I walked to the East Side Gallery in Berlin, as most new arrivals do. The Gallery memorializes the remnants of the Berlin Wall, a concrete barrier that separated West Berlin of the Federal Republic of Germany from the German Democratic Republic’s East Berlin.
Monuments of remembrance are ubiquitous in Berlin, recalling histories of violence and resistance. The city has more than twenty memorials to victims of the Holocaust. There are also ‘stumbling stones’ that remember victims who resided in the city.
There is a section of the Wall that struck me as contradictory — it made me stop and reflect. This section had the Israeli and German flags interwoven together: the blue stripes and Star of David superimposed on the German flag’s black, red, and yellow. The mural was painted to mark the 50th anniversary of the Night of Broken Glass (Kristallnacht), when Nazi forces destroyed Jewish-owned businesses and shops. The mural is supposed to remind us of the violations of extremist regimes and to protest human right abuses. It has been a contested site since its unveiling in the 1990s, with protestors writing ‘Free Palestine’ across it in 2019.
It is strange to trace the practices and rituals of remembrance of the Holocaust in Germany and their unnecessary intertwinement with the continued oppression of the Palestinian people. Initially, I thought it ironic that the remnants of a wall in Berlin are decorated with the flag of a settler colonial state that has built a higher wall and maintains the largest open-air prison. I remembered a litany of Palestinian ruminations on this contradiction — the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish once asked, “Will I be able to speak of peace and war among victims and the victims of victims, avoiding superfluous words and asides? Will they tell me that two dreams cannot share a bed?”
The Holocaust systematically targeted European Jews with death, torture, and ostracization. It relegated Jews to a space of horror. It is a world-destroying event that uprooted families and histories. Both Europe (particularly Germany) and Israel isolate and exceptionalize the Holocaust as a separate event — as the only event that deserves reflection, memorialization, and reparations. It is the event that enables Europe to turn a blind eye to the genocidal monster it has created and nurtured: the Israeli settler colony. The Israeli regime has the power to guilt European power and weaponize the Holocaust to appeal to its colonial and supremacist sensibilities.
Yet, we cannot think of the Holocaust as separate from histories of slavery and colonialism. In Discourse on Colonialism, Aime Cesaire argues that Hitler’s crime was that he targeted white Europeans with methods of torture historically reserved for the colonial subjects. The concentration camp, for example, had appeared much earlier in the colonies. Prior to the Holocaust, it had been used as a spatial technology by the United States against the Indigenous peoples, as well as by German colonialism in Southwest Africa and British colonialism in South Africa in the early 19th and 20th centuries. Only when it was used in Europe was it finally recognized as an abhorrent practice, necessitating a Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Furthermore, following the Second World War and the staggering numbers of refugees from Europe, an international refugee system was enshrined and clarified. And that system made sure that even the category “refugee” — the most rudimentary status for a human subject — only applied to refugees from pre-1951 Europe. In her book Asylum After Empire, Lucy Mayblin discusses how the 1951 Refugee Convention (the cornerstone of the international refugee system) ensured that the category “refugee” only applied to European male refugees. She shows how the British cabinet at the time insisted on a definition that excluded the people of the colonies. Consequently, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) was established and remained restricted in its operations to Europe. Meanwhile, the separate agency of the United Nations for Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) was established exclusively for Palestinian refugees. Although the temporal and geographic limitations of the 1951 Convention were removed in 1967, the ramifications of this racial division of labor between the UNHCR and UNRWA continues into the present, making the latter more susceptible to conditional funding by the United States and the European Union.
It is no coincidence, then, that the Holocaust forms the only moment of inquiry and reflection for white European thinkers, philosophers, and the general public. The Holocaust targeted Europeans and occurred within Europe. Therefore, it is worthy of recognition and reparations, at any cost.
Meanwhile, slavery and colonialism remain sidelined in world history. Indeed, we still debate if reparations are the right thing for the formerly colonized and enslaved. We still question if rethinking the public memorialization of colonial and slaveholding figures in the United States, the Netherlands, Belgium, the United Kingdom, and other countries is a historical necessity. The victims of colonialism and slavery are not white and are, therefore, not proper historical subjects.
From the vantage point of a Eurocentric humanity, the suffering of the colonized and enslaved cannot be turned into a historical claim. This is essentially informed by a hierarchy of victimhood: there are people whose suffering must be translated into a historical claim (even a nation-state) at any cost, and there are those whose suffering may never be recognized, even after centuries of oppression. Thus, when the Israeli regime says that it has the right to exist, it is speaking to Europe and its guilt. As black American thinker Fred Moten once said, “states have no rights and ought not have rights.” A power relation that feeds on the erasure and oppression of the indigenous Palestinians should not exist.
In his book Habeas Viscus, Alexander Weheliye asks what would happen to European thought and popular consciousness if slavery, rather than the Holocaust, was taken as the constitutive event of the modern world? Weheliye is not evoking an oppression Olympics of who should be thought of and remembered first. He is simply saying that we cannot fully understand the Holocaust without understanding this history of colonialism and slavery.
There are significant political implications for his proposition. Once we think of the Holocaust in relation to colonialism and slavery, it becomes unjustifiable and unpredictable for Europe and the Israeli regime to selectively manipulate this history and translate the oppression of European Jews into a settler colonial state. From this different vantage point, we can see the superimposition of an Israeli flag atop a German one as different iterations of a Eurocentric humanity. And, more importantly, we are able to glean a better promise for liberation and a more inclusive conception of humanism; one that refuses to consider the further suffering of the colonized as a rational solution to oppression.
This is all to say that a settler colonial state in the Levant was never a solution to oppression, but merely an extension of it. It is an imaginary solution that propagates a Eurocentric humanity: one that devises an ideal European human and measures the rest of humanity against him, thereby devising a hierarchy of humans. This is a hierarchy that denies the humanity of indigenous, Black and brown bodies. Only by refuting it altogether are we able to imagine a liberated future.
