Gaza in the face of history

27/08/2024

Culture • History • Books • Middle East

By ENZO TRAVERSO & MARTIN MARTINELLI*

A conversation about Enzo Travesso's book

Martín Martinelli: The three main virtues of the book are how you trace arcs from the late 19th century and early 20th century to the present day, which we see as historians and geographers, showing that there are no totalities.

Secondly, my attention was drawn to the comparisons that you establish, as a specialist, between different types of violence and you contrast this with different cases because, although the book talks about a specific topic, it is a topic that transcends borders, as it is it is a symbolic struggle that includes the Global South.

The third point is the question of the role of the intellectual and how you position yourself in a place that does not claim to be neutral, but claims that this book is an urgent text and that is why I consider it a political statement.

Enzo Traverso: I'm not an expert on the Middle East. I am a historian of modern and contemporary Europe. My field of research is intellectual history; I don't speak Arabic or Hebrew. That is, I did not write this book as an expert on the Middle East who can clarify and explain what is happening, but as a historian of the modern world and contemporary Europe who feels affected and challenged by what is happening there.

The historical roots of the current crisis are in Europe. The history of anti-Semitism, Jews, 20th century Europe, colonialism. The current crisis is the eruption of a set of contradictions that have accumulated over decades and whose roots are located in Europe. For these reasons, despite not being an expert, I believe I have the legitimacy to speak out about current affairs.

As Martín Martinelli said, I also do it as a historian who does not accept the very comfortable pretext that, because it is not my field of investigation, I lock myself in my library or archive and protect myself from remaining indifferent to what is happening. There is an ethical-political dimension to the profession of the historian, the researcher, those who deal with the social sciences of not being able to continue, for example, teaching about the Holocaust in historiography or the Holocaust in post-war culture as if nothing were happening or as if the fact that the memory of the Holocaust is mobilized today to legitimize a genocide has no relation to what I research and teach.

My essay is not a history book in the conventional sense because historians work for many years before publishing their archival research product. It is an urgent piece of writing in a context of crisis as a response to the need to speak out and take a stand. Therefore, it was written with the desire to critically distance yourself and not simply be overwhelmed by the emotional dimension of what is happening. Critical distance allows us to look at it in historical perspective, but I cannot deny that it is a writing full of angry feelings that has become a contribution to the current debate.

Martín Martinelli: Taking into account that you worked on the genocide category in your previous works, with this work you complete the perspective by including what is happening in Palestine. How to interpret the use given to this concept?

Enzo Traverso: In one of my books History as a Battlefield I propose some tools to reflect on the use that can be made of the concept of genocide in the historiographic field. I recognize that there are many problems because it is a term that must be treated with caution. On the one hand, it cannot be ignored because it belongs to common language, to the semantics of global public space: if everyone talks about genocide, we cannot ignore it.

On the other hand, it is a legal concept whose application to social sciences poses many problems because it was forged during the Holocaust and aims to distinguish between the perpetrator and the victim. This distinction is fundamental, but it is assumed that a historian does not limit himself to distinguishing this and analyzes the context, the causes, the role of other actors, starting from the observation that these roles are not fixed because there is no ontological definition of the guilt and victimization.

Other concepts, such as mass violence, are more relevant, but the concept exists and also has a very impactful political dimension because it was used to request or obtain recognition of the status of victimizer or to indicate who is to blame. There is, precisely because it is a legal concept, a normative definition of what genocide is and was codified by the United Nations Convention in 1948. If we read that definition, it corresponds to what is happening today in Gaza.

We cannot reflect on the meaning of this concept without reflecting on its use in particular moments. We cannot ignore the fact that, at this moment, the use made by the International Court of Justice has a political objective, which means that there is a real risk of genocide and that it must be immediately stopped. This is also an element that must be taken into account.

All the comments that talk about the notion of war crime are, in fact, relativizing what is happening and legitimizing Israel's role as the leading state in this war, despite the forms. The problem is that if the issue of genocide is raised, we have to ask it to stop. This is the starting point and I confirm that thousands of researchers who are not historians of contemporary Europe, but researchers who are specialists in particular genocides, jurists, specialists in the Middle East, have taken a clear position that what is happening is a genocide .

This is something that challenges us all and that authorizes us, researchers, to take a position so that we cannot claim academic neutrality. We can no longer accept this position, we must take the corresponding risks in the face of a fact that will have its history written in the future. In ten or twenty years there will be historians of the war in Gaza who will explain to us what is happening today. Therefore, I have no intention of writing the history of this war, but I have the responsibility to position myself at the risk of making mistakes on some points based on the information that circulates.

Martín Martinelli: We also have the study by Francesca Albanese, Anatomy of a genocide, in which she discusses this concept in depth. From this derives a fourth virtue of her essay that goes against the historical and archaeological narrative, as well as against propaganda. It's something that the book constantly discusses where you state that Palestine is becoming a cause of the Global South, having moved from an anti-imperialist and anti-colonial position to become a demand of many populations like the ones you mention.

Enzo Traverso: Palestine has symbolically been a cause of the Global South. It plays a central role in the culture of post-colonialism, of all movements against new forms of imperial domination and neo-colonialism, against planetary inequalities. This awareness is spreading and is also appearing in the Western world, which is changing its image of Israel because of the Gaza war.

Here we must make reference to another concept, which is apartheid. In any country in the Global South it is said that the situation of Palestinians in the area controlled by Israel is an apartheid situation; It's something that doesn't need to be discussed because it's obvious. In the Western world there is a lot of reluctance to talk about apartheid because Israel is still surrounded by this aura of victimization inherited from the Holocaust that Israel instrumentalizes and transforms into a weapon of domination.

However, public opinion is changing. For example, one of the reluctances to define genocide is that of the common consciousness that underlies the text of the 1948 United Nations Convention, which says that genocide is the Holocaust. Therefore, comparing Gaza with the Holocaust is not so obvious and it is obvious that they are not the same thing due to the historical context.

We are talking about a portion of land where 2,4 million Palestinians live in conditions of permanent segregation since 2007. It is clear that the size is not the same, we do not talk about the same things but there is something consensual in historiography to talk about genocides in different historical contexts because we are referring to different historical experiences.

What is happening in Gaza is not the conquest of the New World and the resulting century-long indigenous genocide, but the definition of genocide is the intention to destroy the material conditions of existence of a people; this is what is happening in Gaza. All the infrastructures that allow a population to live were destroyed: schools, hospitals, roads, their administration, water, fuel, electricity, evacuation of the population from north to south from where they also had to leave due to bombings, added to a military control that prevents the arrival of humanitarian aid. This is a process of genocide with long-term consequences.

Not recognizing this is a form of cowardice on the part of many intellectuals who know what is happening and have all the tools to see it or, well, a form of hypocrisy or blindness. I am referring to very respectable people, so in my essay I make the comparison with the vision of the Soviet Union that existed at the time of the Cold War in a kind of syllogism that was established: the Soviet Union was socialism and socialism is freedom, so concentration camps cannot exist in the Soviet Union and those who say that concentration camps exist are anti-communist liars.

In the same sense, a similar psychological mechanism occurs today: Israel is a product of the Holocaust, it is the response against the violence of anti-Semitism and racism of the 20th century, so it cannot commit genocide as long as Israel is an ontologically virtuous representative of the victims.

This is the psychological mechanism that legitimizes genocide for ethnic reasons and it is a perverse process that must be dismantled. One of the reasons why I decided to write this essay on the same night as October 7th is because a reading of the event came out that said that day had been the biggest pogrom in history after the Holocaust. This definition summons History. What is the relationship between pogroms and the Holocaust? If we accept this definition, it means accepting that behind October 7th there is no occupation of Gaza, no segregation, no decades of oppression and death of Palestinians.

This reading has a consequence: Israel is threatened, pressured to react legitimately because it cannot accept a new Holocaust. In these terms, it is a just and necessary war. This is the reading that was imposed from the beginning and was accepted by all heads of government and the major media. Therefore, historians of Europe have a responsibility to dismantle this interpretation.

Martín Martinelli: In relation to some passages in the essay, you emphasize that even the cemeteries were destroyed and what some call 'memoricide' came to mind, and I relate this to the erasure of those lands of the many civilizations that existed there and that are replicated in. archaeological aspect from which they extract only what can be associated with the Jew or the Hebrew, omitting the Umayyad, the Muslim. I was also thinking about the infanticidal aspect of this genocide, because it attacks civilian populations, of which, in Gaza, the majority are children. Almost half of the victims are minors.

In one of the chapters you mention orientalism, Said, Fanon. This is related to the question of how the media covers and supports this genocide in Europe and the United States. How does this orientalism impact? Is this changing as energy decreases compared to other times?

Enzo Traverso: One of the products of this war was a frightening revival of a reading of orientalism as defined by Edward Said in his late 1970s essay: orientalism is a dichotomous vision of the world in which there is a West, the embodiment of the Enlightenment , and the non-Western world, the embodiment of barbarism. This is opposed to concepts such as: barbarism-progress; rationality- obscurantism; reason- fanaticism.

That old narrative that was forged to legitimize colonialism in the 7th century has been reactivated. It is the same narrative that prevailed after October XNUMXth: Israel is part of the West, an island of rationality and liberal democracy in a region dominated by fanaticism and obscurantism. This is the rhetoric and it is something that must also be dismantled because the semantics of war affect its legitimacy.

Some commonplaces must be qualified and critically reformulated. The idea of Israel as a bastion of the West is evidence itself. Israel cannot conduct this war without the economic and military support of the Western world and the United States, first and foremost. This explains many things, it is the reason for the anti-war movement in the United States similar to the context of the Vietnam War, in that there is a very strong awareness that the Gaza war is not being conducted only in Gaza, where the bombings are happening and dead, but also in the United States. If the Biden administration or others decide to cut this economic and military support to Israel, the war will end within two weeks. This is obvious.

However, it is commonplace to say that Israel was born as a bastion of the West. Martín explains it much better than I can, but the truth is that Israel was born at the end of the Second World War in a particular historical context, which is the end of the war, when there was still an anti-Nazi coalition between the United States, the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union, and the beginning of the Cold War in which the international order is reconfigured and it is at this moment that Israel becomes this intended bastion.

When we talk about “Orientalism” we must understand that, at the beginning, in the 19th century, it had a very strong racial connotation. Rationality, progress, Enlightenment correspond to a European, white and Christian humanity, while barbarism is a world with racial connotations. If we apply this vision to Israel, we must recognize that these categories are metaphors because half of Israel's population is ethnically Arab, they are Israeli citizens who have their origins in North Africa, in the Middle East.

Therefore, talking about a bastion of the West is wrong because it is not the Israel of 1948, of the white European Jews who settled in those lands. For decades, a process of forced cultural assimilation of Jews from the Middle East and North Africa was carried out to uproot them and transform them into new Israeli men who correspond to a Western model of man.

However, there are other dimensions to analyze, such as economic and geopolitical ones. In the United States there is a debate about how to explain Biden's position, who is regularly despised and humiliated by Netanyahu, who explicitly expresses his contempt for the American president. How to explain this? All opinion polls say that the Democrats are at risk of losing the November elections because some important states, like Michigan, consider the US position in the war in Gaza to be a disaster.

There is a public opinion that will never vote for Donald Trump, but that cannot, for ethical-political reasons, approach the Democrats due to their positions on Gaza.

How can this contradiction be explained? The United States has the possibility of changing Israeli policy, but behind this there is a scientific, economic and military apparatus in which Israel is deeply integrated, so interests and ties are stronger than considerations of political rationality and intellectuality. This is something I see in universities, for example, which have always supported the anti-racist movement and when Donald Trump was elected the Universities were blocked with the support of the leaders of these Universities.

In the past there were interests between the United States and South Africa, but at a certain point the opposition to apartheid was so great that the universities understood that they could sacrifice the few interests we have in Africa and change their position. Now this does not happen, it is not possible and we see how all campuses are affected by the anti-war movement and all leaders of large universities repress these demonstrations.

The point is that these large Universities have scientific cooperation links and are involved in the process of producing drones that are used in war. Therefore, if they do not distance themselves from the anti-war movements, funding for Universities will be cut. There are mechanisms, connections, that are stronger than political opportunities.

Martín Martinelli: It could also reflect a certain fissure and contradictions within the United States. What we call 'globalists' and 'Americanists' and this makes me think of the part of your book where you compare it to the demonstrations against the Vietnam War that ended up influencing the end of the conflict. In other words, what happens inside the United States and in the areas where the war in question takes place also matters.

There is a part of the essay that seems fundamental to me, where you work on the categories of violence, terrorism and resistance, where you compare different asymmetrical confrontations. Finally, this is influenced by the construction of the enemy, first communism and then the fall of the USSR and especially in 2001, the intentionally called “Islamic terrorism”.

Enzo Traverso: There are a set of problems that must be analyzed separately. The issue of violence is fundamental and a simple observation must be made: violence resurfaced on October 7th on the part of the Palestinians after the collapse of the peace agreements. This is a shipwreck that was pursued and planned by Israel from the beginning. Well, although he signed the Peace Accords, it was with the aim of reserving time to continue colonization. Thus, the epilogue of these failures of peace is October 7th, a return of Palestinians to terrorist violence.

The news a few days ago not only said that Hamas was late in negotiations in Qatar, but also said that it plans to resume suicide attacks. This can be seen in different ways: we can talk about despair or regression, but the paradox is that by paying an immeasurable price, like genocide, it is Hamas that achieves an objective.

Before October 7th, nobody talked about Palestine, there was a project based on peace agreements with Arab countries that were willing to sign them without negotiating anything for Palestine. So, practically, there was a context in which Palestine was condemned to disappear in international politics, in diplomacy.

Therefore, I say that after October 7th everything changed and now no one knows what will happen, nor is there a solution to the current crisis. But one thing is certain: we cannot think of a solution for the Middle East without Palestine. Violence, from this point of view, had a result.

We can say that it is a policy of despair because I do not believe that the Palestinian issue can be resolved with suicide attacks or acts of terrorism. However, the question exists and is a question of political and moral philosophy, because there is a general principle that indicates that when there is oppression, violence for liberation is legitimate. This is a people oppressed by systematic violence who respond through violence, although this does not mean that all forms of violence are legitimate, ethically acceptable or politically effective.

This is the debate that took place during the Second World War, when the resistance made the decision to take up arms to fight against Nazi occupation and oppression. Later it will be said that yes, at that moment, the strategy involving killing civilians was or was not effective and legitimate.

This is a big and significant political question mark and it is a debate that we, historians, can record in the history of socialism and anarchism. However, philosophically it is a question that forces us to return to Machiavelli and see the relationship between the means and the end. Just like the debate between Trotsky and Victor Serge in the 1930s, note that not all means of action are coherent and legitimate to achieve certain ends.

If the objective is the liberation of a people, there are some means of action that are not compatible with that objective, so a massacre of civilians is not a legitimate means of action, even if it is within the framework of a return to violence that is taking place .

Thus, we can criticize and condemn Hamas' action on October 7th for political, strategic and moral reasons, but, at the same time, it is Hamas that is in the Gaza tunnels fighting an occupying army. Thus, the fact that Hamas is the agent of the Palestinian resistance is proof that terrorism is a method of action in the dimension of the National Liberation Wars, anti-imperialist and resistance movements. This is a fact whether we disagree or not. I greatly respect pacifists who do not accept violence, although this is not my approach.

You cannot say that you cannot negotiate with Hamas because they are terrorists and fundamentalists, because that is not a valid argument. The reality is that, in fact, negotiations are taking place with them, even if indirectly. One of the responsibilities of intellectuals must be to clarify these points and respond to the rhetoric that prevailed after 11/XNUMX, which indicates that terrorism is a kind of monster, a specter that must be exorcised.

Terrorism is a form of struggle by resistance movements and, in some cases, with catastrophic successes and others that have achieved objectives. The example I gave in my movie book The battle of Algeria by Gillo Pontecorvo describes how the women of the FLN (National Liberation Front), in the Algerian war, disguised themselves as French women to go to French neighborhoods and plant bombs in bars and cafes. It is something that would be horrifying today for much of Western opinion, after decades of rhetoric about human rights and rejection of violence. All national liberation movements have adopted these means and this includes violence against civilians, which ends up being inevitable.

Martín Martinelli: The issue is contrasted, as you say, in these asymmetrical confrontations because what the Algerian women did or the attacks by Hamas are considered terrorism, but it is not considered that Hamas does not even have a helicopter or state-of-the-art aircraft. combat and 300 warheads like Israel has. The US invasions and bombings of civilian populations are also not seen as terrorism. Thus, the notion of terrorism was used to accuse movements that have much less military power and not the great powers that can bomb indiscriminately.

Enzo Traverso: The issue of violence cannot be removed from its context because the effectiveness and the very possibility of using violence and its limits bind the context. There is no doubt that the French army could have militarily won the Algerian War, just as there is no doubt that the United States could have destroyed the Vietnamese resistance or Afghanistan, as Israel does today in Gaza. But there was a geopolitical and political context in France and the United States that did not allow this conflict to be resolved in purely military terms.

The response to the Vietnam War was so strong that the United States was unable to keep up. I insist that the end of this conflict ended with a battlefield defeat against Vietnamese fighters, but it was also a victory achieved within the United States by the anti-war movement. Thus, in the context of the war of the 1950s, France could not continue that conflict at the time of decolonization and the Cuban revolution. Therefore, it is a problem of political power relations and not just in military terms. This also explains the existence of those movements that can change a trajectory.

In my book I distinguish between different components of these anti-war movements. One of these components is the post-colonial component of young people originating from Asia or Africa, with a strong African-American component that identifies the Palestinians' struggle as a struggle against racism, in the same way that post-colonial minorities identify them against colonialism.

A third component are young Jews who do not accept that Israel carries out a genocide in their name and participate in this movement, not as personalities, but as organized associations.

This is a symptom of a change in opinion and we see that the Jewish minority in the United States is not compact in terms of support for Israel. It means that there is a new generation that does not accept Joe Biden's policies. Let's understand that Biden is a Pavlovian reflection of support for Israel, then Netanyahu shows up and treats him like an idiot while continuing to fund him. Therefore, this change could have notable consequences for what we were saying.

At a certain point, Israel's policy will no longer be acceptable, just as in 1990, a South African state of apartheid was no longer acceptable. Sooner or later this will happen, it will end and we can warn through these symptoms in which violence is a factor that can accelerate the process. Everything will depend on how violence is used, for what purposes and how it is contextualized.

Martín Martinelli: I would like to highlight a sixth virtue of the book, which is the care you take, knowing the pretexts that are used to counter the arguments, in each of the statements you make, proposing broad examples of different historical facts.

Enzo Traverso: The issue of Zionism is complex and is a source of permanent misunderstanding. It is difficult to characterize the nature of Zionism because history textbooks explain that it was born at the end of the 19th century in Central Europe, where Theodor Herzl published his book The State of the Jews. Here we see that Zionism, at first, is simply the Jewish version of the European nationalisms of the time.

It is a caricatured version, in many cases, of German nationalism that is most admired by Herzl as a project to build a Jewish nation-state delimited from an ethnic, cultural and religious, as well as geopolitical, point of view. In that book, in fact, he already mentions that in Palestine the Jews will be the bastion of the West. In other words, they play the role of representatives of progress and civilization in the midst of oriental barbarism.

However, there are other Zionist currents that do not share these colonialist and racist stereotypes. There are anarchist and Marxist currents and, after the 1920s, there are also fascists like Zeev Jabotinsky, who was an admirer of Benito Mussolini and in his movement parades with the black shirts. Therefore, Zionism is a very heterogeneous movement and is at the same time a very racist and colonialist caricatural Jewish version of European nationalisms. In addition to being a national movement of an oppressed minority, it takes on features of national liberation.

We also find what was defined in Germany and Austria as cultural Zionism, which did not aim to build a Jewish State in Palestine, but rather to create a national Jewish community. In other words, that Jews have the right to live as a national community with their religious practices and language, thus creating the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

In fact, one of the founders of that university, Judah Magnes, was a cultural Zionist who thought it would be fruitful to create a national Jewish community in Palestine, but not a Jewish state. I found it natural to think of Jewish national life as part of a multi-ethnic, multi-religious and multicultural Palestine. This is currently an option.

If this is the history of Zionism, we must recognize that after the creation of the State of Israel, it was Herzl's conception of political Zionism that became hegemonic and, in this sense, the State of Israel is Zionist and delimits itself in religious and cultural. terms. This is the reason why many intellectuals critical of Zionism speak of the theological-political roots of the Zionist project that materialized in the State of Israel that exists today.

The first observation that must be made is that Zionism was, for a long time, a minority in the Jewish world where there were very powerful anti-Zionist currents for religious, political and cultural reasons, thinking that the vocation of the Jewish world is diasporic, playing a role within the framework of the nations in which they live, being an element of cosmopolitanism and representing a supranational brotherhood between peoples. Therefore, there is a tradition of Jewish internationalism that is anti-Zionist.

Thus, the issue of Zionism cannot be reduced to stereotypical forms. What I consider essential to clarify today is that, despite the complexity of the history of Zionism, there is a political Zionism that Israel embodies today that corresponds to a colonizing and oppressive conception that denies the rights of Palestinians.

Thus, anti-Zionism today is a form of anti-colonialism, anti-racism and is the banner of many national liberation movements. Of course there are anti-Semites who are anti-Zionists, certainly. However, being anti-Zionist does not mean being anti-Semitic. If we accept this equation, we must conclude that much of the Jewish world is anti-Zionist.

Martin Martinelli; I would like to close with the “one or two states” question with which you conclude the book, but first I want to highlight your participation with us and in other places where you present these ideas (and in different languages). This leads us to affirm the level of commitment you have as an intellectual activist.

Enzo Traverso: As I said before, today no one has a solution. The tragedy of this war is that it deepens, but almost no one has a strategy to get out of it. Those who have a clearer vision are, precisely, the Netanyahu government, which is the total destruction of Gaza and the expulsion of the Palestinians. The project is a new Nakba to then recolonize Gaza. However, Netanyahu wants to continue the war until November in the hope that Trump will be elected and support him to remain in power.

Arab countries have no solution or peace proposal. While the United States supports Israel without proposing anything and the same happens with Europe, which is completely out of all negotiations, which is shameful. In turn, in the Palestinian field the PLO is practically an agency of Israel, therefore it is out of option and Hamas is the only weapon that uses violence as a form of survival.

It is a context in which a solution cannot be defined or outlined. In the medium term I am very pessimistic and I only see a deepening of the tragedy while in the long term I see a solution that cannot be other than a binational State or a federation that guarantees full equality of rights to all citizens without distinction of language, religion or ethnicity .

The point is that in the global world, which is the world of the 21st century, an ethnic or religious state like Israel is a total aberration because it cannot exist without establishing forms of segregation, discrimination and exclusion. Along these lines, from my point of view, the creation of two ethnically and religiously delimited States can only occur through a process of ethnic cleansing in several locations between the river and the sea because they are two communities that live together. So what we have to think about is ways of coexistence.

The idea that a Jew cannot live with other religious communities is decontextualized because, ultimately, this is the society whose members they share, regardless of their cultural roots. Those who propose the two-state solution are politicians who accuse those who say America should be white and Christian as racists. Therefore, I believe that the idea of two states is obsolete, as it reproduces a concept of nation-state that emerged in Europe in the 19th century, and which produced catastrophes in the 20th century.

It seems to me that the place where this reflection would be most natural is Argentina because it is a country that has a very strong national identity, but national consciousness implies a plurality of origins, cultures and religions. This is the natural way of existence of humanity in the 21st century and Zionism today is a regression even in the Jewish world. That's why I'm not surprised that the defense of Israel as an ethno-religious state is raised by the extreme right.

*Enzo Traverso is a professor of history at Cornell University. Author, among other books, of The new faces of fascism (Âyiné Publisher).

*Martín Martinelli Professor at the Department of Social Sciences at the Universidad Nacional de Luján (Argentina).

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