Five distinct forms of genocide denial in German war discourse – showing how Germany explains Israel’s genocide in Gaza away, one concession at a time.
Hanna Pfeifer is a political scientist and head of the research area “Societal Peace and Internal Security” at the Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy (IFSH).
Translation by Hanno Hauenstein
The German original of this essay was first published here CC-BY-NC-SA
Photo: Wikimedia Commons
In genocide studies, denial is understood as a constitutive part of violence – a “constant feature of the genocidal process.” In German war discourse, Israel committing genocide against the Palestinians is rejected in a range of distinct ways. Techniques of denial in international media coverage of the Gaza genocide have already been examined. What follows focuses specifically on types of denial in the German context.
The coexistence of different types points to a layered structure of denial. A new layer emerges whenever a concession is made vis-à-vis the previous one – acknowledging aspects of the violence taking place. This also helps explain how denial and justification, ignorance and legitimation of Israeli violence can exist simultaneously in German discourse. At the same time, these patterns can also be read diachronically: as a repertoire that allows for incremental concessions over time, each concession giving way to yet another form of denial.
In the following, I outline ideal-typical variants of how the accusation of genocide is rejected in German war discourse, including within academic debates, particularly in social science. While these variants exhibit distinctly German features, they can, in principle, also be observed in other contexts.
Type 1 / Moral Denial: The Principled Impossibility of an Israeli Genocide
The first variant denies, outright and a priori, the possibility of genocide by Israel. It rests on a particularistic reading of the lessons of the Holocaust, according to which “Never again” applies exclusively to Jews. Internalised through practices of memory culture, this position also entails a categorical rejection of a suspected perpetrator-victim reversal. Accusing Israel – often treated pars pro toto for Jews – of genocide is therefore considered morally, theoretically, and practically impossible; and at the same time seen as a denial of the Holocaust itself.
As a result, whether Israel is committing genocide is not treated as an empirical question. Raising it at all is seen as a taboo violation. From this position, there is no obligation to examine facts on the ground or to produce new knowledge about unfolding realities. Type 1 denial operates at the level of principle – if not ideology. It is effectively immune to empirical challenges.
To preserve this immunity, the taboo surrounding the genocide question is reinforced through practices of defamation and repression. Central to this is the ever-broadening invocation of antisemitism, which in some cases extends to the spectre of a global conspiracy hostile to Israel – and thus, by extension in Type 1 logic, hostile to Jews. This accusation is directed at a growing number of individuals – scholars, cultural workers, journalists – and institutions, entire academic traditions, and even international bodies such as the United Nations. In Germany in particular, the charge of antisemitism is facilitated by lowered – or entirely absent – standards of justification.
Maintaining denial through tabooisation requires the moral discrediting of those actors and institutions whose empirical research threatens to puncture the prohibition on engagement. Here, practices of denunciation come into play, as well as their repetition and circulation through lists and dossiers, and their enforcement via disinvitations, cancellations, and public scandalization. All this reinforces a well-documented empirical effect: self-censorship.
Type 2 / Epistemological Denial: The Insurmountable Unknowability of Mass Violence
While Type 1 relies on moral taboo to rule out even the suspicion of genocide, Type 2 moves onto the terrain of what is discursively processed as real-world events. It does so by erecting a defensive perimeter of fundamental doubt around the very possibility of knowing what is happening in Gaza. Attempts to dispel such doubt are, in turn, recast as overt “resolve” and folded into accusations of antisemitism. Images of alleged violence are themselves dismissed as instruments of warfare – serving propagandistic purposes, particularly for Hamas – and are therefore stripped of any evidentiary value.
Within this logic of generalised suspicion, Palestinians in Gaza are treated per se as unreliable witnesses. Are they not, implicitly or explicitly, somehow themselves Hamas? Are they not all presumably antisemites? In this way, being Palestinian suffices to disqualify any testimony by victims. Its epistemic value for reconstructing the violence is being denied in advance.
This strategy is all the more striking given its mirror image. For simultaneously, the Israeli military – an interested party to the conflict and accused of gravest crimes – is treated as epistemically reliable. That reliability is assumed by reference to its purportedly “democratic” or “moral” character; and to a shared belonging to “Western civilization.” Accordingly, evidence presented by the Israeli armed forces, sometimes produced through techniques of so-called “digital forensics,” is readily accepted. In the absence of what is deemed “neutral” reporting on the ground – due to Israel’s ongoing, near-total restrictions on access to Gaza for media and researchers – this source is defaulted as both official and credible. As a result, Israeli mass violence against Palestinian civilians becomes, in principle, unknowable.
Type 3 / Ontological Denial: Bilateralising Unilateral Violence
Faced with mounting evidence and formal investigative procedures, Type 3 no longer insists that the reality of events in Gaza is, in principle, unknowable. Satellite imagery or reports by expert colleagues endowed with epistemic authority are not rejected anymore. Instead, this defensive line of genocide denial shifts to an ontological claim: what appears in images and reports as one-sided violence against civilians in Gaza must instead be understood as two-sided violence between the Israeli armed forces and Hamas. Accordingly, all military violence is reframed as counter-violence – and thus as necessary.
This bilateralisation of unilateral violence rests on a temporal stretching of the claim to self-defence following the terrorist attacks of 7 October. Ultimately, all subsequent violence is retroactively attributed back to that date, and therefore to Hamas. Israel is said to possess, in principle, a right to the establishment of “permanent security.” Limits of proportionality are occasionally acknowledged, but their violation is conceded only on a case-by-case basis and framed as isolated incident. War crimes are treated as exceptions and typically accompanied by references to their presumed judicial prosecution within Israel’s rule-of-law system.
Bilateralisation is further reinforced through a spatial reconfiguration of Gaza into visible and “actual” infrastructure. On the surface – as a kind of stage set – stand what appear to the naive observer as residential buildings, schools, hospitals, cultural centres, mosques, or archaeological sites.
This appearance, however, serves as camouflage for an “underground city of terror.” Where people or structures are not themselves designated as terrorist, they are said to be infiltrated by terrorism, including by being used as (human) shields. At this point, the argument no longer hinges on individual cases but instead becomes generalised: the population and infrastructure of Gaza as a whole are cast as integrated, in one way or another, into the terrorist apparatus. Through this combination of temporal extension and spatial layering, the charge of genocide is invalidated – without the need for further empirical scrutiny.
Type 4 / Methodological Denial: The Uninvestigability of Intent
Type 4 marks a further shift. Unlike previous variants, it concedes the empirical possibility of mass violence against civilians and civilian infrastructure in Gaza, including one-sided violence. Within this framework, Israel is accused not only of war crimes but also of ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. Support is expressed for the International Criminal Court and for enforcing arrest warrants against Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant. The far right within the Israeli government is explicitly criticised. Type 4 acknowledges the serial nature of individual cases and, with it, the systematic character of Israeli violence. What it continues to deny, however, is the existence of an intent to destroy the Palestinians “in whole or in part” – the legal threshold required to demonstrate in order to establish genocide.
In this view, the extraordinarily high death toll and the scale of destruction are interpreted as collateral damage. Israel may have made insufficient efforts to prevent civilian harm, or may even have knowingly accepted it in part. These outcomes are nonetheless framed as the byproduct of a flawed but structurally messy practice of warfare – rather than as expressions of an intent to destroy. Alternatively, responsibility for the systematic destruction is attributed to the extremism of individual actors within the Israeli government or the military. Their repeated and ongoing genocidal statements are acknowledged as dehumanizing rhetoric, yet contained as isolated lapses, incapable of coalescing into a coherent genocidal intent attributable to a collective actor.
What Type 4 systematically sidelines are specific qualities of the series of violence: recurring patterns of targeted headshots, including against children, documented through X-rays; shootings at food distribution sites; the destruction of the material foundations of life – agricultural land, seed banks, olive trees, and similar resources. Nor are broader patterns of destruction, or “hyper-relations” – the relations between relations of individual acts of violence – taken into account, despite their established relevance for demonstrating intent in court.
At the same time, the determinability of a general intent to destroy is readily assumed in other contexts: in Hamas’s terrorist attacks, in ISIS’s genocide against the Yazidis, or in Russia’s deportation of Ukrainian children. As social scientific comparison would expose this inconsistency, a general incomparability of the Israeli (or also the Palestinian) case is additionally invoked. Here, an echo of Type 1 reappears insofar as the very method of comparison is cast as suspect and is itself charged with the insinuation of antisemitism.
Type 5 / Authoritative Denial: Exclusive Legal Jurisdiction over Genocide Determination
Unlike Type 4, Type 5 treats everything as theoretically possible, but nothing as already established. Israel may well harbour an intent to destroy the Palestinians. Yet this can only be considered proven once the International Court of Justice (ICJ) has reached a corresponding judgment under the Genocide Convention. Type 5 thus declares all epistemic authorities beyond the ICJ to be incompetent on the question of genocide. The position rests on a radical – and largely uncritical – form of legal positivism.
This monopolization of judgment goes hand in hand with a devaluation of entire fields of academic knowledge. The existing body of research – developed across political science, sociology, anthropology, and the historical, comparative, and normative study of genocide – is effectively negated. In this respect, Type 5 mirrors Type 4’s prohibition on comparison, insofar as it treats accumulated knowledge as non-transferable to the present case.
As a result, the rich extensive debates in international journals that apply interdisciplinary genocide research to Gaza remain largely ignored in Germany. Type 5 also borrows from Type 1, insofar as any research on genocide in Gaza is suspected of being driven by an antisemitic obsession with Israel – again understood as a stand-in representation of Jews. According to this logic, such scrutiny would not be applied to other instances of mass violence.
Across all five types, a shared demand emerges: strict restraint when it comes to the question of genocide in Gaza. Each, on its own premises, insists that judgment on this issue – genocide: yes or no? – must be deferred. One consequence of this is that investigation of Israeli violence is discouraged: neither within the specialised field of genocide studies nor within the broader disciplines of violence and conflict research. The appropriate response to mass violence in Gaza is thus framed as epistemic and moral abstinence, extending – at times – to outright silence. This structural preference is also reflected in the programmes of German social science conferences, where few topics of comparable urgency are so conspicuously absent from academic discussion.
Only gradually are spaces emerging in Germany for the debates that are urgently needed: empirically grounded, academically informed, and openly contested discussions of genocide and other forms of violence in Gaza – beyond denial and generalised moral suspicion. As with other pressing questions of security and peace in our time, the corresponding well-founded and controversial arguments are a prerequisite for a functioning scholarly discourse – and thus also for a democratic engagement with “existential problems.”
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