4. Forced displacement of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip devastated by Israeli bombing, January 29, 2025. Jaber Jehad Badwan, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
are at the forefront of the struggle against Israel ' s actions. But the vast majority of mainstream institutional Jewish world stands almost entirely alongside the State of Israel and pushed for the suppression of global protest against it. As historian David Myers wrote on the eve of Tisha B ' Av this year, the day on which Jews have marked for thousands of years with fasting and mourning the destruction of the Temple, the Jewish institutional world will need to perform very deep soul-searching about its unconditional support for Israel at this time.
Regarding the impact on the study of " mass violence," here too it is still early to say what the impact will be, but it will certainly have a very significant impact. I think that this field suffers from an increasingly acute split to the point that different groups within the field will not have a common language and certainly not a common moral framework with one another. Each group will create its own research frameworks, institutions and discourses. But beyond this, because of the focus on the legal definition of genocide in the context of Gaza and the centrality of the question of intent in the political debates, I fear there will be a very problematic return of the research and academic field to focusing on understanding mass violence through the question of intent, which from a historical, sociological, and other scholarly perspectives is not necessarily the most important. When examining the causes and the enabling factors of any historical event( events of genocide and mass violence included), direct intent is not necessarily the most important. One can think of structural, cultural, economic, political, psychological, sociological etc. elements and contexts that are just as important
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