Reckoning with October 7: Register Today for the Upcoming Webinar

REMINDER:
Our next webinar takes place on February 7. Register today!

The second webinar in the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute’s yearlong series reckoning with the response to October 7 will take place on Wednesday, February 7, 2024, at noon Eastern Standard Time. The title of the panel will be “Historians on Ideology and Politics in the 1948 War: October 7 and the Aftershocks of World War II.”

Click here to register for the event.

All subsequent panels are likewise scheduled for noon EST on the seventh day of each month throughout 2024. Panels will run between 90 to 120 minutes long, followed by colloquy among panelists and audience Q&A.

Building on the success of our thought-provoking first panel, which laid the groundwork for ongoing discussion of critical theory and the Israel–Hamas conflict, our next panel features renowned historians, Jeffrey Herf, Matthias Küntzel, and Benny Morris. Herf’s presentation is titled “Israel’s Moment: The Forgotten International Politics Regarding the Establishment of the State of Israel.” Küntzel will present on “Nazi Antisemitism and the Hamas Massacre.” Morris will consider October 7 and the 1948 Arab–Israeli war as jihad. Series organizer Gabriel Noah Brahm will moderate.

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Reckoning with October 7: Panel 2 Announcement

The second webinar in the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute’s yearlong series reckoning with the response to October 7 will take place on Wednesday, February 7, 2024, at noon Eastern Standard Time. The title of the panel will be “Historians on Ideology and Politics in the 1948 War: October 7 and the Aftershocks of World War II.”

Click here to register for the event.

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Anti-Zionism and Antisemitism: A Note on Cüppers

In this brief interview, Martin Cüppers refers to Islamic antisemitism in Germany as a “reimport.” That terse designation builds on his core thesis that during the 1930s Nazi Germany exported its particular brand of antisemitism, with all its uncompromising viciousness, to the Arab world, where it spread and festered and eventually came to define the Arab–Israeli conflict. With the considerable immigration from the Arab world into Germany, especially after 2015, this same Nazi legacy has returned to Europe. The Federal Republic of Germany, which made serious efforts to develop a memory culture and to face up to the German culpability for the Shoah, had in effect opened its doors to carriers of some of the same Nazi values that it had done its best to overcome. The refugees from the Arab world were Germany’s own “return of the repressed.”

Cüppers’s argument about Nazi ideology as a source for Palestinian and more broadly Arab antisemitism is part of a larger body of scholarship that includes the publications by Jeffrey Herf, Matthias Küntzel, and Elham Manea in particular. Thanks to this research, the claim has become incontrovertible that Nazi Germany played a significant role in shaping the ideology of the Arab–Israeli conflict in ways that continue today and that explain the unique brutality of the October 7 Hamas attacks as well as the aspiration for a massive elimination of Jews from the region. It is exactly that which finds expression in the frequent call for Arab Palestine––فلسطين عربية—which means Arabs only, and no one else (one looks in vain in the founding documents of the PLO or Hamas for any commitment to minority rights).

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The Hamas Massacre Would Have Been Unthinkable without Influences from Nazi Germany: Interview with Martin Cüppers

Editor’s note: Martin Cüppers directs the Research Unit Ludwigsburg at the University of Stuttgart in Germany, where he also teaches in the Department of History. He studies the crimes of the Nazi regime, especially the Holocaust, and how they were treated by postwar German society and its judiciary. Together with Klaus-Michael Mallmann he published Halbmond und Hakenkreuz: Das Dritte Reich, die Araber und Palästina [Half Moon and Swastika: The Third Reich, the Arabs and Palestine] in 2006. His work belongs to a growing body of scholarship that exposes how Nazi Germany was able to insinuate its exterminationist antisemitism into the Middle East and how that influence continues to poison Arab and especially Palestinian views of Israelis and Jews in general. Other contributions to this important line of research include books by Matthias Küntzel, such as Jihad and Jew-Hatred (Telos Press, 2009) and Nazis, Islamic Antisemitism and the Middle East (Routledge, 2024), Jeffrey Herf’s Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World (Yale Univ. Press, 2009), and Elham Manea’s The Perils of Nonviolent Islamism. The Nazi genealogy of Palestinian animosity toward the Jews helps understand the particular viciousness of the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023. This interview originally appeared in the Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung on December 5 and appears here with Cüppers’s permission. Translated by Russell A. Berman, whose commentary appears here.


Mr. Cüppers, in your book Half Moon and Swastika you explore the connections between the Third Reich, the Arab world, and the Palestine conflict. What is your main finding?

In light of our current context, the book makes clear that the terrible Hamas massacre of October 7 was inconceivable without the historical influences of Nazi Germany.

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Matthias Küntzel on the Iran Deal and Germany

On The Caravan Podcast at the Hoover Institution, Russell Berman talks with political scientist Matthias Küntzel about the potential return of the United States to the Iran Deal, Germany’s long-standing special relationship with Iran, anti-Americanism in Europe, and the anti-Semitism of the Iranian regime. Listen to the podcast here. Küntzel is the author of Germany and Iran: From the Aryan Axis to the Nuclear Threshold (Telos Press, 2014), which examines why the history of the special relationship between Germany and Iran is critical to understanding the ongoing controversy over Iran’s nuclear program. Both Germany and Iran and Küntzel’s earlier book Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism, and the Roots of 9/11 are available in our online store for 25% off the list price. Küntzel’s articles for Telos are also available at our online archive.

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The Nuclear Deal Crumbles

Matthias Küntzel’s Germany and Iran: From the Aryan Axis to the Nuclear Threshold, published by Telos Press Publishing, presents an extensive and detailed historical account of German–Iranian relations from the early twentieth century to the present. Save 20% on your purchase of Küntzel’s Germany and Iran in our online store by using the coupon code BOOKS20 during checkout. The following essay has been translated from the German by Matthew J. Cooper.

As late as May 7, 2019, France sent a message to Iran’s rulers: “We do not want Tehran to announce tomorrow actions that would violate the nuclear agreement, because in this case we Europeans would be obliged to reimpose sanctions as per the terms of the agreement.”

The admonition was futile. On the following day, exactly one year since the United States withdrew from the nuclear agreement, Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani made two things public: He announced that effective immediately the regime no longer felt bound by the central provisions of the nuclear agreement. For example, by section 7, which requires the regime to limit its inventory of low-enriched uranium to 300 kg. Also affected is section 10, according to which Iran may not manufacture or store more than 130 tons of heavy water for fifteen years. Iran will not adhere to this provision either, according to Rouhani. Heavy water is used for reactors that are specially adapted for the production of weapons-grade plutonium. These quantitative restrictions on materials needed for nuclear weapons belong to the core of the agreement that Tehran is now avowedly violating.

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