Enmity is defined politically before it is acted upon violently

Evidence

The question of the enemy emerges and recurs here as the history of political identities, as the history, perhaps, of the political. How, for example, did it become possible in this particular case “not only to set a group apart as an enemy, but also to exterminate it with an easy conscience” (13)? And how did the killings in Rwanda “remain directed in the main at those identified as the political enemy, not the class enemy” (194)? What were the conditions that brought about a “truly disturbing aspect of the genocide,” namely, that “the definition of the enemy appeared credible to many ordinary Hutu” (202)? What is the history that led to the emergence of an “internal enemy,” an enemy who was quickly turned into an outsider to be fought with, expelled, and later exterminated? — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 51

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the ‘enemy’ as a historically variable political identity requiring prior definition before elimination.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how the history of the enemy-as-political-identity maps onto the Jew/Arab pair specifically.