Author: Ronit Lentin

The zone of (dis)comfort

Ronit Lentin

Jonathan Glazer’s film The Zone of Interest, probably the most unsettling film I have seen (twice) in a very long time, ends with Auschwitz commander Rudolf Höss is in an office party in Berlin, far away from his wife and five children with whom he had been living in a luxurious villa just outside the concentration camp walls, where they could just about avoid seeing the killing, but where there was plenty of aural and visual evidence of the mass murder, with the chimneys towering over their carefully tended garden. The party is thrown in honour of Höss’s new plan for a more efficient mass extermination operation. After boasting to his wife on the phone about the new plan, Höss wanders in the darkened building and is suddenly overcome by an urge to vomit. As he holds his stomach and stumbles on the floor, a vision of the future appears at the end of the dark hallway: a glimpse of Auschwitz today, a museum commemorating its Jewish and other victims (Dowd 2024).  Vulture’s film critic A. A. Dowd wonders whether we should be reading this ending as Höss being finally confronted by his prominent role in the Nazi Final Solution and if he retched because his “sociopathic dissociation has faltered.” Or, alternatively,  what if “Höss might be experiencing a different kind of rude awakening – not so much the belated emergence of a conscience as the realization of how small he is in the grand scheme of things.”

Another film, the documentary made by a Palestinian-Israeli collective including the Palestinian documentarist Basel Adra and the Israeli journalist Yuval Avraham, No Other Land, about the ongoing harassment of Palestinian sheep farmers in the South Hebron Hills area of Massafer Yatta, made me think about Dowd’s question regarding the end of The Zone of Interest. I watched No Other Land as the Gaza genocide continues. While a growing number of people, including Jewish people, act in solidarity with the Palestinians – others, “uninvolved” people I meet casually, are telling me that my adamant solidarity with Palestine is outside their zone of comfort.

I was born in Mandatory Palestine before the birth of the racial colony of Israel but grew up in Israel in a Zionist family and society before becoming aware of the Israeli colonisation of Palestine. I moved to Ireland where I had lived for 53 years and where I became increasingly involved in Palestine solidarity activism. I suppose that in today’s Ireland I would not have met so many people for whom solidarity with Palestine would be so uncomfortable – in many ways Irish society is exemplary in its solidarity with the colonised Palestinians, perhaps because of Ireland’s past as Britain’s first settler colony. However, even in Ireland, Jewish family members had been less than sympathetic – I spent my whole married life arguing with my late partner about Palestine and Palestine solidarity, had other family members tell me I was “wrong about absolutely everything to do with Israel,” and had some acquaintances say that “I had unresolved hate issues” regarding Israel. Not to mention the profound discomfort of some of my Israeli family members – my brother, a former Israel air force pilot, has recently decided to cut our rather loose ties just because I mentioned the term “anti-Zionism.” 

Despite the sterling solidarity work and mass rallies organised by the unmatched Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign, even Ireland is not ideal on Palestine.  Ireland’s liberal daily The Irish Times, for instance, has published four or five articles about the alleged increase of antisemitism in Ireland since October 7 2023 as resulting, according to Ireland’s official Jewish community leaders, from Palestine solidarity activism. Like other official Jewish communities they are jumping on the anti-antisemitism bandwagon which the Palestinian German scholar Anna Esther Younes has written about so eloquently.

I have often encountered the zone of (dis) comfort in my new abode, on Gadigal land, so-called Australia – another settler colony – in relation to the current Gaza genocide. Two encounters in early June: a friend tells me how “uncomfortable” she feels when I express my distress about the Gaza genocide. Later, I get into a discussion about the Gaza genocide with a random man with whom I share the same space, whose response goes from the usual “it’s complicated” to mansplaining that Hamas and the Palestinians share the responsibility for the mass killing. Eventually, refusing to accept my apologies for making him uncomfortable, he leaves the space we share.

Though many people express sympathy or even admiration when I mention Palestine before moving to more neutral topics, I wonder how come I always end up apologising about other people’s discomfort when it comes to Palestine? Is it about Israel doing such a good propaganda job, despite the live streamed genocide it keeps committing for us all to see?

As the genocide continues, complete with total destruction, hunger, homelessness, disease, the zone of discomfort continues. A survey of film and television producers in the UK reports “not knowing” how to talk about Gaza:

At work, producer Jasleen Sethi, a 2024 Bafta TV winner, wears a pin or a keffiyeh to demonstrate her support for Palestine. “I’m not subtle,” she says. “I wanted to show my solidarity as it became clear what was happening in Gaza.” There was plenty of conversation in her office when the war between Russia and Ukraine began in February 2022, “but there just seems to be silence when it comes to Palestine and Gaza… and silence feels like you’re being told not to talk about it – that’s why it becomes a little more intimidating.”

Returning to Glazer’s film, I cannot but marvel at the ability of so many Israeli Jews, living a stone’s throw away from the bombarded Gaza Strip where the Israeli military murdered nearly 40,000 people, two third of them children and women (though see Khatib et al. in The Lancet, who estimate the number of casualties at about 186,000), to replicate the Höss family’s ability to unsee the horrific sights of murder and annihilation even as the sounds kept coming from across the wall, They can, of course,  because the Israeli media don’t show the sights, always use the escapist “I cannot bear to look at it” excuse. Too many Israelis and their Zionist insist that it isn’t really genocide as I argued in my earlier piece “Genocide is not a metaphor” and that Hamas operatives were the real genocidaires, repeating the debunked orchestrated rumours about beheaded and burnt Israeli babies, and scores of raped Israeli women. 

Take for example Haifa University professor emerita of History and daughter of the late liberal Zionist Israeli author Amos Oz, Fania Oz Salzberger, who posted this tweet (thanks Jonathan Ofir for alerting me to it):

Despite the horrible words thrown around by soul-dead politicians and traumatized youngsters, not a single Israeli soldiers entered Gaza with the commands, intent or wish to murder babies and rape women. Every single one of the 3,000 Gazans who entered Israel on 7/10 obeyed instructions, intended, wanted, and perpetrated just that. While my campaign for a Peace of the Moderates sometimes requires symmetrical language, there will never be a symmetry in the sheer joy of pre-planned massacre. Deradicalize both sides, by all means, but do not forget the difference.

Israeli and other Jews have been invoking the Holocaust, comparing Hamas to the Nazis, and refusing to let go of what has become known as “intergenerational trauma.” However, as Holocaust memory scholar Marianne Hirschwrites, it is especially important, after October 7, to remember that “The characterization of the Holocaust as the crime of all crimes—one that is always in danger of being displaced or denied—impedes, rather than clarifying, an understanding of other genocides, and of the genocidal character of the war in Gaza.” The postmemory of the Holocaust can be useful at this moment, she adds, “but that is true only if those of us who have a stake in it refute, in Jonathan Glazer’s terms, the inevitability of continued victimization, and refuse to allow our histories to be used as an alibi for war and destruction.”

In Glazer’s film Rudolf Höss’s mother-in-law, who comes to visit her daughter, could not stand the thought that perhaps among the incinerated Jews was also a Jewish woman whose house she used to clean. For her the chimneys and the faint sounds of the daily atrocities assumed a human face – the victims no longer the racialised and dehumanised subjects of state racism. For her daughter, on the other hand, the Auschwitz villa is the opportunity she had always dreamt about. “After the war,” she insists when Höss tells her he is being transferred, “we shall live like this again, in the country,” and she revels in the stolen Jewish fur coat that came, she is told, from “Canada,” not realising this was not a country.

I think of this as I watch young Israeli soldiers gloat on social media about their looted spoils – watches, expensive foods (before famine set in), cash, women’s sexy underwear (as if colonised subjects cannot have enjoyable sex lives). Höss’s wife got her luxuries from “Canada” and the IDF boys and girls taking selfies against the smoking ruins of Khan Yunis or Rafah, shout at their critics, “go to Gaza” – the Israeli synonym for “go to hell…”

And all the while we are surrounded not only by the Oz Salzbergers of this world (and I am particularly perturbed as Salzberger is my maiden name – family is no guarantee of consent as I already said). We are also drowning in the sea of discomfort of those who cannot bear our deep commitment – as Jewish people in my and my Jewish comrades’ case – to the decolonisation of Palestine, to the dismantling of the Zionist entity, and to freedom. Outside the loud islands of solidarity we are drowning in the zone of discomfort, in the oceans of denial, which, as Stanley Cohenargued, is a paradox, as we deny only what we actually know.

And as the discomfort turns into fatigue and indifference, the racial colony continues its lebensraum plans to re-settle Gaza, and now also Southern Lebanon with Jews. And the debates shift from whether it is a textbook case of genocide to vigorous discussions about the Palestinians’ right – duty – to resist. As Abdaljawad Omar said shortly after 7 October:

To me the Palestinian struggle exposes truths, reveals fascisms, and emboldens trajectories of change, radical political, and economic change in these societies – or at least it should do so. Palestine is not a nationalist, nor a religious, nor a feel-good cause… Our gift to the world [was] given through our blood, especially for those interested in a more just, more economically equal, decolonial, deracialized world. The struggle we lead reveals hidden discourses of imperialisms and forces centres of power to reveal their schizophrenic stances and hypocritical posturing. This is why Palestine is a universal struggle, a place for the condensation of truth in a post-truth historical conjecture. It is also a place from which the imperial metropole, and those within it suffering from racialized inequalities, can see in Palestine and its struggle a natural and political affinity.

In conclusion I return to Dowd’s question about whether Höss’s stomach pains derive from pangs of conscience or from realisation of his relative marginality in the history of race, coloniality and genocide, and speculate whether the discomfort of those not prepared to see Gaza, believe the genocide, or who insist on continuing the colonisation of Palestine once the Gaza dust settles and the costly reconstruction enriches the capitalists – can continue to prevail in the Omar’s envisaged world, a world of racial, political, and economic change.

Colonial academic control in Palestine and Israel

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Ronit Lentin

Institute of Culture and Society, Western Sydney University, “Taking action for Palestine in Academic and Cultural Institutions”, 11 April 2024 

Last month, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem suspended Professor Nadera Shalhoub Kevorkian, of the Faculty of Law and Institute of Criminology and the School of Social Work for denouncing the Gaza genocide and casting doubts on the Hamas rape allegations. The university justified the suspension by saying it would “preserve a safe climate on campus.” Shalhoub Kevorkian, a world-renowned Palestinian scholar and author of numerous books, whose research focuses on trauma, state crimes, surveillance, gender violence, law and society, said in a recent podcast on Makdisi Street that she would never allow anyone to touch a baby, kidnap a child, or rape a woman: “not in my name; I would never accept it as a Palestinian.”  Shalhoub Kevorkian had been in trouble before. After a paper she presented in 2019 claiming Israel tests weapons on Palestinian prisoners and Palestinian children to boost its international arms sales, and that “Palestinian spaces are laboratories for the Israeli security industry,” the Minister for Education called for her dismissal. And last October she was under pressure to resign her position when she signed a call for immediate ceasefire in Gaza.

According to Bhambra et al, Western universities are key sites through which colonialism, colonial knowledge, and theories of racism have been produced, institutionalised and naturalised, and universities in the global north were founded and financed through the spoils of colonial plunder, enslavement and dispossession. 

As an imperialist, colonial, race-making European project, Zionism has always relied on academic knowledge to deepen its hold on Palestine and racialize the Palestinians. Since the early days of the Zionist movement Jewish universities in Palestine were used as a state-building instrument, and were key to enabling the colonization of Palestine and the racialization of the Palestinians.  University education in Israel and occupied Palestine actually takes place in areas from which Palestinians were expelled. Thus Ben Gurion University in the Naqab is located in Be’er Sheva, the renamed Palestinian Bir Saba occupied by the Zionists on October 21 1948; 5,000 Palestinian were driven out at gunpoint to Hebron and many were shot; Tel Aviv University stands on the grounds of the depopulated Palestinian village Sheikh Muwannis, one of whose houses is the faculty club; the Hebrew University’s Mount Scopus campus is on Palestinian land occupied in 1967 – HUJI  benefits from settlement infrastructure, transport lines and access roads in the occupied territory, some of them on privately-owned Palestinian land; and most infamously, Ariel University is built in the illegal Israeli colony-settlement Ariel in the occupied West Bank. 

There are several historical and current aspects of the Israeli academy’s complicity with the colonisation of Palestine. According to Israeli sociologist Uri Ram, Israeli universities were always central to Zionism’s statist approach and Zionist academics have always maintained white European Jewish supremacy, and produced policies of colonization, of the racialization of the Palestinians as racially inferior to Israeli Jews, Jewish immigration, forging Jewish identity and denigrating “Israeli Arab” identity, the 1948-1966 military government regime, and  Zionist land ownership. Since the 1967 occupation, academics have been ever more central to policies of occupation and settlement, segregation and apartheid, domination and military prowess.  

According to the Palestinian Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), the current Gaza genocide, in which between 40,000 and 50,000 Palestinians were murdered and 80 per cent of Gaza has been rendered inhabitable, has elicited the support of most Israeli universities. Universities offer faculty and student reserve soldiers actively involved in the killing fields of Gaza various perks and privileges as rewards for their contribution to the war effort and the state’s “security.” This discriminates against Palestinian students, most of whom are not conscripted to the IDF and are thus not eligible for university grants and deferred exam dates available to serving Israeli student soldiers. Israeli academics are no different from the rest of Jewish-Israeli society, where 95% justify the bloody assault on the Palestinian people in Gaza, according to a recent poll.

The complicity of the Israeli academy is evidenced in several ways. Israeli universities and third level institutes of science and technology are central to developing and manufacturing Israel’s weapons and security systems, training military and security personnel, and providing theoretical backing for the Israeli occupation. At the same time, Israel exercises control and surveillance over academic institutions in occupied Palestine, curtailing students’ and academics’ freedom of movement and the actual freedom to educate Palestinians at all levels. Having successfully recruited Israeli academics as active collaborators in the colonisation of Palestine, Israel stymies free debate on the Israeli colonization of Palestine. In highlighting the importance of the academic boycott of Israeli institutions, I want to debunk the belief that Israeli academics are “progressive,” and should not be boycotted.

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Genocide is not a metaphor: reflections on Gaza and genocide denial

Ronit Lentin

I recently published a blog post on the Identities blog on the Gaza genocide. Read it below or visit the Idenities blog.

The question to be asked is… how long are we going to deny that the cries of the people of Gaza… are directly connected to the policies of the Israeli government and not to the cries of the victims of Nazism? (Edward Said, 1994)

What we are experiencing here in Gaza is not a war, but a genocide… War is between countries that have militaries, weapons, and air forces. War is not waged against 2.3 million civilians who live in an area of 360 square km and have been under siege for more than seventeen years (Ruwaida Amer, 2 November 2023)

A month into the Israeli genocidal attack on Gaza, junior minister Amichai Eliahu called for dropping a nuclear bomb on Gaza, saying “Gaza has to stop existing… (Gazans) cannot live on this earth”. He later retracted, saying it was “only metaphorical.” But genocide is not a metaphor, to borrow from Eve Tuck and Wayne Yang’s essay, “Decolonization is not a metaphor”. 

Genocide is a reality. We are witnessing it in the horrible images of death and destruction, of hospitals being ruthlessly bombed, and of Gazans struggling to stay alive amidst huge shortages of water, electricity, food, hospital care and basic necessities. All the while, Israeli commentators call for “flattening Gaza” and annihilating all Gazans, all Palestinians. UN Human Rights Office Director Craig Mokhiber called the Gaza attack “a text-book case of genocide”, adding that “the European, ethno-nationalist, settler colonial project in Palestine has entered its final phase toward the expedited destruction of the last remnants of indigenous Palestine life in Palestine”. The attack was clearly termed genocide by Palestinians and their supporters, although the International Criminal Court Prosecutor Karim Khan has been criticized for failing to issue arrest warrants for Israeli war criminals for committing genocide, a term fiercely denied by Zionists and their supporters across the political divide. I propose that there will be no way back from the clear divide between those who admit that the assault on Gaza is genocidal and those who deny it.

Patrick Wolfe calls the elimination of native societies integral to settler colonialism “structured genocide”. This illustrates the concrete links between the removal of populations from their land and mass killings. Israeli Holocaust historian Raz Segal argues that Israel’s lethal assault on Gaza is a textbook case of genocide. In doing so he refers to both Israel’s explicit intentions to displace Gazans and potentially expel them into Egypt, and the UN Genocide Conventioncriterion: “Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part”.

Yet beyond these definitions, and against its government’s argument that if Israel wanted to commit genocide it would have killed “all Gazans” (which it allegedly chose not to do for “humanitarian reasons”) stands the very word itself. Genocide in Hebrew translates as “the murder of a nation”, retzach am. In contrast, the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman calls genocide “categorial murder”, as people are killed for belonging to a category, not a “nation”. Zionism and the state of Israel racializes and dehumanizes the Palestinians and constructs Jews as a superior race. While denying Palestinian nationhood, Zionist thinking constructs Jews as a nation, although the historical veracity of this has been debunked by scholars such as Israeli historian Shlomo Sand.

Defining genocide entails intentionality and, as Segal shows, the intention to liquidate and deport Gaza’s population and destroy the Strip was clearly stated. Israel’s President supported the attack, stating “there are no innocent civilians in Gaza”; Defence Minister General Yoav Gallant declared “we are fighting against human animals”, announcing a “complete siege” on Gaza; agriculture minister and former Shin Bet head Avi Dichter speaking of the expulsion of the population of the northern Gaza Strip: “we are executing now the Gaza Nakba 2023”; and an IDF rabbi expressed his messianic joy that “the whole country is now ours, including Gaza and Lebanon, with the help of God”. Of the three options listed in an Intelligence Ministry report for “dealing with the Gaza Strip” after the IDF occupies it, the third – expelling the Gaza population (2.2 million men, women, elderly and children) – was the “option most strategically positive and long term for the state of Israel”.

This report thus coldly plans a colossal crime against humanity, detailing the means needed to execute it. This report came days after a paper by the Israeli think tank the Misgav Institute for National Security and Zionist Strategy argued that the Hamas attack provided a “unique and rare opportunity to evacuate the entire Gaza Strip”. Intentionality, then, has been explicitly stated, despite the absurd claims, in the face of the high number of civilian casualties, that “Israel is not targeting civilians in Gaza”.

More disturbing, because less expected, than Israeli politicians’ and generals’ explicitly stated intentions to “flatten Gaza” and deport its population, is the rush by Zionist human rights lawyers, journalists and academics to criticize anyone who does not condemn Hamas outright.  

Human rights lawyer Eitay Mack is generally a relentless opponent of the Israeli international arms trade. Yet he echoes the Israeli Hasbara machine when he writes of “false claims that Israel is committing genocide” and claims that there is no evidence of intent as “civilians in Gaza were killed, not because Israel specifically targets them, but because of the extensive Hamas military infrastructures that are located nearby, inside civilian buildings and in the tunnels beneath them”. Mack’s opinion piece is not a legal document. It is essentially a cherry-picked broadside against the fashionable bogeyman of “the global left”. Another human rights lawyer, Michael Sfard (the grandson of Zygmunt Bauman), goes further, clothing his opposition to the naming of genocide in concern for the human rights of occupied Palestinians. In line with several Israeli human rights organizations, Sfard writes, “it’s not easy for Israelis to think about Gazans’ rights in a week when Hamas committed crimes that are still impossible to digest and our whole society is mourning and crying. But Gaza’s catastrophe won’t wait for the end of our shiva”.

Likewise, journalists writing in the liberal Israeli daily Haaretz lambast “deranged leftists” who, in seeking to contextualize the Hamas attack, justify it as a “legitimate Palestinian act of resistance” (Lilach Wallach), and “sickeningly” presenting Hamas’s Israeli victims as “part of the oppressive Zionist rule over the Palestinian Natives” (Iris La’al). Another Haaretz writer, Ofer Aderet, criticizes Raz Segal’s article on the Gaza genocide, arguing that Segal “does not write history but rather uses his tenured job to further a political agenda… joining other Israeli and former Israeli intellectuals whose behaviour will be judged by history”. Sociologist Eva Illouzattacks “lazy left intellectuals” for insisting on setting the Hamas attack in the context of the Israeli colonization of Palestine, absurdly insisting that the colonial context must be suspended. And Israeli historian David Witztum condemns “Jewish intellectuals in Germany” for a letter protesting the prohibition to demonstrate for Palestine, and opposing Israel’s Gaza attack but not condemning Hamas – the main genocide denial tactic in the Zionists toolkit.

However, the support of global civil society for the Palestinian resistance is growing. Israel will not succeed in eliminating all of Gaza’s population, just as it has not succeeded to do so since 1948, when Plan Dalet was executed with the intent of ethnically cleansing the Palestinian population, resulting in many being herded into the Gaza Strip as refugees. Although Israel enjoys the support of western states in the Islamophobic Global North in carrying out genocide, we will not forget those Israeli “leftists” who refused to see genocide as it was happening in full view.