The abuse of trauma to justify genocide

JVL Introduction

This important piece by Naomi Klein focuses mainly on how Israel is using – and has always used – collective trauma for political ends. The immediate and oft repeated linking of Hamas’s October 7^th attack with the Nazi Holocaust could be seen as “using a genocide in the past to justify a genocide in the present – all while its supporters use art, film, virtual reality, dark tourism, and even fashion to transfer Israeli trauma across the globe”.

She cites Marianne Hirsch (a Holocaust scholar) “Memorializing traumatic histories can be done in ways that encourage collective healing and a sense of solidarity across divides. But there are also times when, for political actors within these groups, healing isn’t the goal – keeping trauma alive, despite the passing of time and changing conditions, is infinitely more useful.” (My emphasis, Ed)

“Holocaust studies has mostly been about how to keep the wounds open and transmit the trauma as directly as possible,” and “it has also been about presenting antisemitism as an immovable and omnipresent force of nature, a hatred in a class of its own – a worldview that the rabbi and scholar Shaul Magid terms “Judeopessimism”, in “part because of “how tightly Holocaust memory has been tethered to Zionism, with the creation of the highly militarized state of Israel cast as “redemption” from the destruction of the Holocaust…..If it’s true that the Holocaust can return at any time, and Israel is the only safeguard against that happening, “it creates a kind of alibi for whatever Israel wants to do”

There is much more here including important recognition that this is not only Israel that does this, consider the USA after 9/11 and as Klein does here, the UK creation of “immersive” experiences to garner support for their actions in India following the Indian Rebellion (1857-8)

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This article was originally published by The Guardian on Sat 5 Oct 2024. Read the original here.