To consider the wall that seemingly separates official Occidental opinion – from governments to cultural and media agencies – from support for Palestinians in this historical moment clearly touches deeper histories and their potential disturbance of the status quo. If power inevitably speaks to power and seeks to monopolize the political lexicon by providing an all-encompassing explanation, then it becomes imperative to break that stranglehold. Put bluntly, the wall is that of the Shoah and Occidental guilt. It blocks all discussion of the historical formation of both the Jewish and the Palestinian question. I have frequently insisted in these pages on the colonial constitution of our languages, politics and understanding. And I have suggested that to listen, really listen, to the voices of Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, and Edward Said, or Assia Djebar, Sylvia Wynter, and Denise Ferreira da Silva, or the multiplicity of indigenous voices arriving from the four corners of the planet, is not simply to register the other who refuses to be authorized by us and our version of the world. It is also to acknowledge and work with the fact that others exist with their right to have rights. To insist that only we Occidentals have access to the truth and the means to explain is to install a regime of cultural and political apartheid. It is racism.

The Shoah. The industrialized organization of genocide on European soil against an ethnically profiled part of its native population reveals not only the banal consistency of our murderous modernity famously evoked by Hannah Arendt, later by Zygmunt Bauman, and today in Jonathan Glazer’s stunning film A Zone of Interest (2024). It also drops us into the abyss of archives where we confront how, across the centuries and across the globe, Europe has systematically slaughtered those deemed inferior, identifying populations beneath the measure of Occidental ‘civilization’ and ‘progress’, that could be worked to death and then eliminated in the capitalization of national identity and territorial control.

This is not to relativize the Shoah. Rather, it is to insist on the critical beam it casts into the troubled contours of deeper and longer histories. The Shoah was not spontaneous or simply a breakdown in German culture. Its possibility had been cultivated for centuries in European antisemitism, seeded in Christian fundamentalism, and then ‘secularized’ and finely configured in nineteenth-century nationalism, scientific racism, and imperialism, that, in turn, not so paradoxically, provided the tools and language for the colonial project of Zionism. In other words, it is a dark, tangled, and profoundly European and Occidental story. Yet, in a further colonial twist, it is the Arabs, and the Palestinians in particular, who have been forced to live with its murderous consequences.

It is at this point that the Western sense of guilt for the Holocaust needs revisiting. Of course, many historians and critical thinkers, Jewish and non, have been doing this for decades. The historical and critical details are readily available. What I would simply like to point to, and this brings up yet again the centrality of critical Jewish thought to modernity, is Sigmund Freud’s insistence that the repression, which in this case would be the refusal to work fully through the Shoah to register the colonial constitution of the present, means we are destined to remain in a stalled situation. Blocked in our narcissism, unwilling not simply to signal but also to elaborate on the loss of murdered millions, both in the European death camps and the colonial killing fields, and work through the necessary mourning, we are left, as Paul Gilroy pointed out some time ago, in a state of melancholy.

To insist on the connections that apparently cannot be named and to escape the repression that binds us to a past seemingly emptied of all significance except the history that confirms our sovereignty on the present (and the future) suggests that guilt can only be a point of departure, not arrival. Once duly acknowledged, there is the need for a reply and a responsibility. To take up that critical and political burden means not only refusing the idea that antisemitism has somehow been resolved by being dispatched to the citadel of an ethnonationalist state in the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East. It means, above all, returning to the West its direct responsibility for the ongoing genocide of Gaza and the reign of terror in the West Bank. As much of the rest of the world has understood, it is not simply Israel on historical trial but the whole edifice of the West.

An Italian version of this text was previously published at Il Manifesto: https://ilmanifesto.it/il-senso-di-colpa-gaza-e-la-shoah  

Iain Chambers is a writer and independent scholar. He previously taught Cultural, Postcolonial and Mediterranean Studies at the Oriental University in Naples, where he was director of the doctoral programme in Cultural and Postcolonial Studies in the Anglophone world. His research work is in different fields, including migration, music and the phenomena of identity in the Mediterranean. He is a member of the editorial boards of the journals Cultural Studies, Media & Philosophy and Postcolonial Studies and he is author, inter alia, of the books Mediterranean Crossings: The Politics of an Interrupted Modernity (Duke University Press, 2008).