arab schools. They all watched Dalal Mughrabi, and other terrorists being presented as heroes. Their teachers taught them that the highest goal in life is to be a martyr, and to die while killing Jews. So, some of those raised in a PA or Hamas school, will inevitably engage in that kind of violence.

To bring it full circle, Cossacks conducting pogroms in Tsarist Russia in the late 1800s or early 1900s were raised on a diet of extreme Christian hatred of Jews similar to the pogroms in Germany 500 years earlier. Essentially the same ideological view, resulted in the same horrific consequences.

Of course, during the Holocaust, the Nazis introduced their own particular brand of hate education. All German schools were compelled to teach a curriculum of antisemitism, of glorification of violence, and of the need to eliminate the Jews. The Hitler Youth Movement and the parallel movements for girls in Germany, were essentially breeding grounds for war criminals. These were the same war criminals who 10 years later carried out the massacres of millions of Jews in German occupied Europe. So again, we see the common thread running back all the way from the early medieval period, through Tsarist Russia, through the period of the mass pogroms in Ukraine and through the period shortly after World War I to the Nazi era. This thread sometimes occurred in parallel with the Palestinian Arab war against the Jews.

Let’s look briefly at a couple of examples of the kind of propaganda being inculcated in the children in the different societies we discussed. I am calling it propaganda but for them this is an education staple. Let’s start with this rather well-known image. It is from France in the 1930s but it shows Jewish menace in a way that was very common in Nazi propaganda throughout Europe during this period. The Jew is depicted as a menacing, dangerous insect that is threatening the world. Keep that in mind as I show you a second image from Nazi Germany itself.

In this case, again, we see the image of the Jew as an insect. Here, the Jew is depicted as a spider, trapping innocent Germans in its web. The approach of dehumanizing the Jew is very deliberate. If Jews are portrayed as dangerous insects, then it makes sense to exterminate them. Now, let’s move forward 70 or 80 years. Sadly, we see how little has changed, even in a different country with a different language and a different religion. Unfortunately, the ideology is all too similar. The image we are now looking at, is one from the official Palestinian authority newspaper, Al-Hayat Al-Jadida in the 1990s. Jews are portrayed as insects once again. They are worms eating away at peace. It really is the same image as the previous ones. It also perpetuates the idea that the Jews are less than human and they endanger everyone. Here they are endangering what is called peace. A moment ago, we saw them endangering the entire world. Children who have been raised in different societies are taught the same hate and this produces images with such similar results. The image I showed happened to be from 1998 but there are so many similar ones that they are easy to find.

Let me show you another more recent image. It is an image from last year and from the official Palestinian authority news media. In this picture, the Jew is shown as a scorpion. The basic concept is similar to the images I showed previously. Notice how the scorpion’s front claws look like bulldozer arms. The PA is injecting the idea that the Jews are settlers and occupiers but they also continue to perpetuate the concept that the Jews are less than human and are a menace that must be eliminated.

The image I am now showing is from 2024, after October 7^th. It is one of many examples in which the PA illustrates its ideological solidarity with Hamas and the other major perpetrators of the October 7^th massacres. I have one more set of images. These have to do with one of the most famous anti-Semitic texts of modern history, the infamous protocols of the elders of Zion. This text has been around now for more than a century, and it continues to show up in different countries and different languages again and again. It is remarkable.

I am showing the cover of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion edition from France in the 1930s. This is a tract used to teach and incite people. It is used to incite the public to hate and kill Jews. We can fast forward to any Arab country in any decade of the past century, and find that this text is equally popular and equally deadly in their languages. I am going to show you a Syrian edition which exhibits a different type of dehumanization. This one shows a snake but the text is the same. This text is a staple of hatred and incitement to violence and it does not change regardless of country or ideology.

In the last few minutes that I have remaining today, I want to address the third area of commonality between the past, and October 7^th, 2023. This is a topic I cover in considerable detail in the book. It is the question of the international responses to October 7^th compared to the international responses to the persecution of Jews in the past. It is, of course, a very broad topic, but I want to mention two specific examples.

We have witnessed horrific scenes of support for Hamas atrocities on major American college campuses over the past two years and we continue to see these scenes play out. University responses to October 7^th, strike me as paralleling the way major American universities responded to Nazis on their campuses in the 1930s. My late colleague, professor Stephen Norwood, wrote the book, “The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower.” It is the pioneer exploration of how American universities responded to Nazis in the 1930s, and very well worth reading.

Professor Norwood focused on how Harvard and Columbia invited Nazi representatives to speak on campus. He discussed how they took part in student exchanges with Nazi controlled German universities in the 1930s, and other steps they took to establish friendly relations with Nazi Germany. I have been looking at George Washington University and Wesleyan University to extend Professor Norwood’s research. Recently, I was writing and researching about the position of these two schools in the 1930s.

Some months ago, one of the many pro-Hamas protestors at George Washington University was photographed holding up a sign that said Final Solution. This particular protestor was never interviewed and we cannot be sure whether they were accusing Israel of committing a final solution of genocide, or whether they were saying Israel deserves a final solution and should be wiped out. It is probably a bit of both since that is ultimately the central message of the university rallies from October 7^th onward. They are saying that the Jews are committing genocide and they are advocating for the complete destruction of the Jewish state, October 7^th style.

That sign led me to wonder how George Washington University responded to antisemitism in the 1930s. So, I went back and studied the campus newspaper, the Hatchet, for the entire period from 1933 through 1945. George Washington University is based in Washington DC. I found that Nazi diplomats visiting DC were repeatedly invited to campus and given a friendly reception. George Washington students were sent to spend a year at the universities in Nazi Germany. Students from those universities attended George Washington and acted as propaganda ambassadors for Nazi Germany. I discovered numerous ads placed in the Hatchet by the German government throughout the ’30s. Nazi Germany placed ads in the student newspapers to encourage student tourism of Nazi Germany. This occurred on the George Washington campus without the slightest protest, opposition or regret, from either the university’s administration, from students on campus, or from the editors of the student newspaper.

I will share my thoughts on the comparison between George Washington’s response to Nazism in the 1930’s, versus what we are witnessing in the contemporary period. Over the past two years, George Washington University administrators have been faced with students on campus calling for the mass murder of Jews and they tolerated them. In extreme and rare cases, they penalized them but, generally speaking, they tolerated them. They allowed protestors to call for the genocide of Jews. Their instinct was to bow to the mob. They bowed to totalitarian sentiments and worried more about the feelings of the Hamas supporters than their own Jewish students and faculty. This parallels the actions of the university administrators in the 1930s. In that time, they had participated in friendly relationships with Nazi universities, and they were completely comfortable with such people. Both then and now, they welcomed those who persecuted Jews on campus. They welcomed those who supported the persecution of Jews.

My research on Wesleyan University in Connecticut is much more recent. Ten days ago, the president of Wesleyan University wrote an op-ed for the New York Times criticizing our current president’s crackdown on antisemitism on various university campuses. Coincidentally, the op-ed appeared on one of the days of the Passover holiday. The president of Wesleyan is outraged that the federal government is now trying to do something to counteract antisemitism on campuses like his.

His reaction to this made me curious. I wondered how Wesleyan responded to Nazis in the 1930s. Their university is in Connecticut and not located near the German embassy in Washington, as is George Washington University. Irrespective, I found that the Wesleyan administration invited a Nazi diplomat to speak on campus and gave him a warm reception. Wesleyan also engaged in friendly student exchanges. Pro-Nazi German students came to Wesleyan and gave pro-Nazi speeches on campus. Nobody interfered and nobody protested. The administration never severed this student exchange program. By the way, one of the visiting Nazi students was the nephew of Rudolf Hess, the Hitler confidant and number three man in Nazi Germany. Hess’s nephew was giving pro-Nazi speeches on the campus of Wesleyan in the 1930s and the administration did not do a thing. The Wesleyan newspaper, The Argus, also carried ads from the German government urging and encouraging Wesleyan students to visit Nazi Germany.

This was shockingly and disturbingly similar to what I found in my research on George Washington. Anyone interested in seeing my recent articles on these subjects can simply Google my name and Wesleyan, or Google my name and George Washington. You will be able to see the articles I have written recently.

Before concluding, I want to add that in both cases I contacted the president and other senior officers of the two universities before publishing the research. I asked them for their comments. I asked them whether they would consider issuing a statement expressing regret that their predecessors were so friendly to Nazi Germany. To date, I have not received a response from either university, which, I suppose, is rather telling.

With that, I want to thank you again Sarah, and thank EMET for giving me the opportunity to speak with you today. I welcome any questions from your audience.

Sarah: We have many questions and I hope we will be able to address all of them. One of them was rather detailed. It compared and contrasted the treatment of Palestinians in Gaza, to the treatment of Jews in concentration camps. Our audience member went to great lengths to talk about the similarities between the two. Can you discuss that?

Rafael: The phenomenon of comparing Israel to the Nazis, and Palestinian Arabs to Jewish victims of the Holocaust, did not begin with October 7^th, although we have been hearing it a great deal over the past year and a half. Those who have been observing the Arab-Israeli conflict since its earliest days, know that this is a staple of Palestinian Arab propaganda. The objective is to try and invert history and to portray the Jews as Nazis.

On the face of it, of course, the parallels are absurd. There are no parallels. The comparisons are absurd and baseless. That said, it is interesting how propagandists for the Palestinian Arab cause are often not content to argue on the basis of the actual facts. Rather, they turn facts and history upside down to try to score points.

We have been hearing the phrase, ‘Gaza is a prison’, for years and well before the attack of 2023. It is obviously silly. One of many examples illustrating this is the fact that approximately 15,000 Gaza residents left Gaza every day until the eve of the October 7^th attack. They went into Israel to work and they also could have emigrated if they chose to. By the way, thousands have emigrated every year. I have never heard of a prison where a significant part of the population leaves when they want to. One of the least publicized aspects of the entire Gaza War has been the fact that immigration from Gaza has been continuing even throughout this last year and a half.

The final thing I will say about these obviously absurd comparisons, is that this is the only, “genocide in history” where 99% of the population has survived. Normally, the term genocide is used to describe the deliberate and intentional mass murder of people on the basis of their race, religion or ethnicity. Yet 99% of the Palestinian Arabs residents of Gaza, are still there. That makes Israel the most incompetent practitioner of genocide since the term was invented, or it means that Israel never intended to carry out genocide. If it had intended to carry out a genocide, it could have done it long before October 7^th. Please remember, Israel chose instead to leave Gaza in 2005, eighteen years before October 7^th. So, for 18 years, the so-called open-air prison was a de facto independent Palestinian state. So, to ask the question of genocide is to answer it really.

Palestinian Arab advocates on America’s college campuses and in American streets do not even try to hide their intentions. They do not chant for a state in this or that territory. Their chosen slogan is, ‘From the River to the Sea Palestine should be Free’. The only thing between the River Jordan, and the Mediterranean Sea, is Israel. So, I appreciate the fact that they are frank about their intentions. They are no longer playing the game that Arafat played briefly, when he pretended that he did not want to conquer all of Israel and would accept a small state. Today’s Palestinian advocates are very open and unabashed about their goal, and I think there’s no reason to pretend that they mean anything other than what they say.

Sarah: Right. So, George Washington University and Wesleyan University opened their doors to Nazi high-ranking officials and engaged in exchange programs with the Third Reich. How widespread was this type of behavior? We know this type of thing happened at Columbia and Harvard. Do you think it was endemic to all universities throughout the country during the 1930s and ’40s?

Rafael: I would say that not all universities were complicit in this although we do know that a number of them did pursue friendly relations with Nazi Germany in the ’30s. This is an area of ongoing research. The late Professor David Wyman, author of the bestseller, The Abandonment of the Jews, always said that his book was not the final word on the subject. Professor Wyman studied President Roosevelt’s response to the Holocaust, and paved the way for the next generation of scholars to look at other related areas. I mentioned that Professor Stephen Norwood began studying this field and some of us others have carried on that research, but it is work in progress. As an aside, my institute is named the David Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies after Professor David Wyman.

There are many other schools whose responses to Nazism should be examined. Those that were the closest physically to Washington DC were the ones more likely to have had Nazis come to campus, but not all. We mentioned that both Columbia and Harvard welcomed Nazi representatives. Columbia is in New York City and the Germans had a consulate there. Putzi Hanfstaengl was a very famous Harvard graduate. He was a German who had studied at Harvard decades earlier and who returned for his 25th class reunion in 1934. He was Hitler’s foreign press spokesman at the time. Hanfstaengl was a senior Nazi official who was welcomed to campus as a hero and as a celebrity. Some Jewish students protested, but the university persisted in welcoming him warmly. This was reported in the Harvard Crimson, their student newspaper. There are other similar examples where US universities welcomed Nazis and some of those universities were not even near Washington. I suspect that more such skeletons will be discovered in the closets of many of our elite institutions as we continue to research this field.

Sarah: You mentioned that some Jewish students protested. Was there any pushback at all from Jewish students and their parents when these Nazi officials visited their campuses?

Rafael: There was little pushback at Harvard. There were some protests at Columbia and not only by Jews. There were a number of rallies at Columbia and some hundreds of students took part. There was also a rally outside the mansion of Columbia’s president Butler. He responded by expelling the leader of the protest, Robert Burke from university. He was never readmitted. By the way, 90 years later Columbia has still not expressed a single word of regret for expelling a student who engaged in a peaceful protest.

This is very different from the reception protestors at Columbia today receive even though they incite violence, harass Jewish students, call for mass murder of Jews and cheer the sexual atrocities of October 7^th. Unlike them, Columbia students staged peaceful protests in 1933 and 1936 and their leader was summarily expelled from the university. This is an interesting contrast between then and now.

Sarah: Right. As we know, yesterday Harvard pushed back against the Trump administration for the withholding of grants to Harvard, arguing it is an assault under constitutional liberties and a violation of First Amendment rights. Two hundred universities signed on to this letter led by Harvard and so we will have to wait and see how this plays out.

It is time to wrap up. I want to thank you so much, Raffi, for your years of dedicated research. I think you are the paramount Holocaust scholar now that we have lost David Wyman, author of the book The Abandonment of the Jews – America and the Holocaust 1941-1945. I know you worked closely with him. I would like to encourage everybody to please support Raffi’s work and read his book, The Road to October 7, Hamas, The Holocaust, and The Eternal War Against the Jews published by the Jewish Publication Society,

I wish we could leave on a more hopeful note as regards the war against the Jews. We do have a Jewish state and members of the IDF who serve valiantly to protect it. Please remember to vote for slate number 19 at the World Zionist Congress elections and please continue to support EMET’s work. This afternoon, for example, we have two more meetings on Capitol Hill with members of Congress to make sure that the Jewish state will remain strong. That is our way of fighting back against the war on the Jews and the Jewish state. Thank you so much Doctor Raffi Medoff.

Rafael: Thank you.

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