Gaza Faces History by Enzo Traverso (Other Press, 128 pp, Published Oct 1, 2024)
Francophone Italian author and U.S.-based historian Enzo Traverso has written a world-weary, book-length essay of an indictment, questioning Israel’s legitimacy—as distinct from its right to exist—for perpetrating acts of genocide in Gaza and the West Bank with outstanding Western-sanctioned impunity. As an authoritative scholar of the Holocaust and Nazism in Europe, Traverso’s richly informed commentary contextualizes the deadliest siege of Gaza, with lessons from the past, offering ample insight into the state of Israel’s embattled identity.
With careful, mostly diligent prose translated from the French by Willard Wood, Traverso distinguishes between the state and the nation of Israel. The former overrun by fundamentalist, political Zionism, the latter a well-established cultural collective that has firmly planted its roots within its Hebrew-speaking, sovereign territory in the Levant, whose contested borders were breached by Hamas-led militants on October 7, 2023.
While unspeakable, most of the world and the Global South in particular, has seen the murder of 1200 people and abduction of 254 hostages, overshadowed by the atrocities dealt to Palestinian civilians by the Israeli military, leaving over 61,709 deaths and two million displaced as of this writing.
That the establishment of Israel in May 1948 coincided with Zionist militias perpetrating some 15,000 deaths and expelling a quarter million Palestinians is no minor historical footnote. It remains central to the demands of descendants who still seek restitution for lands taken. Their right to return was formally acknowledged and consigned on paper just seven months after Israel’s independence. It was during that same year, during the Arab-Israeli war, that Resolution 194 of the United Nations General Assembly passed, which promised Palestinians justice for mass dispossession. Yet following the founding of UNRWA the following year after the war’s end, that promise has remained largely symbolic, and has only been impotently upheld.
These events and their grim numbers are laid out in a precise order of contextual historicity in which Traverso draws clear lines between events, between cause and consequence. He frames October 7 as a direct result of the failure of 1993’s Oslo Accords. A failure, where he emphasized, that Israel effectively ensured and condemned through its relentless noncompliant power-mongering, driven by a premodern, revanchist narrative.
In eight, terse chapters that read like erudite newspaper opinion-editorials, the contributor of the socialist Jacobin magazine and textbook leftist intellectual, Traverso prefaces his new book by scrutinizing the imbalance of Western media coverage. Seeing it as saturated, critical and overexposed when it comes to painting Hamas as a figment of Orientalist evil. Yet quieter, even muzzled, when reacting to the full force of Israeli military might over the humiliated, trapped and vastly more vulnerable people of Gaza.
…the murderous, devastating fury that Israel unleashed in the succeeding months has elicited a much more temperate response. Some, embarrassed but indulgent, have taken issue, generally in benevolent tones. The rare critics who have spoken against Israel’s policy have been careful to confirm their underlying sympathy and solidarity.
More a historian of ideas as they’ve come to define the full spectrum of political conscience in contemporary Europe, Traverso confesses that he is not an expert on Middle Eastern affairs, nor an authority on Palestine. Instead, as he writes:
I wanted to take a critical look at the political and intellectual debate that the Gaza crisis has stirred up, trying to untangle its knotted skeins of history and memory.
He is not entirely forthcoming, however, as the book generally reads like the very analysis of the war that he set out to examine—offering a reactive account rather than a more profound, enduring discourse on how the war has impacted the prevailing, historical course of public intellectual debate. Yet, when it comes to his forte, weaving connections between past and present, he delivers with perspicacious tact.
In concert with his predecessors, Gaza Faces History is Traverso’s adulatory communion with Edward Said—held in peerless regard as the patron saint of professorial critiques of Israel and enduring voice of advocacy and empathy for Palestinian self-determination. Said is quoted at least three times, beginning with a prefatory reminder to the reader that the reason Traverso is joining the ranks of his late Palestinian colleague is to soar above the “growing roar of the media,” as he puts it. In this framing, Traverso positions himself not only as a historian, but as a witness, seeking a moral vantage point amid the noise.
So, to lay the groundwork, Traverso returns to 1945, digesting the nature of victimhood among Germans reeling from internalized, postwar trauma after their leaders’ failed attempt to dominate the world. Bound by a linear historicization of national identity—cast only as victor or vanquished—Traverso considers the difficulty of acknowledging a body politic as both aggressor and victim—as a real quandary. That predicament becomes particularly distorted under the influence of propaganda—either pro-Western or single-party rule—in a society anxious to conform to a monolithic, politico-economic unity.
Traverso recounts World War II for its influence in the creation of today’s national enemies. Then, shifts the focus and discussion to Israel—whose national narrative remains rooted in its unceasing portrayal of victimhood in the shadow of the Holocaust—Traverso draws a sharp distinction between historical trauma and contemporary military provocation. Hamas provocations are a far cry from Nazi militarism, yet the Israeli state continues to conflate all of Palestinian resistance with genocidal intent. Similarly, Putin has mobilized Russia and justified his invasion of Ukraine by calling Ukrainians Nazis. Netanyahu also mobilizes and militarizes Israel by presenting an unbroken lineage between Nazism in the Middle East and Palestinian nationalism.
Traverso revisits 1941, when the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini, met with Hitler to discuss anti-Zionist policies in the interest of nascent Palestinian nationalism—a gesture often used to retroactively link Palestinian nationalism with fascism which remains a touchstone for Israeli political myth-making. This stance and sentiment was shared by the Arab League when they rejected partitioning the British Mandate of Palestine into two Arab and Jewish states as proposed by the UN in 1947. Yet, as Traverso insists, drawing a straight line of political continuity from the 1948 Arab-Israeli war and the Nakba, to present-day conditions in Gaza is misleading and reductive. It is, as Traverso details, another convenient distortion, misinterpretation and a deliberate entanglement of past and present designed to uphold the aggressor-victim dialectic.
And it wasn’t only Palestinians who were influenced by anti-modern German nationalism. Zionist thinkers like Nachman Syrkin and Haim Arlosoroff—key proponents of socialist and labour Zionism—drew as Traverso outlines, from the ideological reservoir of philosopher Oswald Spengler. Spengler’s civilizational pessimism and territorial essentialism offered a philosophical template that, ironically, informed both the ethno-nationalist logic of Nazi Germany and the foundational rhetoric of the Zionist project. In this ideological overlap, Traverso locates unsettling affinities—particularly in the sacralization of land and the racialization of belonging that bolstered both Israel and Nazi Germany.
On the altar of Western power, Palestinians are the human sacrifice that demonstrates American global supremacy. In Europe, Islamic fundamentalism has replaced Communism as the greatest perceived threat to the world order. Reflecting on the return of the far-right in Italy, Traverso details how European Islamophobia has led to open-handed support for Israel. Even where antiwar criticism exists, it is often muted, conditional, or entangled in the West’s broader anxiety over migration, religion, and cultural identity.
This might explain why, according to Germany’s “reason of state,”—the title of the third chapter of Gaza Faces History, Traverso outlines that the Reichstag rubber-stamps extrajudicial transgressions of its own founding laws to uphold the current geopolitical balance. As with many critics of Israel, Traverso qualifies using the term “genocide” for the present siege of Gaza, referring to Holocaust scholars, international agencies, and Netanyahu himself, as well as the International Criminal Court, whose very existence coincidentally stems from the precedent set by the Nuremberg trials. Traverso finds resonance with Marx’s bitter prophecy that history first appears as tragedy, then as farce.
Part of that farce lies in the contradiction that for all of their liberal commitments and advances to exclusive democratic freedom, Western nations, Israel among them, remain ensnared, and stuck in a loop of colonial enterprise ongoing since the 19th century. The keyword here is Orientalism, and, again, Said remains relevant for contemporary critics of Israel. The right of defense of national territory is often bigoted in favor of Israel while the means by which Palestinians, as a stateless population, have recourse to mere survival in the face of aggression, or at the very least, treatment as fellow human beings, is called into question, denigrated as barbarism, extremism, terror and other dehumanizations that nullify diplomacy. In his second chapter, Orientalism, Traverso emphasizes the point:
Alongside ritual decelerations of Israel’s right to self-defense, no one ever mentions the Palestinians’ right to resist a decades-long aggression, because no one recognizes that the Palestinians have a history.
In this discussion, Traverso, admittedly inexpert when it comes to the conflict— risks a form of analytical negligence. Certain figures and claims he references would require a far more concerted body of research to confirm with convincing accuracy, one that the relative brevity of Gaza Faces History does not allow. As he states:
To date, Hamas has “barbarically” killed close to 1,200 Israelis, including 800 civilians; the IDF has “intelligently” killed 40,000 Palestinians, of whom perhaps a quarter were Hamas combatants.
The use and addition of “perhaps” there, alongside the rounding out of “a quarter,” seems to be a detail too vital to gloss over with such vague language, especially as this appears to be the key impasse of the whole ordeal. The question remains of whether Palestinian statehood, the transformation from statelessness to citizenry, would guarantee human rights, forcing the Israeli military to discern between innocents and combatants beyond the buzzwords, “collateral damage” and “human shields” for civilians, and “terrorists” or “extremists” for soldiers. Traverso critiques the very usage of “war” to define the conflict, writing:
The concept of war—a term used here in keeping with the usage of recent months—is not entirely appropriate to describe what is happening in Gaza, where there are not two armies facing off. Rather, an enormously powerful and sophisticated war machine is methodically eliminating a set of urban centers inhabited by close to two and a half million people.
After all, one of the first orders of business for the Nazi administration was to strip its enemies of their citizenship. Once, they had been reduced to mere human beings, stateless bodies, their lives became unprotected by law, and thus, expendable. As Hannah Arendt wrote, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, “The moment human beings lose their political status, they are expelled from humanity itself.” Arendt is prominent in Gaza Faces History as an anti-Zionist who stood at odds with Gershom Scholem and other early cultural Zionists as they began to conform to Theodor Herzl’s statist politicization and interpretation of the ancient Jewish yearning to return to the Holy Land—read Zion—after the Roman expulsion in 70 A.D.
Traverso concludes in Gaza Faces History with a retrospective glance, remembering and invoking dissenting Zionist Jews like Judah Magnes, who criticized and publicly opposed the 1947 UN Partition Plan. Instead, Magnes advocated and championed for a binational state of Arab-Jewish unity, which some refer to as the Switzerland of the Middle East. Surrounded by liberal Jewish and Palestinian peers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he served as its first chancellor and president. The book leaves a yawning gap wide open. None of the Palestinian diplomacy are included neither Mousa Alami, nor Khalil al-Sakakini, nor any of their contemporaries are named. Palestinian contributions to the supposedly Western intellectual traditions of universalism and liberalism in support of multinational civil rights are obscured by the all-too-common tendency to lean-in on the redemptions of Western aggression and Jewish victimhood. The final chapter, “From the River to the Sea,” ends as such:
If the war in Gaza were to end in a second Nakba, Israel’s legitimacy would be definitively compromised. In that case, neither American weapons, nor the Western media, nor a German reason of state, nor a distorted and profaned memory of the Holocaust, will be able to save it.
It is Israel’s legitimacy, ultimately, that is at stake, and the sacred memory of the Holocaust— invoked again and again as moral shield—remains untouched, irregardless of Palestinian survival. This bias exposes the broader not just the contradictions of Zionism, but the illegitimacy of the West itself.
Traverso’s Gaza Faces History, for all its erudition and moral clarity, is ultimately a symptom of this imbalance—an attempt to speak truth while still constrained by the architecture of Western discourse. It gestures toward solidarity, but cannot fully escape the gravitational pull of the frameworks it critiques. The result is a book that opens important doors, but leaves others—especially Palestinian intellectual and political contributions—still firmly shut.
