This is the text of a speech at the Palestine Project Round Table at the University of Iceland on November 11.
The Hebrew word “olah”, meaning “a burnt sacrifice offered whole to God”, is translated into Koine Greek as holokauston: holos meaning “completely burnt” and kaustos meaning “sacrificial offering” – thus, “a burnt sacrifice offered to a god”.
The English word “holocaust”, therefore, evolves the meaning “a sacrifice consumed by fire” to “a thorough destruction or slaughter on a mass scale involving extensive loss of life especially through fire”. In recent years, the term, through its selective usage, has come to be wholly and singularly associated with one holocaust, that of the Jewish people during World War II.
But the Hebrew word for this genocide is “Shoah”, meaning “catastrophe” – which is also the meaning of the Arabic word “Nakba”. Perhaps I need not belabour the similarities between these catastrophes. A picture, they say, is worth a thousand words, and I know I could make my point much faster and more powerfully if I accompanied this speech with a set of images to illustrate it.
For many many reasons, I will not do that, but for anyone who has seen them, I imagine that those images coming out of Palestine are etched on the inside of their eyelids. I ask you to recall those as you think of this list of synonyms of the word “holocaust”: inferno, fire, conflagration, wildfire, blaze.
Evidence that this genocide in Palestine is a holocaust blazes forth from every one of those fiery images, but one might yet ask why this distinction between genocide and holocaust is important. If you will bear with me I will offer a very brief history of the evolution of the word holocaust into the name of a singular event, The Holocaust, and explain why we must use this term for the genocide in Palestine.
As someone whose research focuses on histories of trauma, I note especially that in its Latin form, holocaustum, the term was first used with specific reference to a massacre of Jewish people by the chroniclers Roger of Howden and Richard of Devizes in England in the 1190s.
While historians and scholars in the area differ as to details, we can say that in general, the term has largely been used to refer to massive destructions by fire, most prominently in the title of a dystopian 1844 short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Earth’s Holocaust, in which all the world’s literature and artwork is deliberately burned.
That was, in fact, the context of the first known use of the term in reference to the Nazis, a 1933 Newsweek story about a book-burning campaign in Germany. There were smatterings of usage prior to World War II to refer to mass slaughters, too, including with regard to the Armenian Genocide.
So there is some historical precedent, perhaps, to the American soldier and anesthesiologist, Dr David Wilsey’s, persistent use of the word in his letters to his wife from the Second World War culminating in the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp, to describe the horrors all around him.
In the spring of 1945, Wilsey “wonders how many times the world is going to ask for the holocaust-messes to be gone through. Each one seems about the ‘last straw’ and yet more and more come…”
“Holocaust! After holocaust! After holocaust!” he writes, “[was] just wearing [him] to a nub”. Yet, for decades after the war, the genocide lacked any formal title in English except, perhaps, “The Final Solution”, the term the Nazis used. In Hebrew, the calamity quickly became known as “Shoah”, but it wasn’t until the 1960s that scholars and writers began using the capitalised term as a proper noun, and it took the 1978 TV film Holocaust, starring Meryl Streep, to push it into widespread use and make it the generally accepted name of the genocide of Jews in World War II.
Significant for our purpose here is the way in which the proper noun, The Holocaust, references not just the event but something of an open wound, bespeaking the power of a traumatic history that survives over time, keeping the event always alive, never finished and in the past.
Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury says that “when a word becomes an untranslatable proper name, we have to try to understand the wisdom of the language”. He is speaking of the word “Nakba”.
This is also how the Palestinian scholar Rabea Eghbariah understands the term Nakba. “The word Nakba,” he says, “originally referred to an event – a spectacular rupture. But then it happens again, and again, and the word takes on a life of its own. Over the course of the past 76 years, as the original break has morphed into a structure of dispossession, domination, and fragmentation, the word has come to signify for Palestinians the denial of our existence and our political will.”
“This,” says Eghbariah, “points to the second way of talking about the Nakba: the Nakba [not merely as an event, but] as a continuous process, as an accumulation of overlapping histories of violence.”
He calls this “the Darwishian reading, following the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, who once suggested that the Nakba is “an extended present that promises to continue into the future”.
In 2001, on the 53rd anniversary of the Nakba, Darwish argued that Palestinians do not look back at the Nakba as a distant crime to be uncovered… because [they] live the Nakba in the here and now. From this perspective, every act of killing, every act of administrative detention, is an act of Nakba.”
Worth emphasising here is the fact that although these are different events and histories of trauma and violence, the understanding of the proper noun, Holocaust, and that of Shoah, and Nakba, is in fact exactly the same. Only the language differs. To my mind, it is only logical that we use the English term “holocaust” for what is happening in Palestine today – and not just as a matter of terminology.
Eghbariah says that his hope in urging the legal recognition of the Nakba – equivalent to apartheid, for instance – as “Zionism’s organising crime against the Palestinians” is that, moving forward, “recognising the Nakba will be disturbing enough to the system that all of us have a little more room to think and act differently”.
So how might we, as a community, as academics within the university, think and act differently by using the English word holocaust, with all its accumulated social, cultural, and political histories, for the genocide in Palestine?
For one, it will allow us to bring to the fore the fact of the many holocausts that are obscured and ignored by the upholding of the one and only holocaust. Among the erasures within The Holocaust itself is what is called the “Gypsy Holocaust” or the murdering of the Roma and Sinti as part of the Jewish Holocaust.
While the generally quoted definition of The Holocaust is the killing of six million Jews in concentration camps and otherwise, a conservative minimum of a quarter million to an estimated three quarter million in addition to that six million were Roma and Sinti populations of Europe. An estimated total of three million people other than Jews were murdered as targeted killings alongwith Jews, but the genocide of the Roma and Sinti was a matter of stated policy.
The Belgian Richard Liebich coined the term “unworthy life” for them in 1868. The “Nürnberger Rassengesetze” (race laws) of 1935 paved the way for the genocide by classifying the “Gypsies” as “racially inferior”, taking away their nationality and their citizens‘ rights.
Research on the topic was undermined and dismissed by race-theory historians, consequently questioning the fact of the genocide of the Roma itself. As you might imagine, such erasure perpetuates and preserves the idea of the tragic Jewish singularity of The Holocaust.
Calling the genocide of Palestinians a holocaust also forcibly brings to our attention all the other holocausts committed by colonial powers across Asia and Africa, similarly erased, forgotten and unmemorialised because they happened to “those people” “out there” rather than here on European soil to “people like us”. The foregrounding of those other holocausts then throws into relief the powers that perpetrated them – the very same ones that are today perpetrating the Palestinian Holocaust and providing the weapons and the moral and legal arguments that sustain it.
Calling the genocide of Palestinians a holocaust allows us also to disrupt a legal discourse of genocide that is becoming quite comfortable with getting mired in judicial nuances, just as earlier discussions about the many political complexities of the accords and treaties surrounding Palestine, allowed us to sidestep the central fact of colonialism.
But perhaps most importantly, calling the genocide of Palestinians a holocaust will allow the “never again” imperative attached to the holocaust to be applied to this holocaust. Genocides continue to be perpetrated and tolerated because they are never recognised as holocausts.
As genocide and Holocaust scholars have pointed out, the fact that no other genocide is ever allowed to attain the level of magnitude and gravitas that signifies The Holocaust, the “never again” need not apply to them, and they are allowed to continue.
For these reasons, I urge the usage of the term holocaust for this genocide; otherwise, in David Wilsey words, we condemn ourselves to “Holocaust! After holocaust! After holocaust!”
Giti Chandra is a research specialist with the Gender Equality Studies and Training Programme in Reykjavik and teaches at the University of Iceland.
