“Preventing genocide in Gaza should be a moral priority” – L’Express

The historian Joël Kotek having offered to “reframe” me by declaring himself “the only French-speaking historian to have worked on the Herero genocide, specializing for nearly thirty years in the study of genocides”, I allow myself to respond to him to enlighten readers on what seems to me to be, in his column, a double confusion: on the parallel with the Herero and on the United Nations Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide.

Although there is substantial English-language literature on the Herero genocide, I specifically cited, in my text “The Specter of a Genocide in Gaza”, one of the articles written by Joël Kotek, to which I therefore recognized a competence on the subject. But his vision of a “zero moment” misses what I am trying, following other historians, to show, namely that this moment does not come out of nothing, that this present has a past – in short, that it there is history. It is this historical structure of the genocide that I tried to identify.

Initially, there was the breakdown of the protectorate treaty between the German settlers and the Herero breeders with a humiliation of the latter and a grabbing of their best lands, within the framework of a project which was already that of a White “African Germany”, in which indigenous populations would be used as forced labor or herded into reservations. Secondly, there was a revolt which resulted in a murderous attack which left more than a hundred victims among the colonists, creating a deep trauma in Germany, and if Emperor William II sent General von Trotha, it The latter has already distinguished himself in the repression of the Boxer Rebellion in China. Thirdly, this leader of the expeditionary force makes his infamous bloodthirsty declaration – “as a little nigger”, writes Joël Kotek, using an expression for which I leave the responsibility to him – in which he orders the Herero to “leave the country”. otherwise everyone will be “executed”, thus appearing to leave them with the choice between ethnic cleansing and genocidal war. In fact, it is the extermination of the Herero nation which is carried out, both by the fire of weapons and by a total blockade depriving of food and water the populations pushed towards the desert where the majority die of thirst and of starvation.

It is therefore this historical structure that I wanted to make intelligible in order to reflect on what is happening today, not by starting from the terrible massacres of October 7, but by inscribing them in a history, that of fifty-six years of occupation and colonization of the West Bank and sixteen years of siege of Gaza (we understand that I do not speak of the New Testament or the Koran, as Joël Kotek does, pretending to believe that I question the existence of the State of Israel, but from 1967 and 2007, to which numerous United Nations resolutions refer). Drawing such a parallel does not amount to asserting that the contexts of South-West Africa and Palestine are similar, which would be absurd, but by adopting a type of comparison that the historian Paul Veyne described as heuristic, it is an invitation to think about a configuration generating the greatest violence (I let readers establish the connections between these two historical sequences). I add – but is it really necessary, as it should be so obvious? – that taking this story seriously does not justify the abuses committed. Explaining is not excusing, but it is a necessary task, without which the deleterious cycle we are currently witnessing will continue to repeat itself.

By speaking in my article of the “spectre of a genocide”, I was not commenting on a legal reality which can only be established after the facts, and often even a long time later: eight decades in the case of the Herero. I referred to the statements of numerous experts, notably seven United Nations rapporteurs warning of an “ongoing process of genocide”, and of several academics, including some Israelis and Jews, in particular Professor Omer Bartov, historian of the Shoah and genocides at Brown University, writing that his “greatest concern is that there is genocidal intent, which can easily result in genocidal action.” He recalled the words of Israeli ministers saying “fighting human animals” or denying the existence of the “Palestinian people”, and of generals announcing that they would make Gaza “a place where it will be impossible to live” because, thanks to the siege total that they put in place, there would be “no more electricity, no more water, only destruction”.

Others have made the same observation, such as the political scientist John Cox, the anthropologist Victoria Sanford and the historian Barry Trachtenberg, international authorities on genocides, who filed a complaint against the President of the United States and two members of his government, for “complicity in genocide” by arguing that “the level of destruction and the number of deaths in just one month, combined with the language of annihilation used by Israeli leaders and senior army officials, indicate that “This is not about targeting Hamas militants or military targets, but about unleashing lethal violence against Palestinians in Gaza ‘as such’, in terms of the UN Genocide Convention.”

Although Joël Kotek ranks me among the “scientists who, driven by something other than the desire to understand, venture outside their field”, I would like to allow myself in this regard to remind him of two crucial elements that he ignores about the genocide , as defined by this Convention. First, there is no need for the perpetrators to aim to “disappear the entire target group, physically, without escape or escape,” as he writes. The text ratified by 153 states, including Israel, speaks, in its article II, of “killing members of the group” or “deliberately inflicting on the group living conditions calculated to cause its total or partial destruction.” What matters is not the number or completeness, but the “intent” to commit these acts against members of that group “as such.” Secondly, it is not only a question of establishing whether a genocide has occurred in order to punish it, but above all, according to Article I, it is a question of preventing it. Recognizing it always comes too late. It is in this spirit of prevention that those who, like me, are warning about this risk, and not to excite this “Arab street which is only waiting for a spark to explode”, according to another disturbing formula of Joel Kotek. It is not the alert that provokes indignation, it is the facts to which it draws attention.

I understand how the evocation, by specialists from around the world, of a genocide allegedly carried out by the Israeli government can be distressing for those whose people were themselves victims of what is probably the largest genocide in history, but preventing the occurrence of such a crime should be, for them too, a political and moral priority. Because killing the messenger, or discrediting him – in this case, as far as I am concerned, assuming a “goal” other than that of preventing thousands of Palestinian children, women and men from continuing to die because they are Palestinian – it is to continue to perpetuate the denial that prevents Israelis and Palestinians from living together, in a just and lasting peace, on a territory they share.

* Didier Fassin, anthropologist and doctor, is professor at the Collège de France, holder of the chair Moral Questions and Political Issues in Contemporary Societies. Author of When Bodies Remember (The Discovery), in 2018 he gave the first Raphael Lemkin Lecture at Rutgers University in the United States, named after the Polish jurist who coined the concept of genocide.