Israel Has Made Trauma A Weapon Of War

“What is the line between commemorating trauma and cynically exploiting it? Between memorialization and weaponization? What does it mean to perform collective grief when the collective is not universal, but rather tightly bound by ethnicity?… Israel is right now in the grips of a nuclear-armed colonial revenge frenzy in the lineage of earlier colonial punitive expeditions, ones that also used art and collective sorrow as potent weapons of annihilation.⁠⁠ Identifying these deep historical throughlines – what the UCLA Holocaust scholar Michael Rothberg has termed ‘multidirectional memory’ – is work of re-membering, and it holds out our best hope of exiting what increasingly feels like an endlessly recurrent genocide loop.”