Two hours before his execution on 14 October 1946, Hermann Göring took his life. Despite the long list of atrocities committed during his tenure as Prime Minister of Prussia, President of the Reichstag and Former Commander-in-Chief of Germany’s Air Force during Nazi rule, he considered himself a ‘historical figure,’ confiding in his jailers weeks prior that his trial was but a blip in the historical record and that, ‘fifty or sixty’ years down the line, ‘statues in his image would be erected all across Germany’ [1].

At the time of his death, Göring was one of twenty-three tried for war crimes and crimes against humanity during the Nuremberg Trials, which lasted from November 1945 to October 1946 [2]. During this time, the defendants were forced to revisit incriminatory documents that they had personally signed, and to relive lengthly meetings [3]; minutes that they didn’t expect to see the light of day, or more likely, believed would sediment their place as heroic figures within the annals of history.

Had the Nazis won, this may have been the case, but the spectacle of the trial put an end to such delusions, exposing the horrors of Nazi Germany and the extent of atrocities carried out by Göring and his compatriots in the name of the Third Reich. Far from being monumentalised, ‘The Nazi leaders in the dock, and the thousands of henchmen who had enacted their decrees, came to be seen as “other”… Nazism, so the argument went, had been an aberration in European history, a discontinuity’ [4].

American prosecutor Robert Kemper went so far as to describe the trial as ‘the greatest history seminar ever’ [5]. If there was a lesson to be learnt, it came in the form of an edict: ‘Never again!’ Today, however, we are forced to re-examine what we have learnt, for where the horrors of Nazi Germany’s genocide were recounted, for the most part, in retrospect, today a genocide is being live-streamed, and nobody seems willing or capable of bringing it to an end, the results of which may have a lasting and disastrous impact, not only on those directly effected, but on the integrity and capacity to uphold international law.

Before I continue, it must be stated that I do not use the term genocide lightly. While aware of the debates circulating its use, and although the International Court of Justice (ICJ) have not yet qualified it as such, my use of the term is nevertheless consistent with the multitude of evidence submitted by South Africa’s team of lawyers to institute provisional measures, under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, that ensure Palestinian life is protected [6]. Although its use could be read as an unnecessary provocation, it is my view that the term holds power in the imagination of the international community, and that it enables for productive comparisons that are necessary if we are to bring about an end to the ongoing killing and forced displacement of civilians in Gaza. As we have seen, the State of Israel’s response to the ICJ order (published on 26 January 2024), has set a dangerous precedent for the capacity to uphold international law the world over. During the hearing, the ICJ ordered that Israel ‘take all measures within its power to prevent the commission of all acts within the scope of Article II of [the Convention], in particular’:

(a) killing members of the group; (b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; and (d) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group [7].

In addition, the court ordered that Israel ‘ensure with immediate effect that its military does not commit any’ of the aforementioned acts [8]. Yet reports indicate that the Israeli military have since ‘killed at least 3,523 Palestinians in Gaza’ — ‘an average of 120 Palestinians’ per day [9] — bringing the death toll at the time of writing up to an approximate 30,000 people. In addition, the bombing and displacement of the Palestinian population has, according to Amnesty International, left ‘over 1.2 million civilians […] currently sheltering’ in Rafah in an existential predicament [10].

Despite the ICJ order that Israel take ‘immediate and effective measures to enable the provision of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance to address the adverse conditions of life faced by Palestinians in the Gaza Strip’ [11], what we have seen is the further restriction of humanitarian aid, with the ‘number of trucks entering Gaza decreased by about a third, from an average of 146 a day in the three weeks prior [to the ICJ order], to an average of 105 a day over the subsequent three weeks’ [12].

Equally alarming is the defunding of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), ‘considered a lifeline for two million people in the besieged enclave,’ [13] just days after the ICJ order, by many of Israel’s allies. Caused by (potentially coerced [14]) allegations that twelve of the organisation’s few thousand employees were involved in Hamas’s deadly attack on Israel on 7 October 2023 — during which ‘more than 1,200 persons’ were killed and ‘some 240 people’ abducted — the defunding of UNRWA and the suspension of $450 million worth of contributions to the organisation, ‘at a time when more than 2 million Gazans are facing famine,’ [15] could be seen as an act of collective punishment which will have disastrous ramifications on Gaza’s surviving population. This, without any evidence thus far provided by the State of Israel to support the allegations [16].

At the same time, we are witnessing extreme violence and humanitarian crises in different corners of the globe; events which have, for the most part, been overshadowed or ignored. This includes, but is not limited to, the armed conflict and extrajudicial execution of civilians in Amhara, Ethiopia [17]; the devastating humanitarian effects of copper and cobalt mining in the DRC [18]; the obliteration of LGBTQI+ rights in Uganda and Ghana [19]; and the thousands killed and displaced as a result of the escalating conflict in Sudan [20].

Given the scope of this paper, I will not rehash evidence or recount statistics detailing abuses of power in each region. I will also refrain, here, from entering into debates about whether the killing of civilians is justifiable — it is not — and attempt to avoid the stranglehold of competitive memory, described by Holocaust scholar Michael Rothberg [21] as a ‘winner-take-all struggle between different group memories,’ or a ‘competition of victims’ [22]. Instead, I want to focus on two theoretical frameworks that are instructive in thinking about strategies that I believe might help, in part, to undo the narrative logics that disempower the international community from coming together to bring an end to such violence: Rothberg’s multidirecitonal memory, and Carli Coetzee’s accented thinking.

The former insists that there is no ‘direct line’ between memory and identity, and that we are constantly made and unmade by our experiences and the stories we tell and hear [23]. This perspective echoes anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s understanding that the past is never static, but continually shaped and informed by our present, to the extent that any discussion about memory must inevitably acknowledge that the distance between then and now is subject to change, often in accordance with forces that shape our understanding thereof. As notes Trouillot:

[...] the past does not exist independently from the present. Indeed, the past is only the past because there is a present, just as I can point to something over there only because I am here. But nothing is inherently over there or here. In that sense, the past has no content. The past — or more accurately, pastness — is a position [24].

If we can accept, at base, that power dynamics enable the amplification of particular narratives at the expense of others, and that ‘the production of historical narrative involves the uneven contribution of competing groups and individuals who have unequal access to the means of such production,’ [25] then how can we be receptive to stories and experiences that don’t gel with our own, especially those that have been overshadowed? To compare, but not equate [26]? To ‘remember the specificities of one history without silencing those of another?’ [27].

This was Rothberg’s goal in coining the phrase multidirectional memory, which bypasses the us versus them dichotomy — a ‘struggle for recognition in which there can only be winners and losers, a struggle that is thus closely allied with the potential for deadly violence’ [28] — in order to allow the possibility and necessity of ‘strange political bedfellows,’ and enable ‘imaginative links between different histories and social groups to come into view’ [29]. So doing, we might recognise that the histories of others do not obscure our own. On the contrary, consciousness of the one is thought to enable a deeper engagement with the other, allowing for ‘new lines of sight’ where shared experiences and creative strategies of resistance might ‘provide the grounds for new forms of collectivity that would not ignore equally powerful histories of division and difference’ [30].

Palestinian poet, writer, and educator Refaat Alareer understood this. During a presentation in 2015, titled “Stories make us,” he described the lasting impression of a number of stories told to him by his mother: stories of wit, charm, and cunning; of resilience, perseverance, and dedication [31]. These were intergenerational stories, passed down from his grandmother and mother, and later, by Alareer to his own children. He described the importance of these stories not only in shaping his understanding of life ‘under occupation,’ but the role they play in connecting us with the past and preparing us for the future, providing a vital connection to ‘life beyond the armistice line,’ and a connection to a land that, although ‘physically occupied […] still lives in our memories’ [32].

The place of memory is significant for Alareer because his grandmother’s generation are slowly — now rapidly — dying. ’If we stopped caring about stories, if we stopped telling our stories, if we stopped listening to our parents, we create space, we create a vacuum for others to occupy this virtual space in our past, in our heart’ [33]. It is perhaps for this reason that, on 1 November 2023 — just over a month before he and six of his family members were killed by an Israeli airstrike — Alareer dug up an old poem: ‘If I must die / let it bring hope / let it be a tale’ [34]. To paraphrase Nina Simone [35], one could ask: what are the conditions that produced a situation that demanded a poem like that? Worse still, that made him dig it up?

Importantly, while Alareer’s description of storytelling — its place in the formation of individual and collective identity — may read like a straight line from grandmother to mother to father to child, it is his capacity, beautifully demonstrated in his poem “I am you”, to recognise the humanity and shared (yet different) experiences of his oppressor that best encapsulates Rothberg’s multidirectional memory, and which might, if receptive, make possible the kinds of imaginative leaps required for the establishment of ‘new forms of collectivity’ and ‘resistance’. In the opening stanza, we read:

Two steps: one, two / Look in the mirror / The horror, the horror! / The butt of your M-16 on my cheekbone / The yellow patch it left / The bullet-shaped scar expanding / Like a swastika / Snaking across my face / The heartache flowing / Out of my eyes dripping / Out of my nostrils piercing / My ears flooding / The place / Like it did to you / 70 years ago / Or so [36].

Alareer’s visceral description of heartache; the idea that he carry the physical, excruciating spread of the swastika — a pain transferred — and its subsequent occupation of ‘The place’, as somewhere between, is a thread that runs throughout the poem, as is the will toward self-determination and the plea for self-reflexivity. In the following stanza, he writes:

I am just you / I am your past haunting / Your present and your future. / I strive like you did. / I fight like you did. / I resist like you resisted / And for a moment / I’d take your tenacity / As a model / Were you not holding / The barrel of the gun / Between my bleeding / Eyes [37].

And later,

All you have to do / Is close your eyes / (Seeing these days blinds our hearts.) / Close your eyes, tightly / So that you can see / In your mind’s eye. / Then look into the mirror. / One. Two. / I am you. / I am your past. / And killing me, / You kill you [38].

It must be stated that Alareer’s story is not unique, either, and to foreground the dangers that arise when focusing on the singular. As wrote Mohammed El-Kurd, there are:

Tens of thousands whose lives — not only freedom — were decimated, pulverized in the last few months. Most of them nameless, most of them unsung. Singular stories, especially when told recklessly, tend to isolate the individual from the group, sanctifying the former and demonizing the latter. Singular stories tend to situate man-made atrocities outside of politics, reinventing them as inexplicable natural disasters [39].

Without discounting the particulars of a given context, locale, or peoples, what becomes apparent is the need to invoke forms of solidarity that require such imaginative leaps, and that recognise the mutual basis of struggles for justice. It is not surprising, for example, that comparisons between Israel’s occupation of Palestine and apartheid South Africa are frequently drawn, comparisons which empower the global community to act and which help provide an antidote to the narrative cul-de-sac that we find ourselves in. In an interview with author Ali Abunimah, screened as part of the documentary Roadmap to Apartheid (2012), for example, we see a productive comparison that helps us understand the motivations behind both the formation of Afrikaner nationalism and Zionism. ‘Afrikaner history,’ observes Abunimah, ‘formed a sort of self-contained moral universe,’ whereby the Afrikaans population

[...] saw themselves primarily as victims; settlers who were escaping religuous persecution in Europe. They saw themselves as fighting for self-determination [...] The first time in history that the term concentration camp appears is in Afrikaner history. About ten percent of the population died in British concentration camps. So for them, apartheid was about survival, about self-determination, about redemption, about preserving a way of life. You see a very similar pattern in Zionism. Despite the Palestinian experience of them as a very aggressive colonising movement that has dispossessed them, Israelis are capable of seeing themselves as victims, as survivors, drawing on Jewish history in order to justify the status quo. It’s important to address that. It’s important to address them with empathy, and to say ‘I don’t accept what you do, but I understand what the motivation is,’ and to be able to talk about that [40].

If my focus in this essay lies primarily on Palestine, it is because Holocaust memory has become so deeply ingrained the world over that many, myself included, find it difficult to think of the Holocaust as anything but an abomination that is without precedent, and therefore, detached from the multitude of historical, global currents which led to it, as well as those more recent atrocities that have been downplayed because of processes of equation, rendering them mute or incomparable in scale. Such silencing is most notable in the opening remarks made by Co-Agent of Israel, Mr Tal Becker, during the ICJ hearing on 12 January 2024:

Madam President, distinguished Members of the Court, it is an honour to appear before you again on behalf of the State of Israel. The State of Israel is singularly aware of why the Genocide Convention, which has been invoked in these proceedings, was adopted. Seared in our collective memory is the systematic murder of six million Jews as part of a pre-meditated and heinous programme for their total annihilation [41].

Becker’s recourse to the Holocaust as the basis for the court’s existence seems to suggest that the court owes it one, and that, in effect, it would be impossible, even absurd, as the “sole” subjects of this history, to suggest that Israel could be in contravention of the Convention. He attempts to hammer this point home by drawing on the story of Raphael Lemkin, ‘a Polish Jew, who witnessed the unspeakable horrors of the Holocaust,’ and who coined the term genocide. ‘He helped the world recognize that the existing legal lexicon was simply inadequate to capture the devastating evil that the Nazi Holocaust unleashed’ [42]. Similarly, where the brutality of Hamas is said to know ‘no bounds’, the killing of civilians in Gaza is considered a simple byproduct of war, ‘like in all wars’, adding that:

The harsh realities of the current hostilities are made especially agonizing for civilians given Hamas’ reprehensible strategy of seeking to maximize civilian harm to both Israelis and Palestinians, even as Israel seeks to minimize it [43].

Not surprisingly, Becker’s remarks — which echo those of various Israeli statesman — find their own precedent in the words of then American President George W. Bush, when he announced his ‘war on terror’ in 2003:

Saddam Hussein has placed Iraqi troops and equipment in civilian areas, attempting to use innocent men, women and children as shields for his own military — a final atrocity against his people. I want Americans and all the world to know that coalition forces will make every effort to spare innocent civilians from harm [44].

Such comparison is important because it foregrounds a framing device that has been employed time and again to justify the devastation of entire regions and populations, and to defer blame for the loss of civilian life. To this end, Becker states that the Convention ‘was not designed to address the brutal impact of intensive hostilities on the civilian population,’ but was ‘set apart to address a malevolent crime of the most exceptional severity’ [45].

Notwithstanding its attempts to speak on behalf of all Jews, Israel’s repeated claims of self-defence over the past few decades [46] and its continual recall of Holocaust memory insists that, by virtue of the sheer scale of devestation wrought, Israel cannot be the aggressor and must, in the eyes of the world, remain a perpetual victim; its actions an attempt to keep at bay an impending threat, forever at the door. Similarly, the implication that evil was ‘unleashed’ on the world through the Holocaust, as if for the first time — a new lexicon for a new evil — is dangerous. What, for example, of the Atlantic slave trade? Or its predecessors? Instructively, Saidiya Hartman writes that that term slavery ‘derived from the word “Slav,” because Eastern Europeans were the slaves of the medieval world’ [47]. She points out that it was only much later, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when

the line between the slave and the free separated Africans and Europeans and hardened into a color line. For Europeans, race established a hierarchy of human life, determined which persons were expendable, and selected the bodies that could be transformed into commodities [48].

By foregrounding the rise of racial purism, one can also begin to draw parallels to the genocide of the Native American population in the United States which, in temporal terms, by and large paralleled the Atlantic slave trade, reducing the Native American population from an estimated 12–15 million at the time of Columbus’s arrival to 250,000 by the end of the nineteenth century [49]; a particularly bloody decade in which massacres, such as that of Sand Creek in 1864, were commonplace [50].

Again, this is not to amplify a particular history at the expense of another or to “equate” them. What the comparison does do, I hope, is highlight the extent to which claims of exceptionalism by the likes of Becker not only obscure the horrors perpetrated against people in different parts of the world, past and present, but attempt to absolve Euroamerica of its responsibilities towards justice, and thus garner favour with them.

Such perspective is also important because it helps to locate anti-Semitism as an offshoot of white supremacy and racial purism. Zoe Samudzi said as much in 2021. Having foreground the ‘mythos’ that the Nazi Holocaust was a break ‘from the practice of just, regulated European warfare’ and that it was ‘subsequently punished by the Nuremberg trial,’ bringing the ‘then-infant concept of genocide into the fold of international criminal law,’ she goes on to highlight a form of racial prejudice which neglects Germany’s earlier genocide in Namibia whilst amplifying its ‘responsibility to Jews in Germany and to the state of Israel birthed from this attempted extermination and racism towards Jews’ [51]. By drawing attention to the colonisation of what was then South West Africa in the late-nineteenth century, and the resultant 1904–08 Herero Wars, which ‘saw the devastating extermination of 80% of Ovaherero people and nearly half of the Nama,’ Samudzi necessitates an examination of the ’scientific afterlife of this genocide via anti-blackness and its relationalities with other racializing frames and practices’ [52]. She draws on the influence of anthropologist Eugen Fischer, whose studies

of the mixed-race communities in Rehoboth came to influence Germany’s anti-miscegenation policy: from the 1908 and 1912 criminalizations of mixed race marriages in the German colonies and metropole, respectively, to the jus sanguinis-based 1913 Nationality Law, to his influence on Adolf Hitler and the creation of the 1935 Nuremberg Laws [53].

For Samudzi,

The transmutation of racial frames from South West Africa to the lands and populations of Eastern Prussia permits a tracking of the trajectory of Germanness’ calcification as whiteness: German citizenship’s preclusion of blackness and Jewishness and other impurities necessitated racial hygiene science, enforced segregations, and then, necessarily, genocide [54].

Part of the irony here is that today, many of those citizens who reside in Israel are descendents of people who fled from widespread persecution and the rise of racial purism in places like France, Russia, Romania, and Germany... In other words, from the very states to which Becker now makes his appeal, and from the very same prejudicial rhetoric touted by the Zionist state, the effects of which are felt both inside and outside of the state.

In a news article from 2019, titled “Racism: In Israel some Jews are more equal than others,” Nadine Sayegh highlights an internal prejudice against Ethiopian Jews and Mizrahi Jews (‘Jews of Middle Eastern and North African descent’) who, although citizens with political agency, are often met with racial prejudice and police brutality, occassionally resulting in killings and subsequent protests. ‘With several different ethnic populations, there is a clear preference for Ashkenazi (Jews of Eastern and Central European descent who are white caucasian) in matters of social, economic and political concern,’ she observes. Yet still, the ‘full force of the Israeli state is propagated against the Palestinians on a daily basis’ [55].

In The Balfour Declaration, historian Jonathan Schneer provides a detailed account of the multiple periods in which a wide diversity of Jewish immigrants sought a new life in Palestine on the back of increased anti-Semitism in Russia and Europe during the nineteenth century, prior to the emergence of Zionism [56]. He draws a link between the formation of this ideology and the assassination of Russian Tsar Alexander II in 1881, and the blame that his son, Alexander III, placed on the Jews, reimposing ‘the anti-Semitic policies his father had relaxed, most notoriously the law confining Jews to settlements of ten thousand inhabitants or more,’ which became the ‘stimulus for the great late-nineteenth-century Jewish exodus from Russia,’ with 7,000 Jews emigrating to Palestine the following year [57]. As notes Schneer, these were people who ‘sought a peaceful life, not a place to die in peace; and the most energetic and idealistic among them were determined to practice the trade that was barred to them in Russia, namely agriculture’ [58]; who were intent on demonstrating to the world that ‘they were not natural ghetto-dwellers’ [59] but could till and manage the land like any other.

Schneer writes that those who arrived from Russia and Romania, as well as those who had previously settled and stood to benefit, garnered support from philantrophists like Baron Edmond de Rothschild of Paris, ‘members of the London branch of his family, and other wealthy coreligionists’ [60], who ‘provided the necessary cushion when crops did not grow or, having grown, did not sell,’ as well as ‘funds for equipment, tools, seeds, teachers, schools, doctors, and administrators. And of course they gave funds to purchase land in the first place’ [61].

Like Abunimah’s observation, what we see is the will towards self-determination; the desire to establish for themselves that which had been denied, and to live in a context free from anti-Semitism [62]. While noting the presence of anti-Semitism within Palestine itself — not to be equated with the white-supremacist Nazi brand, but born of Palestinian persecution — and the tensions that arose as a result of the acquisition of large swathes of land during this period, it is important to note that it was nowhere near as ‘widespread, vicious, and dangerous’ as that experienced in Europe or Russia, ‘or else the Jews would not have continued to come’ [63]. As historian Ilan Pappé points out:

[...] no one I know has ever objected or questioned the right of people to redefine themselves on a national, ethnic, or cultural ground. [...] Neither is the historical moment in which they to do it questionable, however this particular group had defined itself in the past (in our case, as a religious group). The problem lies elsewhere. What is the price paid by this transformation and who pays the price? If this new definition comes at the expense of another people, this becomes a problem. If a group is a victim of a crime and is looking for a safe haven, it cannot obtain this by expelling someone else, another group, from this space that you want as your safe haven. This is the difference between what you want as a group and what means you use to achieve it [64].

This long view highlights a kind of historical amnesia on the part of many of Israel’s supporters in refusing to account for their own histories of persecution and anti-Semitism, allowing for all that blame to land on the shoulders of Palestinians, who are painted as a hostile entity; what in South Africa we might call swaart gevaar. It is also important because it helps to contextualise the ways in which we as the global community are all, to one or other extent, complicit in the events that are unfolding, and that we share in the responsibility of bringing it to an end.

As wrote Columbia University Professor Hamid Dabashi in 2014, it is ‘near impossible for the cultural critic,’ in this day and age, ‘to find a moral space outside the culture it wishes to criticise’ [65]. All of us who possess a smartphone in the knowledge of the devastating effects of cobalt mining in the DRC will attest to this. Dependance, whether real or imagined, breeds apathy. As does guilt. We’ve seen this dynamic play out recently in Germany, where the long-arm of state-funding for the arts, coupled with the adoption of the IHRA’s working definition of antisemitism, has led to the silencing of anyone remotely critical of Israel or aligned to the BDS movement [66]. As noted Emily Dische-Becker in 2020, ‘The last thing Germans want is to be accused of “relativizing” antisemitism. That’s the often-heard charge here when antisemitism is put into any kind of contextual relationship with other systems of power and oppression’ [67].

Yet as historians David Olusoga and Casper Erichsen have shown, it is precisely such contextual relationships that help forge understanding and solidarity across temporal and geographic divides. Their focus is the Nuremberg Trial, often likened to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. In their analysis, Olusoga and Erichsen, like Samudzi, write of the ‘great post-war myth’, which helped to solidify the ‘comforting fantasy that the Nazis were a new order of monsters and that their crimes were without precursor or precedent’ [68].

They highlight how, despite the start date chosen by the prosecuting nations — 1914, widely considered ‘year zero’ [69] — Nazism, on an ideological level, had begun to flourish years before, through the colonisation of Namibia and the genocide committed at the turn of the century against the Ovaherero and Nama. Of particular import to their argument is the trial of Hermann Göring. When asked to provide a ‘brief’ account of his life prior to WWI, Göring chose to foreground the role of his father, Dr. Heinrich Göring, in the colonisation of Namibia. Appointed by Chancellor Bismarck in 1885 as the first Governor of what was then South-West Africa, Göring‘s father had close ties to both Cecil John Rhodes and elder Chamberlain, both key protagonists in the realisation of the first concentration camps, constructed by the British during the South African War (1899–1902) [70], which not only had devestating effects on the Afrikaans but also South Africa’s black population [71].

If Göring was at pains to express these ties during the Trial — to locate the Third Reich within the ‘mainstream of world history’ and point up the fact that ‘Nazism and the principles on which it had been founded were not unique but merely Germanic incarnations of the same forces with which the prosecuting powers had built up their own empires and expanded their own power’ [72] — it was because he was attempting to justify the atrocoties carried out in the name of the Third Reich. While such comparison ‘could easily be dismissed as a desperate defence tactic,’ write Olusoga and Erichsen, it nevertheless reveals an ‘uncomfortable truth’: namely, that ‘Much of Nazi ideology and many of the crimes committed in its name were part of a larger trend within European history and philosophy,’ and that at Nuremberg, ‘all such historical precedent was plunged into darkness.’ What was described as “The greatest history seminar ever,”’ they write, ‘did not look back far enough into history’ [73]. The same could be said of Israel’s defence during the ICJ hearing, when Becker dismissed the long historical arc provided by the South African legal team as ‘decontextualised’ [74], opting to focus instead on the Holocaust and October 7. Much like Trouillot, who speaks about the use of ‘single and simple moment[s]’ such as dates to commemorate historical events — and the subsequent loss of understanding to what he terms an event’s ‘processional character’ [75] — what we find is a deliberate abstraction that transforms the messiness of the “event” into a digestible, easily manipulated narrative. ‘The isolation of a single moment thus creates a historical “fact,”’ writes Trouillot:

As a set event, void of context and marked by a fixed date, this chunk of history becomes much more manageable outside of the academic guild [...] It accommodates travel agents, airlines, politicians, the media, or the states who sell it in prepackaged forms by which the public has come to expect history to present itself for immediate consumption [76].

By this, he is referring not only to the multitude of ways in which the ‘same’ event may be experienced or understood by different people, but also an event’s relation to a complex network of inseparable undercurrents which are cast aside, overlooked, or simplified in the production of historical narrative, based on what is or isn’t prioritised by those who produce it. 1914 meets 9/11 meets October 7.

Comparisons between the Nuremburg Trial and South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission are therefore instructive, for while both were framed through the language of learning and nation building [77], they were also underpinned by a tendancy to oversimplify, reducing the messiness of the processional into bite-size, easily digestable forms which fail to account for the continued legacies of the Holocaust or apartheid in our present. Such considerations are important if we wish to think about the kinds of regulatory processes necessary to bring about substantive change in Palestine or any of the aforementioned territories, including our own.

As stated by Njabulo Ndebele in 1992, when addressing an audience of predominantly white graduates at the University of Cape Town, the desire to wipe the slate clean can also impede the possibility of real transformation. Contrary to the sensationalist atmosphere surrounding the unbanning of South African liberation movements, the release of political prisoners, and the repeal of apartheid legislation on 2 February 1990, what followed was a neutralisation of their political agency:

That date was not meant to bring in a new world. The promise of the future came by default. That day was designed to induce normalcy in politics so that the politics of the liberation movement could have its inspirational and visionary quality reduced to the mundane, so that it could be contained in such a way that there would be no difference between it and countless other demands that needed to be articulated through a regulatory process. What was done forcibly in the past, that is, to break the back of opposition, was now achieved through an apparent concession. The point of this is that the government, in using the rhetoric of change, was doing no more than reinforce[ing] the past. When the white community thought it was moving forward, it was actually digging in [78].

Such political manoeuvring is also apparent through the State of Israel’s supposed “negotiations” with occupied Palestine, from their proposed two-state solution — which allocated a minuscule portion of their own land back to the Palestinians to “govern” — to the bartering of Palestinian bodies during peace negotiations [79]. Where the global community saw progress, the Oslo Accords had simply bought the State of Israel time to continue its project of dispossession and settlement. This point is expressly felt in the writings of Haidar Eid, who has repeatedly critiqued the Oslo Accords for attempting to ‘guarantee the subordination and conformity of the Palestinians,’ [80] as well as in Slavoj Žižek’s essay, “What Goes On When Nothing Goes On?”:

When Israeli peace-loving liberals present their conflict with Palestinians in neutral “symmetrical” terms, admitting that there are extremists on both sides who reject peace, and so on, one should ask a simple question: What goes on in the Middle East when nothing goes on there at the direct politico-military level (i.e. when there are no tensions, attacks, negotiations)? What goes on is the incessant slow work of taking the land from the Palestinians in the West Bank: the gradual strangling of the Palestinian economy, the parceling of their land, the building of new settlements, the pressure on Palestinian farmers to make them abandon their land (which goes from crop-burning and religious desecration up to individual killings), all this supported by a Kafkaesque network of legal regulations [81].

Carli Coetzee’s conception of accented thinking is instructive here. Echoing Ndebele, Coetzee writes of a reluctantce to accept an easy “post” position for South Africa (post-apartheid, post-race)’ which suggests that history has become irrelevant, the “post” erasing the responsibilities and formations of the past’ [82]. Whilst acknowledging what has already been achieved, her conception of accented thinking is dedicated to the ’long’ ending of apartheid in South Africa, interpreted as an ‘activity’ and perspective that requires constant work:

The way in which I use the term accented [...] is to refer to ways of thinking that are aware of the legacies of the past, and do not attempt to empty out the conflicts and violence under the surface. Accented thinking and accented conversations will often, perhaps atypically, appear conflictual and overly insistent on difference and disagreement. In this book I argue that it is precisely those discourses that acknowledge the asymmetrical legacies of apartheid, and draw attention to the enduring effects of the violent past, that can bring about the long ending of apartheid. The value of this accented sense of an ending is that it requires a regard for the past and a responsibility to seek out that about which one chooses to be ignorant. It is an understanding of the sense of the ending of apartheid as an activist task in which there is work to be done: precisely the work towards this ending [83].

Although this paper has largely been rooted in the geopolitical, in things happening ‘over there,’ Coetzee’s perspective sits closer to home, in the university, classroom, seminar room, lecture hall, or court of law — in other words, more everyday contexts where power asymmetries are at play [84]. She highlights the need for approaches towards learning and teaching that encourage ‘an “ear” for many and diverse accents, and for the diverse forms of knowledge and languages around us’; whereby ‘it is not the student alone who needs to be transformed, but also the teacher and the teaching institution’ [85].

If the Nuremberg Trial can indeed be regarded as a space of learning, what might the world have stood to benefit from an approach like Coetzee’s? Would the prosecuting authorities have been more self-reflexive about the place of Nazism in the long arc of imperialism? Would those publics for whom it was intended have come to recognise their own ‘other’? To what extent would the appeal, ‘Never again!’, have seeded an appreciation for its applicability to a much wider ambit? And what kind of regulatory processes would such an approach have enabled during the TRC? When an interviewer from some large-scale media conglomorate in the UK or US invites a guest speaker from Palestine to talk about Palestine, would they have learnt something? After Alareer,

All you have to do / Is close your eyes / (Seeing these days blinds our hearts.) / Close your eyes, tightly / So that you can see / In your mind’s eye. / Then look into the mirror. / One. Two. / I am you. / I am your past. / And killing me, / You kill you [86]

Endnotes

1. Olusoga, David and Casper W. Erichsen. The Kaiser’s Holocaust: Germany’s Forgotten Genocide and the Colonial Roots of Nazism. London: Faber and Faber, 2010, 9. 

2. Olusoga and Erichsen 2010, 10. 

3. Olusoga and Erichsen 2010, 9. 

4. Olusoga and Erichsen 2010, 10–11. 

5. Olusoga and Erichsen 2010, 9. 

6. See International Court of Justice, “Public sitting held on Thursday 11 January 2024, at 10 a.m., at the Peace Palace, President Donoghue presiding, in the case concerning Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the Gaza Strip (South Africa v. Israel), verbatim record.’ ICJ (11 January 2024): available online.

7. International Court of Justice, “Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the Gaza Strip (South Africa v. Israel),” ICJ (January 26, 2024), see page 23 available online here.

8. International Court of Justice, “Application of the Convention...”, 25. 

9. Al Jazeera, “Has Israel complied with ICJ order in Gaza genocide case?” Al Jazeera (February 26, 2024), available online here.

10. Amnesty International, “Israel defying ICJ ruling to prevent genocide by failing to allow adequate humanitarian aid to reach Gaza,” Amnesty International (February 26, 2024), available online here.

11. International Court of Justice, “Application of the Convention...”, 25. 

12. Amnesty International, “Israel defying ICJ ruling...”

13. Al Jazeera, “Which countries have cut funding to UNRWA, and why?” Al Jazeera (28 January 2024), available online here.

14. Reuters. “UNRWA report says Israel coerced some agency employees to falsely admit Hamas links.” Reuters (8 March 2024), available online here.

15. Julian Borger. “Israel yet to provide evidence to back UNRWA 7 October attack claims – UN”. The Guardian (1 March 2024), available online here.

16. Borger, “Israel yet to provide evidence...” 

17. Amnesty International, “Ethiopia: End extrajudicial Executions in Amhara region, bring perpetrators to justice.” Amnesty International (February 26, 2024), available online here.

18. See Amnesty International. “Democratic Republic of the Congo: Industrial mining of cobalt and copper for rechargeable batteries is leading to grievous human rights abuses.” Amnesty International (September 12, 2023): available online here.

19. See Human Rights Watch. “Uganda: New Anti-Gay Bill Further Threatens Rights: Follows Broader Crackdown on LGBT-Rights Groups, Civil Society in General.” Human Rights Watch (March 9, 2023): available online here.

20. Salih, Zeinab Mohammed. “Sudan’s war leaves deep scars in Geneina, a city of two massacres.” The Guardian (29 February 2024), available online here. Also see Amnesty International. “Sudan: War crimes rampant as civilians killed in both deliberate and indiscriminate attacks – new report”. Amnesty International (August 3, 2023): available online here.

21. ‘Michael Rothberg is an American literature and memory studies scholar. He is a professor of English and Comparative Literature and the 1939 Society Samuel Goetz Chair in Holocaust Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He was the founding director of the Initiative in Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.’ Available online here.

22. Rothberg, Michael. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009. 

23. Rothberg 2009, 3. 

24. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon Press, 1995, 14–5.

25. Trouillot 1995, xxiii.

26. ‘Too often comparison is understood as “equation”—the Holocaust cannot be compared to any other history, the story goes, because it is unlike them all. this project takes dissimilarity for granted, since no two events are ever alike, and then focuses its intellectual energy on investigating what it means to invoke connections nonetheless. The logic of comparison explored here does not stand or fall on connections that can be empirically validated for historical accuracy; nor can we ensure that all such connections will be politically palatable to all concerned parties. Rather, a certain bracketing of empirical history and an openness to the possibility of strange political bedfellows are necessary in order for the imaginative links between different histories and social groups to come into view; these imaginative links are the substance of multidirectional memory. Comparison, like memory, should be thought of as productiven — as producing new objects and new lines of sight — and not simply as reproducing already given entities that either are or are not “like” other already given entities.’ See Rothberg 2009, 18–19.

27. Rothberg 2009, 37.

28. Rothberg 2009, 3. 

29. Rothberg 2009, 18. 

30. Rothberg 2009, 23. 

31. Alareer, Refaat. “Stories make us | Refaat Alareer | TEDxShujaiya.” YouTube (TEDx Talks: 15 November 2015), available online here.

32. Alareer 2015.

33. Alareer 2015.

34. Serhan, Yasmeen. “The Voice Notes Poet Refaat Alareer Sent Before His Death.” TIME Magazine (14 December 2023), available online here.

35. I first heard about the original quote – ‘I do not believe the conditions that produced a situation that demanded a song like that!’ – through a lecture delivered online by Dineo Seshee Bopape. I couldn’t find the lecture again but you can see original here: Nina Simone. “Nina Simone – Stars / Feelings (Medley, live at Montreux, 1976).” YouTube (2021, 8:03 – 8:10), available online here.

36. Alareer, Refaat. “I am you.” Mondoweiss (31 October 2012), available online here.

37. Alareer, “I am you.”

38. Alareer, “I am you.”

39. El-Kurd, Mohammed. “Are we indeed all Palestinians?” Mondoweiss (13 March 2024), available online here.

40. Journeyman Pictures. “A shocking insight into Israel’s Apartheid | Roadmap to Apartheid | Full Film.” YouTube (18 October 2023, 6 – 7:50). Available online here.

41. Becker, Tal. “Co-Agent’s Opening Statement”. In Public sitting held on Friday 12 January 2024, at 10 a.m., at the Peace Palace, President Donoghue presiding, in the case concerning Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the Gaza Strip (South Africa v. Israel). The Hague, International Court of Justice (12 January 2024), 12. Available online here.

42. Becker 2024, 12.

43. Becker 2024, 13.

44. Bush, George W. “President Bush addresses the nation.” The Oval Office: Operation Iraqi Freedom (March 19, 2003): available online here.

45. Becker 2024, 13. Emphasis my own.

46. Pappé, Ilan. “A Brief History of Israel’s Incremental Genocide.” In On Palestine: Noam Chomsky and Ilan Pappé, 147–154. Edited by Frank Barat. UK, USA, Canada, Ireland, Australia, India, New Zealand, South Africa: Penguin Books, 2015.

47. Hartman, Saidiya. Lose Your Mother. London: Serpent’s Tail, 2021 [2007], 5.

48. Hartman 2021, 5–6.

49. Davey, Robin and Yellow Thunder Woman (dir.). “The Canary Effect: Kill the Indian, Save the Man.” 2006, available here.

50. Davey and Yellow Thunder Woman, “The Canary Effect.”

51. Zoe Samudzi. “In Absentia of Black Study.” The New Fascism Syllabus (31 May 2021): available online here.

52. Samudzi. “In Absentia of Black Study.”

53. Samudzi. “In Absentia of Black Study.”

54. Samudzi. “In Absentia of Black Study.”

55. Sayegh, Nadine. “Racism: In Israel some Jews are more equal than others.” TRT World (2019), available online here.

56. Schneer, Jonathan. The Balfour Declaration: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict. New York: Random House, 2010, 50–1. 

57. Schneer 2010, 51–2. 

58. Schneer 2010, 52. 

59. Schneer 2010, 53. 

60. Schneer 2010, 53. 

61. Schneer 2010, 53

62. Schneer 2010, 53–4.

63. Schneer 2010, 56.

64. Pappé, Ilan. “The Past.” In On Palestine: Noam Chomsky & Ilan Pappé, 49–76. Edited by Frank Barat. UK, USA, Canada, Ireland, Australia, India, New Zealand, South Africa: Penguin Books, 2015, 58–9.   

65. Dabashi, Hamid. “Gaza: Poetry after Auschwitz”. Al Jazeera (August 8, 2014), available online here.

66. See Masha Gessen. “In the Shadow of the Holocaust: How the politics of memory in Europe obscures what we see in Israel and Gaza today”. The New Yorker (9 December 2023): https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-weekend-essay/in-the-shadow-of-the-holocaust.

67. Dische-Becker, E., Khatib, S., and Manna., J. “Palestine, Antisemitism, and Germany’s ‘Peaceful Crusade’”. Protocols 8: available online here.

68. Olusoga and Erichsen 2010, 11. 

69. Olusoga and Erichsen 2010, 11. 

70. Olusoga and Erichsen 2010, 15. 

71. See South African History Online. “Black Concentration Camps during the Anglo-Boer War 2, 1900-1902”. South African History Online (21 March 2011, last updated 20 October 2017), available online here.

72. Olusoga and Erichsen 2010, 13. 

73. Olusoga and Erichsen 2010, 11. 

74. Becker 2024, 13.

75. Trouillot 1995, 113.

76. Trouillot 1995, 113.

77. In addition to the aforementioned description of the Nuremberg Trial as ‘the greatest history seminar ever,’ Carli Coetzee also notes, of the TRC, that ‘one way of talking about [it] has been to use the language of learning and teaching. Those who delivered their testimonies were sometimes described as the teachers, or the Commission itself was described as a teaching machine’. See Carli Coetzee. Accented Thinking: Language Activism and the Ending of Apartheid. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2013, 17. 

78. Ndebele, Njabulo. “A Call to Fellow Citizens: freeing the white community.” In Fine Lines from the Box: further thoughts about our country, 47. Edited by Thlalo Raditlhalo Cape Town: Umuzi, 2007. 

79. As noted elsewhere, artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan, in his PhD dissertation, ‘draws on an Al-Jazeera article from 2017, published online, which highlights various instances from the past decade in which the bodies of murdered protestors were abducted and disappeared by the Israeli Defence Forces or later used “as a tactic for leverage in negotiations”, noting how, in 2012 (just two years before the murder of Nawara and Abu Daher), “Israel released the bodies of 90 Palestinians in a gesture of revisiting peace talks between Israel and Palestinian officials.” See Christian, Sven. “[Inaudible]: The Politics of Silence in the Work of Lawrence Abu Hamdan and Gabrielle Goliath.” In Cultures of Silence: The Power of Untold Narratives, 115–27. Edited by Luísa Santos. London and New York: Routledge, 2023. Also see Lawrence Abu Hamdan. “Aural Contract: Investigations at the Threshold of Audibility.” PhD submission in Research Architecture. Centre for Research Architecture, Department of Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths University of London, 2017, 31.

80. Haidar Eid, “The Oslo Accords: A critique”. Al Jazeera (13 September 2013), available online here.

81. Žižek, Slavoj. “What Goes On When Nothing Goes On?” In The Case for Sanctions Against Israel, 23 – 27. Edited by Audrea Lim. London and New York, Verso. 

82. Coetzee 2013, ix. 

83. Coetzee 2013, x. 

84. Coetzee 2013, x. 

85. Coetzee 2013, x. 

86. Alareer, “I am you.”