Coldness and Cruelty: Netanyahu's Willing Executioners?

 I can still remember the controversy raised by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's book on the Holocaust, Hitler's Willing Executioners.  The book, published in 1996, stoked controversy (following on the German Historikerstreit about the interpretation of the Holocaust) for apparently suggesting that the entire German nation and population was gripped by an ahistorical anti-Semitism, and that this ideological climate facilitated the participation of 'ordinary Germans' in the slaughter of Jews.  Goldhagen felt that the debate between 'functionalists' and 'intentionalists' among Holocaust historians was itself a blind alley, and that the pervasiveness of anti-Semitism had not been taken fully into account.    

Goldhagen's work aroused passionate and even vitriolic responses.  The great Holocaust historian Raul Hilberg declared that Goldhagen was 'wrong about everything', and the Israeli historian Yehuda Bauer wrote that Goldhagen 'stumbled badly'.  Fritz Stern said that Goldhagen's book was gripped by an undeclared but saturating and essentializing Germanophobia.

Nevertheless, Goldhagen's book raises the question - he was not of course the first writer to discuss this theme - about the wider legitimacy accorded by German society to what was perpetrated by the Einsatzgruppen and in the death camps.  Now the Palestinian writer Faris Giacaman teases out some of the issues surrounding Israel's actions in Gaza and their relation to Israeli society with its various classes, ideological groupings and institutions.   He does this via a critical re-reading and discussion of Goldhagen's book.   

 

Here is Giacaman's important and interesting essay, published at the excellent Mondoweiss site:

Netanyahu’s willing executioners: how ordinary Israelis became mass murderers

Conor