Gaza Faces History

In this urgent, insightful essay, a respected historian places the Israeli-Palestinian war in context, challenging Western attitudes about the region.

Is the destruction of Gaza only a consequence of the October 7, 2023 attack, or is it also the outcome of a long process of dispossession and eradication? Do Palestinians have the right to resist the occupation? Is talking about genocide anti-Semitism? Enzo Traverso goes to the root of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict by calling history into question and offers a critical interpretation that overturns the one-sided perspective from which we have become accustomed to observing what is happening in Gaza.

Israel is usually described as a democratic island in the middle of an obscurantist ocean, and Hamas as a movement inspired by bloodthirsty fanaticism. The destruction of Gaza is reminiscent of the golden age of colonialism, when the West perpetrated genocides in Asia and Africa in the name of its civilizing mission. Its essential assumptions remain the same: civilization versus barbarism, progress versus intolerance. Alongside the ritual statements about Israel’s right to defend itself, no one ever mentions the Palestinians’ right to resist decades-long aggression. But if a genocidal war is unleashed in the name of fighting anti-Semitism, it is our own ethical values and political norms that are tarnished: the assumptions of our moral conscience—the distinction between oppressor and oppressed, perpetrators and victims—risk being turned upside down. The October 7 attack was terrifying, but it must be analyzed and not just condemned. And we must do so by summoning all the critical tools of historical research. Should the war in Gaza end in a second Nakba, Israel’s legitimacy will be permanently compromised. In that case, neither American weapons nor Western media, nor the distorted and outraged memory of the Holocaust will be able to redeem it.“Enzo Traverso delivers a stinging riposte, rigorously anchored in his mastery of European Jewish history, to the virtually unanimous sanctification by Western elites of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, and their dishonest weaponization of anti-Semitism (in some cases by true anti-Semites on the far right) to attack supporters of Palestinian rights.” —Rashid Khalidi, author of The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine

“In the face of a massive attempt at distortion of facts comes this lucid analysis that explains, among other things, why the West is unable and unwilling to stop arming Israel, how the memory of the Holocaust is utilized in the defense of Israel, and how Israel succeeds in posing as the victim while destroying Gaza under a hail of bombs and much much more.” —Raja Shehadeh, author of We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I and What Does Israel Fear from Palestine?

“One of the world’s leading exemplars of the virtues of thinking with history, Enzo Traverso offers a uniquely important voice of critique: his latest intervention, impassioned and searching, could not be more timely.” —Mark Mazower, author of Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century

“In this somber and eloquent book, Enzo Traverso situates the atrocities of October 7, and Israel’s destruction of Gaza, in a historical sequence that encompasses both the Shoah and the Nakba, the crimes of Nazism and the crimes of colonization. The result is a work of erudition and moral gravitas, offering a devastating indictment of the rhetorical subterfuge by which Israel and its supporters in the West have justified Gaza’s slaughter.” —Adam Shatz, author of The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon

“Hard-hitting and urgent, Gaza Faces History blends political acumen and historical insight to offer a critical account of the public debates that have taken place since October 7, 2023. Traverso’s ‘contrapuntal’ approach challenges the common sense around questions of antisemitism and anti-Zionism, victims and perpetrators, and political violence. Without minimizing the complexities of the crisis in which we find ourselves, the book concludes with a necessary binational vision—the only way forward.” —Michael Rothberg, author of The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators

“This wide-ranging essay by master historian Enzo Traverso presents a courageously unsparing analysis of the debate about Gaza. Ranging from the tension between universalism and orientalism in the West, the role of national myths and appropriate historical analogies, to the efficacy of anticolonial and revolutionary violence, Gaza Faces History challenges the shibboleths that distort understanding of conflict in the land between the river and the sea. It will, I suspect, make for difficult, if necessary, reading for some.” —A. Dirk Moses, author of The Problems of Genocide

“In this edifying little work, Enzo Traverso reflects on Israel’s war on Gaza in light of his experience as historian and intellectual. He thus offers the reader a condensed overview of decades of research and thinking on closely related issues, providing a much deeper perspective on the Gaza tragedy.” —Gilbert Achcar, author of The Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab-Israeli War of Narratives

“This short book by Enzo Traverso is a fundamental critique of the distorted and destructive ways by which the genocide in Gaza is being discussed by large segments of the West. It essentially explains how a distorted memory of the Holocaust enables and legitimizes the occurrence of the genocide in Gaza. This is a sad must-read for anyone who wants to understand the depth of the crisis we find ourselves in today, more than a year after October 7.” —Amos Goldberg, coeditor with Bashir Bashir of The Holocaust and the Nakba: A New Grammar of Trauma and HistoryEnzo Traverso was born in Italy and taught history and political theory in France for almost twenty years. Since 2013, he is Professor in the Humanities at Cornell University. He is the author of several books, including The End of Jewish Modernity, Fire and Blood: The European Civil War, Left-Wing Melancholia, The New Faces of Fascism, Singular Pasts: The “I” in Historiography, and Revolution: An Intellectual History, which have been translated into many languages. He regularly writes for Jacobin in the United States, Il Manifesto in Italy, and French and Spanish-language magazines. He has also taught as visiting professor in several countries of Europe and Latin America.

Willard Wood grew up in France and has translated more than thirty works of fiction and nonfiction from the French. He has won the Lewis Galantière Award for Literary Translation and received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Translation. He lives in Norfolk, Connecticut.Preface

This brief essay is set against the tragic backdrop of the war in Gaza and the heated controversy that ensued. The Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, was met almost everywhere with condemnation, as was necessary and understandable. On the other hand, the murderous, devastating fury that Israel unleashed in the succeeding months has elicited a much more temperate response. Some, embarrassed but indulgent, have taken issue, generally in benevolent tones. The rare critics who have spoken against Israel’s policy have been careful to confirm their underlying sympathy and solidarity. The subtext of these editorials has almost always been the same: “Frankly, you’ve gone overboard, and we can’t help criticizing your brutal methods, but we’re doing so because we’re on your side, as always, and want to help you fight the monsters on the other side.” The countries of what is now called the Global South have expressed their unanimous outrage at the destruction of Gaza, whereas the West—that is, the great majority of its governments and media—has approved or even facilitated it, widening the gap between Western elites and public opinion.
The following pages grew out of this observation. The text was not written, therefore, with serene detachment. Rather, it is an attempt to elaborate on a first line of thought, making no attempt to hide the feelings of astonishment, disbelief, discouragement, and anger that washed over me in recent months. I might say, paraphrasing Sartre, that this is a text written in situation. No one should be misled by the title, Gaza Faces History. I am not a specialist on the Middle East, nor on the Arab-Israeli conflict, nor on Palestine. I don’t pretend to analyze the war or describe its players, different perspectives, or geopolitical dimension. Others already do that much better than I, with tools and knowledge that I don’t possess. My objective in these pages is different. I have wanted to take a critical look at the political and intellectual debate that the Gaza crisis has stirred up, trying to untangle its knotted skeins of history and memory. In short, it is a critical meditation on the present and the ways that history has been summoned to interpret it. The topic is vast and deserves a more exhaustive study than these hastily written notes, but an emergency exists. A historian may at times deviate from his usual habits and take risks, particularly if he has no illusions about practicing a science free from value judgments—and I do not. It is clear to all that this war marks an inflection point, not only for its geopolitical consequences but also for how Palestinians and Israelis are seen by the rest of the world. Of course, the war is happening in the present, and we are not yet in a position to write its history. The historicization of great events takes time, as well as established and accessible sources, a long view, and, indispensably, critical distance. At some future point, the Gaza war will undoubtedly find its historians. For now, we can only take stock of the public use being made of the past, and reflect on what history gives us in the way of tools to examine the present, and the questionable, sometimes unworthy, ways history is used. That has been my main interest here. My point of view is dissonant, in the sense that it does not coincide with the axioms of that small portion of the world known as the West, which claims to have a monopoly on power as well as on morality. To this chorus of consensus, my text will act as a “counterpoint,” on the invitation that Edward Said made to intellectuals years ago, deploring that their voices were heard less and less, drowned out in the growing roar of the media. Yet when we change our point of observation and put ourselves in the position of those who are experiencing this war, the dissonant voices say quite obvious things.