A Memorandum by Jie-Hyun Lim (Sogang University)

Understanding the Global (dis)order 

Q: What political narratives are at work in the world today, especially in the context of the war in Russia/Ukraine and in the Middle East? What political concepts do they draw on? How do they imagine their opponents or enemies? How do they imagine a settlement or the conditions of peace? Other than destruction, how do they accommodate their enemies?

Lim: the binary cliché of ‘East and West’ works out on both fronts. The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson, Maria Zakharova, stated, “Zelensky’s visit to Washington D.C. shows that collective West is prepared for the second confrontation with Russia” (Dec. 22, 2022. Gazeta Wyborcza). To many Russians, Ukraine is a pro-Western renegade to the Slavic cause. Many settlers in Israel in the direct confrontation with Palestinians are newcomers from Russia and Eastern Europe after the Fall. Those Israeli Easterners have behaved like 19th-century Western colonialists towards the Palestinians. I propose to understand global modernity from the perspective of ‘Global Easts’ as plural Easts. From the angle of ‘global easts’, we see not only the East-West conflict but also the East-East conflict under the reframed Orientalism. 

Revisiting the Past

Q: Apartheid and settler colonialism. The framing of Israel as a settler colonial power resembling more and more an apartheid state is a recurrent feature of ‘anti-Zionist’ politics. It is also a theme of much academic writing. What is meant by these terms in the context of Israel? What is their provenance? Do they accurately speak to the historical and political record? Are there alternative perspectives? Are these terms necessarily associated with determinate political outcomes? 

Lim: I want to put this question in a broader context of global memory space. The Holocaust memory had been connected with the postcolonial memories, including the apartheid. Even in the early 1940s, the anti-apartheid activists in South Africa aimed to gain international support by connecting apartheid and Nazi’s extremely violent anti-Semitism. The comparison of the apartheid regime with Nazism remained an oft-repeated topic for discussion surrounding justice and reconciliation regarding apartheid and its victims’ memory and reparation, even in the 1990s after South Africa’s democratisation. With the rise of the victimhood nationalism in the global memory space, however, the competition for ‘who is the bigger victim’ has become a mode. As the Holocaust memory has achieved the position of ‘narrative template’ in the Western dominance of the global memory culture, any postcolonial comparison of colonial atrocities with the Holocaust memory was subject to a condemnation of relativising the Holocaust. The ongoing Mbembe debated that heated Germany is an exemplary. 

Zionism and Post-Zionism in Israel and the Palestinian politics

Q: How important is Zionism in the self-identity of Israeli political actors? What are the dominant expressions of Zionism in Israel today and how have they changed over time? Is Israel a ‘Zionist entity’? How have different Israeli governments imagined Palestinians and their place in the region? What are the dominant tendencies in contemporary Palestinian politics (and resistance)? How do they conceive of Israelis and of Jews? 

Lim: I have been thinking of Zionism from the perspective of the Subaltern studies. First, Zionism matters domestically in Israel. It has become a nationalistically oppressed ideology with the hegemonic power to discriminate against non-Zionist Jews, Oriental Jews and Palestinian Israelis. Second, Western Orientalism still works there as a way of supporting global Ashkenazy Jews’ Zionism, which resonated with the German conscience of the Holocaust guilt. It is ironic to witness that Zionism, the national liberation ideology of Jews in the Eastern borderland of Europe and Russia at the turn of the twentieth century, has appropriated Western colonialism to oppress Palestinian nationalism in the Middle East. Post-Zionist relationship to Zionism may be thought of as a parallel of the post-nationalist relationship to nationalism. 

Shattered humanity

Q: Cruelty and dehumanisation in conflict zones. The Israeli/Palestinian conflict has been one of the longest ongoing conflicts in the world. How has the nature of this conflict changed over the past few decades? Has it become more brutal over time, and what impact might this have for a political settlement in the region? What lessons can be drawn from similar conflicts in other regions or historical periods? Additionally, what will it take politically to address the legacy of multigenerational trauma on both sides? 

Lim: I would like to rephrase the question into “how to change shattered humanity into shared humanity.” It is very challenging. We have witnessed how the postwar East European societies had been demoralised after the grotesque violence of the Nazi occupation and the Holocaust. Kielce Pogrom in 1946 is representative of the demoralisation and dehumanisation of Eastern Europe under Nazi occupation. But it is not an East European peculiarity. We know that waves of anti-Semitism hit the West, like France and the Netherlands, in the post-1945 period. The Israeli/Palestinian conflict can be settled someday, but recovering from the demoralising effect of the long and brutal violence may require much more time and energy than we have thought. 

War in Gaza and International Humanitarian law

Q: What is international (humanitarian) law for? Is international law part of the solution to the conflict in Israel/Palestine or is it an obstacle? Is the Genocide Convention the best legal perspective on the war in Gaza? What is the jurisprudence on non-state actors in ‘international’ conflicts? How does international law regulate or how should it regulate asymmetrical conflicts between state and non-state actors?

Lim: We know that Raphael Lemkin’s original draft of the Genocide Convention was already torn to pieces due to the Cold War power politics. The Western superpowers guilty of colonialism, including but not limited to the U.S., U.K. and France, pressed to remove the article on cultural genocide, such as the extermination of Indigenous culture. Also excluded was the article on political genocide, at the objection of the Soviet Union. With the Western colonial genocide and the Stalinist political genocide crossed out, there remained only the Holocaust. Originally, Lemkin included the Christian persecution in Nagasaki, the colonial genocides in Namibia and the Congo, and the massacres of Roma, American Indians, Aztecs, Incas, Armenians and European Jews in his world history of genocide. International law and legal intervention to prevent the genocide in the Gaza war are necessary. Before that, however, we need to rescue the Genocide Convention from Holocaust reductionism, which will open the gate to the productive discussion for peace and reconciliation in Gaza.