“The Israeli offensive on Gaza bears no resemblance to the Herero genocide” – L’Express

If only social scientists, when they intervene in the public debate on current issues, only tried to intervene within their field of expertise, there would certainly be fewer controversies. As proof, I cite Didier Fassin’s sad comparison between the Herero genocide and the war waged by Israel against (alone) Hamas, developed in an article entitled “The specter of genocide in Gaza”.

The fact is that I am, without doubt, the only French-speaking historian to have worked on the Herero genocide, having specialized for almost thirty years in the study of genocides. It is this very particular knowledge that obliges me to reframe Didier Fassin, whose interest in the first genocide of the 20th century I do not deny. Whether we support it or condemn it, the Israeli military offensive on Gaza bears no resemblance to the Herero genocide, in more than one way. For what ?

Certainly, the first genocide of the 20th century began with a massacre. On January 12, 1904, the Herero, then the majority in the colony of Deutsch-Südwestafrika (German South West Africa), the future Namibia, are rebelling. Some 120 German soldiers and settlers were massacred, 97% of them male. Notably, in fact, the Herero chief Samuel Maharero had ordered not to touch women, children, as well as the British and priests. But that is not the main thing, except of course for the priests, the British, the women and the children who were spared. The main thing is that the genocide that followed, during which 80% of the members of the Herero ethnic group perished, did not arise surreptitiously following any sequence of events. It was programmatic.

What Didier Fassin seems to ignore is the very nature of the concept of genocide. Genocide is not mass violence like any other. A genocide is not “many deaths”, like Syria (500,000 dead), Yemen (200,000), the Algerian civil war (200,000) and Gaza (11,000). . It is a planned, voluntary, premeditated criminal act, which aims to assassinate an entire target population, like the Herero, but also the Armenians, Jews, Tutsi or Yazidis. An aside forces me to note that Didier Fassin seems to ignore in his demonstration that the 21st century has already experienced its first genocide: that of the Yazidis. It is true that this is a genocide committed by “racialized” people. That doesn’t make it any less significant. Genocide is thought of; hence the importance of the notion of “intent”, explained in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, adopted by the UN in December 1948. The intention is to eliminate the entire target group , physically, without escape or escape.

Obviously, the intention radical to eliminate one too many people on earth is not enough, this must necessarily be sanctioned by a decision that can always be dated with a certain precision. In any genocide, there is always a zero moment, that is to say a decision which leads not to causing the death of 1% of the target population, but to quickly eliminating the essential part (80%). , that is to say all men and especially women and children. The Tutsi genocide resulted in 10,000 deaths per day for a hundred days. The Shoah resulted in 5,500 deaths per day for four and a half years. We know the consequences of the Armenian genocide. There were more than 2 million Armenians in 1914 within the Ottoman Empire, there are at most 60,000 remaining in Turkey today. In the case of the Shoah, the decision dates from July 1941 for Soviet Jews and from October 1941 for all of European Jewry. We also know the terrible effects. Just one example: there were 3.3 million Jews in Poland in 1939, only 300,000 survived, most of them after joining the USSR, where they suffered many other torments. There remain in Poland today at most 12,000 Jews.

And in the case of the Herero? Contrary to what Didier Fassin thinks, the extermination of the Herero is not due to a fatal spiral, but to the carefully considered, better still proclaimed, decision of the general in chief of the German expeditionary force, Lothar von Trotha, to put an end to the Herero people once and for all. The colonial war took, from the first days, a genocidal form, where the proclaimed intention was not to subdue the enemy, but to eradicate it purely and simply. It was in this genocidal logic that von Trotha, with the support of the German government, decided, during the Battle of Waterberg, on August 11, 1904, to exterminate not only the approximately 5,500 combatants who had come to meet him , but also the majority of civilians, men, women and children, who, by the thousands, accompanied them. On October 2, 1904, an extermination order (Vernichtungsbefehl) in due form will complete this genocidal sequence. This text, written in “little Negro” is very clear regarding German genocidal designs: “I, the general of the German troops, address this letter to the Herero people. The Herero are henceforth no longer German subjects. […] Any Herero discovered within the limits of German territory, armed or disarmed, with or without livestock, will be shot. I do not accept any women or children. They must leave or die. This is my decision for the Herero people.”

Where can I find the Israeli equivalent of the German extermination order? How can we deny the efforts, perhaps purely tactical, even cynical, of the Israeli military command to spare Palestinian women, children and sick people as much as possible (sending SMS messages, setting up humanitarian corridors, etc.) And this, like the Herero, but not the soldiers of the German expeditionary force nor, it must be emphasized, the Hamas terrorists.

Because there is no doubt that the massacres of October 7 constitute, for the historian of extreme violence that I am, a genocidal sequence; Hamas terrorists exterminating even pregnant women. Question to ask: do these massacres not find their source in the original charter of Hamas, which calls for the destruction of Israel, according to the beautiful expression now established “from the river to the sea”? Because any genocide takes place in an ideological environment which leaves no room for doubt or pity. We will remember the works of the Protestant pastor Paul Rohrbach, who theorized, in the 1900s, the extermination of African populations hostile to colonization. His writings will serve as justification for the annihilation of the Herero and Nama. In 1912, eight years after the genocide, he still found the words to justify it in his bestseller German Thought in the World : “Whether peoples or individuals, beings who produce nothing of importance cannot make any claim to the right to exist. No philanthropy or racial theory can convince reasonable people that the preservation of ‘a tribe of Kaffirs from South Africa […] is more important for the future of humanity than the expansion of the great European nations and the white race in general. […] It is only when the native has learned to produce something of value in the service of the superior race, that is to say in the service of its progress and his own, that he obtains a moral right to exist.” Genocide as a colonial and imperialist instrument!

Finally, to suggest a link between the only Jewish state on the planet and a colonialist enterprise is equally absurd. Israel was not born from colonialism, but, like Poland, Saudi Arabia, Syria or Lebanon, from the ruins of the central empires. The Jews are natives, indigenous people. You only need to open the New Testament to see that Jews lived, like Jesus and the apostles, in Galilee and Judea, territories which were not yet called Palestine. It is enough to open the Koran to discover that there were Jews in the 7th century in the Hejaz. How else can we understand the emergence of Islam, this faith so close to Judaism? Above all, how can we forget that half of Israelis come from the Mediterranean basin, Morocco, Libya, Egypt, Syria,… Palestine. Before 1948, Jews were also Palestinians. Let us conclude with Jacques Prévert: “We must not let intellectuals play with matches.” The same formula applies to specialized scientists, who, driven by something other than the desire to understand, venture out of their field and grab what they can for the goal they have set for themselves. Suggesting the possibility of genocide in Gaza is indeed playing with fire in the context of an Arab street just waiting for a spark to explode. Against the Jews.

* The historian Joël Kotek, professor at the Free University of Brussels and the IEP of Paris, notably published “The Herero genocide, symptom of a Sonderweg German ?” (Review of the history of the Shoah, flight. 189, no. 2, 2008, pp. 177-197) ; “Africa: the forgotten genocide of the Herero” (The story, No. 261, January 2002); “Colonialism and racism as the matrix of the Shoah. The case of the Herero genocide” (in From the Armenian genocide to the Shoah. Typology of 20th century massacres, under the direction of Gérard Dédéyan and Carol Iancu, Privat, History, 2015, 640 p., pp. 431-439).