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Criminalizing Denial as a Form of Erasure: The Polish-Ukrainian-Israeli Triangle
Author(s): Bartov, Omer
Editor(s): Barkan, Elazar; Lang, Ariella
Date: 2022
Topics: Holocaust Commemoration, Holocaust, Communism, Main Topic: Holocaust and Memorial, Memory, Law, Nationalism, Holocaust Denial
Abstract: This chapter argues that recent laws criminalizing or penalizing certain versions of the past in Poland, Ukraine, and Israel, exploit the urge to prohibit denial of victimization as a tool to obfuscate their own unsavory past. Thus Ukraine has wanted Israel to recognize the Holodomor of 1931–1932 as genocide, even while denying Ukrainian collaboration in the Holocaust, and criminalizing any defamation of its World War II insurgents. Poland has criminalized denial of these very same insurgents’ ethnic cleansing operations as genocide, and penalizes assertions of Polish collaboration in the Holocaust. And, Israel condemns such practices of whitewashing the past by Poland and Ukraine even as it has legislated against commemorations of the Nakba, the ethnic cleansing by Israeli forces of the Palestinians in 1948.