Holocaust denial discourse: A conspiracy/theory

HDD as conspiracy/theory

To illustrate the ways in which Holocaust Denial Discourse (HDD) exhibits characteristics of conspiracy theories, a few examples are in order. The first comes from Deborah Lipstadt, the most prominent proponent of HDD since the 1990s. Lipstadt (2005) began writing about negationism shortly after the founding of JHR, at the prompting of Yad Vashem historian Yehuda Bauer and Yisrael Gutman of the Hebrew University’s Center for the Study of Antisemitism (p. 16). In her first book on the topic, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory (Lipstadt, 1993), as in the publications that follow, Lipstadt employs various rhetorical strategies to assimilate diverse viewpoints into the category of “Holocaust denial and distortion,” often abbreviated to “Holocaust denial,” so as to give the impression of a mounting threat.

In one passage, for instance, she cautions that Holocaust deniers have made “inroads . . . into the American educational establishment” (Lipstadt, 1993: 16). This trend is epitomized by Noam Chomsky, a linguist affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). To label Chomsky as a negationist, Lipstadt says he wrote the introduction to the aforementioned book by Robert Faurisson (1993), in which he casts doubt on the existence of gas chambers (p. 16): “Chomsky contended that, based on what he had read of Faurisson’s work, he saw ‘no proof’ that would lead him to conclude that the Frenchman was an antisemite” (p. 16). By glossing the situation in this way, Lipstadt decontextualizes Chomsky’s admittedly untactful move within his career as a linguist and anti-Zionist activist—and a Jewish one to boot. She overlooks the possibility that Chomsky’s support for Faurisson (1993) was not rooted in Holocaust denial; Chomsky is unlikely to have disputed Lipstadt’s assertion that “homicidal gas chambers existed” (p. 16). Rather, Chomsky may have perceived Faurisson as a fellow language connoisseur (recall he was testing an obscure literary theory). He likely also saw him as a fellow critic of Zionist politics—one who, like other conspiracy/theorists, operated “on weak signals, often at the threshold of visibility, pushing against the flood of obfuscating messages” (Weizman, 2019: 29). While these motivations do not justify Chomsky’s defense of Faurisson—which I for one consider misguided—I do not think they warrant the portrayal of Chomsky as a committed Holocaust denier. Furthermore, Lipstadt’s depiction of Chomsky as emblematic of a broader infiltration of academia by deniers distorts reality, or at the very least lacks sufficient empirical support to substantiate its alarmist tone.

The few empirical analyses that exist on the topic suggest that, if anything, Holocaust denial has been on the decline since Lipstadt published her books. For instance, in an in-depth study, Nicholas Terry (2017) notes that websites that promote denial see strikingly little traffic, and the users who do make negationist claims on social media are usually the same handful across forums (pp. 51–53). A decline in Holocaust denial was also suggested during my fieldwork when, surprised by repeated mentions to Holocaust denial, I attempted to gain some clarity on the issue during an interview with Dr. Peter Black, who used to work in the US Department of Justice’s Office of Special Investigations, tracking down Nazis who had fled to the United States. Black went on to occupy the post of Senior Historian at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington, DC for 18 years. His work at the Museum centered on, in his words, ensuring “that what the Museum put out into the public domain, regardless of the venue, would be accurate, up to date, and would include, or at least take notice of, the most recent perceptions based on the most recent research.” Based on this work, Black told me he believed that Holocaust denial was less of a problem than it used to be.

Be this as it may, Holocaust denial discourse continues to be produced by theorists who build on Lipstadt’s strategies to create the impression of virulent antisemitism. Strategies include expanding the definition of Holocaust denial in ways that, if broadly adopted, would block historiographical discussion. Representative of this strategy is an Israel Affairs peer-reviewed article by Nitza Davidovitch and Nissim Dana (2017). According to the authors—writing from Ariel University, on a West Bank settlement—included within the category of Holocaust denial is “the diminution and depreciation of the scale of the genocide (‘6 million is an ungrounded number’)” (Davidovitch and Dana, 2017: 411). By this definition, Yehuda Bauer (2020), Professor Emeritus of Holocaust Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Academic Adviser of Yad Vashem, might be accused of denialism:

What is the true number of victims that deniers argue Jews exaggerate? The iconic number is of course six million. However, no serious historian of the Holocaust will argue that that is the accurate figure. Several major research efforts have been undertaken to establish with greater precision the number of those who perished, and they point to figures between 5.1 and 6.3 million, with a more or less accepted number of between 5.6 and 5.8 million as the most probable. (p. 210)

Exacerbating HDD have been recent publications that suggest a kind of unconscious denialism in the form of Holocaust ignorance. In 2020, the Claims Conference’s “U.S. Millennial Holocaust Knowledge and Awareness Survey” made major headlines when, according to some reports, it found that 63% of people below 40 lack knowledge about the Holocaust. A 16 September Guardian article begins, “Almost two-thirds of young American adults do not know that 6 million Jews were killed during the Holocaust, and more than one in 10 believe Jews caused the Holocaust” (Sherwood, 2020). A closer look at the survey finds that these headlines, along with the survey itself, are misleading. On 18 September 2020, Stephen D Smith, a Holocaust scholar who founded the UK Holocaust Centre, wrote a response to the Claims Conference study in The Forward, a liberal Jewish magazine:

The Claims Conference survey defined “knowledge” of the Holocaust as follows: a person has “definitely heard of the Holocaust” (78% said they had), can name at least one concentration camp, death camp, and ghetto (52% could name at least one), and knows that 6 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust (37% did).

These are not unreasonable things to expect people to know. But it’s also a high bar to clear in order to say that someone has “knowledge” of the Holocaust.

When measuring knowledge alone, how many Americans can cite the number who died at Hiroshima? For how long the Vietnam War raged? The racial terror known as Jim Crow? (Smith, 2020).

Smith cites another survey on Holocaust education that was released the same week the Claims Conference released its results. The goal of this other study, sponsored by Yad Vashem and other leading Holocaust organizations, “was to examine the effectiveness of Holocaust education” in the United States. It found that it is effective: “80% of U.S. college students reported receiving at least some Holocaust education during high school, 78% of those students reported knowing a lot or a moderate amount about the Holocaust.” In short, while no reliable evidence proves that Holocaust denial is virulent or widespread, discourse about both conscious and unconscious denial has been pervasive since the 1970s.

HDD as ideological tactic

Like conspiracy theories discussed by social scientists and historians, HDD functions in part as an ideological tactic or propaganda. Coleman (2023) notes such self-conscious strategizing in her discussion of QAnon (p. 255). Some QAnon members inject their theories into various forums not because they consistently or wholeheartedly believe the ideas, but because they wish to, as Joseph Masco (2024) puts it, “foment a strategic disorientation” (p. 99).

As already suggested, one ideological use of HDD is Zionist in nature. To elaborate on the example provided above, in Israel Affairs, Davidovitch and Dana (2017) remark on a “paradoxical” fact: even as Palestinians deny the Holocaust, they also draw on its symbolism to establish their own claims and grievances. The authors detail these dynamics, stating, for instance, “Hamas prevents United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) in Gaza from teaching about the Holocaust, which it calls ‘a false Zionist story’” (p. 418). At the same time as Hamas frames the Holocaust as a conspiracy theory, its leaders recycle its symbolism: they say that “it was not the Third Reich that brought the Holocaust”; rather, Jewish settlements in Palestine “are the Arab holocaust” (p. 421).

Even as Davidovitch and Dana (p. 2017) describe Palestinian references to the Holocaust as contradictory and hence irrational, the last sentence of their article draws what strikes me as a more balanced conclusion: “Arguably, if the Palestinians were truly convinced that the Holocaust is a myth, they would not make such extensive use of it to promote their own interests” (p. 423). In my reading, this amounts to an admission that many, even most Palestinians likely do not sincerely believe that the Holocaust was a hoax. Palestinians’ Holocaust denial may, for the most part, be an ideological tactic or meaning-making idiom rather than an unselfconscious belief (Berridge, 2018: 312; Sells, 2015: 742). While hinting at such self-reflexivity, in the majority of the article, Davidovitch and Dana label Palestinians as Holocaust deniers who “paradoxically” draw on its symbolism. As they emulate their opponents’ logics, it becomes unclear whether they actually believe that Palestinians deny the Holocaust, or whether stating so is ideological advantageous, or something in between.

HDD, qua self-conscious tactic, does not only serve to discredit Israel’s critics. This is suggested by the USHMM’s 30th Anniversary National Tribute Dinner, which I watched, livestreamed, on 20 April 2023, in Washington, DC. At the podium, William J Wolfe, philanthropist and Chairman of First Washington Realty, Inc, emphasized the need of raising funds for the Museum. This work was urgent, said Wolfe, because of an alarming rise in “antisemitism and Holocaust denial.” In an ensuing speech, Stuart E Eizenstat, US Democratic adviser, current Chairman of the USHMM’s Holocaust Memorial Council, and core member since 2001, echoed this sentiment. He said, “Everywhere we look, we’re deeply alarmed by troubling trends—the egregious misuse of the Holocaust by Russian President Putin as a pretext for his unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, the blatant Holocaust denial in so many places, and the shocking mainstreaming of antisemitism in our own country.” Holocaust denial also came up in the promotional video, Never Again: What You Do Matters. The voice-over commended donors in the audience for contributing to gathering evidence: “You made this truth globally accessible, digitizing the collections, each piece of evidence a dagger in the heart of Holocaust denial” (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2023).

Considering the close ties between the USHMM and overtly Zionist figures and institutions—for example, Eizenstat reports acting as one of Israel’s main backers during his term as President Jimmy Carter’s Domestic Policy Adviser (Eizenstat, 2018: 409-469)—there are undoubtedly resonances between its HDD and Zionist interests. According to this logic, HDD contributes to USHMM fundraising campaigns, serving the ultimate goal of defending Israel. While such lines of support exist, my research also pointed to subtler dynamics: the USHMM as an institution harbors goals closely aligned with US capital interests. Through its exhibits and educational programs for youth across the globe, racialized students in the United States, and law enforcement personnel, the USHMM, much like corporate-funded humanitarian films studied by Sherry Ortner (2017), elicits moralized but depoliticized feelings that obscure the neoliberal order at the root of most global inequalities (p. 529). A case in point is the USHMM’s Bringing the Lessons Home Youth Program (BTLH), which introduces youth to the “lessons” of the Holocaust and has them give tours of the Permanent Exhibit to friends and family. When I asked her what exactly she had learned through the program, one graduate said,

So there’s always that need to separate, because I think that is human nature, but at the same time, it kind of leads down these paths where terrible things happen. And I think learning to say, “It doesn’t really matter who you are.” But I think that that thing of scapegoating and that thing of trying to find fault in somebody because—I don’t know. We’re all kind of flawed. But I don’t know it’s–yeah, I don’t really know. But yeah, kind of like always making somebody flawed while you’re perfect. I think that’s what the issue kind of comes down to.

Like many other people I interviewed—including adult employees and volunteers—this BTLH Ambassador struggled to articulate what exactly the USHMM had taught her. She tried to convey a deep feeling without falling into what her hesitations suggested she herself knew were cliches: “scapegoating,” “making somebody flawed,” “that need to separate.”

If USHMM leadership invokes Holocaust denial in the context of fundraising campaigns, it may not then only be because they seek to legitimize the state of Israel, but also because, consciously or not, they wish to support an institution that helps to convert the meaning of morality into “remembering” the Holocaust, thereby obscuring and excusing economic and structural inequalities, which they in all likelihood benefit from. As Katrin Antweiler (2024) argues in a recent article, the “humanitarian reason” (Fassin, 2013: 37) that dominates mainstream memorial work substitutes political debate and critique for moral feelings. Casting the Holocaust as a story of intolerance and the crimes of “undemocratic ‘others’” (Antweiler, 2024: 149), Holocaust museums tend to occlude the political relations that contributed to the destruction of European Jewry. In particular, they sideline the sometimes justified, if exaggerated, twentieth-century portrayal of European Jewry as both socio-economic power and communist ally (Blatman, 2015; Moses, 2021: 277–331). As students and museum visitors are trained to view the Holocaust in vague, decontextualized, and depoliticized terms, and to believe that change and justice are achieved by overcoming individual “hate,” the need for critical analysis of systemic issues in both the past and the present is shielded from view.

Holocaust denial renders this affective reasoning ever more salient: it materializes the Nazi threat in the form of the denier and offers Holocaust “education” as the solution. Anthropological and historical research suggests that HDD serves such depoliticizing ends beyond the USHMM. While a detailed analysis lies beyond the scope of this article, evidence from the European context points in this direction. For instance, Irena Grudzińska Gross (2019) argues complex socio-political dynamics, having to do with the post-socialist transition, contribute to minimizations of complicity in the Holocaust in the east of the European Union, and especially Poland (pp. 838–840). However, proponents of HDD pathologize such minimizations as symptoms of a Holocaust denial virus (see, for instance, Lipstadt, 1993: 6). This pathologization obscures structural issues that contribute to such subaltern conspiracy theories. They thereby overlook if-harmful critiques of the prevailing economic order expressed therein (Kalmar, 2020: 188–194). Such moves also obfuscate geopolitical alliances, such as those between Israeli and Polish politicians, that perversely excuse or overlook denialism in Poland (Gliński, 2017: 397). ¹

HDD’s banal logics

That HDD helps to protect the neoliberal order and discredit Israel’s critics does not mean that it is reducible to a political or economic instrument. The anthropological work on conspiracy theory is illuminating in this respect. Anthropologists attend to the psycho-affective affordances of conspiracy theories, approaching the latter as subaltern strategies for making sense of, and finding empowerment in, a world that has become increasingly inscrutable due to the neoliberal concentration of power, the spread of bureaucracy, and the manipulations of corporate and technocratic elites (Comaroff, 2003: 287–288; Masco and Wedeen, 2024: 1–18). Some go so far as to argue that conspiracy theory extends the logic of witchcraft and magic otherwise attributed to “primitive” societies (Fassin, 2021: 132; Sanders and West, 2003: 6). However one looks at it, the underlying idea is that conspiracy theories express the concerns of subjects with relatively little institutional power.

As Jonathan Ginsburg et al. (2019) note, North American and Israeli Jews, who according to my research, appear to be the principal promoters of HDD, have increasingly moved from the periphery to the center of their respective societies (p. 5). They therefore cannot, as a group, be neatly slotted into the position of subaltern or working-class. While one may wish to preserve the “subaltern” quality of some Jewish communities by invoking the antisemitism many still face, I wish instead to highlight the meaning-making force of conspiracy theories, regardless of social position—and indeed, that the corporate tycoon and current US president Donald Trump has entertained conspiracy theories in recent years should cast doubt on structural oppression as a precondition for promoting such theories (Coleman, 2023: 253–254).

My research suggests that HDD fosters feelings of enjoyment and purpose among assimilating Jews. When I asked him about his motivation for participating in memorial work, a Jewish corporate lawyer and member of the USHMM’s Memorial Council told me, “I think we face denialism about the Holocaust while survivors are still alive, and I think their deaths will only embolden Holocaust deniers.” Seeing himself as a participant in the fight against emboldened negationists appeared to confer a sense of heroism. Through his participation in the Memorial Council, he was defeating a demonic enemy. Another Jewish interlocutor, employed by the recently opened Toronto Holocaust Museum, also seemed to reap a sense of pleasure and meaning from picturing Holocaust denial as an imminent threat. She described her goal of supporting survivors in the work they had started 40 years ago, when they set out to memorialize their experiences: “They were trying to counter denial and denialists. And I think that the context is still similar. It’s still relevant.” Picturing denial as a present threat deepens memorial work, giving it a concrete shape and purpose.

The pleasures conferred by HDD are elucidated by the social context in which this discourse emerged. As I argue at length elsewhere (Lucas, 2025), with the advent of Jewish integration into North America during the mid-twentieth century, secularizing Jews found themselves in an ambiguous social position that precipitated significant discomforts and anxieties. Having neither a thick Jewish culture nor religion to distinguish themselves from other white people, nor facing systemic discrimination, white Jews became nostalgic for a community of belonging and sense of purpose (see also Brodkin, 1994; Goldstein, 2006; Kugelmass, 1996). Jewish-Black tensions contributed to these anxieties. Until the 1960s, Black and Jewish Americans had seemed joined at the hip in their demands for integration and autonomy. Many Black Americans, including W. E. B. Du Bois, had identified with the Zionist struggle: it was a model for Black aspirations to self-determination (Feldman, 2015: 64; Rickford, 2019: 54). As Jews became more integrated into white society, and as many spoke out in support of Zionism, Black Americans began to associate Jews with white colonial power. This realignment prompted a sense of betrayal among many Jewish Americans: had they not, more than any other white group, supported Black people during the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s? And if Black Americans saw them as white aggressors, what did this mean for their self-image as marginalized, tolerant underdogs?

Even as they contributed to Black-Jewish tensions, media representations of the Holocaust and wars in the Middle East helped to override Jewish anxieties: starting with the broadcasting of the 1961 Eichmann trials, the Holocaust appeared in the public domain as a distinct, sublime entity. Until then the Holocaust had been a mere historical event, part and parcel of the broader history of World War II. Now, through its association with survivor testimonies and widely circulated shows, books, and movies, the Holocaust took on near-biblical proportions. Peter Novick (1999) identifies the 1967 Six-Day War as deepening these investments: when the Israeli army unexpectedly defeated Arab adversaries, it seemed to many American Jews as if God had been given a second chance; this perception inspired “a folk theory of ‘Holocaust and Redemption’” (p. 150). While Holocaust representations, and the images of wars in Israel/Palestine, provoked horror, they were also awe-inspiring and triggered a sense of communitas. Such experiences account for the surge in Holocaust media that occurred in the 1970s throughout North America. Erecting Holocaust museums, producing Holocaust movies, joining support groups for children of survivors, and promoting Holocaust education, helped to foster a sense of meaning and purpose in Jewish communities. It was also during this period that the discourse on Holocaust denial, pioneered by Lipstadt, took center stage. Like other technologies of Holocaust remembrance, Lipstadt’s books helped to drown out the anxieties of Jewish existence, including uncomfortable questions of Jewish whiteness and Palestinian oppression.

Lipstadt’s own trajectory exemplifies these dynamics. Like many North American Jews who struggled with the whitening of American Jews amid remnants of antisemitism, Lipstadt experienced a tribal awakening during the 1960s and 1970s through both the visibility of Holocaust testimony and wars in the Middle East. As she says in her second book on denial, “By the time I returned to the United States [from Israel] in September 1968, I understood the deep imprint of both the Holocaust and Israel on the psyche of the Jewish People” (Lipstadt, 2005: 10). But I linger with Lipstadt a moment longer not only because her work demonstrates this tribal awakening’s relationship to HDD. Notwithstanding the risk of painting Lipstadt as HDD incarnate, I do so because her work displays some of the more opaque, affective logics animating HDD.

While taking issue with Hofstadter’s (1996 [1964]) pathologizing tone, anthropologists agree that conspiracy theorists tend to mimic their perceived adversaries (p. 32). As Todd Sanders and West (2003) say, conspiracy theorists “express their own ideologically informed views of power—views that re-present the world as they experience and understand it” (p. 17). Indeed, Lipstadt often seems to mimic the powers she condemns. She advocates channeling a force as great as, or even greater, than that of Holocaust deniers to defeat such an enemy:

Although we do not take [Holocaust deniers’] conclusions seriously, contradictory as it may sound, we must make their method the subject of study. We must do so not because of the inherent value of their ideas but because of the fragility of reason and society’s susceptibility to such farfetched notions. (Lipstadt, 1993: 28)

For Lipstadt, questioning the virulence of Holocaust denial amounts to a dangerous distraction. Doubt must be cast aside. One must vociferously speak back to deniers.

As is true of (other) types of conspiracy theories, in some HDD, it is not only the perceived disposition of the Holocaust denier that inspires mimesis, but also his form (Vine and Carey, 2017: 54–57): as promoters of HDD understand Holocaust denial as, increasingly, an online phenomenon, they seek to emulate its algorithmic and entertaining structures. Such mimesis is instantiated by a 2022 editorial for a special edition of the peer-reviewed journal Holocaust Studies, on the nexus between digital media and Holocaust education. Victoria Grace Walden (2022) from the School of Media, Arts and Humanities at the University of Sussex, says, “The algorithmic culture that enables such [Holocaust denial] content to be recommended to users who come across pages promoting these discourses, whether accidentally or purposefully, is absolutely core to platform capitalism” (p. 259). As a solution, she proposes creating counter-algorithms: “Could there be benefits of pairing Holocaust institutions with successful lifestyle influencers and other digital-savvy individuals, from Twitch-maestros to Reddit moderators to help the former reach new audiences. . .?” (p. 272). While this suggestion might sound like a postmodern farce, more suitable to an episode of Nathan for You, than to scholarly speculation, my research revealed that Holocaust entertainment, as a means of fighting denial, is currently alive and well. In a 3 May 2024 newsletter, the Montreal Holocaust Museum (MHM) cordially invited me to “Enseignement de l’Holocauste et jeux vidéos: Discussion avec Luc Bernard” (“Holocaust Education and Video Games: A Discussion with Luc Bernard and Mitch Joel”) (Montreal Holocaust Museum, 2024). Highlighting the importance of the presentation was “la montée de l’antisémitisme, de la déformation et du déni de l’Holocauste” (mounting antisemitism, and Holocaust denial and disinformation). ²

As these examples suggest, while some of the feelings of enjoyment and heroism conferred by HDD can be traced back to Jewish anxieties having to do with whiteness and the question of Palestine, this is not the case across the board—in some instances, it appears to be the mimetic force of, and pleasures conferred by, HDD that drive this discourse. Indexing this side of HDD were interviews I conducted with non-Jews, who likely did not suffer from the confusions and anxieties that have accompanied processes of Jewish assimilation. Referring to his goals, one non-Jewish docent at the MHM said: “Fighting Holocaust denial and giving the right information.” A participant of the BTLH program, also not Jewish, passionately expressed the goals she shared with her peers. She said, “We’re bearing witness to what happened. We are telling you that we do not deny this any longer. We fully believe that this happened, we see that proof that’s happening right in front of us.” As Israel did not come up in these interviews, it would be unfair to reduce these feelings to fits of Zionist passion. While both Zionist ideologies and neoliberal trainings encountered in their institutions likely informed my interlocutors’ outlooks, the mission also appeared to confer psycho-social satisfactions not reducible to these ideologies, even if these pleasures helped to sustain them obliquely.

Indeed, the effectiveness of these technologies of “remembrance”—employed by leadership for a combination of personal, social, and political-economic reasons—is indicated by the fact that even interlocutors who did not seem susceptible to the “paranoia” encouraged by HDD were interpellated into this discourse. One non-Jewish educator at the USHMM explained why she avoided controversial issues when putting together educational materials on Holocaust history: “To avoid thorny issues of denial and distortion, it’s better to present an objective truth.” This interlocutor told me she would have liked to include some of these thornier issues—indeed, she thought history depended on such critical engagement—but capitulated based on her superiors’ recommendations. As much as she appeared to sympathize with these recommendations, this interlocutor was also submitting to avoid causing a stir. Whether these veiled orders came from people who were seeking enjoyment, empowerment, and/or pushing particular Zionist or neoliberal ideologies, is less salient in this scenario, than is the bureaucratic infrastructure these motivations have contributed to. Such infrastructures subtly pressure people into promoting the theory that Holocaust denial poses a serious threat in the present age. Social and political agents may participate in HDD not only because they seek to make sense of the ambiguities of late modern life, or because they wish to protect Israel or the neoliberal status quo, but also because, in Lauren Berlant’s (2022) words, it may simply be more “convenient” to do so when faced with “something socially privileged or structurally pervasive” (p. 4).

Conclusion

Since 7 October 2023, many political commentators have painted their opponents as vulnerable to scapegoating logics that they themselves have overcome. Commentaries on student encampments calling for divestment from Israeli institutions complicit in apartheid and the onslaught on Gaza offer a case in point. In a 24 May 2024 article in the National Post, Ramy Elitzur (2024), professor at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto (U of T), says that encampment protesters represent “another chapter to [the University of Toronto’s] antisemitic history.” While protester demands are irrational, Elitzur himself understands the inner workings of business and politics: “meeting the mob’s demands, which U of T is now considering, would mean the university and its pension funds must divest from any funds linked to the Nasdaq index.” Progressives often betray similar, if perhaps ultimately less harmful, logics: they understand structural violence and geopolitics, while Israel’s supporters instead villainize and target “Black, Brown, Arab, Indigenous, Muslim, and radical students and professors,” as Em Cohen (2024) puts it in a Medium article published on the same day.

My aim has not been to discredit the force of, or even elements of truth contained within, such scapegoating logics, or to draw equivalencies between those in support and those opposing the war. If anything, I have shown that HDD is more ideological than might otherwise be assumed: HDD is not only Zionist ideology, but also neoliberal rationality, which seeks to curb understanding of structural inequalities by reducing morality and politics to imperatives to feel and remember others’ suffering. While these logics run through HDD, individual cases of HDD are often more banal than the structures that HDD as a whole may support. Perhaps most of the time, people engage with HDD not because they harbor strong political commitments, but rather because this discourse—like (other) conspiracy theories—confers psycho-social benefits, because HDD has mimetic effects, or because parroting negationist narratives is simply more convenient than the alternative, in light of prevailing power structures. As scholars, such as Kamari Clarke (2019) and Lennon (2018), have argued in recent years—and as Hannah Arendt (2000 [1963]) trenchantly warned half a century before—a deeper understanding of how structural violence is reproduced and fomented may in the end require not only critiquing explicit ideologies, but also contending with the often arational, banal, and affective logics that obliquely sustain them.