Gaza and the Question of Genocide

Announced by the University of Pittsburgh

This lecture will focus on a number of unprecedented elements in Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza. It will discuss the exceptionally direct, explicit, and unashamed statements of intent to destroy Palestinians in Gaza by Israeli leaders and senior army officers, the widespread incitement to genocide in Israeli political and public discourses, and the nature of the mass violence itself that a number of reports have described as one of the deadliest and destructive since World War II. The lecture will show how this unprecedented genocide is rooted in the unprecedented case of Israeli settler colonialism and the Jewish supremacy that has defined it from the very beginning. Finally, the lecture will consider how the unprecedented character of Israel’s genocidal attack on Gaza may bring the impunity that Israel has enjoyed in the international legal system to an end. This is urgent for the struggle to stop Israel’s genocide in Gaza, but it also presents important — and arguably unprecedented — opportunities in the struggle to end the seventy-five years of Israeli mass violence against all Palestinians under its control and military occupation. This, then, may open possibilities for a very different kind of future, one based on equality, dignity, freedom, and security for all the people — Jews, Palestinians, and others — who live and will continue to live between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.

Speaker Bio:

Dr. Raz Segal is Associate Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies and Endowed Professor in the Study of Modern Genocide at Stockton University. Dr. Segal has held a Harry Frank Guggenheim Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, and was recently a Senior Fellow at the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies (2023). His publications include Genocide in the Carpathians: War, Social Breakdown, and Mass Violence, 1914-1945 (2016); Days of Ruin: The Jews of Munkács during the Holocaust (2013); and he was guest editor of the Hebrew-language special issue on Genocide: Mass Violence and Cultural Erasure of Zmanim: A Historical Quarterly (2018). Dr. Segal is at work on two new books: one provides a critical account of the history and memory of Holocaust bystanders, the other offers a new analysis of Israeli mass violence from the 1948 Nakba to the current genocidal assault on Gaza. In addition to scholarly publications, Dr. Segal has published op-eds, book reviews, and larger articles on genocide, state violence, and memory politics in Hebrew, English, and German in The Guardian, LA Times, The Nation, Jewish Currents, Haaretz, +972 Magazine, and Berliner Zeitung, and he has appeared on Democracy Now! and ABC News.

Register Here:
https://georgetown.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_DNZs17SGR_iu5VXl7lMNkQ#/r...