It’s been more than a month since the apartheid State of Israel began its relentless military offensive on Gaza in response to Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack. Israeli airstrikes have unleashed force equivalent to two nuclear bombs, killing more than 13,000 Palestinians. Israel’s bombardment has targeted civilian buildings: hospitals, schools, and residences. The violence is exacerbated by Israel’s illegal blockade of Gaza—which has restricted residents’ access to food, medical aid, fuel, electricity, and water for the last 16 years. In late October, Israel also began a ground invasion of Gaza and escalated deadly raids in the West Bank.
Numerous foreign policy experts, scholars, and activists have described Israel’s violence against Palestinians as genocidal. In recent weeks, large-scale demonstrations in support of Palestinian liberation—including one that drew tens of thousands of people to the nation’s capital—have erupted across the U.S. Although the Biden administration has called for a “humanitarian pause,” it has stopped short of advocating for a sustained ceasefire and maintained a commitment to providing billions of dollars in military assistance for Israel.
In November, Prism spoke with Zoé Samudzi, a scholar of colonialism, genocide, and the politics of mass violence. Samudzi is currently the visiting assistant professor of genocide studies and genocide prevention at Clark University. Her dissertation research focused on the first genocide of the 20th century: the collective punishment and ethnic cleansing of the Ovaherero and Nama people in present-day Namibia during German colonial rule.
Samudzi discussed the role of U.S. and Israeli settler-colonialism in the violence in Gaza, the politics of genocide recognition, and how U.S. media narratives manufacture consent for collective punishment. She concludes by identifying when it is useful to recognize a genocide and what real ceasefire in Gaza would look like.
This interview has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.
Prism: Can you explain how the issue of Palestine relates to your work?
Zoé Samudzi: I started Palestine solidarity organizing a little over a decade ago when I was an undergrad. And while I don’t work directly on Palestine now, I’m really engaged in settler colonialism. Particularly, what we call the “settler international”: the ideological and material relationships between settler states that have similar racial structures. That’s the U.S., the former apartheid states of Rhodesia and South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and Israel.
So it’s this scholarly interest, a longstanding political solidarity interest, and a personal interest because I am Zimbabwean, and my country’s history is tied up in this structure of transnational settler-colonial violence and support.
Prism: A lot of leading scholars on Palestine, like Rashid Khalidi and Edward Said have described the Israeli occupation of historic Palestine as a settler-colonial project. What is the relationship between settler colonialism and the current violence in Gaza? And how does it relate to U.S. settler colonialism?
Samudzi: Settler colonialism is the practice of some colonial power, some group of settlers, moving into [a place] in order to permanently displace and replace the existing community with the society of the settlers. So this can be really different from an exploitative colonial practice, which is more about the process of conquering territory and utilizing indigenous or local communities as a means of cheap or enslaved labor. The thing that’s really scary about settler colonialism is that it does not end: it’s ongoing, unlike, for example, these structures of colonial exploitation that can be dismantled, as we saw during all of these global wars for liberation.
One of the preeminent scholars on settler colonialism, Patrick Wolfe, very succinctly described settler colonialism as not an event, but a structure. It’s an ongoing system that endures even if a settler project does not look exactly the same across time.
So, for example, in the U.S., when settlers first arrived, there were these acute moments of Indigenous de-territorialization—the so-called Indian Wars, the Trail of Tears as a part of the Indian Removal Act, one of the many massacres of native people. [Just because] we’re not seeing that hyper-visible flare-up of violent dispossession, it doesn’t mean that the U.S. isn’t a settler state anymore. There are still many Indigenous communities sequestered to areas of land that were allocated to them. We still see widespread resource deprivation. We still see the Bureau of Indian Affairs is managed by the Department of Interior, which is responsible for federal public land and national parks. Indigenous [people are] still very much managed by the settler state.
In the context of Palestine, we cannot talk about the State of Israel without talking about the Nakba, which was a part of the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. We cannot talk about the founding of the state without this devastating process of dispossession—the forced expulsion and mass displacement of Palestinians from their homes. That’s why we understand Israel as a settler-colonial state. That foundational decision to displace, to continuously expel, and to expand the boundaries and the borders of the Israeli state by eroding the boundaries and the borders of Palestinian territory is incredibly important.
Prism: Can you tell me a bit more about the U.S.’ role in the occupation of Palestine and the current war on Palestine?
Samudzi: One of the most important parts of the American relationship to Israel is Christian Zionism, which is an important political feature of the religious right. [Christian Zionism] is this idea that the land that is now Israel has to be populated by Jewish people in order for Jesus to return.
A big part of support for Israel in the U.S. is this deep millenarian religious conservative fervor [based on the belief that Jesus’ return will precede a thousand-year kingdom of peace and prosperity before the final judgment]. But, of course, Christian fundamentalism is also incredibly antisemitic. The recent March for Israel at the National Mall platformed televangelist Pastor John Hagee, who quite literally said that “God sent Adolf Hitler to help Jews reach the promised land” in a sermon in 1999. That’s far from the only completely heinous antisemitic statement he’s made. Incidentally, Hagee is also the leader of Christians United for Israel, one of the country’s most influential Christian Zionist groups. So there’s a real paradox in the fact that the same white supremacist political forces arming and dogmatically supporting Israel are the forces most hostile to Jewish people.
Prism: Many scholars and activists have described what’s happening in Gaza right now as a genocide, and, a few weeks ago, a top U.N. official resigned in protest of what he describes as a failure to prevent a genocide of Palestinian people. But the dominant framing by U.S. officials and media outlets has rejected this language for Israel’s actions.
Your work frequently addresses the politics of genocide recognition—posing questions about when state violence crosses into the threshold of genocide, who has the right to use the word “genocide,” and how conceptions of genocide are shaped by the identity of the victim. How are these politics shaping U.S. discourse on what’s happening in Gaza?
Samudzi: On Oct. 15, a letter went out: a public statement signed by almost 900 scholars of genocide (myself included) about the potential of genocidal violence in Gaza. I think that what’s happening right now in Gaza is the first time that I’ve really heard people emphatically use the word “genocide” to describe Israeli policy. I’ve heard people describe the blockade of the Gaza Strip as a slow genocide for years, as a kind of suffocation and deprivation whose speed of eliminatory violence differs from this constancy of airstrikes.
The thing about calling something a genocide is that, on some level, there are certain obligations and responsibilities to intervene. In 2005, for example, there was a U.N.-endorsed global political commitment around the “Responsibility to Protect,” which emphasizes preemptive attempts to prevent crimes against humanity as well as “timely and decisive collective response” to violences that may arise. States will often use the euphemism of “genocidal acts” as a means of evading the responsibility for any kind of meaningful response. During the Rwandan genocide, [President] Bill Clinton and his administration chose not to use word genocide publicly despite being fully aware of what was happening: only a month into the genocide did they say “acts of genocide” were being committed in Rwanda, despite the fact that acts of genocide constitute actual crimes of genocide.
The U.S. could not call what’s happening in Gaza a genocide because it is party to the violence: it would deeply implicate itself in a way that it obviously would not want. For example, there are a lot of American weapons being used by the Israeli government. In the past couple of days, people have been sharing images of what a Hellfire R9X missile does. A Hellfire missile is a 100-pound [American] air-to-ground precision-strike missile made by Lockheed Martin: instead of an explosive, the R9X has blades that pop out. Not only will it hit the target, it will also mutilate whoever is within the immediate vicinity.
The U.S. pours billions of dollars into supporting the Israeli defense system, the Iron Dome, and other military structures in Israel that are deployed against Palestinians. Also, for the past 20 years, there have been joint U.S.-Israel training programs in which American police forces and other law enforcement agents are sent to Israel. And so many of these so-called counterinsurgency tactics that are being used in Palestine are being used against American civilians as well.
[On Nov. 9], there were three organizations that approached the International Criminal Court (ICC) with petitions to investigate Israel for war crimes and arrest [Israeli President] Isaac Herzog, [Prime Minister] Benjamin Netanyahu, and [Defense Minister] Yoav Gallant, who described Gazans as “human animals.” The difficulty is that the Israeli government is not a signatory of the Rome Statute, [the treaty that established the court,] and so it claims that the ICC has no jurisdiction. The U.S. is also not a party to the Rome Statute.
For years, the U.S., through the U.N., has consistently blocked investigations and attempted sanctions against the Israeli government—even this pre-recognition of genocide. They’re, as much as possible, using international law and international humanitarian structures to enable the Israeli government to act with impunity.
Prism: Can you describe the prevailing legal and political definition of genocide and how it came about?
Samudzi: The standard international legal definition of genocide comes from the U.N. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, an international treaty that was signed in 1948 and went into effect in 1951. The Genocide Convention codifies genocide as a crime.
Genocide is defined by five acts: killing members of a group; causing bodily or mental harm to the members of the group; deliberately inflicting on a group conditions of life calculated to bring about its end in whole or in part; the imposition of measures intended to prevent birth; or forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Now, what’s difficult about genocide is that, in order to prove something is genocide, you have to be able to prove genocidal intention even if it seems that all of the conditions of genocide seem to be met. Raz Segal, a scholar of genocide, wrote a piece in Jewish Currents a couple weeks back basically saying not only is intention clear, what’s happening in Gaza is unique because actually this is one of the rare times when the people who are actually committing the alleged genocide are telling you exactly what they’re doing and why they’re doing it.
We’ve heard all of these Israeli politicians talk about a plan to flatten Gaza—to remove, to expel, to force everyone to leave. For many people, that is not sufficient evidence [of genocidal intent] because [they believe] Israel is acting in self-defense despite the fact that, again, it’s bombing hospitals, it’s bombing residential spaces, it’s bombing refugee camps and spaces where displaced people are seeking shelter.
I think it’s worth remembering that Netanyahu was central to Hamas’ creation: he funded its expansion so that the Israeli government wouldn’t have to enter into negotiations with the Palestinian Authority. Netanyahu and the rest of his administration have refused the possibility of a ceasefire: refused any kind of meaningful attempts to negotiate for any of the hostages that were taken, refused the possibility of any diplomatic solutions to bring about an end to these aerial assaults. Because the goal is not actually self-defense or territorial protection, the goal is not to bring back hostages; the goal is to eliminate Gaza and Gazans.
Prism: As you were saying, the purported goal of ousting Hamas is being used to justify this collective punishment. How does this narrative manufacture blame and culpability for Palestinians?
Samudzi: Effectively, there’s no such thing as an innocent Palestinian: fighting-aged men are in some way colluding with Hamas, Palestinian children are future Hamas. In this paranoid frame of settler-colonial fortressing, all Palestinians are, in some way, colluding to bring about the demise of the Israeli state and so have to be eliminated.
Part of this is a long ongoing demonization of Palestinians goes back to World War II. And this idea that the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem [Haj Amin al-Husseini] was both a prominent Arab nationalist leader who opposed the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine and was allegedly responsible for inspiring Hitler’s plan for a Jewish Holocaust (he did not influence Hitler’s aspirations, though they did meet in November 1941): these two political phenomena are twinned for many people who understand Palestinians specifically, and Arab politics more generally, as a “new Nazism” plotting genocide against the state of Israel. This meeting is something that Netanyahu has brought up multiple times, and it’s actually a mode of Holocaust denialism because Hitler’s genocidal targeting of European Jews, as well as the invasion of the Soviet Union, had already begun.
But Palestinians, nevertheless, are all responsible: all Palestinians are to be punished for Hamas’ actions. That’s the logic of collective punishment and Israel’s logic of permanent security: there is no separation between the combatant and the civilian, no separation between so-called guilt and innocence.
Prism: Your research also touches on how the identities of the victims can shape conceptions of genocide. I was wondering if you could tell me a bit more about that.
Samudzi: It’s this idea that there are certain kinds of people that are inviolable: that certain kinds of people, because they are not human, can be killed and enslaved and rendered as collateral damage. And so what’s difficult and what’s challenging about these genocide recognitions or these utilizations of international law is that all of these liberal democratic international political structures have the logics of imperialism and colonialism enshrined within them.
For example, the [ICC] overwhelmingly has tried and convicted Africans. This is not to say that the people who had been participating in the ongoing brutal humanitarian crises in the Congo should not be brought to any kind of justice. But it is to say that—why is it so much easier for international law to consistently go after these African violators of international law while they’re so unable to confront these Western states? Why was there not more insistence for George Bush or Tony Blair to go to the Hague for what they did to Afghanistan and to Iraq?
The world has been divided into racial geographies of people who create these laws and invent and interpret definitions of criminality and people who are simply subject to their political and geopolitical whims.
Prism: In recent weeks, there’s been a lot of conversation about the concept of “manufacturing consent” and the role of the mainstream media and dominant narratives in countries like the U.S. to perpetuate violence against the Palestinian people—can you tell me a bit about this?
Samudzi: The concept of manufacturing consent comes from a book from 1988 that was co-authored with Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky about the propagandistic force of the media and its ability to inform and sway public opinion without using force.
[Three weeks ago], as a part of a larger solidarity shutdown and rally, there was a big protest inside the lobby of The New York Times [office] by a group of media workers called Writers Bloc and a small march and rally by a group called Writers Against the War on Gaza, of which I am a part. What is important about the coverage of The New York Times or other outlets is what people call the “exonerative tense”—this is a dangerously misleading passive voice. It doesn’t talk about people who were “targeted” or “killed”; it says that people “die.” Palestinians simply die—whereas the Israelis who were the victims of the attacks on Oct. 7, were “murdered,” were “killed.” The constancy of this language is a part of the production of a dehumanization [of Palestinians], and The New York Times’ writing has been consistent in the deployment of this voice in its coverage of Palestine writ large for years.
The media’s manufacturing of consent requires this ambiguity, but it’s always a fabricated uncertainty that serves the state. And we see this a lot, for example, in The New York Times’ and others’ ambiguous reporting on anti-Black police brutality. Even though there’s often literal video evidence of someone being murdered by a police officer, there’s always this possibility of an alternative: an advocacy of some person’s possible guilt or deservingness of death.
Prism: Can you tell me more about why this ambiguity can be harmful?
Samudzi: It’s this idea of, for example, “a mistake was made” versus saying “someone made a mistake.” It excises active responsibility. It removes subjects. It removes a directionality of violence. It removes political responsibility in a way that allows for ignorant imaginations to fill in certain kinds of ideological and factual gaps.
Like when [al-Ahli Arab Hospital] was first bombed [on Oct. 17] and people were like, “bombs fell on,” and there were all of these investigations and uncertainties. There was so much time wasted pondering the possibility that the bombs could have fallen from anywhere. And weeks later, now you have Israeli soldiers celebrating and talking about occupying hospitals, we’re seeing all of these stories from the Israeli siege of al-Shifa Hospital, where people are trapped inside with decomposing dead bodies, where premature infants were taken off life support because energy infrastructure was destroyed by airstrikes.
[We] wasted all of this time trying to establish a responsibility only to realize that we could have just put that violence into the context of all of these previous years of Israel bombing hospitals and targeting medics and ambulances. For the sake of “objectivity,” the media conducted its little investigations, and in the meantime, the Gazan health system has all but collapsed entirely. This exonerative tense is a deeply awful and corrupted structure of language.
I think that part of this question of whether it was actually an Israeli strike that hit the [al-Ahli Arab] Hospital or a Hamas rocket misfire is an incredulity that the “only democratic nation in the Middle East”—a reputation that Israel undeservedly enjoys—could possibly destroy a hospital. Because hospitals are supposed to be this space of sanctuary where people can seek refuge or care.
In theory, there are supposed to be guidelines that govern how war is carried out. The Geneva Convention says you’re not supposed to target civilians, you’re not supposed to target anyone who’s a non-combatant. But what does this mean in an asymmetrical context of war and collective punishment where no one is treated like a civilian?
Also, as an occupying power, Israel has obligations under the Fourth Geneva Convention, [which is about humanitarian protections of civilians during war]. The Convention says that an occupying power shall not “transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies”: this is exactly what’s been happening in Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights. And yet, the Israeli government continues to build settlements. It just feels kind of maddening to watch all of these very clear mutations and perversions of anything remotely resembling a kind of political truth. We’ve seen for decades this willingness to brutalize, to destroy olive trees and farms, and to demolish neighborhoods. And now all of a sudden, people are confused that Israel would bomb a hospital?
Prism: Earlier, you referenced Segal’s piece in Jewish Currents that has been circulating in recent weeks, which unequivocally calls what’s happening in Gaza right now a genocide. When can it be important to recognize a genocide?
Samudzi: That’s a hard question. I think the only time it would be useful to recognize something as a genocide is if there is going to be some kind of meaningful humanitarian response to prevent it from happening or continuing.
In an ideal world, the U.S.’ recognition of genocide in Gaza would lead to the U.S. withdrawing all military funding from Israel. There’s something that feels profoundly insulting about widely recognizing something as a genocide and then allowing it to continue. I think that if you’re going to put people on trial, people who acknowledged something as a genocide but then didn’t really do anything about share some level of culpability.
And when people talk about a ceasefire in Gaza, it’s, of course, to stop the airstrikes immediately so people can bury their dead and humanitarian resources can be distributed because now people are starting to die of starvation. But also, now, tens of thousands of people have left Gaza—how do new humanitarian considerations account for this devastating displacement and the annihilation of Gazan infrastructure?
There cannot be a real ceasefire in Gaza without the ending of the blockade. It can’t go back to the slow violence as opposed to this intense moment of airstrikes. Gaza has to be able to breathe: people have to be able to move about to access care, to access resources. And prior to Oct. 7, they weren’t able to do that. There has to be an immediate cessation of violence, but also, in the more structural sense, a real, sustained alleviation of suffering.