Elyse Semerdjian, “Gazafication and Genocide by Attrition in Artsakh/Nagorno Karabakh and the Occupied Palestinian Territories,” Journal of Genocide Research (2024).
Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this article?
Elyse Semerdjian (ES): Over the last twenty months, we have seen starvation used as a weapon of war in Gaza and Artsakh/Nagorno Karabakh. Much attention was given to its usage in Sudan in recent years. I felt that it was important, as a scholar of genocide, to engage in comparison and provide historical perspective to this more silent yet effective form of genocidal warfare. I also thought it was important to bring the case of Gaza and Artsakh/Nagorno Karabakh, two very different geographical settings, together because of the unique strategic alliance between Israel and Azerbaijan. The starvation weapon is a silent killer long used in settler colonial warfare. It is so silent and slow moving that it can easily become the ambient backdrop to our happy, satisfied lives—as it is for the characters in Jonathan Glazer’s recent film, Zone of Interest.
J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the article address?
ES: The article engages the writings of genocide scholar Raphael Lemkin, known for his introduction of the neologism “genocide,” and Helen Fein, who extended his arguments on “discrimination in feeding” to offer the nomenclature “genocide by attrition.” It felt important to revisit these writings to provide the correct name for this form of genocidal warfare. The term “genocide by attrition,” known to genocide scholars, has not been used to describe Gaza nor Artsakh/Nagorno Karabakh, yet they are both textbook cases of it.
I also engage Michael Rothberg’s concept of “multidirectional memory” to affirm that comparison does not diminish our capacity to empathize with each other, but rather expands it. I believe that the comparison between Armenians and Palestinians, while visible for some activist and scholarly communities, has not been as robust as it should be. Many Armenians are also Palestinian and the struggle for the Armenian Quarter of Jerusalem’s “Cow’s Garden” against Israeli settlers has brought the mutual struggle for continued existence in those lands into relief. I begin the essay with Najwan Darwish’s poem “Who Remembers the Armenians?” Darwish’s poem serves as a reminder of the parallels between Armenian and Palestinian history. His poem is a remarkable gesture of solidarity.
J: How does this article connect to and/or depart from your previous work?
ES: I am a scholar of the Ottoman Armenian community and of genocide. I recently published a book on the Armenian Genocide, Remnants: Embodied Archives of the Armenian Genocide. In that book, I examine how genocide targets the gendered body to unravel communities, beginning with the household. A great deal of the book also discusses the extreme depravation used to eliminate the capacity of Armenians to reproduce and even sustain life. Internationally, the dominant image of the Armenian during World War I was the emaciated, skeletal figure that is found today in the heartbreaking images of emaciated Palestinian children in Gaza. Starvation and extreme depravation are just as effective as a bullet. I also argue that extreme depravation naturalizes mass murder as a natural event, a disaster, and works to erase the role of the perpetrator who is actually pulling the trigger.
This article also builds on another article, “A World Without Civilians,” which I published in January in a forum hosted by the Journal of Genocide Research, curated by our editor A. Dirk Moses. That article, centered on the attack on Gaza, argued that genocide and modern warfare have reduced the category of civilian to such an extent that civilians no longer exist. This is the logic of genocide. It threatens to make itself perfectly legal, which poses an existential threat to all of us. The international system has proven it is unable or unwilling to stop the war on civilians.
J: Who do you hope will read this article, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?
ES: Many genocide scholars are outraged to see the international community sit by and continue to allow the complete destruction of the Palestinian people in Gaza. Many were outraged when siege warfare was used against the Armenian community in Artsakh/Nagorno Karabakh with little to no outcry. That community of Artsakh Armenians is now completely erased. I seek to bring visibility to these moments in the hope that international bodies will find the fortitude to apply their own laws to all human beings, including those in the Global South. Currently, international law has been selectively applied; I think of it as a form of international apartheid that often serves the political aims of the most powerful nations. Fighting for a more just international system is especially important as human-induced climate change threatens the world with not only genocide but omnicide, that is, the death of every living thing.
J: What other projects are you working on now?
ES: I have many sticks in the fire now. I am doing some writing on the posthumous rights of the dead, and, at the same time, I am embarking on a larger project on pre- and post-war Aleppo. My early work was on Aleppo, so I look forward to returning to the topic because there is much suffering taking place in Syria, and much of the world has looked away.
Excerpt from the article (from pp. 3-4, footnotes removed)
By comparing contemporary examples of starvation warfare in Artsakh and Gaza, I seek to reintroduce the concept of genocide by attrition formulated by Raphael Lemkin in Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress (1944). Helen Fein’s 1997 essay “Genocide by Attrition, 1939-1993: The Warsaw Ghetto, Cambodia, and Sudan,” gave formal nomenclature to this genocidal tool. Fein’s comparative analysis effectively documents how though less spectacular than industrial killing, starvation and depravation are an effective, largely forgotten weapon of war. As such intentional extreme deprivation of entire populations is not incidental to genocidal warfare but part of its design.
Mass starvation and extreme deprivation were included in Lemkin’s original formulation of the genocide concept. Article II lists a series of 5 acts that aim to “destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” Article II (c), in particular, addresses genocide by attrition when it defines genocide as “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part,” which collapses into II (d) “imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.” It is worth recalling that the inclusion of Article II (c) in the UN convention was in direct response to the extreme deprivation suffered by Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto.
In contemporary siege warfare, the right to food is converted into a weapon of mass destruction and repackaged as “humanitarianism.” Lisa Bhungalia has shown how the exercise of sovereignty through surveillance and aid in the West Bank and Gaza are elastic, flexible, and versatile features of Israeli sovereignty. The tethering of aid to security, or what Eyal Weizman has called “humanitarian management,” is “the crucial means by which the economy of violence is calculated and managed,” best visualized in the backflow of rotten and maggot-infested food currently at Gaza’s border crossings. As Melanie Tanielian argues, “[T]he moral technologies of a complex humanitarian assemblage of procedures, organization, and instruments of monitoring provisions, movement, and developmental potential, over time, have been stacked up to exercise contemporary violence.”
Considering the particularities of this violent assemblage, historian Achille Mbembe maintains that necropower’s “drive toward contraction, containment, and enclosure” in Gaza is paradigmatic. While adopting practices from earlier inceptions of settler colonialism, enclosures that partition Gaza and the West Bank are not only walls and partitions, they are “a matrix of rules mostly designed for those human bodies deemed either in excess, unwanted, illegal, dispensable, or superfluous.” Ominously, Mbembe concludes that Gaza is “may well prefigure what is to come.”
The carceral conditions produced by the 2006 enclosure of the Gaza Strip could be called Gazification. Land and territory are not only bifrucated with a discrete line separating two parts, but are fractured several times over through the creation of physical and digital checkpoints, “safe zones,” and border inspections designed to make life suffocatingly unlivable. In order to survive, superfluous beings who resist these necropolitical forces live fugitive lives. Gazification should, therefore, be understood as an instrument of genocide by attrition that predates Hamas’ attack on Israel on October 7. Whether in Gaza or its variant in Artsakh and other areas of the globe as exported technologies of surveillance, Gazification is dependent on the institution of enclosures, surveillance, and “humanitarian management.”