Dear Reader,
Studying Up returns, about 2.5 months since our last post. In that span of time the world has continued swirling down-drain towards an (eminently preventable, yet nonetheless currently still-impending) “Slo-mo Armageddon.”
Some positive moments mixed in there too, at least in the more circumscribed & mundane sense of individual lived experience. Including the successful defense of my long-deferred dissertation… (w/ immense gratitude to my committee for their generosity + patience over the past 9 years).
And so yet again, September marks “back to school,” the beginning of another academic year (except in Gaza, where the universities/schools have been flattened…):
Like
noted recently, it stretches the limits of “cognitive dissonance” as a term to describe the seemingly inescapable split screen of (First World/Global North) “daily life” during times of (Third World/Global South) genocide.As Noura Erakat described in her article “The Boomerang Comes Back” (which served as one of the inspirations for a previous Studying Up post “The Cross Becomes An Imperial Boomerang”) there is an indelible line being drawn between the annihilatory (neo)colonial violence unleashed on Palestine/Gaza and the “imperial boomerang” of colonialism-as-externalized-fascism returning (internally) to the Global North. In fact, as Erakat describes, this phenomenon was magisterially theorized by Aimé Césaire’s 1950 polemic Discourse on Colonialism in the immediate aftermath of what Césaire argued was colonialism’s apotheosis: Nazism/World War II/the Jewish Holocaust. So it is a horrific, though revealing, irony that the apotheosis of “Neocolonialism” (a term first theorized by Kwame Nkrumah) is Zionism’s genocide of the Palestinians, all in the name of “protecting Jews” (in reality: protecting Israel as a Jewish-supremacist, ethnoreligious apartheid state).
Here is Mamphela Ramphele (whose partner was Steve Biko, the politically assassinated anti-apartheid activist and theorist/leader of South Africa’s Black Consciousness Movement):
Host: Your statement likening the famine in Gaza to the Holocaust, do you not see that as provocative?
Ramphele: What provocative? It is a Holocaust.
Host: How can you compare them?
Ramphele: Why can’t I compare them?
Host: Because they’re different. [interrupting Ramphele] They are different. Why can’t you separate them? [continuing to interrupt] I’m not saying Gaza isn’t horrific. It is horrific. But comparing them… it almost undermines what the Holocaust is all about.
Ramphele: The Holocaust happened and the Holocaust will continue to happen in different forms for as long as we make criticizing this kind of behavior a holy cow. It is a Holocaust by any definition. If you look at the deliberate attack on children, on women, on unarmed citizens, and the starvation, using starvation as a weapon of war. Tell me what that is. How different is it?
Host: I’m not disputing what you’re saying… that it’s not a genocide. I’m not disputing that. That’s not for me to decide. But why do you think it is appropriate to compare what happened in World War Two to what’s happening in Gaza.
Ramphele: What’s different?
Host: I think we need to focus what’s happening in Gaza, because it’s different to what happened in the Holocaust. It’s almost like you’re undermining what happened in the Holocaust.
To be clear: one can only believe that naming the genocide of Gaza what it is “undermines what happened in the Holocaust” if one thinks of the Jewish Holocaust as the (one and only) Holocaust. As if the Nazi’s genocide of European Jews was somehow exceptional rather than paradigmatic of the larger processes of European colonialism’s mass murder and wholesale annihilation of entire peoples (across centuries) the entire world over… What this question of “comparison” brings into relief is also, not coincidentally, the relationship of Jews to “Western Civilization” as a whole.
Are we, as Jews, the victims of “Western Civilization,” who share in common with colonized and racialized peoples throughout the Global South/Third World a history of oppression, subjugation, dehumanization, extermination? Or are we somehow actually, at long last, indeed the foremost protagonists of “Western Civilization?” Like Netanyahu so loves to claim when he asserts that Israel in its “War on Hamas” is “Defending Western Civilization”—which brings to mind Theodor Herzl’s statement to Cecil Rhodes that “We [i.e. Zionism/Israel] should there form a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism.” Because if “we” (as Jews) are, in fact, the protagonists of “Western Civilization,” then we are simply the ones who are allowed to commit genocide rather than those who are being genocided.
This zero-sum ontological calculation is one that I reject entirely and unequivocally.
Because this way of thinking might just lead one to believe things like: “The only problem with the Nazis is that I was on the losing side,” a quote once uttered by Hanamel Dorfman, the man Itamar Ben-Gvir appointed as his chief of staff in 2022:
Which lends further credence to the enraged and derisive shouts of “Nazi” made by people protesting Ben-Gvir during his visit to NYC in April:
To this logic I say:
FUCK THAT!
¡Ya basta!
Dayenu!
Enough! is enough is enough.
NO ONE should be genocided.
NO ONE should be exterminated.
“Never Again” is utterly meaningless unless it means “Never Again for Anyone.”
To illustrate the lunacy of this proposition (“either we genocide others, or we are the ones being genocided”) I turn to, perhaps, an unexpected pop culture reference from my “early aughts” childhood/young adulthood: The Sopranos’ iconic/infamous “Columbus Day” episode:
Hesh: “Jews because of their history have common cause with the oppressed. Some Indians were deliberately given blankets tainted with smallpox. Died like flies.”
Christopher: “No shit.”
Hesh: “Yes shit.”
Reuben: “Yeah, you wanna talk bioterrorism? Look who started it.”
Hesh: “Amen to that my friend.”
Reuben: “That’s right. Christopher Columbus was no better than Adolf Hitler.”
Hesh: “Hey, woah, woah, woah.
Back up. Hitler?”Reuben: “Yeah. I’m not the only one who thinks so.”
Silvio: “Yeah, that Indian from the protest, who was whining about the wilderness, they had him on TV and he called Columbus ‘Hitler.’”
Reuben: “Cause it’s true man.”
Hesh: “You’re talking out of your ass. Columbus and Hitler? You’re trivializing the Holocaust. Frankly Reuben, if you’ve got that kind of covert antisemitism, I’d like you to leave my house.”
Reuben: “Antisemitism?”
Hesh: “That’s right.”
Reuben: “Fuck you too my man.”
Tony: “Woah, woah!”
No one can say they “didn’t know.” And yet, in the words of Omar El Akkad: One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This.
As
wrote in May: “The genocide in Gaza is not just unfolding in silence. It’s being confessed to, live, in real time.”
Too, Noura Erakat noted in her testimony before the UN Palestinian Rights Committee (on May 15, now 4 months ago) during a commemoration of the 1948 Palestinian Nakba (should it now be called the “First Nakba?” and what has been unfolding over the past two years the “Second Nakba?”):
“The Nakba is ongoing”
(a formulation also illustrated by Rabea Eghbariah in his—unsuccessfully censored, thankfully—May 2024 Columbia Law Review article “Towards Nakba as a Legal Concept” ).
In a rather succinct and precise formulation (that I plan to discuss further in future posts… in order to understand some of the less visible dimensions of Zionist/Right-wing religious thought), Marc Lamont Hill on his Al Jazeera English show UpFront (and his guests) describe Israel’s recent missile strike on Hamas negotiators in Qatar thusly: “Israel is Trying to Assassinate the Concept of Diplomacy Itself.”
And we are now witnessing the further “boomerang effect” of political violence rebounding, from third world genocide (blow)back to the neocolonial metropole…
In related news, Maddy Clifford over @
wrote one of the most astute things I’ve read regarding the killing of Charlie Kirk:
Or, as (another Seattle diaspora) friend recently texted me:
Ending this (admittedly bleak, as are these extremely dismal times…) “post” with what feels almost a crying out to the eternal, holy power of music & poetry, here’s Ruby Ibarra’s May 2025 NPR Tiny Desk Concert, which I’ve been listening to + watching on repeat as of late:
