Nakba Denial
On the politics of history and genocide
Esmat Elhalaby
This essay was adapted from an oral presentation for the panel “Under the Rubble: History and Memory in Israel-Palestine and Germany” with Omer Bartov and Rebecca Wittmann at the University of Toronto, Mississauga on December 3, 2024. An abridged version was also delivered at the American Historical Association’s 2025 annual meeting on a panel entitled “Genocide in Palestine: Understanding the Nakba and the Holocaust” with Sherene Seikaly, Mezna Qato, Raz Segal, and Barry Trachtenberg.
In April 2012, as an awed undergraduate history student, I attended a conference honoring the distinguished historian of the Holocaust Saul Friedländer. [1] I was humbled by the erudition and eloquence of the speakers, including Hayden White, Ben Kiernan, and Daniel Mendelsohn. I was impressed by their rigor and capacious thinking, fascinated by the scholarly sociality displayed and performed—an intergenerational, international conversation that seemed to represent the very promises of university life. It was only later that I realized many of those assembled were openly hostile to the political aspirations of my people and arrogant in their defense of Israel. “I realized,” Edward Said once remarked in an interview with Phillip Lopate, “that the people who had had the most influence on me, Auerbach, Freud, now Adorno, were not only émigrés and Jews, but also people who would have had very little interest in me.”[2] Indeed, in 2012, among those at UCLA was Yehuda Bauer: the recently deceased historian of the Holocaust who was instrumental in the elaboration of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, which has been weaponized against all of us in recent years.
Another one of the participants at the UCLA conference, Israeli historian Omer Bartov has emerged as an important voice in the North American intellectual scene. Raising the alarm over Israel’s genocide in Gaza and demanding lexical clarity and ethical consistency in political speech, Bartov has used his well-earned notoriety and prestige for good. And insofar as I am a mere son of Gaza—whose interests are primarily in the cessation of genocide and the freedom of the Palestinian people—I care principally in how intellectuals may direct their energies beyond their professional duties. In the current circumstances, even as a professional historian, I care more about the present than the past. And in the present, Bartov is perhaps the foremost historian of the Holocaust of his generation. To be crass, he has proven he can be useful but, more importantly, principled and courageous in a field that values neither of these qualities.
As an Israeli intellectual born in 1954, Bartov has long taken an interest in the affairs of his state. In the last decade or so, he has taken an active interest in the history of Palestine. In what follows, I highlight some of the issues with Bartov’s narration of the Nakba—how his writing exhibits forms of Nakba denial. I will also offer some more general remarks on the turn to Palestine by scholars of Jewish studies, European Jewish history, and the Holocaust—noting the limits of their approach. Beyond these historiographical concerns, I am interested in the annals of Palestinian and Arab thought, where the language of catastrophe and genocide has been part and parcel of the anti-colonial struggle from the outset.[3]
I hope to expose the fallacy of certain efforts to construct parallelisms or juxtapositions that wish to reconcile histories of Zionism and the Palestinian condition. Even if expressly disavowed, this symmetry enshrines an asymmetry that erases Palestinian sources and points of view in the name of recognition. Alongside others in his field, Bartov may speak of the present genocide and attain respect precisely because of how their academic careers and the disciplines they helped establish have denied the genocidal nature of Israel and the Nakba. In other words, their confidence in naming today’s genocide is enabled by a theoretical and intellectual discourse—with its endowments and institutions—where Nakba denial has been the norm. Without revisiting their own historical writings about the Nakba, they relegate the Nakba (and prior events) to an altogether other history outside of today’s continuing Nakba.
I make these points in the interest of our present political circumstances: the wholesale slaughter of my people in Palestine, including dozens of my own family in Gaza. Most recently, on November 29, 2024, my relative Akram Saed Abushaban was murdered by a quadcopter while collecting water in Jabal al-Raees west of Shujiyya—one of at least seventy Palestinians killed in Gaza that day. These points are necessary in the context of burgeoning interest in Palestinian history among a Western public weaned on Zionist historiography. This is to say—despite my appreciation of Bartov’s recent public comments and commitments—it remains incumbent upon us to produce history that confronts Israeli propaganda and attunes itself to the experiences, utterances, memories, and desires of the Palestinians.
Bartov’s autobiographical history is recounted through his Genocide, the Holocaust and Israel-Palestine: First-Person History in Times of Crisis, published by Bloomsbury in the summer of 2023 and launched at a panel at Brown University on October 2, 2023. The ambitious essays trace Bartov’s family history, especially his two decades of research on the fate of the Galician town of Buczacz, from where his mother hailed and where members of his family, those who remained, perished during the Holocaust. Under the auspices of his major initiative on the subject at Brown in 2015, this work represented the culmination of Bartov’s effort to deal with the history of Israel and Palestine.
Through his histories of Jewish intercommunal life and death in Eastern Europe, sometimes directly and sometimes implicitly, Bartov confronts Zionist teleology, the “negation of exile,” and Israel’s abuse of Holocaust memory and history. When he writes of this history—something he does with the vigor and texture of a novelist, which he is, after all—he is on extremely solid ground. Bartov is a master of oral history. He is conscious of what different sources—collected from different places and across different languages, from official documents to memoirs, novels, court records, and memorial books—can reveal about the past. These are all sources familiar to historians of Palestine.
“To be crass, Bartov has proven he can be useful but, more importantly, principled and courageous in a field that values neither of these qualities.”
But when Bartov writes of Palestinian history, his source base is significantly thinner. This is not simply because he fails to consult Arabic sources, but because he draws heavily from Israeli and Zionist sources and reproduces their conclusions. From his 2010 exchange with the historical sociologist Martin Shaw in the Journal of Genocide Research to the closing essay in his most recent book, Bartov has repeated the claim that Arab armies invaded Israel, and that the Israeli response was therefore defensive. But, as Bartov well knows, the genocide or ethnic cleansing or Nakba, as Palestinians call it, had commenced months before May 1948—in preparation years before and, indeed, was constitutive of Zionism’s theory and practice from its very beginning. Generations of work by Palestinian scholars has attested to these facts.
Notwithstanding the volumes of scholarship produced in Arabic over the last hundred years, it is prudent to recall some of that unignorable work produced in Western languages for a global audience, from Fayez Sayegh’s Zionist Colonialism in Palestine published by the PLO Research Center in 1965, to Walid Khalidi’s From Haven to Conquest: Readings in Zionism and the Palestine Problem until 1948 published by the Institute for Palestine Studies in 1971, to Abdul Latif Tibawi’s Anglo-Arab Relations and the Question of Palestine, 1914-1921 (1977), Edward Said’s The Question of Palestine (1979), Elias Sanbar’s Palestine 1948: L'Expulsion (1985), Nur Masalha‘s Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of "Transfer" in Zionist Political Thought, 1882- 1948 (1992), Sandrine Mansour-Mérien‘s L'histoire occultée des Palestiniens: 1947-1953 (2013), and Areej Sabbagh-Khoury’s Colonizing Palestine: The Zionist Left and the Making of the Palestinian Nakba (2023).
*
By the fall of 1947, the Yishuv was armed to the teeth and committed, at the ideological and material level, to the creation of a state where Palestinians were either killed or expelled. “The cause of war,” W.E.B. Du Bois once wrote, “is preparation for war.” The Zionist settler project, as has been well documented, was nothing if not prepared. During the Palestinian revolt against the British empire and their facilitation of a Zionist colonial project that started in 1936, the European Jewish settlers were armed and trained by the British authorities. While the Zionist project was facilitated by the British, the Palestinians had no official representation in the Mandate until the Peel Commission and the White Paper of 1939, which was two decades after the Balfour Declaration. Palestinians were not considered or recognized as a political body. At the time, you had military support for a Zionist army and political recognition of Zionist organizations, alongside an intense war on Palestinians and the protracted political erasure of their representatives. This is all in the lead up to the disaster of 1948.
In the aftermath of the 1936–1939 revolt, the Yishuv developed a highly organized underground militia, the Haganah. And by the early fall of 1947, the Yishuv had in its possession thousands of guns and mortars, as well as armed aircraft. Between October 1947 and July 1948, the Yishuv’s factories produced three million 9mm bullets, 150 thousand grenades, and sixteen thousand submachine guns—a buildup of arms which has not abated since.[4] Alongside this military effort was a considerable project of colonial knowledge production, surveillance, and infiltration. At the Hebrew University, the physics building was made a base for the Zionist settler forces and its basement a shooting range. Yoel Racah, the Italian-born physicist, helped command the Haganah forces from Mt. Scopus. Bartov’s parents paused their studies at Mt. Scopus to fight. His father, Hanoch Bartov, was a commander of a machine gun squad.
We may quote the rest of Du Bois’ passage, from The Souls of White Folk:
“The cause of war is preparation for war; and of all that Europe has done in a century there is nothing that has equaled in energy, thought, and time her preparation for wholesale murder. The only adequate cause of this preparation was conquest and conquest, not in Europe, but primarily among the darker peoples of Asia and Africa; conquest, not for assimilation and uplift, but for commerce and degradation. For this, and this mainly, did Europe gird herself at frightful cost for war.”[5]
Du Bois is here identifying what Aimé Césaire (and later Hannah Arendt) would recognize after the Holocaust as “the terrific boomerang effect” occasioned by European imperial violence.[6] But Du Bois also brings me to my next question: what is the ground from which we study the history of Palestine? And Israel. Bartov’s writing remains attached to a conceptual apparatus ill-suited to the study of Palestine and completely at odds with how most Palestinians have understood their condition.
In his 2023 book, Bartov writes that “the Arab leadership in fact hoped to eradicate the small Jewish population in Palestine and the newly declared state of Israel.” [7] In his aforementioned exchange with Shaw, Bartov hewed even closer to the Zionist account of events, insisting that the Nakba did not amount to genocide: “The Arabs actually did attack the Jews in Palestine and actually did want to destroy the emerging Jewish state, and they had a pretty good chance of accomplishing this goal, considering that there were only 800,000 Jews in Palestine at the time.”[8]
Bartov later repeats this point, again in the same context: “But calling 1948 a genocide is neither historically justifiable nor politically useful. The 800,000 Jews living in Palestine in 1948 were in fact faced with an existential threat—greater than that faced by Britain in 1940 and following a national catastrophe on a scale not experienced by Britain since 1066.”[9]
“Bartov’s writing remains attached to a conceptual apparatus ill-suited to the study of Palestine and completely at odds with how most Palestinians have understood their condition.”
It is a hallmark of Nakba denialism to erroneously represent the Arab efforts to halt the expulsion of Palestinians and the usurpation of their land as an invasion. But beyond this, I am disturbed by Bartov’s insinuation that the Arab project was one against Jews, the presence or existence of Jews in Palestine, or even a project of eradication or destruction. First, the paltry numbers of the Arab force—a small proportion of the Arab states’ standing armies—contradict conspiracies of annihilation. [10] The more important point to acknowledge, however, is that Palestinian and Arab resistance to the Zionist project in Palestine was always first and foremost an anti-colonial response. Moreover, this anti-colonial effort was a response to decades of colonization in the face of a genuine, predetermined project of expulsion. This resistance was and remains just.
*
The public debate over genocide’s conceptual limits has raged in the last year, over the last two decades in the Journal for Genocide Research, and in the field in general. This debate has often turned on the history of colonialism and the relationship between colonial violence—including those in the present—and other genocides, especially the Holocaust. Mark Levene’s two-volume Genocide in the Age of the Nation State (2005) or Dirk Moses’s more recent The Problems of Genocide: Permanent Security and the Language of Transgression (2021)—and the responses those books elicited, including by Bartov himself—have been major touchstones of this debate.[11] Bartov’s absent engagement with Palestinian and Arab sources is only reinforced by the methodological myopia of his generation of Holocaust historians, which insisted that their subject of historical research challenged the very foundations of Western civilization in a way that no other subject did.
The Palestinian writer Muin Bseiso critically described the humanitarian regime imposed on Palestinians by UNRWA in his 1971 Gaza Diaries. The agents of Palestinian dispossession were not simply the Zionist Jewish settlers: “It was an organized starvation which operated through the typewriter, statistics and reports written on thin blue paper. It was a bullet in a silenced pistol fired in the morning, at noon, and at sunset into the mouth of each refugee.” For Bseiso, the historical analogies were clear: “The program of annihilating the Palestinian Red Indians in the new concentration camps in the Gaza Strip supervised by UNRWA didn’t follow the old traditional methods of genocide.” In 1956, when the Israelis occupied the Strip for the first time, Bseiso argued that the assault resembled the Nazis’ aim to eliminate Jews from Europe.[12]
While I am not keen on the “Israelis are Nazis” or “Stars of David are Swastikas” mode of political speech—as it circulates in internet memes or at street demonstrations—it is prudent to note that such comparisons are common in the historical record. Such comparisons were also common during the war in Vietnam or in the Black insurgency against American apartheid when the American empire was likened to Nazism. In any case, we may quote the famous comment of Aharon Zisling, former Israeli Minister of Agriculture, in a 1948 cabinet meeting, while discussing some of the massacres perpetrated by Israeli soldiers against the Palestinians: “I often disagreed when the term Nazi was applied to the British. I wouldn’t like to use the term, even though the British committed Nazi crimes. But now Jews too have behaved like Nazis and my entire being has been shaken.”[13] Nevertheless, I don’t want to dwell on this analogy. Instead, I want to emphasize the anti-colonial current within which the question of Palestine has long flowed.
Consider a 1952 article on the United Nations’ Genocide Convention debates in Al-Thaqafa, Cairo’s premier literary weekly at the time. In a front-page article for the journal, Egyptian lawyer and writer Ahmed Taha al-Sanusi recounted genocide’s coinage by Raphael Lemkin in the context of the Holocaust and the details of the Convention’s provisions. He goes on to quote from the debates, including statements by Pakistan’s Begum Ikramullah, that emphasize the urgency of the convention given how technological advancements—industrial killing, nuclear holocaust—had only increased the possibility of more genocide in the future. Sanusi also quotes from the Chinese delegate at the UN who laments that “cultural genocide” was not included in the final drafting, despite its pervasive place in modern history (Lemkin himself famously regretted this omission). He ends with a quote from the lawyer Wahid Raafat, an Egyptian member of the Sixth or Legal Committee of the General Assembly at the time of the Genocide Convention’s passing. Raafat injects some pessimism into the narrative: “for the penalty of genocide to be effective, influential and binding,” he said, “it is necessary that the perpetrators of the crime be convinced above all that they cannot escape trial by an intentional court.”[14]
Sanusi’s article attends principally to the anti-colonial perspective on the Genocide Convention. This perspective remains relevant to us today. Whatever we may think about the limits of Lemkin’s intervention or the perils of international law, “genocide” was and has been taken up time and again, not without problems, among the colonized people of the world, the Third World—the global majority.
In his opening speech at Bandung, the head of the Syrian delegation to the 1955 meeting of Africans and Asians, Khaled al-Azm remarked:
“Now, the Holy Land is suffering massacres, atrocities and various types of genocide at the hands of Israel. It is noteworthy that Israel does not belong to Asia or Africa… Placed at one of the main gates of Asia, at the crossroads of the three continents, Israel is an advanced outpost of imperialism. Thus, Israel exposed to danger the liberty of the peoples of Asia and Africa—a liberty they captured through their sweat, blood and tears.”[15]
Such sentiments were and remain extremely common. In his indispensable 1971 book, Zionism, Israel, and Asian Nationalism, the Indian journalist G.H. Jansen concluded: “The Zionist state of Israel from its very inception was a foreign object in the body of Afro-Asia: today this object is the cause of widespread disturbance. If it resists absorption into a democratic, secular Palestine, or if it defies encapsulation within the boundaries set for it by the United Nations, then the only likely reaction to it will be rejection.”[16]
All of this is to say that, in every instance, Palestine has existed in an anti-colonial world. The condition of the Palestinians has been understood as fundamentally colonized and Zionism understood as essentially colonial. First European and then American imperialism has been understood as both foundational to the Zionist project’s impossible success and has characterized its role in the Third World, in every Arab state, in South Africa, and in Guatemala—today, in India, Azerbaijan, and the Philippines.
*
In general, Bartov does not seem to find colonialism analytically useful. Indeed, he is a bit hostile to the enormous body of work initiated during the anti-colonial revolt that Palestinians have waged—at least from the Balfour Declaration onwards—on the colonial nature of the Zionist project.[17] While Bartov sometimes cites and acknowledges work from this tradition, he nevertheless sees it as an obstacle to the future. In the introduction to an important 2021 volume that he edited, Israel-Palestine: Lands and Peoples, Bartov recognizes that there is no symmetry to be made between the Palestinian condition and that of the sovereign, militarized Israel. But in the sentence immediately following, he writes:
“But neither Israeli oppression of the Palestinians nor the growing international and academic criticism of the Zionist undertaking as a settler colonial movement has succeeded in undermining the prevailing sentiment in both groups that they belong to that place and that the land belongs to them, a sentiment that continuously overrides any particular political configuration or the vicissitudes of contemporary history.”[18]
Here, Bartov equates the activities of the Israeli state—including daily extrajudicial killing, administrative detention, torture, the destruction of individual homes, the razing of villages, and bombing of cities—to the activities of critical scholarship. The logic is that critical work on colonialism can neither serve a project of reconciliation between a confederated two states, as Bartov envisions it, nor can it break the edifice of Zionist belonging or denial. But why must research in dispossession, destruction, and death speak to the perpetrator? Bartov’s own experience as a historian of the German army, whose conclusions undermined German self-understanding and national consciousness, speaks directly to this point.
I should note that the edited volume, which contains some valuable chapters, features twenty Israeli and Jewish contributors and only five Palestinians. I should note, further, that four of the Palestinians are Palestinian citizens of Israel, which is not surprising. In his work on the subject, Bartov has been keen to focus on the first-generation inhabitants of the Israeli state, which includes himself, and not those expelled and living reluctantly in what Palestinians refer to as the shatat, which he has analogized to the Germans expelled from Eastern Europe after WWII.[19] The plight of Palestinian refugees with their perennial demand for return—despite its centrality to Palestinian visions of the future—does not regularly register in Bartov’s narratives of reconciliation.
Bartov has apparently jettisoned colonialism as a useful framework. Or, rather, he has insisted that it does not serve the necessary utility for understanding the intimacy of an indigenized Israeli settler population and its Palestinian neighbors—who are, we might add, subordinated to Israelis in every facet of life. Instead, like other contributors to the volume or its related projects, Bartov regularly seeks out other approaches as evinced by the relevant essays in his most recent book. There, the topic Bartov most readily attaches himself to is the relationship between the Holocaust and the Nakba—how we might read both events in relation, as a mode of recognition and historical retrieval.
This method, however, faces serious limitations. As Nadia Abu El-Haj writes:
“To write of the Nakba narrative as parallel to that of the Holocaust insofar as it embraces motifs of suffering and victimhood, insofar as it is unique, or sacred or untouchable, is to read it as if it occupies a parallel ideological space. And yet, this is a Holocaust grammar, and it misrepresents Palestinian nationalist narratives, and the struggle itself, in constitutive ways: the Nakba is an on-going project that partakes in a much wider history of settler-colonialism. The nationalist movement has long articulated itself as but one (the latest?) iteration of anti-colonial struggles that have been fought at other times and in other places.”[20]
Moreover, as indigenous critiques from other settler colonies like Australia and Canada attest, recognition is not the basis of a just politics.[21] Recognition, indeed, may simply be a means to extend a colonial relationship, deepen an occupation, and erase a people further. While I have focused here on Nakba denial, we must also contend with the perils of recognition. Indeed, the fury for more nakabat, for more Nakbas, is the situation in which we find ourselves.[22]
Scholars of Jewish studies and historians of Jews in Europe continue to turn their attention to Palestinian history, now that Israel has been belatedly exposed as fascist within their areas of expertise and circles of social interaction. We may humbly request that they neither ignore nor denigrate the century of scholarship—anti-colonial in its reasoning and internationalist in its scope—that precedes them. Nor, for that matter, should they ignore or denigrate Arabic sources. In a recent important and widely circulated essay for The Guardian, Bartov wrote: “I had not been to Israel since June 2023, and during this recent visit I found a different country from the one I had known.”[23] While no one can deny the bloodlust that characterizes contemporary Israeli public discourse, we must remember that, for the Palestinian, there is no prelapsarian Israel. The relationship of the Palestinian to Zionism and to Israel has always been one of subordination. This relationship, a colonial one, must guide both our politics and our historical methodology.
“While no one can deny the bloodlust that characterizes contemporary Israeli public discourse, we must remember that, for the Palestinian, there is no prelapsarian Israel.”
The great Palestinian poet Rashid Hussein offers us a riposte to colonial demands. Born in 1936 in the town of Musmus, Hussein was one of those Palestinians who tried to make a place for himself and his people in the new state of Israel, until he was disabused of that possibility. Fluent in Hebrew, Hussein was the first to translate Bialik into Arabic. His powerful poetry and prose prefigured the resistance verse of other Palestinian citizens of Israel like Mahmoud Darwish and Samih al-Qasim. Hussein’s poem “The Closed Door,” published in his 1958 collection Sawarikh, is addressed to “the Jewish friend who asked me: why don’t you describe the Negev, the kibbutz, and the moshav in your poetry?”:
“You’re asking me to describe the charms of the ‘Kibbutz’ and the ‘Moshav’ and the ‘Negev’
…
Brother, do you want me to forget that you shut the door on me
Do you think me a clown, a liar, or a fool?
You closed the door on me.”
Hussein goes on:
“How can I describe what lies behind the door?
When it is you who decides when I can enter
…
Or do you think that one of these days I jumped over your high walls?
You closed the door on me.
…
Unlock the door and take off the jailer’s uniform
open it!
When you open it you will know who I am
An artist who loves beauty and sanctifies humanity
But how do I praise the wine locked behind the bar
When the lock is high above the door?
Does someone who cannot enter the garden praise its flowers?”[24]
[1]“History Unlimited: Probing the Ethics of Holocaust Culture (4/22/2012 - 4/23/2012)” https://levecenter.ucla.edu/history-unlimited-2012/
[2] https://bombmagazine.org/articles/1999/10/01/edward-said/
[3] Adrien Zakar has written a powerful genealogy of “nakba” in Arabic before 1948, from the Hamidian massacres of Armenians in the late nineteenth century, to the Armenian Genocide itself, through to the Arab revolts of the interwar period. Adrien Zakar, “Nakba: Catastrophic Ideation and the Meanings of Disaster (1895-1948),” American Historical Review (forthcoming).
[4] Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited (Cambridge Cambridge University Press, 2004), 16; Benny Morris, Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-2001 (New York: Vintage, 2001), 188
[5] W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Souls of White Folks,” W.E.B. Du Bois: Writings (New York: Library of America, 1987), 934.
[6]Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (New York: Monthly Review, 2000), 36; Karuna Mantena, “Genealogies of Catastrophe: Arendt on the Logic and Legacy of Imperialism,” in Politics in Dark Times: Encounters with Hannah Arendt, ed. Seyla Benhabib (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 83-112. Despite the manifest clarity with which Du Bois was able to narrate imperialism’s global conditions, he initially embraced Zionism, see: Nadia Alahmed, “From Black Zionism to Black Nasserism: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Foundations of Black Anti-Zionist Discourse,” Critical Sociology 49:6 (2023), 1053–1064.
[7] Omer Bartov, Genocide, the Holocaust and Israel-Palestine (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023), 192.
[8] Omer Bartov, “The question of genocide in Palestine, 1948: an exchange between Martin Shaw and Omer Bartov,” Journal of Genocide Research 12: 3-4 (2010), 255.
[9] Bartov, “The question of genocide in Palestine,” 248.
[10] Illan Pappe, “The 1948 Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine,” Journal of Palestine Studies 36:1 (2006), 18. We must also mention the tacit alliance reached between the Zionist movement and King Abdullah, commander of the largest Arab army. See Avi Shlaim, Collusion across the Jordan: King Abdullah, the Zionist Movement, and the Partition of Palestine (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988); Shlaim, “The Debate over 1948,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 27:3 (1995), 287-304.
[11] Omer Bartov, “Blind spots of genocide,” Journal of Modern European History 19:4 (2021), 395-399.
[12] Muin Bseiso, Yawmiyyat Ghazza (Beirut: Dar al-Farabi, 2014), 30, 31-33.
[13] Tom Segev, 1949, The First Israelis (New York: Free Press, 1986), 26.
[14] Ahmed Taha al-Sanusi, “‘ibadat al-jins wa hayat al-umam al-mutahida,” al-Thaqafa 693 (31 March 1952), 5.
[15] Asia-Africa Speaks from Bandung (Ministry of Foreign Affairs Republic of Indonesia, 1955), 127.
[16] G.H. Jansen, Zionism, Israel, and Asian Nationalism (Beirut: IPS, 1971). 330.
[17] For criticism of Bartov’s writing on the Holocaust, genocide in general, and the elision of colonialism, see Vinay Lal, “Genocide, Barbaric Others, and the Violence of Categories: A Response to Omer Bartov,” American Historical Review 103:4 (1998), 1187-1190; A. Dirk Moses, “Revisiting a Founding Assumption of Genocide Studies,” Genocide Studies and Prevention 6:3 (2011), 287–300.
[18] Omer Bartov, “Lands and Peoples: Attachment, Conflict, and Reconciliation,” in Israel-Palestine: Lands and Peoples (New York: Berghahn, 2021), 2.
[19] Bartov, “The question of genocide in Palestine, 1948,” 246.
[20] Nadia Abu El-Haj, “A ‘Common Space’? The Impossibilities of a New Grammar of the Holocaust and Nakba,” Journal of Genocide Research 22:1 (2020), 145
[21] Elizabeth Povinelli, The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004); Glen Sean Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014).
[22] Nadia Abu El-Haj, ““We Know Well, but All the Same…”: Factual Truths, Historical Narratives, and the Work of Disavowal,” History of the Present 13:2 (2023), 245–264.
[23] Omer Bartov, “As a former IDF soldier and historian of genocide, I was deeply disturbed by my recent visit to Israel,” The Guardian (13 August 2024) https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/aug/13/israel-gaza-historian-omer-bartov
[24] Rashid Hussein, “al-Bab al-mughlak,” Sawarikh (Beirut: Dar al-Awda, 1982), 56-57.