“We are Fighting Nazis”: Genocidal Fashionings of Gaza(ns) After 7 October

On 31 October 2023, Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Gilad Erdan, wore a Judenstern (“Jew’s star”) while addressing the United Nations Security Council. His provocative adornment of the patch, a symbol of the genocidal marking of European Jews during the Nazi Holocaust, was intended to remind the body of the consequences of “staying silent in the face of evil” in the wake of Hamas’ deadly attack on Israel on 7 October. Erdan swore the ambassadorial team would wear the star “as a symbol of pride” until the body formally condemned Hamas’ actions. In response, Dani Dayan, chairman of Yad Vashem, vehemently opposed the move saying that the “yellow star symbolizes the helplessness of the Jewish people”: that Jewish people now have “an independent country and a strong army” and must “place a blue-white flag on the lapel, not a yellow patch.”Footnote¹

Erdan’s performative gesture and condemnatory responses to it can be interpreted as a negotiation and strategic conflation of the two existentially threatening forces at the nucleus of the Zionist political imaginary. Through the discursive entanglement of the Nazi and the Palestinian, we see a political-cultural stage upon which the alienated diasporic European Jew of the twentieth century is articulated as vulnerable to a genocidal annihilation that the contemporary muscular Israeli Jew is no longer.Footnote² Through the evocation of historical Jewish suffering, the Gazan/Palestinian – and specifically, after the October attack, Hamas as a [Sunni] Islamic nationalist group – has been configured by Israel as the new Nazi force whose attempted violent incursion into Israeli territoriality constituted a twenty-first century iteration of an allegedly enduring genocidal threat. The use of aerial tactics, thus, has constituted both a calculated (i.e. purportedly precise) and widely annihilatory means of managing the civilizational threat of a Nazified Hamas/Gaza.Footnote³

Scholarly responses to the ongoing war have been mired in competing historical and socio-legal interpretations of the very concept of genocide, and these fundamental disagreements are partially owed to deep divisions within the field of Genocide Studies itself. On one hand, some claim that Hamas’ massacres and hostage-taking of Israeli civilians constitute genocidal acts in themselves: violences that are inextricably linked to a global rise in antisemitism and the ongoing denial of both Jewish people’s and the state of Israel’s right to existence. While rightfully expressing horror at the brutality of Hamas’ attack, others still situate the enduring armed struggle within an ongoing process of settler colonial violence that has structured Palestinian life since the massacres and mass expulsions of 1948 Arab-Israeli War. Even as Genocide Studies is meant to exist as a transdisciplinary field accounting for a global scope of genocidal atrocities, its disciplinary core remains the Holocaust as an exemplar sine qua non of genocide following relatively conservative interpretations of Raphael Lemkin’s conception and its translation into the United Nations Genocide Convention.

These divergent epistemic structures – a divergence in which orthodox interpretations of genocide proceeding from the exceptionality of Nazi crimes are challenged by more troubled considerations of genocide within histories of colonial race-making and more multidirectional memoryFootnote⁴ politics – represent an overdue disciplinary engagement of the so-called “Palestine Question.”Footnote⁵ This, in turn, bears implications for the overwhelming limitations of international law in questions of genocide and our overreliance on its narrow interpretive power.Footnote⁶

Truncated History of Palestinian Anti-Zionism and/as Nazism

We might understand the genesis of the Palestinian-as-Nazi ontology as the undeniably real but nevertheless oft mythologized 1941 meeting between Adolf Hitler and Amin al-Husseini, by then the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. An Arab nationalist and anti-colonial figure, al-Husseini vehemently opposed both British rule in Mandatory Palestine and the Zionist proposition of a Jewish state. His participation in protests against Jewish immigration eventually led to his emigration to evade arrest by British authorities: first to French Mandatory Lebanon and Iraq in 1937, and then eventually to Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany in 1941. A slippage between antisemitism and anti-Zionism troubles al-Husseini’s legacy as his support for the Nazi Party’s ascent to power in 1933 was informed by his desire to curb Jewish immigration to Palestine; his desire for a political axis between the Arab world and fascist European powers, too, was predicated upon their recognition of Arab statehood and diplomatic reversals of the progress made towards the establishment of a Jewish state.

The infamous meeting between the Grand Mufti and Hitler took place on 28 November 1941. During the meeting, al-Husseini reaffirmed his commitment to alliances between Arabs and Nazi Germany because they had shared enemies in “the English, the Jews, and the Communists.” In return, Hitler reassured him that Germany stood both “for uncompromising war against the Jews” and in “active opposition to the Jewish national home in Palestine.”Footnote⁷ This meeting – and an additional telegram from Reichsführer-SS Heinrich HimmlerFootnote⁸ – is taken as evidence of a political commitment and global racialized conspiracy of both al-Husseini and “the Arabs of Palestine and the Arab World” with the Nazis’ aspirations of eliminating global Jewry.Footnote⁹ Many retellings of this meeting, however, over-assert the Grand Mufti’s influence on Hitler’s plan: as told (multiply) by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and others, al-Husseini’s rejection of the prospect of Jewish immigration from Germany/Europe is interpreted as ultimately influencing Hitler’s pivot from mass expulsion to mass murder. The genocidal Final Solution, however, had already begun by the pair’s meeting: Hitler had already begun his invasion of the Soviet Union, and gangs of Einsatzgruppen had already begun mass killings of Jews, Roma, and partisans, including the September 1941 massacre at Babi Yar in Kyiv, Ukraine.Footnote¹⁰

This purported Nazi-Arab axis of antisemitism is further articulated by democratic Israel’s existence in a region described as a “hostile neighborhood/environment” because of the antagonisms of neighbouring Arab states (including states whose territories and sovereignties have been undermined by Israeli annexation).Footnote¹¹ This characterization exploits Orientalist characterizations of Arabs as counter-civilizational and anticipates Samuel Huntington’s post-Cold War articulations of an increasingly illiberal and fundamentalist “Islamic civilization” posing a threat to western liberal democracy. In the present (as in the past), Hamas’ attack is attributed to an antisemitism inherent to Islam or Arab nationalism rather than situating it in expressed Palestinian opposition, albeit violent, to unyielding Israeli occupation and dispossession. Comparably labelled as “immoral and terroristic” violence akin to Nazi fascism, Zionist commentators of the time similarly delegitimized the 1936 Arab uprising in Mandatory Palestine rather than engaging how “the parliamentary road to Arab sovereignty was obstructed by the Zionists until 1939,” the year of the revolt’s conclusion.Footnote¹² These characterizations complement the fabrications of Palestinians systemically produced in ethnocratic Israeli society in a way that justifies the state’s drive for permanent security through territorial expansion and carceral controls.Footnote¹³

The seeds that would eventually become Hamas were initially sown out of a frustration with the secular Palestine Liberation Organization’s failure to end the Israeli occupation. The expansion of Islamic political formations was enabled when, in 1976, Hamas’ eventual founder Sheikh Ahmad Yassin “applied to the Israeli occupation authorities for a license to establish the Islamic Association” as a cover for its various infrastructural and service work within the Gaza Strip. His application was approved the following year, and the Israeli government “hoped that cultivating the brotherhood would produce a counterforce that could weaken other Palestinian nationalist movements.”Footnote¹⁴ Contra to the Oslo Accords-created Palestinian Authority and the concessions it was willing to make through diplomatic engagement with Israel, Hamas’ political strategy revolved and continues to revolve primarily around rejections of “further concessions from the Palestinian side, including any commitment to disarm the resistance factions or to halt fire.”Footnote¹⁵

From its participation in the First and Second Intifadas to its electoral successes and assumptions of power (particularly after taking control of the Gaza Strip following Israel’s 2005 disengagement),Footnote¹⁶ the party has metastasized into something capable of producing the kind of violent militarized confrontation witnessed on 7 October. Characterized as the largest loss of Jewish life since the Holocaust (and the bloodiest in Israeli history), the language of “pogrom” was used to describe the attacks on the Nahal Oz, Kfar Aza, Magen, Sufa, and Be’ri communities. The Hamas-coordinated aggressive of secular and Islamic resistance groups ossified this anti-Jewish threat whereby the ontological singularities of perceived genocidal antisemitism and Jewish existential possibility are sublimated into Nazism and a twenty-first century re-enfleshment of the Holocaust, respectively. Per this discourse, then, survival of a reiterated attempt at Jewish annihilation necessitates and justifies an unrestrained military response.

Vanquishment by any Means

Following this reparative teleology of the establishment of a Jewish state, the evocation of Israel’s right to self-defenseFootnote¹⁷ operates as a present-day permanent security campaign and a historicized articulation of a protective Jewish fortressing and securitization that was not possible during the Holocaust but has since been actualized by the Israeli state. This is the essence of Dayan’s clarification. Israel swiftly responded to the October attacks with a campaign it has called “Operation Iron Swords,” and as an alternative to ground invasions that would make Israeli soldiers particularly vulnerable, unmanned aerial systems and autonomous weapons systems were paired with conventional manned aerial warfare. But the euphemistically described “surgical strikes” these systems produce utilize a machine learning logic of threat assessment and preemptive striking whose technological evolution has advanced from typical “colonial paradigms of dominion into imperial methods of remote disciplinary control.”Footnote¹⁸ Beyond merely identifying and eliminating threats in the present, Anthony Downey emphasizes that this “neocolonial ‘algorithmic command’” is “crucially and irrevocably implicated in the martial and political will to occupy the future.”Footnote¹⁹ Thus, inhered within this strategy, within Israel’s retaliatory campaign on Gaza, is a transtemporal logic of genocide that attempts to neutralize the Gazan Palestinian in the present so as altogether displace and/or eliminate its presence and foreclose the possibility of its future.

These algorithmic logics operate within a process of always already genocidal statecrafting that is not necessarily illegal because of how coloniality is imbricated within the international legal system: the perpetual war of permanent security, even as it annihilates, is not inherently criminal because it is simply operating in service of the quotidian Euromodern racial order. Notably, Bedour Alagraa describes catastrophe not as a chronology of discrete and individuated events, but as “a structural condition, and a way of life imposed as a form of political and social domination, beginning with the New World colonial encounter(s).” Evoking the “cruel mathematics” that formulate necropolitical calculations, the “smart” calculations of Palestinian military targets are a feature of another structuring process of catastrophe: the Nakba of 1948, literally “The Catastrophe” as proper noun in Arabic, which initiated the present and ongoing colonial epoch of Palestinian elimination.Footnote²⁰

Weeks into the assault, details emerged about Habsora (“The Gospel”), a system of target calculation “which is largely built on artificial intelligence and can ‘generate’ targets almost automatically at a rate that far exceeds what was previously possible.”Footnote²¹ According to the Israel Defense Forces, the system produces recommendations for airstrikes “with the goal of a complete match between the recommendation of the machine and the identification carried out by a person.” While the exact calculations for targeting are fairly opaque, the system “typically analyze large sets of information from a range of sources, such as drone footage, intercepted communications, surveillance data and information drawn from monitoring the movements and behaviour patterns of individuals and large groups.”Footnote²² Coupled with a greater permissiveness for civilian targeting and the claim that Hamas operatives are embedded in civilian infrastructure, this technological production of “legitimate military targets” proceeds also from the political imaginary in which all Gazans – including children, who comprise a devastating proportion of casualties – are collectively rendered as terroristic colluders with Hamas, thus justifying what immediately became a total war against the Palestinian “Other.”Footnote²³ (Despite the use of this “smart” guided technology, unguided “dumb bombs,” whose destructive capabilities pose an even greater threat to civilians, nevertheless comprise nearly half of all aerial strikes.Footnote²⁴)

Because of the legal impunity that Israel has enjoyed, the question of genocide in Palestine transcends the applicability of the Genocide Convention (though, arguably, present violence in Gaza includes nearly every act outlined in Article II) and can be better sociologically understood through the eight techniques of genocide outlined by Lemkin himself: a comprehensive frame of “political, social, cultural, economic, biological, physical, religious and moral” destruction that accounts for the more totalized “destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group.”Footnote²⁵ The bombing of universities, cultural institutions, refugee camps, religious sites, hospitals, and entire neighbourhoods; the targeted assassinations of journalists and killings of retreating and fleeing civilians; the deprivation of humanitarian aid, water, electricity, and the enforcement of the ongoing blockadeFootnote²⁶ constitute a wholesale attack of Gazan life far beyond any conceivably proportionate military response.Footnote²⁷ This total war is figured through both infrastructural destruction and spatiocidal attempts to make Palestinian land unlivable,Footnote²⁸ and displacement and forced evacuations per the goals of the originary Nakba.Footnote²⁹

Disciplinary Possibilities

Rather than contending with the materialities of the violence at hand, the casting of Palestinians and Muslim armed resistance as the primary postwar threat to Jewish Israeli existence creates an irresistible maneuver. Capturing Palestine in the ongoing western moral correction of the Holocaust mystifies the geopolitical machinations that produce ordinary processes of “demarcation, exclusion, elimination, and political reassertion” and necessitate mass death for particularly racialized people around the world.Footnote³⁰ With Gaza, and in the broader discourse around Palestine, the coincidental recognition of genocide as the “crime of crimes” and a definitional near-singularity of Nazi violence elides acknowledgement of a constructed asymmetry in genocide recognition: a failure to robustly confront the mass violence intrinsic to the Westphalian order. If “capitalism’s calculus of the necessary destructions of lifeworlds” animates the political economic arrangements of racial capitalism, how does Genocide Studies reckon with “the crime of genocide in a world where masses of people were never meant to survive”?Footnote³¹

The crisis of Genocide Studies, the rationale for its allergy to and general non-engagement of Palestine, lies in its uncritical promotion of legal normativities: a taken-for-grantedness of the delimiting of the “human” in human rights discourses and its de facto non-universality.Footnote³² Mainstream Genocide Studies fails to approach genocide as a productive practice of modern statecraft, meaning that it also often fails to consider how imperial practices and definitions of citizenship and belonging – i.e. quotidian designations of the populations that could be killed and/or enslaved – still inform legal discourses of genocide as the ultimate crime or political transgression. In this vein, rather than being examined as a settler colonial state whose establishment necessitated the elimination of existing populations, Israeli policy is interpreted solely as part of the aftermath of western resolutions of the consequences of the Nazi Holocaust. And in ideological and material relation with other settler statesFootnote³³ (namely, the United States) whose own denunciations or justifications of genocide are a matter of political utility or self-protection, these settler imaginaries at the heart of state formation come to define the legal grounds upon which the crime of genocide is argued. Invoking how the settler geographic imaginary of the American frontier is transplanted upon and duly fashions conceptions of Palestine, Moses writes that the claims made by “Israeli colonists trump the Palestinian right of self-determination in the minds of those who identify the Palestinians with ‘red Indians’ and associate the colonists … with their forebears who conquered the American interior.”Footnote³⁴ The International Court of Justice’s adjudication of South Africa’s charge of genocide against Israel, then, is competing with the political understanding that Palestinians can be killed and dispossessed as a necessary consequence of Israeli statecraft and that Israel is within its legal and political right to kill and dispossess them.

The deliberate uncoupling of genocide from the study of [settler] colonialism in the case of Palestine not only produces an ahistorical record of the Israeli state, it also perpetuates an irrefutably exceptional Eurocentric ontology of victimhood in which “the moral caché of indigenous survivors of colonialism is less than that of [Jewish victims of Nazism].”Footnote³⁵ Indeed, Lemkin’s conception of genocidal Nazi occupation is informed by his study of colonization in the Americas: his identified second phase of genocide, the imposition of the colonizer’s “national pattern,” may “be made upon the oppressed population which is allowed to remain, or upon the territory alone, after the removal of the population and the colonization of the area by the oppressor’s own nationals.”Footnote³⁶

The denazification of the Palestinian, so to speak, can only proceed through the following. First, it must allow a consideration of Palestinians as people with historical agency and a diversity of political goals not defined solely by their interpolation into the afterlife of the Holocaust. And second, it must cease the allowance of any equations of Palestinians (and Arabs) with Nazis as the allegedly natural enemies of Jewish people, as well as Zionism’s forced synonymity of the existence of the state of Israel with the survival of Jewish people. Truly egalitarian assessments of genocide and the ongoing question of Palestine must transcend the moral and historical fixity of victimhood that perpetually immiserates Palestinians of their humanity, rights, and claims to self-determination and aspires, instead, towards redressing the violences of colonial modernity.