Interview
Bashir Bashir and Amos Goldberg call for ‘political and substantive equality’
‘The egalitarian binationalism we propose starts from the fact that the entire area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea today constitutes a single political space shared by two communities.’
Palestinian political theorist Bashir Bashir (Open University of Israel) and Israeli historian Amos Goldberg (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) are among the most authoritative voices in the debate on memory, history and binationalism in Israel/Palestine. They co-edited the volume The Holocaust and the Nakba: A New Grammar of Trauma and History (Columbia University Press, 2018).
We met them recently in Forlì, Italy, where they took part in 900Fest, organized by the Alfred Lewin Foundation. The following interview represents the perspectives of these two radical scholars.
Can you tell us how the project The Holocaust and the Nakba came about?
Amos Goldberg: In 1958, the Israeli Jewish poet Avot Yeshurun wrote that the Holocaust of European Jews and the Palestinian Nakba can be seen as one single “Holocaust,” because the two tragedies “gaze into each other's eyes.” This verse, long suppressed, touches the heart of the problem: the Holocaust and the Nakba meet, question and challenge each other, because they are two foundational, interwoven historical events. They are certainly different, but they have been systematically separated in our collective recollection by a rigid political discipline over memory. Challenging this separation was the starting point for our work.
When we developed this book project, we knew we were breaking a taboo. In Israel and the West, a memory regime has been constructed that prohibits not only any comparison but even any juxtaposition of the two events. Relating them does not mean proposing a simplistic comparison or arguing they are equivalent. The Holocaust is an extreme form of genocide, an industrial-scale project for the total annihilation of Jews. The Nakba is an ongoing process of expulsion, ethnic cleansing, fragmentation and systematic dispossession of the Palestinian population, which has now evolved into the genocide in Gaza. They should neither be completely equated nor isolated from each other, but considered together from a historical point of view, because one played a role in the political constitution of the other. What happened in Europe in the 1930s and 40s – anti-Semitism and the Holocaust – had a decisive impact on what happened in Palestine, and in Israel afterwards. The state of Israel was born largely in response to European anti-Semitism, which led to the annihilation of two-thirds of European Jews, but it was simultaneously built on the national destruction and ruin of the Palestinian people through the Nakba. To escape the prison of competing memories, we introduced the concept of “empathic unsettlement.” It is an invitation to confront the trauma of the other without renouncing one's own. This willingness to be displaced by the other's memory is the essence of the new moral and historical grammar we wanted to propose: an attempt to make a future of substantive equality possible.
Bashir Bashir: The project dates back over ten years and is the fruit of continuous dialogue between us. It began with the shared conviction that a new language was needed to think about the memories of the Holocaust and the Nakba together. However, it wasn't just a two-person effort, but a collective intellectual and moral project involving Palestinian, Israeli, Arab and Jewish scholars, several of whom contributed to our volume, feeling that this confrontation could no longer be postponed. Authors in Palestinian, Arab, Israeli and Jewish literature have long grasped this relationship. I'm thinking of the works of Ghassan Kanafani, Elias Khoury and Edward Said, among others, who wove the traumatic paths of Jews and Palestinians into their narratives. We situated ourselves within this tradition, but wanted to go further, to understand the ethical and political implications of placing the Holocaust and Nakba within the same conceptual frame. Our goal isn't to compare them, but to trace and explore their relationship. Recognizing the Holocaust does not invalidate Palestinian claims regarding the enormity of the wrong inflicted on them by Zionism and the state of Israel. Empathy for Jewish victims is not the same as complete identification with them, or the erasure of otherness. It means accepting that there are two foundational traumas that mirror and wound each other and cannot be separated without continuing to produce violence. The current horrific colonial and eliminationist ethnic cleansing policies pursued by Israel in the West Bank and the ongoing genocide in Gaza, which continue the Nakba, are a cruel reminder of the violence inherent in settler colonialism and apartheid, founded on the abuse of the memory of the Holocaust and the deployment of the language of Jewish security, majority and sovereignty.
What is your position on the definition of “genocide” applied to what has happened, and is still happening, in Gaza since October 7, 2023?
AG: I wrote the article Yes, It Is Genocide, which was published in Hebrew in April 2024, after my first brief trip abroad since October 7. While I was in Israel, I was trapped in its all-encompassing emotional atmosphere. Only from a distance could I regain a fully critical position and take responsibility for saying what I was seeing. In that article, I also explained how, in most cases, genocide emerges from the perpetrator's profound sense of “self-defense.” I recognize the gravity of the accusation and don't take it lightly, especially as a Holocaust historian. It was very difficult for me to write that accusatory article, as it concerns my own people and the society I belong to. The extent of Hamas's atrocities on October 7, together with the destruction of communities and the fear for the fate of the hostages taken to Gaza, were all shocking. However, once I grasped the scale of what Israel was doing, and is still doing, silence was no longer an option. There are various definitions of genocide, but only one is globally accepted: the one introduced by the Genocide Convention adopted by the UN in December 1948. It describes genocide as acts committed with intent to destroy, “in whole or in part,” a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, “as such.” The “intent” to annihilate is crucial. As a historian, I argue that all the elements of a genocide conducted by Israel can be seen now in Gaza, premised on a pervasive dehumanization of Palestinians within Israeli society and the incitement to the total erasure of a whole society by the Israeli leadership. Gaza no longer exists. We must recall that a genocide does not have to resemble the Holocaust, with gas chambers and the systematic persecution of every single individual, to be a genocide. Most genocides don’t have these features.
How do we emerge from this immense tragedy? In your project, you speak of egalitarian binationalism as the only possibility. What does that mean?
BB: In the face of the genocide in Gaza, talking about the future risks sounding anachronistic or utopian. Indeed, the priority now is for Palestinians, especially Gazans, to heal, improve their psychological and material conditions, rebuild Gaza, rise from the ashes of the genocide, reconstruct their national institutions, and hold Israel accountable for the crimes it has committed. Still, it is precisely in this context that we believe it is necessary to insist on imagining an alternative future. For too long, the Palestinian question has been reduced to a problem that could be solved through geopolitical engineering – shifting borders, land swaps, temporary solutions disguised as peace processes and peace deals. All of this has systematically failed, because, among other things, it evaded the real dimension of the problem: two national collectives share the same land, but under conditions of radical asymmetry, generally taking the form of Israeli apartheid promoting Jewish-Israeli supremacy and segregation.
The egalitarian binationalism we propose starts from the fact that the entire area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea today constitutes a single political space shared by two communities: the Israeli Jewish one, holding total sovereignty and setting the rules of the political and juridical space; and the Palestinian Arab one, subjected to territorial fragmentation, dispossession and colonial violence. Our perspective is binational because it recognizes and promotes the existence of two national groups with equal rights to self-determination. This means there can be no solution that preserves the supremacy of one group over the other or that continues treating one community as a demographic problem to be contained, expelled or eliminated. The core of our project is political and substantive equality: the redistribution of political power, dismantling discriminatory mechanisms, equitable access to resources, mutual recognition as legitimate collectivities, and symmetrical individual and collective rights, including to self-determination, for both peoples on the land they share. In this sense, egalitarian binationalism also requires a decolonization process: an understanding that takes into account settler colonialism, the expulsion and uprooting of Palestinians in 1948 and its consequences visible today, up to the genocide in Gaza. Egalitarian binationalism is not a political solution; it is an ethical principle that must guide any political solution and process of historical reconciliation in Palestine/Israel, centering the memories of the Holocaust and the Nakba and the right of return for Palestinian refugees.
*Simon Levis Sullam is a contemporary historian at Ca' Foscari University of Venice. He specializes in the history of intellectuals, fascism, anti-Semitism, the Holocaust and memory. He has written about Israel and Palestine for publications such as il manifesto, Il Sole 24 Ore’s Sunday edition, Il Domani, the online edition of Il Mulino, leparolelecose.it, glistatigenerali.com and novantatrepercento.it.
Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/bashir-e-goldberg-un-binazionalismo-egualitario-dalle-memorie-di-shoah-e-nakba on 2025-10-26