Decorated scholar of the Holocaust, totalitarianism, and contemporary historiography professor Enzo Traverso met with students in the department of Modern Languages and Cultures (MLC) on Thursday, Oct. 24 to discuss his newest book: “Gaza Faces History.”
Traverso teaches in the departments of History, Romance Studies, and Jewish Studies at Cornell University and has published nine works on genocide, war, and collective memory.
He began the talk with a lengthy disclaimer about the nature of historical writing and the inability to create historical works without critical distance from the events they focus on. He pointed out that this work is not an unbiased, apolitical historical text and lacks the years of close research needed to create such a book. Instead, his work is meant to provide insight into recent events and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from the perspective of a scholar of the Holocaust and modern Europe.
Though he touched on many points in his two-hour talk and Q&A session, which navigated both editorial issues like word choice and broader world concerns including pogroms, Said’s notion of Orientalism, and the United Nations, his principal focus was antisemitism.
Traverso outlined the long-term consequences of this narrative and warned that blaming the conflict solely on antisemitism, as many Western media sources have, is dangerous for all involved.
“Till recent times, the Holocaust memory was a powerful tool to reactivate the atonement of other colonial crimes,” Traverso wrote in an essay. “Today, the use of the Holocaust to justify Germany’s unconditional support for Israel blurs the democratic culture, education, and memory that the Federal Republic of Germany has built up over several decades.”
He cautioned that things as sacred as The Day of Remembrance risk becoming hollow and hypocritical, should they be used to further other ends.
As a historian and what he calls a “scholar of memory,” he questioned the utility of memory if not to serve as both a reminder of what we’ve lost and a warning to ensure we do not repeat past mistakes.
He also said that justifying the genocidal violence committed by Israel against the Palestinian people risks tainting our “sacred and institutionalized memory” of the Holocaust and weakening the fight against antisemitism.
His essay warns that “if you can conduct a genocidal war in the name of fighting antisemitism, many good people will start to think it would be better to abandon such a dubious cause altogether.”
Much of the following Q&A focused on technical terminology and philosophy. Students asked about his ideas for potential solutions or thoughts on possible outcomes of this conflict. In response, Traverso repeated that he is not a scholar of international law or the Middle East, reaffirmed the importance of critical distance in creating comprehensive historical works, and reiterated the time it will take to write such works.
Despite the uncertainty and closeness of the conflict, he remained hopeful for a peaceful resolution.
“Why would a binational Israeli-Palestinian state be impossible or irrational?” he asks in the final chapter of his essay. “In the throes of World War II, the idea of building a European federation combining Germany, France, Italy, Belgium, and the Netherlands would have seemed strange and naive […] But by the end of the process, the idea of a war between Germany, Italy, and France had become quite simply absurd. Why would the same not be true in the Middle East?”
For more information and in-depth discussion, check out “Gaza Faces History.”
