Statement of Scholars in Holocaust and Genocide Studies and Related Fields on the Attack of the Israeli Army in the Palestinian City of Jenin on 26 January 2023

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Feb 9, 2023 Palestine-Israel
Israel's occupation force attacks Jenin refugee camp (26 January 2023). Photo via Wikimedia Commons. Israel's occupation force attacks Jenin refugee camp (26 January 2023). Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Statement of Scholars in Holocaust and Genocide Studies and Related Fields on the Attack of the Israeli Army in the Palestinian City of Jenin on 26 January 2023

By : Jadaliyya Reports

4 February 2023:

We, scholars of Holocaust and Genocide Studies and related fields, strongly condemn the Israeli army forces’ raid in the Palestinian city of Jenin on 26 January 2023. Israeli soldiers killed 10 people, wounded more than 20, and destroyed buildings and cars. According to eyewitness reports, Israeli forces furthermore fired tear gas canisters at the children’s ward of the Jenin Government Hospital and prevented ambulances and medical staff from reaching wounded people for some time.

For news reports, see articles by the New York Times, The Guardian, and CNN.

This deadly attack is a culmination of a marked escalation of Israeli military and settler violence against Palestinians in the last year. Israeli forces and settlers killed at least 220 Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem in 2022—the largest annual figure since the Second Intifada (2000-2005). And in less than one month in 2023, Israeli forces have already killed 30 Palestinians, leaving dozens of others injured, and wreaking havoc on cultural and religious sites, crops, water sources, buildings, and streets.

Israeli military and settler violence against Palestinians is a structural element of Israeli society and politics, rooted in the killings and expulsions of more than 750,000 Palestinians and the destruction of hundreds of Palestinian towns and villages in the 1948 War and the Nakba; the imposition of a military regime over Palestinians who remained as citizens in Israel that lasted from 1948 to 1966; and the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem since the 1967 War.

This history has now reached a particularly violent threshold with the new Israeli government, which presents an explicit and unabashed agenda of Jewish supremacy over all of Palestine/Israel. It has already begun translating this agenda into anti-Palestinian policies and actions, continuing and intensifying further an already violent history. As Holocaust and Genocide Studies scholars, we oppose all targeting of civilians and recognize, based on many cases past and present, the acute danger of disproportionate state violence in the name of counter-terrorism, where state authorities come to identify a group as a whole as an enemy. This is particularly important in view of the shooting attack the following day, 27 January, where a Palestinian from East Jerusalem killed 7 Jews leaving a synagogue in the Neve Yaakov settlement and injured others. We condemn this violence as well, and we call on the Israeli government not to escalate the situation further and stop immediately the attacks of settlers against Palestinians, which have intensified markedly in the last few days.

The red lights are flashing for all of us to see. As scholars devoted to the study of mass atrocities, rooted in our commitment to Holocaust scholarship and remembrance; to the struggle against state violence; to the voices of victims and survivors—we cannot stay silent regarding the ongoing Israeli assault against Palestinians and Palestinian society and culture.


We condemn this strongly, we stand in solidarity with the Palestinian victims and survivors and with Israeli citizens who take an active part in the struggle against Israel’s destructive assault on Palestinians, and we call on scholars and students in Holocaust and Genocide Studies to join us in:

  1. Putting pressure in all ways on the Israeli government;

  2. Discussing, teaching, and writing about this ongoing case of mass atrocities for decades—the only military occupation and settler colonial regime of its kind in the world—in the frame of Holocaust and Genocide Studies;

  3. Providing support for scholars and students, including Palestinians, to conduct research, write, and lecture about the experiences and histories of Palestinians in programs, conferences, and workshops in Holocaust and Genocide Studies; and

  4. Demanding truth, freedom, and justice for Palestinians, an end to Israeli military occupation and settler colonialism, and a future of equality for all the people living between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.


Signatures

Dr. Mohamed Adhikari, Emeritus Associate Professor, Department of Historical Studies, University of Cape Town

Dr. Steven Alan Carr, Professor of Communication and Director of the Institute for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Purdue University Fort Wayne (for identification purposes only)

Dr. Jordan Corson, Assistant Professor of Education, Stockton University

Dr. Martin Crook, Senior Lecturer in Sociology, Department of Health and Social Sciences, University of the West of England, Bristol

Dr. Anna Hájková, Associate Professor of Modern European Continental History, University of Warwick

Dr. Michael Hayse, Associate Professor of History and Wally and Lutz Hammerschlag Professor of Holocaust Studies, Stockton University

Dr. Marianne Hirschberg, Professor, Chair of Disability, Inclusion and Social Participation, Faculty of Human Sciences, University of Kassel

Robin Kirk, Professor of the Practice of Cultural Anthropology and Faculty Co-Chair, Duke Human Rights Center at the Franklin Humanities Institute, Duke University

Dr. Jeffrey Koerber, Assistant Professor, Department of History, Chapman University

Dr. Ümit Kurt, Assistant Professor, University of Newcastle, Australia

Dr. Mark Levene, Emeritus Fellow, The University of Southampton, UK

Dr. Anat Matar, Senior Lecturer at The Department of Philosophy, Tel Aviv University


Dr. Christina Morus, Associate Professor of Communication & Dr. Marsha Ratikoff Grossman Professor in Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Stockton University

Dr. Victoria Sanford, Lehman Professor of Excellence, Lehman College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York

Dr. Steven Seegel, Professor of Slavic and Eurasian Studies, The University of Texas at Austin

Dr. Raz Segal, Associate Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies and Endowed Professor in the Study of Modern Genocide, Stockton University

Dr. Damien Short, Professor of Human Rights and Environmental Justice, Director of the Human Rights Consortium, School of Advanced Study, University of London

Dr. Mira Sucharov, Professor and Associate Chair, Department of Political Science, Carleton University

Dr. Henry Theriault, Worcester State University and Co-Editor, Genocide Studies International

Dr. Barry Trachtenberg, Rubin Presidential Chair of Jewish History, Wake Forest University

Dr. Brenda Vellino, Associate Professor of Literature, Human Rights, and the Environmental Humanities, Carleton University

Dr. Ramya Vijaya, Professor of Economics, Stockton University

Dr. Johanna Ray Vollhardt, Associate Professor of Psychology, Clark University

Dr. Mahmoud Yazbak, University of Haifa

Dr. Laura Zucconi, Professor of History, Stockton University

Dr. Ran Zwigenberg, Associate Professor of Asian Studies, History, and Jewish Studies, Pennsylvania State University 

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Feb 16, 2011 Lebanon
Jadaliyya Reports By :
Jadaliyya Reports

Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 

[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412