International Chair for the History of the Second World War 2026

This lecture series examines the rise of nationalism and antisemitism and the emergence of Zionism, the events of the Holocaust as an eruption of multiethnic violence, and the trajectory that led from the establishment of the state of Israel to the genocide in Gaza.
 

Lecture 1 - Israel: What Went Wrong?
Tuesday 8 December, 18h30, S.R42.5.503 - Auditoire Pierre DRION

This lecture traces the tragic transformation of Zionism from a movement of liberation and emancipation for the Jews of East-Central Europe into an ethnographic-national state ideology of militarism, expansionism, violence and exclusion, eventually sprouting elements of messianic Jewish-supremacy geared toward ethnic cleansing and genocide.

 

Lecture 2 - Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Multiethnic community
Wednesday 9 December, 18h00, S.R42.5.503 - Auditoire Pierre DRION

This lecture traces the origins and intimate reality of how genocide occurred in one small town in Eastern Europe. The interethnic community of Buczacz, where Ukrainians, Poles, and Jews lived side-by-side for 400 years, turned into a sea of violence, where neighbors turned against each other, under the German occupation of 1941-45. Why did this happen and what does it tell us about the possibility of shared life between different ethnic and religious communities?

 

Lecture 3 - Defining Genocide and the War in Gaza
Thursday 10 December, 18h00, S.R42.5.503 - Auditoire Pierre DRION

This lecture analyzes the deep and immediate origins of the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023 and Israel’s ongoing retaliatory operation in Gaza. In defining what is the nature of Israeli actions, the lecture distinguishes between war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide, and concludes that the goals of the Israeli military’s operation was to make Gaza uninhabitable for its population and remove it from the strip. Failure to accomplish ethnic cleansing ended up in an ongoing genocide, whose future is as ominous as the destruction it has already wrought.


Chaire organisée pour la treizième fois par la Faculté de Philosophie et Sciences sociales de l’ULB, grâce à la générosité de feu le Baron Jean-Charles VELGE, décédé le 29 mai 2010, qui tenait à honorer la mémoire de Jean Vanwelkenhuyzen, historien de la Deuxième Guerre Mondiale.