Israeli sociologist Eva Illouz has insisted that the humanitarian disaster in Gaza is the outcome of a retaliatory war and not genocide. Others like Israeli historian Raz Segal and British sociologist Martin Shaw have argued that the conflict is a “textbook case of genocide” and warned of the “specter of genocide” yet again haunting the Middle East, respectively. The South African legal team presenting its case to the International Criminal Court of Justice concurs with the latter, and so should we. The legal team made two critical interventions when considering the Gaza conflict’s implications for the field(s) of Holocaust and Genocide Studies: the role of Israel’s (1) humanitarian management and (2) the state’s settler-colonial policies past and present. Outlining Israel’s deliberate and systematic withholding of “objects indispensable to survival” (OIS) and connecting this wartime practice to historical policies of siege and occupation, the legal team situates acts and omissions of genocide not only in the broader context of settler colonialism affecting Gaza long before October 2023. Plenty of historical examples illustrate economic warfare as a strategy to bring the internal or external enemy to its knees. From the Napoleonic Wars and the American Civil War in the nineteenth century to the total wars of the twentieth century, the Nazi “hunger plan,” the US’s Operation Starvation blocking food from entering Japan during WWII, to Putin’s drone attacks on grain silo and loading facilities, food sat and sits at the heart of conflict. The Allied blockades during the First World War are exemplary; British, French, Russian, Italian, and American fleets interrupted food supplies to reach the Central Powers (Germany and Austria-Hungary) and their Ottoman allies. The Allied blockade of the Mediterranean Sea contributed to a full-fledged famine in today’s Lebanon, causing the death of an estimated 400,000 civilians. Ottoman Armenians died of starvation on the deportations roads. This paper argues that albeit famine hashistorically been used as a tool of war and genocide, Gaza is unique in that system that allows for OIS to be cut of has been carefully constructed over time by the Israeli state and has been part of what Eyal Weizman (2011) has referred to a humanitarian management based on “standards of ‘humanitarian minimum,’” meaning the “calibration of life-sustaining flows of resources through the physical enclosure” allowing for survival but little more.

In 2023, the Armenian population of Artsakh/Nagorno Karabakh and the Palestinian population of Gaza were intentionally subjected to extreme deprivation of food, water, electricity, and medical supplies. In both cases, depriving entire populations was framed as a legitimate military tactic in an existential battle against terrorism. This paper will compare recent events in Artsakh/Nagorno Karabakh and Gaza, with a particular focus on the intentional stripping of entire populations of live-sustaining infrastructure. Used in the genocides in Darfur and Tigray, this strategy has a name—genocide by attrition. What is genocide by attrition? How has unplugging entire populations from life support been, to use Rob Nixon’s term, a form of lethal “slow violence” in historic and present genocidal warfare? Human Rights Lawyer Raphael Lemkin outlined this type of genocidal strategy when he described “a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves.” This includes political, economic, and social institutions along with language and culture to eliminate a “national group.” While mass starvation falls under article 2c of the UN Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, The Rome Statute of the international criminal court defines starvation as a war crime when it states “intentionally using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare by depriving them of objects indispensable to their survival, including willfully impeding relief supplies as provided for under the Geneva conventions.” As in cases of genocide, Alex de Waal has argued that the crime of starvation must be have intentionality to be a war crime. This paper will test these legal and historical criteria in the case of Artsakh/Nagorno Karabakh and Gaza, two geographical regions with very different histories where a surprisingly similar pattern of slow violence against civilian populations has emerged.

This paper aims at putting past and present processes of cultural destruction in dialogue. The intentional destruction of cultural heritage, especially religious heritage, is a central element in mass violence and genocide generally. Claims for the restitution of surviving religious and artistic objects often feature in post-conflict processes of survival or reconciliation. Specifically, the widespread destruction of cultural heritage is a well-known dimension of the Armenian Genocide, but has only recently been the subject of sustained investigation. Is the culture of a community that was subjected to genocide, discrimination, or minoritization included in the official state heritage, is it excluded, erased or appropriated? What are the implications for the cultural heritage sector in general, and for specific objects and sites of cultural heritage of the community in particular? The history and cultural heritage of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey since the end of World War II shed light on the long-term impacts of genocide, minoritization, and state power. This presentation makes use of Peter Balakian’s notion of “captive sites” in reference to architectural and religious constructions that remain on site, and my concept of “survivor objects” in reference to portable objects looted or displaced in the wake of genocide and displacement. This presentation will examine how such categories can help us understand the process of cultural destruction in Gaza, and how contemporary processes of cultural destruction can help us understand past atrocities.

When South Africa accused Israel at the ICJ of committing genocide during the 2023-24 war, it sent shockwaves through the field of Genocide Studies and revived public policy and academic discussions about Holocaust exceptionalism and the value of the historical comparison of atrocity. Accusing Israel, a state founded in the wake of the genocide of European Jews and home to survivors and their descendants, provoked an immediate reaction from many Holocaust scholars who rejected South Africa’s claim of genocide on the facts or out of concern that it could dilute or even defame the memory of the Shoah. Some welcomed the invocation of genocide, as either an accurate assessment of the status quo, or as a rhetorical gesture made to convey the urgent need to protect Palestinian life. In other cases, most notably when critic Masha Gessen compared Gaza to the urban ghettos where Nazis segregated and murdered Jews, it led to the recission of an award and the accusation of antisemitism. For historians of genocide and mass atrocity in the Middle East, however, the ICJ case and the war that provoked it, invited less a comparison with European genocide than an effort to compare it with other, longer histories of violence and displacement and mass atrocities against minoritized ethnic and religious communities including Armenians, Assyrians, Yazidis, and Kurds or with the brutality of the wars in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Sudan. In the space between the invocation of the Holocaust as abstraction and historical event and the Middle Eastern contextualization, I argue, is a way to a) respond to Uğur Ümit Üngör concerns about the possible moral inconsistency of exceptionalzing Israeli violence against Palestinians in the absence of similar outrage or empathy over other episodes of historical and contemporary mass killings and genocide especially in nearby Syria; and b) answer Michael Rothberg’s recent call to create an ethic of comparison that could evaluate productively and compassionately “provocative historical juxtapositions.” In this paper I enter a dialog with the comparative work of other historians (including those on this panel) around the current war, focusing primarily on the 1915-1922 Genocide of the Ottoman Armenians and 2014-2017 Yazidi Genocide in Iraq. Bringing these genocides together into the same frame of the Palestinian experience with mass violence and displacement will foster an approach that takes advantage of the possibilities of comparison to build historical understanding and human solidarity.