The Privilege of Staying Out of It

Ever since I taught my first course on the Holocaust, in 1991 at the University of Vermont, I have tried to avoid discussing Israel, Palestine, and Israel/Palestine in my classes and public presentations. Sometimes it has been easy to do so; at other times it has been more difficult. The list of topics to steer clear of is long—the Nakba, intifadas, Zionism, war in Gaza, Benjamin Netanyahu, the BDS movement, and more—and it has seemed like I would only bring trouble by weighing in.

There were more overt pressures, too, sometimes from students and colleagues but more often from audience members at public events. Messages arrived online, some anonymous, others bearing names of people I know, reacting to occasions when I expressed views about current affairs. Speaking at a roundtable on “Antisemitism and the U.S. Elections,” organized by the Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto in January 2017, brought me a scolding from a community member and a few unpleasant emails. Signing the open letter about US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's use of the term concentration camps to describe detention centers at the US-Mexico border elicited some nasty insults (“you are disgusting”) and threats to inform the administration of my university of what a “shameful” scholar of the Holocaust I was.Footnote ⁸ These incidents are nothing compared to the dangers people all over the world face every day, and I am not writing this to suggest I have it hard, only to point out that, when I think about it, I realize even these minor irritations added to my reluctance to initiate or join a conversation about the Holocaust and the Nakba.

And yet it seemed important to engage with this volume edited by Bashir Bashir and Amos Goldberg and face the challenges it poses to Holocaust studies and to me as a practitioner in the field. The list of topics to avoid was growing too fast, and people and events kept adding to it. Netanyahu's blatantly false and provoking claim in 2015 that Hitler got the idea of annihilating Jews from the mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husayni, was a pivotal moment for me.Footnote ⁹ Another turning point was the show of force of an anti-Black, xenophobic, antisemitic, Islamophobic confederacy at Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017. The Holocaust was not going to stay in a closed box labeled “1933 to 1945” or “1933 to 1948,” even though I organize my research and teaching that way. Or at least, it was taking more and more intellectual and emotional energy, and felt increasingly dishonest, for me to sit on that box or inside it, holding the lid down over my own head.

Students in my first-year seminar “Religion and Violence” helped me move toward rethinking the Holocaust and the Nakba through a broader discussion of Israel/Palestine. For their term project, students choose a topic to research and a format in which to present it. Over the years, I have had students create graphic novels about genocide in Guatemala, write plays about sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, make scrapbooks about the assault on Indigenous children and families through residential schools in Canada, and more. The key thing is that their work should open up questions rather than claim to resolve them.

Several years ago, a student developed a project on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, which he titled “Both Sides of the Wall: A Comparison between Palestinian and Israeli Viewpoints.” He interviewed two middle-aged academics, both men who had lived in Israel for about thirty years and now reside in Canada. One was Palestinian, the other Jewish. He asked them the same questions, showed them the same set of photographs, and juxtaposed their responses without attempting to analyze or judge them.

For me, two of those juxtapositions jumped off the page. The first involved this question: “Can you describe an event that comes to mind that highlights your interactions with the other side?” The Palestinian respondent told the following: “One day, I was studying for my oral driving test with my friend. So the soldiers took us and they brought us to a three foot wall and asked us to jump up and down the wall for maybe half an hour and they kept us there for maybe two or three hours, just for fun.” He went on to recount other humiliations until the interviewer had to ask him to move to the next question. The Jewish respondent answered the same prompt this way: “I don't think so. I don't have memories of very dramatic transformative events that would define the whole experience.”

The next question and pair of responses deepened the contrast. The student asked, “Did you have any interactions from people on the other side?” The Palestinian man answered, “Yes, we had to go and get permits from them. They would kick us at the checkpoints; they would beat me. That's it.” His Jewish Israeli counterpart responded very differently: “Living in Israel, you are almost never exposed to Palestinians. If you are not in the army, if you do not live as a settler in territories, then you almost have no opportunities to encounter Palestinians living in those places. So there is a clear separation. They go to work in Israel, but if you don't go to places where they work, then you don't really get to interact with them.” Reading and reflecting on that student's project was eye-opening for me because it highlighted an aspect of privilege I had not fully recognized before. Being privileged means you do not have to look, you do not have to see, and entire systems exist to protect you from doing so. By not looking and not seeing, you perpetuate a certain narrative without even thinking about it.

I grew up in Alberta as a white, settler European-Canadian. My family lived on a farm about twenty miles away from the community of Maskwacis, then officially called Hobbema, a territory home to the Maskwacis Cree, collectively, and individually known as Samson Cree Nation, Ermineskin Cree Nation, Louis Bull Tribe, and Montana First Nation. The Ermineskin residential school, one of the largest such schools in Canada, was located there. Until the mid-1970s, while I was attending school in a town nearby, Indigenous children my age who had been taken away from their homes were confined there, deprived of decent food, beaten for speaking Cree, and subjected to every form of abuse.Footnote ¹⁰ Privilege allowed me never to think about that residential school or even know it existed. Growing up, I did not give much thought to the situation of Indigenous people in general, including children my age who had been apprehended from their birth families in the so-called Sixties Scoop.Footnote ¹¹ Yet some of those children lived in foster homes in my neighborhood and rode on the school bus with me; some of them were my cousins.

Asymmetry

A word that comes up a lot in Bashir and Goldberg's book is asymmetry, and the privilege I am talking about is related to that phenomenon. Hearing my student's presentation and thinking about where I grew up made me realize that to be able to tell a personal story and have it be heard, as I am doing here, is another form of privilege. The most personal chapters in The Holocaust and the Nakba are by Yochi FischerFootnote ¹² and Omer Bartov.Footnote ¹³ These are beautiful essays, stirring and honest. Fischer recounts how her father, a Holocaust survivor and refugee, boasted about helping “grab” an apartment in a “big Arab house” near the sea for his mother. Bartov describes his project to write a “personal political history” of the first generation of Israeli citizens. In the process, he tells some remarkable stories—for instance, about he and his classmates shouting out to Golda Meir when she visited their high school, “What about the Palestinian people?” He recalls her response: “There is no Palestinian people. I am a Palestinian; I lived in Mandatory Palestine and have the ID to prove it.”Footnote ¹⁴

The word asymmetry features in both Fischer's and Bartov's chapters. There is a major asymmetry, Fischer writes, “in the responsibility of the Jews for the Nakba and the absence of responsibility of the Palestinians for the Shoah.”Footnote ¹⁵ A profound asymmetry exists, Bartov concurs, in the “tale” he hopes to tell: “This is the obvious asymmetry in the conditions of Jews and Palestinians.”Footnote ¹⁶ In a chapter titled “Counterpublic of Memory,” Nadim Khoury spells out the “highly asymmetrical conditions” of the “public sphere” encouraged by the Oslo Accords, “where Israelis and Palestinians could deliberate on their collective memory.” In fact, he points out, “there is no equality between Israelis and Palestinians,” and the public sphere was mostly created from the outside, “a byproduct of the dialogue industry.”Footnote ¹⁷

Bashir and Goldberg's volume does not include any chapters by Palestinian scholars that are as personal as those by Fischer and Bartov. Instead, for the Nakba, the voice of experience enters through literature. Three wonderful chapters at the end of the book, by Refqa Abu-Remaileh, Raef Zreik, and Yehouda Shenhav, analyze Elias Khoury's 2016 novel, Children of the Ghetto: My Name is Adam. Through the character of Adam Danoun, a Palestinian man who sets out to write a novel then changes to a memoir, readers of this volume catch glimpses of the Lydda massacre and perceive the ongoing silences around 1948. As expressed by Adam's interlocutor Murad, a victim and witness: “We were denied tears, denied crying, and when you are not able to cry in fear of death, words lose their meaning.”Footnote ¹⁸ Words are a kind of promise, so when there is no future, communication has no value.

In spring 2020, I assigned the Bashir/Goldberg volume in my graduate seminar, “The Holocaust: History and Historiography.” Before the term ended, COVID-19 struck and the university shut down, so we discussed Bashir/Goldberg online, through written posts. Our class was a sophisticated group of fifteen people, with varying levels of familiarity with the subject matter, ranging from students fluent in Arabic to others who encountered the word Nakba for the first time. All of them loved the book and especially appreciated its nuanced approach to comparison and its thoughtful use of literature. Like me, they found especially compelling Honaida Ghanim's chapter, “When Yaffa Met (J)Yaffa: Intersections Between the Holocaust and the Nakba in the Shadow of Zionism.”Footnote ¹⁹ Another case where “people” enter the narrative through literature, Ghanim's analysis of Rashid Hussein's poem “Love and the Ghetto” portrays the encounter between Jaffa—the city, Yaffa—a young woman and Holocaust survivor, and the young man who loves them both, as a joining of two destructions. Survivor and victim share the same desire, to live on, but their realities are opposed and their affections doomed. What started as a love affair dead-ends in a tomb and a cross.Footnote ²⁰

Amnon Raz-Kravkotzkin's carefully formulated conclusion to a chapter on Walter Benjamin, the Holocaust, and Palestine also resonated with students.Footnote ²¹ “The inevitable recognition of the right of the people of the land to return to it will indeed undermine and require the reconstitution of Jewish existence,” Raz- Kravkotzkin writes. “It is undoubtedly a source of anxiety,” he concedes, but worse is the anxiety “provoked by denial” because it can “only end in destruction.” Yet in all this, he continues, “we must also ask how the Jewish collective existence may be ensured and recognized. Attending to denied memory demands recognition of the Jewish-Israeli collective as well.”Footnote ²² Holding these conflicting positions together led to some creative expression. “I do not want to go too much into it,” one student posted, “but I feel the need to introduce Palestinian rap music as a way to counter the dominant narrative.” Another obliged by providing a link to the group DAM, singing “Mama I fell in love with a Jew.”Footnote ²³ The performance, they noted, “tries to use humor and sarcasm to confront the notion that Arabs and Jews should just learn to live together in peace. It highlights the impossibility of these relationships built on a colonial and therefore inherently unequal power structure.”

European History, Western Civilization

But what do these conflicts have to do with Europe? The answer is, of course, everything. In Bashir and Goldberg's words, “It is not aberration that Europe must fear, but the devil at the very core of modern, liberal, democratic, western civilization.”Footnote ²⁴ The Holocaust originated in Europe, and colonialism is a European product. Removing Europe from the Holocaust and the Nakba is tantamount to permitting those who started it in the first place to walk away, shaking their heads as if to say, “What is wrong with those people. Why can't they get along?”

Gil Anidjar's profound chapter starts from the concentration-camp jargon Muselmänner—Muslims—to reveal the Christian West's interconnected, often interchangeable views of Jews and Muslims.Footnote ²⁵ Anidjar repeats the phrase “Muslims in Auschwitz,” expounds on its implications, and reveals it to be part of a pattern:

Anidjar's point about “the Jew” and “the Muslim”—“the Semites”—as the Christian West's twin foils has enormous analytical and historical significance. At a practical level, it made me revisit my ongoing efforts to replace the hyphenated spelling of “anti-Semitism” with the more focused “antisemitism,” with its clear anti-Jewish dimension, or at least to contemplate what is lost with excision of that hyphen.Footnote ²⁷

European history—and by extension, Holocaust studies—has the luxury of separating itself from the rest of the world. As an expert on the Holocaust, I can choose not to think about the Nakba, but a counterpart who focused on that case of extreme violence could absolutely not do the same with regard to the Holocaust. What is more, I can invoke a noble-sounding excuse for doing so—equally part of a privileged narrative of ignorance—which is that I do not know the languages or have the training to say anything informed. And anyway, at my large university, I have colleagues who specialize in the Middle East, and I can easily refer students and others to them. But these very explanations reveal the disproportionate resources at my disposal and highlight the privilege of not being forced to be informed.

Isolating the Holocaust erases a lot of people, ideas, and possibilities. Mustafa Kabha's chapter on Najati Sidqi demonstrates this fact and reveals the stakes. Sidqi, an influential Palestinian intellectual of the interwar period, early and consistently identified Nazism as “a complete contradiction of his values as a communist, Arab, and Muslim.”Footnote ²⁸ Through his involvement in the Spanish Civil War, his work in the Communist Party (until he was expelled for opposing the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact), and countless publications, from popular books to newspapers, he stressed the terrible danger of “destructive Nazi doctrine and its barbaric regimes.”Footnote ²⁹

Erasure of Sidqi and likeminded intellectuals from the history and memory of Palestine and Israel illustrates how the present can taint interpretations of the past. Netanyahu's charge that Mufti Haj Amin al-Husayni had a “major role in developing the ‘Final Solution’” may have shocked Holocaust scholars in 2015,Footnote ³⁰ but as Kabha points out, it was by no means the first time current hostilities had fueled and been fed by allegations that Palestinians supported Nazi Germany's murder of Jews. Also disregarded in a narrative of unchanging enmity between Palestinians and Jews, Kabha observes, are the nine thousand Palestinians who fought for the Allies, and the British authorities’ maltreatment of Palestinian civilians in the wake of the revolt of 1936–1939. Sixty years later, Kabha reported, when he interviewed some Palestinians who lived during that time, “they angrily displayed scars or deformities inflicted upon them at detention centers during the revolt.”Footnote ³¹

Sealing the Holocaust in a closed system of “western civilization” also obliterates possibilities that existed or might have existed for alternate trajectories and histories.Footnote ³² In his chapter, Alon Confino tells the story of a Polish Jewish woman, Genya Kowalski, and her husband, Henryk Kowalski, survivors of the Holocaust, who arrived in Israel in 1949.Footnote ³³ The Jewish Agency assigned them “a house of Arabs who left,” but when they realized those people had in fact been thrown out, they refused to move in. “It reminded me how we were made to leave,” Mrs. Kowalski told Confino; “The plates on the table. It was scary.”Footnote ³⁴ To Confino, the Kowalskis’ act declares “by whispering not by shouting, the moral obligation of the victim toward other victims, particularly toward the victims created by one's own actions.”Footnote ³⁵ This quiet act of solidarity might also help us imagine the countless other such actions, large and small, that were precluded altogether by Jewish military force. Perhaps some Palestinians would have tried to help Jewish refugees, would have said to survivors of the Holocaust, “Come in,” as happened even in the deadliest zones of genocide, but expulsion meant there was no opportunity to tell that story or indeed for it even to happen.

Moving, Changing

With its theme of “empathic unsettlement” and its emphasis on the Nakba as an “explicitly continuing present,” Bashir and Goldberg's book is a call to think and also to act.Footnote ³⁶ Students in my graduate seminar took up the challenge. “I wonder,” one asked: “as people who study the Holocaust, what is our obligation? By studying genocide while simultaneously staying silent about the ways that the State of Israel has made political use of the history of the Holocaust, does our research make us complicit in the subjugation of Palestinians?” Another underscored Elias Khoury's distinction between past and present. “With the Holocaust,” the student wrote, “we have no capacity to change the events of the past. With respect to the Nakba there is an urgent obligation to address an ongoing injustice.” A third responded to the melding of history and power: “For the present understanding of the Holocaust to justify Israeli policy, the uniqueness of the Holocaust becomes essential, as a kind of necessary evil to create the conditions for the Jews so that this may never happen again. The shifting of Holocaust responsibility is terrifying!”

When I assigned The Holocaust and the Nakba, I shared with students my reluctance to address this issue. But I told them I considered it my responsibility to help people who may teach about the Holocaust—including them!—reflect on where they stood and how they wanted to position themselves. “If we can't find a safe space in a graduate seminar on the Holocaust to listen and speak openly,” I asked them, “where could we ever hope to do so?” Their willingness to jump in, disagree, ask questions, adjust and revise their own posts, and above all to listen and think together said a lot about them as scholars and people. It was also a magnificent tribute to a book that invites intellectual creativity and offers anyone who cares to join the discussion “a new syntax and grammar of history and memory.”Footnote ³⁷

Reading The Holocaust and the Nakba raised a question for me about the discipline of history. Are historians too fixated on answers, arguments, conclusions, and closure? A student in last year's seminar reminded me of an exchange about Indigenous people's claims to restitution in Canada. “When will it end?” a student had wanted to know. Why do we expect solutions, I asked in turn? Maybe studying the Holocaust serves as a warning about describing people—women, Jews, Black people, Indigenous people, Muslims—as questions to be resolved and problems ripe for “final solutions.” One student quoted Hannah Arendt's 1945 criticism of the “valiant attempts of contemporary historians to lend events a certain grandeur.”Footnote ³⁸ Others noted the racist framework of that same article, with Arendt's references to the “Dark Continent” and “savage tribes.”Footnote ³⁹ I thought of the danger of “big ideas,” so powerfully articulated by Nell Painter with her penetrating observation that “a notion of freedom lies at the core of the American idea of whiteness.”Footnote ⁴⁰

One lesson from Bashir and Goldberg's book is that history, if it is going to be anything other than a means of domination, needs people. Like Genya and Henryk Kowalski, whose names Confino's title uses to contrast the Hegelian pomposity of History—“When Genya and Henryk Kowalski Challenged History”—people and their complex, unpredictable lives (even if they are fictional lives) are the greatest disruptors and “contaminators” of all.Footnote ⁴¹ This book does not contain many jokes, although Yehouda Shenhav quotes one from the poet Mahmoud Darwish, in an exchange with a Jewish Israeli: “Do you know why we Palestinians are famous? It's because you are our enemy.”Footnote ⁴² Shenhav uses that quip to highlight a serious point: “The Palestinians needed to become the Jews of the Jews in order to be seen.”Footnote ⁴³

When Bashir and Goldberg's volume first came out in Hebrew in 2015, I knew I wanted to assign it in my seminar, but I had to wait for the English edition. It was not ready for 2019, so we read Bashir and Goldberg's 2014 coauthored article, “Deliberating the Holocaust and the Nakba: Disruptive Empathy and Binationalism in Israel/Palestine.”Footnote ⁴⁴ It is an excellent piece, and many of the main ideas appear in some form in The Holocaust and the Nakba. Missing, however, is my favorite part, about the Holocaust exhibition of 2009 in the village of Naalin. The exhibition was the idea of Khaled Kasab Mahameed, a lawyer from Nazareth, who believed Palestinians should educate themselves about the Holocaust in order to understand Israeli Jewish society. Bashir and Goldberg characterize the project as “unsettling” in its willingness to confront the enemy's catastrophic history. But it also signaled to Israeli Jews, in the authors’ words, “Yes, we are willing, however hard and challenging it may be for us, to engage with your history but we do not abide by your narrative.”Footnote ⁴⁵

The Naalin exhibition project models what I try to encourage in my history classes: engagement, understanding, presenting, discussing, switching the frames, interrupting the gaze, and turning the tables. In short, I want to open up multiple possibilities. Refqa Abu-Remaileh offers another model. She cites the poet Darwish on “the little-acknowledged pleasure of the Palestinian story.” Their story has an “open frame that provokes, dislocates, decenters, and creates ‘new kinds of thinking.’” Abu-Remaileh observes: “It has immense potential for the radical, ethical, and transformative, and even for the disharmonious, unresolved, and unreconciled, which can culminate in a great capacity for aesthetic and political freedom. In short, it is a story that can contain itself and its opposite and, in this sense, can contain both the Nakba and Holocaust.”Footnote ⁴⁶

A student in my graduate seminar suggested an additional model for inviting “new kinds of thinking.” They were involved in a project in Germany where newly arrived refugees served as educators at Holocaust memorial sites. The goal was for these people “to reinvigorate the German narrative of this past with their own experiences.” It was incredible, the student said. Using vocabulary from Bashir and Goldberg, they described the project as “a kind of empathic partnership, one that leads neither to appropriation nor to submission.” And without a doubt, “it does create a type of disruption.” Like Najati Sidqi, Genya and Henryk Kowalski, and Khaled Kasab Mahameed, the refugee Holocaust educators complicate and interrupt master narratives of the past and attest to the relevance of Bashir and Goldberg's book. Its editors and contributors may not be able to fulfill the promise in the subtitle (“A New Grammar of Trauma and History”), but by opening windows onto lives and perspectives rarely brought together, they definitely make the hoped for “decent contribution.”

Some Methodological Remarks

In the field of genocide studies, there have been long debates about the terms Holocaust and Shoah. The Holocaust has become a metaphor for the uniqueness of Jewish suffering and trauma, whereas genocide has been used as a more general term in international law, politics, and history. Of course, the exceptional and exclusive usage of the word Holocaust can be and has been disputed. Nevertheless, the attempted complete destruction of European Jewry stands out in modern history due to the sheer numbers of victims, its spatial range (which might have included Palestine had World War II taken a different course), and mode of organization. Although this might appear contradictory, one may conclude that precisely because the Holocaust is unique in many regards, it has served as a vantage point for studying and assessing other genocides. Thus, over time it became relativized, sometimes for overtly political reasons (e.g., when Germans who had been removed from eastern Europe after 1945 claimed equal victim status with Jews), and sometimes in service to academic agendas. One of the lasting merits of genocide studies is that it has made a comparative agenda explicit and opened up debates on how genocides could be compared.

The very act of bringing two or more objects of study together is controversial in and of itself. Many debates about historical comparisons have evolved around variations of “apples and oranges,” and how two objects of study might not be comparable.Footnote ³ However, comparison and other relational approaches such as the study of cultural transfers (which was pivotal for nation building in the Middle East) and histoire croisée bring two or more objects of study together and put them on the same analytical level. This can also be done through the conjunction “and,” which is used in the title of the book (The Holocaust and the Nakba) and indicates an implicit comparison, while it explicitly argues that there was a strong correlation. Hence the question why the Nakba is placed in the same context as the Holocaust merits discussion. Is that reference point and object of comparison indeed the obvious one? Or might it be more fruitful to debate the Nakba in other comparative and relational directions?

Mentioning and correlating the Holocaust and the Nakba in one short sequence of words sends a clear signal: it indicates that the Nakba was traumatic too. This is hard to dispute, but if two genocides are compared and correlated via the deliberate construction of comparisons, the goal is not to falsify one case as not being genocidal. There is an underlying assumption of similarity that justifies the common study in one terminological framework. Although the term Holocaust still conveys uniqueness, as demonstrated by the fact that it is rarely used in the plural, it is commonplace to speak about genocides and to assume that the worst of all crimes against humanity have occurred multiple times in various places and periods.

Genocide versus Ethnic Cleansing

The universalization of the Holocaust through the term genocide was built upon a very broad legal definition. According to the 1948 United Nations Convention on Genocide, the destruction of a group is defined in much broader terms than physical killing. The removal of a group from a given territory and even a suppressive assimilation policy destroying its culture could be considered genocide. It remains doubtful whether Rafał (later Raphael) Lemkin had this in mind when he invented the term, first in Polish (ludobójstwo) and then in English. We do know, however, that Lemkin, who was well informed about the multiple crimes committed against Poles, was not only Jewish, but also a citizen of the Polish Republic. He did not seek to create a term reserved for one ethnic or national group, but a more universal term, and he succeeded. The very fact that genocide became so broadly defined by the United Nations might be considered a pyrrhic victory. The wide scope of the term as it was codified in 1948 was one of the reasons it was hardly ever used in international politics during the Cold War. There were too many conflicts and wars for which this term could have been applied, hence it was hardly ever invoked.

The cases of the Christian Poles and Polish Jews (many of whom, including until his emigration Lemkin, might be labeled Jewish Poles) during World War II are not only key to understanding the evolution of the term genocide, but also show how comparison of the two cases can help to demonstrate the difference between genocide and ethnic cleansing. A very brief working definition of the latter term is the systematically organized, enforced removal, by violent means, and usually permanently, of a group stigmatized due to its ethnicity or nationality.Footnote ⁴ The Nazis certainly attempted to decapitate and enslave the Polish nation. This is why they shot tens of thousands of intellectuals, priests, and public servants, and incarcerated even more in concentration camps. One could argue that in the Polish case a genocide was in the making, though it could not be carried out due to the priority of the war and of murdering the European Jews.

Nevertheless, three key differences existed in the treatment of Christian Poles and Polish Jews, which helps us distinguish between genocide and ethnic cleansing. The first one was territorial. The Nazis planned to remove up to 10 million Poles from the annexed territories in their megalomaniac attempt to expand the German Lebensraum. Because of the priorities of the war against the Soviet Union, the Nazis expelled and resettled just under three hundred thousand Poles to the occupied General Government. Certainly, after the presumed victory, that part of Poland was supposed to be ruled and settled by Germans as well. Nevertheless, the primary goal was territorial expansion, to exploit and chase out Poles, not to kill as many of them as possible. A strong territorial imagination was evident in all cases of ethnic cleansing, covering borders and lands where unwanted minorities could be brought. In the case of a genocide, there is either no concept of an external homeland or transporting a group thereto is deemed out of the question. This is symbolized by the infamous end of the railway tracks in Auschwitz-Birkenau: they did not lead to a territory for the Jews, but to a void, a space of pure nihilism and death.

A second key difference was whether members of the persecuted group were regarded as suitable for assimilation. The Nazis did not want to dilute and spoil their imagined German nation by racial mixing. However, assimilation of specific groups of Poles was considered possible and was actively encouraged in some regions. Hence the racist ideology, and its implementation differed vastly from the annihilation of the Jews. Although Christian Poles suffered tremendously from German crimes against humanity, approximately 90 percent of this group survived the German occupation. Among Polish Jews, the victim to survivor ratio was the exact opposite, only about 10 percent survived the Holocaust, affecting the narration of the traumatic experience. In retrospect, we may consider the Holocaust a trauma, but we must consider that for many more Jews it was a traumatic and a lethal experience. That means that the vast majority of possible narrators—I prefer to analyze their activities as an individual, creative, and transgenerational process (which many of the articles in the Bashir/Goldberg volume show), not as a seemingly objectivized narrative—were simply dead. Moreover, a substantial minority of the surviving Polish Jews were survivors of a different trauma; they had been deported by Soviet security forces to the East, and thus had survived by chance.

Although the chances of survival in Kazakhstan or Siberia were much higher than in areas occupied the by Germans, some aspects of the Soviet deportations in 1940–1941 and in 1944 bring them close to a genocide. The mortality rate among the deportees was much higher than in ethnic cleansing; it reached almost 25 percent in cases such as that of the Chechens.Footnote ⁵ Also absent was a clear territorial vision. Most deportees were brought to a no man's land, not to an imagined external homeland or nation state. However, the suffering and the lethality of Soviet deportations of Jews still fades in comparison to that of the Holocaust. Even in the worst phases of Stalinist antisemitism, the Soviet Union never had the primary intent of the mass killing of its Jewish nationality. If we consider these differences—the primary intent, the underlying ideology and its implementation, and the mortality versus survival rates—we can recognize a big difference between ethnic cleansing and genocide.Footnote ⁶ This distinction has also been recognized in international law, which distinguishes between various crimes against humanity and the ultimate crime, genocide. The distinction has been further developed by the International Court on the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague. The court did try many Bosnian Serb perpetrators of acts of genocide. But eventually, after a number of revisions, the ICTY decided to try for genocide only Bosnian Serb functionaries who were directly involved in the intentional mass murder of some eight thousand Muslim men and teenagers in Srebrenica. It stressed the principle of dolus specialis, which in most legal systems serves to distinguish between murder and manslaughter. This distinction makes sense, as does the focus on actual killing, and not on the “wanton destruction” of material objects, though that has often preceded mass killing.

An important debate emerged at the turn of the twenty-first century concerning whether and how an agenda of ethnic cleansing can escalate and result in a genocide. Norman Naimark has argued that the Nazis first wanted to remove the Jews from Germany, and only went on to kill them en masse after the invasion of the Soviet Union.Footnote ⁷ A fine point, though we should not underestimate the violent and lethal racism of the National Socialists. Nevertheless, other European cases, such as the Romanian policy toward the Bessarabian Jews, or the persecution of Jews and Serbs by the Croatian Ustaše, demonstrate how ethnic cleansing can mutate into genocide.Footnote ⁸

The line separating ethnic cleansing from genocide was blurred in the “white” settler colonies as well. The westward deportation of the indigenous peoples of America in the nineteenth century (deportation being characterized by the fact that it did not occur across international boundaries, but within a single state) built upon greed and racialized contempt. Native American suffering and the mortality rate were extremely high due to neglect, maltreatment, and diseases. There was also a lack of a territorial vision, except to concentrate various indigenous peoples in so-called reservations, which could be changed and dissolved any time if overriding material interests like the extraction of mineral resources presented themselves. The deportations in the Americas were certainly more lethal than the Nakba.

Can the Nakba “largely be explained in the context of European settler colonialism,” as the editors claim in their introduction to the book? (See page 15.) Was Palestine, if we zoom in again on Europe and the Mediterranean, another Algeria? It seems doubtful, not only because of the ancient roots and history of Jews in the region, their presence in the Ottoman Empire, in particular the Vilayet of Beirut or the Sandzhak of Jerusalem, or later as a substructure of the British colonial empire. Neither the eastern European nations ruled by the Habsburg and the Russian empires nor the Ottoman Jews were members of colonizing nations like the French, English, Dutch, or Belgians, and Germans. The history of these western countries served as the point of departure to develop “postcolonial studies.” Hence, postcolonialism is an occidentalist term, that can be applied to the Jewish-Palestinian conundrum only with great caution. Some Middle Eastern and Sephardic Jews took on the role of middlemen under British colonial rule, yet they were not members of a colonial or actively colonizing nation. We should be cautious about making judgements about the “absolute wrong of settler-colonialism” (citing Edward Said on page 14) because this term has been invoked too many times in European history to claim land and power and to chase out national minorities. The Bohemian and Silesian Germans and the Galician Poles were attacked and eventually ethnically cleansed in 1944–1948 based on the claim that they had come late to where they lived as illegitimate colonizers.

If we consider all these comparable (not be equated with similar) cases, we can clearly recognize that the mass expulsion of the Palestinians constitutes a case of ethnic cleansing. However, in some regards it was a unique case. Firstly, because of the location; the model of European nation building with its component of violent homogenization was mostly implemented in Europe and in the transatlantic settler colonies. The central and eastern European founders of Israel obviously transferred radical concepts and practices of nation building from their regions of origin to Palestine, as Mark Levene states in his contribution.Footnote ⁹ However, was this transfer deeply connected with the Holocaust? A large majority of the Jewish inhabitants of Palestine had immigrated prior to World War II, and the same is true for the soldiers who served in the underground forces before 1948 and then the Israeli army. Of course, the Holocaust and the dire situation of Jewish DPs in postwar Europe additionally served to legitimize the foundation of an independent Jewish nation-state. However, if we focus on an immediate causal connection between the course of the first Israeli-Arab war and how Jewish forces gained the upper hand and then ethnically cleansed Palestinians, the delivery of modern Czechoslovak weapons in 1948 (one of those non-colonizing European nation-states that do not fit neatly into the paradigm of postcolonial studies) might be considered as crucial as the transfer of the idea of a radically homogenized nation-state.Footnote ¹⁰

Ethnic Cleansings Compared

Compared to postwar Czechoslovakia, the homogenization of Palestine in 1948–1949 was incomplete. Czechoslovakia removed almost all Germans, and would have liked to remove all Hungarians from southern Slovakia (it succeeded in doing so in the future capital of Bratislava) and thus became a nation-state in which approximately 95 percent of the population belonged to the titular nation(s). The campaign against the Hungarian minority was only stopped due to Allied and in particular Soviet intervention. Poland was even more radical than Czechoslovakia. Besides the Germans, it expelled or deported the entire Ukrainian minority in the Southeast.

By contrast, Israel tolerated a sizable Arab minority, especially in Galilee, a number of loyal clans, and Bedouins in the desert. This comparative assessment might look like an unbearable relativization of the Nakba. Nevertheless, it sheds a different light on Israeli policy, which might have aimed more at imperial domination than the total homogenization of an imagined national territory. I prefer the term imperial over colonial because there was no systemic racist distinction between colonizers and the colonized like there was in the European overseas empires. That does not mean that there was no racism in Israel, as some of the Mizrahim and in particular the Ethiopian Jews came to experience, and of course Israeli Jewish nationalism at best accepted Arabs as a subservient class. In spite of open discrimination, Israeli Arabs could advance to become high-ranking judges, members of parliament, and scientists. That kind of mingling and social advancement, though it was rare, would have been impossible in European colonies in Africa or Asia.

How is it that Czechoslovakia, the most liberal nation-state in interwar Europe, and the most accommodating toward its national minorities, became so repressive, intolerant and, in spring of 1945, sometimes murderous? The reason was revenge for the German aggression and occupation. Moreover, the postwar context was a unique opportunity to “solve” the German question once and for all. Certainly, this was not a “final solution” like the Nazi government had foreseen for the Jews. At most 1 percent of the Czech Germans died as a result of individual violent acts and pogroms in the spring of 1945. After the summer of 1945 and partially due to Allied interventions, the state regained its monopoly on power and organized the transfer of the Germans more or less as stipulated in the Potsdam Agreement. The high level of technical and logistical organization in the removal of the Germans helped to save lives, yet is reminiscent of some of the dark sides of European modernity upon which Zygmunt Bauman reflected in his book on the Holocaust.Footnote ¹¹

I have referred here to Czechoslovakia because, with respect to some other details, it is the most similar to the case of Palestine and Israel. The German minority constituted almost one-quarter of the population of Czechoslovakia—it was even more numerous than the second titular nation, the Slovaks—while Czechs amounted to roughly half the population. This means that the ratio of the nation that cleansed its territory and the affected minority was approximately 2 to 1. The removal of 3 million people was only possible through the total defeat of Germany, which made impossible any civic or armed resistance. Rounding up and transferring a large and in some areas predominant national minority was logistically very challenging. The case of Palestine was the only one in the history of ethnic cleansing in which a slightly smaller population expelled a larger one. While the role of the British and the other Allies in first permitting and then actively supporting the “orderly transfer of the German populations” from Czechoslovakia is well researched,Footnote ¹² much less is known about their role in co-organizing the transport of the Palestinian Arabs to neighboring countries, especially to Jordan. On paper, the role of the British was limited because there was no equivalent of the Potsdam Agreement, yet on the ground the British army did help to organize the removal of Arabs to the West Bank and over the Jordan River.Footnote ¹³

In both cases, the removal of such large populations could only take place in the context of a major war. Perhaps the editors of The Holocaust and the Nakba came to the conclusion that enough has been written about the war over Palestine and Israeli independence. Indeed, in some sources, such as Benny Morris's later works, military action almost seems to serve as an ex post facto excuse for violent ethnic cleansing.Footnote ¹⁴ Massive ethnic cleansing occurred as well in areas that were not primary theaters of war.Footnote ¹⁵ Yet the larger context needs to be taken into account again. The misguided intervention of the Egyptian, Syrian, Iraqi, and Lebanese armies led to an escalation of military action and subsequently of ethnic cleansing in 1948.

Every single war in the twentieth century resulting from territorial conflicts in the framework of partition plans has resulted in massive ethnic cleansing. Examples include multiple cases in southeastern Europe, Asia Minor, the Polish-Ukrainian borderlands, Transylvania, partitioned India, Palestine, and, later, Cyprus. When partition plans were implemented, one of the main areas of conflict and military action was always the location of the new borders. Often, earlier lines of partition were moved in favor of the winners of the war and to the detriment of its losers. This happened in the Greco-Turkish war in 1919–1922, when the Greek army first pushed the borderline of a future partition (which was laid out in principle in the Treaty of Sèvres) far to the east, until the Turkish army pushed back the Greeks and reestablished the border in the Aegean Sea. A similar process took place in Palestine. After the failure of the Arab international intervention, the Jewish victors could dictate the lines of territorial and ethnic partition. The Israeli government did not have a completely free hand because it depended on the consent of the great powers. Nevertheless, it moved the borders far east and north in favor of the newly independent country. The asymmetry of power, the course of the war, and its escalation sealed the fate of 750,000 Palestinian refugees.

Causes of the Palestinian Trauma

What created the traumatization of subsequent generations of Palestinians? Was it only the Nakba, which is so central to Palestinian collective memory, or also subsequent events and processes, such as the terrible living conditions in refugee camps, the next Arab defeat and subsequent mass flight in 1967, or the long-term denial of integration in most countries of arrival? Is it one trauma or multiple traumatization, created by being deprived of the most basic human rights, and poverty in the receiving regions and countries? The term trauma has the drawback that it turns traumatized individuals into passive objects of history. However, the Palestinian refugees were more than that; later on, the PLO and other Palestinian organizations were also subjects of history. This is even truer of the Arab states of arrival which for a variety of reasons hesitated or denied the incoming refugees citizenship in both a narrow and a broader sense. Jordan was a positive exception in many ways—also because the number of refugees was so overwhelming, it had not much choice but to develop a more constructive policy toward its Palestinian population.

I mention the neighboring states not in order to reduce the responsibility of the nascent Israel for the Nakba, but to stress that the afterlives of refugees can be as important as the original event that caused them to flee. In most places of violent population removal, notably in post-partition India and Pakistan, there has been a strong effort to mitigate the suffering of refugees and to overcome the trauma of mass flight. Historians should look upon the integration record of each of these countries with some skepticism. The touted successes of integration were never as great as announced, and the first generation often remained traumatized and had great trouble finding new jobs, homes, and everything else that is needed to start a new life. The integration was one-sided, refugees had to adapt to their new environment, and their identities were often suppressed, as initially King Abdallah suppressed a Palestinian identity in Jordan. Nevertheless, today no German question exists in Poland and the Czech Republic, and no Polish question in Ukraine or Lithuania.

Although Pakistan and India have fought several wars, these have not been fought over the “right of return” or any other major refugee issue. This is because all of these countries have accepted that the presence of the postwar and post-partition refugees is permanent. A key component of integration was granting citizenship, based on the assumption that the refugees were part of the same national or ethnic community as the residents of the country of arrival. This was not the case with the Palestinians, with the exception of Jordan and some thirty thousand Christian Palestinians in Lebanon, who did receive Lebanese citizenship. Even Pan-Arabism did not help as a bridge for integration. This refusal to take responsibility on the part of Israel's Arab neighbors, including for their own military interventions, was not a single traumatic event like the Nakba, but it intensified and prolonged its traumatizing impact.

The larger Middle Eastern context is also required to bring the Mizrahim into the picture. In terms of numbers, their expulsion and emigration from the Arab world into Israel is comparable to the Nakba. Of course, while the Nakba occurred in a relatively short period of time and in the context of war, the exodus of the Mizrahim took more than two decades. This facilitated their arrival and integration in Israel, probably even more so than the official ideology of Zionism, which was not invented by or specifically for the Middle Eastern Jews.

In spite of these differences between the Nakba and the exodus from the Arab world, the commonalities in individual experience created mutual understanding and compassion, as Omri Ben-Yehuda and Alon Confino show in their contributions to the Bashir/Goldberg volume.Footnote ¹⁶ That linkage might be more productive for a Palestinian-Israeli rapprochement than the binationalism proposed by the editors. If we take the term binational literally (the book has a tendency to interpret terms beyond their original meaning), there is a risk that it might confirm or even strengthen the dialectical setup and confrontation between Israelis and Palestinians. Instead of (re)constructing a binary constellation, which the British established in a classical “divide and rule” policy, and which might have been useful for a two-state solution after the Oslo Accords, the plurality among the Jewish population of Israel might serve as a better point of departure, as some chapters in the volume suggest.Footnote ¹⁷ The same is true for the Palestinians and the Israeli Arabs, who differ a lot depending on their country of residence, religious belief or nonreligious convictions, class status (which is barely discussed in the volume), and generation.

Multinationalism in a self-declared nation-state might seem like an oxymoron, yet the possible annexation of large parts of the West Bank would turn Israel into an even more multinational state than it is today. Multinationalism was one of the characteristic features of the continental empires that existed in Europe prior to 1918 and of the Soviet Union. Obviously, Israel is too small to be labeled an empire, but it could perhaps learn from empires how to coopt minorities (although one needs to acknowledge that individual Israeli Arab Palestinians rose to prominent government and judicial positions), to create power-sharing arrangements, and to reduce violence.

Can democratization or other forms of civic inclusion and participation be achieved by looking into a past that is so full of suffering, discrimination, disenfranchisement, and ethnic cleansing? Democracies were mostly established step by step and by looking into a better future. How would that future look in an enlarged Israel whose government actively rejects a two-state solution?

Perhaps such a debate would prove more fruitful than a focus on “healing” and undoing past injustices. Overcoming trauma can only be an individual process. If it is elevated to a political level and applied to entire nations, it can probably work only if there is some symmetry of power. In postwar Europe, the overarching political structure and project of the European Community and then the European Union were pivotal for overcoming past conflicts. This is the framework in which France, Germany, Poland, and Ukraine (although the latter is not an EU member) slowly overcame the legacy of two world wars. This was also possible because the time and cause of the trauma and its main perpetrators could be clearly identified. This would be more difficult to achieve for the Palestinians, who were traumatized in multiple ways and by different historical actors during and after the original catastrophe of the Nakba. Moreover, who would be the present-day actors of such a reconciliation process if there is no national government or other generally acknowledged institutions that can act on a par with Israel?

The goodwill of the intellectuals who contributed to this volume to launch a dialogue and rapprochement over history between Israelis and Palestinians is to be commended. Alon Confino once rightly stated that the task of the historical discipline is “not only of reminding us what to remember, but also of liberating us from the tyranny of the past.”Footnote ¹⁸ Daily life in poverty for the vast majority of the Palestinians is a tyranny of the present, which historians can acknowledge, but unfortunately have very limited means to remedy.

Writing Violence into the History of Empire and Nation

To talk about the Holocaust and the Nakba together requires rethinking empire in its broadest historical framework. The present volume focuses on “the violent stream” of events in the twentieth century wrought by imperialism and its consequences for the Middle East.Footnote ¹ But the genesis of massacre as a problem in its modern form dates to the nineteenth century as a manifestation of European imperial politics at home and abroad. The great European land-based empires—the Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman—had never successfully reconciled the status of minorities within their borders. Living side by side in multi-ethnic, multi-linguistic, and multi-confessional states, minorities often fared well in peacetime but enjoyed few protections when tensions rose as a result of internal and external pressures that provided the root cause of pogroms and massacres.

At the same time, an outward-looking European foreign policy, led by Britain, began during the mid-nineteenth century to engage in the politics of what Carole Fink has called “defending the rights of others.”Footnote ² The well-known story of European intervention after the Crimean War in the internal affairs of the Ottoman Empire to stop massacres against Christian minorities had its counterpoint in Europe's own culpability for crimes committed in the name of imperial expansion in its overseas empires in Asia and Africa.

Just as the Nakba and the Holocaust, according to the editors, belong “to the same modern and global history of genocide and ethnic cleansing,” they also belong to the longue durée of imperial expansion and European nation building in the context of the treatment of subject populations.Footnote ³ Mark Levene, in an article that opens the collection, frames the problem as one of ethno-nationalism in order to explain how deportation came to be used as a tool of nationalists. Reading the Treaty of Lausanne, which ended the war between the Allies and the Ottoman Empire in 1923 as the birth of the national solution as rooted in international law and practice, he shows how the idea of the minority was managed and shaped by nationalism. This brand of nation making—removing those who do not easily conform to the imagined community of the emergent nation—did not originate in the Middle East but in Europe. Ethno-nationalism, with its roots in nineteenth-century European imaginings of the nation-state, helped shape the colonial relationship between minorities in the Middle East, first with British and French imperial policy, and later with Israel's treatment of the Palestinians in 1948.

The replacing of empire with nation thus had dramatic consequences for minority populations in both Europe and the Middle East who, after World War I, faced a reconstructed imperial order. The colonial experience in this sense was not one of slaves and masters but of the complete removal of subject populations who did not conform to the boundaries of the new nation-state. This ethno-nationalist embrace of deportation had its earliest dramatic consequences and solicited widespread condemnation in the international community in the case of Ottoman Armenians, Greeks, and Assyrians during the Armenian genocide of 1915. The story of removal and deportation in the service of nationalist agendas, however, predated this event. The massacre of Bulgarians during the 1878 Russo-Turkish War, pogroms against the Jews in Russia during the late nineteenth century, and the removal of Muslim borderland populations during the Balkan Wars that preceded World War I were all part of a nationalist agenda that held sway in multi-ethnic, multi-religious, and multi-confessional empires.

The use of violence against minorities as a tool of foreign policy thus emerged within and across imperial and national borders well before the twentieth century and contributed to the weakening and subsequent destruction of the European land-based empires after World War I. The continued growth of Britain and France's imperial holdings in Africa, Asia, and especially the Middle East exacerbated the problem. This new imperial reality—a world made up of fading but still powerful land-based empires and expanding overseas empires—posed challenges to nineteenth-century liberal ideals that unsuccessfully sought to reconcile the status of minorities in the nation-state in both Europe and the Middle East. Tensions culminated in the context of two destructive world wars, ongoing famine and civil war in the Russian borderlands, and the aftermath of genocide in the lands of the former Ottoman Empire, where the imperial and national project collided.

The postcolonial frame embraced by Bashir Bashir and Amos Goldberg in the introduction to explain events of the twentieth century in the Middle East thus needs further refinement. Both pre-national and colonial relationships remained a powerful determinant of what happed in the mid-twentieth century. Imperialism as perpetrated by the British and the French had a role to play in atrocities against the Palestinians as Europeans practiced a policy of divide and rule to prevent nationalism from challenging their imperial claims. But so, too, did an older framework of statecraft that divided the world into contiguous empires that challenged one another and kept pressure on minorities to maintain global power and prevent domestic unrest. These geopolitical realities that came from domestic and overseas imperial engagements had their own role to play in explaining the rise of racist ethno-nationalism against minority populations in Europe and the Middle East in the twentieth century.

The story of the rise and fall of empires further complicates the narrative of nation building and rebuilding in the context of decolonization after World War II. The end of the large overseas empires led by the British and the French meant that empire as a form of state formation had little purchase during the second half of the twentieth century. But decolonization created new obligations and historical burdens that tied former colonies to imperial masters and, even more problematically, provided a blueprint for the treatment of minority populations in new nation-states. Israel, born in the aftermath of these events, shares the traumas and complexities of a nation forged in the aftermath of genocide and the end of empire. The Palestinian story is equally complex and made even more so by the fact of the Palestinians’ reality as an occupied people who still do not have equal citizenship or a nation-state. This has prevented them from fully narrating a story of nation from a neocolonial perspective and has made literature and storytelling the one form that allows for a true understanding of identity and actionable politics.

Geopolitical explanations, however, provide only one way to understand the roots of these traumas. Nations forged in the aftermath of genocide and ethnic cleansing create from these experiences “foundational pasts,” in Alon Confino's formulation, and have the difficult task of narrating a usable history and imagining a present that fulfills expectations of a more peaceful and just future.Footnote ⁴ Violence, an extreme but seemingly fundamental tool of nation making, remains a powerful constitutive and psychological force that can hold the nation as imagined by its citizenry together. Placing the Nakba and the Holocaust on the same linguistic and historical plane challenges us to narrate these stories as mutually constructed and equally relevant. While the question of defining perpetrators and victims remains important in this context, there is a greater urgency to understand genocide and ethnic cleansing less categorically and more in terms of how these events represent the experience of a people connected by a not-uncommon history.

Experience(s) of a People

Trauma is an inevitable result of systematic violence against a people. That experience often has been overshadowed in scholarship by definitional battles over what counts or does not count as genocide. As Clemantine Wamariya, a survivor of the Rwandan genocide, put it: “The word [genocide] is tidy and efficient. It holds no true emotion. It is impersonal when it needs to be intimate.” The word genocide in this context risks becoming a “cool and sterile” descriptive legal category, which Wamariya, rejects as “the worst kind of lie.”Footnote ⁵ Although naming an event remains an important and necessary first step in giving it a history, too close a focus on definition and meaning has led scholars to neglect the study of mass violence as the experience of a people.

Raphael Lemkin gave us our current working definition of genocide, which as those engaged in this work have shown, remains problematic.Footnote ⁶ Today, scholars continue to reconcile themselves to Lemkin's concept, whether to reject or accept his formulation.Footnote ⁷ Thus, all events that fail to meet the criteria for genocide seem somehow less significant, which explains, in part, why the word has taken on such power. It is important to recall that Lemkin's own definition came out of a specific historical context—attempts to understand what happened to the Armenians during World War I and the lead up to World War II—and had its own politics.Footnote ⁸ Its potential to explain how humans experience mass violence relies on understanding the many contexts in which genocidal events occur. The experiences of World War I and World War II led to the axiom that genocide occurred under the cover of war. That both world wars witnessed genocide has offered a way of seeing the act in its modern form. But the study of mass violence has moved beyond these confines to include crimes committed by the state in peacetime and times of civil unrest. This shift remains important for understanding massacre, the concept of crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing, and genocide as operating on an equal plane that occupies an important space alongside the legalistic definition of the act, which historically has focused on identifying and prosecuting perpetrators.

Acknowledging acts of mass violence, regardless of categorization, needs to be followed by a reconciliation of the event and its definition as the experience of a people. The study of genocidal acts, then, becomes the study of the materiality, ideas, and events that move beyond the act itself. In practical terms, it means reading the archives differently. Material artifacts—what people left behind, what they took with them, where objects ended up—are read against official orders to remove subject populations. Popular media accounts are analyzed alongside autobiography and even, controversially, fictional accounts of survivors and their children attempting to reconcile the event in the collective memory.Footnote ⁹ This methodology, which reads culturally generated texts against the grain and in intimate connection with one another has the potential to make the response to genocidal acts both more particular in its very materiality and universal in its humanity.

Alon Confino's reading of one couple's refusal to occupy a Palestinian home in the aftermath of the Holocaust reveals the stakes in this approach. The experience of Genya and Henryk Kowalski as Holocaust survivors who saw in their situation as refugees in Israel a parallel with what they left behind in Germany when they were expelled to the ghetto by the Nazis offers a way of seeing expulsion as a human problem. One experience cannot offer empirical evidence of the actions and attitudes that characterized life for refugees in this moment. One experience also is not indicative of a pattern, a tool used by cultural historians to understand change over time. Rather, as Confino argues, such stories make “a crack in history's course of events.”Footnote ¹⁰ The tie between the Holocaust and the Nakba, then, is predicated on a human experience of exile that relies on narrative connections between events and feelings of loss. But how did Palestinians forced into exile understand their experience in this context? The place where these narratives—Jewish and Palestinian—meet, has the potential to provide an explanatory framework and show how human suffering and loss are constitutive of historical change and not simply its byproduct.

Tal Ben-Zvi takes a different approach to understanding genocide as experience by delving into the culture of memory in the representation of refugees in Jewish and Palestinian art. She makes the two sides talk to each other through artists’ renderings of distinct experiences of exile. The life and friendship of Holocaust survivor Lea Grundig and Nakba victim Abed Abdi is read through their artistic and political commitments which reflect their individual experiences. Refusing to de-historicize the experience through unsustainable comparative claims, the story of these individuals and their art finds common ground in their representation of human suffering. Looking for commonality in both individuals’ quest for social justice through art, however, largely sidesteps the politics of the Arab-Israeli conflict by focusing on the plight of the refugee. What is the nature of empathy born out of these experiences that bridges experiences of human suffering and loss?

In his “personal political history” of the Israeli experience, Omer Bartov raises the question of how to narrate suffering and victimhood from two counternarratives about homelands.Footnote ¹¹ While acknowledging the possibility of dialogue he also recognizes the violence inherent in any discussion of claims to occupy a space and call it an ancestral home. Competitive claims over who belongs lead to different readings of the events of 1948 as either war of independence or moment of expulsion. After these distinct foundational events, accommodation and compromise between various state and nonstate actors seemed impossible and provided only limited forms of understanding the experiences of the Other. Yet these events shared, somewhat remarkably, a similar view of what was owed to each side: the right of refugees to “go home.”

Home in these articles reveals itself as a powerful, motivating idea that has long animated human movement and experience. But the idea of home can blind historical agents and actors to the possibilities of engagement and accommodation that make room for the displaced in unlikely places that do not necessarily conform to the boundaries of empire or the nation-state. The idea of going home remains part of a utopian strand of liberalism that imagines the possibility of the free movement of peoples who ultimately embrace the romantic idea that they belong to a national homeland that always has existed. In this way, the history of massacre and genocide and subsequent displacement has the power to fundamentally define the experience of a people. Refugees in the Middle East, who became refugees because of the horrors of the Holocaust and the Nakba, could not pick up the pieces and live quietly among their neighbors again, as had happened after some previous massacres and wars. Nationalism and the legacy of empire in the Middle East made it difficult if not impossible to imagine a functioning multi-ethnic and multi-confessional state.

Despite these difficulties, the Holocaust and the Nakba when viewed side by side offer scholars an opportunity to use new tools and apply methods that map the experience of violence and its consequences for survivors across time and place. People experience mass atrocity as perpetrators, victims, or observers. Understanding the myriad actors, actions, and ideas that constitute these events as lasting and translatable means moving beyond writing and reconciling individual histories in order to see the story of loss as a defining modern human experience.

Fiction and Truth Telling

Reading genocide and mass atrocity as a collective experience means studying their representation in a variety of literatures. This raises the question of how to read texts that do not easily conform to conventional forms of truth telling. Social scientists rely on archives, statistics, and material evidence to unlock objective truths. The choice to include an entire section on the reading of Elias Khoury's novel, Children of the Ghetto: My Name is Adam, challenges scholars to expand the archive of knowledge surrounding the Holocaust and the Nakba. A master storyteller who writes from a deeply engaged and highly personal understanding of both events, Khoury reveals the trauma of the experience of loss and memory that ultimately transcends the event itself.

Children of the Ghetto speaks to the dilemma of how to read and narrate trauma. It sits between genres in many ways, and contributors to this volume read it as a combination of testimony and literature. The experiences of the Holocaust and the Nakba are intertwined in Khoury's story of Adam Danoun, a Palestinian Israeli living in New York City. Adam lives between worlds and serves as a mediating voice through which to understand trauma. Fully belonging to neither world, his character offers a window onto both sides of an experience and resists easy categorization as victim. The always negotiated state of his identity creates the potential for Adam's political and emotional transcendence. But the trauma of occupation ultimately weighs too heavily on him rendering any reconciliation of the events of the past impossible. Refqa Abu-Remaileh offers a Saidian “contrapuntal” reading of the novel, which shows the intimate connections between the Palestinian and Jewish stories.Footnote ¹² Raef Zreik goes further, claiming that the novel allows the “subaltern to speak” through its silence, making possible the impossibility of Gayatri Spivak's original formulation.Footnote ¹³ Here literature, rather than history, allows for storytelling in its most honest form because literature makes it possible to imagine a space for agency. This is a theme that Khoury repeats again and again in the novel, denying the possibility of history and historical method to accurately tell this story from any point of view.

Silence, according to Khoury's Hebrew translator Yehouda Shenhav, functions as a “root metaphor” in the novel.Footnote ¹⁴ Indeed, there is a focus on silence in each of the articles in this section that speaks to the difficulty of narrating the events of the Nakba and the Holocaust together. But Khoury also seems to be after something else in these silences. The urgency of this refusal to speak and to narrate events is driven by both the desire to forget and the fear of forgetting. Forgetfulness, one of the few powers of the powerless, can become a tool of survival. Adam's suicide appears to be the only way out for him. But Khoury's insistence on telling a story that does not want to be told shows the impossibility of forgetting and thus insists on the imperative of telling more stories while also rewriting the ones we cannot be made to understand.

Truth telling through fiction offers possibilities for thinking about events beyond the Holocaust and the Nakba. Representations of atrocity in popular culture, literature, and media, and most especially the iterations of survivors themselves, whether in autobiography, poetry, song, or oral testimony, can offer a fuller picture of displacement and survival. Reading Franz Werfel's Forty Days of Musa Dagh and the Hollywood film Ravished Armenia about the Armenian genocide, for example, reveal the high stakes in using this approach to study the history of trauma.Footnote ¹⁵ Are these texts best read as testimony? Literature? Fiction? Entertainment? Pornography? It depends on the question we ask of the text in relationship to and in conversation with other texts. Forty Days of Musa Dagh reveals certain truths about the experience of the Armenian genocide despite its status as a fictional account of real events. Ravished Armenia, the Hollywood film based on the true-life story of Aurora Mardiganian who escaped the Ottoman Empire as a teenager, offers more complicated truths and shows some of the limits of such an approach. A new version of the film has subtitles and a dramatic classical soundtrack, neither of which conforms to the original. The film is intended to offer evidence of genocide through dramatic storytelling. But this reading of the film also can unnecessarily blur the line between fact and fiction.Footnote ¹⁶ In the process, Mardiganian's story gets lost. Interviews with her in her later years revealed how what happened to her was representative of an experience of sexual violence that many women like she must have shared.Footnote ¹⁷ Writers thus face a moral imperative to get it right when fictionalizing true life atrocity events. This burden falls heaviest when making the past speak through the imagined retelling of the traumatic experience of one individual meant to represent the tragedy of an entire people. To access this experience as a form of historical truth, stories like Adam's and Aurora's must be read and reread against and alongside other representations that reflect and even challenge their individual narratives.

Where does this method of reading and interpretation leave the archive? The recovery of truths from fiction relies on the existence of documented experience accessible only through storytelling. These stories need letters and memoirs from those who experienced the trauma of displacement as much as they need official reports and statistics chronicling how and why an event happened. Similarly, the archive needs storytellers who create new ways of knowing human experience. This is particularly important for events not part of the dominant historical narrative because it offers a unique space to understand trauma as history. The layering of individual stories, real and fictional, shows the complex dynamic of mass violence and the mark it leaves behind on the social and political landscape. It asks us not to take sides and places perpetrators, victims, and observers in a unified and extended historical frame. This methodology also refuses to look for precursors in earlier events in order to show the inevitability of genocide or attempts to read genocide backward, which risks an ahistorical treatment of events.Footnote ¹⁸ Reading experiences of displacement, belonging, and human suffering beyond the moment of atrocity situates genocide as a process. It also starts to address the vexing question of how to compare these events without losing their historical specificity.Footnote ¹⁹

To study genocide as experience means engaging the debate over legal definitions—who is a victim and who is not—as a political claim on moral conscience in order to understand genocide as a modern human problem. In other words, it is not something that happens to me but to us. Understanding genocide and ethnic cleansing as existing in both a historical and a relational context makes it harder to accept the inhumanity of humankind as a series of unfortunate but inevitable events. Most importantly, it means taking mass violence seriously as an agent of history that has played an important role in forging our recent global past.

Reconfiguring Narratives and the Framework of Debate

Broadly speaking, the project undertaken in The Holocaust and the Nakba is one of narrative reconfiguration. The volume aims to reframe the debate on both events so as to mitigate the need for the denial of the Other's suffering, to create a “syntax and grammar of history and memory in which the combination ‘Holocaust and Nakba’ or ‘Nakba and Holocaust’ makes historical, cultural and political sense.”Footnote ⁵ The editors are well aware that “making sense” does not mean creating harmony or immediate mutual understanding. The conversation they stimulate is fraught with moments of disruption and pain. Yet this is the only viable route toward developing a shared “language of historical reconciliation between the two peoples.”Footnote ⁶ Although chiefly set in a framework of historical analysis, the volume is an intervention into an urgent present.

With their focus on narrative patterns and discursive frameworks, the editors and contributors shift emphasis from the quest for historical “truth” to problems of intersubjectivity and communicability. This perspective resonates with approaches in conflict and violence research after the linguistic and narrative turns, which emphasize that the stories we tell about conflicts are part of the dynamics of conflicts themselves, and therefore highly relevant.Footnote ⁷ It also connects to debates in sociological science and technology studies (STS) about the ontological or “worldmaking” effects of research.Footnote ⁸ Scientific inquiry, the argument goes, participates in those communicative processes that configure imaginaries and establish the spaces of what is thinkable and debatable in any given society, and in doing so enacts specific realities.

The collective expedition into this contentious terrain is undertaken not in closed formation but in individual and at times very personal quests. The book deliberately seeks to open up a variety of angles and connections through which to explore “Holocaust and Nakba” or “Nakba and Holocaust.” The contributions share the understanding that these two historical moments are connected by more than causal sequence. They are considered to be the product of long-term developments in European history: the rise of (ethno-)nationalism on the one hand and colonial expansion on the other. Underlying these developments were narratives of Modernity and progress, in whose name violent policies were justified. These macro-historical dynamics and overarching discursive structures are the focus of part 1 of the book. Another strong line of analysis refers to the entanglements of the Holocaust and the Nakba in biographies and family histories. Such juxtapositions of the personal and the political, the historical and the biographical, are mainly explored in parts 2 and 3. These contributions trace how historical moments come to be connected in the experience and memory of historical subjects, as they are forced to integrate politically irreconcilable events into their life histories. In some chapters, the authors make their personal entanglement with their research topics transparent and explore how their own life histories and experiences can be made productive in processes of research and analysis. Part 4, finally, discusses questions of language and translation in multilingual contentious political spaces.

Unsurprisingly, this polyphonic and decentered inquiry does not result in some new narrative on “the Holocaust and the Nakba” or “the Nakba and the Holocaust.” And such a thing never was intended. The book's main contribution is not to be found on the level of content, but on the level of method and process. The volume unsettles and reconfigures narratives and imaginaries by recontextualizing stories and events. The chapters provide new frameworks or lenses through which we can “read” anew all-too-familiar processes and problems. But they do not converge toward a unified perspective. Although the texts clearly speak to each other as topics reoccur,Footnote ⁹ dissonances and incongruities between them remain. The book thus appears like an exercise in what Donna Haraway calls “mobile positioning,”Footnote ¹⁰ a methodological strategy for analyzing contentious realities in a globalized world. Because the contributions are not just additive or complementary, but can also be read against one another, they also demonstrate on a formal level the importance of construction at work in any research (or narration).

Although its title might suggest comparison between two historical events, the book is in fact an exemplar of Histoire croisée Footnote ¹¹ and multi-sited/-situated research.Footnote ¹² The methodological and theoretical problems discussed as well as the insights gained transcend the specific historical objects of analysis. The volume, thus, shows how questions of universality can be pursued by analytically connecting dissimilar particularities.

Explaining Silence

How is it that this book, which clearly speaks to current theoretical and methodological debates in various disciplines, which has been published by a major university press, and which treats empirical topics to which German audiences have been hardly indifferent, receives so little attention in Germany?

Despite the many contingencies at work in the reception of academic publications, I would argue that, in this case, the silence surrounding the book is neither chance nor hazard. It is produced by social and political processes, which are themselves a topic of the volume. Discussing Elias Khoury's novel Children of the Ghetto: My Name is Adam, Raef Zreik argues that in this novel the author had found a form to articulate an incommunicable perspective and that, in this sense, the book's central achievement was to productively engage with silence. Zreik observes: “Muteness results from the impossibility of airing a version of events within the dominant discourse. This discourse sets the limits of what can and cannot be said. It does not forbid, prohibit, or suppress an expression outright, rather it fails to recognize the semiotic move, and thus the act of silencing is itself made silent and invisible.”Footnote ¹³ This kind of silence is produced by collective imaginaries, which set boundaries to what can be meaningfully communicated and understood. In the collective imaginaries that condition dominant public discourses in Germany, there is no place for a subject like “the Holocaust and the Nakba.” To account for this situation, entanglements between research and politics are as important to understand as are properly scholarly problems relating to structural aspects of Holocaust research in Germany.

(Dis-)Connections

Bringing more of the complexities present in historical research on the Holocaust to public debates in Germany seems important not only from a scholarly point of view. In the past sixty years, not least due to several waves of immigration from southern Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and Africa, Germany has become an increasingly diverse societyFootnote ²⁶ and home to people whose life or family histories have been marked by different, but no less painful, foundational catastrophes. Some might argue that these demographic changes threaten or undermine the centrality of the Holocaust in the national narrative. Yet this is shortsighted. The growing diversity of German society lends new and present relevance to remembering and intellectually engaging with the legacy of a period of German history in which the eradication of diversity became a cornerstone of state politics.

As new voices appear, however, the conversation will not stay the same. To the new participants in this national debate, the Holocaust is relevant not because it is the history of their forefathers and foremothers, but as a crucial moment in global history that affects perceptions and experiences of other events. Within scholarly research, this relevance of the Holocaust in the memory of global Modernity is widely acknowledged.Footnote ²⁷ Yet, as already pointed out, the imaginary of public discourses has not expanded in the same way. In Germany, Holocaust remembrance continues to be a soliloquy among the descendants of perpetrators. Germans with different family histories appear in these rituals and discourses only insofar as they serve them these established narratives—for example, in the role of the Jewish victim or the Muslim antisemite—but not as actors in their own right with distinct perspectives and concerns.Footnote ²⁸ And similar to how Yochi Fischer describes Nakba remembrance in Israel, these self-referential tendencies have grown stronger as historical distance from the events has increased.Footnote ²⁹

A public scandal unfolding while I was working on this article acutely illustrates the disconnect between Germany's increasing transnational embeddedness and its memory culture. At the center of the affair was the historian and philosopher Achille Mbembe, one of the few internationally well-known scholars from Africa. He had visited Germany frequently, hosted by academic and cultural institutions. In 2020, he had been invited to deliver the opening speech of the Ruhrtriennale, the largest art festival in the federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia. Then suddenly, he was publicly denounced as an antisemite hostile to Israel.

The accusations were first brought forward by a delegate in the North Rhine-Westphalian state parliament, for whom critique of the African scholar was chiefly a means to resume an older dispute with the head of the art festival. But the accusations quickly gained national momentum as they were taken up by the Federal Government Commissioner for Jewish Life in Germany and the Fight Against Antisemitism, who publicly demanded that the invitation be revoked. The critics mainly referred to two of Mbembe's oeuvres: first, his book Necropolitics,Footnote ³⁰ in which the author explores different forms of violent rule in recent history and in doing so discusses the Holocaust in the same analytical categories as the South African apartheid state; and second, a foreword, written in the form of a travelogue, to the volume Apartheid Israel: The Politics of an Analogy.Footnote ³¹ Their readings of these texts were apparently selective, and harsh accusations were derived from the interpretation of isolated sentences.

Within a month, this dispute grew into a political and intellectual controversy of transnational scale. National newspapers and radio stations stimulated the debate. Two open letters were published in direct support of Mbembe, signed by almost one hundred scholars from different countries, including some of the contributors to the volume edited by Bashir and Goldberg.Footnote ³² A third open letter published in the wake of these events and signed by more than four hundred international scholars and artists criticized the shrinking spaces for advocacy for Palestinian rights in Germany more generally.Footnote ³³ Going into the details and the evolution of this controversy would be interesting but is beyond the scope of this article. The very constellation of events, however, illustrates how far Holocaust remembrance in Germany is already globalized, even though this is not acknowledged in dominant public discourse.

Critics of Mbembe tended to stage this debate as a confrontation of or competition between the memory of the Holocaust and the memory of colonialism, which politically poses an “old” Germany against a “new” one. This polarization can flourish in a discursive environment that represents the Holocaust and colonialism as two isolated subjects and ignores the extent to which they are connected in the history of global Modernity as well as in the flow of biographies and family histories—a topic that is central to the Bashir/Goldberg book.

In his first detailed response to the allegations against him, Achille Mbembe also stressed this point. Under the heading “Living in the Myths of Others: A Letter to the Germans,”Footnote ³⁴ he emphasized the insecurity and riskiness involved in exploring the global entanglements of collective experiences of suffering. Such inquiries are like a journey that “forces us to leave the comfort zone of the familiar and to consciously expose ourselves to the danger of upsetting our certainties.”Footnote ³⁵ Perceptively, he added that the urge to throw oneself into such intellectual endeavors might be “a peculiarity of those who were born somewhere, left early, and never came back.”Footnote ³⁶ Mbembe explained that the current polarization was the opposite of what he had tried to achieve. To him, the intellectual engagement with a variety of distinct, yet structurally similar moments in history is a way to envision a truly shared world. “Today, we all need to ask ourselves whether the suffering of a people is owned by this people alone and only that people can relate to it. Is it possible to share the communality of the memory of the world, and under which conditions?”Footnote ³⁷ These words by the African intellectual echo Elias Khoury's foreword to the Bashir/Goldberg volume. There, the novelist argues that exploring the Holocaust and the Nakba together is important to establish the relevance of both events in the collective memory of humankind.Footnote ³⁸

Research and Courage

In a book-length interview about his life and his work published in 1990, the sociologist Norbert Elias argued that social science research should fearlessly face realities. Recounting how, in the early 1930s, he had attended a Hitler rally in Frankfurt out of an urgent intellectual interest, he concludes: “There should be more people like me, who are not afraid of what they might discover.”Footnote ³⁹ A Holocaust survivor and émigré who had dedicated his major works to the historical sociology of the modern condition, Elias knew something about intellectual ventures that produce unnerving new questions and exposed old wounds.

The Holocaust and the Nakba is a book that is daring in Elias's sense. Its aim is not closure. It tries to irritate and shake established imaginaries and frameworks so as to stimulate conversations and from them develop new perspectives. This is what makes the book highly relevant to current debates in Germany. The perspectives unfolding throughout its pages transcend the perpetrator-centered frameworks that still dominate German public discourses. Moreover, the book demonstrates how researchers’ biographical entanglements with the historical events in question can be made productive in methodologies of self-reflexion and dialogue. The volume leaves no doubt that this is an unnerving and potentially painful exercise that poses challenges beyond the intellectual sphere. But without leaving the parochial comfort zones of unchallenged perspectives, a shared world cannot be achieved.

Historical Connections

The Holocaust ended in 1945. The Nakba occurred in 1948. From the perspective of Jewish history, they exist along a single continuum. Because the development of Zionism and the establishment of the State of Israel cannot be understood in isolation from the events in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s, and because the Nakba is a central and indivisible, albeit unpleasant, part of modern Jewish history and the history of Zionism and the State of Israel, the events are inexorably bound to each other. This should be common sense—just as, for example, the history of Poland during World War II cannot be separated from postwar Polish history.

As some of the book's contributing authors and some of the participants in this forum have noted, between one-third and one-half of the Jewish Yishuv/Israel fighting force in 1948 comprised Holocaust survivors (broadly defined). If the story of the survivors is the last chapter of the story of the Holocaust—as assumed by much of mainstream Holocaust historiography—then the Nakba, which was perpetrated by some of these survivors and by the state that absorbed them, is integral to that story. The Nakba is, therefore, part of post-Holocaust Jewish history and part of the last chapter of the history of some Holocaust survivors.Footnote ²

The connection between the events, however, appears to run much deeper. There is no doubt that World War II and the Holocaust exerted a decisive influence on postwar leaders—on the Jewish side, on the Arab side, and around the world. Dimitry Shumsky, for example, has recently shown how various forms of binationalism and autonomism enjoyed considerable support until the mid-1930s, even among prominent mainstream Zionist leaders, such as Ze'ev Jabotinsky, David Ben-Gurion, and Berl Katznelson.Footnote ³ Over the course of the 1930s and 1940s, with the rise of the Nazis to power in Germany, the consolidation of antisemitic regimes in Europe, the Arab Revolt, and the Holocaust, the view that only an exclusive Jewish nation-state would satisfy the political aspirations of the Zionist movement and meet the real needs of Jews came to dominate the Zionist mainstream. It was at the Biltmore Conference of 1942, held in the shadow of grave reports from Europe (although the extent of the catastrophe was not yet clear), that Ben-Gurion first declared that the goal of the Zionist movement was to establish an exclusive Jewish commonwealth in Palestine. The proliferation of such an idea was greatly reinforced after the Holocaust. Many Holocaust survivors and the Zionist movement that helped them settle in Palestine imagined the new land as one in which Jews would finally live only among themselves and enjoy exclusive sovereignty. These positions did not lead deterministically to the Nakba, but were certainly among the factors that enabled it, because a country in which 45 percent of the inhabitants are Palestinian Arabs—as the State of Israel would have been according to the UN Partition Plan of 1947—was incompatible with these needs and aspirations.

Moreover, the Arab Revolt itself (1936–1939), which had a considerable impact on the development of the Arab-Israeli conflict, was largely the result of large-scale Jewish immigration to Palestine, particularly from Nazi Germany and nationalist Poland in the 1930s. The Peel Commission of 1937 (headed by Lord Robert Peel), appointed in the midst of these events, stemmed from the legacy of the Lausanne Conference (1922–1923), at which the British foreign secretary, Lord Curzon, raised the idea of compulsory “population exchange” as a method of conflict resolution. Indeed, the Peel Commission was the first to formally propose separation and population transfer as solutions to the worsening conflict between Zionists and Palestinians. Consequently, as Nimrod Lin has recently shown, politico-demographic discourse gained traction among leaders of the prestate Zionist settlement (Jewish Yishuv), largely rendering the idea of “transfer”—or what we today would call “ethnic cleansing”—legitimate and realistic. The connection between the events in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s and the importation of ideas of population transfer is thus patently clear.Footnote ⁴

We could cite many more causal and contextual links, like those we briefly alluded to in the introduction to The Holocaust and the Nakba (also addressed, for example, by Geoff Eley in his article in this forum), regarding the problem of refugees after the war. The concept of repatriation, which dominated European reconstruction efforts (alongside expulsions and massive population shifts, particularly in central and eastern Europe), was ill-suited to resolving the problem of Jewish refugees, who experienced virulent antisemitism after the Holocaust, especially in eastern Europe. The UN Partition resolution of November 1947—viewed by the Arabs as a criminal expression of Western colonialism, granting (with the complete support of the Soviet Union and its satellites) land that was not its own to recently arrived settlers—was largely a response to the Jewish refugee problem in Europe. This resolution was also the trigger for the violence, in the context of which the Nakba occurred.

How, then, can we separate such proximate and dramatic events in Jewish and Arab history? Although the Holocaust and its broader context are not the only or the most important factor in understanding the Nakba, they are central and significant factors that cannot be ignored. Had the events of the 1930s and 1940s not occurred, the Nakba may not have occurred either. So even if one rejects the specific connections that we have sought to establish between the two events, there is no escaping their linkage; it thus behooves critics to put forward their own proposals about the relationship. Given the preponderance of the empirical relationship, any attempt to eschew this inevitable connection represents an attempt to marginalize the Nakba as a historical event of ethnic cleansing worthy of study in its own right. Such attempts reflect the problematic view that the Nakba is nothing more than collateral damage, regrettable perhaps, but secondary to the truly important historical event—the establishment of the State of Israel—and, in any event, the result of Arab and especially Palestinian rejection of the Partition Plan.

The Nakba, as an ongoing national catastrophe, did not only bring fundamental change to the Palestinian people, Jewish history, and the Middle East. Arguably, the long-standing conflict in the Middle East, which is largely a result of the Nakba (although it began much earlier) also had a real effect on world history. We therefore argue that the Nakba is a significant event in Arab, Palestinian, Jewish, Zionist, and world history, and is connected, in one way or another, to the Holocaust that occurred only a few years earlier. In our opinion, questioning these two observations signifies taking an ideological position, in the sense that it rejects widely accepted methods in defining and understanding historical events and processes and the connections among them.

Unfortunately, the close connections between these two events have barely been studied. Yair Auron's The Holocaust, Rebirth, and the Nakba (2017) is an exception in the field of history, and Elias Khoury's books (from Gate of the Sun to the Children of the Ghetto trilogy—My Name is Adam, Star of the Sea, and the final volume, which has not yet been published) are exceptions in the field of literature. There are also some works in the field of memory studies. In our book, we sought to offer a number of conceptual frameworks within which this joint discussion might take place.

We are conscious of the criticism expressed by Geoff Eley in this forum, also intimated by Philipp Ther and Michelle Tusan, that the book offers little in the way of empirical historical research, with most of its chapters focusing on issues pertaining to literature, art, and cultural and intellectual history. We would like to stress two fundamental points here. First, Arabs and Jews writing a book together on equal footing is practically a chimera in the present reality. The number of authors willing to take the risk and face the challenge of grappling with the connection between the Holocaust and the Nakba naturally limited the selection of themes. In this sense, editing the book as a collective project was no simple task (as Geoff Eley acknowledges). What is more, and this is a far more significant point, the book is an invitation to initiate a discussion of the inescapable connections between the Holocaust and the Nakba in a variety of disciplines and from a wide range of perspectives. It seeks to open a number of different channels of discussion of what Ethan Katz (and many others) have termed, albeit in a slightly different but certainly relevant context, “entangled histories.”Footnote ⁵ It is our hope that, in the wake of this book and other writings, research on this subject will also progress along more empirical historical lines. Such studies might focus not only on the historical connections in the Jewish and colonial context, but in the Palestinian context as well.

The shared history we identify in our book is not only political and military. As Michelle Tusan notes in this forum, the history of experience and mentalities is no less important. This unravels the dichotomy between history and memory proposed by Jockusch becuase the way in which historical agents experience and understand the reality in which they live, the imagery and symbols they draw upon, their aspirations, moral decisions, fears, and the memories they use, are all a part of history, but also significantly affect its course. Jockusch herself is well aware of this, as she has shown in her brilliant study of the first testimonies of survivors after the Holocaust (Collect and Record! Jewish Holocaust Documentation in Early Postwar Europe [2012]). The stories of Genya and Henryk Kowalski (of Alon Confino's chapter in our book) are as much a part of post-Holocaust Jewish history as the historical committees that collected the testimonies of Jews after the war. The world of the historical actors in 1948 was imbued with the Holocaust as a close and formative historical and personal experience that also influenced the course of events.

Let us briefly mention an issue we did not address in our introduction to the book, but which arises from Hannan Hever's chapter on Abba Kovner: revenge. Benny Morris often writes that the motivation of the Zionist fighters in 1948 stemmed, inter alia, from the Holocaust.Footnote ⁶ Elsewhere, he explains: “Without doubt the Holocaust played a part [in consolidating Zionist thinking on transfer].” It proved that “massive murderous intentions [against Jews]” could materialize.Footnote ⁷ This connection contributes to our understanding of the Jewish fighters’ mental and cultural world, which was one of the factors that made the war so brutal, and enabled or led to violence against the noncombatant Palestinian population and to the Nakba.

The idea of revenge against the Germans was central to the consciousness of Holocaust survivors and of that generation of Jews in general. Actual acts of revenge against the Germans, however, were very few. Some of that energy appears to have been transposed to the struggle in Palestine. In 1953, the poet Haim Gouri, the epitome of the generation of Zionists who fought in 1948, wrote the famous poem “From that Fire,” which would become a central and permanent fixture at Holocaust memorial ceremonies for many years. The poem includes the lines: “From that fire, which burnt your tortured and charred body, we carried a flaming torch for our souls…. Your humiliation we made into guns.… We avenged your bitter and lonely death with our fist, which is heavy and hot.”Footnote ⁸ In this poem, the terrible helplessness of the Holocaust is transformed into violence and revenge—not in Europe but in Palestine, and not against the Germans but against the Arabs.Footnote ⁹ This is in line with the findings of political psychologists and political scientists such as Vamik Volkan, Dan Bar-On, and Mahmood Mamdani; they have shown that major political traumas tend to replicate themselves against, and to transpose themselves on, other enemies. This is yet another aspect of the connections between the Holocaust and the Nakba that awaits historical study.

This book, as a collective project undertaken by a group of Arabs (mostly Palestinians) and Jews (mostly Israelis), is only a beginning. It is an invitation to scholars to examine for themselves the range of historical and cultural connections between the two events.

Analogical History

It seems that most of the criticism and even indignation expressed by some of the participants in this forum was elicited by the analogical frameworks we proposed. We argued that two central conceptual frameworks for the understanding of modernity—nationalism and the modern nation-state on the one hand, and colonial violence (especially that of settler colonialism) on the other—are common to both events despite their great differences. These frameworks were partly developed by Mark Levene in his chapter in our book and, to a lesser extent, by Omer Bartov in his chapter. This argument is also a basic principle in both postcolonial and decolonial thought. Our suggestion of conceptual continuity is not meant to be as exhaustive as some respondents seemed to think we suggested.

A vast body of literature exists on the Nakba, and entire libraries on the Holocaust. The idea that the few pages in which we attempt to provide conceptual frameworks for a joint discussion of such different historical events seeks to offer a complete explanation of one or both of these events is unwarranted. We certainly accept the basic argument advanced by Donald Bloxham, on which we drew, inter alia, in delineating this analogical framework: “If the basic matter of power politics over the longue durée should not be ignored, the different rationales employed in this period for lifting up populations … are not simply matters of intellectual nuances.”Footnote ¹⁰ They determine the specific components of every concrete event. A full and accurate understanding of a given event, including the Holocaust and the Nakba, depends on the broad, general context, as well as the concrete details that determine the nature and specific components of every event—including which instances of violence become ethnic cleansings and which become genocides. There is also considerable value in common conceptual frameworks.

The important articles by Geoff Eley, Philipp Ther, and Michelle Tusan are excellent points of departure for a broad discussion of the validity of our analogical framework. Each in its own way, these contributions begin to explore the senses in which these historical analogies are valid and those in which they are not, revealing clear differences of opinion. We believe that these are merely the first steps that should be taken further. We ourselves, as noted, have suggested a framework for such a discussion, largely following in the important intellectual tradition of which Mark Levene is a leading exponent, although by no means the only one. Donald Bloxham identifies the time frame 1875–1949 (but effectively until the end of the wars in former Yugoslavia in 1999) as the “unweaving of Europe”: a more or less coherent period for the understanding of “population removal, at least in two of its major guises, genocide and ethnic cleansing”Footnote ¹¹ caused by the disintegration of empires, the establishment of nation-states, and the immense violence that unfolded during the course of these processes, often in borderlands.Footnote ¹² The period begins with the Eastern Crisis of 1875–1879, the Balkan Wars of 1912–1913, the Armenian genocide, followed by Stalin's population transfers and starvation project, Nazi violence (including the Holocaust), and numerous other events, all the way to the great postwar ethnic cleansings. The Nakba, although not explicitly mentioned by Bloxham, easily falls within the schema he describes. Indeed, a recently published anthology on partitions demonstrates how these global processes of “unweaving” reached also the British Empire and resulted in territorial partitions, often accompanied by ethnic cleansing and mass violence—as in the case of Palestine/Israel.Footnote ¹³

It seems to us that Doris Bergen's article sheds light on some of the ramifications and promising directions for further study that arise once the option of entangled/comparative histories is taken seriously in the Israeli-Palestinian context, and even expands them to a discussion of American and Canadian reality—particularly with regard to the connection between political privilege and the right to tell a story and to be heard.

Zygmunt Bauman, to whom Philipp Ther and Teresa Koloma Beck also refer, and who postulated the existence of an intimate link between the Holocaust and modernity, is undoubtedly central to the analogical framework we have sought to delineate.Footnote ¹⁴ In this we are, of course, exposing ourselves to the criticism leveled at Bauman himself and many others, that such broad concepts offer little in the way of historical explanation. We are of the opinion that analogical and conceptual thinking is essential because it opens up a broad range of contexts in which historical events should be understood, and it enables comparative/entangled research. For example, Mark Levene, in the final part of his chapter (which none of the critics address), points out that this analogy applies not only to the Holocaust and the Nakba (as well as many other events), but also to the expulsion and emigration of Mizrahi Jews with the rise of radical nationalism in Arab countries.

Ultimately, this comes down to a fundamental question: Is the comparative/integrative study of events in a genocide, and the Holocaust in particular, as well as events in ethnic cleansing justified and instructive, or not? If the answer is that such research is valuable, this would apply to the Holocaust and the Nakba as well. In his authoritative book on the subject of ethnic cleansing, Philipp Ther asserts that there is an essential difference between ethnic cleansing and the Holocaust, which is why his book does not deal with the latter.Footnote ¹⁵ Many have criticized this position, to the point of calling Ther's distinction artificial, arguing that it makes it harder to understand historical processes and seeks merely to preserve hierarchies of suffering and catastrophic events. Some have even suggested that it is for this very reason that the powers that won World War II, and other conflicts, sought to exclude mass expulsions from the UN Genocide Convention (contrary to Raphael Lemkin's view that such phenomena exist on a continuum). Ther's critical article in this forum is in keeping with his fundamental position.

Even so, we find it hard to agree with Ther's claim that postwar Czechoslovakia, which expelled the Germans from the Sudetenland, is the relevant analogy for the situation in Israel/Palestine in 1948. Although a significant ethnic German population had lived in Bohemia and Moravia since the Middle Ages, Jews were only 10 per cent of the population of Palestine in 1917, when the British colonial empire promised them, in the Balfour Declaration, exclusive national rights in the country. The Palestinians were the long-standing indigenous population (despite having absorbed waves of regional immigration over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries). Most of the Jews who lived in Palestine in 1948, however, were European immigrants. These immigrants for their most part had clear opinions about the “Orient”—that is, the indigenous Palestinian population—and had come to Palestine to realize a colonial national project that strove not to integrate into the existing political structure in the region but to replace it. In other words, Ther ignores the fact that the Palestinians were an indigenous population, while the Zionist Jews were a population of settler immigrants. We do not think one can ignore this dimension of events—in which we find striking and bold elements of settler colonialism. What is more, the expelled Sudeten Germans were absorbed by West Germany and shared in the economic miracle of the late 1940s and 1950s. By contrast, at the end of the war of 1948, no Palestinian state was established to absorb the Palestinian refugees, most of whom were scattered throughout the Arab world, where they encountered weak economies and were often treated as unwanted burdens.

The truth is that it is almost impossible to grasp and appreciate the rise of Palestinian nationalism after the Nakba without understanding the centrality of the refugees, the refugee camps, and refugeehood. The significance of these foundational experiences was resettlement in places that were, in many cases, hostile to the refugees. The pressures of denial, negation, and misrecognition brought to bear on Palestinian nationalism after 1948—not only by Israel, but by Arab regimes as well, including those that took in refugees—were enormous. Contrary to the process of absorbing the Sudetenland expellees in Germany, the Arab host countries could not, in any way, be considered the homeland of the Palestinians, and some of the Arab regimes even fought against Palestinian nationalism while, at the same time, presuming to represent the Palestinians

The tension between improving the living conditions of Palestinian refugees and the Palestinian national struggle and right of return has been and continues to be of considerable interest to scholars—primarily Palestinian scholars. But Ther not only advocates improving the living conditions of Palestinian refugees, but recommends their naturalization in the host countries, which would then become their permanent homelands. We assume that Ther was not referring to the Orientalist-colonial view of the entire Arab world as a monolith, without national distinctions or particular affinities to concrete regions, so we are at a loss to understand what he meant.

To return to the question of the connection between ethnic cleansing and genocide, Ther refers to Norman Naimark's Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe (2001) and relates to the idea that the Final Solution developed from policies of ethnic cleansing, giving the impression that this is an outlying opinion. Yet ever since Uwe Dietrich Adam's Judenpolitik im Dritten Reich (1972) or even since Raul Hilberg's The Destruction of the European Jews (1961), the view that ethnic cleansing—of Jews and others—as a territorial solution preceded the implementation of the Final Solution has been accepted by the vast majority of Holocaust researchers. Furthermore, as Hilberg stressed on numerous occasions, the same officials, clerks, and professionals who engaged in the expulsion of the Jews and later in their murder, were also involved in the planning and implementation of the expulsion and starvation of other populations, so that the continuity (not the equivalence) between various aspects of Nazi population policy is evident and invites comparative or analogical discussion. In this context, we could also mention Heinrich Himmler's well-known memorandum to Hitler from May 1940, outlining his thoughts on demographic issues in occupied Poland. In this document, Himmler lists, in a single continuum, various methods of getting rid of different ethnic groups. Regarding the Jews, he makes clear that his intention is to expel them to Madagascar or some other colony. In the same memorandum, in a slightly different context but as a sweeping general statement, Himmler notes that the “Bolshevik method of physical extermination” should be rejected as “un-German and impossible.”Footnote ¹⁶ The development of Nazi policy itself entails a connection between ethnic cleansing and extermination.

The analogical framework has another aspect, for which we draw on the work of a number of scholars, especially Raz Segal, as a contribution to the framework of integrative historiography, which would include the Holocaust, the Nakba, and many other events of mass violence. (It is interesting that none of the respondents commented on Segal's approach.) As many scholars have noted in recent years, the Holocaust could not have happened on the scale that it did without the participation of many members of other groups—Hungarians, Romanians, Slovaks, Croats, Poles, Bulgarians, and others, who did not necessarily share the Nazi antisemitic ideology—in the expulsion and murder of the Jews. Although the motives behind such actions were different, they were close to those at work in Palestine in 1948. These events often stemmed from a combination of radical nationalism and territorial expansionism (“greater Hungary,” “greater Bulgaria,” etc.), and involved the quasi-colonial ethnic cleansing of borderlands (although sometimes central regions were cleansed as well) of groups (including Jews) that undermined the demographic dominance of the majority group.

As for the relevance of the settler colonialism framework to both the Holocaust and the Nakba, much has been written on the relevance of an imperial and colonial framework to understanding Nazi violence in general and against the Jews in particular. As Tusan rightly reminds us, the first to identify the connection between genocide and colonialism was Raphael Lemkin. A broad (albeit not universal) consensus exists today that this is a significant point for understanding of Nazism (and not just Nazism), and, contrary to Jockusch's claim, we do not suggest otherwise. We argue that the Holocaust, as an event, is interwoven with broader colonial dynamics.

Both Ther and Jockusch doubt the relevance of the conceptual framework of colonialism in general and settler colonialism in particular to the case of Zionism and the State of Israel. As we wrote in the introduction to our book, we do not believe that settler colonialism provides an exhaustive paradigm for understanding and analyzing the complexity of Zionism and its development in Palestine/Israel. Nevertheless, like many others, we are convinced that settler colonialism is relevant and constitutive to the Zionist case. Jockusch relies on Derek Penslar's work on the subject, which actually acknowledges that the Zionist movement was suffused with colonial tropes. Indeed the evidence provided by Penslar (and others) seems to run counter to Jockusch and Ther's claims. Ze'ev Jabotinsky, for example, in his 1923 essay “The Iron Wall,” explained the violence that had already broken out in Palestine, and which he predicted would worsen within the colonial context:

For Arab intellectuals, this was the primary framework for understanding Zionism from its inception. Indeed, most scholars of Zionism—including Anita Shapira, perhaps the foremost historian of Zionism, and Shmuel Noah Eisenstadt, the doyen of Israeli sociology, see at least some aspect of colonialism in Zionism.Footnote ¹⁸ Where they differ is on the extent to which this component should influence our understanding of the phenomenon. Rashid Khalidi, Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Nadim Rouhana, and many others have recently shown that the types of violence that Zionism and the State of Israel used against the Palestinians coincide with models of settler colonialism; Oren Yiftachel has demonstrated that the concept of space espoused by Zionism and the State of Israel is very much in keeping with this model, and Gershon Shafir has shown that the labor market that the Zionists developed in Palestine possessed the characteristics of this model.Footnote ¹⁹ Above all, we think the evidence indicates that Zionism and the State of Israel embody fundamental colonial racism and discrimination.

Although Philipp Ther is right that Palestinians within the Israel of the 1949 armistice lines (the pre-1967 borders) are citizens and can vote and be elected to parliament and be nominated to judgeships, they are confined to second-class status by structural discrimination. Immigration and land and property laws, among others, are manifestly discriminatory. The former grant automatic citizenship to all Jewish immigrants to Israel, while making it nearly impossible for noncitizen Palestinians to become citizens. The land laws are grounded in British emergency laws from 1945, imposed in order to circumvent the courts, and much land was taken not only from refugees but from Arab citizens of Israel after 1948. It thus comes as no surprise that, since the establishment of the State of Israel, more than seven hundred Jewish settlements have been built—many on the thousands of dunams of land expropriated from Palestinian Arabs (some of it taken from the thousands of refugees that Ther proposes should become naturalized and settle permanently in neighboring countries)—and not a single Palestinian settlement. In its reports, the Adalah Center has enumerated dozens of discriminatory laws in the Israeli legal code. This discrimination is built into the definition of the State of Israel as a Jewish state, further entrenched by the so-called Nation-State Law adopted in 2018. While a Muslim, Christian, Jew, or member of any other faith may, at least in theory, be of Dutch, Egyptian, Russian, or any other nationality, a Muslim or a Christian cannot be a Jew. Thus, the option of assimilation, or even inclusive and egalitarian integration and membership in the body politic, simply does not exist for non-Jews in the State of Israel as a Jewish state. We consider the racialized citizenship regime in Israel a clear expression of the settler colonial structure of the state.

Lana Tatour, who has examined the citizenship of Palestinian citizens of Israel, observes:

We thus find it hard to understand the argument advanced by Ther, who sees the state's attitude to Mizrahi and Ethiopian Jews as the clearest expression of Israeli racism and not the state's attitude to the Palestinian population under its rule. At the same time, as many have noted, there is a deep affinity between different types of discrimination (we have not even mentioned the inhabitants of the Occupied Territories, who live as noncitizens in a state of permanent occupation that threatens, at any moment, to become annexation, without rights being granted to the Palestinian inhabitants of the area).

The Holocaust and the Nakba—despite the enormous differences between the two events—inevitably share conceptual frameworks, both on the level of political history and on the level of the cultural history of memory and identity. Following Alon Confino, in his chapter in our book, we think that the important question is thus not whether it is justifiable to discuss the two events together but how they can be discussed together and why this type of discussion is still so rare.

One of the insights we found particularly interesting in this forum is Geoff Eley's attempt to explain the lack of a rich and extensive empirical history in our book. Such a history is replaced, he suggests, by subjective writing, characterized by “enunciating, declarative, confessional tones.” Eley explains that when there is no real political context in which a strong empirical history is grounded, history becomes personal, and, to some extent, this is what dictated the nature of the entire volume. The connection between political circumstances and historical imagination is very interesting, which is why we have grounded our own historical thought in an egalitarian binational political theory that is informed by decolonization and historical reconciliation. In our opinion, this does not signify, as Jockusch suggests, that the entire project is a kind of political activism. That would be like saying that the YVOS's studies of the 1920s and 1930s, which were grounded in a Jewish diasporic national approach, were little more than political activism.

Teresa Koloma Beck's article deals head-on with the question of the silence in Germany surrounding this connection between the Holocaust and the Nakba. Beck especially notes the lack of interest in the Holocaust in the social sciences. A forthcoming edited volume confirms this observation and points to the fact that this tendency has only recently begun to change.Footnote ²¹ By its very nature, sociological thinking is comparative because it relies on abstract and often broad conceptualizations like “modernity” or “violence.” Such comparative approaches are at a complete loss in the face of the idea of the uniqueness of the Holocaust, which, although not always expressed so explicitly, serves as a kind of reverential epistemological underpinning of many studies of the Holocaust—what Dirk Moses has called “Holocaust anxiety.”Footnote ²² In Germany, this anxiety is even greater, as Beck notes briefly when touching on the Achille Mbembe affair, and it prevents any comparative discussion from becoming a part of public discourse—all the more so when such comparative discourse brings Israel and Zionism into the analogical equation. Yet at the heart of our book lies analogical thinking, of which, as we have noted, Zygmunt Bauman was one of the leading proponents with regard to the Holocaust.

In an article entitled “The Dream of Purity,” Bauman wrote:

Despite the many differences between the phenomena, the aspiration to purity links the Holocaust and the Nakba, as well as many other events, and may underpin the enlightening words of Michelle Tusan, who concludes her contribution to this forum as follows: “Understanding genocide and ethnic cleansing as existing in both an historical and a relational context makes it harder to accept the inhumanity of humankind as a series of unfortunate but inevitable events. Most importantly, it means taking mass violence seriously as an agent of history that has played an important role in forging our recent global past.”

We can only agree, and it is our belief that the power of our book lies in the fact that this insight arises from an intellectual partnership between Arabs and Jews and from the entwined specificities of the geographical space of Palestine/Israel.