- There are ‘worrying similarities between what was played out in South-West Africa and what is being played out today in Gaza’, as Didier Fassin wrote a few weeks after 7 October. In both cases, the mass killing, destruction and displacements followed humiliating military defeats by people they thought to be inferior. The Nama and Ovaherero traditional authorities insist on the recognition of these historical continuities: ‘Our shared experience of settler colonialism and apartheid becomes a platform from which we do not claim for singularity but rather pursue global justice and a quest for solidarity and universal freedom.’ It is important to listen to these voices. Such continuities could bring together the history of the Holocaust with that of colonialism and enslavement, allowing the historical solidarity between Blacks and Jews, and between anti-Zionist Jews and Palestinians, to be recognised.
Continue reading at https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n08/eyal-weizman/diary