For episode 172, Elia Ayoub and Daniel Voskoboynik talk about a very difficult topic: the Holocaust and the Nakba. The ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza brings up urgent questions about how memory is weaponized. Elia also talks about Jonathan Glazer,’s The Zone of Interest and the haunting parallels between the everyday life of the Nazi family portrayed in that movie, and the normalization of genocidal rhetoric in Israeli politics today.

The Fire These Times is a proud member of ⁠⁠From The Periphery (FTP) Media Collective⁠⁠. How to Support: on ⁠⁠Patreon⁠⁠ or on ⁠⁠Apple Podcasts⁠⁠. You’ll get early access to all podcasts, exclusive audio and video episodes, an invitation to join ⁠⁠our monthly hangouts⁠⁠, and more. If you are already subscribed, thank you! Please leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts, share our episodes, and tell your friends about them.

Episode Links:

• ⁠Elia’s piece: The Ghosts of Israel’s Future, Part 1⁠
• ⁠Multidirectionary Memory⁠ by Michael Rothberg
• ⁠Rachel Auerbuch, Yad Vashem and Israeli Holocaust Memory⁠
• ⁠Unzere Kinder⁠, a film (1946, 1948)
• ⁠Ancestral Future,⁠ by Ailton Krenak
• ⁠Trailer of The Zone of Interest⁠
• ⁠Jonathan Glazer calls out Israel’s weaponisation of the holocaust⁠
• ⁠Mir Kumen On, a film (1936)⁠
• ⁠The Holocaust and the Nakba: a new Grammar of Trauma and History⁠
• ⁠Raez Zreik: The Palestinian Question as a Jewish Question⁠

Check out

• First video essay on YouTube by Ayman Makarem: ⁠Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims⁠ and subscribe to our channel

Transcriptions: Transcriptions will be ⁠by Antidote Zine⁠ and published on ⁠The Fire These Times⁠.

Pluggables:

• From The Periphery has a ⁠website⁠⁠ and is on ⁠⁠Patreon⁠⁠, ⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube⁠⁠, ⁠Instagram⁠ and ⁠⁠⁠⁠Twitter⁠
• Elia Ayoub is on ⁠⁠⁠⁠Mastodon⁠⁠, ⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠, ⁠⁠⁠and ⁠⁠Bluesky⁠⁠, and he has a newsletter: ⁠Hauntologies.net⁠
• Daniel Voskoboynik is on ⁠Instagram⁠, and he has a newsletter: ⁠The Ecology of Us⁠

Credits:

Host(s): Elia Ayoub and Daniel Voskoboynik | Producers: Aydın Yıldız, Elia Ayoub, israa’ abdel fattah, Ayman Makarem and/or Leila Al-Shami | Music: ⁠⁠⁠Rap and Revenge⁠⁠⁠ | TFTT theme design: ⁠⁠⁠Wenyi Geng⁠⁠⁠ | FTP theme design: ⁠Hisham Rifai⁠ | Sound editor: ⁠Elliott Miskovicz⁠ | Team profile pics: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Molly Crabapple⁠⁠⁠⁠ | Episode design: Elia Ayoub

From The Periphery is built by Elia Ayoub, Leila Al-Shami, Ayman Makarem, Dana El Kurd, Karena Avedissian, Daniel Voskoboynik, Anna M, Aydın Yıldız, Ed S, Alice Bonfatti, israa’ abdel fattah, with more joining soon!

⁠The Fire These Times⁠ by ⁠Elia Ayoub⁠ is licensed under ⁠Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International

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Transcript via Antidote Zine:

The great survivor and historian Nechama Tec said there’s a flipside to the banality of evil, which is the banality of heroism. Survival is baked into us. We want to live; we want to survive; we want to protect the memory of our ancestors—as the people in Gaza are doing now, against the odds. There’s a banality of heroism, and the proximity of horror is what reminds us of the proximity of hope.

Elia J. Ayoub: How are we feeling about this chat?

Daniel Voskoboynik: It’s the mixed feeling of, How do we even begin to have this conversation? What is there to say? and This conversation is indispensable. These voices fight inside of me. There’s a quote by a rabbi called Irving Greenberg: in a conversation about the Holocaust, he said something like, Don’t say anything you wouldn’t say in front of burning children. That’s how I feel right now, seeing and hearing the news from Gaza.

And yet, it’s an impossible principle to uphold. We have to speak through the unspeakable. But before I say anything, I very much have the voices of people in the horror of horrors right now. That’s where I’m at. How about you?

EA: Pretty similar. 

I watched, for the first time, over three days, The Zone of Interest, that movie that most listeners probably know by now. It became more famous because of the Oscars speech of the director, [Jonathan] Glazer, because he explicitly said, We are Jews who refute our Judaism being used to justify wars, or something like that [“We stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many people, whether the victims of October 7th in Israel, or the ongoing attack on Gaza.”]. It made folks online furious, of course. This triggered my interest. 

But watching it was very intense, precisely because you don’t see what’s happening. At no point do you actually see the Holocaust. You hear it. It’s literally in the background. It’s the true story of one of the guards at Auschwitz and his family, [Rudolf] Höss. They were literally living in what the Germans called the “zone of interest,” in a pretty fancy family home: luscious gardens, and a family doing what Hitler asked them to do with Lebensraum—living space—essentially colonizing the east, after depopulating it through genocide. This was in Poland, of course, in Auschwitz.

You see the contrast between the everyday concerns of the guard himself—he ends up becoming a commandant—and his wife, who are the main two people talking, along with a few other officers. You don’t see Hitler, you don’t see Himmler, you don’t see the higher ranking folks, but you hear about them a lot in conversations among the main characters. It’s not that they don’t mention the Holocaust at all; they do mention it—they just mention it in euphemistic terms, and you’re always invited to fill in the gaps of what they’re saying, because you know what’s happening.

The grandmother asks at some point, Have you heard about Mrs. X? (the Jewish neighbor of the family), and then complains about her as if she was just a bother. What’s she up to now? And they say something along the lines of “Bolshevik” stuff and “Jewish” stuff. Very nonchalantly. They don’t want to think too much about it. In fact (spoiler, sorry), the only time we see the grandmother really think about it is in a scene where she hears screams. Again, you hear this all the time; there’s no point where you don’t hear either that or a loud silence (a buzzing like a machine, the crematorium; you see the smoke, you see the top of the towers). 

And the grandmother can’t sleep because she hears this (she doesn’t seem to be as invested in Nazi ideology as her daughter or her son-and-law were), and she leaves one night, and leaves a note. We don’t know what’s in the note, they don’t read it out loud, but we get it from the context that she can’t handle it and she leaves, and she doesn’t tell anyone where she’s going. In the entire film, it’s the only moment of even minor defiance to what’s happening. At no point is there anything else, and the Holocaust is still continuing when the movie ends. The guy gets repositioned elsewhere. They mention the “Hungarian operation,” the extermination of 300,000 Hungarian Jews, who would be sent to Auschwitz and elsewhere.

There are parallels between The Zone of Interest and elements of modern Israeli society. It’s not as straightforward as They’re just modern-day Nazis, because things are always more complicated than that, and history doesn’t repeat itself but it rhymes. But the banality of evil is very present in the film, and for me that’s how I’d describe much of Israeli society today (of course with notable exceptions, which we try to boost wherever we can). The soldier just went for two weeks to do his or her duty, and then went back home and continued their lives, and now they’re reservists and they may be called upon to go back to the “front,” as they would call it, and that’s the end of that thought process.

In a genocide, most people don’t participate directly in the killings, or even if they do, which is a more modern thing now, they don’t do so from up front. It’s with a drone, maybe, or from behind a tank, shooting from far away, or whatever it might be. That depersonalization contributes to a dehumanization of the entire thing; you can’t help but conclude that they become what Baldwin calls “moral monsters.” 

(Quick clarification: “moral monsters” is a poetic term; it does not mean that they are no longer humans. The entire point of this language is not to dehumanize those who are doing the dehumanization—in fact I don’t want to strip them of their agency, because otherwise how can you reproach them for committing a crime?)

But it was so surreal watching that film. It’s about Jews, obviously, about the Holocaust—and the state currently committing this genocide self-identifies as the only Jewish state; the army committing this genocide self-identifies as a Jewish army; and there are many other parallels, whether it’s colonialism, whether it’s Islamophobia, racism. And watching it, I could see the parallels. They are very clear and obvious.

While watching it, I was writing a very hard essay which includes a clip of Yeshayahu Leibowitz, a late Israeli-Jewish philosopher and critical thinker (whose work I know you’ve engaged with a lot as well), on a panel together with Yair Lapid’s father (which you pointed out; Yair Lapid is an “opposition” politician in Israel today). Leibowitz used the term “Judeo-Nazi” to describe Rabin’s “breaking bones” policy during the Intifada, and Lapid is egging him on: Do we have concentration camps? Leibowitz says, We do. I know of two thousand Arabs who are in concentration camps. 

(To our ears today, it rings even more true, with tens of thousands of Palestinians arrested by the Israelis in what B’Tselem and others have described as “torture camps.”)

So he says, Yes, there are concentration camps. And then Lapid asks him, Do we also send them to gas chambers? He’s egging him on, always moving the goal posts: How can we be Judeo-Nazis? How can we have that label, if we’re not exactly what the Nazis did? If we do sixty percent, we cannot use that label; it has to be one hundred percent exactly how it looked. So he asks, Do we burn them? two or three times, and at some point Leibowitz clearly gets angry, and says, This is your prophecy. You are making that prophecy.

It has a religious connotation I’m not as familiar with, but even in secular terms, because I study hauntologies, it’s about the future: Leibowitz is saying, You’re putting this out there because it’s in your mind; you’re thinking about this. Even in your mind, you who are on the right of politics and clearly have dehumanized Palestinians [and later his son would do the same]—why would that thought even cross your mind in the first place if it weren’t part of your subconscious? Either you feel guilty somehow that the comparison makes even five percent sense, or you’re putting it out there in the ether and are part of making it truer. It’s more of a possibility, even conceptually, now that you have put it in public discourse—and it didn’t shock you to put it out into public discourse.

He said it two or three times before Leibowitz got angry. So yeah—it’s surreal.

DV: Your reflections bring us to the deeper question, which is one about the ethics of comparison. We’ve seen so much in the last month, from very different sides as well. The Holocaust—I prefer to use the Yiddish term for it, which is Churban (“destruction”). The Churban is brought in by the state of Israel as a justification for a just war, from a mainstream Israeli perspective, to crush Hamas. It’s also used to try and show the scale and brutality of the genocide. 

So it’s used by all sides, really. To me that’s the really interesting thing: the way the Holocaust has become, over the last decades—a lot of people forget that in the first decades after the Holocaust, this was not the case. There is a very interesting history about how the Holocaust comes to be used in the way most people might understand it today, but it has now become used to justify all sorts of things.

I want to talk about my positionality here. I approach this as a diasporic Jew; to me, the topic of Holocaust memory has been a horizon of my life from very early on. Both my maternal grandparents were child survivors, and I grew up maybe overly exposed to films about the Holocaust, from a very young age. This transformed the way I thought about the world from a very early age, and I still think that the space of the Holocaust is one of the closest teachers for how I think about politics. That’s why I care about it deeply and why I think Holocaust memory has to be treated with a lot of care, just as in the case of any genocide or any crime, any abyss.

But what I find interesting is that it has become this event of exceptionality, an event that has this sanctified memory that can never be questioned—if you go back to one of the first films about the Holocaust, in 1946, a film called Unzere Kinder (Our Children in Yiddish), it’s a fascinating film where child survivors question adults about how they’re presenting the Holocaust. There’s a scene in the film: there are these performers doing a tragicomic scene about life in the ghetto during the Holocaust, and at one point in the show the kids interrupt the performance, claiming that the performers are misinterpreting what happened and doing an injustice to the memory of those who survived.

That symbol of kids reminding adults, or questioning adults, is the spirit, to me, of memory. Memory isn’t some kind of dogmatic picture which we must uphold—something that states often want us to do, especially the state of Israel in relation to the Holocaust. Memory is something we question, something we have to be critical with. I refuse, from my position, to let any state institution (especially a state institution responsible from the brutalization of Palestinians), to use the Holocaust as a weapon. To me, this is an affront to survivors.

What I’m curious about in this conversation is to try and braid together how the Nakba and the Churban can speak to each other—the Nakba is an ongoing event, and to me the Churban is also an ongoing event, in the sense that the destruction of primarily eastern European Jewry is a haunting which remains. It remains in Israel but it also remains in Europe. And the inability for Germany, for example, which is so complicit in the genocide, to learn even the most basic of lessons from the genocide that it committed shows to me the importance of this conversation.

How can we build a more spacious memory, where we don’t use each genocide as a political weapon to try and simplify the story, but as a space where we can heal? And especially now, ten or eleven months into this iteration of the Nakba, we need to find new frames, new ways of talking. Because if we don’t we’re going to be trapped in cycles of enclosure where memory is not a space of healing and revitalizing some of the best traditions from the past from Palestinian memory, from Jewish memory, that can help us find each other. Unless we start doing that we’re going to keep on in this cycle of hypercompetitive and genocidal memory.

EA: This reminds me of a quote from Mahmoud Darwish I’ve mentioned a few times. Darwish was in a movie by Jean-Luc Godard called Notre Musique. I’m not a big fan of the film itself, but there is this scene that is very powerful: Mahmoud Darwish mentions the poets of Troy, because Troy never got to tell its story—we know of Troy and the battles from the poetry and perspective of the victors. So he asks this question: If a people doesn’t have poets, does that justify them being conquered by a people that does? He’s talking to an Israeli Jewish woman—it’s very important in that film. And he says, We the Palestinians are very lucky and cursed to have you as our enemy. The interest in us stems from the interest in you.

My interpretation is this means the question of Palestine is just a reiteration of the Jewish question—which, if people don’t remember, is a historical question of what is to be done about European antisemitism. There were three positions on that. One is the notorious Nazi one, of course, which is the extermination of Jews. One is the Zionist position, which is: We need to leave; we need to build a homeland elsewhere. And one is Doikayt, “hereness” in Yiddish, and was the position of the Yiddish Labor Bund and others: This is where we are; this is where we are from; this is our home and we need to build a home here, wherever here is. This is a transnational, diasporic thing.

We could say in retrospect that one of those three was the most destroyed: diasporism, as we might call it, or Doikayt. And of course Zionism ended up with the state of Israel in 1948, and the Nazi one ended with the Holocaust up until 1945 and the fall of the Nazis. Mahmoud Darwish linked those two, early on. 

Raez Zreik made it even more explicit. He has a lecture called “The Palestinian Question as a Jewish Question” effectively saying that the Jewish question was never resolved in Europe, as you yourself just put it here. The Holocaust was never resolved, it just ended because the people who were committing it lost. That’s it. But its fundamental logic, the root of it all, wasn’t dismantled. What actually happened, arguably, is that the work of memory (which as you said, should be about questioning, should be more critical) was assigned to and embodied in a state. We don’t want to have this question, so we have embodied that, anthropomorphized it, in the form of a state: the state of Israel.

That’s why the Germans, from Merkel to Scholz, call it their Staatsräson; the raison d’etre of their state is to protect at all costs the state of Israel, because the Nazis did the Holocaust. That quite literally means: Because we murdered six million Jews in the Holocaust, we owe our uncritical support and allegiance to a state that calls itself Jewish. Even though those two are not the same people, of course. It’s not the state of Israel that was exterminated during the Holocaust; it didn’t exist.

But that’s the displacement. That what Raez Zreik would describe as the displacement of the Jewish question into a Jewish and Arab question. It’s not that it’s either/or now. It’s not just the Palestine question. It’s still the Jewish question. It’s something that especially Germans have difficulty understanding, but broadly speaking it is a very deep problem in the West.

From the perspective of “the Arab,” the reaction is more straightforward: We did not do this. We did not commit the Holocaust. We know that it was used to justify the state of Israel’s existence even in the way it was formed—not just the idea of a state in historic Palestine, but literally how it came into being in 1948 with a Nakba, the forced expulsion of seven to eight hundred thousand Palestinians, including my grandfather (who passed away a few years ago).

The Arab perspective, speaking very generally here, is: This is what we oppose. This is what bothers us. We saw this in a protest in Germany a few years ago: it was by Palestinians, one of the responses to an escalation of violence in Israel-Palestine before the current genocide, in 2021. People were saying, Germany, your conscience can not be assuaged by blaming Palestinians, or something along those lines. It’s not an insight that is new. It’s also not rocket science if you really just pause and take a step back, forget about nation-states for a bit (forget about “thinking like a state,” as some scholars would put it), and just see the parallels as they are.

It’s a phenomenological approach of taking the thing as it is, and taking it seriously as it is, as a self-contained entity. Do that, and do you see parallels between the Holocaust and the Nakba? And between the Holocaust and the ongoing genocide in Gaza? If yes, what are they? Try and identify them. What do they say about the world we live in today? This is the thought process: if you conclude that yes there are parallels, a single parallel should raise all sorts of alarms if you are serious about “Never Again,” the post-World War Two slogan about never repeating the Holocaust.

John Oliver even said it; this is mainstream at this point. There are two versions of “Never Again:” This should never happen again to Jews, or, This should never happen again to anyone, anywhere. We know which one the state of Israel has always chosen. One of the former spokespeople of Netanyahu said, These are not your grandfather’s Jews. In other words, “Your” grandfathers are the ones who died in the Holocaust; they were defenseless, weak. These are the Jews that can fight for themselves, fight against their enemies—a very militarized version of Jewish identity.

This is part of the problem. Memory should not be unidirectional. It shouldn’t be: This happened, therefore there is only one other thing that can happen after this thing, because this happened. This is the German state’s position, and of course the Israeli state’s position, and in many ways the American position as well, although it’s more messy over there. It’s what the scholar Michael Rothberg called “multidirectional memory.”

I’ll ask you to reflect a bit, maybe we can get into that concept, because it’s at the core of how we think about this.

DV: Thank you for your reflections, and bless the memory of your grandfather, that we keep alive, hopefully, in this conversation, and that inspires us.

I work a lot in doing Holocaust memory education, and something I want to emphasize is that we often summarize it as “six million Jews,” and the Yiddish term Churban, “destruction”—the more you sit with the plurality of the Churban (people often assume it was just one event), it was the destruction of thousands of Jewish communities, together with many other communities as well. When you sit with what happened, it’s the full-on demolition of Jewish communal infrastructures, of communities who had been together for up to a thousand years—hundreds of years of shared communal experience. The demolition of medical institutions. The demolition of world-leading children’s hospitals (like the Medem Institute, for example, funded by workers to treat children with tuberculosis through empowerment), the destruction of entire Jewish archives, of ecological memory.

I could go on and on. It’s the point of mass atrocities that it is unspeakable, it is undefinable, it is unnameable. But the more we go into some of the details, that is where the comparison is, to me, when I see the way the Israeli military is destroying educational institutions in Gaza, destroying medical institutions, destroying schools. I don’t have to draw the parallel for people. People see. If we live in a capitalist culture of competitive memory, people try and see who is best. I’m not interested in this kind of supremacist game. 

Also, the point of comparison isn’t equivalence. To me, the political point of comparison is: we’re still in a situation, in a moment where we can protect lives. We can try and avert the worst from happening. Unspeakable things have happened, but we are mobilizing and trying to transform the reality on the ground to protect all people between the river and the sea, specifically those who are most defenseless, which is people in Gaza, and the West Bank as well, with the escalating mass ethnic cleansing there.

The more you look into the Churban, the Holocaust, the parallels speak for themselves. The assault on Jewish communities to make way for Lebensraum—a lot of people refuse to look at the Holocaust through a colonial lens, but this was very much a colonial project to completely wipe away the Jewish population of the area and install a new kind of regime. This is of course very similar to the intentions and the operations of what the Israeli military is doing right now.

But the point isn’t equivalence. What you alluded to in the beginning of this conversation, between Leibowitz and Lapid, where he’s saying, You can never use this comparison between Jews and Nazis because they can never be equivalent—to me, the point of comparison is not to be equivalent, but to try and say brutality is available to any group, and right now we want to do our best to prevent as much brutality as possible.

There’s so much to say. There’s an important quote I reflect on from the Holocaust historian Samuel Kassow, which is that The catastrophe erases everything but the catastrophe. One of the ways the Nazi genocide was successful (or provisionally successful, because I never want to give them the chance of being successful) is that it utterly decimated so many Jewish trajectories of political, cultural, and communal thinking. This victory is reinforced when mainstream political Zionists try and say, Well, the Holocaust proves political Zionism right by showing how Jews can only be safe in a militarized state that is theirs, that is “Jewish.”

But it’s our responsibility to re-flourish and revitalize the very different Jewish trajectories—work that you have done, that I am very deeply grateful for. It is those perspectives, those memories, of how Jews in the heart of the Warsaw ghetto (this is something that Molly Crabapple has been doing great work on), while they knew they were going through exceptional suffering, were thinking about situations of other people struggling for liberation around the world. People were hosting plays written by [Rabindranath] Tagore, for example, in the heart of the Warsaw ghetto.

The fact that people in the heart of the most genocidal suffering (as we’re also seeing in Gaza: people making statements in solidarity with other peoples), to have, in that moment where you’re trying to survive, the ability to think for a moment about other people struggling for liberation (what we’ve also seen from Syrians as well, declaring solidarity also in the heart of destruction)—we need to revitalize these traditions of multidirectional memory, because I think it’s one of the few things that can save us.

We live in a world-devouring world, whether we’re thinking about the climate crisis or we’re thinking about the genocidal atrocities taking place in Sudan or the Russian invasion of Ukraine. There are political forces that are intent on devouring other political worlds, from a perspective of colonialism. Unless we start to put a brake on this genocidal logic, which exists whether we’re talking about the Israeli state or the planetary crisis—unless we try and join these dots together, and start remembering differently, I’m deeply afraid for what is already unfolding, which should horrify us to the core.

But the point of comparison isn’t equivalence. As Masha Gessen has tried to make clear: if you understand what’s happening in Gaza as the liquidation of the ghetto (that parallel is so clear to me at least, from seeing the history of so many ghettos), what should that awaken for us? And what are the possibilities that are available to us in terms of building another kind of imagination for this moment?

EA: This is why I mention that quote, These are not your grandparents’ Jews, by the Netanyahu spokesperson about the IDF. Because to follow that logic, you would have to conclude that your grandparents’ Jews are in Gaza right now. If you’re saying that “your grandparents’ Jews” are not the ones committing the genocide (or “winning the war,” as he would put it), then it’s the folks on the other side of that divide. And one of the closest parallels to Gaza is the Warsaw ghetto, as you said. 

As for that quote, Destruction erases everything except destruction—I had an episode with Ayman [Makarem] a few months ago called “The Gaza Genocide Changes Everything,” and one of the things I mentioned was this “mask-off moment.” We saw it in Ukraine with Putin. At one point, the Russian state, the Putin regime, decided they don’t care anymore about even pretending to follow the rules of war, the international rule of law. It didn’t matter. They were already sanctioned; the West hates them anyway and they hate the West.

What happens when there is a mask-off moment? This is when we saw the acceleration of the genocide in Ukraine—ongoing, and thankfully there are more resources that Ukrainians have to resist it than anything Palestinians have ever had. This is another point of comparison that isn’t meant to downplay the struggles of the Ukrainians against Russian imperialism, but just to point out very simply: if they are allowed to defend themselves, why aren’t Palestinians allowed to defend themselves? It’s a very straightforward question.

There might be listeners who say, Well, Ukrainians didn’t do an October 7. I don’t want to get too bogged down in details, but following that logic, what we should be saying isn’t that there is no right to resist; what we should be saying is that this right to resist does not extend to killing civilians. It’s very simple. You can apply this throughout history, whether it’s the IRA, whether it’s the PLO. There are forms of resistance that are legitimate, and there are forms of resistance that are not. You can have that distinction without erasing the right to resist. 

Of course there have been nonviolent resistances that have also been destroyed and crushed, and usually when people say, What about X? What about Y? what they want is to silence Palestinians. The only way for Palestinians to exist is to be killed and silenced. Consciously or not, that’s what they are effectively requesting—demanding—if they don’t accept that Palestinians also have a right to resist, as anyone anywhere has.

Destruction erases everything except destruction—the thoroughness of the destruction in Gaza right now! The almost obsessive attention to detail, at times, like when it’s a targeted strike against Mohammed [Abu al-Qumsan]’s twin kids! People know about this. He went to register the birth of his twins that were just born two or three days prior; his wife, the mom, was with them in the apartment; he went to register their birth and by the time he came back he heard there had been a strike and they were killed. It was a targeted strike, you can see it from the photo. The apartments around them were not destroyed.

Whether it’s that, whether it’s [Refaat] Alareer, whether it’s other folks who were targeted, we know this, and we can see this from IDF members online boasting about it as well. One other specific thing that the Israelis do that very few other states do is they explicitly go for family trees. We’re not just going to assassinate Ismail Haniyeh (which they did, of course, illegally, not that that matters these days), but we’re going to kill his entire family. Some random cousin, his kid, his grandkids, his grandmother, whatever. We’re going to kill them all.

This is collective punishment by definition. But this is the lesson. The lesson isn’t that If you do something against us we will eliminate you. The lesson is: If you do something against us, perceived or real, we will eliminate everyone around you, everyone you know, your entire existence. And there’s even a patriarchal logic to this, because those family members “belong” to you, as the man. The Israelis put this into practice. We will kill your wife, because ultimately she belongs to you. We will kill your children, because ultimately they belong to you. That’s what it is. The murder of Mohammed’s children and his wife was not against them, it was against Mohammed. They were an extension of him in this case.

The point is to make sure that the very process of life, whether it’s reproduction, whether it’s expansion, whether it’s having a community, whether it’s getting healthcare and education, fishing in the sea, playing football with your friends outside, whatever it might be—the very processes of life are to be rendered impossible, to the point that you cannot even think of feeding your child. Not that you can’t do it, you can’t even think about it. You just have to live with that consequence, live with that reality.

As any human would, no one actually gives up. If you’re in a famine situation (except towards the end when you’re too weak to think or move at all), you’re actively, constantly, trying to find food and water. The fact that ninety-five-plus percent of all water reserves and treatment plants in Gaza have been bombed by the Israelis, as a deliberate target which even the UN has recognized is a war crime and a crime against humanity, of course means they have to drink polluted water, which has contributed to the spread of polio and other diseases. This is ongoing as of now.

That’s part of the process. That’s part of making sure that at every step of the way, We will poison your wells, we will poison your lives, your food, your ability to exist as a human being. Every aspect of that relationship—thinking of myself here, as a father, as a son, cousin, grandson, friend of someone, maybe a professor (in Refaat’s case), whatever other professions I may or may not have: Those branches are also what we’re going to target; not just you as an individual. Killing the individual is just killing you. Killing the branch is killing the entire nation, the entire people, the entire concept of a Palestinian.

This, of course, is accompanied by: There is no such thing as a Palestinian, as Golda Meir put it, and Palestine didn’t exist before, and so on. These have to come together. You cannot dissociate these two. You cannot have the genocide in Gaza without also having, online and offline, entire constant, obsessive attempts to make sure that the people you are killing don’t even have a name. You’re not even Palestinians, you’re just Arabs. You’re part of a wider collective, because your connections to this specific piece of land, the Holy Land, historic Palestine—that’s what we want to sever. That’s what we want to destroy.

You as individuals, we don’t give a shit. Because you can just leave if you “want.” You’re their problem, the other Arabs’ problem. Your relationships, your centuries of connection, that’s what we want to destroy. 

How is that not an additional parallel? In the Nazis’ case, they were about extermination. But in the early days, before the Holocaust accelerated, there were some Nazis who were content to Let them leave. They lost out to the more “extreme” elements who wanted extermination: Hitler, Himmler, and the others. But that was there as well. 

What is that logic? The logic is: The land cannot be for both of us, and we are even willing to destroy the land, to pollute the land, to hack down and burn olive trees that are older than both of these territories and national identities. Even the existence of an olive tree is threatening, because that olive tree is associated with your presence as a Palestinian. We will hack it down, burn it, and then maybe we will plant another olive tree, except this one will be Jewish.

That’s the textbook application of that logic. The land is neutral, the land doesn’t matter. Whatever came before it, before us, doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if it was Polish or Jewish or Hungarian, or whatever. What matters is what we’re going to do with it now. The land only matters in relationship to us as the German nation, for example. Now that’s been the application of the most extreme forms of the Israeli government, the settlers and so on: the land is also part of this genocide. We want to destroy before building anew on top of it.

Somewhat subconsciously, they feel (and maybe they say so explicitly): We can’t just take over; we can’t just push you out—although in some cases they do that, they just take over homes. But at some point down the line they would prefer to just destroy it all and rebuild on top of it, because the land also harbors memories. There are certain things about it that you want to destroy if you’re doing a genocide, because otherwise it will remind you of too many things, and it would be an act of memory in and of itself, like a monument, unless you destroy it.

It’s not enough to inhabit it; you have to also destroy it.

DV: Thank you so much for these weavings. There are so many important parallels. The demolition of entire family trees is haunting to me. When I’ve seen some of the lists of names of entire families, it’s so reminiscent. Anyone who looks into the Churban, you’ll find villages where—this is something I stress as something that’s been really difficult for me, as someone who works a lot with Churban memories: seeing the banalization of the Holocaust, especially in the last year.

Even speaking with friends who are very progressive, they say: We’ve covered that, I know. But even basic things like the fact—most people associate the Holocaust with concentration camps, extermination camps, but around half the victims of the Churban were executed in their villages, where in many cases there were no survivors. Ironically, often when you have survivor testimonies it almost skews the landscape, because there are a lot of spaces of entirely destroyed families, where maybe one person survived by a miracle.

In these stories, often—if we look at the revelations around Lavender AI, for example, and the Israeli army’s use of it for targeting, we find the basic, cruel, calculated, mathematical ratios of a “high-level” militant target justified to kill hundreds of civilians. If we go back to the way that Nazis or Nazi-affiliated paramilitary forces would punish any Jewish partisan activity, it would be equivalent. For one person, for one Nazi soldier who was killed, they would take out hundreds and hundreds.

I’m not saying they are equivalent, I’m saying this collective punishment logic, which is available in any context, is horrifying and we have to defy it if we’re going to have any semblance of a world where we believe that every human being is worthy of divine protection (or however you want to understand it).

An ecological perspective is also indispensable to look at the absurdity of this ethno-nationalist logic. If we’re going to have any planet or any world that’s livable, we have to understand that no one owns the land. The land is something that we honor and we steward together. Does it look like stewardship to burn olive trees that have been cared for by families over generations? Does that look like a responsible way of inhabiting a territory, the land?

Even when I talk to some of the most brazen ethno-Zionists, I often ask them what the vision is for the next twenty or thirty years, when this part of the world becomes even more exposed to the horrors of ecological violence and climate violence. There is no vision! It’s a vision which is so narrow, so exclusionary of Palestinians.

And again, seeing that this is not a model which is embracing of life and memory, I often bring people back to a useful formulation from Enzo Traverso on mainstream political Zionism, which is that people see, and the genocide has exposed, the main, most brutal, horrifying negation of political Zionism, which is the erasure of Palestinians, the negation of Palestine, the negation of Palestinian life, memory, and futurism. All of it.

As you were saying so well, a genocide is the destruction of the processes of life and the conditions and institutions necessary for life to sustain itself. But there are other ancillary negations which hold the Palestinian negation in place. One is (in Hebrew) “shelilat hagalut,” the negation of the diaspora. A powerful diaspora memory is not useful to Zionism, is not conducive to sustaining mainstream political Zionism.

Then there’s the negation of the fluidity between Arab and Jew. If the Holocaust hadn’t happened and we had an incredibly strong Jewish center in eastern Europe, with a rich trajectory of diasporas with an anti-Zionist critique (which is what existed up until the Holocaust)—if that were flourishing, or were allowed to flourish through post-Holocaust memory policies, I don’t think we’d be in this position. Maybe we could be, but I hope not. 

Also, if we would have allowed for a conversation around Arab Jewishness or Jewish Arabness, or Islamic Jewishness, or all the other configurations people have thought about—if that solidarity and connection weren’t so impossible, I think we’d be in a different place.

This lays out a bit of our task. There are incredibly immediate acts of solidarity that need to happen, that are obvious and have been suggested in other podcasts, and we can uplift those at the end. But what I would also stress for people is: we need to re-expand the imagination as well, and by allowing the Churban and the Nakba to speak, to open a new grammar of trauma. There is a wonderful book that has tried to do that. It’s even harder now; it almost feels impossible now. But I would encourage people that the non-Zionist and anti-Zionist Jewish visions of the past, which were completely confiscated by the Holocaust, have a lot of incredible tools which allow us to approach this moment differently.

I would just vouch for those—not as some arcane, archaeological insistence that the priority right now in a time of mass genocides is to listen to Jews in the 1920s and 1930s. To a lot of people listening, that might even seem absurd. But ten months, almost eleven months now, of witnessing a genocide shows us the futility of many of the actions we’ve taken (though I think things are changing). Unless we think differently, unless we imagine differently, I really struggle to see how we’re going to build another kind of politics.

What it looks like for the transformation of Israeli society, I’m not sure. But what I do know, at least from a Jewish perspective, is: Zionism is spiritually hollow for a lot of people. You can only brutalize a people, and narrow their political imagination, for so long before they start looking for alternatives. One of the most singular indictments of the Israeli state took place a few days after October 7: I don’t know if you heard this interview with a survivor of Kibbutz Be’eri, who was seventeen; she worked in the créche at the kibbutz, and survived by a miracle. And they asked her for her testimony, and she said, I don’t want to live in a society where, at the age of five, young kids, instead of asking themselves what they want to do in life, the question they are thinking is “What role am I going to play in the military?” 

The militarization of Jewish life and identity is a novel phenomenon, one that is only made possible through a complete narrowing of Jewish memory, and that’s something we have to tackle. 

This film that I mentioned before, Unzere Kinder, was written by an incredible Holocaust survivor called Rokhl Auerbakh. Rokhl Auerbakh survived the Warsaw ghetto and was part of a collective called Oyneg Shabbos, which was a group of social historians inside the ghetto that interviewed people inside the ghetto before the liquidation (they knew it would happen; they knew they were marching to their deaths). They said something very powerful; they witnessed how conditions in the ghetto deteriorated over time, and how people, within a few months, forgot what their life was.

It’s like the shifting baseline syndrome in ecology: when you’re only thinking of surviving, what are you going to be thinking about your previous life? You’re thinking of breathing, and you’re thinking of at least finding something for your kid. This is what they understood: they said, After liquidation, the memory of the after is going to swallow the memory of before. People are going to have no clue about the flourishing of Jewish culture, about the plurality of what Jews were up to before the Holocaust.

Even now, people have no idea of what happened. This is also my deep fear for this interation of the Nakba. What will become, and what will people remember? I’m hopeful that the Palestinian diaspora and many other institutions will help in this. But Auerbakh buried the testimonies and stories of many Jews underneath the ghetto. Auerbakh was one of the few people who survived, and went a few years afterward to dig these materials out from underneath the ashes of Warsaw. Some of the materials remain missing to this day; we don’t know where they are, but we know they are underneath the Earth, in a way.

It’s this effort to protect the before, before it is swallowed by the after, that is the hope, and is also why I think that in a way, the full genocide is impossible in Palestine. There’s absolutely no way people are going to forget about their connection to that territory. The Zionist project, in a way, is incredibly futile. It’s unsuccessful in its design.

I would just bring those parallels in as invitations. Firstly, the genocide is impossible. It’s up to us to stop the worst. I don’t know how, but following Walter Benjamin, it’s up to us to make this into a state of exception, in a way, to make this exceptional. I hope we can do it. But I’m curious on your thoughts.

EA: Lots to reflect on. I agree that the memory of Gaza (and Palestine in general) is too strong to be completely erased by what the Israelis are currently doing. After all, the Nakba was in 1948, and all of this time there has been a Palestinian diaspora that, in different places and at different times and in different ways, has linked with each other. Members of the diaspora have linked with one another, when sometimes they don’t have much else in common.

It’s a bit like when I went to London, the first time I left Lebanon, and I met Syrians, for example, and Palestinians, for that matter. It’s not that I didn’t know Syrians or Palestinians in Lebanon, but there was something very specific about the fact that now, those of us who were in that space at the same time, have a new thing in common, which is that we’re not there, in the homeland, in the balad. And that creates a different connection, because what links us now is the physicality of where we are, as well as the time, the temporality, that it’s now.

If I had met someone after London, in a different city, who I also know was in London twenty years before me, we would have some connection: the location, maybe, but not the temporality. We were not there at the same time, and different things were happening. It’s different worlds. But with those specific folks, some of whom I’m still friends with, we have that specific thing in common.

Palestinians have been doing this since the forties, since ’48 and in some cases beforehand. That means that there is a pretty large body of literature, of poetry, of music, culture, textile arts—so many different foods, of course—so many different things that have been replicated elsewhere. Not to be too cliché about it, but it’s like V for Vendetta: “You can kill the man but you cannot kill the idea.” That’s effectively what it is. The concept of a Palestine, the idea of Palestinian identity (as with Kurds and others in different contexts) is unkillable in that sense.

They can kill a lot of people, of course, and in Gaza right now they are doing so. The damage will be extensive even after a ceasefire, which—Netanyahu has proven that he is willing to do absolutely anything, including sacrifice hostages, as we know that he’s done, to avoid any kind of ceasefire, any kind of concession, because it’s about his personal political aspirations. But in any case, even after that—the horrors are happening right now, and it’s almost insulting to think of the day after, but we need to, because what’s going to happen the day after is there is going to be an entire people, two-plus million people, most of whom will still be there (the Israelis will not massacre two million people; even technologically they can no longer do so, short of dropping five or six nuclear bombs, which would also affect them and Egypt—some of them have thought about this already), facing a world that is already erasing them, is already actively trying to forget about them and to make them forget about themselves.

It’s even more brutal than that, because it’s not actively making them forget, it’s just not thinking about them, period. We’re just going to abandon you. We’re not going to think about you at all. This is not the first time, of course. In Syria this happened multiple times over. The danger, the risk that you’ve identified, on this “day after” in Gaza—what could happen is that it’s turned into a permanent ruin, a permanent camp, effectively. Refugee camps are not new in Palestine—in the West Bank, in some parts of Jerusalem and in Gaza—but it’s something more than that: You will be even more dependent on international aid. In this situation, the Palestine question will be determined by other forces, not by you.

If Harris comes to power in the US, whatever she decides is worth it, with the Egyptians and maybe the Qataris, clearly the Israelis of course, and the Jordanians maybe—they can be starting to think of ten different scenarios, and I can guarantee you that at no part of that process will there be any Palestinians involved. This is not new, of course; from the Dayton agreement to the Oslo agreement, the victims are not included at the negotiating table, because the very act of negotiation is violence. We’re not negotiating on idealistic terms—You have grievances, I have grievances, we’re going to find some compromise, we’re going to have to let go of certain things. In this instance, what’s going to happen is that the “international community” will come together to discuss the “Gaza crisis.”

It’s not going to be to help the survivors of the Gaza genocide. It’s not going to be described as “to alleviate the suffering caused by our ally Israel in Gaza.” Those are not the terms that are going to be used. We’ll see. We could be surprised—I don’t consider anything impossible—but the current trend is that it’s going to be depoliticized, and that is going to be the final violence of it all.

This is another parallel with the Holocaust. Because the Holocaust, in popular memory, has been depoliticized. The crassest version of this is Captain America beating up the Nazis; the good guys on one side and the bad guys, who are mythologically evil, on the other. I’m fine with beating up Nazis, for the record. But philosophically, what does this say? There’s no comparison between you and me. There’s no comparison between me the American and you the German Nazi (even though Hitler praised the the eugenics movement, and the American extermination of the Native population of Turtle Island, same for the extermination of Armenians by the Ottomans). There were always these parallels. 

The depoliticization of the Holocaust will offer some lessons for the depoliticization of the genocide in Gaza, which is ongoing as it’s happening. It is being depoliticized as it is occurring. We see this in the passive language used in the media—and that’s not an accident, or just gaslighting; it’s part of the violence, it’s part of the genocide. It’s being erased as it’s happening.

The other thing is: one of the reasons why the Holocaust was almost erased in public, political memory in Europe was that antisemitism was not exclusive to the Nazis. That was of course the worst form of it, there’s no doubt about that. But why was there are Kindertransport in the UK? Why was there even a need to have that? Because the UK didn’t allow their parents to go. The Americans, multiple times, rejected Jews who wanted to go to the US and would have become Jewish Americans. They rejected them at Ellis Island and forced them to go back to Europe, and in many of those cases, many of those folks were killed in the Holocaust.

You ignore that, because that would mean it’s not just the Nazis who committed the Holocaust. They and their allies in the conquered territories were of course the direct perpetrators of the Holocaust, but the Holocaust was also made possible by a world, a Western world specifically, that had the seeds of antisemitism in it even before the Nazis, and did not eradicate it even as the horrors of the Holocaust were coming out in the news. There were no attempts among influential folks to make comparisons, because that would require some kind of mea culpa, and people don’t usually want to do that.

They think the liberation of the concentration camps, whether by the Soviets or the Americans, is sufficient to absolve themselves of the long-standing antisemitism which contributed to that environment.

DV: I sit with a common reflection, which is that radical, liberatory memory, whether it’s Jewish memory or Palestinian memory, is dangerous. For many reasons, the Holocaust has entered into a convenient story. Germany is a whole other category in terms of how it has weaponized its expertise in genocide to become an expertise in deciding what is genocide, and deciding who is Jewish—the way the conversation seeks to confiscate Jewish plurality and Jewish memory is obscene. In a culture of competitive memory, we’re going to wrestle against each other constantly. But I think there is a way, which is incredibly clear to me, to open and stretch and say that there are bright lines that connect Palestine and the Churban all across eastern Europe, and to the history of racism and colonialism more broadly.

A lot of anticolonial and counter-colonial thinkers saw this clearly, saw the way Europeans saw exception in the Holocaust. But as many Jewish scholars have pointed out, the exceptionalization of the Holocaust is not something that came initially from Jews. It came initially from European powers; Israel then took this up much later on. But this is an important phenomenon. 

We’ve done a lot of work on the way the Israeli state erased the Yiddish language, which is a whole other interesting phenomenon, because if you want to understand the history of the Holocaust, you have to think and read in Yiddish. If you remove access—

EA: If you transform that memory, if the Holocaust is spoken in English, or in Hebrew, for that matter, you’re erasing how it was experienced by most of the people themselves.

DV: And think about the possibilities that happen: in my journey of trying to recover Yiddish for myself, going back to the word itself, churban—in Yiddish it means “destruction.” A lot of Jews use the word; “churban” is the word often used in Jewish memory to describe the impacts of catastrophe. 1492, for example, the expulsion of Jews and Muslims from the Iberian peninsula, is referred to in Yiddish as a churban. So a lot of Jews—if you read poetry from the ghettos, you find Jews reflecting on: I’m going through what my ancestors were going through. Or what others’ ancestors were, for that matter! There are even records of Jews reflecting on enslavement in the US from afar, calling that a churban.

These braiding lines are very important. Europe has not dealt with many, many things. Europe is not an example of what it’s like to deal meaningfully with the history of colonialism and racism. If folks are interested, I would recommend a book called Nazi Billionaires, which was written by a Financial Times journalist [David de Jong]. Did the German political economy change in any reparative or restorative way after the Holocaust? Not really. People know about the way thousands of academics and scientists went to the US and formed part of NASA and different US institutions. But many of the businesses that profited from Jewish enslaved labor remain some of the most powerful institutions in Germany and have only done symbolic acts of reparation—that speaks for itself.

Germany has narrowed the conversation to a full-throated defense of Israel, at the expense of the demolition of so many Jewish trajectories, and so many Jews’ ways of thinking and dreaming of what it was like to be Jewish in the world. We have to start thinking in these more plural terms. What antisemitism does, which is horrifying, is it understands Jewishness as a monoculture, Jews as a particular archetype. In fact, if anything, in a deep critical history of antisemitism, one of the big reasons Jews were so hated is also this disruptive questioning attitude, constantly picking at dogmas within Europe—by refusing.

A politics of refusal, a politics of refusing to obey, to think about things—the history of Jewish political thought always asks questions about who is silenced, who is invisible, who is not here. One of many beautiful legacies of Jewishness as a fragmentary thing is there always being a question mark. That’s a question mark that is also towards Jews themselves, especially Jews involved in mass crimes right now.

I would just invite us, following your invitation: radical memory, from Palestinians, from Jews, is dangerous. People don’t like it, because it reminds them of the hauntings that you talk about so much. If we’re able to make that memory reparative—I follow the tradition of Ailton Krenak, who says the future will be ancestral, because it was already here. Hopefully our ancestors, with their memory, with their commitment to the Earth, with their refusal to leave behind the enchanting traditions and culture they were raised in—hopefully they can help us braid something different.

EA: You mentioned the power of words. If you talk about “churban,” “dammar” in Arabic would mean destruction. You’re very likely to hear it today, in the past year or so. I watched a video just yesterday from Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank, and one of the people filming said something in Palestinian Arabic along the lines of, They are destroying our house. “Dammro” in this case would be the verb of “dammar.”

What happens when we turn something into a verb? Something that’s often spoken to as a noun—what happens to that thought process or that horizon of the imagination when you turn it into a verb? If you turn into a verb the word “genocide” (“genociding,” we’ve heard this a few times), it feels a bit clunky. All it means is, They are mass-killing us as part of a genocide. It would be quite interesting, maybe, for the poets and linguists to do: what do you do if you start thinking of “churban” as a verb, and translate it into Arabic? And maybe even vice-versa?

What can be done with that, poetically, as an exercise of braiding, and creating those links that may need to be rediscovered? There’s good book reflecting on that by Lital Levy called Poetic Trespass about Jews who write in Arabic and Palestinian Arabs who write in Hebrew—poetry, for the most part. One of the most famous songs of Marcel Khalife is on Mahmoud Darwish’s love affair with an Israeli Jewish woman. What can be done with this?

To turn something into a verb, it becomes an action. What is this act of destruction? Not just the physicality of it all, but what happens when you start linking it, let’s say, to “churban” as a term? It’s almost like you’re skipping the thinking-like-a-state process. You’re taking some creative liberties.

I mentioned earlier watching The Zone of Interest—I felt like it was about me (not in the literal sense, of course. I’m not Jewish and don’t have that experience in my background). It was about the dehumanization of a people in such a thorough manner, and, just as importantly, the silences that came after the Holocaust but even during, the silences of the Nazi officers and the families that were living their best lives just next to the concentration camp that was exterminating hundreds of thousands of people, Auschwitz. Those silences are silences that I identify with very strongly.

It’s very haunting, because it says so much about what we can say out loud. A white relative of mine said to her white relatives that this is a genocide in Gaza right now, and there was an awkward silence around the dining table, when that was said, that wasn’t followed by a denial that this was genocide, but you could almost imagine the thought process: If we call it this word, we’re going to have to think about something completely different than what we are currently able or willing or ready to deal with or think about.

This is a humanitarian crisis; this is very sad; this is not fair; the Israelis are committing—they can say “war crimes” and “crimes against humanity” and that it should be investigated, but if you use the G-word, it has this spell effect. It creates a moment—as soon as she said it out loud, you can’t ignore it anymore, so you can only either end the conversation and move on to something else completely, or talk about it. They opted to end the conversation, semi awkwardly—It’s very sad—and move on.

Because the weight of the term said out loud is unsettling. As it should be! It should be unsettling, that’s the point of a haunting. But it’s something that many people don’t want to deal with—to some extent understandably so, but with the consequences that we are talking about.

DV: There’s so much there. It brings me to think of Zygmunt Bauman for some reason. I recommend folks explore his work on modernity and the Holocaust, but he has this lecture—and I’m paraphrasing, and probably forgetting part of it—which is that the chilling thing when you engage with any genocide or act of mass brutality (right there with the “banality of evil”) is how close it is. Speaking about the Holocaust, people often give the Nazis a lot more intelligence than they really had. It was often just a very brutal, simple operation, of very banal force and brutality. And the more you come close to that, and the ease with which people can be put into that situation, as a bureaucrat or as a soldier—the famous stories of someone going and killing people and then coming home to their family; a policeman in rural Germany going and executing thousands of people and then coming back and manning the traffic lights—for anyone who looks at these acts of atrocity, it’s the proximity of it which is haunting.

It’s the reality also that today in our world, intense planetary violence is banal. But I would also want us to think about what the great survivor and historian Nechama Tec said, which is that there’s a flipside to the banality of evil, which is the banality of heroism. Survival is also something that is baked into us. We want to live; we want to survive; we want to protect the memory of our ancestors—as the people in Gaza are doing now, against the odds: finding ways to grow food, to find food, to sing, to imagine all possible ways.

This reminds me directly of something called the “maline” in Yiddish, which is the “architecture of survival.” People would dig holes in the ground and find cellars where there were no cellars, just to survive, to be hidden. There’s also banality of heroism, and the proximity of horror is what also reminds us of the proximity of hope. There’s a very important principle in the Talmud (the very sacred Jewish text which antisemites love to use in the same way that Islamophobes love to use the Quran), which is that the path is open. Memory reminds us of our creativity, and the impossible complexity of the past should give us hope.

There’s tons of horror. In Yiddish folklore, people would often talk about the chain of destruction, of churban. There’s been a history of destruction for all peoples. But there’s also the “goldene keyt,” the golden chain, the chain of sanctity and memory and enchantment, and all the beautiful things that allow for us to be. I don’t think we’d be here, in any capacity, us speaking together, if it weren’t for all the chains of banal kindness that allowed for us to be and survive.

I know that this is something that is very dear to you as a new father. I would encourage us there. It’s incredibly difficult to listen, to say the unspeakable, to know that a people that you’re part of is complicit or committing a genocide. It’s unthinkable, in a way. But making it thinkable allows for us to think about and dream about what we must do right now, and what is possible for us to think about the day after, where hopefully we can abolish some of the most horrifying violences that we’re seeing today.

That’s a prayer, and I hope we can honor the memory of our ancestors with that.

EA: You said so much, and you mentioned my child. One thing that is so powerful for me, when I really think about it—it’s just a brutal fact: she could live to the year 2100. That could happen if everything goes well and she’s healthy. My grandfather was older than what she would be. And so much has happened since my grandfather was a kid. So much has happened that it’s dizzying to think of how much has changed. And the pace of history (using limited language here) is accelerating in many ways.

This is where it gets hopeful: this also means we can really change things in ways that are impossible for us to fully conceptualize what will happen in the end. You can start something, create something, and it is not possible even to imagine what is going to come out of this metaphorical seed that you have planted. Her being my new center has been difficult in many ways but has also been a big blessing, because there’s now a reorientation.

I’m still who I am. I’m in my thirties, grew up in the nineties, a millennial. But there’s been a reorientation away from that self, that self-history, historiography, personal narrative. It’s important, but it’s not the only thing anymore. When you love someone, or something, you’re not losing yourself necessarily, but you’re accepting that you’re part of something else; that you’re not the story, you’re part of the story.

That’s how it is with her. I’m mentioning this at the end because she is now the great-granddaughter of a Nakba survivor, and as much as I don’t want to make anything about me, I can make it about her in terms of a storyline. Because her very existence, her happiness, her creativity, her desire for life, when she grows up and hopefully will want to discover the world, is in and of itself an act—I don’t want to call it an act of resistance because it’s just exhausting, but it’s an act of creativity that is antithetical to the political project that is currently committing a genocide in Gaza.

As you said, the political project responsible for this genocide cannot last. It has so many failures and weaknesses from within. Forget about us, the people they’re trying to exterminate. From within! There are so many internal contradictions between them, that they have created hauntings that they will have to deal with. I don’t have to deal with that—those are not my hauntings. I have other hauntings to deal with.

We’ll end on [James] Baldwin. When he talked about the N-word, he said, I am not the N-word. My brother isn’t that; I’ve never met anyone who is that. You the white person have created the N-word, so you have to figure out why you felt the need to create the N-word in the first place. He said, I’m giving it back to you. It’s your problem, not mine.

There is something liberating about this. Of course I’m speaking from a positionality of privilege here. But it’s something I try and hold onto, because what else is there to do?

Thanks for doing this, Daniel.

DV: Thank you, thanks for the vulnerability. How did you feel?

EA: It’s good. It’s necessary. It’s a very difficult conversation to have, but it’s one that must be had. And one of many. We don’t have the final word on any matter, but is important to say that memory is critical and has to be critical. Futurisms have to be critical. And the hauntings are not linear. It’s all multidirectional, and I’m moving more and more towards that in my thinking, and accepting impermanence is really important.

DV: Very much. There’s one point I’m realizing I very much wanted to make, that I didn’t make, that is very practical. What I want to say to friends who are involved in Palestinian organizing, who tend to use Holocaust metaphors a lot, is that there comes a point where it’s counterproductive. We are trying to challenge this exceptionalization story, and yet we’re reinforcing it.

It’s a paradox, but there are more examples, and the conversation becomes more anti-tankie; the parallels between Russia and Israel are huge. Equating Israel to the Nazis I don’t think is a very useful tool to transform Israelis. But that’s a whole other conversation.

EA: Thanks for having it with me. Thanks, mate.

DV: Thanks for the generosity and the openness. Thank you so much, my friend.