The military operation in response to the bloody attack by the Palestinian resistance on the Israeli settlements adjacent to the Gaza ghetto on 7th October 2023 quickly became the scene of war crimes against the Palestinian civilian population. Let’s start by recalling the true toll of the Hamas attack on several military bases and settlements in southern Israel[1] on October 7, 2023, as well as a music festival: in the course of the armed action, 1,139 people were killed, including 695 civilians (among them 71 foreigners and 36 children) and 373 members of the security forces (305 soldiers, 58 policemen and 10 members of the Shin Bet intelligence service)[2]. Hamas also captured 251 hostages (including numerous military personnel) in order to exert pressure on the State of Israel, in particular to obtain the release of hundreds of Palestinian prisoners, over 1,300 of whom were being held without charge or trial before October 7th[3].
In retaliation, the Israeli army claims to have killed over a thousand Hamas fighters who took part in the attack, while independent investigations, as well as the testimonies of a number of surviving Israeli civilians, also blame the IDF for the death of a significant number of Israeli civilians, among those officially attributed to Hamas. Experts refer to the application of the “Hannibal Protocol”, a 1986 Israeli directive which advocates avoiding as far as possible the need to negotiate the release of hostages, even if it entails killing one’s own nationals held hostage during the planned assault to free them. One thing is certain: this bloody adventure by Hamas has legitimized an unprecedented outpouring of violence by Israel, which has been condemned by the International Court of Justice for acts of genocide against the Palestinians of Gaza.
The rules of conventional warfare were in fact widely violated, first by the proscribed practice of siege, blocking the population’s water, electricity and food supplies, then by the combined use of weapons banned by international conventions (chemical weapons such as white phosphorus), snipers and killer drones targeting unarmed civilians, as well as the carpet bombing of residential areas, refugee camps, humanitarian NGO vehicles and premises, places of worship, schools and hospitals.
From the very first weeks of the operation, dozens of humanitarian workers, working doctors and journalists were killed or arrested and transferred to detention centers without trial. The images produced by the Israeli regime’s and army’s communication services have not sought to conceal the use of inhuman and degrading treatment against the prisoners, who do not benefit from the status of prisoners of war, nor of hostages, either status implying the adoption of specific procedures and negotiations for their continued detention or their release within the framework of negotiations between the parties to the conflict. The IDF soldiers themselves did not stop communicating from the first day of the operation on social media, and in particular on Tiktok and Telegram, boasting almost daily of committing crimes and broadcasting damning videos testifying to their dehumanization of the Palestinians. More on this aspect further on.
Below, a montage of videos taken from social media, to show a small part of what the IDF has committed and continues to commit in Gaza since October 2023.
Trigger warning: some images are difficult to watch.
Social media tell the truth
War crimes have therefore been fully documented by the international community, NGOs and the media, including the Israeli media. In addition to conventional institutions and structures, social media have also widely reported on these crimes, and must be considered legitimate sources of information insofar as they transmit raw testimonies from an area directly affected. As such, these resources have as much evidential value as the testimonies of victims and civil parties, as well as the confessions of perpetrators in criminal trials, regardless of the subsequent use made of the images thus made public. What’s more, user accounts, as well as the locations and dates of video recordings, can easily be verified and fact-checked by experts and investigators, making it impossible to consider them fabricated or manipulated: the vast majority of the thousands of megabytes of data from Gaza CANNOT be the result of fake news and computer-generated images, as some claim. Societies have evolved, and taking modernity into account means recognizing new information and communication modalities as legitimate, not least because they guarantee a greater diversity of sources than the mainstream and national media.
However, we know how embarrassing it is for governments to have to deal with media that avoid their control, hence their constant efforts to obtain total censorship of critical content shared on social networks.
Self-defense or retaliation?
Once we have ruled out the negationist or revisionist hypothesis, which implies denial of the reality of the crimes committed by the Israeli army against the Palestinians, what remains to be examined is the motivations behind these crimes and their intentional nature.
The notion of intentionality is crucial for several reasons. Firstly, because it makes it possible to distinguish self-defence from revenge or retaliation, and secondly, because it makes it possible to identify the real purpose of the act of violence or crime. Self-defence, a basic rule at the crossroads of natural and positive law, defines the circumstances in which a person can be killed or harmed without fear of punishment. To define precisely the circumstances in which self-defence can be invoked, the law has identified a number of criteria which must be met for self-defence to be deemed legitimate: the threat must be real (not imagined or supposed) and imminent (not prior to the moment of response), the response must be immediate (confined to the source of the threat and without delay, otherwise it would be retaliation), necessary (there must be no other way to avert the threat) and proportionate to the threat (just enough to neutralize the threat). At its origins, this rule was thought to enable the individuals lacking legal authority to protect themselves in the event of aggression, but also to be protected from any sanctions or legal proceedings if they have used violence to defend themselves from others violence. Over the past decade, however, the legal authorities (whom we would like to believe to be legitimate), i.e. the State and its representatives, have progressively changed the discourse and laws to appropriate rules of law reserved exclusively for those subject to the law.
If we take a step back and refer to the overall theoretical context in which these developments took place, we can only draw parallels with the argument mobilized by the State of Israel and its allies to legitimize the relentless massacre of Gaza’s Arabs, based exclusively on its “right to defend itself” following the Hamas attack of October 7th 2023. The highly pragmatic questions the world should have been asking were: Was the threat posed by the population of Gaza to Israeli society a real one? Was the response – the total annihilation of an enclave inhabited by over two million people – necessary and proportionate? If the criteria of imminence and immediacy are indeed met on the surface, it would have been necessary to ask a final question to invalidate Israel’s argument regarding the legitimacy of its response: Was the Hamas attack part of an ongoing context of oppression and colonial violence on the part of Israel, or was it a gratuitous act of aggression responding to no threat to the people of Palestine?
Before answering this question, it is absolutely necessary to recall historical events such as the Warsaw ghetto uprising of 1943 (against Nazi siege) or the Soweto township riots of 1976 (against South African apartheid regime), and to draw the necessary parallels: The state of Israel is neither colonized nor oppressed; it is the colonizer and the oppressor. As such, it can under no circumstances claim self-defense, for if we follow this logic, France would have been legitimated in erasing the entirety of Iraq and Syria from the map following the Islamic State’s attacks on Paris in 2015. And in response, any Arab country would be justified in bombing Western cities whenever NATO armies forcefully interfere in its national affairs. Clearly, the logic legitimizing mass arabicide doesn’t hold water. And yet, this is exactly the logic that led the United States to permanently destroy Iraq between 2003 and 2011, on the pretext of a nuclear threat which the best analysts knew to be totally implausible. The West always has a fallacious motive for destroying Arab societies.
Beyond the violence and horror of the Hamas attack, no one can decently deny the absence of any compelling necessity justifying the annihilation of the Gaza Strip from October 8th onwards, nor the total disproportionality of the means employed to this end, given that the attackers on October 7th were largely decimated or taken prisoner during their attack (1809 fighters according to Israel) and that the 5000 rockets fired by Hamas were largely intercepted, killing no more than five people in all: the main and imminent threat was therefore neutralized by the evening of October 7, and strict self-defence only applied to the Israeli response on the same day. Revenge, on the other hand, is characterized by premeditation and/or moral inflection, i.e. the anticipation or preparation (including mental preparation) of the crime, with the intention of not acting ethically. Lastly, while the real motivation or purpose of armed action is often unofficial, even secret, and therefore open to interpretation, in law there are what is known as “array of presumption”, which makes it possible to establish whether there are criminal motivations, particularly racist ones. In the context of Palestine, these grounds for presumption include acts and public declarations that demonstrate a desire to essentialize the entire population of Gaza and to assimilate it as a whole to a specific group, in this case Hamas. This essentialization involves the use of reductive and simplifying terminology that erases the complexity and diversity that characterizes any civilian population, especially if it includes several thousand people. In the case of Gaza, we’re talking about 2.23 million inhabitants, including a multitude of ethnic, religious and political minorities, as well as thousands of dual nationals and 1.046 million children under the age of 18 (48%).
Hamas is in power in Gaza, but the Gazans are not Hamas
If we go back to the origins of the Hamas movement, we note that it was born late in 1987, almost 40 years after the creation of Israel. Before it, Palestinian resistance had been embodied by nationalist, socialist and secular political movements, including Fatah, founded in 1959. These movements globally renounced armed struggle at the end of the first intifada (1987-1993) to invest in peace negotiations, while remaining in solidarity with popular resistance to the Israeli apartheid regime. The perpetuation of violent oppression of the Palestinians despite the peace talks was the primary reason for the emergence of Islamist forces in Palestine, which coincided with the confessionalization of territorial conflicts in the region during the Lebanese civil war (1975-1990). Israel played an active part in this confessionalization, notably by supporting the Lebanese Christian militias, while encouraging the emergence of Hamas to weaken the socialist and non-confessional Palestinian organizations (PLO: Fatah, PFLP, DFLP, PPP, PLF…).
The imprisonment and death of political leaders involved in negotiating the peace agreements[4], followed by the second intifada (2000-2004) and the Lebanese war in 2006, accelerated the rise of Hamas in Palestine and Hezbollah in Lebanon. Finally, in 2006, Hamas won the elections in Gaza with 44.45% of the votes cast, while the secular nationalist and socialist political forces remained in the majority but divided (Fatah + PFLP + The Alternative + Independent Palestine = 51.32% of the vote). If we look back at these elections in detail, and take into account the abstention rate of 22.82%, then just 32.61% of registered voters chose Hamas. If we consider that 34.17% of the Palestinian population was either not registered to vote or not of voting age, only 11.14% of the 3.95 million Palestinians at the time actually chose Hamas.
Over the following decade, Hamas established itself as a conservative force that is intolerant of criticism and represses all forms of opposition, making itself relatively unpopular, as evidenced by a poll carried out in June 2023 by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research : 73% of Gazans consider that there is corruption within Hamas, 59% believe that Hamas cannot be criticized without fear, 57% would vote for Marwan Barghouti (Fatah) if he were free rather than for the Hamas candidate, while 43% believe that neither Hamas nor Fatah deserve to represent the Palestinians. Furthermore, 47% of Gazans favor peaceful resistance over armed struggle[5]. Finally, since the last elections were held 18 years ago, almost 78% of the current population was not born (48%) or of voting age in 2006 (30%), not to mention the fact that part of the population, and therefore of Hamas voters, has died in the last 18 years. As a result, we can say that the population of Gaza in 2023 has little or nothing to do with the election of Hamas in 2006, nor much to do with the fact that it has held on to power by force ever since.
Hamas: a reactionary movement
What’s more – and this is often overlooked when talking about Palestinian resistance – the process of essentialization also affects Hamas militants themselves. Notably, Hamas’s historical affiliation with the Muslim Brotherhood (and therefore with political Islam) is denied, and it is compared with jihadist currents, or even regularly equated with Al Qaeda or the Islamic State. Numerous intellectuals and specialists, most of whom cannot be accused of being Islamist sympathizers, have written a multitude of university theses and books on the history of Islam, as well as on religious and political currents within Islam. All these studies make it possible to understand why the Muslim Brotherhood is not jihadist, and why the institutionalization of political Islam almost systematically leads these currents to moderate their exercise of power[6]. The orientalism that characterizes the analysis of Muslim and Islamist currents today also clashes with the reality experienced by Arab and Muslim populations confronted with these movements.
What this reality says is that the Muslim Brotherhood is a moderate threat, both to the population under its control and to its neighbors, or in other words just as pervasive as any authoritarian political party or movement in power. Indeed, Hamas’ despotism against the civilian population stems not specifically from its religious radicalism, but more from its desire to maintain a hegemonic hold over the Palestinian society. In the same way as any far-right current in the world, Hamas is an authoritarian party bearing conservative and retrograde values in many respects, but it is not a Salafist or Jihadist movement: Hamas, however violent, does not behead or burn anyone alive. Finally, the motivations behind the commitment of Hamas fighters must also be assessed in the light of the situation of strangulation and continual oppression of the Palestinian population for 75 years, as well as the blockade imposed on Gaza by Israel for 16 years, entailing an unemployment rate exceeding 45% and an overall lack of prospects for young people. Hamas militants aren’t waging jihad, they’re joining the only decolonial armed movement that claims to oppose normalization and build a balance of power with the Israeli apartheid regime. The number of fighters affiliated to Hamas is not known, the only figure given by Israel is 30,000. Given the reality of the region, and in particular the numbers of other Islamist militias (notably Hezbollah), it is unlikely that the real number of Hamas fighters exceeds 20,000 men, which does not indicate massive support for the movement among Gazans.
The anti-terrorist screen
It’s easy to see why Israel, in its efforts to dehumanize the Palestinians and discredit Palestinian resistance, finds it comfortable to use anti-terrorist rhetoric: like all authoritarian and colonial regimes, Israel refers to those who resist its oppression as terrorists. This newly universally accepted semantics reveals not only the ignorance and narrow-mindedness of those who employ it, but also their intention to reduce any armed resistance or radical or revolutionary opposition to a mere threat. Under the guise of protecting the civilian population from a threat to their security – which is not its actual motivation – counter-terrorism is first and foremost a tool of counter-insurgency to protect the security and interests of the state. Henceforth, simply designating a group as terrorist is enough to instantly deprive its members of every right and protection normally guaranteed by the laws of war, humanitarian laws and international conventions for the respect of human rights and dignity.
Moreover, the term “terrorist” has no precise legal definition, making it a vague notion entirely open to interpretation. Thus, in addition to the term “barbarian”, it is used to deprive individuals of their status as human beings, making public humiliation, summary executions, torture, mutilation and bodily harm lawful and acceptable. France in Algeria, the USA in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq, Russia in Chechnya and even China in Xinjiang have all contributed to the normalization of cruel practices that are illegal under UN conventions. When Israel crosses the red line even further, it does so by assimilating the entire civilian population of Gaza to terrorism, claiming complicity with Hamas, including under-age children who, as already mentioned, make up almost half the population of Gaza. By encouraging the dissemination of blatant lies about Hamas’s acts of cruelty during the bloody attack of October 7th 2023, and in particular the alleged beheadings of some forty children and serial rapes[7], Israel knew perfectly well that barbarity and terrorism would be the appropriate lexical register to legitimize all the war crimes that were to be committed in retaliation against Gazans. This is part of Israel’s propaganda strategy, the Hasbara, which is part of Zionist lobbying aimed at countering negative discourse delegitimizing Israel.
The demonization of the Palestinians in order to convince the world that their annihilation is justified is thus combined with historical revisionism regarding the way in which the State of Israel was built and imposed by violence, and denial of the crimes committed by Zionist militias before 1948 and by the Israeli army since. For instance, we’re supposed to forget that the Zionist Irgun militia carried out bomb attacks against civilians as well as the British police in the years before the creation of Israel[8], before its leader Menachem Begin became Prime Minister and then Minister of Defense of Israel thirty years later, conveniently cleared of his crimes. The State of Israel is therefore the best showcase of victorious, unpunished terrorism. Thus, the question is: who decides who is a terrorist, and for how long?
Nevertheless, the concept of terrorism is an extremely useful tool for designating popular resistance, whatever its ideological basis. Beyond that, it is the Arab communities as a whole that are targeted. The Arab has become the practical enemy number one, the scapegoat who bears responsibility for any popular resistance to the hegemonic and civilizing will of the West. A single armed attack by a marginal individual or group from Arab-Muslim communities is enough to legitimize the elimination of tens of thousands of Arab lives. Collective punishment has thus become normalized. And we can talk about the slow death of the Palestinians because it’s in the news, but we mustn’t forget that Western interventions in the East since the late Middle Ages have all been guided by the same messianic desire to reclaim the “Holy Land” from the heretic or godless barbarians who inhabit it, that is to say the Arabs[9]. What changed in the second half of the 20th century was the rhetoric, but not the motivations. Ever since the Western nations set themselves up as the enlightened vanguard and promulgated their laws of war and all kind of humanitarian conventions, before granting independence to a number of countries after decades of racial supremacy, colonial plunder and slavery, they have indeed been forced to renew their rhetoric in order to continue justifying imperialist wars waged in the name of the Global Market, particularly where oil and gas abound. And what better theme than the familiar theme of the barbarian from the East? And yet not just any ordinary barbarian, fighting a battle that respects the laws of war, and whose cause is seen as legitimate by a section of the people and the Western left. No, rather it is the paroxysm of the barbarian, monstrous and cruel, who terrifies anyone who imagines him close to them. The West will call this barbarian a “terrorist” for simplicity’s sake. And if it doesn’t exist, we’ll have to help create it, or help it create itself, the crucial thing being that it frightens any ordinary people sufficiently for them to accept its death without further ado. This monster is the Muslim terrorist, who in the Western imagination resembles the vile and brutal Arab embodied by Mohammed Hassan aka Frank Lackteen in American movies of the 1930s-40s, as well as 78% of characters from the Near and Middle East appearing in American TV series[10].
Therefore, as soon as an Arab or Muslim launches a surprise attack or detonates a bomb here or there, it must be clearly understood that this is a specifically odious act, which has of course nothing to do with the attacks carried out by the Resistance to Nazism during the Second World War, the annihilation of Nagasaki and Hiroshima in 1945, the counter-insurgency actions applied by the French army and police against Algerian civilians between 1945 and 1962, the bombing of the American black group Move in the middle of the city by Philadelphia police in 1985, or the targeted assassinations regularly carried out using drones or remote-controlled missiles by the armies of the major democracies[11]. What sets them apart, though, is precisely the racist prism through which the perpetrators of these acts of violence are identified. Some, who can be described as villains, are by nature the aggressors, while the others, who are obviously good guys, necessarily act in self-defense. The former kill indiscriminately to terrorize and generate chaos, while the latter “neutralize targets” to restore peace and security. Beyond the ironic nature of these last sentences, we must realize just how close these caricatures are to the discourse commonly served up by the world’s political and media elites, and adopted by the majority without any real critical suspicion. There are no good terrorists, only bad Arabs and bad Muslims. But when a white man massacres dozens of children in an American school or stabs Arabs in a French town[12], nobody uses the term terrorist. It’s an “appellation d’origine contrôlée”.
Israel, the embodiment of white supremacism and anti-Arab racism
In Gaza, Israël commits crimes, that has been established. The only thing that does not meet with consensus is the justification/legitimization of those crimes. We therefore need to look at what is known in law as the “motive for the crime”, which brings us back to the “array of presumptions” mentioned above. This requires an analysis of the organic relationship between Israel, Europe and North America. We won’t be going around the bush here: we want to address the ideological proximity of Zionism and German nationalism, both of which combine a colonial project with racial/national supremacism. In addition to considering the defended race or nation as superior or chosen by divine will (messianism/millennialism), both nationalisms agree on the possible – and therefore morally acceptable – subjugation or annihilation of other nations or races deemed backward or inferior. The more moderate versions of these nationalisms[13] are confined to evoking the need to bring progress and development to populations frozen in the past, usually under the guise of modernism. Such is the case with Zionism.
This ideological movement was initiated by the Austro-Hungarian journalist and writer Theodor Herzl (1860-1904) in 1897. Since then, numerous international Zionist congresses have been held, setting up structures to encourage the diaspora to perform its “aliyah” (ascent), i.e. to settle in Palestine, which had been under Ottoman (Seljuk Turkish) rule since 1517, and then under British occupation from 1920. Herzl’s personal views were deeply influenced by German supremacist theories, and he saw his move to Palestine as a hygienic project aimed at civilizing Eastern peoples, including the indigenous Jews. His anti-Zionist detractors, such as Abraham Shalom Yehuda (1877-1951), a Jew from Palestine, and Reuven Snir (b. 1953), a Jew from Iraq, mentioned some eloquent passages in Herzl’s memoirs, published in 1960: “It is God’s will that we return to the land of our fathers, we shall in so doing represent Western civilization, and bring the hygiene, order and pure customs of the West to this pestiferous and corrupt piece of the East […] It is with the Jews, an element of German culture that will approach the eastern shores of the Mediterranean […]. The return of the semi-Asiatic Jews under the rule of authentically modern people must undoubtedly mean the restoration of health in this neglected part of the East”. In this respect, we can draw a clear parallel with the thoughts and writings of Herzl’s contemporaries, the geographer Friedrich Ratzel (1844-1904) and the philosopher Karl Haushofer (1869-1946), and in particular with their theory of “Lebensraum” (living space). This theory largely inspired the supremacist theories developed by Hitler in Mein Kampf, even though Ratzel imagined a colonial settlement of the German people in the heart of Africa (Mittelafrika), rather than in Eastern Europe as advocated by the ideologues of Nazism. In any case, both Ratzel and Herzl placed their colonial and civilizing ambitions beyond the Mediterranean, which makes them similar to many Western imperialists of the 19th and 20th centuries.
What the end of the twentieth century brought was a renunciation of the overtly racialist approach of Western imperialism, and with it, a certain (albeit relative) moralization or weighting of essentialist discourses relating to the populations of the South from the late 1970s onwards. However, the turn of the 1990s and the emergence over the last two decades of Arab[14] and Islamist terrorism have renewed Western supremacist discourse, which, while failing to openly display its racist bias, has imposed the idea that the defense of Western democracy can only be achieved through the suppression of Arab nationalism, which is always conveniently equated with Islamist fundamentalism, even though the two are often opposed. The idea of the besieged citadel and the rampart against barbarism from the East, which has its origins in the pre-medieval period, has found a new lease of life: it is no longer the Roman Empire that is in danger, but Western Democracy in its broadest sense, which implies that the stakes go beyond the safeguarding of European and North American societies alone to become the preservation of the entire “civilized world”, the boundaries of which nevertheless remain very blurred.
Good versus Evil, or civilization versus the desert
Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) was a German philosopher, political scientist and journalist of renowned reputation, who conducted an in-depth analysis of the forces driving modernity and totalitarianism, based in particular on the experience of Nazi horror. While many know or claim to know her work on the banality of evil, namely that the worst atrocities are often permitted or committed by ordinary, even insignificant people, few actually give due importance to her analysis of the complicity of victims in their own persecution, through cowardice, naivety or wait-and-see attitude. In particular, Arendt had revealed the involvement of the Jewish Councils (Judensräte in German) in the deportation of Jews to Auschwitz, provoking a heated controversy that cost her some of her friendships[15]. Without going into the details of the controversy, which testifies to the inability of most people to put aside their own egos and survive their withering[16] in the face of the revelation of a truth that is painful to hear or facts that are difficult to admit, her writings tell of the impossibility for Western societies to conceive and accept the idea that barbarism has its source largely within themselves. It’s interesting to note that the advance of the desert[17] that Hannah Arendt also spoke of, describing the rise of totalitarianism from within Western societies, can be the result of a population that is in itself a victim of such totalitarianism. In this respect, it is extremely revealing that, having been persecuted for millennia in the West, a considerable part of the Jewish community has become convinced that, by moving beyond its borders, it could not only find peace and security there, but that it would also constitute an outpost of democracy in the face of barbarism, at the very limits between civilization and the desert. It would be nothing less than civilizing the East while re-civilizing the West. In any case, this is how Zionism perceives its presence in Palestine, and how the United States justifies its unconditional support for Israeli colonization: Israel would be the bulwark of the moralized (yet unlivable for Jews) West against the unbridled violence of Arab “Mordor”[18] – which by the way did not take part in the Holocaust. It’s comfortable to imagine an external enemy from which we can separate ourselves with a simple wall, when reality and historical experience demonstrate that more often than not the enemy is within us or among us. In the paradigm inversion represented by the Zionist colonization of Palestine, the conceptual desert of which Arendt spoke is embodied by these settlers from the West, while the natural and inhabited desert facing them is placed in the position of being subjected to their own totalitarianism. The paradox is such that the Zionists, who have come in search of greener pastures elsewhere, find themselves burning down centuries-old olive trees to plant conifers everywhere, contributing to the impoverishment of an entire ecosystem to which they are total strangers[19].
The fanatical settlers who are expanding their presence into the heart of the West Bank under Palestinian authority are making no secret about the fact that they’re setting up more and more – illegal – outposts there, in response to a supremacist imperative that sees Arabs as a population to be expelled or eliminated in the name of a metaphysical battle of Good versus Evil. The expression of this duality takes the form of violently racist rhetoric on a scale not dissimilar to that used by Nazi theorists against Jews. In 2009, Yitzhak Shapira and Yosef Elitzur, rabbis from the settlement of Yitzhar, located five kilometers south of Nablus, published a book entitled “Torat HaMelech” in which they defended the idea that Jews were authorized by religious edicts to kill non-Jews, including children, in certain circumstances. These genocidal writings were supported by Dov Lior, rabbi of Hebron and Kiryat Arba, and charismatic leader of the Israeli Zionist far right, who has also repeatedly justified the murder of non-Jews, inspiring a whole fringe of the Israeli right with his hate-filled speeches. In the same spirit, in 2012 Rabbi Eyal Karim, currently rabbi of the Israeli armed forces, had justified the use of rape by soldiers in wartime, considering the matter in these terms: “Since our priority is the community’s success in war, the Torah has allowed [soldiers] to satisfy their evil urges under the conditions it has stipulated in the name of the community’s success”. The “anti-Goyim” and anti-Arab preaching of these rabbis feeds the racism that justifies the commission of crimes in the name of the survival of the Jewish people, and has an immense influence on hundreds of thousands of Israelis. Since then, the religious fundamentalists who have made the colonization of Palestine a messianic issue have gradually infused their supremacist and fascist ideas into the highest levels of the Israeli state. Their racist, millenarian vision is perfectly illustrated by Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanhayu’s speech, delivered on October 26, 2023 to justify his latest military offensive against the Palestinians of Gaza: “We are the sons of light, they are the sons of darkness, and light will prevail over darkness […] Remember what Amalek did to you” [20]. When he invokes the extermination of the “seeds of Amalek” the reference is not religious but ethnic, insofar as Islam post-dates the period concerned by the use of this notion, designating an ancient people of Sinai in conflict with the Judeans: the Edomites (8th to 5th century B.C.). Beyond that, it’s a promise of vengeance that has its origins in national mythology. At the same time, many other representatives of the Israeli government and parliament have made one racist statement after another, condoning the mass murder of Palestinian Arabs, while the Israeli army has engaged in the deadliest military operation in Israel’s history, ethnically cleansing the Palestinians in Gaza, with no international body or state taking the necessary steps to stop the massacre[21]. But this is nothing new: for many years, the Revisionist Zionist current to which most members of the Netanyahu government claim to belong[22], including himself, has been multiplying public statements targeting Arabs. Long before October 7th, the Israeli right was marching in the streets with the slogan “death to the Arabs”, which has appeared more than once in the last decade on large banners carried by demonstrators. In addition, the practice of “price tag attack” initiated since 2008 by extremist settlers close to the current Minister Itamar Ben Gvir includes the spraying of hate graffiti and the commission of violently anti-Arab acts of vandalism. Ben Gvir, along with Bezamel Smotrich and other representatives of the Israeli government, have constantly called for the destruction of Arab communities, using openly racist rhetoric that has nothing to do with the fight against radical Islam or terrorism[23]. Their inflammatory rhetoric is not aimed at Islam, but very clearly at Arab ethnicity. The Pandora’s box opened by religious eminences and by the Israeli political representatives to whom they are close has legitimized the unbridling of public discourse in Israel, leading a number of public figures to express unmistakably racist and supremacist views without suffering any backlash. One of the most telling examples is TV presenter Tzofit Grant’s statement about Palestinians in Gaza during a TV show in December 2023: she called them “disgusting, stinky losers, walking with flip-flops. Repulsive people.” That says it all. Finally, when Yoav Gallant refers to the Gazans as “human animals”, the choice of lexicon is again socio-ethnic rather than religious. There’s no need to list all the racist statements made publicly by influential Israeli figures to understand that anti-Arab racism is the primary motivation behind Israeli policies.
If I draw this parallel with the situation in Palestine, it’s because it perfectly embodies all the paradoxes of Northern (Western) societies in their relationship with Arab societies in particular, and of formerly colonized societies in general, but also because the majority of Israelis come from these Northern imperialist societies. As such, they are allochthones, importing into the Middle East an ultra-individualistic, ethnocentric and neoliberal way of thinking typical of Northern societies. Considering themselves to be at the cutting edge of civilization and democracy, the vast majority of Israelis (the Zionists) never conceive of the Arab world as their equal, and deny the very reality of Arab cultures and progressivism: for them, Arabs can be neither modern nor democratic. Arabs are merely an obstacle to capitalist modernity, and as such their eradication alone becomes the guarantee of social order and peace. With the genocide underway in Gaza since October 8th, 2023, Europe’s far right has massively united with the State of Israel, so much so that its approach to Arabs is a model of effective Arabicide. Hatred of Arabs and Muslims has overtaken their historical anti-Semitism, and they seem to have suddenly reconnected with the Jewish part of their Judeo-Christian identity, while denying the Semitic part of Arab identity.
Since September 11, 2001 and the launch of the U.S.-initiated War on Terror, the international community, made up of the most influential states (UN, NATO, G7, G20) and their client-states, have rallied behind the American neo-conservatives and their ideological and military crusade against the Muslim world. It should be pointed out that Arabs are not in the majority in the Muslim world, over 60% of Muslims being Asian (Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh) and 15% sub-Saharan (Africa). However, the Western crusade against “terrorism” is essentially focused on the Arab world and the former Persia (Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran). In any case, the accusation of terrorism is sufficient in itself to legitimize all forms of violence against targeted individuals or groups: administrative detentions without charge, extra-judicial assassinations, torture, sieges and cutting people off from food and resources, expulsions and deportations, as well as “carpet bombings” of residential areas accused of harboring or supporting terrorist groups[24]. The laws of war have been subject to so many derogations that they have become obsolete. War crimes are even legitimized by military doctrines such as the Dahiya doctrine outlined by Israeli Chief of Staff Gadi Eizenkot in 2010, after having been applied by the Israeli colonial army in Lebanon in 2006. This doctrine authorizes the asymmetrical and disproportionate use of force to put pressure on hostile regimes, notably by systematically destroying civilian infrastructure linked to the enemy, even if this bombardment involves the massacre of hundreds of civilians.
There can be no doubt that the strategy employed in Gaza since October 8, 2023 is the strict application of this doctrine, with the cities of Gaza, Jabalia, Deir-el-Balah, Khan Younis, Rafah and their outskirts (2.14 million inhabitants on 365 km², i.e. 5967 inhabitants/km²) having been bombed intensively, inducing the assumed massacre of 40,000 to 200,000 Palestinian civilians who obviously bear no responsibility for the October 7th attack. The very notion of “collateral victim”, which was already unbearable enough, is no longer put forward, as the genocidal Israeli government asserts without trembling that all Gazans are linked to Hamas and that they are “animals”[25]. It is therefore, in the Hebraic sense of the word, a holocaust[26], and therefore genocide.
This racist and genocidal rhetoric, implicitly endorsed by all Israel’s allies, led by all the former colonial powers, echoes the racist and Islamophobic rhetoric commonplace throughout the European political class, from the far right to the center left, and now also by the social democrats and liberals who still call themselves socialists in several countries. What’s more, even the radical left has long since taken up the clichés against terrorism, incapable of offering a serious, intelligent critique of the notion, the way it is used, but above all of the totalitarian slide that the abused use of this notion entails. Ethnocentrism of the Whites (let’s call a spade a spade) means that every time there is an armed attack against their people, their interests or their territory, a sacred union declares the homeland or democracy threatened, even though the main victims of terrorism since the 1970s have been Muslims. Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Nigeria, Burkina Faso, Pakistan, Syria and Yemen have been the worst-affected countries over the past fifteen years. In Iraq and Syria, Islamist groups linked to Al Qaeda and the Islamic State have mostly killed Muslims[27]. And when the international community intervenes militarily in response to terrorism, it destroys civil societies already targeted by armed groups, and thereby sustains the disastrous breeding ground for hatred and fundamentalism. All the more ironic – and this is what societies in the North refuse to understand (or consciously deny) – is that “terrorism” is in reality a self-defense reflex of societies or individuals crushed by capitalism and the imperialism that flows from it.
What this reality continues to successfully conceal is that the motivation and objective of imperialist wars is never the establishment of peace and democracy, but rather the maintaining of a chaotic status quo entirely compatible with capitalist predation and the plundering of resources it entails. In none of the countries where the United States and its allies have intervened since the 1960s has a lasting democratic regime been established – quite the contrary. Any Arab democracy, on the contrary, would threaten the Western economy because it would be accompanied by self-management of its resources and a likely challenge to the economic hegemony of the countries of the North, while allowing its nationals to return home and travel freely, without continuing to constitute a workforce exploited exclusively by the former colonial powers. Conversely, several northern countries, but also the petromonarchies of the Arabic Peninsula, have actively supported Islamist armed groups in central and northern Syria, in the hope of destabilizing the Assad regime and its Russian-Iranian allies, while militarily supporting the Kurds in order to keep safe the oil resources of northeastern Syria, which make up 70% of the country’s total resources. In 2019, US President Donald Trump thus declared: “We’re keeping the oil, don’t forget that. We want to keep the oil. Forty-five million dollars a month.”
Western interventions are part of a colonial continuum whose stakes and objectives have never changed since the 19th century. One eloquent demonstration of this assertion is the international community’s total disinterest in the democratic, non-confessional revolt of the people of the Suwayda governorate in Syria, which began in August 2023 and is still going on more than a year later. The fact that the region is predominantly Druze, a minority that is impossible to associate with Islamism, and that it has no major resources on its territory, makes it a negligible issue for capitalist regimes accustomed to pitting ethnic and religious communities against each other in order to derive economic profit from the disorder engendered. There can be no Arab democratic movement that arouses the interest of Western democracies. For them, “democracy” and “Arab” are an oxymoron. Israel for instance, which presents itself as a democracy and has occupied the Druze villages of the Golan Heights since 1967, does not seem interested in encouraging the emergence of a democratic, non-confessional movement among the Druze Arabs living nearby. All the better.
We can legitimately assume that Israel’s existence is threatened less by the armed attacks of Hamas and Hezbollah than by the establishment of truly democratic Arab regimes on its borders. Indeed, a true Arab democracy could not suffer the presence of the colonial entity and would never cease to question its existence, at the very least out of solidarity with the Palestinians subjected to its violent apartheid regime. Those who believe that Israel promotes peace and democracy in the Middle East are mistaken: war is far more beneficial to it, and that’s why Israel has conscientiously sabotaged the peace agreements with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), encouraging the assassination of its architects Yitzhak Rabin (in 1995) and Yasser Arafat (in 2004), before facilitating the emergence of Hamas with the avowed aim of defeating its moderate, non-confessional opponents from Fatah, notably the very popular Marwan Barghouti, imprisoned since 2002 following two failed assassination attempts. To this day, Israel has never protected democracy, but on the contrary promoted fascism to maintain its illegitimate existence, encouraged by its American and British sponsors, for whom Israel is the best outpost or Trojan horse in the Middle East.
The ongoing wars in the Middle East, but also the policies implemented in Europe and the United States, are thus accompanied by a permanent physical and cultural arabicide under the pretext of fighting terrorism, protecting democracy and defending “Western values”. Israel is part of the logical continuum of this supremacist/imperialist approach. Thus, focusing on Islamophobia rather than racist hatred and multipolar imperialism helps validate Western binary rhetoric and invites its opponents to identify more with specific religious or national groups than with more diverse popular liberation movements.
NOTES :
[1] Many of these settlements are kibbutzim, which doesn’t take away their colonial status.
[2] See the map produced by the October 7th Geo-visualization Project: https://oct7map.com/
[3] As of September 3, 2024, 117 hostages have been released, 100 of them following negotiations with Hamas. 97 hostages are still in Gaza, 33 of whom are presumed dead.
[4] Marwan Barghouti was kidnapped and life sentenced in april 2002 ; Yasser Arafat died in suspicious circumstances in november 2004
[5] https://pcpsr.org/en/node/944
[6] Read Roy, Olivier; Volk, Carol (1996). The failure of political islam. Harvard University Press
[7] These fake news were debunked by several media, including the Israeli media Haaretz : lies were based on false statements by the Zionist NGO Zaka, which identifies victims of terrorism, road accidents and other disasters in Israel and around the world. It is worth recalling that its founder Yehuda Meshi-Zahav was prosecuted for a series of rapes and sexual assaults committed over several years, as well as embezzlement, before dying in a coma in 2022 following a suicide attempt.
[8] Between 1937 and 1948, the Irgun carried out 60 attacks against Palestinian civilians and British colonial police, most often detonating bombs in markets, on public transport or in cinemas. The death toll from these attacks was almost 700, most of them civilians. On July 22, 1946, the Irgun detonated a bomb in Jerusalem’s Kings David Hotel, murdering 91 and wounding 46 people, including Arabs, British and Jews. The Irgun has been designated a terrorist organization by the Anglo-American Committee of Enquiry.
[9] The First Crusade of 1095-1096 also attacked the Jews.
[10] According to the results of a study conducted in 2015-2016 by the MENA Arts Advocacy Coalition (MAAC): https://www.menaartsadvocacy.com/
[11] These examples have been taken totally at random, but of course the list is much longer.
[12] On February 1, 2024, two fascist militants from Lyon’s Les Remparts group, Pierre-Louis Perrier and Sinisha Milinov, stabbed three Arab people with twelve knives as they left a nightclub.
[13] I include the “left-wing Zionism” of the kibbutzim in the category of moderate nationalism.
[14] “Terrorism“ in the name of Arab nationalism was initiated in the 1970s by the Palestinian organizations Black September, founded in 1970 by members of Fatah, and Fatah Revolutionary Council (Fatah-RC), founded in 1974 by Sabri al-Banna (”Abu Nidal”) at the instigation of Saddam Hussein. The former is known for the assassination of Jordanian Prime Minister Wasfi Tall on November 28, 1971, and the hostage-taking and execution of 11 Israeli athletes during the Munich Olympics on September 5 and 6, 1972. The second is held responsible for attacks and targeted assassinations that led to the deaths of over 300 people between 1972 and 1997.
[15] See the film “Hannah Arendt” by Margarethe von Trotta, 2012.
[16] One of the main criticisms levelled at Hannah Arendt is that she doesn’t “love the Jews”. In Hebrew, this specific love has a name, Ahavat Israel.
[17] The desert is understood here as the place where that which constitutes “the world” disappears, i.e. that which connects human beings, namely the set of social relations where politics is born.
[18] In J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy novel The Lord of the Rings, Mordor is a region in the far east of Middle-earth, the stronghold of the Dark Lord and the forces of evil.
[19] The Jewish National Fund paid for the planting of 240 million trees, most of them pines considered invasive by naturalists, who blame them for impoverishing the soil and preventing other plant species from developing, as well as being a major cause of fires.
[20] Netanyahu’s speech here refers to the Old Testament writings of Deuteronomy 25:17, which mention the attack on the Hebrews by the Amalekites, descendants of Amalek, during their exodus from Egypt. The Amalekites embody in Judaism the archetypal enemy of the Jews‧ives, without their existence as an ethnic or social group ever having been established by historians and archaeologists. And if this were the case, it’s unlikely that they had any connection whatsoever with either the Philistines or the Arabs of Palestine.
[21] At the time of writing, exactly one hundred days after the start of the war, 40861 Gazans have been killed, including 16164 children and 10399 women, with a further 94100 wounded and 10000 missing. 220 UN employees, 172 journalists, 523 health professionals and 76 members of the civil defense forces were killed. Nearly 2 million Gazans were forcibly and repeatedly displaced in the southern part of the Gaza Strip, with no possibility of leaving the territory. 516,500 homes were destroyed, along with 439 schools, 763 places of worship and 19 hospitals.
[22] Revisionist Zionism is a movement initiated by the Ukrainian Jew Ze’ev Jabotinsky, founder of the right-wing extremist movements Betar and Irgun. Inspired by Italian fascism, the movement advocated the emergence of a new Jew, the Hebrew, as distinct from the previous Jew, the Yid. In 1934, Jabotinsky founded the Betar naval academy in Italy with Mussolini’s support.
[23] It’s worth remembering that on February 26, 2023, hundreds of Israeli settlers aided by the Israeli army attacked the village of Huwwara, engaging in arson and intentional violence on such a scale that the international press described the attack as a pogrom. The Israeli Finance Minister, Bezamel Smotrich, expressed his wish that the Palestinian village be “razed to the ground”. This was just a foretaste of the racist, supremacist violence that unfolded during the Gaza offensive some eight months later.
[24] The first examples of “carpet bombing” were the Fascist bombing of Guernica and Barcelona in 1937-1938 and the Japanese bombing of Chongqing (China) in 1938, before the practice became commonplace both by the Nazis (Warsaw, Rotterdam, London, Coventry) and the Allies (Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo) during the Second World War, and then by the American air force in Vietnam in 1964-1965.
[25] Remarks by Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant on October 9, 2023: “We are imposing a complete siege on Gaza. There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything will be closed. We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.”
[26] The Larousse dictionary states: “Holocaust (Low Latin holocaustum, from Greek holokaustos, from holos, whole, and kaustos, burnt) : In ancient Israel, a religious sacrifice in which the victim, an animal, was entirely consumed by fire; the victim thus sacrificed”.
[27] My purpose here is not to deny the many Yezidi, Kurdish, Druze, Christian and other minority victims targeted by Islamists, but to compare the total figures in terms of proportions. The eight main jihadist groups (ISIL, Taliban, Boko Haram, Al-Shabaab, Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, Fulani Islamists, Al-Qaeda in Iraq and Al-Qaeda) have claimed almost 100,000 victims since 2000.