 Okay, I'm going to let the attendees kind of join and then I'll begin shortly. Okay, I think I will begin proceedings. Welcome everybody. It's lovely to be here on the third day of the SOAS Festival of Ideas. And this is the panel on history, memory and trauma. My name is Mira Sabaratnam and I'm in the Politics Department here at SOAS. I'm delighted to have a great range of speakers here today to speak to this subject. Well first like to introduce Professor Gilbert Ashka, who is of course Professor of Development Studies and International Relations here at SOAS in the Department of Development Studies. Many of you I hope will be familiar with his work. He was the first chair of the SOAS Center for Palestine Studies, since its foundation in 2012 until 2018, and his many books include the Pasha Barbarian Barbarisms, the Making of the New World Disorder, Perilous Power, the Middle Eastern US foreign policy, co-author of the Narm Chomsky, the Arabs and the Holocaust, the Arab Israeli War of Narratives, some of which I think we'll hear about more today. Welcome Gilbert, it's a pleasure to see you. We also have Dr. Vikant Tarian, who is a lecturer in history and international relations at the University of Geneva and at Webster University in Geneva. He has worked as a war reporter and peace building practitioner, writing on armed conflicts in the post-Soviet space as well as the Middle East and North Africa. And amongst his works include war and peace in the Caucasus, Russia's troubled frontier, and open wounds, Armenians, Turks and a century of genocide, again very relevant to our themes today. And finally we have Dr. Yahya Wallach, who is a senior lecturer in Israeli studies at SOAS University of London, but he's also the head of the SOAS Center for Jewish Studies. And he's currently, and we're all very proud and envious at the same time, a Liverpool research fellow. He's a cultural and social historian of modern Palestine, Israel, and his book, A City in Fragments, Urban Texts in Modern Jerusalem, books at Arabic and Hebrew street texts in modern Jerusalem. So we are really excited to have our speakers here. And what we're going to do, we'll invite each of them to make opening remarks for 10 minutes. I'll pull some of the themes together, and you the audience are available, able to ask questions in the Q&A and the chat. So we are recording the session just so that everyone's aware. Hopefully we'll get to see some of you face to face and I'll invite you to speak face to face as well, but you can of course put your questions in the Q&A box during the session as well. Okay, so without further ado, I'm delighted to invite Gilbert to speak. Please Gilbert, take it away. Thank you very much, Mira. Yes, I mean, of course we are having those brief introductory remarks on huge topics and very complex topics. That is even more of a challenge because you know, the more complex it is, the more you need to be nuanced and we have to speak for 10 minutes. That's really difficult. Anyway, we'll try the best we can, the three of us I'm sure, and I'm also looking forward to your own input to Mira in this discussion. And now the theme I'm going to address is indeed related to that book of mine that Mira mentioned, the Arabs and the Holocaust, and the subtitle is the Arab-Israeli War of Narratives. And it's very much related to the topic of this panel, which is history and trauma. And that's what we're discussing. And indeed, this is probably one of the, let's say, the most burning themes of this kind of discussion of the relation between trauma and history and the present and ongoing history, actually, not only past history, but it is still very much here with the present carrying on as history in the making. So the Holocaust and the Nakba, this is what I'm going to address very briefly, of course the Holocaust in itself stands on its own as a huge historical tragedy and does not request a discussion of the Nakba when you are discussing it. You can discuss the Holocaust as a European event, a major event in world history and European history. But the history has been, has worked in such a way that the Nakba, which is the name that the Arabic name given to the Palestinian trauma, was directly related to the Holocaust. We have this peculiarity that we'll find probably in other languages we can tell us about maybe Armenian, but the tragedy of each people is called the catastrophe, which in Arabic Nakba is and in Hebrew Shoa is. So the terms used, each population or each ethnicity refers to its own trauma as the catastrophe. So what is the relation between the two? I mean some people even disputed even from the, let's say pro-Palestinian side by saying, well, Zionism preceded the Holocaust and therefore there is no direct relation between the two. So that's very, very, I think it's a weak argument and although of course the design, the implementation of the Zionist project of creating a state of the Jews in Palestine started with the, I mean, started with the Balfour Declaration under British colonial auspices in after the First World War, the fact remains that without the Nazi's Caesar of power and what it represented and then the Holocaust, the genocide of the Jews, without these you wouldn't have had the that the flow of refugees and later on Holocaust survivors into first Palestine and then the state of Israel. So there is a very direct connections in that regard. But the fact remains that the state of Israel itself was created through war conditions that ended up with that state controlling 78% of the land of Palestine between the river and the sea. I mean, British, the Mandate Palestine and on from that territory, 80% of the Arab native population, the Palestinians had fled whatever the conditions, you know, you have a lot of discussions about whether expelled or fleeing or whatever. These discussions are irrelevant to the fact that they were never allowed to come back and their homes, their lands, all that were seized. And that is an act that even someone who became a rapidly right wing Zionist historian like Benny Morris and knowledge as ethnic cleansing. And so you have this relation between the two traumas, the two tragedies and hence the swore of narratives with each side using their own tragedy as a legitimation of the reviews. Of course, for there is a qualitative difference here and I will end with this qualitative difference. It is that the Nazi genocide of the Jews is a past event. It is, it is a trauma in collective memory. It's a huge tragedy. No discussion about that. But it is, on the one hand, an event circumscribed in history and say and the, the perpetrators were not those, I mean, were not the Palestinians, were not Arabs, they were Europeans, they were, that's where it happened. On the other hand, the Nekba is, is not only a past event. It's, it is continuing. It has been in some way revived with the 1967 war and the occupation by the state of Israel of the remaining parts of Palestine, and this permanent oppression represented by the ongoing occupation. In addition to other forms of discrimination within the state of Israel itself against its Palestinian citizens. So there is this difference here, which is very important to take into account when we discuss these tragedies. One of them is of a much larger magnitude than the other that is the Holocaust but at the same time that the other one is ongoing and therefore it is a matter of real urgency for any prospect of peace in the region to get to justice in this, in this regard and justice for the Palestinians is crucial in that regard. Thank you very much. Thank you Gilbert, that was extremely succinct and I will definitely be coming back to you for more expansion on these, on these themes. I'd like now to turn to Yahya to address us as well and then we'll go to weekend. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Mira and thank you Gilbert for these comments. And I have things to say, but I'll keep them for the discussion later. But I think one thing is that what is useful about me coming after Gilbert Gilbert talked about the constitutive traumas of Israelis and Palestinians, the things that are historical traumas that are very much that we can continue to share to present. And what I will talk is about the trauma. And in some ways the shared trauma, if we want to force it or over emphasize it but we can say there's a shared trauma that is not remembered. And by this I mean the First World War in Palestine. So I'll talk about a bit about the magnitude of that trauma and why it is not remembered. And yes, so first is to say that the First World War is usually not discussed much. I mean, you know, of course in the UK the First World War features heavily in public discourse, not so much in Israel-Palestine. And because of that, there's no, there's little attention to how traumatic it was to the people at the time. So the war involved a set of catastrophes for the population in Palestine, starting with conscription when the Ottoman Empire enters the war, forced conscription, and people were sent to the front, whether it's in Suez, the failed Suez attempt, or in the Caucasus, or Gallipoli. So quite a lot of people died. In the case of Jews and Christians, for the first time in a comprehensive manner they are conscripted to the military. They cannot get away but they are not trusted to actually do the fighting so they're sent to do hard labor in quite difficult and impossible conditions. And again, we don't have exact death figures but a lot of people die because they don't get proper food because of disease and because of really poor conditions. So there we're talking about really thousands or tens of thousands of people and conscription of course is a very traumatic experience. And really there's devastation that comes with the war and the economy that is built on trade and tourism very much collapses. There's a lot of fines and taxation from the Ottoman and very hard line, kind of try to squeeze money out of the population which I can tell you various ways. There's someone who's looked at this period. There's inflation. And then we're talking about widespread disease, cholera and various other diseases that really decimates the local population in a dramatic, in a dramatic manner. There's massive deforestation in order to feed the trains of and that really changes the landscape in a very abrupt way. And there's political oppression, you know, for the first time in a thing. We experienced that so much before the war. Other parts of the Ottoman Empire did, but in the case of past tense quite heavy handed intervention directed at local political elites that seem to be not loyal enough to the Ottoman project as a part of intimidation practices so the Ottoman kind of authorities in past and take the gloves off during the war and it's in and to a population that was not used to it. So let's read one account briefly and this is from an execution of five, five people in Jerusalem in 1916. They're accused of deserting the military and there was a mass problem of people escaping military service. So there's these five young people executed in 1916. They're Hebrew newspaper. On Thursday, four a.m. at dawn, five youths were hanged to death in our city to Jews to Christians and a Muslim were accused of army desertion near Jaffa gate a line of wooden beams was constructed each with a metal ring and a rope. Before the execution to rabbi's two priests and one share came for confessions from those condemned to death. After the confession they asked the accused if they had any last wishes or anything to say. One Jew asked for some water to drink the other asked to make sure that people who owe him money would pay back to his mother. The minister showed no fear with courage, he walked up to the gallows and sang in a sand voice a melancholic song in Spanish Jewish, he demanded not to be blindfolded, but his request was denied. This is a description of the execution which will spare you. And then the bodies were left hanging until nine for the public to see in fear. A large crowd from the city's resident sampled in Jaffa gate to look at this sad site. And now there's the names and professions of the people that were hanged. And these execution work documented by Palestinian photographer Holly ride and we have the photograph. And now what do we know at least one of these people, and this is a Moroccan Jewish guy yourself. Who was a resident of Jerusalem and he actually wasn't a deserter at all. He didn't have the document to show that he had a license to go he was asked by his commander to go and bring something from Jerusalem and he didn't have the document and and this was an order by the commander of the fourth army Jamal Pasha find me a couple of Christians a couple of Jews and the Muslim I want to deliver a message. Now I think what is interesting about this kind of startling and this is just one example but startling description and how I mean it's almost never mentioned anywhere. There was an attempt by the families of those people to make them listed in the list of Israeli heroes, people that, for example, people that were handed by the mandatory authorities are listed and commemorated, they are not and there was a resistance to that. And that's partly part of a general amnesia of that kind of that trauma which was at the time meant prison forced exile depotations of tens of thousands and death and so forth. So I say, so why is this forgotten, I think there's one reason is of course the traumas that come afterwards are enough for Palestinians, it's the Nakba. So Israeli Jews is partly the price paid in the conflict and and of course we are talking about Israeli casualties as well but it's also the Holocaust was which looms large and therefore this is forgotten but also I would say that these kind of traumas are useful and resonant in the current political present and the last in the in the reality after 1917. So over one with its kind of sense of betrayal by the Ottomans and that that is not actually that useful or was not particularly useful from the kind of political stories that happened after 1917 after the declaration which marked the kind of new So there is an anti Ottoman sentiment both in Arab nationalism and in Zionism, but it's actually not it plays a minor role. And I think that that is something I think we, we know that memory is constructed and that does not say it's artificial but certain things are highlighted, responding to the kind of situations that we are someone who has looked back at World War one and emphasize and what a lot of what I say is inspired by Salim Tamari Palestinian historian, and this book is one that recommend the great war and the remaking of Palestine and he really emphasizes the significance of that moment, which is forgotten later And I would say one last thing what is and we, I think that the context of the talk mentioned decolonization the whole festival of ideas is around decolonization what would decolonization mean when we talk about that. I would say generally my approach for me decolonization means a very, very simple thing, which is to shift the focus and the perspective to the local perspective, and that is the first step to take that you have to pay attention to people, local and how they view the situation. And when I teach World War one. There is temptation of course when you talk about Palestine World War one you talk about sex because and you talk about the buffer declaration and all the things that happen in London and Paris. It's very important for me to start discussion with Palestine and what a residence. What were their hopes what the horizons. And then how they understand what's coming next in terms of sex because because if we do not start there, we replicate the colonial perspective, we continue to look at it through the colonial lens, even if we are critical about this. And just to end, I'll show you can I share a picture. So I will share this picture. And this is the moment of the surrender of Jerusalem. And it's a familiar picture 1917 December, the surrender of Jerusalem to the British. What people usually miss when they look at this photograph is that this is not the British sophisticated army, encountering, you know the Jerusalem backwaters. This is a photograph that is directed orchestrated and staged by the Jerusalem mayor that you can see in the middle of the picture. Hossein telling Hosseini, he gets the photographer to come along and to document this this event. He has agency he has this is the last moment that he has agency in that situation to dictate the historical record. And Hosseini dies two weeks later from influenza. And understanding that local people have agency have perspective is really, really important if we are to take seriously I think this kind of idea of the colonization and here. Thank you. Yeah, yeah. Again, lots of food for thought and I'm delighted that you talked about the Great War because that's something I like to think about as well. I would also like to invite Vicken Vicken Cittarian to to present with his remarks. Thank you. Thank you very much. So me I will talk about the influence and impact of Turkey on the Karabakh conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan. So it's an ongoing subject if there's a war going on there. It's September 27. And basically we have largely regarded the Karabakh conflict as part of Soviet and post Soviet history, which it is. Karabakh is the result of Soviet policies of defining territories based on ethnic belonging. And on top of this, they gave certain autonomies being part of ethnically defined nations. Karabakh was an autonomous region with its Armenian majority, but placed within Azerbaijan, Soviet Republic. So at the time of the disintegration of the Soviet Union, those tensions had to be resolved one way or another. To not develop on this point, I will look at another dimension of the Karabakh conflict that is largely absent from literature. And I will link it to what Yahya was saying going to the First World War, and to the Armenian genocide. This is a major event taking place in the Middle East within the Ottoman Empire. The event is one of the three in charge of the empire at the time, three who have committed mass deportations and massacres, during which the majority of Ottoman Armenians perished, but also other non Muslim communities, especially the Syrians. So, how can we link this event, which took place in another empire, in another zone? How can we link it with the emergence of the Karabakh conflict? Well, from early on, it was present. That's basically the emergence of the issue, as a political issue, the local Armenians demanded to be detached from Soviet Azerbaijan and attached to Soviet Armenia. And one week later, they were faced by pogroms in a different city in Azerbaijan. And the pogroms were associated with a political language that emerged in Azerbaijan that links the view, the vision of this conflict to the vision present in Turkey at the time, in Turkey of 1980s, a Turkey which had not recognized its crime of genocide, a Turkey which, on the other hand, had developed a denialist discourse. So what I will do now is to show how such an event, a denied and censored for over a century, how it influenced the two actors of the conflict, the Armenians on the one hand and Azerbaijanis on the other hand. So this denialism has also largely shaped Turkey and Turkish political culture and Turkish state institutions and Turkish public opinion, but I will not deal in that here. You know, a lot has been said recently, a lot has been written recently on that, but what we have not taken into consideration is that this largely censored, denied trauma has found its way, in a very strange way, into the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict, into the Karabakh conflict. So to start with the Armenians, for the Armenians, the pogroms in Sumgait and later similar pogroms in Kirovabat, today's Ganja, the second city of Azerbaijan, here later in 1989, and then the pogroms in Baku in January 1990, for them it was a reminder of the threat of annihilation. It was a reminder of the danger that the genocide can be repeated again. So this feeling pushed them into a kind of existential angst and mobilization, seeing the Karabakh struggle as existential struggle, that they had no other choice but to fight Azerbaijan. Otherwise, they were facing threat of extermination. Later, the involvement of Turkey on the side of Azerbaijan, starting from 1992, you might know that Turkey refuses to establish diplomatic links with Armenia. Turkey refuses to open its border with Armenia. So the last portion of the Cold War border, Iron Curtain, still exists. It's the economic blockade that Turkey has imposed in the last three decades on Armenia. Plus Turkey has taken, starting from 1993, political position, completely supporting Azerbaijan and opposing Armenia on the Karabakh question. So Turkey insists on solving this problem from the perspective of Baku. And third element is that Turkey has provided military aid in the past, as well as now, to Azerbaijan. Already in 1992, Turkey bought large quantities of arms left behind by the Soviet army in East Germany and transferred to Azerbaijan in 1992-93. But today we see that Turkey is directly involved in the fighting, Turkish air force is there, Turkey is sending Islamist mercenaries from Syria and from elsewhere, recruiting them and shipping them to Azerbaijan to take part in the conflict. So if we make a comparison with the Arab-Israeli conflict, it's like 100 years after the Shoah, we have still a Germany which is ruled by post-Nazi elite. So we have a continuity between the Nazi party ruling Germany during the war and the party that emerged in post-Second World War Germany, the same people ruling. This post-Nazi elite does not recognize the Holocaust, plus this nationalist German elite joins the Palestinian struggle with an Arab country, let's say, a Basist Syria, by sending the Luftwaffe, but also by recruiting former Nazi fighters. Military recruiting them as mercenaries to ship them to take part in the struggle against Israel in favor of the Palestinians. So my argument is that this kind of situation exists in the Caucasus and this kind of situation is influencing the three actors, Turkey, Armenia and Azerbaijan. For Armenia, it reminds them of the danger of extermination by a neighbor who is there where we have elite continuity between those who perpetrated the genocide and those ruling Turkey today on the level of discourse concerning the genocide. And they are actively supporting Azerbaijan on the question of the Karabakh conflict. Now I will take the second part, how this Turkish participation has shaped Azerbaijani political culture. Now, as I said in the beginning, the Armenian-Azeri conflict has its roots in the Soviet arrangements. So, as well as Armenia, as well as Azerbaijan, they have perspectives to put forward. Azerbaijan emerged defeated in the first war. Azerbaijan has 600,000 internally displaced, has territories it lost in the war, so it has a lot to put forward in its discussions with Armenia. But Azerbaijan also adopted the denialist discourse that Turkey had in the 1980s and started seeing the Armenians as illegitimate, they don't have the right to exist, they don't have the rights to exist on the territory of the Caucasus. Azerbaijani historiography and elite have developed a discourse saying that the Armenians are newcomers. They were brought there by Russian colonialist forces. They are historically an aberration, they don't have the historical right to be there. Plus, they see the Karabakh conflict as an existential struggle between Azerbaijan and Armenia. And by adopting this discourse, Azerbaijan developed a discourse of victimhood where Azeris are the victims of Armenian genocide, so the perpetrators become the Armenians and the victims become the Azerbaijanis. And this policy started in 1998 by a law issued by the ruler of the time, Hedar Aliyev. And after this law, Azerbaijan started a state propaganda representing the Armenians as genocide perpetrators and Azerbaijanis as genocide victims. So there's a law, there's days of commemoration where the Azerbaijani state spends lots of money in propaganda, in doing propaganda in that sense, there are museums to commemorate this and so on. On the other hand, Azerbaijan became one of the most extreme deniers of the Armenian genocide and they have become one of the obstacles in any attempt of dialogue between Armenia and Turkey. For example, in 2008, there was an attempt by the presidents of Armenia, Serge Sarkisyan at the time and the president of Turkey, Abdullah Gül, to try to normalize the relations. It failed and one of the major reasons was radical Azerbaijani opposition seeing any attempt of dialogue between Armenia and Turkey as a betrayal. So to make it short, Azerbaijan has developed a political ideology which denies the existence of the other, denies the existence of the Armenian genocide, but in a very strange way has adopted the same narratives that touches the Armenian genocide, but adopted a negative image of that, presenting Azerbaijani victimhood. Now to conclude, I will say that the Karabakh conflict is one of the most complex conflicts, because it adds an ethno-territorial conflict that we inherited from the Soviet system, from the moment of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Just like the conflict in Aprasia, in Moldova, in Chechnya and so on, but on top of that we added the Armenian-Turkish conflict, the unresolved conflict of the 1915 genocide, its consequences and its denial. So this makes it incredibly complex and very difficult to resolve. Thank you very much. Thank you, Vikin. Thank you to all the speakers for some very stimulating remarks, which I'm going to reflect on. I would just like to remind the audience, though, to start maybe putting together your questions. Your questions can be for any of the speakers individually or collectively, and anything to do with the theme of trauma, history and memory. And as Yaya reminded us, and as I should have reminded us as chair, the wider theme of the festival is decolonisation, and so maybe thinking about how these things relate to that issue. I'm going to say just a few remarks. I don't like always positioning myself biographically, but in this moment I feel the need to respond biographically to some things which are going on. And I mentioned this on Monday, the opening event, which is the curious shape of the culture war in the present day British discourse. I saw somebody showed me that a government minister in parliament had decried critical race theory and had declared that the government is unequivocally against critical race theory. And I was shocked. I'm completely perplexed. I have an article coming out which literally says this is about applying critical race theory to things. So I think this now makes me, however, nicely I tried to play at some kind of enemy of the state. And this is, I mean, we're in such a absurd situation. And this relates to the questions of history and trauma and memory because as the decolonisation debate has kind of unfurled in spaces of education in culture and museums. We see the statues coming down and we see people on the streets and so on. And the response of the state and particularly the government and specifically this government, which is clearly influenced very heavily by the alt-right discourse from America, is this government I think is based on the rejection of trauma. Right, so they see the attempts to decolonise culture and education as an attempt to reintroduce a recognition of historical trauma or to introduce a recognition of historical trauma, where previously there has only been denialism and triumphalism and generally of whitewashing. And it is the trauma or the traumatic question which is constantly rejected. Have you really experienced racism? Is it really a thing? Did people really not like British imperialism and so on? And it's funny because it seems that the populist right at the moment is built on a kind of a jouissance, a kind of enjoyment of life, right? Trump's whole thing is about enjoying himself, putting his fingers up to the elite and he's putting his fingers up to the scientists and so on. And he's going out there and he looks like he's having a good time and Boris is looking like he's having a good time and he's enjoying, you know, teasing his opponents and so on. And the entire construction of the right is about the rejection of the idea that we should be traumatised. And that's clearly very attractive and it has some kind of appeal, right? Even all of the nonsense of Brexit, what people heard was, we are not going to be victims anymore, right? And that's why it's so much that came out of that whole situation. Yet profoundly as you know, as we know from our critical race theorist friends and others that empire is a continuing wound in Britain, right? It is, it is the constitutive integral part of it and just as these triumphalist discourses are pushing forward, the, if you like the victims of England's imperialism are starting to tear away, right? So Scotland is starting to back off and even Northern Ireland, we have questions now about the integrity of the union there. So the very, ironically, the very nature of that triumph is destroying the interconnecting tissue of Britain, perhaps. So that's one set of thoughts. But then I asked myself the question really, because then you have the other thing which is the victimhood. So one of the things that's happening in the rejection of critical race theory is the rejection of the idea of white privilege, right? It's the idea that because white people can be disadvantaged, therefore there's no such thing as white privilege essentially seems to be the argument. And that to call people racist is the bigger insult. Anyway, so these questions lead me to think about how and to what extent can trauma or the rejection of trauma be a basis for a liberationist kind of politics. And I would situate this not just in the questions around Britain, but my own background is as Sri Lankan Tamil obviously Sri Lankan Tamils have endured huge conflict displacement, ethnic cleansing. And, and many have claimed the label genocide for what happened, you know, the mass killing of Tamils in the north. But I've always been uncomfortable with the constant focus on the trauma as the central node in the politics, partly because there's the stratification within, let's say the Tamil community, which means that particular leaders are able to mobilize trauma for particular populations and actually to shut down other pathways. So once you have trauma, can you have dialogue right once you have trauma, can you have resolution is the only end game, a kind of separation is that the only way to deal with trauma. What does it mean. What, how can we envisage a politics which can accept and sit with trauma as a necessary integral part of the historical experience, but which is not defined only and always by traumatic events or particular periods. And I would echo what you said I think it's interesting and you see this a lot in diaspora politics, often diasporas are more radicalized and more traumatized than those who stay, because those who stay are engaging in the kind of means of survival and they need to get by in various kinds of ways. In some respects they're being more, they're being more pragmatic than those who sit afar and are traumatized doubly by the violence but also then by their by their exile. Maybe these thoughts are not useful but I would be interested to hear what the panel had to say. We do have a couple of questions coming through but I'm going to let them collect a bit so maybe I'll come back to our panelists for just a couple of responses either to each other or things that they wanted to add maybe just two or three minutes each and then I will go to the to the audience. So maybe start with Gilbert. That's okay. Thank you. Thank you, Mira. Yeah, well, some few quick, quick comments. On what what you explained, which I found quite interesting. I want to say that in Lebanon, the memory of the famine and all that is there it's in the history and the people know about that. And the memory of Ottoman oppression is very much there that the major square in Beirut is called the Martyr Square. These are martyrs martyred by the Ottomans, not anything else, you know, so this history is very much there. But if it is not for the Palestinians, very much part of the, let's say, active memory, although, of course, historians and all that would know about it. It is because, as you said, they had a much bigger trauma, which was this this uprooting from from their from their land from their country. And that's it. And I think that on this level, we can't if I mean you can't also draw here any, I think comparison with when you say Jews with the overwhelming majority of Israeli Jews were not I mean their ancestors were not in Palestine at the time of the great famine. Okay, so I wonder what proportion of people were. I mean, descend from families which were already there and could have therefore any kind of memory of that. The issue of what we can said, we can, I think the analogy you gave is unfortunate to be frank with you. I mean this analogy with I mean because it doesn't work like this. Armenia and Azerbaijan are not in the relation of Israel and the Palestinians right Israel we are speaking of decolonizing Israel, Israel is a colonial fact is a settler colonial state which is not the case of what you were mentioned actually the as areas see the carabakh as some kind of of attempt at you know at some settler Armenian settler colonialism in their own land. And so that's a different story. And if you want to take the kind of analogy that you had when you had a German state was a post Nazi elite, which was West Germany had a lot of former Nazis in I mean Hannah aren't and all that have very much significant of these issues. And this state, well did not help the Palestinian but it had the designers movement have the Israel actually can point to a very interesting book that came out recently by a source alumni it's based on that so as PhD thesis which is called white washing and state building on a German Israeli relations. So I think that you should handle analogies with with more care and because here this one I think is not is not fortunate otherwise, of course, everything you said was very interesting. And finally, I should say that mirror it's quite good that you you spoke because being bringing the British issue in this discussion was absolutely crucial and not only through history balfour or colonial mandate in Palestine but also what's going on which is very much related. I mean this this denial denial of the colonial legacy this this this willingness which you see at various level including the way the government that was under Theresa May celebrated the hundreds anniversary of the balfour declaration for instance without any regard to the victims in that in that conflict. So that's very much that but on the key question that you you you mentioned on trauma and referring to your own experience of Sri Lanka with which I happen to be quite familiar actually I think that for like any traumas. There is no way to suppress the trauma unless you acknowledge it. That's like in psychoanalysis or whatever you can't suppress it by denying it and that's the problem that's that's that's why denial is at the core of everything we are discussing. You know, and that's why I try to explain in my book on the Arabs and the Holocaust that the condition for any real dialogue leading to a real peace is a mutual recognition of each other's trauma. Okay, now, even though the Palestinians were not at all perpetrators in the in the Holocaust, the the the acknowledgement of what it means for those of the Israelis who. And many of them who are survivors or descendant of survivors is very important to establish a dialogue. But more crucial even from that is the recognition on the Israeli side of the historical injustice and the ongoing oppression of the Palestinians that's the key point so without this mutual recognition. And the end of the night denied by the Israeli state of the network. In particular, then there is no possible peace in my view. Thank you. I'd like to bring in Jayena. Okay, so I'll answer to she bears comments and also my comments. So you of course, right that most Israelis. Their families came after 48 and so forth. So there's not family or the family relation to anyone that was in Palestine 1970 is is is the limited. But if you look at the way that's the 1929 events are commemorated in Israel. And again, there's no family relations, but it is understood as part of the nation's history and the sense that it's kind of a, you know, and that and that kind of connection is made. It's not made towards the people I discussed, which is a decade earlier. So it is an imagined connection in many ways. I mean, in that sense, but you know, you could, you could think of Israel Palestine in which these people are commemorated. Okay, because it's a question of who you choose for your national narrative. I'm very much welcome. I think that she's best work in general and specifically the kind of thinking through these connections because I think as you've been said I mean there's, you could say well why do we need this right I mean why when we say you talk about West Bank colonization. Why do we need to even mention the you know the Holocaust or anything like that. We're talking the language of international law right people say don't single out is well okay not we don't we just use the language of international law and not discuss it. I think so it can work to the extent but I think on some level it cannot work I mean I think it is so fun foundational. There are also Israel's relations with the Jewish diaspora and the Jewish diaspora as a racialized minorities around the world that is very much, you know, produced and impacted by the Holocaust. And therefore if you want to take it seriously if you want to analyze it seriously need to take the Holocaust into the account. And I think that's important. One thing that you best said that you know what it's important because of course there is historical connection and 48 times three years after 45. And we can doubt whether without for second world war there would be Israeli state and so forth. But it's also worth mentioning that without the conditions that produced the Holocaust which is at least in part the antisemitism in Europe there would be no Zionism the force. So even if we go backwards and say Zionism starts in 1880s. Yes, but this is it starts exactly because of European antisemitism. So that's why you cannot really take antisemitism out of the account it produces this situation constantly. And the last thing I would say is that it's true. And again we are not comparing the two traumas I think it's a very good or the different traumas are all in their account. But I think it's true that a you know the Holocaust as an event of state Nazi violence ends in 45. And that is, you know, important to say, while if we talk about Palestinian situation and Palestinian experience of displacement is continuous and and repression and so forth. That sense I accept that. But I would also say that these historical traumas, even when they end they do not really. So they continue to work they continue to reverberate in this case the absence of Jews in Europe, in much of Europe. It continues to be a force that actually continues to condition relations. We don't have state violence as such but we don't have necessary state recognition in some states in Eastern Europe. And we have events like, you know, cemeteries being vandalized. And that is, that is, you know, this is a statement that you're dead will not be safe. It's not that we have killed we have killed you but you're dead even will not be safe in this continent, which is something that continues. It's a haunting experience. Now it's not unique I think to the Holocaust in many cases traumas, even after the situation stabilizes and so forth and there is some kind of resolution these things remain as a wound as a scar. And it's something and specifically in Israel person I do think it continues to work in various ways and we should be aware of that. And I'll just maybe one more thing. And about the Armenian genocide and the way it works in Jerusalem and this is something that Armenian ceramic art is very popular in Jerusalem, very popular among Israelis and Jews and the Palestinians. It's a fantastic book by Satu Mualian, but only when I read this book I understood that this is an art of genocide. It's very existence in Jerusalem is the product of the Armenian genocide it wouldn't be there on that scale if it wasn't so it's a very sad and beautiful and I think this is to see how the Armenian genocide shaped our landscape I think is in Israel person is also interesting to think about it. And. Thank you. Yeah, yeah, Vicken please feel free to pick up on any of the comments or the issues raised. Thank you Gilbert. It was an analogy I didn't mean to to make parallelism between two very complex histories. What I what I wanted to underline is that on a ethno-territorial conflict in the Caucasus where two sides had issues to discuss with each other after the ceasefire of 94. The addition of this denialist genocidal vision from the side of Azerbaijan has exacerbated this this conflict and made the possibility of debate impossible. I cannot go to the others. Concerning to what you just mentioned about the ceramics who are families who came from Kutahya in Turkey, dynasties for generations they were working in the story. I want to say that the history of the Armenian genocide has been for long censored, not just by the state of Turkey only, but also on the level of academia but also on the level of history of the Middle East. For me, I think the history of the Middle East, modern history of the Middle East, post-Ottoman history of the Middle East will be enriched a lot if we include this experience in our consideration of historical narrative. There's a number of issues that we haven't addressed and is, you know, the roots goes back to the moment of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the mass violence, the state exercise on its population and so on. And now, trauma and dialogue. Yes, it's possible. But the precondition, as Gilbert said, is that the perpetrator recognizes. In the case of the Armenian genocide, the perpetrator for 100 years and plus tried first to censor to take out any mention of not only the mass violence, but any mention of the victims. After being exterminated physically, they were excluded from geography, from history, from culture, from public discussion. And the last point I want to make is that this is the case of Turkey. This has conditioned Turkish history. We often have mass violence, mass murder and denial, but history will keep remembering and history is remembering in a very strange way by the emergence of this issue in the form of the Karabakh conflict. I am convinced that the Karabakh conflict could have been resolved through discussions, through negotiations, through dialogue, but adding the very heavy, very intense history of denial of the mass violence of 1915 is making any dialogue impossible today. Thank you. Yeah, I mean, I think it's, it's interesting because it's one of the things that I think outsiders can't understand. And so when you get these efforts to mediate conflict and you get these people trotting down from the UN or from Oslo or wherever the negotiators come from. And just being really unable to understand how and why things become non-negotiable. So things like trauma, things like the recognition of a historical event, which is on one level in the past, become absolute non-negotiables in these situations. And it's one of those questions, things that makes things intractable. Anyway, so I won't dwell on that. What I would like to do now is, I'll maybe say a few words, but we will go to the audience. What I'm going to do in terms of the chat, so we've got a few questions in the Q&A. There have also been some questions here in the chat box. I'm not really sure who can and can't see the chat box. So I'm going to ask. So I'm going to read out some of the questions from the chat box. We'll take them in batches. So if you still want to ask questions you can do. But I'll take them in a few batches and hopefully the audience will forgive me that I will summarize some of the questions in the chat box. So we've gone, I think, quite a straightforward question from Khadija saying, if this is a discussion on history memory and trauma under decolonization, why is it only the Middle East and Eastern Europe, Asia, Asia, and essentially not the other regions, Africa or India, Pakistan. So a question from Manuel in the chat box, noting that 800,000 Jews were expelled from the Arab states and now they are the majority in Israel. And so the dispossession of the Mizrahi Jews being one of the traumas that shapes the Jewish population in Israel. The third question I'll take for now is the question on transitional justice as a means for processing trauma and reaching some kind of justice or reconciliation. What role can formal justice mechanisms or formal transitional justice mechanisms play, whether they fall short, and can these tools be imposed by outside actors. Often they are imposed by outside actors, can they be decolonized, right. So three things there, the geographical focus, the trauma of the Mizrahi Jews and this question about transitional justice. I think I might start by saying a few words about transitional justice mechanisms and this is a huge area which I've spent some time thinking about in the context of Mozambique so Mozambique is interesting. If you think African conflicts that were sort of ending in the early 90s. Lynn Grable put a little article together called pardon punish amnesia and it was looking at Mozambique, Rwanda and South Africa all had been through traumatic war violence and the fall of apartheid. So the South Africa shows a sort of truth and reconciliation commission approach in Rwanda you had a lot of trials national trials international trials and then the local kind of good chapter courts. And in Mozambique you had nothing right you had an amnesty law and public amnesia about everything that had happened in the war, even though a million people had died and more had been displaced. What was interesting is about that is that I think on one level they will work to an on one level they all didn't work in Mozambique you actually had a kind of piece that held between the warring parties for 1520 years or more. And which only broke down where the failure of the elites to kind of share the spoils of the state kind of worked out at a public level though it's not clear that the people wanted to remember the war, but because to remember the war was to invite it back in to their lives actually people had ceremonies where they sort of removed the war from the community by by purifying community afterwards. And it's a very different approach to the idea that we have to talk things through to to resolve them. What is the effect of that it's unclear whether there has been any negative effect of it. I mean I'm sure people who have suffered from the war personally suffered PTSD and all the rest of it but as the body politics suffered by failing to reckon with the war in a big public way. I find it difficult to say that it has, I think on one level in Mozambique at least with this case that I'm familiar with the the desire for the war to be over, not just in a sort of physical sense but also in a mental sense of the desire for the war to be over was so strong that the amnesia was sort of a relief in a way. South Africa in Rwanda I mean these are longer stories to tell which I won't tell now but there's at least been some evidence that in Rwanda, you know the the meeting out of punishment whilst necessary has also been heavily kind of politicized, and is leading to kind of suppression of the opposition now. South Africa. Yes, we have success on one level, but also the rejection of a lot of that settlement in the present. So anyway, and hopefully that's some some answer to to Claire's question. I'll come back to Gilbert and the other panelists for responses on the other two points, or maybe I'll just say that sorry the geographical thing is. I think this is just the people that we had to speak to areas that they were knowledgeable about but I think in general we would recognize that these dynamics cross continents and borders, and in the metropolis as well as well. Yeah, I mean this this issue of the Mizrahi Jews, or let's put it more clearly the Jews from Arab countries. This is a very classical argument when you discuss this this issue, except that it belongs to the same logic. That would explain or justify the Israeli state and the Zionist project by Nazism and what the Nazis did to the Jews, because otherwise, then you are basing it on some racial view that because you have Arab states then the Palestinians bear a responsibility in what the Arab states do, even though they don't bear no responsibility in what Germans do. No, it doesn't work like this, even if all Arab Jews had been expelled after and that by the way would have happened after 1948 after the creation of state of Israel, even if that this is no justification to what happened to the Palestinians, and the Palestinians have no responsibility in what any Arab state do that's number one. Number two is that the major instance of expulsion of Jews from Arab country is that of Iraq that was done by a government closely linked to Britain. And then that was done with the complicity of the Israeli state and the great happiness of the Zionist movement. And that's why Iraqi Jews resent this exodus that they suffered, and they were not happy at all with finding themselves in Israel. For the rest, Moroccan Jews were not expelled. Yemeni Jews were not expelled. You know, the story of presenting all Arab Jews that went into Israel as expelled is not true, including my own country in Lebanon. At school I had a lot of Jewish classmates, you know, I mean, of course, I'm speaking of a time that changed after 1967, and that after that you had an exodus and the vast majority didn't go to Israel, they went to Canada, they went to to North America. And that's the case actually with the overwhelming majority of European Jews, when if they had the choice they would have the overwhelming majority of them went anyhow to North America, but even those who ended up in Palestine would have chosen to do that. And just a final point just to, so that we can, or maybe also Yair recommend, actually the Israeli, the Zionist institution, I'm not speaking of all Israelis, of course, and especially not Yair here, but the Zionist institution actually practiced the denial of other genocides like the Armenian. I mean, the Israeli state had very close connection with the Turkish state and still has, and in Azerbaijan, the major source of armament of Azerbaijan is Israel. So it is actually complicit in, you know, in helping the denial side in this conflict. And this is also something that you know should be reflected upon. Thank you very much, Yair. I'll just say that on the, on the regional issue, I mean, I think I wish we did have also from the subcontinent, or from Africa, it would be really, really interesting. Sometimes we discuss this thing separately. And we have to be attentive to context, but also a lot of times there's shared colonial logic. So I think, for example, it is important to discuss partition in Israel, Palestine and India, Pakistan together. These are very different contexts, but for British colonial officials that kind of navigate these situations. They don't understand the differences or they don't see the differences and they recommend similar policies, which result in similar results to some degree. So it doesn't, it's not to equate them, but I think there are connections, I mean, especially when I think of partition in India, Pakistan and in Palestine, which happened more or less in the same time. We cannot really. So it is productive and it is, of course, productive to think about differences. That's one thing. I mean, transitional, transition justice, I think in Israel, Palestine, we are very far from that point where we can, when we can talk in these terms. But I think though the infrastructure is there in the sense of in terms of knowledge and in terms of academic work and so forth. And I would say that if we get to the different political environment, then things may be easier than we think. But it's not that people are ignorant. I mean people or people sometimes say things that they know better. But you know, you are in a hit of the situation and you are locked in that situation and especially in the moment where it's not clear what the political horizons are. I think it's difficult, but and it's difficult to speak in these terms. Now, on the question of misogynist, I would just say that we have to, we can go into this histories and narratives and so forth. We have to recognize it for the vast majority of them that ended up in Israel. This is not a, this was never a pure choice. Some of them were more kind of willing to do it and some of them at all not. But it was not a, you know, it was not a pure choice over someone that wakes up in the morning and ends up in the state. And that produces trauma also for these communities. And I think we can. And I think that this has to be taken, you know, into consideration, not in a simple equation, but in recognizing that on the Israeli Jewish side, practically every most of the population ended up in Israel, not out of pure choice. Let's put it this way, which is also to some degree intention with designers now, of course, that is about a choice, that decision. And I think part of, and part of the problem is, I mean, was mentioned that they make up most of the population in Israel. The reality is that we cannot say this for sure. And because the Israeli sensors and statistics refuse to take this, refuse to collect this information for third generation, because these things are actually quite sensitive in Israeli society. Because, you know, these high, there's hierarchies within Israeli societies that, you know, continue to be operative in the case of Mizrahi versus Ashkenazi Jews. And that's, so, in a way, I think it's, we would be better in a situation where these things are discussed openly in Israel and the state would actually take responsibility for its role in marginalizing these communities as well. Thank you. And Bikin. Yes, to pick up what Gilbert said about Israel and the current conflict in Karabakh, Israel indeed is a player in the conflict militarily. Because Israel is one of the major sources of armament for Azerbaijan. Some Israeli reports revealed that last year Azerbaijan imported 61% of its total arms imports from Israel. And, and these include very sophisticated drones surface to surface missiles and so on. But this could also link to to the other question, which is genocide recognition trauma. And indeed Israel is from this perspective from the perspective of the Armenian genocide, it's a denialist state. Israel rejects the idea that apart from the Holocaust, there's any other comparable comparable event that can be qualified as genocide under the UN's definition of genocide. So Israel has rejected this terminology and resists the idea of equating or in any way, a legal way or doing historical comparisons between these two experiences. And I wonder whether there's any link between denialism of the of the genocide and the active military cooperation with Azerbaijan. I want to talk about transitional justice in the context of the Armenian genocide issue. And indeed, in the last decade, during moments when Turkish politics was moving towards more liberal positions. There was no an opening within Turkey. And for the first time, 80 years after the genocide. They were the first debates the first books published 90 years after the genocide there was the first academic conference in Istanbul, where the term genocide was used. And, and yes, this dialogue is possible. And this dialogue is is not just a service that a community belonging to the perpetrators does to the, to the others. But this is a service that they do for their own community. I will take the other argument why denialism is still important for Turkey. What does it mean for the Turkish state to deny the Armenian genocide. The Armenians are not there anymore. They practically don't exist, apart from a very small minority in Istanbul. Well the state denies because the state is saying, I did it in the past. I don't assume responsibility, and I'm ready to do it again. And minorities in Turkey. When you talk to the Kurds in Turkey. They recognize this very well and the intellectuals the political forces that are struggling for recognition. They are struggling not just for any kind of historical luxury, but as a way to defend themselves by having a society where crime is recognized as a crime as a first step to stop it from repeating in the future. Thank you, Viken. Yeah, lots of food for thought there. One thing which I'm thinking about as you're all speaking is, is about the symbolic nature of acknowledgement and recognition versus what we might think of as more material reparations and which of these things might matter more in the context of moving forward. You know, is it more important to recognize say the Armenian genocide, and you know have it historically recorded, or is you know the reparation of money or land or whatever to the Armenians, the key thing. I mean, so I'm just going to leave that question floating there I'll pull in a few more from the audience. I was asked, do you think a gendered approach should be integral to the reconstruction of memory and and what would gender bring to us I think that's one really fascinating question to open up. We have a couple of maybe more factual questions, which are one I would invite you to answer in the in text about the factual details of the Jerusalem executions and whether this comes up in the book. And one from Daniel asking about what is Iran's position in relation to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. Does it influence it. Does it recognize the genocide and so on. And two more questions which I'll throw out to the panel. One is to Yair to say, when we talk about decolonization and shifting focus to the local perspective, I guess how do we deal with the people who have been displaced or migrated. They are no longer local in that, in that sense. And one, I suppose is about the question of political dislike of religion, driving war. I guess to what extent is religious hatred driving war from. Okay. Does anyone want to tackle the question of gender and the reconstruction of memory. Okay, sure. Go ahead. No, we can you wanted to say something. Very quickly. The, of course, there is a huge deficit in approaching issues from the gender perspective. All these conflicts that we are discussing the amount of attention paid to this, the gender dimension has been relatively limited, although it's not completely absent of course, because in the description of traumas and all that. This is taken into account when you discuss refugees you are also you have the I mean it's also very much a gender issue that speaking of refugees, especially when you have refugees after a genocide where where males have been slaughtered and so that gives it in itself also a gender dimension. But this is, I would say I mean I can't I don't see that in impacting the topic itself, except from the point of view of of maybe. I mean the role of of women in in these instances is is crucial because they mean they tend to, to be better at establishing real dialogue and moving towards the issues that we mentioned recognition and the rest. And then mails, I mean speaking in general terms, and so. I mean that's what I can say in a very few words about this, this issue, but indeed, as in many, many aspects we are very much lagging behind and this the gender perspective is being constructed from from relatively recent period in history, and that should definitely carry on. Thank you. I mean I think maybe I would just add to that that one of the interesting gender dynamics that maybe makes a number of these conflicts intractable is the gendered character of the nation and often when there has been either symbolic or actual sexual violence in conflict. This makes, well this is, you know, this is a trauma squared, right, so it is not just a violence it's not just the termination of life but in some sense, it's absolute degradation it's absolute a basement. So, when we try to think about how would we work through a situation of, you know, damage and innocence and victimhood and so on. Once you bring in sexual violence it raises the, you know, the stakes are raised so highly because of the place of patriarchy and understanding how, how the integrity of the person is to be maintained and therefore the integrity of the nation. So, these things become very difficult. It is interesting that not all conflicts have the same kinds and varieties of sexual violence, like some conflicts have, it's incredibly widespread it becomes kind of weaponized and you strategically and others it plays very little role at all and I think in them. There's a wide literature I'd really recommend and spike Peterson's work on the gendered economies of war and how the symbolic the productive and the reproductive orders of war are all kind of heavily gendered. And I think that gives some insight into how the mechanics of war and peacemaking themselves are are inflected by it. Just to add an illustration of what I was saying about the role of women in peacemaking and all that. We see it in the formations of you know like women in black mothers and all that. So this is, I mean, this is a dimension I think it's very, this dimension is very important in peacemaking and the more the role of women is I mean the higher their input is the more you can have some progress towards conflict resolution. I think this is quite quite important this time I mean we we we think when we think of gender we think of the the the trauma the tragedy and all that, but we have also to think of the gender perspective in conflict resolution that's I think quite quite important. Yeah, thank you. I mean this is a really interesting big topic, but one of the one of the key issues I suppose that comes out again when looking at the role of women in war and post war conflicts is because women are so often involved in the sort of daily acts of social, the production of food, the care of children and the vulnerable and so on. It requires women to insert themselves into society in a kind of different way right to play a different role to make different kinds of connections. And so there's a there's a lot of feminist peace theory which tries to use, if you like the intimacy of the roles that women play as a basis for peacemaking or alternative memory making and so on. I'll move now to Yahya Viken. Yeah. Yahya. I just say about a gender I mean I think it's it's these things work in a kind of subconscious way right so, and that's why I think it's important to, you know, to be aware of it and also to forth. For example, I talked about World War One trauma, and I gave a specific case of it. So I talked about conscription of males. And I talk gave an example of five men that were hanged. I, and I had 10 minutes and that kind of the things that came out to me. And I was making a list. But I could have also spoken about prostitution, widely practicing Jerusalem during the war year, at least partly driven by the situation of women and, and, and, and being a difficult circumstances. And I talked about the people that were executed, but I could have mentioned at least one film one mother, and that's of one of these soldiers committed suicide insist that try to commit suicide. So these things that I think if a woman was telling the story would probably maybe look at different things and that's why I think it's important. First to be aware of these things and second I think we all, we can see that the things we pick are sometimes subconscious about experiences that are more relatable to us because of gender or ethnicity and so forth. I'm just saying that there was a question of what does it mean in terms of, you know, what I said about about shifting the perspective to local people. And this is, for example, if we're talking about refugees, then we start with refugee experiences we don't start with the UN officials that's tried to kind of manage the situation we don't start with the politicians that are kind of again managing which we start with people's own experience I think that's the kind of. That's the kind of insight that I was trying to communicate for me as a story when I talk about 1917 is, I think it's particularly important because the temptation is so strong to shift the perspective to the imperial perspective. And by this we are raising the people on the ground that had their own ambitions, plans, horizons, hopes, and by deleting them from from the discussion, we make them passive, you know, spectators of history and that is a colonial colonial perspective by definition and that's what I was trying to communicate of course when refugees are continued to be part of the picture but and I think it's important to give to listen to their voice and listen to their agency within specifically in Israel person but also in the context. We can compare dimension. I think the gender dimension in the case of the Armenian genocide can be compared to to the Yazidi experience with Daesh men executed women enslaved hundreds of thousands of women, young girls, also boys were kidnapped. They were exploited sexually adopted in families and then their memory was censored. Many, many, probably several million today in Turkey have ancestry very often it's a grandmother. Often this grandmother was kidnapped before becoming part of the family. And only in the last 10 15 years this issue emerged in Turkey. The first book being that of Fethiye Chetin, the lawyer, the human rights militant who wrote a book about her grandmother, the title is my grandmother that kind of narrates the story where she discovered the history, very tragic history of her grandmother. So yes, the gender dimension in the events is very strongly there and probably part of it echoes in the Yazidi experience. Recognition or reparation in the case of Armenian genocide. I think for the Armenians recognition is primordial. It's, it's the, it's the most important. The rest is just details. It's not important because by recognition. In Armenia, we've received the guarantee that Turkey will not threaten Armenia anymore. Armenian Armenians. So these days the Armenian community in Istanbul, they are harassed regularly, regularly, and they fear for their safety. So for Armenians, recognition would mean that Turkey recognizes that in the past it committed a crime against Armenians and will not commit similar violence again. So it's a security guarantee. And I think for minorities in Turkey, it has the same sense. Now about Iran and the conflict in Karabakh, I think Iran is in a very difficult situation. Iran is very unhappy to see an NATO army being established on its northern borders, the presence of Turkish military aviation generals in Azerbaijan today. Iran is very worried about Israeli military presence in Azerbaijan. And Iran is very worried to see, you know, Islamist, Sunni, Jihadi elements now being deployed in Azerbaijan. But at the same time, Iran, for Iran, the events are very delicate. The Iranian regime is not very popular these days in Iran. Probably you have noticed that. And Iran has a very large Azeri-speaking ethnic community in northwest Iran. And there has been at least twice demonstrations in Tabriz and other cities in the north of Iran in favor of Azerbaijan. So on the one hand, Iran is not happy with the military and geopolitical developments. On the other hand, Iran is very careful with the events in the Caucasus. Thank you. It's very comprehensive. And yeah, maybe you can answer the question about the executions in the Q&A box. I don't know if you can see that. Okay, so we're coming towards the end of our session. And I think we've managed to deal with most of the questions. So I think I will ask our panelists if they want to say anything to wrap up on this broader question of history, trauma, memory. I mean, these are massive issues. And I think we've just managed to unpick a little in a few cases of how these things operate and how they shape the political present. And so maybe I will start with Viken to just say a couple of words if you would like by way to give the audience something to take home. Yes, I think when we debate mass trauma, mass violence, genocide in the past, very often we talk about the communities that suffered, the victimized communities. Which is important, but I think we should also pay attention to what is happening on the other level, what is happening to states, state institutions, institutional memory. And I think this is extremely important because we see that when we have states and institutions that took part in mass violence. And when after those events, they do not draw a clear line between the past experience and the present states keep the memory of mass violence. And they keep it as sometimes positive memory as an as instruments to kids to be used when they are confronted with with other conflicts and tend to reuse mass violence. And I think the struggle to debate and to raise these issues is not just a struggle to defend past victims. It is struggle to defend and to stop future perpetration of mass violence is a struggle to defend the future from states that might be still remembering the past violence and even considering it as a heroic act, you know, celebrating mass violence. I think we should also shift the focus and the debate towards how perpetrators, especially states and other forms of institutions keep this memory and continue this experience. Yeah, yeah. Mike. Okay, I still can't hear you. I'll turn to Jill Ben and then I'll come back. I'll just say that the things we talked about what 20th century traumas and related to state violence in general applied against categories of people. And I think there is a question of, you know, how they continue to reverberate but there's also a question of the kind of violence that we can see today and could see today. So in that sense, I think we have to be thinking about not just about the past, and how the past plays out, but, you know, the kind of challenges of the moment and the future, especially when with the rise of hard rights kind of quasi fascist fascism all over the world and the kind of environmental catastrophe that is often coupled with ethnic cleansing of indigenous populations and so on. So that is these things that have also wider origins. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah, thank you. Well, to to to for my final words I just addressed the question that remained unrest about religion and war. Right. And, yeah, I mean, I think that explaining wars by religion and by religious hatred is doesn't explain anything because actually if you look at history you will find that the periods of of clash between religions are much fewer than and much shorter than the periods of coexistence or peaceful coexistence between religions. So the, like, just to give you an example, for instance, you have a tendency which is very orientalist and simplistic in the media and even some maybe some in the academia to explain what's going on in the Middle East now as a clash between Sunnis and Shia, and you will have articles starting 1000 years ago or 1500 years ago to explain what's going on but that doesn't make sense. This is not what it is about. The issue is that religions at some point is used as one of the vehicle one of the ideological tools in which certain type of conflict of interest can be expressed. And that's what we have always to do to look beyond the religious what are I mean to look to the uses of religion. That's the key point how religion is used is not religion per se, it's how it is used, and therefore how it is used is a matter of the kind of interest that are served by the kind of use that we are dealing with. Thank you Gilbert. Thank you very much to all of our panelists and to the festival organizers for putting together this brilliant event and particularly to Vic and for joining us from Geneva. It's been a real pleasure. What I take away from this is, yes the profound, profoundly complex character of trauma and history and memory but I think I would also want to emphasize that we need to be a little bit critical about trauma as well and trauma politics as a mode of kind of conducting political dialogue. I don't know what it gives us the opportunity to do but what kinds of things it, it shuts down. And particularly if we're thinking about movements that are pushing against the elite or you know, against existing power structures in some ways. I think trauma can be very powerful up to a point but then it can also box people in in a very But thank you all. Thank you very much to the attendees for your participation and to all of the speakers. And I look forward to seeing you at more of the events in this festival ideas. Thank you everybody. And thank you Mira. Thank you for moderating. And thank you all, all the best. Bye bye.