Dr. Eilat Maoz is an anthropologist working at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is currently a member of the Martin Buber Society of Fellows (MBSF), a joint German-Israeli program for postdoctoral fellows, supported by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). In her work, she studies the political economy of organized violence, crime, and policing, in colonial and post-colonial situations, focusing on the Caribbean and Palestine/Israel and employing a comparative historical framework.
Eilat Maoz: Ethnic Violence or Colonial Violence?
I begin by questioning the category of ethnic violence. To what extent is this category relevant or central to understanding violence in our region? My argument will differ somewhat from that presented by Levy.[1] I will attempt to offer a more theoretical reading of the concept of „ethnic violence“ and its development in anthropological and sociological literature, as opposed to another category, perhaps the shadow category that isn’t much discussed these days in Israel, that of colonial violence.
In short, what I’ll try to do here is a kind of conceptual investigation, and I’ll argue that the use of the category „ethnic violence“ is largely a function of how we understand conflict resolution, rather than an analytical category that helps us determine the nature of the violence itself.
It is important to begin by saying that the attempt to find a sociological category aimed at understanding violence from a conflict-resolution perspective is preferable to a reality in which violence reflects a lack of understanding of the ability to live together. Violence with genocidal characteristics from both sides—Hamas and Israel since 10/7—this kind of violence reflects the total nature of the war, where no distinction is made between soldiers and civilians, and is aimed at destroying any possibility of communication or future coexistence. The distinction I am drawing on here is that between communicative violence, which is part of a relationship that seeks to bring the other side to the negotiation table and to discuss conditions for resolution of the conflict, and violence that symbolizes the destruction of the ability to live together—both in its scope and its brutal nature, which makes it hard to sit together afterward.
Again, I want to talk about the category of ethnic violence as one that reflects a vision of future political resolution. I will try to discuss it in contrast to another way of understanding the current violence as colonial violence and the different solutions these perceptions of violence suggest for the present reality.
The category of ethnic violence appears relatively late in sociological literature, in the 1990s. Even the article that Yagil mentioned, by Brubaker and Laitin,[2] is itself a review article of literature that emerged in the 1990s. At that time, they began discussing violence in “new states,” in newly formed nation states, democracies, that emerged after the dissolution of modern empires. This was a form of post-colonial violence, initially understood in the literature as violence over the question of who owns the state. Once a nation-state is created, which is a source of distribution of resources and opportunities, ethnicity becomes one of the means that different social elites use to take control of the state, to justify the distribution of resources, budgets, licenses, and all the things the state enables to distribute among different social classes and networks. The principle is that they live in one country and fight over ownership of it and what it offers.
In anthropological literature, ethnic violence is described as violence between neighbors, violence rooted in daily resentments between groups living intermingled with one another. Its most striking expression is the episodic eruption of masses in so called “ethnic riots”, which reflect the explosion of many petty grievances stemming from everyday life. For example, Veena Das speaks of how ethnic riots represent the eruption and disruption of routine social relations, in a way that tears apart the bonds between individuals, families, and communities. The paradigmatic cases of ethnic violence in those days were: the wars in former Yugoslavia, the Rwandan genocide, and the ethnic riots on the India-Pakistan border. In all these cases, these were communities that were interwoven—working alongside each other, living side-by-side, even intermarrying, and one of the main questions, from a theoretical perspective, was how people who are neighbors— who are intimates—suddenly become enemies. The explanation is the appearance of the state as the central actor in appropriation and distribution.
Ethnic violence is understood as violence that seeks to symbolically mark separation. It creates a boundary between groups where no clear separation exists, or where there is a blurring of identity or moral, religious, or other boundaries. With the state, it becomes important to determine who gets what, and under what conditions, it’s crucial to understand who belongs to my group and who does not. Grievances between citizens also intensify under these conditions. People ask themselves why someone from the other group, who is supposed to be beneath me, is overtaking me. Why does he earn more than me? Why does he get a better job? Why do his children get into university and mine don’t, and so on. Ethnic violence, as described in the literature, appears in our context, Israel/Palestine, at points of social encounter. Consider, for example, the violence that erupted in mixed cities in May 2021. In mixed cities, Jewish and Palestinian communities are more or less intertwined, maintaining day-to-day relations. Therefore, grievances and tensions can develop related to boundary blurring or the breakdown of hierarchies perceived as self-evident. Jewish Israelis might ask, for example, why an Arab is surpassing them in university admissions or earning more than they do. What is he getting, and what am I getting? It is a violence of envy. In May 2021, participants in violent demonstrations were mainly drawn from lower classes of both Jews and Arabs who felt left out of processes of development and social mobility over recent decades.
In contrast, colonial violence is violence rooted in and stemming from separation—spatial, conceptual, and ontological—between colonizers and the colonized. In the colonial context, if we return to Frantz Fanon, for example, violence is both an expression of and derived from separation, and its function is to reproduce the dividing lines again and again. If ethnic violence occurs in a social space where there is ambiguity in social, moral, religious, and cultural boundaries, then colonial violence is the violence of the frontier, violence that seeks to replace the native. While ethnic violence between neighbors often involves state agents (for example, police collaborating with rioters from one side), colonial violence is organized and state sanctioned. At the same time, however, colonial violence is characterized its exceptional character. It is carried out, often, under declared state of emergency and suspension of constitutional protections. If ethnic violence is rooted in the context of struggle within the same state framework, there is no shared framework between settler and native in colonial analysis. They do not belong to the same space; the struggle is not over who owns the state, but who is sovereign over the territory, who rules the land. The fundamental split between colonizer and colonized shapes the way each side experiences violence. Violence is always present in the daily life of the colonized subject, but for the colonizer, it appears as episodic and unexpected eruptions, inexplicable and senseless. Anti-colonial violence responds to the systematic violence of occupation or colonization, but is perceived by the colonizers as senseless, as if it came from nowhere. This split in experienced reality creates epistemic and psychological structures of dissociation, revenge, and guilt, which are associated with colonial violence and reproduce it.
So far, I have presented two concepts of violence, each pulling in a different direction: ethnic violence of integration and colonial violence of separation. These two concepts are suitable for analyzing dimensions of the local reality—if ethnic violence is, for example, the reality in Lod, then colonial violence, the violence of separation, characterizes what is happening in Gaza and, to a large extent, in the West Bank. Each offers us a different way of understanding the overall framework—as both shared and separated. This may reflect what Ariella Azoulay and Adi Ophir called „a regime that is not one.“[3]
Mahmood Mamdani’s intervention in the discussion of ethnic violence, beginning in the late 1990s, first in his 1996 book Citizen and Subject and up to his latest work, Neither Settler nor Native (2020), allows us to move beyond the conceptual dichotomy.[4] Mamdani essentially shows that ethnic violence is a colonial legacy. Ethnic identities mobilized in situations of extreme violence are categories created by the colonial state. His examples include Rwanda, Sudan, and Israel/Palestine. Ethnic identity is not given, nor is it a cultural-religious identity, but first and foremost a legal-political category that necessarily produces differential access to the nation-state. In his current work, Mamdani attempts to show that the modern nation-state is a distinctly colonial product. He traces its development as a framework with „permanent minorities“ since the conquest and expulsion from Spain in 1492 and the conquest of the New World. In the nation-state, the organizing principle is ethnicity; the assumption that the state belongs to one ethnic group creates a permanent majority-minority situation, with unchanging relations between them. In democratic theory, majority and minority are products of political processes of debate and differentiation. The minority accepts the majority’s decision, assuming it could become the majority one day, while the majority refrains from completely oppressing the minority because it knows it could one day become a political minority itself. This basic democratic principle does not hold in an ethnic nation-state, because the state inherently belongs to one group. The ethnic state contains within it a basic principle of exclusion and even outright purification. For Mamdani, the solution to ethnic violence, or what is the same thing, the mass violence of modernity, is to transform the colonial-nation-state into a civic state where ethnic categories play no political role, though they can play other roles in people’s lives, say, as cultural identities.
The model Mamdani offers in his latest book is the South African model, where a political transition takes place, abandoning the basic principle of anti-colonial struggle as a struggle for social economic justice. This model both abandons the Nuremberg model of justice, since here criminals are not brought to trial but are offered broad amnesty for those who committed violence in the name of the regime, and the demand for socio-economic justice, meaning redistribution of resources between the losers and winners, beneficiaries and victims, of the racist regime. In South Africa, the end of apartheid did not include a change in socio-economic relations, only the political framework. The dilemma was political justice versus socio-economic justice, and they chose to prioritize political justice, if the state could become a framework for achieving social economic reforms that advance equality.
When we apply the category of ethnic violence to the reality of Palestine/Israel today, are we thereby suggesting that the resolution of the conflict will have to take shape within one state? Is the proposal, here, to overcome national identities and frameworks, which are part of the colonial legacy, and build a one democratic state for Israelis and Palestinians? Are we invited, as it were, to follow the South African example of non-racial democracy? What does this mean for our ability to deliver justice to the victims of colonialism? To say, today, that what we are witnessing is ethnic violence means, in a sense, reading back into the present the idea of a future where Palestinians and Jewish Israelis share a polity. By contrast, insisting that we are seeing colonial violence calls for a process of decolonization, which focuses on the demand for justice and self-determination.
[1] See https://blog.soziologie.de/2024/10/what-does-the-ethnic-framing-of-the-gaza-war-serve/.
[2] See Rogers Brubaker & David D. Laitin (1998): Ethnic and Nationalist Violence, in: Annual Review of Sociology 24, pp. 423-452. https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annurev.soc.24.1.423
[3] Ariella Azoulay & Adi Ophir (2008): This Regime Which Is Not One: Occupation And Democracy Between The Sea And The River (1967- ), Resling; engl. transl.: Stanford University Press, 2011.
[4] Mahmood Mamdani (1996): Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism, Princeton University Press; Mahmood Mamdani (2020): Neither Settler nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities, Harvard University Press.
