jewish philosophy place

Your seers prophesied to you
Delusion and folly.
They did not expose your iniquity
So as to restore your fortunes,
But prophesied to you oracles
Of delusion and deception.

Lamentations 2:14

The book of Lamentations, read on the hot summer fast day of Tisha B’Av, puts the onus for the suffering of the people, not on the enemy who came to destroy, but on the political and spiritual leaders who bring upon themselves the murder and havoc and the destruction of the City.

On a long layover in Abu-Dhabi, the United Arab Emirates is a good topos for first surface impressions around which to think about interconnections between place and space. For the purpose of this little blog, that includes utopian imaginings regarding the place of Israel in the space of the larger world. Open for serious business, Zayed International Airport is a crossroad between West, South, and East Asia. My flight to Tel Aviv left at 3:25 AM.

As described by its designers at Kohn Pederson Fox (KPF). the port was built on an X-scheme: “The X scheme demonstrated the greatest programmatic efficiencies, reducing the average walking distance between points for those leaving, arriving, or transferring from Terminal A.” At KPF, they “see airports as cities–not just stagnant machines for moving people and cargo, but living, working, 24/7, flexible environments that grow and change. As such, we approached our design and planning for Zayed International Airport with considerations for lively mixed-use spaces, public art, and sustainability.” The airport is “raised up from the road level giving the appearance of sitting on its own plateau. In this context the building is the dominant and most imposing structure on the horizon with a profile silhouetted against the sky.”

Let’s start with point that is being mainly overlooked. Omer Bartov’s repeat opining in national media about Israel committing genocide in Gaza are many different things. First and foremost, they are the cri de cœur of an Israeli, an eminent researcher of the Holocaust. Bartov wants (he says so himself) is to see something better for his country, a future less traumatized and violent. He says this verbatim at the end of the most recent op-ed here at NYT, i.e. at the very point in the op-ed by which most readers will already have stopped reading, either because Bartov has confirmed their priors or has completely outraged them. But these lines are worth quoting in full because they tell us about this moment in the history of the Jews and the history of Israel. “Perhaps,” for Bartov, “the only light at the end of this very dark tunnel is the possibility that a new generation of Israelis will face their future without sheltering in the shadow of the Holocaust…Israel will have to learn to live without falling back on the Holocaust as justification for inhumanity. That, despite all the horrific suffering we are currently watching, is a valuable thing, and may, in the long run, help Israel face the future in a healthier, more rational and less fearful and violent manner.” Let’s note and leave aside the strange offhand comment and assert for ourselves that nothing about this carnage is “valuable thing” for anyone –Israeli and certainly not Palestinian. It is fair to say that Bartov’s interventions at the NYT and other media platforms express profound moral distress in the face of unprecedented destruction and death on October 7 and during Israel’s conduct of the war against Hamas in Gaza.

But, none of this has anything to do with genocide. Bartov, in this most recent opinion piece, one pocked by omissions, has not, in fact, made his own case that the destruction and death constitute the crime of genocide. Words like “goal” and “intent” are essential arguments about genocide in international law. The standard definition of genocide, determined  in 1948 by the United Nations, refers to a number of acts committed with intent to “destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such”  In a critical vein, Dirk Moses calls genocide “the crime of crimes.” The crime entails ascription of a special intent (dolus specialis), which for Moses is one of the problems of genocide as a conceptual term of art (The Problems of Genocide).

Is there special intent to commit genocide? In his review of the war some six months after October 7,2023,Bartov explains, “By May 2024, the Israel Defense Forces had ordered about one million Palestinians sheltering in Rafah — the southernmost and last remaining relatively undamaged city of the Gaza Strip — to move to the beach area of the Mawasi, where there was little to no shelter. The army then proceeded to destroy much of Rafah.” Bartov mentions in the next paragraph that these acts were “consistent” with “statements denoting genocidal intent made by Israeli leaders in the days after the Hamas attack.” As Bartov sees it, “I believe the goal was — and remains today — to force the population to leave the Strip altogether or, considering that it has nowhere to go, to debilitate the enclave…to such an extent that it is impossible for Palestinians in Gaza to maintain or reconstitute their existence as a group.” Or, he says, the intent of Israel’s war against Hamas is “[the Gaza] Strip’s destruction.”

Intent to do what? To commit what act and which crime? On one hand, claims regarding intent to force permanent, as opposed to tactical, population transfer as an act of state policy have yet to be proven. On the other hand, acts of complete destruction in Gaza and the enormous toll on civilian life might well constitute a clear, factual basis demonstrating intent to commit crimes of ethnic cleansing and other war crimes and crimes against humanity. But nowhere does Bartov commit himself to claiming that Israeli conduct in war demonstrates “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” A close, critical reader will notice that the most Bartov can say after these long months since May 2024 and October 2023 is that alleged acts of ethnic cleansing and the reality of mass death and destruction “can morph into genocide” –meaning that they do not yet constitute genocide “as such,” according to the recognizable definition (emphasis added).

Voicing frustration with scholars in Holocaust Studies, Bartov insists that among Genocide scholars there is a growing consensus that Israel is committing that very crime in Gaza. He cites Uğur Ümit Üngör who quipped that “there are probably scholars who still do not think it’s genocide,” but who then said, “I don’t know them.” But clearly everyone in Genocide Studies knows Dirk Moses and his work. Bartov himself mentions Moses in passing, failing to indicate that Moses has already weighed in here about Gaza. In an essay from late 2023 after October 7 entitled “More than Genocide,” Moses already pulled back from calling Gaza a genocide for reasons unique to his own theoretical approach to the study of genocide, political violence and settler-colonialism [sic].

Moses argues that international law is so narrowly defined as to make it impossible to accuse any country of committing the crime of genocide. In his words, it is “extremely difficult” to “[prove] that individual Israelis have committed acts of genocide…given the parameters set by international law.” What Moses argues here and throughput his own scholarship concerns the way the modern nation state is inherently premised upon the violence committed in the name of “national security.” The right of self-defense, he argues, constitutes the pretext for committing the most heinous acts of violence against civilian populations. For Moses, the question of genocide as beside the point –not just because genocide is impossible to prosecute; also because the genocide convention has been overdetermined by the Holocaust; and “because successful analogies with the Holocaust are virtually impossible to make—especially by Palestinians against Israel, for which the Holocaust memory is a state project. For Moses, the problem of genocide is that the concept sets genocide apart as the “crime of crimes,” blinding us to “other types of humanly caused civilian death, like bombing cities and the ‘collateral damage’ of missile and drone strikes, blockades, and sanctions” that are “driven by the permanent security imperatives of states and political movements seeking to found states” at an “apocalyptic” juncture in history (The Problems of Genocide, pp.477, 511). (For a recent essay by Moses on the “problem of genocide,” see here, but it’s not about Gaza and more a concise precis of his own work; h/t Ben Wexler)

Where does this leave Bartov’s analysis at this current impasse? Bartov must surely know that “genocide,” if not beside point, works towards another point. Bartov himself knows that genocide is not a neutral description, understanding  that “Nations, politicians and military personnel suspected of, indicted on a charge of or found guilty of genocide are seen as beyond the pale of humanity and may compromise or lose their right to remain members of the international community.” In this light, there is no reason to cast doubt on the counterclaim –as Bartov doubts, vociferously– that “malign interests and sentiments” against Israel motivate much of the Israel-Genocide-Gaza echo machine on campus and across the general culture. If Bartov’s Jewish critics are furious with him, it is because of the mediated spectacle to which Bartov is contributing on the basis of his own authority as a student of the Holocaust, and an Israeli dissident.

For many, the Israel Genocide Gaza meme is an operation of pure malice; for others, “Genocide in Gaza” reflect deep distress and political outrage (In good faith, I believe Bartov stands in the latter camp). In my own small circle in academic Jewish Studies and online Jewish community, Bartov’s presence on the scene meets deeply felt needs of colleague and friends on the left in the face of real distress and rage about Israel and the rightwing in Israel. Yet, for all that, it has become painfully obvious after October 7 that people in the world wish real malice on both the State of Israel and Jewish people more generally. The genocide meme is fuel to the fire, the reality of permanent conflict, the failure of two national communities to come to terms with each other via negotiated agreements based on mutual recognition. The “Israel Genocide Gaza” meme affects the volatile place of real and figural Jews in the Digital Age when the violence of Israel and Palestine is traded in a currency of “value” far away from the people who suffer the violence in real life.

5 thoughts about the word and the spectacle of “genocide” and Israel and Gaza — minus what genocide means, defined in 1948 by the United Nations, as “the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.”

— Pushing back against widespread claims in the media that ethnic Sudanese Arab forces committed genocide against Black Africans in Darfur, Mahmood Mamdani, a scholar of African Studies at Columbia University almost twenty years ago in 2007 had us consider here that the scale of violence in that region was the (natural?) result of historically complex, back and forth conflict.  About the politics of genocide, his words continue to resonate. “It seems that genocide has become a label to be stuck on your worst enemy, a perverse version of the Nobel Prize, part of a rhetorical arsenal that helps you vilify your adversaries while ensuring impunity for your allies.” Omer Bartov, again writing now here at the NYT, cites Mamdani’s essay to make the same point. “Nations, politicians and military personnel suspected of, indicted on a charge of or found guilty of genocide are seen as beyond the pale of humanity and may compromise or lose their right to remain members of the international community.”

–As a mediated event in the public sphere, the word “genocide” creates a moral circus and spectacle carried by big blaring headlines at NYT, New York Review of Books, the Guardian, New York Magazine. The word  is circulated across the internet and compressed into memes. Moral outrage in the face of collective trauma is leveraged into moral theater. “CRIME OF THE CENTURY” “I’M A GENOCIDE SCHOLAR. I KNOW IT WHEN I SEE IT.” Against this grain,Palestinian peace activist and Hamas critic Howidy Hamza writing here at Twitter responds to Alon Mizrachi –an a/z Israeli living in London?—comparing aid tents in Gaza to gas chambers, “No, Alon — that’s not criticism, it’s a blood-stained metaphor that confuses moral outrage with moral clarity. There’s plenty to be said about these centers, and not all of it is reassuring. But invoking gas chambers doesn’t deepen the critique — it collapses it into noise.”

–A cover image for the Omer Bartov op-ed at the NYT directly transposes Holocaust memory onto the war in Gaza, reflecting the combination of Genocide Spectacle and Holocaust Spectacle that marks the current discourse about the Jewish State:

–The right word. Debates about “the genocide” force those of us who care about Israel to defend the indefensible. What’s clear is the scale of death and destruction. Also clear are the politics. Israel would not be facing ethical and legal challenges in the public sphere, not to this degree, without Netanyahu and Kahanist Religious Right conducting a terrible Forever War with Hamas, unable and unwilling to conclude its part in a system of regional and international agreements and alliances. The good-faith bystander struggles for the right words to convey moral shock and political opposition, words that can match the complete and unpr4cedented scale of violence, death, and destruction in Isreal on October 7, in Gaza, and also the West Bank. Hachkhadah, hashmadah, hachravah, kilyon are Hebrew words connoting obliteration and complete destruction that convey something of that scale. For many months, a year ago, it has become increasingly clear that the war in Gaza is no longer a war of defense. The Israeli press, including establishment voices here, regularly reports that the fighting is simply listless, that military brass in Israel concede that there are no more military objectives. Without a recognizable military mission, nothing comes anything close to justifying this scale of destruction and death. But the war against Hamas in Gaza still might not meet the bar of genocide. A crime against humanity, tevach is the Hebrew word for massacre and slaughter, associated with butchering animals.

–Folding this discussion back to Mahmood Mandani’s statement about the political rhetoric of the word genocide. Sari Nusseibeh, says in an interview here at Die Zeit. “The words used in a political conflict serve less to describe reality. They are primarily instruments in this conflict; they are weapons and instruments of power. Those who speak of genocide or apartheid do so to establish legal and symbolic power. This applies to most of the terms used on both sides. I don’t need the word genocide, and I’m sure you don’t either. Nobody really needs it to see the horror, do they? The horror of what’s being done. You know, you can use any word you want for that” (Google Translate).