The Genocide in Gaza and Its Consequences for the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

This text is Étienne Balibar’s memorandum for a conference that took place in Johannesburg September 18–20, 2024, organized by the New South Institute as part of the series “African Global Dialogue,” with the title “Narrative Conditions Towards Peace in the Middle East.” It originally appeared in Philosophy World Democracy.

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Prefatory Note

During September 18–20 of 2024, a conference will take place in Johannesburg, organized by the New South Institute as part of the series “African Global Dialogue” with the title “Narrative Conditions Towards Peace in the Middle East.” In early May of this year, I received an invitation to take part in the conference from the Director of the Institute, Ivor Chipkin, in the following terms:1

The physical assault on Israel on 7 October has been accompanied by an ideological assault on the fundamental legitimacy of Israel as a state. Public discourse has been radicalised, undermining nuance and complexity and, in turn, the search for constructive approaches to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Many opponents of Israel, and its military operation in Gaza, are unwilling to unequivocally condemn Hamas, and the brutal atrocities it committed. Many Israelis, and indeed Jews outside Israel, including those who are deeply critical of the current Israeli government, feel that they have no space to be heard in the public domain—unless they are willing to reject the very right of the Jewish state to exist. As the war against Hamas continues, with increasingly catastrophic consequences for Palestinian civilians, so does the polarisation of the public discourse—which hinders attempts to break out of the zero-sum logic of conflict and destruction.

Between 18th and 20th September 2024, the New South Institute will host a series of dialogues on the Middle East in the global order, settler colonialism, Zionism and anti-Zionism, international law, feminism and rape in war, and on peace initiatives, with a view to considering: what kinds of narratives, grounded in evidence and history, might be available to renew the possibilities for more peaceful ways forward, even in these unpromising conditions?

Addressing these questions from South Africa carries a special significance, given the centrality of the country to contemporary claims about Israel as an Apartheid state, or an instance of settler colonialism. The South African government, moreover, through its recent application to the International Court of Justice has sought to position itself at the centre of a global Palestinian solidarity network.

In addition to yourself, we are sending invitations to a diverse group of leading scholars and experts, including: Felwine Sarr (Philosopher, Dakar, Senegal), Adebayo Olukoshi (Political Scientist, Wits/ CODESRIA), Mark B. Smith (University of Cambridge), Chile Eboe-Osuji (Nigerian, former President of the International Criminal Court 2018–2021), Philippe Sands (Director, Centre on International Courts and Tribunals, University of London), Yuval Shani (International Law, Hebrew University), Eva Illouz (Philosopher, Hebrew University and Science-Po), Mark Mazower (Historian, Columbia University), Selim Deringil (Bogaziçi University), Abdel Monem Said Aly (Director of the Regional Center for Strategic Studies, Cairo), Salaam Fayad (Former Prime Minister, Palestinian Authority), Fania Oz Salzberger (Historian, University of Haifa), Radmila Nakarada (Former Head of the Yugoslavia Truth and Reconciliation Commission), David Grossman (Novelist) and many others.

I was in sharp disagreement with the above presentation of the situation as well as the appreciation of the dominant opinions about the current war and its consequences for the “resolution” of the conflict in historic Palestine, which I perceived as oriented towards a justification of the Israeli standpoint (even if avoiding an explicit support of the Netanyahu government) and dramatically lacking a presentation of the Palestinian view of the situation. However, I agreed (from very far away) with the idea that South Africa is a privileged place from which to address the question, both because of its history and its recent decisive role in summoning the International Court of Justice to declare an “imminent danger of genocide” in Gaza and calling on the Israeli Defense Force to refrain from pursuing its operations (which, as we know, was never done). And, given the quality of the potential participants of the conference, I thought that I should not back from presenting my own views to counter the prevailing view implied by the proposed framework. Accordingly, I confirmed my participation and started to think about how I would build an argument.

It was on September 11, 2024 (one week before the opening of the Conference) that I first received emails from friends, colleagues, and comrades whose judgment I greatly value, who informed me with details and support that the coming conference had been severely criticized and objected to by the South African BDS branch, which denounced it as a piece of Zionist propaganda, aiming at “whitewashing the genocide” and delegitimizing the South African case before the International Court of Justice, undermining its role in supporting the rights of the Palestinian people on the world stage—all accusations which, given these friends’ personality and my long-term commitment to this “universal cause” (as I wrote once), I could not take lightly. My friends urged me, directly or indirectly, to reconsider my acceptance to speak at the conference, following the example of several respected intellectuals who had decided to cancel their participation, sometimes claiming to having been misled about its objectives. In the next days, while receiving new advice to the same effect, I could also read the full text of the statement by BDS (also backed by several other organizations, including South African Jews for Palestine).2 And I could see that the list of participants was very different from what I had anticipated (including now in particular one Israeli academic who is well-known for vocally advocating the expulsion of Palestinians from their land, “finishing the job” that had been left incomplete by the Naqba, and more recently supporting the idea that the IDF has a duty to “eliminate” Hamas from Gaza regardless of the civilian toll). This perhaps should have convinced me to withdraw from the conference, following the example of my colleagues and the demands that I received. Why did I not do it? Essentially for three reasons: 1) I did not find in the program or the “speakers notes” of the conference an explicit “whitewashing” of the genocide (which I completely agree is taking place in Gaza), or it was there only by contextual implication (which is not the same in terms of intellectual compromise); 2) although I resolutely back the motto launched by BDS of boycotting Israeli institutions (especially if they contribute to the colonization and the war on Palestine, but it’s very difficult to find ones which don’t) as an effective strategy against colonial and racial oppression (as it was in South Africa, despite the historical differences), I never agreed with the idea that discussions (however polemical or uneasy) with individuals on the other side ought to be interdicted (provided they are not manipulated; that is, of course, the problem); 3) I thought that I could not honorably avoid the confrontation for which I had prepared myself just hours before it took place, unless I could provide evidence that I was misled (which was not the case). I decided that the right attitude (which may be the wrong attitude …) was to attend the conference (by Zoom), read my “memorandum” (I received the guarantee that I would not be interrupted), and publish it with an independent journal as quickly as possible, so that I can be judged not only on a symbolic decision, but on the basis of the content of my position (which I have no doubts can also raise objections from different sides).

I am immensely grateful to Philosophy World Democracy for accepting to publish my “memorandum” as if it were an “article,” with the insertion of a prefatory note. I hope that my argument can be read (and evaluated) both in its content and in relation to the above described context, which itself is part of a major debate in this dramatic moment.

Memorandum

In this memorandum, I express the positions that I intend to defend in our Dialogue in a very direct manner, which obviously should receive nuances. Hopefully the discussion will make room for that.

I need three preliminaries:

First, I must say that I am deeply pessimistic about the situation in “historic Palestine.” In the statement that I issued on October 21 of last year, I asserted that the combination of the murderous attack of Hamas and the exterminationist war of retaliation launched by Israel against Gaza prepared for a destruction of Palestine as a people and a land. Palestine à la mort.3 This is even clearer today, after months of massacres whose genocidal character is manifest. Add the responsibility of the states which, despite repeated calls from the UN’s Secretary General, actively or passively support the Israeli war. This is true for the US, which delivers the bombs for the annihilation of Gaza and vetoes the resolutions against the continuation of the war, but also for the Gulf states, and for Europe. However, the Palestinian people have demonstrated in the past extraordinary capacities to survive and fight for their rights. Pessimism should not deter us from trying the impossible, which is also a duty.

Second, I speak here as an intellectual, a socialist, and a Jew (among other things, since I don’t believe in exclusive identities), because Israel claims to be a “place of refuge” for all Jews of the world threatened by the continuation of anti-Semitism, and this would justify that it uses every means to “defend” itself. The grandson of a victim of the gas chambers myself, I find it unbearable that the memory of the Holocaust is instrumentalized to justify colonization, apartheid, oppression, extermination, in the name of the defense of the ”Jewish People.” Admittedly, this means that I am not “unbiased” in this debate. But tell me who is?

Third, I grieve every human victim on every side of the conflict, even those who could be said to bear a collective responsibility in their fate. This holds for the past and the present, but also for the future, because I believe that the catastrophes generated by this war will continue and threaten everyone in the region. There will be more “innocent” and “not so innocent” victims. Their deeds are not equivalent, but their deaths belong to the same tragedy.

Now, summarily, my positions on three points of debate:

First, about what happened on October 7 and after. Hamas’s assault on Israeli villages, fortifications, a music festival, etc., involving killings of civilians, rapes, and other atrocities, and abduction of hostages, came after years of oppression and state terrorism against the Palestinian population in Gaza. As a military operation, it was made possible by the ineptitude or complacency of the Israeli administration towards Hamas, its “preferred enemy,” which the violence of the retaliation is now supposed to obliterate and compensate for. It was not a “pogrom” (“pogroms” are rather carried out by colonists against Palestinian villages), but undoubtedly it was a terrorist operation. Historically, terrorism is not incompatible with resistance, although it may undermine its legitimacy. It is my conviction that Hamas knew in advance that its assault would be retaliated against with a process of extermination. They took this responsibility and sacrificed their own people for the sake of a strategic “victory” over the enemy. The terrible price will be long paid for. On their side, however, the Israeli military and extreme-right government, deeply penetrated by fascist forces, but also facilitated by the nationalist self-righteousness and the indifference of the majority of the Jewish population in Israel regarding the fate of the Palestinians (exceptions to this are all the more admirable), exploited cynically the trauma suffered by the population and seized what they saw as a “miraculous opportunity” to “finish the job” (in David Ben-Gurion’s words), i.e., carry on a second Naqba, expand the colonization in the West Bank, uproot and decimate the Palestinians, erase the monuments of their history and culture. They accepted, planned, and carried on a mass massacre of civilians with few equivalents in recent history, which it is hard not to call a genocide, at least in “tendency” (in the words of the International Court of Justice). Which now means: a genocide in the making. News that we receive day after day is unbearable, and very partial. This does not obliterate the crimes committed by Hamas (as rightly indicated by the ruling of the International Criminal Court), but it raises the violence to a qualitatively different dimension, which should modify irreversibly our perception of the adversaries.

Second, the so-called Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which was always completely asymmetric in terms of power relations and moral legitimacy, becomes now even more unequal. Since 1948 and before, the Palestinians have been subjected to colonization, forced expropriation, ethnic cleansing, racial discrimination, political disenfranchisement, which together lead to a process of erasure of a whole people, with its memory and civilization, and expulsion from their historic homeland. I am not saying that the Palestinians—or some of them—bear no responsibility at all in this process, which now reaches a new level of cruelty. But there is no symmetry. This situation creates on their side an absolute right to resist, whether politically, culturally, or militarily (which is not to say that every strategy of resistance is good, or every form of counter-violence is just).

Turning to the other side, what needs to be discussed carefully in order to lay the conditions for any future settlement of peace are the vicissitudes of the legitimation and subsequent delegitimation of the existing political entity. My position is not that the state of Israel as such (when recognized by the UN in 1948, albeit not unanimously) was illegitimate, but that its legitimacy was conditional. And I submit that it has now practically lost the conditions. Israel’s moral and political legitimacy did not rest on the myth of the exiled people “returning” to its ancient Biblical land (which, in Golda Meir’s words, was supposed to be “a land without a people for a people without a land”). It does also not rest on the history of the Zionist movement and the continuous migrations of European Jews to Palestine since the nineteenth century, although in ideal conditions these exiled Jews could have become part of a Palestinian society which always had a cosmopolitan dimension. As the Israeli historian Shlomo Sand recently wrote, the European nations “vomited us,” with their virulent anti-Semitism and the resulting persecutions, after which the Zionist Jews ironically conceived of themselves as pioneers of European civilization in the Orient … But this created no obligation for the natives to open their arms for the incomers. The unique foundation for Israel’s legitimacy as a state was its capacity to provide a refuge and recreate a collective future for the survivors of the Holocaust, rejected from every other part of the world. And it was a very strong foundation. But implicitly at least (and contrary to certain deep tendencies of Zionist ideology, which is a European nationalism in the purest form), this went with two conditions: 1) that the Zionist settlements be “accepted,” through negotiation and alliance, by the historic inhabitants of the land, instead of seizing it by force, and claiming to be its “true proprietors” since immemorial times; 2) that the state of Israel become a genuinely democratic (and secular) state, granting equal rights and dignity to all its citizens. Instead of that, facilitated by various circumstances that include wars waged or prepared by Arab states, we had ethnic discrimination, state terrorism, and policies that permanently contradict international law (as if Israel, by virtue of its messianic origin and destination, enjoys absolute immunity). This orientation culminated with the decision in 2018 to officially redefine the country as “Nation-State of the Jewish People,” a racialist definition that legitimizes apartheid, and prepared the current criminality. Therefore—I repeat not with schadenfreude but with sadness and concern—Israel has delegitimized itself, threatening its own existence.

Hence, my third point. Every people has a “right to exist” (which means conversely that denying any people—I insist: any people—its right to exist, is a crime against humanity). That also includes the idea of protection or security, hence self-defense. However, this does not mean that the right to exist can be exercised in any constitutional form, under any name, within any conquered borders, through any type of sovereignty that ignores other peoples, as if in a singular dialogue with God or History. The problem here comes from the fact that Palestine in the twentieth century, through a tragic chain of violences and resistances, has become a “land of two peoples,” where men and women of two different genealogies and cultures bury their dead parents and raise their children. The possibilities for them to coexist, sharing the resources and the rights, which was always weak (or utopian), has become almost unthinkable after the current war. Palestinians may bear some responsibilities for that (especially when their politics is governed by such ideologies as jihadism). But it is overwhelmingly Israel’s continuous imperialism, with very little effective internal resistance despite the “democratic institutions” of the state, that has destroyed the possibility. To break the circle would mean to invent a federal constitution of some sort and find the steps towards its imposition and acceptation on both sides, with the support and monitoring of international agencies. “One State” and “Two States” are abstract formulas, which beg the question. The absolute precondition was once formulated by Edward Said in perfect clarity: “Equality or nothing.” Therefore righting the wrongs already done and reversing the current tendencies. We are far from there, but we can ceaselessly reinstate the principle.

Immediate imperatives:

Supposing we can move in that direction, the immediate imperatives are obvious:

First, unconditional cease fire in Gaza, exchange of surviving hostages and political prisoners, complete evacuation of what remains of Gaza by the invading army, and its transference—at least provisionally—to humanitarian organizations supervised by the UN. This could also involve an open negotiation with Hamas and other Palestinian forces.

Second, an interdiction of the colonial violence in the West Bank and Jerusalem, and the progressive dismantling of all the illegal settlements. This might of course require a regime change in Israel and lead to a new Palestinian “authority.”

Third, a complete and rigorous implementation of the decisions and rulings adopted—at the request of South Africa, whose decisive role we must hail in this circumstance—by the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice, including the penal sanctions and the interdiction of providing arms to a state and an army that exterminates a whole population.

Fourth, a lifting of the ban imposed by the United States and followed by other states on the recognition of the state of Palestine, and its admission to the UN with full membership rights. No more, but no less.

To which on a personal note I would add a “subjective” condition, which is also political: “Jews” everywhere in the world must dissociate themselves from the idea that defending or protecting the Jewish people involves supporting Israel’s colonial policies, which are criminal and self-destructive, and they must reject the idea, which has been officialized in several countries, that anti-Zionism is a form of anti-Semitism. Jews are concerned with the fate of Israel and the consequences of its actions. Their collective attitude can make a difference. It is also their “naming” in history that is at stake. They have no special right to support the Palestinian cause (critically, as every support should be), because, as I wrote a long time ago, “This is a universal cause,”4 but perhaps they have in this moment a special mission.