As the civil rights lawyer Dylan Saba argues, “International law operates principally as discourse, providing a ready-made language and a set of ethical limits for evaluating political violence.” Despite manufacturing the first “livestreamed” genocide in history—where, in the words of the lawyer Blinne Ní Ghrálaigh, “the victims are essentially broadcasting their own destruction in real time,”—the Israeli war on Gaza continues with ample support and cover from Western nations, and limited intervention from international groups. Condemnations of the apartheid state of Israel have been few and far between in the West, leaving many questioning the utility of the word “genocide” despite the litany of damning evidence. Part of the issue is that the word was first understood in the context of Nazi violence.
The term genocide was first used by Raphael Lemkin in 1944 to document Nazi atrocities. Created from the ancient Greek word “genos” (race, tribe) and the Latin “cide” (killing), Lemkin defined genocide as the immediate destruction of a nation, when “accomplished by mass killings of all members of a nation.” It is important to note that Lemkin was also inspired by the Ottoman Empire’s mass killings of Armenians as well as colonial campaigns in the Americas, but these historical nuances have been overshadowed by the positioning of the Holocaust as a rare, singular, and aberrational event in “modern” history. As the Martinican writer and poet Aimé Césaire argued in “Discourse on Colonialism,” because Hitler “applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India, and the [blacks] of Africa,”Western institutions such as the UN appropriated Lemkin’s understanding of genocide to focalize the Holocaust and center its victims at the core of legal and humanitarian frameworks of genocidal violence.
In our conversation, the genocide scholar Zoé Samudzi raises the stakes by looking at genocide as “a quotidian part of nation-state processes.” This framework resists a kind of Holocaust exceptionalism that positions the Holocaust as the genocide, and questions the legitimacy of any genocide that does not meet hyper-specific preconditions. We also discuss Germany’s 20th-century genocide in present-day Namibia, its deep interconnectedness with the Holocaust as part of a larger colonial logic and its relationship to Palestine and Israel, and African political sovereignty amid the ongoing genocides in Tigray, Sudan, and the Congo.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Matene Toure: What does it mean to be a genocide studies scholar in this moment?
Zoé Samudzi: What I found to be disappointing is how politically rigid people’s understandings of genocide are. The discipline of genocide studies is deeply invested in the Holocaust remaining a kind of genocide exemplar against which all other incidents, events, and processes of genocide are to be compared, although most genocides don’t look like the Holocaust.
I don’t know of any other genocides that have used that terrifyingly forced production of death. Other genocides have mostly occurred under the cover of what we would describe as a civil war, internal conflict, or a rogue state engaging in some kind of campaign of exterminating political groups or ethnic groups as we saw in Cambodia. We have this field of comparative genocide and we’re supposed to be holding these genocides against one another to look at their different processes, structures, and motivations
What does it mean for all these genocides to be held to a political bar that is impossible for them to clear? [It means that] genocide remains this rare kind of political transgression, rather than, as I understand it, a mass annihilating violence that is a quotidian part of nation-state processes.
A part of the misunderstanding of the Holocaust is a refusal to understand it as a settler colonial project.
The Nazis expressed a desire to colonize Europe, but because of this idea that it’s a modern genocide, and therefore not a colonial genocide, there is such an adamant refusal to hold the Holocaust in any kind of conversation with colonialism. Particularly with the colonial genocide that the Germans were responsible for carrying out in Namibia at the beginning of the 20th century, as well as the colonial genocide that the Germans assisted the Ottomans with against the Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks.
Because the Holocaust inhabits this epicenter, there’s this real inability to understand that Jewish people or Eastern European Jews emerged as perfect victims or innocent people who were given Israel as a kind of reparation. There’s this [inability] to understand that the creation of the Jewish state was itself a settler colonial violence.
Germany is riddled with this guilt and responsibility such that even in the face of all these destructions of refugee camps, apartments, and schools, it continues to say that Israeli security is the German state’s reason for existence. It’s called “Staatsräson” and was coined by Angela Merkel. There’s this violent conflation of Jewish safety, Jewish futurity, and Jewish self-determination with the cruel, dispossessive, genocidal violence of the Israeli state.
Toure: Can you talk about your specific scholarship around excavating indigenous African genocide histories and how it’s helped expand your definition of genocide?
Samudzi: I did my dissertation in a medical sociology program. My work was in German colonialism, and specifically Germany’s genocide in present-day Namibia against the Namibian and Over Herero people. I was thinking about the concept of Lebensraum or “living space,”—a land-based settler colonial expansionist project formalized in 1904 by the German state. It was in Namibia that Germany first deployed this as a kind of tactic of state crafting, of thinking that the state has a kind of biological character.
I started thinking about the nature of genocide outside of this constrained, deliberately narrow, legal definition. I started to think about it as this organism with cultural, ethnic, and racial qualities. And about how the maintenance of the integrity of the nation-state has historically been achieved through dispossession, ethnic cleansing, and reservation systems like in the United States, South Africa, Zimbabwe (where my family is from), Australia, and New Zealand.
The first person who described what happened in Namibia as a genocide was Horst Drechsler, a Marxist historian. He was thinking about genocide through this understanding of political economy. It wasn’t even this abstract idea of evil; the Imperial German forces wanted land. The only way to access land is to kill the people who are on it and put the rest of them into concentration camps in order to access this pool of labor. That’s also exactly what happened in Namibia and Nazi Germany.
So I started thinking about genocide as a means of political economy, as a means of making the state, getting as far away as I could from this mystification of morality. Now that I am an editor at Parapraxis, I’m thinking about the psychoanalytic as opposed to the moral. The psychoanalytic and the political-economic are intertwined for me and then the moral exists somewhere else.
You have to be able to indulge in a political fantasy to justify your own superiority. You have to be able to imagine this land as your birthright. You’ve been here for some 50 years, but this land has always belonged to you. Much of the way that settler history is produced is predicated on this idea of fantasy. What is manifest destiny apart from a fantasy? God has ordained for me this land. I am entitled to this land and everything that it contains. This fantasy then, animates an understanding of how the land is to be enclosed, how the land is to be brought into a political economy, how the natural resources are to be turned into commodities, how the people on the land are also to be turned into commodity, how people are to be imported to maximize the amount of land that can be turned into commodity. In all these steps, you have these fantasies, these means of reinforcing and justifying your dominance.
You have the Bible, [and] race science; all of these structures to claim your superiority and justify the utter dehumanization of people so that they can be enslaved or murdered or cleansed or broken apart or deported to develop this land that belongs to you.
Toure: In your essay “We are Fighting Nazis”: Genocidal Fashionings of Gaza(ns) After 7 October,” you discuss how in the wake of Hamas’s attack on Israel, Israel has been able reconfigure Hamas and Gazans as the new Nazi force intent on eliminating Jews in the 21st century. Can you expand on how you came to that analysis in your essay?
Samudzi: I talk about a story that Netanyahu tells a lot, that is a form of Holocaust denialism. The Mufti of Jerusalem (aka Mufti al-Husseini) had this meeting with Hitler. He felt like the fascists could help Palestinians prevent Jewish migration to Palestine. The denialist aspect of it is the claim that he is the person who told Hitler to kill all the Jews to prevent them from migrating to Palestine.
The Final Solution had already started by the time he had this meeting with Hitler, so there’s no way that he could have told him to do this. But in any event, because Mufti al-Husseini is speaking on behalf of Palestinians and Arabs, there’s this kind of conflation between him and Arabs adopting this genocidal, fascist supportive position. Also, during the uprising in 1936—a revolt against the proposed waves of Jewish migration—Zionists at the time called Palestinians Nazis because a Nazi is understood to be the enemy of humanity.
After World War II, the threat is no longer Nazis. But you have this Arab political formation that finds itself at odds with the “democratic” Jewish state. And there’s no way that they could be opposed to the existence of this Jewish state, other than the fact that they have genocidal motivations on the brain. Not because the Israeli state annexed a chunk of three different states to expand its territory, right? For the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights, and the West Bank to have become a part of Israel, Israel had to invade and annex parts of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan.
It is the transformation of Palestinians, of Gazans, into Nazis that justifies the “by any means necessary” military elimination of Hamas specifically, because the PLO and the PA are kind of secular. In contrast, Hamas is Sunni and came out of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. And once you call someone a Nazi that seeks to eliminate or obliterate Jewish existence, there’s nothing you can’t do to them. Part of that has to do with the Holocaust being the nucleus of how we understand genocide and Israel being the reparative conclusion to that atrocity.
Toure: The imagery of the carnage in Rafah, which is now being called the Tent Massacre, just like the Flour Massacre and the massacre at Al-Shifa Hospital, further highlights how the spectacularization of undesirable populations is a normal aspect of state violence. Also being the first “livestreamed” genocide in history—I’m wondering about how our understanding of suffering has come to necessitate a component of visuality and how that has been magnified in the last eight months.
Samudzi: What you’re asking are the questions that I also tried to pose in a class that I taught my first semester this year, called “Looking at Violence: Episteme of Atrocity.” One of the things that we talked about was how visual evidence works like forensic corroboration of what nonwhite people say happened to them. It has to exist on one hand because nonwhite people are “unreliable narrators.” On the other hand, the economy of the image and the history of the photograph were used as a means of proliferating the idea of race. You have these biometric images of nonwhite people who are marked as imperial subjects or criminals (i.e., the emergence of the carceral image in the mug shot). There’s this fucked-up quandary where Palestinians are forced to use the same photographic, televisual, and other mechanisms that have contributed to their othering as a means of trying to beg and plead the rest of the world to see them as human.
In this essay by Kimberly Juanita Brown, “Regarding the Pain of the Other”—a response to Susan Sontag’s “Regarding the Pain of Others”—Brown uses Black studies’ understanding of the human to discuss how atrocity images serve to solidify the effective distance between oneself and the other. Of course, what we’re seeing in Gaza is probably not going to happen in the United States. But we are foolish to believe that there is not a honing of technologies, a priming of certain populations to meet certain kinds of fates.
The Chinese government is selling all this surveillance equipment to the Israelis. The Israelis are selling all these drones and other counter-surveillance equipment to the rest of the world. All our police forces are getting these counterinsurgency tactics from their training in Israel, which we’ve seen them using on student protesters.
I think as we enter these moments of intensified shortages and crises, we’re foolish to believe that these kinds of abject violences won’t be turned on us in the West.
I’m grateful for the people who make the deliberate effort to not flatten, but to be like, here’s how we internationalize. For example, Zionist extraction in the West Bank is connected to the Israeli multinational and other Western multinational presences in the Congo, in the extraction of minerals.
Toure: In terms of the genocides in Sudan, Tigray and the Congo, the U.S. invasion of Haiti and the lack of recognition of these atrocities, can you talk about the relationship between anti-Blackness and continued loss of sovereignty, and how this may illuminate the ways that Black and Indigenous dispossession and death are intertwined?
Samudzi: The Congo never had a chance. The uranium that was used for the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki came out of the Congo. We don’t talk about how all these European colonies were intensifying extraction to fund the war effort after they lost their colonies. The pivot to development became how all these countries could fall and remain under European control.
Structural adjustment policies and financial assistance are euphemisms that erode African national sovereignty to ensure that states can hold tightly to the resources they had to leave behind when they left the continent. I found it fascinating that the Israeli state is one of the biggest handlers and dealers of diamonds in the world, despite not having any diamond reserve. There’s a guy called Dan Gertler who was running around the Congo [buying up mineral rights] and his grandfather was the founder of the Israel Diamond Exchange.
Also, African states are complicit. Like Paul Kagame arming the M23 [a rebel military group] in Kivu, DRC—he’s supposed to be understood as this beacon of democracy, but he’s responsible for his own atrocities in the Congo. Or the former president Robert Mugabe, who destroyed the Zimbabwean economy by sending the Zimbabwean army to the Congo during the Second Congo War to protect his mineral interests in the region. We have the Kenyan government buddying up with the American government, and the Kenyan government is heavily involved in these interventions that are going to be happening in Haiti. You have Rwanda being willing to be the receptacle for deportations from the British government; Rwanda was previously involved in talks to receive African migrants being deported from Israel. We see some genocide denialism in Ethiopia, despite Ethiopia itself being historically a settler state. I hope that we push hard to internationalize and for Africa not to be an afterthought.
