Please join us October 15 from 7-9pm for this important lecture at the University of Waterloo in room ET 1015/via livestream on Zoom.

Co-sponsored by Kitchener-Waterloo community members and:

• Just for Peace Advocates
• Canadian Voices for Palestinian Rights (CVPR)
• Independent Jewish Voices (Waterloo Region)
• Voices for Palestine (UW)
• Jewish Faculty Network
• Faculty 4 Palestine (Southwestern Ontario)

Israel’s Genocide in Gaza: Settler Colonialism, Holocaust Weaponization, and International Law

This lecture will discuss the large body of evidence on Israel’s genocide in Gaza in the last two years, rooted in more than seven decades of Zionist settler colonialism and Israeli state violence against Palestinians. Dr. Segal will show how specific elements of Israel’s genocide, including the use of forced displacement and the mass murder of children, have characterized genocidal violence in the late modern world, from the Armenian genocide to Myanmar’s assault on Rohingya Muslims.

Dr. Segal will also address the weaponization of the Holocaust, specifically the depiction of Palestinians as Nazis by Israel and its supporters and the efforts to delegitimize and outlaw criticism of Israeli policies and violence as antisemitic, including in Canada. The final part of this lecture will focus on Israel’s genocide in Gaza and Holocaust weaponization as a fatal attack also on the international legal system, and how this has shaped the anticolonial struggle for accountability, truth, and justice in Palestine and beyond.     

Dr. Raz Segal is Associate Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies and Endowed Professor in the Study of Modern Genocide at Stockton University, where he also directs the Master of Arts in Holocaust and Genocide Studies (MAHG) Program. Dr. Segal has held a Harry Frank Guggenheim Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, and he was recently a Senior Fellow at the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies (2023) and recipient of the Baron Velge Award (2024) from the Free University in Brussels for his work on World War II.

His publications include Genocide in the Carpathians: War, Social Breakdown, and Mass Violence, 1914-1945 (Stanford University Press, 2016), and he is now at work on a book on the distortion, weaponization, and mobilization of Holocaust history in the reproduction of white supremacy and state violence, including a focus on Israel’s assault on Palestinians from the 1948 Nakba to the current genocidal assault on Gaza. In addition to scholarly publications, he has published op-eds, book reviews, and larger articles on genocide, state violence, and memory politics in Hebrew, English, and German, including in The Guardian, LA Times, The Nation, Jewish Currents, +972 Magazine, Jacobin, and Berliner Zeitung, and he has appeared on Counter Points, MSNBC, Al Jazeera English, Democracy Now! and ABC News.