NAZA Again: Occupation, Democracy, and the Refusal to Know

24. 10. 2026 / Muriel Blaive

 

The “original sin” of occupation

Early in the discussion, the moderator, Ruth Katz, provocatively suggested that describing Israel as a “democracy” was something of an oxymoron. Someone in the audience objected that no one could deny that Israel is a democracy. This is where Waldman’s intervention usefully shifted the discussion to the real matter at hand: it is not only that Netanyahu’s “judicial overhaul,” launched in 2023, sought to limit the Supreme Court’s ability to review government decisions and legislation and to give the governing coalition greater influence over judicial appointments – this would undermine judicial independence in any case. But even more to the point, the Israeli Supreme Court, theoretically one of the gatekeepers of democracy, has spent the past decades struggling over the legal justification for military rule in the West Bank. The crisis over Netanyahu’s overhaul thus exposed a contradiction that had long been embedded in Israel’s legal system.

In the aftermath of the Holocaust, I am prepared to accept the establishment of a Jewish state as a defensible response to the urgent need for Jewish refuge and security, despite the colonial dimension of that project and the grave injustice inflicted on Palestinians in the Nakba. The UN’s 1947 partition plan correspondingly endorsed the creation of both a Jewish and an Arab state. In 1967, however, Israel existed and had successfully stabilized. We can perfectly well understand its exhilaration after winning a six-day war rightly perceived as an existential threat. But military victory does not confer sovereignty over conquered territories; the international community did not recognize that acquisition, and UN Security Council Resolution 242 reaffirmed the inadmissibility of acquiring territory through war. It is thus the subsequent Israeli decision to entrench the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank rather than bring it to an end through a political settlement that I would call Israel’s “original sin.” There is of course nothing particularly original about this observation. Ra’anan Alexandrowicz and Liran Atzmor’s excellent 2011 documentary The Law in These Parts detailed how Israeli authorities constructed the legal framework of the occupation, leading them to progressively reshape the law in order to accommodate a situation fundamentally incompatible with democratic principles. Occupation was corrosive not only for the occupied but also for the occupier.

The 7 October massacre and the subsequent attack on Gaza now gives this contradiction a devastating urgency: how can a still relatively democratic society (even if that democratic character is under continuous assault) endorse massive war crimes and ethnic cleansing? The short answer is that it did not abandon democracy overnight. The change occurred gradually precisely thanks to the normalization of occupation, the adaptation of legal institutions, and the corresponding dehumanization and acceptance of violence against a population whose rights have long been treated as secondary. Without the post-1967 occupation and the practices of domination it entrenched, I am willing to argue that Israeli society might never have reached this point.

The distance between knowing and confronting

I find it difficult to believe that beyond a small circle of fanatical settlers and their enablers, most Israelis would remain unmoved if confronted upfront with the consequences of what is being done in their name. It is one thing to authorize a bombing from a distance by pressing a button; it would be quite another to line up a Hamas executive before a firing squad and then be told that, in order to kill him, you must also shoot twenty-five women and children. Or two hundred. Or five hundred.  

I can imagine that many people would agree to execute a terrorist but I very much doubt they would be prepared to shoot small children in the face in cold blood. The physical and psychological distance between the decision and its consequences is essential here to accept practices that would otherwise be morally intolerable. But Waldman made a particularly disturbing observation in this regard: with elections approaching in Israel, neither Gaza nor the West Bank seem to occupy much space in public Israeli debate. According to him, many Israelis are poorly informed, and even more importantly, they are not particularly interested in Gaza’s fate.

This brings us to the distinction at the heart of this article: information can be available without being sought out. It can be encountered without being accepted, and accepted without being allowed to change anything. A society can intuitively know what is being done in its name and still organize its public life as though it did not.

The German experience: knowing, not knowing, and remaining silent

Waldman, who is German-Israeli and holds a joint doctorate from universities in Berlin and Jerusalem, drew an interesting comparison with postwar Germany. Despite his somber assessment of the current situation, he expressed his conviction that Israeli society, like post-Nazi Germany, will eventually reckon with what it has done. I broadly share this hope, but as a historian I cannot help wondering how long such a process will take, and what will bring it about.

The limits of the comparison between Nazi Germany and contemporary Israel must be clear from the outset: I am not equating them, nor suggesting that the crimes committed in Gaza are equivalent to the Holocaust. The systematic, continent-wide persecution and extermination of European Jews, the industrialized machinery of the killing centers, and the ambition to eliminate an entire people form a specific historical configuration. The scale, methods, and objectives were different, will remain forever – one should hope – unrivalled, and cannot simply be collapsed into an analogy. Recognizing this specificity does not diminish Palestinian suffering nor does it settle whether the crimes committed in Gaza constitute genocide under international law – genocide does not have to reproduce the Holocaust to qualify as genocide.

What I am comparing are the social and political mechanisms through which people avoid confronting what they could know, maintain silence about what they remember, and subsequently reconstruct the past to preserve a morally acceptable image of themselves. Studying these mechanisms comparatively does not equate the crimes to which they relate.

I have never found convincing the claim that ordinary Germans knew nothing during World War II of the extermination of European Jews. Jews in hiding, deprived of access to information, understood clearly enough the danger of deportation; as the little boy in Louis Begley’s semi-autobiographical novel Wartime Lies says, when their group was rounded up in Warsaw and they learned where they were being sent, his legs trembled at the answer: Auschwitz. I have often summarized the problem as follows: those who wanted to know, knew; those who did not want to know, did not know – the same, incidentally, applies to Czechoslovak society and the crimes accompanying the expulsion of the Sudeten Germans. The issue was not simply access to information, but the willingness to seek it out and confront its implications. Adorno identified the problem in his 1963 essay “The Meaning of Working Through the Past”: the desire to put the past behind oneself can become a way of avoiding precisely the confrontation that genuine reckoning requires.

Public acknowledgement, private denial

After 1945, this selective ignorance in Germany was compounded by the process of Schweigen: not simply keeping silent in the literal sense, but a socially sustained practice of not speaking about what was known, suspected, or remembered. It did not necessarily require an explicit agreement but could operate through shared conventions about which questions should not be asked, which experiences should remain private, and which aspects of the past were best left undiscussed. Hermann Lübbe later theorized this phenomenon as kommunikatives Beschweigen, a “communicative silence” about the Nazi past which, he argued, facilitated the reintegration of former Nazis into the new democratic society.

Lübbe's interpretation was arguably partly apologetic as he was himself a member of the NSDAP in 1944-45, but it identified an important political function of collective silence: facilitating social integration while leaving questions of individual responsibility unresolved. Catherine Perron’s research on German memory politics similarly shows that public remembrance is shaped by political struggles over whose suffering is recognized and how it is placed in relation to Nazi crimes. Silence and forgetting are not necessarily passive phenomena: they can be politically encouraged and socially maintained, determining which experiences can be publicly acknowledged and which must remain unspoken. What is interesting is precisely how societies collectively negotiate what they remember, what they discuss, and what they actively prefer not to know.

The issue here is that it took German society several decades to begin seriously confronting its participation in Nazism – and even so, the process was uneven. The Eichmann trial in 1961 and the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial of 1963-65 brought Nazi crimes into renewed public focus. The generational revolt of 1968 challenged the silence of the parents; the broadcast of the television series Holocaust in 1979 brought the extermination of the Jews into millions of German homes; and the exhibition Crimes of the Wehrmacht, beginning in 1995, challenged the comforting myth that the regular German army had remained uninvolved in Nazi atrocities. Yet, as Harald Welzer, Sabine Moller, and Karoline Tschuggnall demonstrated in their 2002 book Opa war kein Nazi (Grandpa Was No Nazi), even when the crimes of Nazism became part of public historical consciousness, German families long continued to construct narratives in which their own relatives were innocent victims, or even opponents of the regime – see for instance, the case of Leopold von Mildenstein discussed in another fantastic Israeli documentary film, The Flat (HaDira, Arnon Goldfinger, 2011). Public acknowledgment and private denial can coexist remarkably well.

The mechanism is remarkably familiar in the Central European post-communist context. As I have argued in Britské listy, the Czech state officially condemns the former communist regime and has endeavoured to construct a collective memory in which almost everyone was its victim and hardly anyone participated in sustaining it. It has opened the archives extensively, while largely avoiding the unsettling implications of documents that reveal how deeply the regime depended on ordinary people’s participation and accommodation to the rule. The historical record does not need to disappear or remain hidden; rather, its interpretation is reorganized to preserve a reassuring distinction between perpetrators and victims.

Conclusion: from knowledge to acknowledgment

The problem is that such narratives of collective innocence inevitably end up shaping the treatment of those who challenge them. When a society’s moral identity rests on seeing itself as a community of victims, asking it to acknowledge its own wrongdoing can be perceived as an act of betrayal. Waldman compared the calls to deprive the filmmakers of NAZA of their Israeli citizenship to the East German regime's treatment of Wolf Biermann, who was stripped of his GDR citizenship in 1976 for criticizing the regime. It is indeed a revealing parallel: rather than address the criticism, authorities seek to exclude the critics from the national community and protect the collective narrative from uncomfortable evidence. The problem is no longer what has been revealed, but the supposed disloyalty of those who reveal it. Needless to say, this reaction is not characteristic of a democracy.

The German experience of Nazism, like the Czech experience of communism, suggests that neither the availability of information nor the passage of time necessarily produces a form of reckoning. The obstacle is often not a lack of evidence, but the collective narratives through which evidence is interpreted, neutralized, or rejected. The question, then, is how to dismantle those narratives before their consequences become irreversible. The West German contrast with East Germany suggests that overcoming these mechanisms requires the long, patient, and costly work of building a democratic civil society capable of sustaining such public reckoning. But this work developed under highly particular historical conditions: the Allied occupation, the prosecutions at Nuremberg and beyond, and substantial American support for reconstruction and investment in intellectual life, including the CIA’s covert funding of culture and counterculture via the Congress for Cultural Freedom. The postwar economic recovery and growing confidence in the future also helped provide a durable social foundation for democracy. These developments required decades and took place in favorable circumstances that seem unlikely to be reproduced today.

There are of course people undertaking similar civic-minded work in Israel: the filmmakers of NAZA themselves, the soldiers and intelligence officers who agreed to speak, Ofer Waldman, and other courageous individuals willing to challenge the prevailing account. Their efforts need protection, resources, and a public prepared to listen. But the question I would have liked to put to Waldman is: if Israeli society will eventually have to reckon with what it has done, what would make that process begin sooner? How can knowledge become acknowledgment, and acknowledgment a willingness to act? Indeed, a potential reckoning in the distant future offers little comfort to the Palestinians whose lives are at stake right now. I cannot offer a simple prescription for bringing this about. But the urgent task in Israel is to overcome denial while acknowledgment can still change what is being done.