A Genocide in Its Context

Bill V. Mullen

Gaza Faces History
By Enzo Traverso
Other Press, 2024, 127 pages, $15.99 paperbck.

Half a million Gazas trek north to their homes, now mostly reduced to rubble.

JAMES BALDWIN ONCE wrote that the state of Israel was created out of “Western interests” and that Palestinians had long paid the price for Europe’s “guilty Christian conscience.”

Baldwin was referring both to the realpolitik support given by Europe to Zionism as a political project, and to Europe’s tawdry history of antisemitism that was an inducement to that support. The ruling classes of countries like England supported the creation of Israel, Baldwin knew, in part because they hoped it would relieve them of their own Jews.

It is significant and important then that a leading historian of modern Europe would write a book about how Europe and European history might be used to assess the ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people.

Italian-born Enzo Traverso is the author of many books, including Fire and Blood: The European Civil War 1914-1945, and The Origins of Nazi Violence. More recently, he has written on the rise of new authoritarian states in the world, among which Israel might be counted as one.

In his new short book Gaza Faces History, Traverso offers what he calls “a critical meditation on the present and the ways that history has been summoned to interpret it.” It is a book unabashedly critical of Israel’s genocide, and strong in support of Palestinian self-determination.

It is also a bracing effort to wrest analysis of the genocide away from a narrow, American-centric perspective reflective of the fact that the United States stands today as the primary financial and political enabler of Israel and its genocidal war.

By way of a framework of European history, Traverso makes a number of important political and historical arguments helpful to radicals and activists attempting to see both the darkness and potential light at the end of the genocidal tunnel.

Perpetrator as Victim

Traverso’s first chapter argues that Israel has successfully turned itself into a “victim” of October 7 for much of the Western world, despite perpetrating what by international legal definition is clearly a genocide.

European history is his ironic guide to fleshing out this double standard. Traverso notes that the International Criminal Court that has declared Israel’s genocide “plausible” is the “direct descendant of the Nuremburg courts; its initiatives are praised as long as they target the West’s enemies, such as Russia or Serbia, or the barbarians of the global South, as the butchers of Kigali [Rwanda]; they provoke an outcry when they are directed at Israeli leaders.”

Here Traverso introduces a running theme of this book, namely that since the state’s founding in 1948 Israel has successfully assimilated itself into becoming one of the Western powers.

This argument leads logically into the next chapter, “Orientalism,” recalling indirectly Edward Said’s famous argument that the Western world “creates” the non-Western world as a savage “Other.”

Traverso argues that Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims today remain outside of the West’s definition of “civilization.” Israel’s genocidal war embodies this fact.

Traverso cites Max Weber’s concept of “instrumental rationality”— a utilitarian form of reasoning upheld by the “Enlightenment” West — to describe an Israel Defense Force officer’s calculus for murdering Palestinians: “You don’t want to waste expensive bombs on unimportant people.”

Such “rationality,” Traverso argues, has now achieved the level of statecraft across Europe. He focuses in particular on Germany, where guilt and responsibility for the Nazi holocaust have resulted in “unconditional support of Israel” articulated by Chancellors Angela Merkel and Olaf Scholz as “reason of state” (Staatrason), a term for “justifying illegal and immoral actions that are in fact a hidden face of the law.”

Thus, Germany’s repression of all opposition to the present genocide — including denying visas to former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis and British surgeon Ghassan Abu-Sittah — are examples of antidemocratic censorship done in the name of “democracy.”

As Traverso puts it, “What’s wrong with discriminating against immigrants and Muslim, if it’s to defend the Jews?”

Antisemitism Morphs to Islamophobia

Announcing another major theme of his book, Traverso shows how Europe’s histories of anti-Semitism have come home to roost as fanatical Islamophobia.

Traverso turns to Europe’s long history of war to contextualize the “false news” or “fake news” phenomenon that has accompanied the Palestinian genocide. Unproven media stories of Hamas baby beheadings and mass rape are analogized by Traverso to World War I stories in German newspapers about Belgians as “bloodthirsty beasts.”

Again, Traverso notes an ironic turn in histories of Western racism: “Whereas early-modern anti-Semitic mythology is intolerable, contemporary Islamophobic allegations have become banal: they have been integrated into our zeitgeist and belong to the natural order of things.”

Building out from this insight, Traverso’s chapter “Anti-Zionism and Anti-Semitism” examines the ways in which antisemitism has been “weaponized” mainly by right-wing and right-leaning governments both in the United States and Europe. Here too, history provides ironies.

Referring to a 1930s “transfer agreement” (allowing German Jewish emigration to Palestine) that undercut a global boycott movement against Nazi Germany, Traverso notes that “Whereas anti-fascists tried to create a mass movement against Nazism, Zionists made an agreement with Hitler.”

Today the Meloni government, directly descended from Italian fascism, “can simultaneously affirm her support for Israel and their membership in the Western camp, stigmatize the Left, and pursue xenophobic policies toward migrants.”

Traverso notes an important, pernicious effect of this conjuncture: “Fighting anti-Semitism will become increasingly difficult given the distortion and misappropriation of the term.”

Roots of Violent Resistance

Traverso’s chapter “Violence, Terrorism, Resistance” was for this reader the most complex and innovative one in the book. Traverso begins by arguing that Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack on Israel “must be analyzed, not simply deplored.” Traverso recalls that “Killing civilians, as deplorable as it may be, has always been the weapon of the weak in asymmetric wars.”

He notes that not just Hamas but Nelson Mandela’s ANC, the PLO before Oslo, and Vietnam’s NLF all killed civilians as part of their wars against colonial or imperial aggression. In the European context, Traverso reminds us that Auschwitz inmates used violence against their oppressors in order to affirm their humanity.

For Traverso the political lesson to be drawn is this: “Decades of memory politics, focused almost exclusively on the suffering of the victims, aiming to present the cause of the oppressed as the triumph of innocence, have obscured a reality that has seemed obvious at other times. The oppressed rebel by resorting to violence, and this violence is neither pretty nor idyllic, and is sometimes even horrifying.”

Traverso’s argument here recalls an analogous one made in his 2016 book Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory. Writing nearly 30 years after the collapse of “official” Soviet Communism, he wrote that the receding distance of the 20th century’s great revolutions had made it easier to remember defeat rather than victory, especially for Socialists.

Traverso’s meditation on liberatory revolutionary violence in Gaza Faces History makes a similar point about our memory and evaluation of past national liberation struggles.

Philosopher and activist Alberto Toscano has written since the genocide began of the prospects for describing the contemporary state of Israel as fascist (“The War on Gaza and Israel’s Fascism Debate,” versobooks.com, October 19, 2023)

Traverso wades into this territory, focusing in on what he calls “Jewish supremacy” thought in Israel. Traverso argues that Israeli state leaders’ descriptions of Palestinians as “human animals” and “roaches in a bottle” has blurred the boundaries between tactics used in the Nazi holocaust against Jews and Israel’s genocidal war.

The destruction of Gaza by the IDF, he writes, recalls the razing of the Warsaw ghetto by General Stroop in 1943. “Netanyahu is not Hitler, and his government is not a Nazi regime, that is obvious,” he writes. And yet, “it looks as though Israel is doing everything it can to erase the difference.”

Toward Resolution

Traverso leans most fully — and optimistically — into European history in his final chapter, “From the River to the Sea.” Here, he openly endorses what the early PLO, a branch of the Israeli left (Matzpen) and many Palestinians themselves have called for, namely a binational state with equal rights for all citizens.

Pushing back against Zionist claims for total control of the region “from the river to the sea,” Traverso forcefully argues that “the idea of a binational state is no way anti-Semitic, and it certainly doesn’t equate with wanting to expel Jews from Palestine.” He continues:

“Why would a binational Israeli-Palestinian state be impossible or irrational? In the throes of World War II, the idea of building a European federation combining Germany, France, Italy, Belgium, and the Netherlands would have seemed strange and naïve. But ten years later, the process of building Europe had started…Why would the same not be true in the Middle East?…Sometimes tragedies serve to open up new horizons.”

Traverso’s “optimism of the will” may strike some readers as discordant given the daily, ongoing human horror of the current genocide. He also admits at the start and end of his book that there are limits to analogy, and that European history and Middle East history have their own contours.

Yet other writers, like Ali Abunimah, have also offered up South Africa, and northern Ireland, as potential templates for what could become a post-colonized, post-apartheid Palestine.

While much of what Traverso argues in his book will be familiar to readers heavily versed in histories of Zionism, Israel and the Palestinians, he does offer a silent demand, I believe, that it will require a breaking apart of Europe’s hegemonic support for Israel — in combination with a loosening of the U.S. imperial death grip on the region — to break the shackles and stay the bombs in Palestine.

Indeed, elsewhere in his work on authoritarian states, Traverso has made the argument that the Arabs and Muslims of our time are like the Jews of prior centuries — the most heavily targeted and violently expelled peoples from “Fortress Europe.”

In this context, Gaza Faces History is a powerful appendix and coda to very long epoch in Western histories of racism, imperialism and empire that can only be re-routed, one concludes, when Palestinians themselves are emancipated. The task of making this happen, Traverso clearly suggests, belongs to all of us.

March-April 2025, ATC 235