Seeing Genocide - Boston Review
ā»https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/seeing-genocide
In her account of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, Hannah Arendt wrote that āgenocide is an actual possibility of the future,ā and, hence, āno people on earth . . . can feel reasonably sure of its continued existence.ā Imperial governments do not represent humanity but the logic of their racializing regimes. This endows them with imperial rights to support each other when they use genocidal violence. The millions in the streets all over the world, blocking roads, protesting in front of the offices and factories of arms manufacturers, blocking shipments of arms, and marching in unprecedented numbers in support of Palestinians know that the order of humanity is being attacked yet again. They affirm that we should not fail to recognize the genocide that is happening right now. If this wave of genocidal violence will also pass unrecognized, and if the genocidal regime which is perpetrating it goes unquestioned, then not only Palestinians but more people will be unsafe.
These are not discrete images of what happened but visual megaphones calling us to recognize the decades-long genocide and to stop it now.
Arendtās discussion of crimes against humanity is instructive. Those crimes, Arendt writes, are written in the bodies of their victims, but they are also committed against the community in the name of which they are perpetratedāagainst the communityās law, and more broadly against an order of humanity defined by its diversity. Palestine was destroyed because Zionists didnāt want Palestinians living among them; the regime the Zionists erected was meant to be the materialization of this genocidal intent. The enforcement of a racial law, an affront to human diversity, has been the raison dāĆŖtre of this regime since 1948. It lies at its basis, and it is this law that should be abolished between the river and the sea for all inhabitants therein to be free. It must be abolished for the sake of Palestinians, so that they can regain their rights to return to live in Palestine and rebuild their world; and, so too, it must be abolished for the sake of Israeli Jews, so that they can liberate themselves from Zionism, free themselves from the position of perpetratorsāthe only one they can inhabit under this genocidal regimeāand reclaim the diverse Jewish histories of which they were deprived when they were forced to embody a fabricated Israeli identity defined by its enmity to Palestinians. Israelis can choose to act as citizens of their genocidal regime and endorse the transformation of the tragic day of October 7 into its justification, or as some have done, they can reclaim their place as members of a shared humanity and reject the genocidal foundation of their regime.
