A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of settler colonialism. Across its nation states, the unacknowledged, undead pasts of settler colonialism trouble the present as the fact of genocide is brought once again into public view. In London and Paris, galleries cancel scheduled exhibitions. In Berlin and Vienna, universities ban academics and censor students. On city streets, words and chants in solidarity with Gaza are criminalised as metropoles that prided themselves on free speech now reveal themselves in a state of panicked denial. As in the US, the phrase settler colonialism paired with genocide, is subject to suspicion, derision and repudiation.

In a recent series of talks in Vienna, we were repeatedly questioned as to the relevance of speaking about settler colonialism in the present moment. It is a term of which Europe professes ignorance and from which it dissociates itself. What is at stake in these refusals, bans and disallowances? What do they reveal both about the past and the present?

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As we write this brief reflection, the expulsion from Rafah has begun, with close to a million Gazan civilians yet again forcibly on the move and under fire. Across the globe, protest against Israel has intensified with South Africa returning to the International Court of Justice to call for an urgent intervention. In the U.S campus encampments in solidarity with Gaza have multiplied even as authorities have resorted to unprecedented levels of violence in response. In Australia student have set up encampments at Curtin, Melbourne and Sydney universities. They face Zionist counter-protest, targeting and harassment. We view the students’ actions in the light of a recent statement by the Jewish Israeli historian Raz Segal, one of the earliest among genocide scholars to identify what is happening in Gaza as a “text book case of genocide.”  More recently Segal stated:

If we finally recognized Israel for what it is, which is a white supremacist settler state, then the problem is that it’s not just confined to that. We have to recognize the whole system behind it, its support, its allies, including white supremacy and settler colonialism in the U.S.

We offer a scattered itinerary of settler colonialism, its long duration, wide reach and transnational deathscapes, and its structural implications in genocidal practices. In doing so, we follow a course traced by Raphael Lemkin, formulator of the term genocide. “New conceptions require new terms,” Lemkin wrote as the opening words of the chapter entitled “Genocide” in his magnum opus, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. Yet, as Lemkin would realise over the remaining years of his career, genocide was not a new or singular event. He would go on to map its core constituents across a range of places and times.

Lemkin’s Axis Rule provided the basis for the eventual inclusion of the new crime of genocide at the Nuremberg tribunals, and later for the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. The coordinated “techniques of occupation” documented in Axis Rule lay bare the steps through which a program “to destroy or cripple the subjugated people in their development” was differentially applied across the conquered territories of Europe by the Nazi state and its puppet regimes. These techniques included: the renaming and partitioning of occupied lands and the redrawing of existing borders; the preferential treatment of inhabitants associated with German ancestry; the confiscation of land and property belonging to other inhabitants to make way for German settlers; the introduction of a “starvation rationing system for non-Germans”; “killing or removing elements such as the intelligentsia which provide spiritual leadership”; and mass death.

Lemkin summed up the techniques of occupation revealed in the decrees of Axis states as

a gigantic scheme to change, in favour of Germany, the balance of biological forces between it and the captive nations for many years to come.

In East West Street, the legal scholar Phillippe Sands writes that the decrees that Lemkin documented in painstaking detail implemented “ideas shared in Mein Kampf on Lebensraum, the creation of a new living space to be inhabited by Germans.” In a recent commentary in the London Review of Books, Eyal Weizman offers an additional source for “lebensraum,” drawing on the 1897 work of German geographer Friedrich Ratzel, and marking its similarity to the US doctrine of Manifest Destiny on the Western Frontier. In the context of Germany’s colonization of Southwestern Africa in the 1880s, Weizman describes lebensraum as

the space that was needed to sustain a species or people in their Darwinian struggle for survival. To allow German settlement, Indigenous peoples had to be moved out of the way.

As David Olusoga and Casper W Erichsen document in The Kaiser’s Holocaust, Germany’s establishment in 1883 of a settler colony in what is present day Namibia was enabled by campaigns of colonial warfare and the development of the first concentration camp: the Shark Island camp in the South Atlantic, to which Ovaherero and Nama prisoners were shipped. Shark Island became the site for their industrial-scale elimination. A few decades later, Germany would deploy this model in its industrial-scale elimination of Jews, Romani people, people with disabilities and LGBTQ+ people in its occupied territories in Europe.

In Berlin in January 2024, the leaders of the Nama and Ovaherero peoples, in conjunction with Weizman’s Forensic Architecture group, presented new findings from the Shark Island concentration camp. Afterwards, they issued a statement of solidarity and affinity, marking that their presentation was occurring as South Africa brought Israel before the International Court of Justice for genocide in Gaza. “When we spoke about one,” the leaders wrote:

we remembered the other.  Presenting an event about the Namibian genocide, while the Gaza genocide was unfolding, brought into focus a complex set of entangled historical relations, and multiple lines of affinity.

The leaders’ statement emphasised that, for the Nama and Ovaherero peoples, these lines of affinity extended to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust and to the Palestinian people.

The statement continued:

We the Nama and Ovaherero people are all too familiar with the relation between settler colonialism and genocide, with the way genocide emerges as a direct consequence and culmination of violent settler colonialism. We know that the Zionist movement intends to turn Palestine into the “land without people”, it originally imagined it to be, in order to make a living space (similarly to the German lebensraum) for settler Jews.

The leaders’ statement pinpoints critical historical relations that are largely ignored. Although central to Lemkin’s analysis, lebensraum is the absented third term in present day discussions of Zionism and settler colonialism. The forgetting or absenting of lebensraum is a repression of the knowledge of European genocide as inextricably connected to other genocidal acts: acts informed by shared “techniques of occupation” calculated to “change … the balance of biological forces” within a conquered territory.

By insisting that the World War II genocide in Europe was a singular and unprecedented event, institutional memory in Europe refuses a body of conceptual, structural and material links that looks both backwards to prior colonial genocides and forward to the program of Zionism. The “complex set of entangled historical relations, and multiple lines of affinity” that the Ovaherero and Nama so movingly identify are precisely the entanglements and affinities that this form of memory wishes to repudiate in its acts of censorship and cancellation.

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European political Zionism, in theory and practice, emerged from a nineteenth-century European context of imperialism, settler colonialism and racialised violence. Forged in the crucible of violent European anti-Semitism, as Edward Said notes:

Zionism also coincided with the period of unparalleled European colonial territorial acquisition in Africa and Asia, and it was part of this general movement of acquisition and occupation that Zionism was launched initially by Theodor Herzl.

Nur Masalha underscores:

Despite its distinct features and its nationalist ideology … political Zionism followed the general trajectory of colonialist projects in Africa, Asia and Latin America: European colonising of another people’s land while seeking to remove or subjugate the indigenous inhabitants of the land.

The settler colonial doctrine of terra nullius, with its genocidal imperatives, found its Zionist articulation in the imagining of Palestine as “a land without a people.”

In such characterisations, the longstanding historical association of Jewish and Palestinian people with the land of Palestine is first erased, then recast and reconfigured through the proclamation of a new state entity, “Israel,” and buttressed by new discriminatory regulations of citizenship, rights and belonging for some and non-belonging for others despite their long-standing inhabitation. It is in this act of remaking the land and recasting the existing relationships within, by making anew the identities of native and settler, citizen and refugee, that the state of Israel—as Mahmoud Mamdani argues in Neither Settler Nor Native — reveals itself to be “settler colonial.”

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Lemkin put it simply:

Genocide has two phases: one, destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group; the other, the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor [and the consequent] colonisation of the area by the oppressor’s own nationals.

Situated within this  context,  the settler colonial occupation of Palestine emerges as structurally connected “to a global history of settler colonialism”. This history, Somdeep Sen writes,

might explain why Indigenous communities from around the world have stood in solidarity with Palestinians, while settler states like the United States, Canada and Australia seem to perpetually waver in their support for Palestinian rights.

Similarly, adherence to a European perspective that understands genocide in the terms set by the Holocaust might explain the persistent obliviousness to the “techniques of occupation” documented by Lemkin that are at the heart of the settler colonial genocide underway in Gaza.

In our opening sentence we invoked Marx and Engels’ resonant phrase—”a spectre is haunting Europe.” The Manifesto continues: “All the Powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre.” This haunting pronouncement speaks to the present, as the Powers of old Europe work assiduously to exorcise the spectres of European-fomented genocides that have been unleashed by Israel’s war on Gaza. The ghosts of old Europe’s (repressed) campaigns of genocide in Namibia, Algeria, Libya, Ethiopia, the Congo — to name but a few — are at once animated and repressed by Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza. That they can still be so effectively repressed, as attested to by Europe’s continuing disavowal of the genocide in Gaza, points to the intimate link, noted by Derrida in Spectres of Marx, between the logic of hauntings and the power of hegemony:

Hegemony still organizes the repression and thus the confirmation of a haunting. Haunting belongs to the structure of every hegemony.

Even as the Powers of old Europe deploy virulent campaigns of silencing and criminalisation directed at those attempting to speak to the truth, a chorus of dissident hauntings continues to unsettle its hegemonic regimes of repression.

In the current moment, the scattered itineraries of settler colonialism and its structures of genocide that we have traced find their intolerable manifestation in Israel’s war on Gaza. In this war, the crime of genocide assumes its full-blown structural dimensions of elimination, encompassing ecocide, urbicide, scholasticide and so on. The settler-colonial-genocidal past is not dead. On the contrary, in Gaza it is very much alive — as a lethal spectre that insists on bringing into focus an otherwise disavowed “complex set of entangled historical relations, and multiple lines of affinity” that continues to shape the genocidal present.

Image: a Palestine solidarity demonstration in Ireland, 7 November 2023 (Sophie Popplewell)