The Cape Town Holocaust and Genocide Centre (CTHGC) sits in Hatfield Street, Cape Town on the boundaries of the Company’s Gardens where logics of settlement, subjugation, and sanitisation by holocaust and genocide were incubated and disavowed by a deluge of silent settlers and tyrannical traders in the penal colony persisting in the present.
The CTHCG has been roundly castigated for its culpability for current instantiation of the Genocide in Gaza emanating from its ongoing silence on the genocide in Gaza and colonial holocaust across Palestine. The CTHGC has designed a pedagogic programme designed to ‘highlight the consequences of prejudice and racism in all of its forms, and to draw attention to the dangers of indifference, apathy and silence’.
The inexorable moral culpability of inaction and silence is not just a matter of self-description for the CTHGC, but inheres throughout the purported praxis of the museum and its installations.In a central installation in the museum the words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer in italics, ‘Not to act is to act. Not to speak is to speak’.
Despite this hubris imbued conviction on the grave dangers of silence, The CTHGC has retained an indefatigable commitment to silence in relation to Palestine, while bearing witness to one of the most live streamed genocides in history.
In an utterance replete with disinformation for deathmaking and the cruel gymnastics of justification for genocide, Jakub Nowakowski, the Director of the CTHGC disingenuously attempted to explain the inexcusable settler colonial sensibilities of the Centre’s selective stance on silence with fraudulent recourse to the law. Nowakowski, not satisfied to gerrymander the meaning of genocide, sought to rewrite international law to evade his personal accountability and the Centre’s culpability for genocide.
In response to questions by journalists and activists about whether he intended to remain committed what is a de facto programme of genocide denialism imposed on thousands of children, he remarked, ‘[i]t is important to note that the designation of genocide is a legal matter, determined…by international tribunals specifically established for that purpose. Should such a tribunal reach a determination in relation to the situation in Gaza, I would act accordingly with regard to the Centre’s educational programming’.
At the level of international law, it is simply inaccurate to conflate the culmination of a tribunal’s activity on a matter and the eventual handing down of a ruling with the geo-location in time of the moment of establishment of genocide. When South Africa invoked the Genocide Convention against the State of Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) it confirmed to Israel and all parties to the Convention, that the duty to prevent and punish genocide represents a jus cogens or non-derogable norm in international law. The Genocide Convention produces, as was confirmed by the ICJ in the Barcelona Traction Case (1970) the erga omnes obligation in preventing and punishing genocide, which means all States have an obligation to prevent and punish genocide wherever and whenever it occurs or may occur.
In this sense at the at the legal level, the existence of a plausible risk of genocide as was offered by the minimalist terms of the ICJ in the South Africa v. Israel case constitutes a sufficient threshold to activate the responsibilities of all actors under the Genocide Convention. This was recently confirmed by the United Nations Independent Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel in its meticulously evidenced confirmation of the fact of Israel’s perpetration of genocide in Palestine. Per the Commission’s report, ‘State responsibility under the Genocide Convention is not dependent on a finding of guilt of an individual under international criminal law’. In either trajectory, Nowakowski’s feeble attempt at juridifying genocide denialism would depend upon the Holocaust and Genocide Centre’s jettisoning of the Genocide Convention itself to establish any semblance of consistency in its manipulation of truth in the service of genocide.
Of course, were this the type of Nuremberg style tribunal seeking individualised criminal responsibility which Nowakowski egregiously misrepresents, if past practice and penal precedent is anything to go by, would most likely find himself spewing these genocidal assertions from the dock of the tribunal he so yearns for. Julius Streicher was sentenced to hang at Nuremberg for crimes against humanity in the course of the Nazi Holocaust in Europe without the need for a single bullet from his gun to be fired. His crimes were the sedimenting of propaganda in support of racial violence and genocide in the shape of his publication of Der Stürmer. If Nowakowski is so set on recourse to the Nuremberg style tribunal, there is a precedent for propagandists of his ilk.
Outside of the limited lexicons of the language of the law, it is a barbaric deviation from common sense, best practice around political violence, and the CTHGC’s own commitment to victim and survivor-centred narratives to articulate that a genocide is not a genocide until so-claimed by a tribunal.
Would Nowakowski have told the partisans of Warsaw Ghetto that they were not in fact defending their people against a Holocaust in Europe because the Nuremberg Tribunals eschewed the languaging of holocaust? Would Nowakowski march into Auschwitz and bellow at the besieged and the burning that their genocide was no genocide because the culmination of the continuities of white supremacist violence between Nazism and US racism and the Cold War focus of the Nuremberg Prosecution and Bench meant that aggressive war or ‘crimes against the peace’ were prioritised over the crimes of genocide in the Nazi Holocaust in Europe?
As we pose these questions, thee Centre forges ahead as a genocidal co-conspirator in the Final Solution in Gaza. One of the ways in which this is made possible is in the sustained structure of a twofold Nakba denialism, and thereby perpetuation of the Nakba in the work of the CTHGC on the one hand, and of a denial of the colonial character of the current genocide, holocaust, and indeed those that fall under its purview, on the other hand.
Redolent in the Centre’s missives is a clear colonial temporality in bracketing contemporary genocide in Gaza, however fervently the genocide is denied. The CTHGC erases nearly 80 years of settler colonial apartheid and racial capitalism in Palestine, whose legal formalisation in 1948 was in deep collusion with the establishment of the conversant colonial racial capitalist apartheid regime in South Africa. Moreover, the CTHGC, as pointed out by Azad Essa at the Middle East Eye completely erases and thereby participates in the Nakba, which constitutes not only fragmentation, land dispossession and genocidal ethnic cleansing, but also the erasure of Palestinian memory.
It is way too late, no matter what sanitising aesthetics might ensue, for for the CTHG to reclaim any moral authority for the egregious exploitation of the memory of our Jewish ancestors who lived, died, and resisted in the Nazi Holocaust in Europe to sediment a kindred holocaust against our Palestinian siblings.
The questions are rather, to my mind, after his Nuremberg moment, how will Nowakowski atone for the archive of apartheids, genocides, and holocausts enabled under his watch?
How will the Centre begin to contemplate what levels of reckoning and repair are demanded of it for its indoctrination of thousands of minors and people of all ages into the logics of genocide and holocaust it claims to resist?
How might it provide a full accounting and accountability for its actions enabling the genocide and holocaust in Palestine and its denialism of the same globally?
How might mourning and movement displace the barbaric evil of this mausoleum to the museum masterminds of the military, the mortuary, the memory, and the mass murder?
Jo Bluen is an activist, writer and academic focusing on colonialism, race, gender, capital, and the international law of genocide who has recently submitted a PhD to London School of Economics. She has written for The Funambulist, Al Jazeera, the Oxford Research Encyclopaedia of International Studies, the American Journal of International Law/. Based in and from Johannesburg, Jo organises with South African Jews for a Free Palestine, BDS SA, Energy Embargo SA Chapter and serves on various international law groupings around the Global Sumud Flotilla. She also works with social movements focusing on anti-oppressive politics, supply chains, especially within mining affected communities.