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History As It Happens
The Name of Barbarism
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Want to skip ads? . A U.N. commission reported that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, provoking denials and denunciations from Israel’s government and its U.S. supporters. What explains the endless wrangling over a term coined by Raphael...
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Unsolved mysteries to unexplained phenomena from comedy goal to relationship fails. Amazon Music's got the most ad free top podcasts included with prime because the only thing that should interrupt your listening is, well, nothing. Download the Amazon Music app today History as it happens September 23, 2025 the name of barbarism, the goal of the.
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Israeli government is abundantly clear. As we continue to witness the destruction of Palestinians in Gaza, the commission finds it is genocide the most fundamental right of all, the very right of human.
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Groups to exist as groups.
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Hamas will understand that by attacking us, they've made a mistake of historic proportions. We will exact a price that will be remembered by them and Israel's other enemies for decades to come.
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A UN Commission reports Israel is committing genocide, provoking denials and denunciations from Israel's government and its allies. What seems obvious to some that Israel is systematically destroying Gaza is an unfortunate consequence of a just war. To others, what will it take to end the wrangling over a term coined by Raphael Lemkin to define the crime of national destruction? That's next, as we report History as It happens. I'm Martin DeCaro.
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The definition of genocide in the Genocide Convention is limited. For example, the convention focuses exclusively on physical destruction of a group, not only primarily on the physical destruction of a group, but it doesn't, for example, cover other forms of destruction as a political group. So that's a serious shortcoming.
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Although when Lemkin invented the concept of genocide in the early 1940s, he saw genocide as a form of warfare against the civilian population. It was, you know, wars of extermination. In his book Axis Rule and Occupied Europe, he referenced those from history, you know, from Genghis Khan and antiquity and so forth. And he says, that's what we're trying to outlaw, the world of extermination. But when the Allies and the victorious powers in the United nations came to codify his idea from this book he wrote 1944. They wanted to rescue the notion of military necessity.
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The jurist Navi Pillay was a judge on the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. It sentenced 62 people for the genocide of more than a half million Rwandans. Today, Palay chairs the UN Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory in Israel, a team of independent experts that has concluded Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. On the specific intent of genocide, the.
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Commission concludes that statements made by Israeli authorities are. Are direct evidence of genocidal intent. The Commission also concludes that the pattern of conduct is circumstantial evidence for genocidal.
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Intent and that genocidal intent was the.
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Only reasonable inference that could be drawn from a totality of the evidence.
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In 1948, three years after the Allies vanquished the Nazis, the year the State of Israel established its independence, the UN General assembly, meeting in Paris, adopted the International Genocide Convention. Its president was Herbert Wir evatt of Australia.
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The most fundamental right of all, the.
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Very right of human groups to exist as groups. And in so doing, the General assembly is taking positive action to fulfill its.
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Mission under Article 13 of the charter.
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That is to promote the progressive development of international law and its codification. I would urge, and I think that's the spirit, the unanimous view of the.
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Assembly, that this Convention be signed by all states.
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The following year, Evik credited UN mediators for negotiating a series of armistice agreements to end the 1948 Arab Israeli wars, separate agreements with Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria. He could not have known that 76 years later, the fundamental conflict would remain unresolved and as bloody or genocidal as ever.
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I know there'll be differences of opinion about it from the point of view.
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Of the merits of the case, but it's undoubted that in the Palestine question.
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The United nations has pointed the way towards a just, a stable solution and has averted war in this region.
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To those who question the use of the term genocide here, maybe you agree with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that, that if Israel really wanted to kill or starve all the Palestinians, it would have by now. There is nothing stopping them. If we're practicing genocide, we're surely doing a very bad job of it because.
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We could have, you know, basically eliminated the entire population of Gaza, but we went the other direction.
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But there may be a different way to define genocide. If we look back to Raphael Lemkin's original idea, the destruction of a nation, not only the murder of individuals, but the elimination of a people as a nation, which is what Israel is doing today, as its government ministers and military figures have made clear. They want to make Gaza uninhabitable and scatter the surviving Palestinians to other places, while possibly annexing the West Bank. And as some scholars say, this is not a recent development. It began in 1948.
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The new Jewish state is born. In the tense atmosphere of civil war, Haganah troops search for Arabs after capturing the city. Arab strong points are taken after being blasted to rubble. Israeli forces drive spearheads across the Sinai Peninsula, west to the Suez Canal, south to the entrance of the Gulf of Aqaba, breaking the blockade, capturing the west bank of the Jordan river and occupying the Old City of Jerusalem.
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Writing in the Journal of Genocide Research, Martin Shah says successive waves of expulsion destroyed Palestinian society in the majority of the territory as the foundational genocidal event. The forced removal of 750,000 Palestinians during the Nakba of 1948 was followed by the expulsion of a further 300,000 in the 1967 war and over the 56 years before 2023, persistent further removals from the areas occupied as a result of that war, which represented slow motion genocide. The words of Martin Shaw, Israeli Prime.
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Minister Levi Eshkal must be the proudest man in the world, especially when he entered into the Jordanian sector of Jerusalem. What's going to happen to all the Arabs here?
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They'll have all freedom like the Arabs.
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That they have in Israel.
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Writing in that same journal, the Palestinian jurist Sonia Boulos criticizes liberal genocide deniers, saying by severing the link between the current genocidal violence in Gaza and the foundational violence of The Nakba, the 1948 expulsion of Palestinians from their lands. Liberal denialism precludes efforts to remedy the full spectrum of historical and structural injustices that define the settler colonial project in Palestine. In doing so, she says, it positions genocide as an aberration rather than as a logical outcome of a political order premised on permanent security for the settler population at the expense of the indigenous. So these two passages link past and present. They argue that genocide is a process, a process that began in 1948. Now, at the same time as political elites in Israel, the United States and Germany, to name three, defend Israel's war. Public opinion is turning in some places faster than others. People can see with their own eyes the consequences of indiscriminate bombing, the wholesale destruction of cities, the denial of food and medicine, the targeting of children. Writing in the Berlin Review about German opinion and historical memory, historian Dirk Moses says students who are bearing witness to the immeasurable suffering of Palestinians in Gaza today are identifying a crime to which German elites are not only blind, but that they actively ignore the crime of enduring colonial occupation, exploitation, deportation and genocide that non Europeans have endured at the hands of Europeans for hundreds of years. Settler colonialism, he says, is a shorthand for this insight that observes the slow death delivered by the low intensity violence of long term colonial rule. Dirk Moses is a historian and political scientist and professor at the City College of New York. He edits the aforementioned Journal of Genocide Research. Sonia Boulos is an expert on international human rights law at Antonio D. Nebrija University in Madrid. Her research focuses on the international protection of human rights. Our Conversation Next, but first, consider supporting history as it happens. Become a subscriber for $5 a month you can skip ads, get access to the entire catalog of 500 episodes, and get bonus content. Go to historyasithappens.com and subscribe through Supercast and support the important work we're doing here. Let's map out this week's amazing destinations and travel tips.
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Dirk Moses, welcome back to the show.
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Good to be here with you again.
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And Sonia Boulos joining us from Spain. Welcome to the podcast. This is your first time. It's great to have you here.
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Thank you for having me.
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Let's begin with the terminology. I don't like to get bogged down in definitional debates, but that is part of what we're seeing here. And it's not just an academic debate. These words matter in the legal realm and for history. Dirk, in your essay in the Berlin Review, I did notice you described Israel's war as genocidal. In some of our past conversations you had been reluctant to use the term genocide or genocidal. Why have you changed your mind if in fact that is the case?
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Well, it's interesting you mentioned that point and you honed in on that particular phraseology I used. So, as Sonia knows, because we have a constant argument about these things, I have been arguing for a while that the law of genocide as it was codified at the convention in 1948 and since then in the Rome Statute, is fatally flawed because it is distinguishes genocide from warfare. Although when Lemkin invented the concept of genocide in the early 1940s, he saw genocide as a form of warfare against the civilian population. It was, you know, wars of extermination. In his book Access, Rule and Occupied Europe, he referenced those from history, you know, from Genghis Khan and antiquity and so forth. And he says that's what we're trying to outlaw, the worlds of extermination. But when the Allies and the victorious powers in the United nations came to codify his idea from this book he wrote 1944, they wanted to rescue the notion of military necessity, which is the notion that states are entitled under the laws of armed conflict to inflict enormous damage, including on civilians, but incidentally or collaterally in the cause of a military operation. So the idea is that there are legitimate military objectives. You know, if civilians get in the way, they can be killed, though it has to be proportionate. There has to be warnings and so forth. And of course, that's the argument that Israel's, you know, making in Gaza, that they can destroy Gaza, but it's an act of necessity. The necessity is we're dealing with an implacable genocidal enemy known as Hamas. So we have no choice. Our hands are tied. So the. The reason States wanted to rescue that notion of necessity after the Second World War, of course, is they just defeated Nazi Germany in a war. I mean, for them, warfare itself, a kind of warfare in which you flatten enemy cities with all the civilians in it, including with atomic weapons, let's not forget, in Japan, is not illegitimate. So they wanted to then really cordon off genocide as a very distinct and special and rare form of violence, and made it very difficult to prove. So this wasn't an accident. And it's. I don't think that this sort of high threshold of proving genocide means it's somehow special or pure, though that's how many international lawyers seem to argue we need to not contaminate it by confusing it with warfare. And that is the issue that's going on. Is this warfare with some regrettable aspects, or is it a criminal program of genocide? So what I'm arguing, or just in that throwaway line, if you like, in the Berlin Review, which is about Germany and not about Gaza, what I'm doing there is saying it's a genocidal mode of warfare because it's attacking the entire population of Gaza, but there can be.
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Multiple intents existing at the same time. There is a military intent and then a civilizational destructive intent or genocidal intent. Sonia, as an international legal expert, is there any question in your mind that what is happening in Gaza is a genocide?
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Absolutely not. It is a genocide. Even if we take the jurisprudence of the International Court of Justice without doing too much effort or being too creative. And that's precisely what the paper that was published by the International Commission of Inquiry suggests. I just want to refer to some of the points that were raised by Dirk before. I do agree with him that the definition of genocide in the Genocide Convention is limited. For example, the Convention focuses exclusively on physical destruction of a group, not only primarily on the physical destruction of a group, but it doesn't, for example, cover other forms of destruction as a political group. So that's a serious shortcoming. But at the same time, I do not necessarily agree that Genocide Convention is drafted in a way that makes it impossible to argue that this is genocide, even if the genocidal campaign has some sort of military logic into it. For example, the Convention says that genocide can take place in times of peace and during conflicts or in time of war. So by saying that genocide can happen in times of war, you're not excluding the possibility that genocide, genocide could also have, at the same time some sort of military logic. Genocide in itself could be, you know, used to achieve some military objectives. Now this is one point. The other point is that the way the law was interpreted by the International Court of Justice, yes, it was interpreted in a way that it's is limiting, but you know, law is an argumentative discipline. You can always argue about the law, but, but still, and I want to repeat this and insist on this, even within the existing jurisprudence, you can make a case that's what's happening in Gaza now is genocide. What the Court said in few cases that we look at the pattern of conduct on the ground, the destruction, what's taking place, and we have to reach the conclusion that this is the only reasonable inference that we can have that whatever is going on the ground aims at destroying a group in part or in whole. When you see the level of destruction in Gaza, no reasonable person could reach the conclusion that this level of destruction aims at defeating Hamas or achieving legitimate military goals. Even the law and international law, the law on the use of force, even the right to self defense in international law is limited and it must be subjected to two principles, necessity and proportionality. When you see that the military operations on the ground are extremely disproportionate the.
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Aerial photos do not lie.
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Not only the aerial photos, but also, I mean, targeting people in food distribution points, targeting hospitals, fertility clinics, complete destruction of cultural sites, religious sites, the contamination of the environment, all these things. I mean, there's no way that any reasonable, not only international law scholar or, you know, practitioner, any reasonable human being with basic human decency would argue that this is proportionate in any way.
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So I see this debate happening at different levels. There is this legal realm or the scholarly realm, people like yourself and jurists, people who are on, say, the UN Commission experts having this debate or discussion. And then there's of course the political realm, which is not a very reliable realm as we know when it comes to accuracy. But then there's also ordinary people, right, who maybe have a concept of genocide as, unless you're trying to kill, physically kill every last member of a group, well then it can't be a genocide. But I think what we're seeing here, Sonia, to your point, the nation, the Palestinian nation, the national project, is being wiped out in Gaza and the West Bank.
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If we look at the Palestinian people as a political community, not only in Gaza and West bank, but also the Palestinians who live inside Israel, the State of Israel does not recognize them as a political community. They are denied from the right to self determination. Israel is practically the only country that I know of that by a constitutional law, a basic law that has a constitutional status clearly states that almost nearly 20% of the citizens of the country have no right to self determination. Not as Palestinians alone, but also as in any other form, not even as Israelis. The only ones who are entitled to self determination are the Jewish citizens of the state. What does that mean? Well, self determination has two components. The first component is the right of a community to decide on, you know, its own future political status, its own institutions. So by law, Palestinians in Israel are denied from this. They can participate in elections, but under very, very strict conditions that make it nearly impossible to challenge the settler colonial structures of the state. And the other component is ownership, collective ownership of natural resources of the country. Again, Palestinians are not seen as part of this collective on this. So this elimination is not only in the west bank and Gaza, it's also inside Israel. And it didn't start today. It started from 48 with the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. 80% of the Palestinians who lived in, in what is now known as the state of Israel were ethnically cleansed from their homelands. So this is not new. That's why Palestinians, you know, from day one in Gaza, they have been Living throughout this process of political elimination and other form of elimination from ethnic cleansing, apartheid, denial of self determination. So they knew early on when they saw the level of violence being directed against them in Gaza, that what we're seeing is something else. It's not just the typical warfare.
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During the mopping up operations, Haganah forces seek out every Arab and barricades are set up to screen those who had not already fled the city. Everyone is searched. With the relinquishing of the British mandate, Palestine is wrought by full scale war and both sides mobilize. Arab captives are held for evacuation.
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It's a process. It's not a single one day or one week event. Intent and actions develop over time, right?
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Yes. And in all these multidimensional ways that Sonia mentioned and which Lemkin actually articulated when he first formulated the concept of genocide in his book Axis Rule and Occupied Europe, which was about not just the German, but also German allies occupation and conquest of neighboring states. And there he was preoccupied or concerned not just with the attack on the local Jewish population, although that was front and center for him, but also on the way. The, say the occupation of Poland by the Nazis was genocidal of the Polish nation because it attacked the Polish nation in many different ways. Very similar to what Saunja was saying. Now his concept was broad and in some ways maddeningly imprecise for some people, including me, which is why there's so much wrangling about what it is. And you mentioned people who say it can't be genocide until there's an intention to exterminate every last person. But they're of course using the Jewish experience as paradigmatic. But when Lemkin formulated the concept, he was also trying to cover the destruction of nations. That's what genocide is trying to criminalize, not the protection of individuals. For that you have war crimes and crimes against humanity. There's alternative legal concepts. So genocide is to protect our people, a particular people, whereas crimes against humanity is concerned with civilian population generally, but without denoting them as the Poles or the Germans or the Jews or the Czechs, you know, the national or religious identity. So it's very much an artifact of the age of nationalism, which to some extent came to an end in Europe, at least in its toxic notion at the end of the Second World War. But when he was formulating a very broad concept of genocide, he wanted to protect nationality and that meant the natural resources of a state, which Sonia mentioned in regard to Gaza, it meant the educated, the political class and the educated class who are bearers of the national ideal. So, for example, he recognized that the Germans didn't want to exterminate all the Poles, but they wanted to get rid of the strata of polar society which were bearers of the Polish national ideal. And then you're left with a sort of a helot class of peasants who would have been denationalized, who can be easily exploited and worked to death or hyper exploited on German farms and mines, but you would have no more polished nation left. You just have an undifferentiated mass of peasants. So that's what he was trying to get at. A lot of people don't realize that. So when the convention codified it, they dropped all that stuff. They said that's not really central to the genocide concept. We're going to fixate on the biological aspect, which Sonia mentioned as well. So this notion of genocide has gone through various iterations, but what's really interesting is that popular understandings like the common sense of ordinary people watching the TV or seeing this unfold on their phones, you know, the notion of a live stream genocide, they can see intuitively that what is happening in Gaza is not only wrong, but that it's a multidimensional attack on the ability of Palestinians to reproduce their life in Gaza. And it's, it's not just about mass killing. I mean, in fact, in relation to other armed conflicts, the casualties are much lower. So in Rwanda, we're talking about 800,000 people in a couple of months. Okay. This is, I think it's a lot more than 60,000, mind you. But even if it's say 120,000 double that, it's a lot lower over nearly two years, right?
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In relative terms, sure. Yeah, yeah.
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But the mass, of course, of populations are different. The size, the scale of this.
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And this isn't over yet either, but go ahead.
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Yeah, but the point is that, for example, in the Biafra, Nigeria civil war in the late 60s, up to 3 million people died of starvation in the blockade of Biafra. I mean, this is all forgotten at last. With the capitulation ordered by General Ajuku's successor, the bloodbath of Biafra seems to be at an end. But only many of General Garand's federal forces conduct the aftermath with discretion and humanity. Those of us who study these things haven't forgotten people in Nigeria haven't forgotten it. But you know, there was an international debate about genocide and starvation in Nigeria in the late 60s very similar to the one we've got today regarding Gaza, although without the intervention of the International Court of Justice, and it's been totally forgotten. Although the casualties are massively high.
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The former IDF chief of staff recently said that his estimate is 200,000 Palestinians killed and wounded, which is 10% of the population.
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It's true. It's not a question of numbers. What the concept genocide captures is the attempt to eliminate a group. And to achieve this goal, you don't have to literally kill everyone in the group. What is interesting, for example, in the report that was published few days ago, there's also emphasis on the things that Israel doing. The harms that are being inflicted on Palestinians, dismantle their identity as a national group. So the problem with focusing on numbers is like you mistrack or just you don't see clearly what is the kind of harm or damage that this term attempts to capture. And it is destroying a human group. And also just I want to go back a little bit to the question you posed before about, well, they're not killing all Palestinians. But even legally speaking now, the Genocide Convention doesn't talk about that you need to aim at killing everyone. It talks about destruction in whole or in part. That is the law. Otherwise we cannot say that Srebrenica is a genocide. So that is the problem. First of all, legally speaking, yeah, there's no such a requirement that you have to aim at the destruction of every single Palestinian living on earth. Palestinians in Gaza are part of the Palestinian people and it's a significant part. So that's also important point to remember.
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The 1948 convention. Here are the words of Genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group as such, the key words being in their intent and as such, killing members of the group. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. The UN Commission report said that Israel is doing four out of these five. And to Dirk's earlier point about people who are following this, the live streaming on their phones and the student protesters, they can see that the defenses of Israel's actions simply do not add up. And that's not to say there is no truth in it. Hamas does use civilian infrastructure to hide, but that cannot account for all of the destruction or even most of the destruction we're witnessing right now. You can also listen to and read the comments of Israeli government ministers and Israeli military figures, current and former. This is not just commentators on TV channels. These are the people who are in charge talking about how they're orchestrating what is a famine in Gaza. They wouldn't use the word famine, but they say we're cutting off all aid deliberately. So the defense that it's not a famine or that people are lying about what Israel is doing, these things just don't add up. I am pontificating here. Please forgive me, but either one of you can jump in there.
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I mean, what you're saying regarding the observations of people around the world chimes in very well with the point I was trying to make before, which is that the common sense understanding of what people can see there is consistent with what Lemkin was trying to capture with the notion of genocide in the early mid-1940s, but that the law narrowed, I think, in an unacceptable way in 1948, and then that convention definition was adopted by the Rome Statute, which governs the International Criminal Court. So you have this distinction between the law and common sense, which is well known. I mean, in the literature, people have noticed that, you know, the public has a different understanding of genocide than the lawyers. The problem is, and I'm not referring here to Sonia, who's a very distinguished jurist herself, but. But many other international lawyers think that the law has got it right and that the public needs to understand that the lawyers have the monopoly here and can decide ultimately, you know, whether it's genocide or not. My view is the opposite, is that the public view is actually phenomenologically the accurate view of what is going on and that the law needs to catch up. So what I found fascinating about the report that Sonya mentioned that the UN Human Rights Committee brought out a couple of days ago was a three member report, and which I read immediately, is that it brings in many of these other dimensions, and Sonia may speak to this next, which are often forgotten in the purely legalistic discourse about genocide. And they do so by that element about mental harm you mentioned, Martin. You know, that allows them to. That's a door they open. And through that door they can bring in many of the elements which are usually left out of the discussion about genocide with its focus on biological destruction. Sonia, do you know what I'm getting at?
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Yes, I think that was precisely one of the points that, you know, were unique about this report. I tend to agree with Dirk on this point, that lawyers, generally speaking, they focus on the killing, the causing bodily harm and things like that, and less on other aspects of harm that are inflicted on a daily basis on the victims in Gaza. But what was unique is the emphasis on the mental harm displacement, pushing people to the edge. On average, Palestinians in Gaza have been displaced six times. Some families have been displaced 19 times. The inhuman conditions under which people are living, the sexual violence that were used against detainees, the starvation, having to live in constant worry that you might not, you know, survive, that you're going to be killed at any moment. You know, Palestinians have been dehumanized so much, we even forget that also they have feelings and harms that could be inflicted on them are not only physical harms, killing them, shooting them, but also mental harms. So I think in a way, it is restoring the human dignity, recognizing, you know, the humanity of Palestinians. That's why I think it's really important that they addressed this point. For example, many times they say, I'm just giving statistics, maybe not accurate, just to give an example that 80% or 50% of the victims are children and women. Like, somehow it assumes every single Palestinian man could be a legitimate target, that every single Palestinian man is a threat. Just for being a man, he's a threat. With children and women, it's okay. We immediately assume that they're like civilian victims. But if you're a Palestinian man, if you're killed, okay, it could be problematic, but not as much.
- [34:27]
B
It's a military logic, so it is used immediately.
- [34:30]
C
We assume if the victim is a Palestinian male who's 25 or 35, this is just pure dehumanization of the Palestinian people. I think focusing on the mental harms is very important, not only because in a way you're expanding, not expanding, because the convention talks about mental harm. It's not that they inventing this up, but giving proper weight to this element that has been neglected for many years in the discussions on genocide. That is very important by itself, but also it's very important from the perspective that you see Palestinians as human being. In the report, they say you have one bathroom for 700 children in Gaza. You have families living in dog cages covered with something to protect the kids. You have 10 people sleeping on the same mattress at the same time and taking turns. This is completely inhuman. These kinds of harms also count as part of this genocidal campaign against the Palestinian people. And not to mention the complete destruction of IVF clinics, reproductive health centers, the destruction of embryos, and all the ment suffering for people have been there for years trying to get treatment. On one day, Israel decides to destroy everything. These are also Very serious mental harms that also are addressed in the report.
- [35:47]
A
I was going to ask you, Sonia, where does this come from? What are the roots, the historical roots of the dehumanization of Palestinians, which I think does feed in to the genocide denialism.
- [36:00]
C
I think it's part of the colonial legacy of European colonialism, that dehumanization of everyone who's not white and European. So it's a continuous kind of trend. People tend to ignore the fact that Israel is a settler colonial project. Part of the justification of establishing the state of Israel, a Jewish homeland in Palestine, by leading Zionist leaders is precisely using colonial tropes and language. We're going to be the representation of civilization and a region of the world that people are uncivilized. So, you know, it's all comes back from colonial roots of the conflict. Settler colonial project that is based on the elimination of Palestinians. If you want to eliminate people, you have in a way to convince yourself or try to convince others that there are less of a human being to be able to do to them what is being done today to the Palestinians. Now everyone talks about settler colonial studies. They talk about Patrick Wolfe, the 90s. It gets consolidated as a field of studies. But it was Faiz Sayer, a Palestinian intellectual who as early as the 60s, identified what is unique about the Zionist settler colonial project in comparison to traditional colonialism. He understood from the beginning for this project to succeed, Palestinians were standing in the way of this project. They had to be expelled from their homeland because their existence, by just simply existing on their homeland, they were an obstacle to this project.
- [37:31]
A
It's not hard to find find the statements of revisionist Zionists going back 100 years now, or a little bit more than 100 years from the era of the Balfour Declaration, who said these things right? They were going there not just to be immigrants and to integrate within the existing society, but to create their own state. Not just a homeland for the Jewish people, but a state. Dirk, as the historian here, I'm eager to hear what you have to say about this. But I'll just say in last week I did do an episode about the Balfour Declaration and a legal petition that has been filed with the British government by Palestinians. I interviewed Victor Katan of the University of Nottingham and he reminded me that about this whole debate about colonialism and this very charged word that you hear on college campuses today, he said the very first Zionist bank was the Jewish Colonial trust established in 1899.
- [38:23]
B
So Victor is right, and there are many other examples like that. What people forget is that until the end of the Second World War, colonialism wasn't a dirty word in the West. I mean, it's really only later in the era of decolonization, in the 50s and 60s that colonialism became tainted to some extent. Although there are many in the metropoles in London who still thought it was a great idea. Don't forget they had settler colonies like Kenya and so forth, which they held onto as long as possible. But certainly in the first half of the 20th century empires, colonialism was considered a force of progress and indigenous societies were seen as feudal and backwards. So that's why the Labor Party in England or Great Britain, for example, was pro Zionist, because this was with a force of progress. The Zionist settlers were socialists, they set up kibbutzes, whereas Palestinian society was governed by these mukhtars and sheikhs and so forth. You know, this was very backwards and that Zionism was introducing modernity into the Middle East. So if you go back and think with the categories at the times, it's not a paradox that Zionists would adopt the language of colonialism. That's one aspect. The other aspect is that of course they were non state actor, so they needed to rely on empires and states like Great Britain and so forth for patronage. And so they needed to appeal to them and say to them, our project of a national home in Palestine, Minaret's Israel will be useful for you. So they appealed to the British Empire in terms of their imperial interests. Now that switched after the war and then moved to the Americans where America becomes a patron. So looking at this historically, I think it's possible to do so without undue pandemics and the high octane yelling and screaming you get on university campuses and so forth. I want to also add that, you know, when some of us started talking about settler colonialism more generally, for example, my first book was about genocide in Australia. Now I've written very little about Palestine. You know, that was in 2004, so it was over 20 years ago. And you know, this discourse was fairly new in academia, although as Sonia says, it has deeper roots in Palestinian discussions into the 60s and certainly was not a term that college students used as a slogan. That's a very recent phenomenon. Now as an academic, I'm against slogans. More generally, I'm interested in nuanced thinking and not simplistic thinking. If I had a college student say to me, Israel and Zionism is nothing but a settler colonial project, I would say, well, I don't think that's right. It's also A national project.
- [41:02]
A
Yeah, a national liberation movement.
- [41:04]
B
Europe as Jewish people understand it. The thing is, you know what I mean? By comparison, complexity, nuance is that two things can be correct at the same time. So these are the kind of things that academics try to do to get students to think in more complex and nuanced terms.
- [41:19]
A
And Zionists differed among themselves. And the ideas, of course, like any national liberation movement, change over time. Right. They're not static over the course of a century.
- [41:30]
B
Well, they have different factions, they have rivalries within themselves. There are different versions of. Of Zionism.
- [41:35]
A
Yeah, so there's Zionism as a national liberation movement. It was also a colonial project. It was also immigration, but immigration with a certain purpose.
- [41:45]
B
What's the difference between an immigrant and a colonist? Yes, an immigrant comes to join the existing society and integrate to some extent. A colonist comes to take it over. And that's the difference. Once again, you have to look at different scales. Refugees from Europe who came with nothing but the suitcase, legally or illegally to Palestine in the 1920s and 30s, didn't think of themselves as colonists. They were just happy to be safe somewhere. Right. But the people who were organizing this, like Chaim Weizman and others, Ben Gurion and so forth, they did have a particular project which was to demographically overwhelm the indigenous Palestinian society. Let's not forget, a lot of people don't realize at the end of the First World War, Arabs, so Muslims and Christians, where 90% of the population, 9, 0. Right. So by the time you get to the Second World War, the proportions are 30, 70. Right. So within 20 years there's been a massive demographic shift because of immigration, you know, refugees coming in, colonists, what have you. Right. Obviously this provoked a response from Palestinian society in different ways. Some of it was violent and ugly. Right. But Hans Kohn, the famous Czech born Jewish Zionist historian who ended up at City College where I work here in New York, left Palestine in 1929 after the Hebron massacre uprising because he said this was a very ugly anti colonial massacre of Jews in Hebron. He said, but you know, this is what happens when you enforce a colonization project on an unwilling majority population. He says if you look historically, because he was an historian of nationalism, you get this. This is a colonial situation. We're here without being invited and we're imposing something on this native population and it's inevitable. This is going to end in tears. There's going to be many more instances of this. So he left. He left and came to New York.
- [43:39]
A
With the backing of the British Empire during the Mandate period. Sonia, what do you make of the recent Western declarations recognizing Palestinian statehood in.
- [43:49]
C
The face of this logic of elimination, not only in Gaza, but also what we're seeing in the west bank and the government speaking openly about annexation and not recognizing by law that the Palestinian people has the right to self determination by saying clearly that there's not going to be a Palestinian state. I think it's important to have these kinds of declarations. However, we have to be cautious and careful. In my opinion, some of these declarations, they're not here to protect or support the Palestinian people in a way that an attempt to, let me put it this way, save Israel from itself. So it's not about the Palestinians, it's about saving Israel from a path of complete isolation, of being treated as a rogue state. So it's in a way for the protection of Israel, not the protection of Palestinians. I think what happened in Gaza and the genocide in Gaza in a way is it decolonized the international consciousness in the sense that people started seeing the link between the Nakba, the ethnic cleansing of 48, the different forms of political and other ways of elimination started back then, and the genocide that is taking place today. So in a way this opened a window of opportunity to envision a different kind of future, decolonial future. So I think some of the declarations try to reverse this tendency and they want to bring us back to one day before October 7th. And that is dangerous because it's not going to guarantee that this is not going to repeat itself. If these states are serious about supporting the right of Palestinians to self determination, it's very easy. The International Court of Justice and its advisory opinion of June 24 said it clearly Israel's presence in the west bank and Gaza violates the right of Palestinians to self determination. It violates the prohibition on acquiring lands through war and it violates norms of international human rights law and international humanitarian law, including the prohibition on racial segregation and apartheid. All these norms are considered what we call jus cogents or peremptory norms of international law. The violation of these norms have clear consequences for third states, including the duty not to recognize these violations, not to aid and assist in these violations and to collaborate to bring an end to these violations. Put differently, this is language of sanctions. So if they really want to protect the right to Palestinians to self determination, it's not enough to recognize a fictitious state and ignore the advisory opinion guidelines of a roadmap to achieving this right.
- [46:37]
A
You brought up the Nakba of 1948. The catastrophe for Palestinians was the founding of the independent state of Israel. Martin Shaw, the historian, he's a political scientist. Political scientist, sociologist.
- [46:50]
B
Yeah.
- [46:50]
A
Thank you, Derek. Yeah. In the roundtable that you organized on Gaza and genocide studies, his latest essay is out where he says the Israeli project to eliminate Palestinian society had largely been implemented before 2023. I'm quoting his article here. Successive waves of expulsion destroyed Palestinian society and the majority of the territory as the foundational genocidal event. The forced removal of 750,000 Palestinians during the Nakba of 1948 was followed by the expulsion of another 300,000 in the 1967 war. And over the 56 years before 2023, persistent further removals from the areas occupied as a result of that war, which represented slow motion genocide.
- [47:38]
B
Arab captives are held for evacuation to Acre. Women flee with what belongings they can carry. And as Palestine struggles for national existence, the conflict catches the inevitable innocent in its toils.
- [47:52]
A
How is this going to be taught? Dirk, you get to this in your essay in the Berlin Review. You reflect on Theodore Adorno, the German philosopher, his observations about German society after the Second World War and how Auschwitz needed to be taught, or how German people were conceptualizing or understanding what their nation had done during the Second World War. What is going on in Germany today? And how's the world gonna process this and convey the information accurately so further generations know?
- [48:25]
B
Okay, thanks for that lead in. So Teodor Adorno, a famous.
- [48:30]
A
It was a very long lead in, but go ahead. Sorry.
- [48:32]
B
Yeah, Marxist philosopher who wrote the famous book Dialectic of Enlightenment with Max Horkheimer. So they fled Germany in the 30s because of the Nazis, and then were mainly in California and in New York wrote this important book, Dialectic of Enlightenment. And Adorno then led a series of studies on the studies in prejudice they were called where we get the idea of the authoritarian personality in berkeley in the mid-1940s. Anyway, they both end up back in Frankfurt after the war and Horkheimer renums his professorship and resumes leadership of the Institute for Social Research, which was the research institute they'd established before the war. They were welcomed back by the university to renew their work and of course, as an act of contrition on the part of the university in light of their forced flight as Jewish refugees. Now they of course were very ambivalent about being in Germany, given the circumstances, but they may do. And in the late 50s there were a series of nasty anti Semitic incidents. There were, for example, desecration of Jewish cemeteries and so forth, and also the rise of a far right political party. And in this context, Adorno started to give radio addresses for public education. One of them was in 1959 with the title was what does it mean to say we should work through our past. And then the one that you're referring to was called Education after Auschwitz in 1966. And these have become canonical essays in German re education since then. You know, the idea is that we'll get people to read Adorno and we'll elaborate his ideas so that the youth of Germany no longer attempted by far right parties. You know, it's to inoculate each generation of Germans against National Socialism or politics, which are very similar to that. Okay, the essay is canonical and fascinating and worthwhile and complex, which I'm not going to get into all its details here. But what he made clear is that he didn't back down from his very pessimistic views about modernity and genocide and the Holocaust from his previous work, which he ascribed to, if you like, a catastrophic historical system of domination and rational, untethered, rational calculation of administrative bureaucracies without any human or humane calculations. And yes, although he didn't really talk much about imperialism, colonialism, the kind of things that Martin Shor was going on about is what he had in mind, like this juggernaut of societies dominating other societies and exterminating people. Annihilatory expansionism, whether through capitalism and so forth. I mean, because he was a Marxist. Okay, now this is a very vulgar explanation of Adorno's thinking, but you know, he was a pessimist, right? But with his notion of Education after Auschwitz, he didn't think that you could unwind that the fascist potential was locked into any society because these societies produce frustrations in people because they make promises they can't fulfill. That's what he was basically saying about capitalism. These frustrations then get canalized into far right politics. What he wanted to do with Education after Auschwitz as a project was to at least put up some guardrails. Unless we undo the economic and political system that we have, these frustrations won't go away. But what we need to do is, since we can't do that, is at least put up some guardrails. He wanted to introduce what he called critical self reflection so people aren't tempted to blindly follow orders to massacre people or to fire people en masse. Inhuman kind of behavior. What I was doing in writing this essay called Education After Gaza After Education After Auschwitz was reflecting on Adorno project in light of the ruins of German memory culture today in relation to Gaza, it's like, what would education after Gaza mean? Like, imagine if Adorno was alive today, what would he say? So I argue that we would need to engage in the critical self reflection that he was recommending. And that would be very painful for many Germans because they have actually adopted a version of Adorno as their ideology, misinterpreted it. They would need to unlearn much of what they think they've learned accurately over the last few generations. But I end on a pessimistic note. I say that the German commitment to Israel is so visceral and so intrinsic to their identity as post Holocaust subjects that actually they can't do it. I make this one terrible analogy, which is comparison is between Anna Frank, because I was living in Frankfurt over the summer when I wrote this piece. She was a little Jewish girl from Frankfurt who with her family fled to Amsterdam and as you, as many of your listeners will know, was hiding in an attic to escape the Nazis until the family was portrayed. And she ended up in Auschwitz and died of typhus, but wrote this amazing diary which has made her famous as her father popularized it after the war. Now she's an icon of memory in Germany. In fact, there were pictures of Anne Frank on billboards throughout Frankfurt. I was there for various events to commemorate her. And there's even an educational institute in her honor, you know, the Anna Frank Educational Institute in Frankfurt. Now on the other hand, you have Hindraja, who stands in for the, you know, tens of thousands of Palestinian children. She was a little girl who was in a car convoy which was then shot up by Israeli tanks. And what we have is the transcript of her hapless phone conversation where she was trying to be rescued because everyone around her was shot and killed. But she survived for a couple of hours and she's making phone calls. This has all been recorded. You can see it on YouTube. Impossibly wrenching to listen to. And eventually her car was riddled with.355 shells or bullets and she died. She was murdered by Israeli soldiers. She has become an icon in the Palestine movement and you'll see her images everywhere. This pretty little girl with her graduation ceremony. And how could it come to this? Now the question I put to Germans in this essay is that why would it be impossible for you to remember Anna and Hind together? And the reason is this, for Germans, people like Hinn need to die so that people like Anna can survive and absolve them of the guilt of the Holocaust. They need Germans, need Jews and Israelis and especially this partnership with Germany and Israel at the state level for their post Holocaust absolution. And without that, they openly say then we have no historical right to exist, given what we did in the Holocaust. I mean, there's a lot of German acceptance of their guilt, but their only way to come to terms with it is to gain the forgiveness of the people that they killed. And for them, Palestinians figure as an enemy in this strange circular relationship because they see Palestinians as an ontological enemy of Zionists and Jews and even Ahindraja, because she's not dangerous now, but she could grow up and become dangerous in the future. And she's dangerous, according to their logic, solely because she demands the right of self determination as a Palestinian person, her national right to which are recognized under international law. So there's actually no interest in the victims in Gaza, in Germany, and they can't even admit it. They're not even aware of the psychic investments that they have in this entire terrible episode.
- [56:21]
A
It's a distortion of history. Using never again the slogan never again to defend rather than condemn the ongoing violence against Palestinians for the reasons you mentioned, the Palestinians are viewed as the enemy of the Jewish people and the Germans must have the acceptance, the forgiveness of the Jews for what the Nazis did during the Second World War.
- [56:45]
B
Well, in fact, Martin, what it allows me to come back to Adorno, it's in that essay he says we need to reorder things so that never again Auschwitz becomes the categorical imperative for German life now that has existed. I mean, people constantly refer to never again in German politics in relation to Israel. And in the last two years, the slogan you'll see in German posters and in the media is that Never again is now. That is the Hamas attack according to the German political class put us to the test. Like now is the time we have to stand with Israel because Hamas are like Nazis. That's how they view these things. It was a genocidal attack on the Jewish population of Israel. So we need to stand by them in the tradition of Adorno, although they don't reference Adorno, that's sort of been forgotten in the meantime. So that in implementing, as you say, the notion of never again, they're actually in fact supporting a genocidal project. And that's something that they really haven't been able to face. That said, the reason I say the political class is that 80% of Germans are against this. 80% of Germans are against this unqualified German support for this campaign. So I'm not generalizing about, quote unquote the Germans. I'm talking about the political class.
- [58:03]
A
On the next episode of History As It Happens. What does it mean when we say Israel has a right to exist? Where does that question come from? Are we referring to the state, the regime, or the current government? And remember, tell your friends subscribe to the podcast to skip ads and get bonus content@historyasithappens.com and make sure you sign up for my free weekly newsletter. Go to Substack and search for History As It Happens.
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B
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A
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A
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