Professor Moses, your surname and field of study often lead people to assume you are Jewish or German. Yet, you grew up in Brisbane in a Christian household, in a country grappling with its own colonial violence against Aboriginal people. Did this Australian 'settler-colonial' perspective give you a specific toolset to deconstruct German memory culture that perhaps German historians lacked?

There are several elements to your question. Regarding my surname and background: my mother is a German migrant and my father is Australian. He earned his PhD in Germany, where he met my mother. They married and settled in Australia, where my father taught German history at the University of Queensland for nearly three decades.

So, German history and culture were always present in our household. German and Israeli historians frequently visited in connection with my father's academic work. I remember, as a child, visiting one of those historians, Walter Grab, in Israel. We also visited my mother's family in Germany. For these reasons, I was predisposed to an interest in German history

At university, however, I primarily studied Australian history. I was a student of Raymond Evans, a pioneering historian of race in Australia, so this was a topic to which I was exposed as an undergraduate in the mid-1980s. Later, I studied German intellectual history at the University of California, Berkeley, with Martin Jay, a historian of critical theory. In the 1990s, the debates about Germany's memory of the Holocaust, memory studies and intellectual history were central, especially in light of the major historiographical disputes of the 1980s, which were still fresh.

I was deeply fascinated by these issues because I was already interested in questions of historical justice — in both the German and Australian contexts — even though at the time I still viewed them as separate domains. I wrote my dissertation on German intellectuals and the Nazi past, which I completed in 2000 and published as a book in 2007. The book offered a relatively optimistic conclusion to what had been a tortured and complex debate about the meaning of the Nazi past for the postwar West German democracy.

If you look at the debates of the 1950s and '60s, the central question wasn't "Why did the Holocaust happen?" but rather "Why did German democracy fail and how can we prevent that from happening again?" Competing answers to that question emerged, particularly in the context of the Cold War.

Meanwhile, in late 1990s Australia, a bitter national debate erupted over the state policy of forcibly removing Indigenous children, especially so-called "mixed-race" children, from their families and placing them in institutions or white foster homes. This practice, which continued into the 1960s, was carried out under the racist logic that these children would be better off assimilated into white society. It was a deeply traumatic experience for Indigenous communities, similar to the residential school systems in North America.

By the mid-1990s, Indigenous activism had led to a formal commission of inquiry into these policies. In 1997, the resulting Bringing Them Home report described the removals as a form of genocide and called for reparations. This triggered an intense backlash from Australian nationalists, who vehemently rejected the term "genocide."

While I was a doctoral student in Freiburg, I was asked to speak on this issue as the only Australian in town. Thus in parallel with my German studies, I continued to engage with Australian history. This eventually led to a series of articles on Australian history from 2000 onward. Still, at the time, I kept Germany and Australia in separate intellectual compartments.

But over time, through my research into the intellectual history of genocide and the work of Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term, I realized that he had already incorporated settler-colonial logics into his concept. The Nazis' project in Eastern Europe involved displacing Slavic and Jewish populations and replacing them with Germans — a form of colonization. That insight eventually led to my 2021 book, "The Problems of Genocide."

Germany is often viewed as the world champion of "dealing with the past." For decades, admitting guilt for the Holocaust was seen as the ticket to becoming a liberal democracy. But in 2021, you shocked the German establishment by calling this memory culture a rigid "Catechism" — a  quasi-religious dogma with clergy who expel heretics. How did we get here? How did a culture meant to create a free and open society turn into one that now cancels artists and bans protests in the name of "protecting the truth"?

My intervention wasn't so much historiographical as political, though it draws on academic insights. What I observed, and what shocked and appalled me, was that artists, intellectuals and others, many of them Jewish, particularly from the U.S., were being serially "cancelled" in Germany. I felt this represented an authoritarian and illiberal turn in German political culture and wanted to understand it, not just condemn it.

What became clear was that Holocaust memory and accusations of antisemitism were being deployed against these individuals by identifiable figures in the political establishment, the media and institutional frameworks, like antisemitism commissioners. These campaigns were often coordinated, with visible patterns on social media.

More deeply, I saw a sacralization of Holocaust memory — it had become sacred. When you read the anthropological literature on the sacred and the profane, you learn that the sacred is defined precisely by what cannot be touched or contaminated. It must not be mixed with anything else; it stands above all.

In this context, I saw how the German establishment resisted any suggestion that the Holocaust might have colonial dimensions or that earlier German colonial genocides — like those of the Herero and Nama in what is now Namibia — could be seen as precursors to the Holocaust. Such ideas were treated as heresies.

That's why I described this cultural and political formation as a political religion. The Holocaust is treated as the founding violence of the Federal Republic and a clerical class had emerged in public life to enforce orthodoxy and conduct what I called witch hunts or orthodoxy trials.

I identified five core tenets of this "catechism":

• The Holocaust is unique;
• It was driven solely by antisemitism, specifically German "redemptive antisemitism";
• Antizionism is antisemitism;
• Racism and antisemitism are entirely unrelated phenomena;
• Germany's reason of state (Staatsräson) is the security of Israel.

Empirically, I noticed that anyone who questioned any of these tenets would be expelled from public life — denounced as a relativizer, a denier or an antisemite. While they could go on living their private lives, public careers became impossible unless one subscribed to this orthodoxy.

I deliberately used the term catechism rather than commandments to underscore the Christian dimension of this phenomenon. It's about redeeming Christian Germany — not about Jewish heritage.

This brings us to one of your most provocative recent claims: that the German state's fervent defense of Israel (Staatsräson) has mutated into a form of "State Antisemitism." To our readers, this sounds like a complete paradox. How can a policy designed to protect Jewish life end up, as you argue, classifying progressive Jews as enemies of the state? 

Jewish life, especially in the United States, but to a much lesser extent in Germany, is extremely diverse. There's a long tradition of non-Zionist Jewish politics in the U.S. — Bundism, for instance. Many Jewish communities have historically embraced a diasporic identity, rather than defining Jewishness through the state of Israel.

While most Jewish communities today do place Israel at the center of their communal life, many Jewish people do not — and these are the ones targeted by the German memory culture. This targeting happens with the cooperation of establishment Jewish organizations, which see these non-Zionist or anti-Zionist groups as internal rivals, renegades and threats.

If you look back to the 1920s and '30s in Germany, you'll find something disturbingly similar. Back then, antisemites were particularly perturbed by secular, leftist Jews — figures they associated with so-called "Judeo-Bolshevism" and "cultural Marxism." These individuals were seen as culturally corrosive, associated with so-called "degenerate art." 

That same figure — the secular, intellectual, anti-Zionist Jew — is again being targeted by the German state. And this continuity is deeply troubling. In this way, what is officially presented as state anti-antisemitism becomes, paradoxically, a form of state antisemitism itself.

In Estonia, we follow the war in Ukraine very closely, while the world is debating the definition of genocide regarding Gaza. You argue that our obsession with this specific word creates a hierarchy where other mass crimes seem "lesser." By focusing so much on proving "genocidal intent" — whether in Mariupol or Gaza — do we risk missing the actual, terrifying logic driving these wars?

First, let me be clear: I strongly oppose Russia's war against Ukraine. I support the Ukrainian people's right to self-determination, including in Crimea, which was illegally annexed. While international law has many shortcomings, it does offer protection to small nations and occupied peoples, like Ukrainians and Palestinians, by upholding norms against conquest and occupation.

In that sense, I see strong parallels between the situation in Ukraine and Palestine. Yet many people who support Ukraine also support Israel, which I find incoherent. In both cases, we see a powerful neighbor occupying and annexing the territory of a weaker one. That's the essential structure. Political alliances often obscure this basic fact.

The problem with the concept of genocide, as it's understood today, is that it has become culturally synonymous with the Holocaust. Although genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity are legally considered equal under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, genocide has come to be seen as the "crime of crimes."

As a result, many victim groups feel compelled to frame their suffering as genocide in order to gain recognition and attention. There's a strong symbolic pull, because saying "we are victims of genocide" implies a parallel with the Holocaust, which in global society has become a stand-in for absolute evil.

Another key difference is that genocide is understood as a crime against identity — a group's existence — whereas crimes against humanity are committed against civilians as civilians, not specifically as members of an identity group. This distinction has encouraged a tendency to "ethnicize" violence and to prioritize identity-based harm over other forms of mass atrocity.

You see the problem if we take the logic to its conclusion: if one says Hamas committed genocide on October 7th by killing around 1,200 people, Israel can kill perhaps 100 times more Palestinians in response and justify it as ethical because Israel claims its actions are motivated by military logic and self-defense, not genocidal intent. At most, some war crimes were committed, say Israel supporters. 

Under the current framework, Hamas is considered more evil for killing 1,200 people in an alleged act of genocide than Israel is for killing over 60,000 Palestinians in the name of self-defense. I ask readers: is this really how we want to define and understand evil?

This illustrates the absurdity of the way we rank atrocities based on whether or not they meet the threshold for genocide. That's what my 2021 book "The Problems of Genocide" is about: it traces the historical development of this hierarchy of evil.

If the legal definition fails us, let's look at your alternative concept: "permanent security." You describe it as a state's paranoid striving to be completely invulnerable — killing a neighbor so they cannot become a threat later. Is Putin's invasion a textbook example of this? Does understanding the war as a preemptive strike for "absolute safety" change how we should respond to it?

Yes, I think so. Putin has given us various justifications for the invasion. One is historical: that Ukraine is not really a separate nation, that Ukrainians are actually Russians and that Ukraine is part of a Greater Russia. But he has also presented a security argument: that while Ukraine may not be a threat now, if it joins the Western sphere of influence, it could become one in the future. For example, missiles stationed in Ukraine could reach Moscow far faster than those in Western Europe: too fast to intercept. That possible future danger, in his logic, constitutes not just a threat, but an existential threat. Therefore, it must be dealt with now.

This is the essence of the "permanent security" doctrine: security establishments in powerful states aren't only tasked with responding to current threats. Their job is also to anticipate and neutralize future threats. Every major power — Russia, the U.S., Israel, China — has defense units specifically dedicated to this kind of strategic foresight.

From that perspective, Ukraine moving into the Western orbit becomes an intolerable risk — not because of something it is, but because of what it might become. Therefore, Russia treats it as an existential threat now. That's why the invasion wasn't just about annexing parts of eastern Ukraine; it was about destabilizing or even eliminating Ukraine as a viable, independent state. And if total conquest isn't possible, then the goal becomes to leave behind a broken, economically unviable rump state.

Political theorist John Mearsheimer has laid out the Russian security rationale quite clearly. As a realist, he accepts the security logic of great powers and effectively concedes their right to do so as a quasi law of international relations.  I don't share that view. I side with smaller nations — like Estonia, or Ukraine, which, while large in size and population, is historically vulnerable — as well as stateless nations like the Palestinians. These are the communities whose rights are usually crushed by paranoid, powerful neighbors.

One of the few real achievements of the post-WWII international order was its legal norm against conquest and occupation. That norm is now being explicitly eroded. It was always violated in practice, of course, but states at least paid lip service to it. Until recently, even the U.S. acknowledged that the Palestinian territories were illegally occupied and that Crimea was unlawfully annexed.

Now, however, we're seeing open green-lighting: for Russia's annexation of Ukrainian land, for Israel's annexation of Palestinian territory and soon, possibly, of Lebanese or Syrian land as well. Gaza too. All of this represents an explicit dismantling of the UN-based order, and that's dangerous, especially for smaller nations.

Coming now specifically to the logic of the war in Gaza: Israel argues its war is against Hamas, not the Palestinian people, yet the civilian death toll is staggering. You've suggested that under the logic of "permanent security," the distinction between a civilian and a combatant vanishes because the entire population is viewed as a potential future threat. Are we witnessing the normalization of a new kind of warfare where "self-defense" allows for the total destruction of civilian infrastructure?

Unfortunately, yes. Any fair-minded observer of the Israeli campaign — especially if you pay attention to the public statements of Israeli ministers, TV commentators, senior journalists, community and religious leaders — can see that there's a broad societal and governmental consensus in favor of ultimately removing the population.

Since Egypt has refused to open its borders to facilitate mass deportations, the new strategy appears to be making life in Gaza so unbearable that the population "self-deports." This is now being done in a piecemeal fashion: a few hundred people on one flight, a few hundred on another. Some of these "ghost flights" have already landed in South Africa.

The long-term policy seems to be to reduce the population as much as possible, while Israel has effectively annexed more than 50 percent of Gaza — including all its fertile agricultural land. Your readers should understand that geographically, Gaza has two main zones: the western part near the coast, which is mostly sand, unsuitable for farming, and the eastern part where most of the crops and fruit trees were grown. That eastern section has now been seized and will be held.

So even if Gaza wasn't fully viable before, it certainly isn't now. That's one aspect of the total war on Palestinian society.

Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term genocide, originally used it as a synonym for wars of extermination. He believed that this type of warfare was common in antiquity and the medieval period but had supposedly been replaced by more "civilized" warfare in which combatants and civilians are kept distinct.

What we see today contradicts that ideal. Israeli authorities claim they are targeting Hamas, not civilians. Yet because Hamas operates among the population, they say — in tunnels, homes, and institutions — the result has been massive inadvertent civilian casualties. Israeli officials, then, say this is unavoidable due to the nature of urban warfare. 

But this is difficult to accept given the precision capabilities Israel has demonstrated elsewhere — for example, in killing specific individuals in Iran or Qatar. They could use those same surgical weapons in Gaza, but they don't, because they are expensive. Instead, they use 2,000-pound bombs that obliterate entire apartment blocks to kill a single low-level Hamas operative — who might just be a policeman or municipal worker in a Hamas-run local government.

Each such strike might be a war crime on its own, but considering the overall pattern — especially as mapped by Forensic Architecture in their Cartography of Genocide report — you see missile strikes across nearly the entire Gaza Strip. The map is covered in impact points. It is difficult to argue that, taken together, this obliteration in Gaza is a mere byproduct of the war and not its point. Intended rather than incidental. 

So while Israel says it's only attacking Hamas, in practice, it is attacking the population as a whole. This isn't collateral damage — it's a systemic logic. It's not credible to simply blame Hamas for "hiding among civilians" when we know from drone operator testimonies that Israeli AI targeting systems waited until a target entered a home before launching the missile. In other words, they waited for civilians to be present before striking, because the goal wasn't only to eliminate the operative, but to destroy Gaza bit by bit under the guise of adhering to international law.

We know this because, after clearing areas of Hamas fighters, the military would then go on to level entire neighborhoods — so they couldn't be used again. This is a violation of international law, which only permits destruction in response to immediate threats, not anticipated ones. It is permanent security.

There seems to be a massive split in how the Global North and the Global South view these conflicts. Germany and the U.S. see the Holocaust as the central trauma of history. South Africa and Brazil look at Gaza through the lens of colonialism and apartheid. Is the "Western" model of memory, which places the Holocaust at the center, crumbling before our eyes? Are we seeing the end of the Western consensus on history?

I believe so. We need to make a distinction within the West, however, While Western political elites continue to frame these issues through the lens of Holocaust memory, their publics have increasingly distanced themselves from those narratives.

For instance, in Germany, around 80 percent of the population has long been against the war in Gaza. A significant majority also distrust the mainstream media's coverage of it. Thanks to independent information sources on social media, people can see for themselves what's happening and many recognize the war as genocidal — not just a targeted campaign against Hamas. Many refer to it outright as genocide or more accurately as genocidal warfare, which aligns with Raphael Lemkin's original conception.

This disconnect has created two major consequences: deep mistrust in the press and devaluation of Holocaust memory as a moral currency. Many people feel that Holocaust memory has been misused and instrumentalized to justify violence that they consider illegitimate. 

And I find that tragic. Holocaust memory should be central to European memory culture. It was the largest genocide in European history and not only Germans were responsible. Across occupied and allied states, local authorities collaborated with the Nazis to eliminate their Jewish populations, often using the occupation as cover to carry out their own ethnonationalist agendas.

At the same time, Holocaust memory should coexist with memory of other historical crimes, including those committed by Western European colonial powers. We need a fuller picture of European criminal history. But the current instrumentalization of Holocaust memory, particularly in justifying warfare in Gaza, has compromised that broader memory project.

Much of your work connects the Holocaust to colonial history. However, in Eastern Europe, our experience of colonization didn't come from overseas empires, but from the Russian Empire, Baltic German landlords and the Soviet Union. Western postcolonial theory often overlooks this "continental imperialism." Does your framework allow us to bridge this gap? Can we integrate the Gulag and the Atlantic slave trade into a single understanding of violence?

That's an excellent question. It touches on the very problem I call "partisan history" — the tendency for nationalist histories to be partisan in the sense of partial and apologetic and partisan in the sense of glorifying partisan resistance heroes during World War 2.

For many years now, scholars of Eastern Europe have applied postcolonial theory to Eastern Europe because the logics of conquest, occupation and cultural assimilation were strikingly similar. My framework connects these histories not just through forced labor, but through the logic of "permanent security." Both the Soviet deportations and Western colonial violence were driven by a paranoid imperial need to eliminate "threats" — whether those were labeled as "bandits," "bourgeois nationalists" or "primitive savages." When we view history this way, we can see that the Nazi "Generalplan Ost" and Soviet policies were colonial projects applied to Europe.

However, applying this colonial lens to Eastern Europe is complex. The language of colonization has been central to nation-building in this region for centuries. But concepts like "indigeneity" and "decolonization" can be double-edged. On the one hand, they articulate genuine grievances against Russian or German imperialism. On the other, they can be weaponized to depict local minorities as "settlers" or collaborators with foreign powers.

For example, Jewish communities were often viewed not as indigenous, but as foreign elements — a perception that played a fatal role in their persecution. In the Baltic states and elsewhere, the stereotype of "Judeo-Bolshevism" allowed nationalists to frame the murder of Jews as a defensive, "anti-colonial" act against Soviet imperialism.

By moving away from a competition over "who suffered more" (Auschwitz vs. the Gulag), we can integrate these histories into a broader understanding of how empires — whether liberal, fascist or communist — use violence to manage populations they deem a security threat.

The post-war order was built on the slogan "never again." Yet looking at Ukraine, Gaza and Sudan, international law seems powerless. If the legal definition of "genocide" is too narrow and the UN is paralyzed, what new moral language do we need? How do we talk about and stop mass violence in the 21st century without falling into the traps of the past?

I think we first need an analytical language like that which I have proposed with concept of permanent security. It's unlikely this concept will ever be codified in international law because states, fundamentally, want to retain the right to do whatever they deem necessary when they feel existentially threatened, whether by internal or external enemies They will resort to mass violence that others may view as genocide.

We've seen this logic at work with Russia in Ukraine, China with the Uyghurs in Xinjiang, Myanmar with the Rohingya and Israel in Gaza. In each case, the state claims it is not targeting a people as such, but rather fighting terrorism or defending its national security. This allows them to sidestep the genocide convention, which requires intent to destroy a group as such.

There have been efforts to create a separate convention on crimes against humanity, similar to the genocide convention. But even that faces resistance. If you read the UN debates, you'll see that some of the strongest opponents are states like China and Iran — authoritarian regimes that fear international legal scrutiny. They often see internal populations as potential collaborators with hostile external powers and justify extreme measures on those grounds.

So even arriving at a strong, enforceable framework for crimes against humanity is politically difficult. That makes it even less likely that something like Permanent Security could become a legal norm. But I do believe it can help us understand the logic driving these atrocities.

Only once we understand that logic can we begin to build a new moral vocabulary. That's why I've returned to Raphael Lemkin's original framing. For him, genocide wasn't opposed to war — it was a form of war. A war that targets not just enemy combatants, but the entire civilian population.

We see that today in Gaza and in a more low-intensity form in Ukraine. In Gaza, even during the so-called ceasefire, Israel continues to kill 10–20 people per day. Similarly, Russia regularly launches missile attacks that kill small numbers of Ukrainian civilians. These daily casualties accumulate over time, but because they're not as spectacular as earlier mass bombings, they fade from the headlines. And that's by design.

This reveals a key limitation of the genocide convention: it assumes mass killing will be intensive and punctual. But if a state slows down its violence — makes it a long-term campaign rather than a sudden massacre — it often falls below the legal and media radar. Yet the human cost can be just as devastating.

So we need to rethink not only our moral language, but our legal frameworks as well. Otherwise, the slogan "Never Again" will remain just that — a slogan.

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