The historian Tal Bruttmann, a specialist on the Holocaust and anti-Semitism, is the author, with Stefan Hördler and Christoph Kreutzmüller, of Un album d'Auschwitz. Comment les nazis ont photographié leurs crimes ("An album from Auschwitz. How the Nazis photographed their crimes").

Politicians, historians and editorialists have described Hamas's attacks as a massacre, an attack, a pogrom, and even genocide. As a historian, how would you describe this event?

The word that came up most often was "pogrom," but Hamas's attacks do not, in my view, fall into this category. This Russian term refers not to mass crimes against Jews, but to the destruction of property in their possession, accompanied by violence against individuals. What characterizes a pogrom is the fact that a majority, aroused or even incited by the powers that be, violently attacks a minority living within it.

In the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, there were many anti-Jewish pogroms in Europe, notably in Russia and Romania, but this term does not apply to Hamas's attacks. Firstly, because their aim was not to destroy Israeli property, but to kill Jews; secondly, because Jews in Israel are not a minority, but a majority; finally, because Hamas is not a people, but a terrorist organization. As far as I'm concerned, these attacks were a mass massacre: The aim was to kill as many Jews as possible.

Some have used the term genocide. Do you think it's relevant?

In the Western imagination, genocide has become the alpha and omega of crime, even though it is no more serious under international law than war crimes or crimes against humanity. Personally, as a historian, I don't use this legal term, whose definition is immensely complex: I leave it to the magistrates and the courts. It's up to them to establish, after an investigation, whether or not the massacre submitted to them was a genocide.

Nobel Prize-winning writer Elfriede Jelinek has compared Hamas to the Nazis. What do you think of this analogy?

We have to be careful with words: Hatred of Jews is not enough to characterize Nazism. The Vichy regime and Jacques Doriot's Parti Populaire Français [PPF, 1936-1945] were profoundly anti-Semitic, but that doesn't mean they were Nazis. To be a Nazi is to adhere to the political ideology developed by Adolf Hitler after the First World War and implemented by the Third Reich from 1933 onwards.

Hamas is obviously deeply anti-Semitic: Its initial charter, which explicitly refers to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion [a fabricated 1903 text purporting to detail a Jewish plot for global domination], asserts that the Jews were behind the French Revolution, the Bolshevik Revolution and the First World War. Hamas, however, must be taken for what it is: a nationalist Islamist movement that is no more Nazi than Al-Qaeda, Iran or Marine Le Pen.

You have 75% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only.