In what could be construed as a policy shift from previous years’ conduct cases and the silencing of student protests, Colorado College invited Nadia Abu El-Haj to give a talk titled “Illiberal War: Trauma, Intent, and the Gaza Genocide” for the Abbott Lecture on Sept. 22. The lecture series was established in honor of W. Lewis Abbott, a professor of economics and sociology at Colorado College from 1920 until his passing in 1949.
Abu El-Haj is a professor of Anthropology at Barnard College and Columbia University and Co-Director of the Center for Palestine Studies. Among other distinguished positions, she serves as Vice President and Vice Chair of the Board at The Institute for Palestine Studies in Washington, D.C.
Unlike many other political voices, Abu El-Haj is adamant that Israel is committing a genocide, the origins of which she explored in her presentation.
Abu El-Haj began with the construction of Israel as a liberal polity, the so-called sole democracy in the Middle East. In her construction, liberal violence of the kind committed by neoliberal democracies like Israel is seen as a necessary evil, and something that is not undertaken lightly.
So, how does Israel legitimize the total violence enacted against Palestinians? The answer, argued Abu El-Haj, comes from the weaponization of trauma, the invocation of which substitutes genocidal intent.
In South Africa’s International Court of Justice genocide charge against Israel, Israeli defense lawyers argued that genocidal statements by politicians did not constitute proof of genocidal intent: rather, they were simply natural, emotional reactions to the Hamas attacks. Abu El-Haj describes this “natural rage” as “traumatic rage,” the result of repeated, re-traumatizing events. In constructing the Hamas attacks as the largest single-day mass killing of Jewish people since the Holocaust, Israeli lawyers provide cover for the destruction of Gaza and change the narrative around genocidal intent. Trauma as motivation also makes it more difficult to blame Israel or cast them in a negative light.
The invocation of trauma presents a narrative where Israel is a perpetual victim engaged in an ontological war of self-defense. The speaker expounds on this, stating, “In effect, the lawyers are arguing, this is what ‘never again’ actually looks like on the ground.” In calling on the language of ‘never again,’ Abu El-Haj claimed, Israel draws a throughline from the virulent antisemitism of Nazis to anti-Zionist movements today.
According to Abu El-Haj, conceptualizing the Holocaust as a unique atrocity of a different caliber was part of a political movement in the latter half of the twentieth century. In the U.S., especially, there emerged museums, monuments, television shows, and academic curricula to establish what she called the “Holocaust memory industry.” Using Sigmund Freud’s language, the Holocaust became the “primal scene” for Jewish people, a primal scene repeated on Oct. 7. The invocation of this trauma, Abu El-Haj believes, combined with the dehumanization of Palestinians, provided perfect cover for Zionism.
“Jewish Israelis have long shared an image, an ideal or fantasy, perhaps, of a world without Palestinians. Those taken for granted affects and fantasies and aspirations, as they collided with the attack that was Oct. 7, are the reasons why the words spoken and the brutality enacted so immediately and seamlessly took hold with virtually no opposition.”
She cited polls of Israelis from the last decade that showed substantial support for the displacement of Palestinians, stating that while blatant calls for expulsion used to be considered fringe views, this settler colonial rhetoric was largely politically legitimate by 2022. Abu El-Haj claimed that the violence of Oct. 7 made it possible to take actions that may have previously seemed too extreme.
Professor Abu El-Haj appealed to an example of trauma as a political justification for acts otherwise considered egregious that may be more familiar to an American audience: the terrorist attacks of 9/11. The public’s fear in the wake of the attacks was used as a tool to push forward legislation that may not have previously been possible, such as the Patriot Act.
“There was so much anticipatory fear built into the public domain that you had a citizenry that was almost willing to hand over, or to let go, certain questions about democratic governance and transparency because that panic could so easily be invoked,” she said. The trauma and anticipatory terror mirror the Israeli political unconscious that has allowed the wholesale destruction of Gaza.
Abu El-Haj ended her presentation with a call to action, saying, “This is as acute an emergency as the world has ever seen.” In her estimation, political changes in the U.S. are coming far too slowly to matter for Gazans. “As we enter the second year of watching the world’s first live-streamed genocide, I wonder, will that moment ever come? I do think the political train will shift. But I don’t know what that means, because what will be left? Who will survive?”
Even though Abu El-Haj disagrees with Martin Luther King, Jr., that the arc of history bends toward justice, she says, “I think we have to act as if it does, because otherwise we’re really abandoning any kind of ethical and political commitments we may have, and any kind of possibility of winning.”