Africa’s first Holocaust centre is facing a deluge of criticism from activists and human rights advocates for failing to acknowledge and demand that Israel end its genocidal war on Gaza.
The Cape Town Holocaust and Genocide Centre, which sits in the heart of South Africa’s “mother city”, is facing accusations of complicity in the devastating 22-month-long war, after adopting what its detractors call a shameful position of silence.
More than 200,000 Palestinians have been killed or wounded since Israel went to war in Gaza in October 2023, with recent reports, based on Israeli military intelligence data, claiming more than 80 percent of those killed in the enclave until May of this year were civilians.
Kelly-Jo Bluen, a genocide scholar and member of South African Jews For a Free Palestine (SAJFP), said that by choosing to remain silent on the horrors unfolding in Gaza, the centre had “flagrantly misappropriated the memory of our ancestors who resisted, fled and died in the Nazi Holocaust in Europe to participate in the most egregious genocidal complicity by genocide denialism.”
“It has brought shame not only to its curatorial and managerial team, but onto the community,” Bluen told Middle East Eye.
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Like other Holocaust centres around the world, the Cape Town Holocaust and Genocide Centre has been under intense scrutiny over how it has responded to the carnage unfolding in Gaza.
For more than a year, activists in South Africa have said they have attempted to engage with the centre for it to change track, including attempts at dialogue and raising public awareness over the situation in Gaza.
However, they said that not only had the leadership refused to acknowledge that a genocide was taking place, the museum also ignored calls to collaborate with the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) on an exhibition showing both the destruction as well as the resilience of Palestinians in Gaza.
According to the activists, the centre said it was waiting for a final judgement from an international tribunal on the crime of genocide in Gaza before it would adjust its educational programming.
Jakub Nowakowski, the director of the Holocaust and Genocide Centre, told MEE that the decision did not “stem from indifference or a lack of compassion, but rather from our long-standing policy not to incorporate ongoing conflicts into our exhibitions”.
“We are deeply disturbed by the violence and human suffering we are all witnessing, and we share the hope that this war will end as soon as possible,” he said, adding that the centre maintained this approach for other conflicts.
Nowakoswki maintains that the museum’s responsibility is not to offer political or legal judgments in “real time” but to instead equip visitors with the tools to make their own decisions by looking at the past.
“The moral challenge lies precisely in the fact that each of these tragedies deserves recognition, and our role as a museum cannot be to adjudicate between them in real time,” he added.
Activists and scholars told MEE that the centre’s silence over Israel’s assault on Gaza rendered it a bystander, and that it could therefore be seen as a collaborator to the very crimes it urges visitors to stand up to within its own walls.
“If a Holocaust Museum remains silent, or worse, goes into denial while Palestinians face extermination, what purpose does it serve?” Usuf Chikte, the coordinator for the PSC in Cape Town, told MEE.
As a Holocaust museum located in South Africa, the activists said, the centre had the unique opportunity to incorporate the story of Palestinian erasure as part of a larger curriculum of racial supremacy that characterised the policies of Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa, as well as the state of Israel.
They pointed out that whereas the centre carefully connects the conditions of apartheid South Africa to the treatment of Jews during Nazi Germany without ever overstating it, it completely ignores both the Nakba – the forced displacement of Palestinians in 1948 that culminated in the creation of Israel – and the charge of apartheid against Israel.
Whereas academics have been using apartheid since the 1990s to describe Israel, several international human rights groups, including Israeli groups, as well as UN investigators, have since also proscribed Israeli policies of dispossession, discrimination and political repression as befitting the label, too.
The erasure of these dimensions from a centre that seeks to use the Holocaust as an entry point to discuss genocide and crimes against humanity, activists say, is a stunning eschewal of institutional responsibility and stimulates unease over the centre’s purpose as a front for Israeli policy.
Responding to the centre’s position that it was awaiting a tribunal to declare the situation in Gaza a genocide before it would do so, Chikte said that the International Court of Justice (ICJ) had already described Israel’s actions as amounting to “plausible” genocide – an action itself that triggers a series of obligations for states and corporations around the world.
According to Chikte, the centre ought to be helping articulate a plan of action, even spearheading calls for accountability, but was instead succumbing to Israeli tactics of “whataboutery” as a means to justify inaction.
“Selective remembrance reeks of hypocrisy and signals complicity. In such hands, ‘Never Again’ is stripped of its universal meaning and turned into a sectarian slogan,” Chikte said.
He added that as a centre dedicated to employing examples of the past to educate, the act of omission was really an effort to turn Holocaust memory into political cover for Israeli state violence.
Likewise, a spokesperson for the South African chapter of Healthcare Workers for Palestine (HCW4P-SA), told MEE that they merely wanted the centre to fulfil its own stated aims.
The centre’s website states that participants in its workshops “reflect on human rights abuses that are happening today”.
Bluen, the scholar on genocide, said the centre’s deflection to a tribunal’s final judgement made for an easy escape to assume responsibility.
“This is, quite frankly, a moderately sophisticated way of justifying one’s committed status as an accomplice to genocide,” Bluen said.
“It is also another form of participation in the ongoing Nakba, which constituted not only fragmentation, land dispossession and genocidal ethnic cleansing, but also the erasure of Palestinian memory.
“Perhaps the board of CTHGC will be able to hear the declaration of genocide at an international tribunal from the dock, where it belongs. Perhaps then it will change its approach,” Bluen added.
‘An accomplice to genocide’
The Cape Town Holocaust and Genocide Centre was built in 1999 and was the first of its kind on the African continent. It was initially called the Cape Town Holocaust Centre, but in 2018, ‘Genocide’ was added to expand the agenda of the centre.
In 2019, it was providing material for school curricula, had trained more than 5,000 teachers and was contributing to police, navy and prison services programmes.
Drawing in more than 25,000 visitors annually, in 2020, the centre was awarded the Traveller’s Choice Award by TripAdvisor for being in the top 10 percent of attractions worldwide, underlining its popularity as a tourism destination.
It also received a ministerial award for ‘Outstanding Contribution to Promoting Social Inclusion’ at the 18th Annual Western Cape Cultural Affairs Awards.
As narrated by Cynthia Kros, from the University of Cape Town, the permanent exhibition “is designed according to the metaphor of ‘the road to genocide’, taking visitors from the age-old origins and persistence of racism and antisemitism through the horrors of the Nazi regime, its expansion in Europe, developments culminating in the attempt to implement the ‘Final Solution’, and on to liberation, the Nuremberg trials, and survivor testimony.”
The exhibit is not just immersive, it’s filled with photos, reminders and fragments of people’s lives along the way.
These include examples of racist laws and sections on how documentation was used as a form of resistance, the armed resistance against the Nazis and the efforts of German allies who tried to speak out.
“Not to act is to act. Not to speak is to speak,” a quote attributed to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German who was executed for trying to rescue Jews, is highlighted in a section about the White Rose resistance movement.
Despite the centre providing a vast body of work on the Holocaust and other genocides, scholars and activists told MEE that its close proximity to the state of Israel, through partnerships or collaborations, or through its trustees, was alarming.
The centre’s annual reports are replete with examples of events, visits, and collaborations with the Israeli embassy.
Several of the centre’s trustees include high-profile pro-Israel supporters, including Philip Krawitz, who was recognised in 2015 by Israeli fundraising organisation Keren Hayesod for his fundraising efforts for Israel during the 2014 war on Gaza.
According to reports in the South African Jewish Report, Cape Town raised the most amount of funds per capita for Israel during the 2014 war that killed more than 2,000 Palestinians and injured 10,000 others.
The disconnect between the purported aims of the centre and its exhibits has not gone unnoticed. The head of history at one school told The Times of Israel in 2019 that her learners end the tours at the centre with many unanswered questions, “particularly regarding issues between Israel and the Palestinians, and the way people were treated during the Holocaust and how they treat others today.”
“That is never addressed by people who speak at the centre – it’s a hole that needs to be filled,” the teacher said.
“In our debrief afterwards, we often bring that in, otherwise, we feel it is a very one-sided view that we give them,” they added.
For Bluen, this erasure is deliberate and amounts to a form of acquiescence to the Israeli narrative.
“If Cape Town Holocaust and Genocide Centre chooses to remain silent on the most live-streamed genocide of our time, and its untold barbaric annihilatory violence, it has chosen the side of genocide.”
