Rewriting history through sustained propaganda, the ‘Free Palestine’ movement takes a page from post-Holocaust Lithuanian revisionism and inverts the truth turning the persecuted into the persecutor.

By Grant Gochin

The Palestinian cause has become the world’s most effective moral spectacle – commanding headlines, swallowing aid money, captivating international conscience. But this is not advocacy. It is diversion. The obsession shields perpetrators of genuine genocides from scrutiny.

What the world fails to recognize is the source code. The propaganda machinery deployed by Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, and their Western enablers did not emerge from the Middle East. It is a replica perfected in the killing fields of Eastern Europe, refined in post-Soviet bureaucracy, and exported as a blueprint for moral inversion. Lithuania pioneered these techniques in the 1990s and 2000s, systematically rewriting Holocaust history. Today, these same methods shield mass murderers from Darfur to Nigeria while Israel – like Lithuanian Jews before – stands falsely accused.

After almost four decades tracing the mutation of Jew-hatred – from Lithuanian revisionists to modern anti-Zionists – I recognize the pattern with forensic clarity. The assault on the Jews has never been about geography. It is an existential campaign to invert truth:

• turn the Persecuted into the Persecutor.

The “Free Palestine” movement borrows directly from Lithuania’s post-Soviet playbook. Under its cover, real genocides unfold—unfilmed, unfunded, unacknowledged.

THE LITHUANIAN LABORATORY: INVENTING MODERN HOLOCAUST INVERSION

In the 1940s, Lithuanians and their allies exterminated 96.4% of their Jewish population. The pits of Ponary, Kaunas, and the forests of Telšiai became mass death pits. Lithuania achieved the highest Jewish murder rate in all Nazi-occupied Europe. It was safer to be a Jew in Nazi Germany than in Lithuania. An estimated 20,000 Lithuanians actively participated; hundreds of thousands more profited from stolen Jewish property or stood by as unrepentant witnesses.

But here is where true innovation occurred: After regaining independence in 1990, Lithuania did not confront this history. Instead, it systematically inverted it.

THE 8 PILLARS OF LITHUANIAN PROPAGANDA TECHNIQUE

Through approximately 30 legal cases, hundreds of documented government actions, and relentless exposure campaigns, I have identified the exact mechanisms Lithuania deployed. These 8 techniques now form the core arsenal of anti-Israel propaganda:

1. Victim-Perpetrator Inversion Through “Double Genocide” Theory
Lithuania’s masterstroke was “double genocide” theory—the proposition that Communist crimes equal Nazi crimes, making Lithuanians victims of both. If everyone suffered equally, Lithuanian Holocaust perpetration becomes merely one episode in mutual suffering. Jewish victims are displaced by Lithuanian victimhood.

The logic is circular and intentional: Lithuanians who massacred Jews were “anti-Soviet resisters”. Jews who survived by joining Soviet partisan units became “Judeo-Bolsheviks” – perpetrators of genocide against Lithuanians. The murdered become the murderers.

Hamas deploys this identically. Israel’s self-defense becomes “genocide”. Hamas’s October 7 massacre – 1,200 Israelis slaughtered, hundreds raped, families burned alive – is recast as “resistance”. The aggressor becomes the victim. The Lithuanian precedent provided the template.

2. Heroification of Perpetrators as “Freedom Fighters”
Lithuania systematically elevated Holocaust perpetrators to national hero status. Jonas Noreika, who personally orchestrated the murder of up to 14,500 Jews in northern Lithuania, was declared a national hero. Kazys Škirpa, who in 1941 called for the “elimination” of Jews, remains honored. The Lithuanian Activist Front – responsible for initiating pogroms before German forces arrived – is celebrated as an independence movement.

The state’s Genocide Center – created ostensibly to research Nazi and Soviet crimes – became an engine of perpetrator glorification. Government “historians” like Dr. Alfredas Rukšėnas and Dr. Arūnas Bubnys produced pseudo-academic reports whitewashing Noreika’s crimes, claiming he “rescued Jews” even as archival evidence documented his orders establishing ghettos, confiscating Jewish property, and facilitating mass murder.

Hamas uses this same mechanism. Terrorists who murder Jewish children become “martyrs”. The October 7 pogrom becomes “liberation”. Suicide bombers are heroes. Murder is resistance. Both systems require the perpetrator to become heroic for the inversion to succeed.

3. State-Funded “Research Centers” That Manufacture Counter-History
Lithuania’s Genocide and Resistance Research Centre represents perhaps the most insidious innovation: state-funded institutions with academic veneer whose sole purpose is historical fraud. The Centre’s own historian, Dr. Alfredas Rukšėnas, admitted in 2023 that it is not a “scientific” center but serves “nationalist, pro-Nazi, political interest groups.”

The Centre produced “findings of history” declaring Jonas Noreika innocent. When challenged with archival evidence -documents bearing Noreika’s signature ordering Jewish ghettoization, testimony from survivors, German records confirming his role – the Centre ignored it. When I filed legal challenges, every case was dismissed on technicalities without examining evidence. Multiple separate legal actions; not once did a Lithuanian court adjudicate the facts.

The modern anti-Israel apparatus copied this wholesale. Organizations with authoritative-sounding names – the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS), various UN “fact-finding” missions, academic departments -produce predetermined conclusions wrapped in scholarly language. When just 100 IAGS members (from 500 total, recruited for $30 each) voted to accuse Israel of genocide, they created propaganda at minimal cost with maximum impact. The method is Lithuanian: create the appearance of authority, ignore contradicting evidence, dismiss challenges procedurally rather than substantively.

4. Criminalization of Truth-Tellers Through Lawfare
Lithuania weaponized its legal system against those exposing Holocaust fraud. I was threatened with criminal charges for “slandering” national heroes by documenting their genocide. Holocaust survivor Yitzhak Arad, who escaped the Vilna Ghetto and fought in Soviet partisan units, was investigated for “war crimes” by the same government that honors actual Holocaust perpetrators.

The message was clear: speak truth about Lithuanian Holocaust collaboration, face prosecution. The government declared in 2019 that opposition to their Holocaust narratives constituted a “national security threat.” They literally defined truth as treason.

This is now standard anti-Israel practice. Those who document Hamas’s use of human shields face “lawfare” accusations. Israelis who fought in defensive operations are pursued with arrest warrants while Hamas leaders operate freely. The International Criminal Court issues warrants for Israeli leaders while ignoring perpetrators of actual genocides in Sudan and Nigeria.

5. Semantic Manipulation: Redefining Key Terms
Lithuania mastered semantic fraud. The term “Nazis and their collaborators” became mandatory – always “Nazis” first, “collaborators” reduced to footnotes. This obscures the fact:

• that Lithuanians often initiated massacres without German orders,
• that Lithuanian units volunteered for concentration camp duty across Europe,
• that Lithuanian enthusiasm for murder shocked even German observers.

At Ponary, 70,000 Jews were murdered. Lithuanian Prime Minister Ingrida Šimonytė, when vandalism occurred at the site, referred to victims killed by “Nazis and others” – unable to say “Lithuanians”. The formulation was deliberate: spread responsibility, dilute Lithuanian culpability, make perpetrators anonymous.

Modern anti-Israel propaganda has perfected this. “Israeli occupation” replaces historical context. “Apartheid” is weaponized despite Israel being the region’s only democracy. “Settlers” dehumanizes Jews in their ancestral homeland. “Genocide” is deployed so promiscuously it loses meaning -applied to the only conflict where the Palestinian population has consistently grown. When words mean whatever propagandists need them to mean, truth becomes impossible.

6. The 2-State Strategy: Different Messages for Different Audiences
Lithuania deployed sophisticated audience segmentation. For international consumption: glossy “We Remember” campaigns, Holocaust museums with minimal content, expressions of sadness about how Jews were “lost” (as if they wandered into the forest and will soon be located). For domestic consumption: honored perpetrators, glorified collaborators, textbooks minimizing Lithuanian responsibility.

Lithuanian diplomats became experts at performing contrition abroad while defending genocide at home. When pressed by foreign governments, they offered symbolic concessions – an admission here, a removed plaque there – while the underlying revisionist infrastructure remained intact. The Genocide Centre keeps producing fraud; Noreika remains a hero; children learn the sanitized version.

Hamas and the Palestinian Authority run the identical playbook. In English: “We want peace, two states, coexistence.” In Arabic: “From the river to the sea,” celebrations of martyrs, textbooks teaching Israel has no right to exist, summer camps training children for jihad. Western journalists interview the English speakers; the Arabic content remains unexamined. The Lithuanian model demonstrated you can maintain contradictory narratives for different audiences – and largely get away with it.

7. Bureaucratic  Exhaustion: Delay, Obstruct, Outlast
Lithuania’s response to every challenge followed a pattern: delay, obstruct, redirect to another bureaucratic dead end, wait for attention to fade. My thirty legal cases against Lithuanian Holocaust revisionism all ended in dismissal on technicalities. Not once did a court examine substantive evidence. Each dismissal redirected to another venue, which redirected to another, which declared lack of jurisdiction, which sent it back to the start.

The strategy is brilliant in its cynicism: create the appearance of legal process while ensuring truth never receives adjudication. Exhaust the challengers through endless procedural loops. Wait for witnesses to die, activists to tire, international attention to move elsewhere.

This is now standard response to documentation of Hamas war crimes. UN investigations are delayed pending “security.” Evidence is disputed through procedural challenges. Requests are redirected between agencies. Hamas refuses to cooperate; the UN waits. Media cycles move on. By the time any conclusion is reached, the conflict is old news. The Lithuanian innovation was understanding that modern attention spans are short – you don’t need to refute evidence, just delay adjudication until no one cares.

8. Appropriation of Victim Status: Jewish Memory as State Property
Perhaps Lithuania’s most audacious technique: appropriating Jewish suffering as state property while erasing actual Jewish voices. The Vilna Gaon State Jewish Museum, under Ministry of Culture control, minimized the Holocaust in its exhibitions. A memorial culture centered Lithuanian suffering. Commemorations excluded uncomfortable truths.

The government marketed Lithuanian Jewish heritage to tourists while silencing living Jews who contradicted the narrative. When Silvia Foti, Jonas Noreika’s granddaughter, exposed her grandfather’s crimes in ‘The Nazi’s Granddaughter’, she faced vilification. Ruta Vanagaite, a Lithuanian author who documented Lithuanian Holocaust collaboration, was so viciously attacked she had to leave the country.

The state claimed authority to determine what the Holocaust meant, who its heroes were, which stories could be told. Jewish memory became Lithuanian state property, sanitized for national consumption.

The Palestinian movement has copied this wholesale. Palestinians claim the mantle of Holocaust victims (“the new Jews“) while denying the actual Holocaust. They appropriate the language of Jewish suffering while celebrating those who inflict it. “Never Again” becomes “Never Again to anyone (except Jews)”. The genocide of Jews is erased while a demonstrably false genocide accusation against Jews is amplified.

THE EXPORT: FROM VILNA TO GAZA
These techniques did not remain in Lithuania. The post-Soviet world became a laboratory for propaganda innovation, and authoritarian regimes took notice. Iran, Russia, and their proxies studied these methods. The Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, and the Palestinian Authority adopted them. Western NGOs became transmission mechanisms.

The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance identified Lithuania as a Holocaust distortion state. The U.S. State Department and German government issued joint statements condemning Lithuanian revisionism. Yet the methods spread. Why? Because they worked.

Lithuania demonstrated that a small nation could rewrite history through sustained propaganda, neutralize international criticism through symbolic gestures, maintain domestic mythologies while projecting international respectability, and ultimately escape accountability for genocide. If Lithuania could transform Holocaust perpetrators into heroes, others could do the same.

GAZA: THE LITHUANIAN METHOD IN REAL TIME
Since Hamas’s October 7, 2023 massacre of over 1,200 Israelis, the narrative machine has operated at full tilt using the Lithuanian playbook:

Victim-Perpetrator Inversion: The story was inverted overnight. Hamas became “resistance“; Israel became “the aggressor”. The October 7 pogrom – families burned alive, children murdered, women raped – was erased or justified as “context”. Israel’s defensive response became “genocide”.

SEMATIC WARFARE:
The word “genocide” was deployed so aggressively it lost meaning. Experts who screamed “genocide” at Israel were exposed when the ceasefire deal proved Israel’s stated aims: dismantle Hamas, rescue hostages, defend civilians. Yet the semantic damage was done. The term “genocide” will forever be associated with Gaza in millions of minds, despite Gaza’s population growing throughout the conflict.

STATE-FUNDED COUNTER-NARRATIVE INSTITUTIONS:
Qatar’s Al Jazeera functions as Hamas’s Genocide Centre—an ostensibly journalistic entity manufacturing alternative reality. The BBC’s leaked internal report confirmed systematic suppression of Israeli suffering, unchecked airing of Hamas fabrications, and recasting terror as resistance. These aren’t news organizations; they’re propaganda arms following the Lithuanian model of pseudo-authoritative institutional fraud.

APPROPRIATION OF VICTIM:
Palestinians claim Holocaust victim status while Hamas’s charter calls for Jewish annihilation. The same activists who chant “Never Again” ignore the October 7 pogrom’s explicitly genocidal intent. Jewish suffering becomes universalized while specific Jewish suffering is denied or justified.

CRIMINALIZATION THROUGH LAWFARE:
Israeli leaders face ICC arrest warrants while Hamas operates freely. Jewish students are investigated for “hate speech” for displaying Israeli flags while open calls for Jewish genocide go unpunished. The legal system becomes weaponized against victims defending themselves.

BUREAUCRATIC OBSTRUCTION:
Every attempt to document Hamas’s war crimes meets delay. UN “investigations” remain incomplete. Evidence is disputed procedurally. By the time any adjudication occurs, the news cycle has moved on. Lithuania taught the world you don’t need to win the argument; you just need to delay it.

THE PRICE – REAL GENOCIDES ECLIPSED:
The consequences extend far beyond Israel. By monopolizing moral bandwidth, by diluting “genocide” into political insult, Lithuania’s exported propaganda methods shield actual genocide.

Since April 2023, Sudan‘s Rapid Support Forces have slaughtered tens of thousands in Darfur, displaced millions, and weaponized famine. The UN calls it one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises. Yet it is rendered invisible beneath Gaza hashtags. Where are:

– the emergency UN sessions?

– the campus protests?

– the ICC investigations?

In Nigeria, Islamist militias murdered over 4,000 Christians in 2024 alone. Entire villages burned, churches razed, children incinerated. Yet not one Western march, not one celebrity Instagram post. The same media outlets that turned Gaza into a daily dirge barely acknowledged Nigeria’s extermination campaign.

The machinery of pro-Palestinian activism – NGOs, influencers, “human rights” experts – has perfected Lithuania’s art of monopolizing moral attention. They scream “Israeli genocide” until the word loses meaning, erasing real genocides by sheer volume. The result: impunity for Africa’s butchers and applause for Palestine’s propagandists.

THE PATTERN EXPOSED – ANTISEMETISM AS TECHNOLOGY TRANSFER:
What Lithuania did to its Jews, the pro-Palestine movement now does to Israel. Old blood libels have gone digital: Jews as child-killers, settlers, colonizers. Ancient myths are rebranded as “decolonial theory.” Hasbara – the defense of truth – is dismissed as propaganda, while Hamas’s explicitly genocidal charter is excused as “context”.

The technology of antisemitism has evolved, but its source code is visible. Lithuania proved that:

– Perpetrators can become heroes through sustained propaganda

– Victims can be made into villains through narrative inversion

– State institutions can manufacture authoritative-sounding lies

– Legal systems can criminalize truth while protecting fraud

– International opinion can be managed through audience segmentation

– Accountability can be avoided through bureaucratic exhaustion

– Actual genocide becomes invisible if attention is directed elsewhere

Hamas, Iran, the Muslim Brotherhood, and their Western enablers didn’t invent these techniques. They imported them from Lithuania, refined them for modern media, and deployed them globally. The Lithuanian model of Holocaust inversion became the template for Israeli demonization.

The connection is not merely philosophical – it is methodological, systematic, and intentional. When South African officials meet with Hamas before filing ICJ charges, they follow Lithuania’s pattern of using international legal institutions for propaganda. When the IAGS passes an anti-Israel resolution with minimal participation, they replicate Lithuania’s Genocide Centre model. When BBC editors suppress Israeli suffering while amplifying Hamas claims, they follow Lithuania’s two-narrative strategy.

CONCLUTION – THE LIE THAT KEEPS KILLING
Both Lithuania and Hamas provide the lies, and the world gobbles them up with fervor. It is always Jews being murdered while our murderers sanitize themselves in real time. My decades of work exposing Lithuanian fraud – thirty court cases, thousands of documents, endless campaigns – appear to have fallen flat. Hamas simply repeated Lithuania’s strategy, and the world consumed it with even greater appetite. The cycle endures because the world wants the lie. Until that hunger is confronted, the weakest will keep paying the price in blood.

About the writer:

Grant Arthur Gochin currently serves as the Honorary Consul for the Republic of Togo. He is the Emeritus Special Envoy for Diaspora Affairs for the African Union, which represents the fifty-five African nations, and Emeritus Vice Dean of the Los Angeles Consular Corps, the second largest Consular Corps in the world. Gochin is actively involved in Jewish affairs, focusing on historical justice. He has spent the past twenty five years documenting and restoring signs of Jewish life in Lithuania. He has served as the Chair of the Maceva Project in Lithuania, which mapped / inventoried / documented / restored over fifty abandoned and neglected Jewish cemeteries. Gochin is the author of “Malice, Murder and Manipulation”, published in 2013. His book documents his family history of oppression in Lithuania. He is presently working on a project to expose the current Holocaust revisionism within the Lithuanian government. Professionally, Gochin is a Certified Financial Planner and practices as a Wealth Advisor in California, where he lives with his family. Personal site: https://www.grantgochin.com/

While the mission of Lay of the Land (LotL) is to provide a wide and diverse perspective of affairs in Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world, the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by its various writers are not necessarily ones of the owners and management of LOTL but of the writers themselves.  LotL endeavours to the best of its ability to credit the use of all known photographs to the photographer and/or owner of such photographs (0&EO).

Many countries refuse to acknowledge the major role their citizens played in the mass murder of their Jewish inhabitants during the Holocaust.

By Dr. Efraim Zuroff

(Courtesy of The Jerusalem Post where first published)

The past few months have been very difficult for those who seek to preserve the accurate narrative of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe, a region that, since the transition from Communism to quasi-democracy, has become a hotbed of terrible Holocaust distortion.

Although many countries accept the fact that the Holocaust took place and was a terrible tragedy, almost all of them refuse to acknowledge the major role that their citizens played in the mass murder of their Jewish inhabitants.

For example, the Lithuanians, who were major participants in the mass murder of 96.4 percent of Lithuanian Jewry (212,000 of 220,000 Jews who lived in Lithuania during the Nazi occupation), have still refused to accept any responsibility for the massacres and to cancel the hero status of their “heroes” who collaborated with the Nazis in the mass murders of their Jewish fellow citizens – the same is true throughout Eastern Europe.

Three recent examples of Holocaust distortion will suffice to demonstrate the problem, which is rampant in post-Soviet Eastern Europe.

RECENT INCIDENTS IN LATVIA AND CROATIA

The first took place in Latvia about two months ago. A local prosecutor decided that Latvian mass murderer Herberts Cukurs – one of the highest-ranking officers of the notorious Arajs Kommando, which murdered tens of thousands of Latvian and Belarusian Jews, and who was assassinated by the Mossad in Uruguay – was not a criminal.

This decision would enable him to be buried in the cemetery of Latvian heroes according to the wishes of his family and Latvian extreme nationalists.

Numerous protests from Jewish organizations both in Israel and Latvia made the Latvian prosecutor temporarily change his decision, but the issue is not permanently closed.

A second example took place a month ago in Zagreb, the capital of Croatia, where half a million fans of the country’s most popular singer, Marko Perković, better known by his nickname “Thompson”, purchased tickets for the largest concert in history, which was even listed in the Guinness World Records.

The problem in this case is that Thompson is a fanatic supporter of the fascist regime that ruled the “Independent State of Croatia”, created by Nazi Germany and fascist Italy, a government that launched three genocides against Serbs, Jews, and Roma (Gypsies) and was responsible for the mass murder of hundreds of thousands of innocent people. 

What made this concert so disturbing and concerning was that there were no protests against it, and leading politicians attended along with their young children, some even taking photos together with Thompson.

ANOTHER INCIDENT IN ROMANIA

The third example, this time from Romania, is particularly alarming. Newly elected President Nicusor Dan, a member of the liberal and progressive community, is challenging a recently passed parliamentary law designed to enhance the effectiveness and accessibility of efforts to combat antisemitism. Dan argues that the law infringes on freedom of expression, a justification commonly used in Romania by antisemites and Holocaust deniers.

Equally troubling was his recent statement during a press conference, in which he declared his opposition to prosecuting organizations that glorify former Romanian Nazi leaders as heroes. More recently, Dan has openly refused to comply with a ruling from Romania’s Constitutional Court, which upheld the legality and urgency of implementing the antisemitism law. 

Rather than accepting the court’s binding decision, he announced his intention to send the law back to Parliament to revise it in accordance with his personal views.

This is a highly controversial decision, which is interpreted by the antisemites and Holocaust deniers as support for their revisionist and racist views. 

The president’s actions have led to a significant surge in antisemitic incidents and Holocaust denial, including increased online harassment targeting Romanian Jews and the widespread glorification of Nazi collaborators and contemporary neo-Nazis. His stance has effectively reversed years of progress Romania had made in addressing local antisemitism and confronting Holocaust denial.

In the light of these recent developments, the question is who is responsible for combating Holocaust distortion? Yad Vashem harshly condemned the decision of the Latvian prosecutor, which was very helpful, but did not respond to what took place in Croatia or what is happening in Romania.

IHRA, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, has not responded at all to any of these incidents, which is hardly surprising since it is apolitical, and every one of its decisions must be unanimous. Thus, it is left to individual historians and Holocaust experts to speak out in the hope that they can convince local politicians to do what has to be done.

About the writer:

Over the last four decades, Holocaust historian Efraim Zuroff has played an important role in bringing Nazi criminals to justice as the chief Nazi-hunter of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. Maximillian Marco Katz also contributed to this article. He is the founder and director of the Center for Monitoring and Combating Antisemitism in Romania.

While the mission of Lay of the Land (LotL) is to provide a wide and diverse perspective of affairs in Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world, the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by its various writers are not necessarily ones of the owners and management of LOTL but of the writers themselves.  LotL endeavours to the best of its ability to credit the use of all known photographs to the photographer and/or owner of such photographs (0&EO).

“At no point in the war had the Allies achieved a definite, clean success. How then, was the war to be brought to an end?” David Lloyd George, the British Secretary of State for War, at a meeting of the British War Cabinet in October 1916.

By Neville Berman

The First World War started in August 1914 and ended in November 1918. It resulted in between 16-22 million deaths. In his ‘The Road Less Traveled: The Secret Battle to End the Great War, 1916-1917’,  historian Philip Zelikow, makes the case that millions of lives could have been saved if the opportunity to achieve peace in early 1916 would have materialized. According to Zelikow, incompetent politicians, who overestimated both the military and financial capabilities of their countries, shrank from their responsibility of ending the war. Below is an abridged form of the story that is particularly relevant to the present situation in the Middle East and to the Russian – Ukraine war.

Britain entered the First World War on August 4th 1914. The popular concept at the time was that the boys would be home for Christmas. The reality proved to be completely different.  H. G.  Wells coined the expression “The war that will end war” Ironically, the aftermath of the war contributed to the conditions that led to the Second World War.

In 1905, Japan was lacking financial resources to continue its war with Russia and asked President Theodore Roosevelt to try to mediate a peace between the warring parties. Roosevelt succeeded in bringing an end to the war and was awarded the 1906 Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts – the first American to win a Nobel Prize.

Woodrow Wilson was the 28th President of the United States when the war broke out in Europe in 1914. He maintained a policy of strict and impartial neutrality and was against American involvement in what he considered a European war. Inspired by what Roosevelt achieved in 1905, Wilson entertained the idea that America could play the role of a mediator and end the war in Europe without actually taking an active part in the war itself. 

In May 1915, a German U-boat torpedoed the luxury civilian ship Lusitania just off the coast of Ireland. 1,198 people were killed including 128 Americans. Both Republicans and Democrats still did not want America to become involved in a European war.

In 1915, all the offences by Britain and France had failed. In February 1915, the disastrous Gallipoli Campaign was launched against Ottoman troops in the Balkans. By the time the campaign ended in January the following year, over 73,485 Allied soldiers from Great Britain, France, Australia, New Zealand and India had been killed or injured. Almost nothing had been achieved by the campaign.    

President Wilson saw the continuation of the war as a tragedy. Wilson came to the conclusion that there was a need to develop a new basis for managing world politics. He also believed that American economic power might play a crucial role in bringing justice and peace to the world.

Wilson’s closest friend and advisor was a wealthy Texan by the name of Edward Mandel House. He was known as Colonel House even though he never served in the military. In December 1915, President Wison asked Colonel House to travel to Europe as his personal envoy. House was thrilled with the idea and relished meeting the leaders of Europe. At the time, Germany had occupied Belgium and controlled Alsace-Lorraine. The mission of Colonel House was to see if Britain, France and Germany would agree to a peace conference called for by America. As President Wilson would be involved in a re-election campaign towards the end of 1916, the window of opportunity for American mediation and a peace conference would have to be completed before the end of the summer of 1916.

Colonel House arrived in London in January 2016. He met with Edward Grey the British Foreign Secretary and Lloyd George the Minister of Munitions.  Despite the fact that they had been warned by the Treasury that Britain would not be able to sustain the war after the coming summer, they informed Colonel House that Britain was in a good position to outlast Germany and that victory was in sight.

A month later Colonel House arrived in Paris. He met with the American Ambassador to France, Willliam Sharp, and French officials including and former Premier Georges Clemenceau. The discussions focused on French willingness to accept American mediation. The French were of the opinion that American mediation would result in Germany retaining Alsace-Lorraine and that Belgium would remain under German control. Like the British, the French rejected the idea of American mediation.

In Berlin, House met with Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg and with the German Foreign Secretary Gottlieb von Jagow. Both were fluent in English. They were of the opinion that Germany was winning the war and that it was not in Germany’s interest to seek or agree to American mediation. The Chancellor spoke about the challenge of political leaders being unable to free themselves from “the machine of war passion.” As Colonel House was departing, the German Chancellor mentioned that House should remember the name Verdun.

Colonel House returned to Washington and informed the President that none of the warring parties had agreed to accept American mediation. Almost unnoticed, the possibility of ending the war in early 1916 had slipped away. The war would continue for another 20 months with millions more dying and being injured unnecessarily. House recorded in his diary that:

“War is not so much a breakdown of civilization as it is a failure of statesmanship.”

In February1916, the Germans attacked the French in a place called Verdun. The Battle of Verdun would last for 302 days and would be one of the bloodiest battles of the war. The entire battle consisted of brutal trench warfare in an area of less than 20 kilometers. It consisted of attacks and counter attacks in appalling conditions. It resulted in 377,231 French casualties and approximately 337,000 German casualties with an average of 70,000 soldiers killed or injured per month. It ended on December 18, 1916, with the French repulsing the German offensive at an appalling cost to both sides.

On July 1, another battle began – in northern France. It was called the Battle of the Somme. The massive Allied army consisted of soldiers from Britain, Ireland, Newfoundland, South Africa and India. They faced an equally large German army. Both armies had dug trenches that were separated by a few hundred yards of “no-mans land.” On the first day of the Somme offensive, over a hundred thousand men of the British army were ordered “over the top.” They were mowed down in the thousands by German machine gun fire and artillery. The British suffered 57,470 casualties including over 19,000 deaths in one day. It was one of the bloodiest days in the history of the British army. A small strip of “no man’s land.” was gained. The senseless battle would continue for five more months. The use of poison gas led to tens of thousands of casualties. By the time the Battle of the Somme ended on November 19, 1916, more than a million soldiers from both sides were either killed, wounded or went missing. Like all wars, new technologies were invented. The First World War saw the introduction of tanks and aircraft. After the Battle of the Somme, Britain found itself very short of both sufficient manpower and finance. In order to raise money J.P Morgan, was entrusted with issuing British Bonds in the US. It was hugely undersubscribed and Britain was plunged into a financial crisis. 

In March 1916, the French passenger ship, the Sussex was torpedoed in the English Channel. It led to the Sussex Pledge whereby Germany agreed that passenger ships would not be targeted, and that merchant ships would not be sunk unless they were first searched and found to be carrying weapons. In such an event, the crew of the merchant ship would be allowed to safely leave the ship before it was sunk.   

In November 1916, President Wilson was re-elected for a second term as President and was now even more determined to renew his efforts to form an international body to help prevent war. 

In January 1917, Germany was convinced that it could win the war by cutting off supplies to Britain by unrestricted submarine warfare. The Sussex Pledge was rescinded by Germany with immediate effect. It would herald the beginning of the First Battle of the Atlantic. 

In February 1917, British intelligence intercepted and decoded a secret message from Germany to Mexico, in which it was proposed that Mexico would join Germany in attacking America and that Mexico would be able to reclaim Texas and Arizona. The British sent a telegram known as the Zimmerman telegram revealing the decoded message to President Truman. After nineteen merchant ships were sunk by German U-boats in the Atlantic, and the staggering revelation of the Zimmerman telegram that was released to the public, Americans turned against Germany. On April 6, 1917, Congress passed a Declaration of War against Germany. Once America entered the war against Germany, it was only a question of time before Germany was decisively defeated. It still took nearly another 6 months before the First World War ended on the ninth hour of the ninth month of 1918. Over 116,00 Americans were killed in the war. This figure included over 63,000 soldiers who died from diseases and the influenza pandemic of 1918.

Zelikow makes a strong case that the war could have ended 18 months earlier. Millions of lives and untold billions could have been saved. Having the foresight to end wars, instead of continuing in the belief that total victory is possible, is what separates statesmen from politicians.

It is a message for both Netanyahu and Putin should contemplate.  

Feature picture: Soldiers in a WWI frontline facing poison-laden projectiles. Could this war have ended before this horrifying development? (Photo: Maj. Tracy Everts/US Army Signal Corps/Getty Images).

About the writer:

Accountant Neville Berman had an illustrious sporting career in South Africa, being twice awarded the South African State Presidents Award for Sport and was a three times winner of the South African Maccabi Sportsman of the Year Award.  In 1978 he immigrated to the USA  to coach the United States men’s field hockey team, whereafter, in 1981 he immigrated to Israel where he practiced as an accountant and then for 20 years was the Admin Manager at the American International School in Even Yehuda, Israel.  He is married with two children and one granddaughter.

While the mission of Lay of the Land (LotL) is to provide a wide and diverse perspective of affairs in Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world, the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by its various writers are not necessarily ones of the owners and management of LOTL but of the writers themselves.  LotL endeavours to the best of its ability to credit the use of all known photographs to the photographer and/or owner of such photographs (0&EO).

A plague outbreak – “DISEASE NO. 9” – in Paris in 1920 blamed mainly on Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, turned out to be France’s antisemitic fake news!

By Michel Levine

(Translation from article published by the Auschwitz Foundation in French in the magazine “Témoigner” N°140 April 2025.)

During World War I, antisemitic movements largely suspended their rhetoric in the name of national unity, redirecting hostility from Jews to Germans. Even ardent nationalist Maurice Barrès began honoring Jewish soldiers who died for France. This wartime truce was symbolized by Rabbi-Chaplain Abraham Bloch offering a crucifix to a dying Christian soldier before being mortally wounded himself.

RENEWAL OF HATRED

After the war, the November 1919 elections brought political newcomers who formed the National Bloc – a coalition manipulated by Georges Clemenceau and Action Française. For the first time, Charles Maurras‘ movement overcame its contempt for the Republic’s electoral process, promoting candidates steeped in antisemitism now enhanced with racialist theory.

The 1920 publication of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” provided pseudo-historical validation for anti-Jewish campaigns. This fabricated document detailing an alleged international Jewish conspiracy was crafted in 1901 by the Russian secret police to weaponize hatred. Distributed worldwide in millions of copies, the Protocols were exploited by leaders who recognized their fraudulent nature – as Joseph Goebbels confessed:

“I believe in the intrinsic truth, but not in the factual truth of the Protocols.”

THE JEWISH PLAGUE  

In spring 1920, plague cases emerged in Paris’s impoverished outskirts. The epidemic spread among fifty thousand social outcasts, including eight thousand recent immigrants. Authorities identified the source: rats carrying plague-infected fleas had escaped from a barge delivering British coal. To prevent panic, officials designated the outbreak “Disease No. 9” – plague’s registry number – while the public dubbed it the “rag-pickers’ plague.” This final plague outbreak in Paris caused only 34 deaths before subsiding.

Initially, public opinion remained indifferent to a disease affecting society’s “invisible” members. But soon, newspapers began amplifying alarming rumors. Le Petit Bleu de Paris explicitly identified supposed culprits:

“The epidemics that have devastated . . . certain regions of Europe were due to the introduction, by Orientals, of Yersin’s bacillus.”

These mysterious Asian carriers were allegedly spreading:

 “…the doctrines of defeatist Bolshevism.”

UNDER THE TARNISHED GOLD OF THE REPUBLIC

On December 2, 1920, the French Senate convened an extraordinary session addressing the plague affecting Paris. The session unleashed a torrent of hatred and prejudice from these “wise men” of the Republic. Adrien Gaudin de Villaine, known for anti-republican positions, challenged the health minister:

“Paris and its suburbs are threatened… by a contagion that doctors call disease No. 9… Everywhere people with strange appearances, in heterogeneous rags, speaking incomprehensible language… all Jews and all speaking ‘Yiddish’… I add that the infant mortality in Paris… is also a consequence… of this invasion of exotic people…”

Senator Dominique Delahaye proposed:

“A first method of control would consist, since you cannot delouse them, of making them pay a certain sum upon entry; after which, they would be subjected to a continuous tribute“—unwittingly proposing a return to centuries-old discriminatory practice.

Confronted with this disturbing rhetoric, a few senators attempted to redirect the debate toward actual public health issues. The bacteriologist Émile Roux from the Pasteur Institute later countered these claims:

“The rare cases of bubonic plague observed did not occur among the immigrants accused in the Senate… the disease… was brought… by plague-infected rats arriving with barges delivering English coal.”

Only the Socialists and organizations like the League of Human Rights mounted genuine responses to this venomous wave. Le Populaire denounced an “odious calumny” that used disease No. 9 as a weapon against proletarians vilified simply for being foreigners.

UNCERTAINTIES

If this malignant rumor did not fundamentally alter how “native” French viewed their Jewish fellow citizens, it was because the social climate was not particularly receptive. The country was focused on healing war wounds, and the barely lethal disease No. 9 seemed insignificant compared to the devastation of war and the “Spanish” flu.

In May 1924, elections witnessed the defeat of the National Bloc and the rise of the Left-Wing Coalition. Yet this represented only a brief respite. The 1930s would witness dictatorships seizing power across Europe and unspeakable racial hatred culminating in the Holocaust.

As historian Léon Poliakov presciently observed:

“The only certainty I have today regarding antisemitism and racism… is that all this will continue. We cannot predict exactly in what form, nor with what intensity. But we can be convinced that it will not cease.”

Nor will cease, one hopes, the determined struggle against the poisoning consciences.

About the writer:

Michel Levine is a historian of Human Rights and the author of a work dedicated to the major cases of the League of Human Rights (Unclassified Cases. Unpublished Archives of the League of Human Rights, Paris, Fayard, 1973).
Further publications include a historical investigation on the repression of Algerian demonstrations in Paris in October 1961 (The October Ratonnades. A Collective Murder in Paris in 1961, Paris, Ramsay, 1985; reissue Jean- Claude Gawsewitch Publisher, 2001.)

While the mission of Lay of the Land (LotL) is to provide a wide and diverse perspective of affairs in Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world, the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by its various writers are not necessarily ones of the owners and management of LOTL but of the writers themselves.  LotL endeavours to the best of its ability to credit the use of all known photographs to the photographer and/or owner of such photographs (0&EO).

We suggest that every tragedy that might be classified as genocide be tested by the three I’s – Intent, implementation and implication.

By Prof. Per Anders Rudling and Dr. Efraim Zuroff

(Courtesy of The Jerusalem Post where first published)

The accurate definition of genocide has come under scrutiny ever since the International Court of Justice accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza in its response to the October 7, 2023, attack by Hamas terrorists, which claimed the lives of 1,200 Israeli civilians and foreign nationals in communities in southern Israel, and revelers at the Supernova music festival. 

The term, coined in 1944 by Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin in his book ‘Axis Rule in Occupied Europe in the wake of the Holocaust’, was defined as any attempt to destroy a group, in whole or in part, based on its national, ethnic, racial, or religious identity.

The 1948 United Nations Genocide Convention not only criminalizes genocide, it also obligates state parties to pursue its enforcement. The convention was adopted in response to the Holocaust as the archetypal genocide. In recent decades there has been an expansion of the term to include a number of atrocities, well beyond the original genocide convention.

This phenomenon is particularly prevalent in some post-communist countries in Eastern and Central Europe. Lithuania, in particular has taken the lead in “widening” use of the term “genocide” to include Stalinist deportations and repressions.

Often, these claims came with inflated numbers of victims. These cases are too many to mention. One such “victim inflation” was the plaques initially placed in Auschwitz, when Poland was under a Communist regime, which claimed that 4 million persons had been murdered in the camp. After Poland transitioned to a democracy, however, a team of expert historians revealed that the accurate number of victims was 1.3 million, among them 1.1 million Jews.

Former Ukrainian president Viktor Yushchenko cited a tally of 10 million victims of the government-engineered famine in Soviet Ukraine in 1932-33 – known as the “Holodomor” – calling it, in the superlative, “the greatest genocide.”

This is not just a matter of nomenclature, and not just about Lithuania. Over the past three decades, legislative assemblies across Europe have designated several atrocities as genocide. In 1994, Germany criminalized the “belittling, denying, relativizing… acts committed under National Socialist rule.” In subsequent years, other EU member states followed suit.

In 2008, the EU adopted a “Framework Decision on combating racism and xenophobia by means of Criminal Law, which meant that member states must make condoning, denying, and grossly trivializing crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes a criminal offense.” This scope soon expanded to criminalize denial of “other internationally recognized crimes” as well. 

DEFINITION OF GENOCIDE BECOMES LEGISLATED

As a result, numerous laws now define how we should interpret historical atrocities. France, for example, recognized the massacre of Armenians as genocide. The above-mentioned Lithuanian definition of genocide has been “widened” to include Stalinist deportations to Siberia and population transfers following World War II.

In 2006, the Ukrainian Parliament recognized the 1932-1933 Soviet-engineered famine as a Ukrainian genocide, though the brutal Stalinist policies were aimed against economic and social groups (small farmers) and had devastating effects on many ethnic groups in several areas of the USSR. 

Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, France, Germany, Finland, Ireland, and the European Parliament officially recognized that the Holodomor famine constituted a genocide.

Such memory regulations do not take into consideration that the historiography remains sharply divided as to the genocidal narration of the famine, and that many authoritative historians on the famine do not endorse the genocide thesis.

In some cases, inflated numbers have entered the official declarations of recognition, causing confusion rather than understanding. The current efforts also open up potential legal liabilities to those disputing the now-official narrative of the famine as a deliberate genocide of Ukrainians. These regulations risk hampering, rather than stimulating, critical inquiry into genocide.

Nor do they provide a consistent approach to what constitutes genocide. For instance, the 1995 Srebrenica massacre is classified as a genocide by all EU-member states. The 33,000 Muslims there should have been protected by Dutch UN forces, but were abandoned to Serb forces. Approximately 6,500 males of combat age were murdered; women, children, and the elderly were released. What kind of ‘genocide’ was this? It was undoubtedly a war crime but not a genocide.

This crime against humanity is interchangeably referred to a genocide and an act of ethnic cleansing. The EU regulations, and national memory laws in member countries, affirm the genocidal narration.

However, the Rwandan genocide of 1994 has not been universally recognized as such. Approximately 700,000 Tutsis and some moderate Hutus were slaughtered by radical Hutus intent on murdering the entire Tutsi population in Rwanda. 

For some reason, which is difficult to identify, the United States refuses to recognize the mass murder of the Rwandan Tutsis as a case of genocide. One possible explanation is that the American refusal to send troops, or to encourage the United Nations to do so, remains highly problematic in light of the results of their failure to try and stop the mass murders. 

Ukraine does not recognize the 1915 massacres of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire as genocide; its foreign ministry actively opposes campaigns to recognize the event as such.

THE THREE I’s

We suggest that every tragedy that might be classified as genocide be tested by the three I’s of intent, implementation, and implications:

• The intent, in such cases, is to deliberately murder a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group, with the aim of destroying that nation or group.

• Implementation reflects the goal of the perpetrators, the scope of the murders, the cruelty of the perpetrators, and the inability of those targeted to survive. 

• Implication refers to the degree of damage inflicted on the victims, and what possibility they have to survive/recover.

Justice and historical understanding can only succeed if the historical inquiry into past tragedies is open and free from ideologically imposed censorship.

About the writers:

Per Anders Rudling is an associate professor of history and Wallenberg Academy Fellow at the Department of History, Lund University, Sweden.

Holocaust historian Efraim Zuroff has an MA and PhD in Holocaust Studies from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. For the last four decades, he has played an important role in bringing Nazi criminals to justice as the chief Nazi-hunter of the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

While the mission of Lay of the Land (LotL) is to provide a wide and diverse perspective of affairs in Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world, the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by its various writers are not necessarily ones of the owners and management of LOTL but of the writers themselves.  LotL endeavours to the best of its ability to credit the use of all known photographs to the photographer and/or owner of such photographs (0&EO).