Accompanied by humanitarianism, judged from a legal point of view, disputed on moral grounds
Israel’s Gaza war — a challenge to the powers and moralists of the imperialist world^[1]

1. UNRWA^[*] and its scandal: On the current pitfalls in the rich tradition of humanitarian support for Israel’s permanent project of founding a state against the Palestinians

At some point in the course of the war, Israel accused UNRWA, the most important UN agency responsible for assisting Palestinian refugees, of having a few — or more than a few — open supporters and even practicing members of Hamas in its ranks. UNRWA’s immediately suspending the accused staff members and promising an in-depth internal investigation did not protect it from Israel’s increasingly strong demands that the organization as a whole be finally scrapped, nor from the most important — Western — donor countries promptly implementing threats to stop funding it. UNRWA was outraged and spoke of collective punishment and condemnation in advance. As expected, it received support from the more or less official Palestinian representatives, the Arab and other states, and activists of other international aid organizations. There was dispute about the degree of involvement and the necessity or impossibility of separating UNRWA’s activities from the terror that Israel, according to majority international opinion, must and is entitled to ward off. In view of what has been taking place on the ground for decades, such a separation is necessarily hard to come by.

a)

Israel’s ongoing policy of preventing a Palestinian state from being established has perpetuated the purpose for which UNRWA was created, reproducing the reason for its existence over the decades. This organization solely responsible for supporting the Palestinians was created by the world community assembled in the UN because it had only realized half of its plan to found a Jewish state and an Arab-Palestinian state in the former British Mandate of Palestine (this also being an entity approved under international law, namely by the League of Nations). Settling the British-Zionist-Arab dispute over the area’s future by amicably founding two states turned out not to satisfy each state-founding party’s will to conquer the other by military force, but rather to incite it. The well-known, very one-sided result was that in 1948 the state of Israel was not only officially proclaimed but actually able to establish itself as a state entity west of the Jordan River. And it did so using a brand of force typical of the establishment of statehood, not only preventing the Arabs from getting a state but also displacing hundreds of thousands of them. The latter either landed in the territory intended for the Palestinian state or fled — in several waves — to the surrounding Arab states, sometimes being driven from one to the other in the course of various conflicts. Since then they have not been treated everywhere and by all relevant sides simply as refugees, but in this capacity as virtual citizens — of a state of Palestine that does not exist but is supposed to. By consistently providing them with a pale imitation of welfare-state services — from food, health care and schooling to vocational training and support for people with a disability or a start-up idea — the United Nations has insisted that its 1947 resolution is still valid, i.e., that establishing the Arab state of Palestine is not simply what its political nature makes it, i.e., a question of force to be fought out and decided on the ground by the irreconcilable parties each out to found their state, but is actually a question of higher law.

On the one hand, this is an idealistic approach, as the now over 75-year-old “Middle East conflict” itself shows. A state is a force-wielding political actor whose prime, crucial ‘characteristic’ is to assert itself against its peers, to appropriate the territory it claims and the humans it claims as its people, and exclude other states from accessing both as far as its own means of force allow in comparison with theirs. Only on this basis do states enter into relations with each other, recognize each other, and present their interests to each other while taking the other party’s will into account. So it is only on this basis that they establish any law they will be willing to accept between each other. The international-law idealism that is organized in the UN and stubbornly applied to the relationship between Israel and the Palestinians turns things upside down by insisting that monopolists on the use of force that are excluding and restricting each other from accessing land and people must and do coexist as the result of a higher law. This idealism is also practiced on the Palestinians by helping them exist as refugees: a few million non-citizens residing on Israeli-occupied territory or in neighboring Arab states are at the same time treated and reproduced in this negative capacity as the basis of a future Palestine. The UN insists on Palestine’s eventual founding as a legal position also by means of its UNRWA, cultivating the people, thus also insisting that the UN is the authority responsible for administering the corresponding law. It is adamant that founding a Palestinian state is its business, which it will not give up no matter how effectively Israel thwarts it.

On the other hand, the Palestine ‘question’ — which was first launched officially by a UN resolution and has since been increasingly hemmed in by legal rulings of varying binding force and looked after in practical terms by UNRWA, among others — also reveals the imperialist realism that is glorified in the idealism of international law.

b)

So the states in the form of the UN stubbornly adhere to the law it administers even though ‘legal reality,’ i.e., the forcibly established reality in the land “between the river and the sea,” makes a mockery of it. This means, conversely, that these states, in their capacity as self-interested players acting against each other or sometimes in changing alliances, do not make their actions dependent on their collective legal rulings but have a very calculating attitude to them — according to what and how far-reaching their interests and claims are and how much power they have to pursue them.

All calculations relating to UNRWA are based on the services that this organization provides for those who depend on it to exist. For the people it is aimed at, the organization’s activities are survival aid, whether by providing aid in kind to those who lack the monetary income to afford basic necessities such as food or medicine; whether by generating income for its Palestinian employees itself through its work; whether by operating schools and training centers and other aid projects to create the possibility of actually obtaining an income oneself somewhere within the basically miserable Palestinian economy. And it should come as no surprise that some Palestinians with UNRWA jobs that ensure their survival start championing the “Palestinian cause” in their own way, possibly even taking advantage of a few opportunities their jobs offer. Especially since they can see themselves as part of a deeply justified, larger Arab cause, advocated by various parties that are using the Palestinians to pursue their own cause.

First of all there are the organizations representing the Palestinian will to found a state. They are given very practical help by UNRWA in providing material support to those they intend to be the people of the future state and whom they actually already govern in the occupied territories as far as their means of power reach, either as an internationally recognized “Palestinian Authority” or as a not recognized but ostracized Hamas. But their power does not reach very far and so their practical status as quasi-state entities makes them dependent on UNRWA to relieve them of some of the humanitarian burden. This has become more and more important as Israel has increasingly ruined any possibility of earning a living in the West Bank by continually seizing land, harassing the population in all kinds of ways, and bleeding the Palestinian Authority dry financially after barely recognizing it officially. As for the Gaza Strip under Hamas rule, Israel has officially quarantined it and caused even worse devastation of the already miserable economic conditions there, making more and more Gazans officially dependent on UNRWA aid, which they have received. Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, which are exercising some of the power of the as yet nonexistent state in some of the territory intended for it, see this practical support as confirmation of their political entitlement to having a proper state founded at last. They logically also see it as confirming that Israel’s continued obstructionist policy is illegal, a position they pass on to their people and their people’s children and which they, in the case of Hamas, also put into militant action themselves.

Where UNRWA looks after refugees living in the surrounding Arab region in their camps, some of which have grown into veritable towns, it helps the states in question — Jordan, Lebanon, Syria — deal with the economic dead weight the Palestinians mostly are for them and the economies they govern. This service too has become increasingly important in recent years because these three countries, which also host plenty of other refugee populations, have got into extremely bad shape for a variety of reasons, with the result that even large parts of their own population cannot make a living to sustain them or serve as a tax base for the state. At the same time, by having UNRWA take care of the Palestinians, the UN confirms how right these states are to be quite unwilling to ‘integrate’ them into their own people. Even after decades and in the umpteenth generation, they do not allow them to become citizens but treat them as the millionfold living testimony to their political objection to Israel, which they are fighting for exclusive claims to territory and thus for the terms for making peace. On this basis, the Palestinians on their territory and their respective political factions have been quite useful as a pool and a lever for interfering in internal Palestinian power struggles, and as such have been welcomed and celebrated as brothers and sisters, and sometimes even paid a wage. Not much of this is left — apart from the negative standpoint that the Palestinians do not belong to their people and tend to be a nuisance. This makes the support provided by the collective of states in the form of UNRWA welcome and more important than ever.

All of these parties interested in UNRWA’s existence and performance, both the powerless ones and those blessed with political power, are reacting to the fact that the major international donors, for their part, have a monetary interest in the organization’s continued activities; this too has a twofold nature. On one hand and quite fundamentally, these financially strong, politically important powers have made the official international-law position their national business. They owe it to their status and self-image as elite states to put their power at the service of international law, Palestine Division, because this is tantamount to asserting their claim to co-define and co-determine the real power constellation in the region. On the other hand, these powers who, in the rules of international law concerning the Palestinians, have legalized and want recognition for their interest in reordering and utilizing the region also have a practical interest in ‘their’ Middle East being ordered somehow in a controllable way, especially when the one decisive state issue constantly ‘remains open.’ UNRWA’s support for the Palestinian population spread across the region helps keep the violent and potentially violent conflicts, with the associated elements of mass poverty and state collapse, within a scope that is acceptable from the world powers’ standpoint in terms of their grip on and dealings with the states in the region. Of these, Egypt, for example, has indicated diplomatically that if the Gazans were expelled to Sinai it would make its problem with that a Western one — in the form of new waves of refugees across the Mediterranean that it could no longer prevent as effectively as before; Jordan warns that its state will disintegrate further unless the war ends at some point after which the Palestinians are given a real statehood of their own; and so on. It has certainly never escaped the powers targeted by such complaints that their UNRWA is at the same time contributing to the ruinous conflicts over the Palestinians and their prospects for a state; there has always been criticism voiced about its funding in every Western donor country, at least in the form of pro-Israel lobbyists. But their overall assessment has ultimately always leaned toward continuing the funding. UNRWA has always had to put up with the question of its relationship to Hamas and the Palestinian resistance in general; its work has never been secure just automatically. The time limit on its mandate and the need for its periodic extension have always been the form the donor powers have given their to-ing and fro-ing between considerations of principle and expediency. And Hamas’ blow and Israel’s reprisal each conceived as an ultimatum have added a new given to these considerations.

In light of the Israeli war with which Israel is escalating its intolerance of any autonomous Palestinian activity, and which its imperialist sponsors and suppliers have basically approved and continually support, these sponsors find it unacceptable that their UN organization is now so notoriously involved with Hamas, which they also think should be eliminated. No matter whether something has actually ‘come to light’ or whether they are reassessing facts that have long been known — Israel in any case insists it has always considered UNRWA a Hamas accomplice and also provided its Western partners with denunciatory facts to prove it — the donors now see fit to temporarily cut off the UN outfit’s funding. And these decisive players proceed to make it very clear that it is the political point of view that counts here and not any ‘facts’ that have long been known, just been revealed, or are even entirely fabricated. They are now escalating their contradiction in their relation with the Palestinians. On the one hand, they definitely want nothing to do with the autonomous will to found a state that Hamas is militantly asserting against Israel — indeed, they openly approve of Israel’s army annihilating this will. But on the other hand, from their standpoint of being in charge and maintaining order, this brands the affected Palestinian people all the more as being absolutely needy, and thus subject to the humanism organized in UNRWA up to now and foreseeably (again) in the near future, a humanism the donor powers at the same time continue to hold on to without pity. Israel meets with the same contradictory double standpoint the other way around. The major powers still do not concede to their ally the consequences that the state of the Jews has long demanded, namely, complete, permanent liquidation of UNRWA. Even though they support this state’s anti-Palestinian anti-terrorist war, they will not allow it to be the one to determine what is ultimately legitimate force and what is not in the Holy Land either. That is why they do not give in to Israeli pressure to stop treating Palestinians displaced decades ago or whenever, or their descendants, as refugees and thus as living objections to the one-state solution sought by Israel. Citing further investigations or the Palestinians’ misery that should somehow remain manageable, they instead insist on being the only ones to make new decisions — which will lay down what is legitimate.

And that is why the various ‘reactions’ to be observed in the course of the affair are not simply reactions but the product of keen considerations, which all result from the principle of politically managing the purposefully blown-up ‘UNRWA scandal.’ As it should, the USA guides the way, immediately withdrawing its funding, which is so extensive it already plays the decisive role. From the American standpoint, the ‘scandal’ is an opportunity that definitely has to be seized — not by paying money but by saving it for once — to assure the Israelis of America’s unconditional solidarity while at the same time demonstrating to all other nations how America sees the current relationship between anti-terrorism and humanism in the land of milk and honey. This is the decisive datum for all other powers relevant in the matter: how much disagreement with the USA does one dare to demonstrate, how much does one owe it to oneself to do so? How much does one want to agree with Israel’s position that any international comment must be oriented to Israel’s definitions of security, danger and terrorism, how much does one want to demonstratively put Israel in its place on this issue? How much is it worth it to a European state to demonstratively distance itself within the EU from Germany’s and Brussels’ radically pro-Israeli course? And so on and so forth. And all of this needs to be balanced against considerations of how useful UNRWA might be from the point of view of maintaining some kind of order, a problem definitely still persisting. The practical results emerging after careful national assessment are variants of cutting funding under variable conditions and for variable periods of time — combined with proposals for long-term or temporary alternatives to UNRWA. For there is a general consensus among these powers that this organization actually has a lot more to do right now than it normally does.

2. War famine, famine aid, and the squabble over it: on the insanity of a war to annihilate terrorism being accompanied by humanitarianism

The internationally valid standpoint is that the Palestinians are entitled to their own state, so that the international community owes these people whom Israel keeps stateless some charity to tide them over, corroborating this political position on the humanitarian level. This standpoint has a bit of a hard time in view of the Gaza war.

a)

Announcing it would fight and eliminate a locally embedded terrorist outfit, Israel has set itself the task not of pushing its Palestinian enemy to surrender, but of annihilating it. So it has granted itself the right to treat this enemy’s area of operations, the Gaza Strip, entirely as the enemy’s infrastructural swamp and drain it. Israel is most consistently applying the logic of an anti-terrorist liquidation operation by the police to an enemy that is beyond the status of a merely angry/idealistic state-founding club because over the last twenty years it has come to rule over a piece of land and the people living on it, thereby also making them dependent on its quasi-state organizational and welfare services.

That is what makes the war the disastrous enterprise it famously is, for by fighting Hamas Israel is necessarily nullifying every conceivable way of organizing the Gazans’ survival. It is making them into a mass of some 2.5 million individuals struggling miserably to survive, and at the same time claiming no responsibility for looking after them as such. Entirely in keeping with this specific war logic, as soon as the war started Israel cut off all supplies of essentials to the Strip — from the point of view that they could be useful to Hamas in its fight against Israel. It didn’t care that this area is not only Hamas’ base of operations but also the habitat of Arabs, who are now being killed by the tens of thousands or having to endure total destruction of their material livelihoods. The only way Israel put forward to safely escape the fate of being massive collateral damage of its radical terrorist hunt has been its official suggestion of a mass exodus of civilian Gazans to Sinai with funding offers to Egypt.

From the standpoint of international law that is advocated by the collective of respectable state powers, both are taboo: there should be no mass extermination of Palestinians in Gaza, nor a mass exodus from the Strip. The latter is prevented in particular by the practical efforts of the Egyptian state, which has sovereign rule over the area that Israel’s strategists have taken the liberty of envisaging as a place to put fleeing Gazans. And Egypt’s position is supported by all other relevant powers that want to prevent the Palestinians from being territorially disposed of, because they don’t want the prospect of a Palestinian state to be accordingly disposed of, and/or because they — mainly the European powers — fear it would exacerbate their refugee problem, as Egypt promptly promised it would. But from the higher standpoint of the international authorities in charge, it is equally out of the question to simply leave the Palestinians trapped in the Gaza Strip at Israel’s mercy. And this gives rise to the claim that Israel, while being entitled to wage its war aimed at eliminating all its armed enemies and moreover destroying all conditions that make future hostilities possible, must at the same time be considerate of the civilian population. So the relevant powers interpret Israel’s entitlement to fight terrorism exactly the other way round from Israel: they see it as a restriction, to “only!” fight Hamas while sparing the civilians and the elementary material conditions for their survival — as far as possible. They demand that in all its actions, which astonish even some hard-boiled observers, the militant protector of all Jews should respect this distinction, which is absurd in relation to its war aim. It should at least show that it is not completely ignoring it.

And on the basis that expulsion remains a real taboo for the time being, Israel is not even entirely averse to granting this request. Apart from some considerations of expediency with regard to specific war events,^[2] this state combines its uncompromising interest in fighting the militancy of Hamas (and its popular base) with the certainty that exercising this supreme, self-awarded right not only must be accepted by the rest of the world, but also can be recognized, indeed is basically to be welcomed, by it. It considers itself by all generally accepted standards to be a model state whose use of force is not only extremely successful but also absolutely justified. It has not only opened up and is securing a home for the Jewish people but is also a blessing in terms of human civilization. It stresses this in a negative form by portraying its adversaries, in this war too, as enemies of everything that is decent on this earth. The positive form is its slogan that Israel’s armed forces are “the most moral army in the world” (Israeli prime minister Netanyahu), which really and honestly only produces civilian casualties when they cannot be avoided and are therefore not Israel’s fault but the fault of its terrorist opponents. This is the way (or one way) that Israel not only defensively accepts that its anti-Palestinian violence is an international affair. By expecting the moral absolution it grants itself for its violence to be approved by other state powers, it is offensively demanding that they politically recognize its violent state-founding agenda. But this also makes it clear that Israel will not make its war dependent on whether such recognition is conceded or denied. And this contradiction means, on the moral level, that it categorically refuses to let anyone tell it how to apply the standard of humanitarian warfare that the world community expects it to meet and that it considers it has always met by definition.

b)

None of the important world powers expect Israel to actually look after the Gazans affected by its military strikes itself. But neither are they willing to exempt Israel, more or less a friend, from the obligations a warring and occupying power has. In combination, this results in the demand that the most humanistic army in the world be humanistic enough to allow others to deliver and distribute aid. Such supplying activities — accompanied by a lot of press hype wherever possible — have thus had a threefold significance from the outset. Firstly, they actually supply the Palestinians with goods, to the extent that they take place. Secondly, they demonstrate to Israel what it should really be doing as a warring and occupying power under international law. And thirdly, they relieve Israel of having to do this itself, the result being that they help it exercise its freedom in waging war.

This paves the way for the activities of foreign aid workers, whom anyone who wants to can see as personifying the absurd ideal of a war being conducted as humanely as possible, only to be accordingly disappointed by the facts ‘on the ground’ and shocked by the corresponding pictures. Pictures show a battlefield where people are foraging for food; aid workers who are at risk of coming under Israeli fire; deliveries that are looted; mass brawls and panic at the distribution points, which can sometimes only be controlled by the force of arms, and sometimes are actually provoked by it, and so on.

All this — together with pictures of malnourished people and the accompanying warnings of a truly catastrophic famine — is material for a political dispute about who is responsible for the situation and what it can lead to. This dispute is conducted between Israel and the interested powers having a part in the events. For reasons of their own — which obviously become more urgent as the war continues — these powers have to accuse Israel that it has room for improvement when it comes to preventing war-famine disaster.

Just to keep the whole violent affair manageable, these powers are surely genuinely interested in preventing “the worst” — this superlative being open to interpretation as far as the affected people are concerned whose plight the powers aiming to be humanitarian are moved by to the usual extent. But they are sensitive as soon as they realize that this state will not accept any of their objections, but is making its war a long-term effort regardless of all the consequences for them. Above all, they do not like to see Israel completely disregard their competence to interfere in the armed conflict, their being in charge of regulating and terminating it. They consistently keep mixing up the humanitarian with the respect for their authority, which leads to the next absurdities that are duly staged. Before the world public they haggle with Israel over the technical details of how to approve and handle aid deliveries — and the German foreign minister has herself filmed shaking her head as she examines the logistical complications that the otherwise so efficient Israelis are forever unable to straighten out. When these powers become increasingly dissatisfied with Israel’s high-handed actions and they start demonstratively taking Israel’s rebuff of them as insolence toward them, they express this too strictly in terms of food supplies, adding their own air war to Israel’s and now also throwing food at the hungry people and those fleeing from one unsafe place to another. This reinforces the three above-mentioned aspects of survival aid and the order of their importance, getting to the heart of the matter. Firstly, air-dropping supplies is not very useful in terms of the unfolding famine disaster according to experts, is dangerous for the people, fuels usury in the war-ravaged economy, etc. But secondly, it is a clear demonstration of dissatisfaction with Israel’s supplies that are insufficiently ensured via land routes. And thirdly, the interested foreign powers show their disapproval by they themselves increasingly providing the supplies they consider the Palestinians entitled to — of course, only insofar as Israel gives them airspace clearance. By keeping on about the danger of the “famine disaster getting out of control,” the powers overseeing the war are additionally ventilating their impression that Israel has actually slipped out of their control.

Among other things, the deadly shelling of a foreign aid group provides a suitable opportunity to intensify criticism of Israel for its illegitimately excessive use of force and ignoring its obligations toward the population. In the meantime, even Israel’s staunch allies are giving the impression that they have “lost patience with Israel,” meaning that they increasingly see themselves flouted by Israel as the authorities in charge of using force in their world and thus of integrating the Israeli war into their world order. In keeping with the political thrust of their indignation about dead helpers, delayed delivery of goods, and the like, these state powers add the next elements to the jumble of supporting the war politically and worrying about the food situation on the battlefield. Again, their different positions here evidently do not result from the various matters they are talking about, but from the political standpoint making use of the matters. And that’s why everyone takes it for granted that dissatisfaction with Israel over the deaths of foreign citizens once again takes its lead from the USA. Its increasingly critical comments on Israel’s anti-terror war is taken by other states as permission to express not only unwavering solidarity but also well-dosed reservations certified by international law and humanism. That is, they blame Israel for their political contradiction of conditionally conceding Israel’s unconditional stand.

They have nothing against the war as such, which owes its particular severity to Israel’s equating Palestinian state ambitions with eliminatory terrorism. But its devastating consequences and lengthiness make them ask their ally about an ‘exit strategy.’ This is extremely constructive, on the one hand, since it sticks to the idea that Israel is entitled to pursue its declared war objective — complete destruction of Hamas — and need not stop before it achieves it. And on the other hand, the friendly but impatient request that Israel start thinking about plans to end the war and “the day after” is a reminder of a claim that challenges Israel’s position in waging this war from the highest vantage point. The Western sponsors are thereby not only admonishing Israel to fight its war taking account of the fact that it is increasingly entangling them in moral and real costs that don't suit them. They are above all reminding the anti-terrorist warlords that there is an internationally established legal position, which they share and advocate, that Israel has to accept coexisting with the Palestinians, this still being expressed today by the image of a “two-state solution.” Although Israel — not only with the ongoing war — has destroyed any serious prospect of realizing such a thing, it is still expected to find some kind of ‘political solution’ with the Palestinians according to the will of the West and its all-decisive leading power. It should not only be ‘realistic’ this way for its own good and to achieve a ‘peaceful coexistence of Jews and Arabs’ at last, it owes it to the Western powers, who have the final decision on whether a state has used military force properly.

The longer the war drags on, or rather, the longer Israel drags it on, the louder such accusations consequently become: Israel is taking the right to use force in a way that is incompatible with the law that all states must adhere to when using force in war.

3. Accusing Israel of disproportionate action and genocide: On the interested cynicism of judging Israel’s terrorist extermination operation from a legal point of view

a)

The one type of legal criticism that Israel has to put up with as the war wears on is based on the fundamental premise that the war as such is profoundly justified. This is not a contradiction, because the states of the world permit themselves to wage war provided it is for self-defense against an illegitimate war of aggression or for aiding in such self-defense. In the case of Israel, this means that its war against Hamas is justified self-defense against the October 7 attack and all attempts to repeat it. But this does not mean that those states taking this position will let Israel get away with everything. They have established the principle of “proportionality” which Israel must adhere to in its permissible military operations dedicated to protecting its citizens. When this category of proportionality or appropriateness of the use of force in war is spoken of, there is usually not much discussion of what proportion is right for the acts of killing and destruction that are ordered and carried out, or in relation to what they might be appropriate. It is true that there are specific regulations for — almost — all war situations but there are also alternative interpretations for each of them, and that does not water down the category of proportionality, as one might think, but rather gets to the heart of it. When, in the present case, Israel’s allies and suppliers who are concerned about the possibility and necessity of sparing Palestinian civilians say that Israel is accepting a disproportionate number of civilian casualties, their yardstick cannot be the civilians, for whom the war was hardly ‘appropriate’ from the first bomb on, nor Israel’s effective war objective. After all, that objective is already the yardstick for the means the Israeli military are using. When foreign policy makers accuse Israel of disproportionate action, it is Israel’s relation to their nations that they are complaining about. They see — again from different points of view and with varying urgency — a lack of respect on Israel’s part for them as major powers. They repeatedly point out that they are the ones who are securing Israel’s freedom and providing it with the means to set about destroying Hamas any way it sees fit and to successfully finish the job. The USA in particular — or rather, its current government — is now thinking Israel is compelling it to unconditionally support a war that is beginning to interfere with conditions for exercising its world power in the region in other ways, especially with regard to the handling of Arab allies. What the USA is criticizing as Israel’s disproportionate warfare is that Israel is making the imperialist relations of subordinating and instrumentalizing other powers more difficult. It finds sufficient evidence of this in the war and demands that Israel demonstrate its good will to use America’s unbroken support for defining and pursuing a realistically achievable war objective and soon ending the war. It is much less the rising numbers of casualties and extent of destruction that make the USA more and more intent on reining in its ally’s warfare, than Israel’s open refusal to make any concessions at all. The war itself, like any other war, is ultimately judged by America in terms of whether it is contributing to its world order or tending to disrupt it. The result is that, as far as the current US government can prevail at home against the even more radical pro-Israel legislature, the US has since dealt out a practical form of criticism very appropriate to this standpoint. It has launched investigations due to some initial suspicion or other, and not delivered bomb components — only ones the bombs can fly or drop without, just not aimed quite as well, since Israel is still supposed to win. This gives Israeli politicians the opportunity to put a humanitarian problem on the Biden administration. Thus, all sides make it clear that when there is a dispute about ‘proportionality’ in war, it is really about one side demanding to be recognized as a foreign power in charge of the war, and the other side “politely but firmly” refusing to do so.

b)

A rather more serious accusation is that of “genocide,” which South Africa brought before the International Court of Justice (ICJ). For, according to the 1948 “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide,” this court is the body responsible for settling the dispute between South Africa and Israel regarding genocide, which the same Convention introduced into the catalog of exploits that states prohibit each other from undertaking, i.e., evidently think each other up to. The text of the Convention characterizes genocide as the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group as such,” whether directly or indirectly, and it is considered the “crime of crimes” or “the most serious crime against humanity.”

This ban was enacted by modern bourgeois nations in view of the fact that a modern bourgeois nation had recently brought to a head the large-scale enterprise of actually exterminating the human base of states whose territory it was seeking to annex as “lebensraum,”^[†] and, above all, of eliminating a people, the Jews of Europe. This “people” that the fascists aimed to exterminate was not the base of a state of its own, it was not even a “group” that could be perceived as somehow homogeneous and distinguishable from other parts of the population, but rather a construct arising from the fascist program of rescuing the German nation. The fascists’ anti-communism was aimed at eradicating all socialist activities that undermined the unity of the people — so, according to its pro-people logic, it was aimed at the functionaries of the movement who had obviously lured the basically good German working people into engaging in such activities. Their reactionary anti-capitalism was aimed at liberating the nation from what they perceived as its enslavement by finance capital — i.e., from the obviously existing agents of a capitalist enrichment who were not strengthening the nation’s power but undermining it. To Hitler, the enemy of his people was a crypto-people onto whom he projected these two sides of his deeply moral criticism of the state of the nation, and whom he identified with ‘the Jews,’ drawing on corresponding traditions of enlightened Western civilization. He used racial doctrine laid down in law to track them down in order to destroy them. Such a thing was supposed to happen “never again!” so it was to be immediately prohibited and even prevented as falling under the newly created criminal offense of genocide.

What this body of law is about, according to article II, is acts committed against a “group” of people due to their “national, ethnic, racial or religious” group identity. It is expressly irrelevant in this context whether the group is the proper constitutive people of a state and is victimized as this “group” by another state in the course of war,^[3] whether it is recognized as part of the people belonging to the state that is committing acts against it, and even whether it is proper state rulers or non-state actors committing the acts.^[4] And there is a separate paragraph expressly denying that the crime of genocide has any political nature at all, i.e., that it could be the legitimate object of different political considerations, so that no state may refuse to extradite wrongdoers guilty of this crime.^[5] No one may do what the Convention bans — and vice versa, every state must do everything in its power to enforce this ban.^[6]

The latter is a clear indication of what the above-mentioned abstractions are aimed at. It is the states of this world, political monopolists on the use of force over territories and the people living there, who are being obligated by way of a ban to accept the existence of “groups” even when official state rulers or alternative representatives of the people see them as having the wrong ethnicity, religion, or race for fitting in with the particular state’s self-definition equipped and illustrated with such categories, and with its unity with the people it governs. There were no longer supposed to be any ethnic cleansing programs defined and carried out with regard to “natural” characteristics such as “race” or the more supernatural category of “religion.”

The starting point here, which is not considered of any interest or even worth mentioning, is that states actually use “national, religious…” “identities” to define themselves, namely, their supreme and unquestionable right to rule over their respective peoples, as emanating from and serving these peoples’ “nature.” All states are thus well aware of the need to legitimize their exclusive claim to rule the people subjected to them by citing an exclusive characteristic shared by the collective, which is factually created by state power. And they do not mean to deny each other this need by their Genocide Convention. They ‘merely’ have to water it down: set it relation to their Convention-based obligation to care for and protect, which prohibits them from getting rid of those “groups” of people whom they define as alien and disruptive. And this prohibits them as a matter of principle, i.e., in terms of the formal ban on going through with the most extreme, eliminatory consequence, from even looking at certain sections of the population as “alien” and “disruptive” elements that might destroy the unity of state and people. This is fitting insofar as history teaches that such definitions, as soon as they are made, are already devised in terms of the practical consequence they are aimed at.

This prohibition is therefore complementary to the requirement, laid down in other bodies of law such as the UN Charter of Human Rights, that all states bestow egalitarian treatment on those they claim as their people and govern, recognized by all other state monopolists of force. They are to treat them merely as citizens who are equally subject to state law. No matter how states may define and legitimize themselves in terms of the distinctive character of their particular people, they must always act as guardians of the abstract freedom of all their citizens. They must grant them the equal right to self-determination as their essential feature, which is not influenced by any special determinations, whether real material ones or quite fictitious ones. This function of state power seems nobly restrained but actually gives it a great deal to do. For such a distillation of what is solely relevant politically — the citizen’s freedom remote from any discriminatory element — has itself one crucial element that cannot be had without omnipresent state power. That is one’s personal, exclusive right to do what one wants with what one owns, whatever it is. This sphere of legally protected possession does not refer to particular goods as such, but to the power to get hold of them which the state guarantees. Property is realized economically in money, the quantified form of the pure power to get hold of anything, and property is the stuff of the abstract freedom that the state under international law has to guarantee, while competition for property is what this freedom is about. The duty to guarantee freedom is the starting point for a complete reason of state for implementing the system of capitalist competition for money and its accumulation, and making it the material basis of the state power that such a system needs. The state being obligated to use its power to protect freedom and equality “without respect of person” actually means it is obligating its citizens to be forever competing for money.

In order for the state to succeed in making bourgeois working life, with all its necessary conflicts of class and other interests, a source of capital accumulation to support it, it must be concerned above all else with itself. It must make sure its power is unconditionally absolute for there to be a productive “social peace.” It necessarily makes itself the overriding purpose of the life of society that needs its intact power. This expands its set of tasks enormously, so as to include even the competition between states. Its demands on its human basis grow accordingly; and it accordingly has a growing need to commit its citizens to it and its own competitive success. This means they are no longer called on to be merely individuals who are abstractly free and concretely competing, but must now be the particular, willing possession of their particular, nationally defined sovereign. They are to be utilized as the state’s own people, as natives fundamentally separated from foreigners. This opens up the whole sphere of defining and creating a national identity, which inevitably involves a different kind of discrimination to that based on property, class affiliation, and competitive success. From this point of view — in order to appropriate its competitive society as its very own people and act as their homeland — a bourgeois state power will take some liberties itself when it comes to legal distinctions. Such liberties are supposed to come second to the prime essential of its reason of state, i.e., to realize the abstract freedom of concretely competing individuals, and that is what the human rights that bourgeois states commit to are mainly about. States like to idealize these human rights as absolute claims to protection that individuals have against state power so as to discredit other states and deny the legitimacy of their rule — which, in serious cases, always includes a discriminatory judgment of those other states’ worthless rank and file.

The ban on genocide was added to the catalog of human rights due to the Nazis’ excess of exterminating millions and the shock at what an anticommunist people’s state is actually capable of. But this was not in itself a sufficient reason for issuing such a legal rule. This German state first had to be destroyed unconditionally, along with its hideous morale. And it had to be replaced, not by a socialist class consciousness, but by the ethos of the freedom of competition, in order for the victorious powers to agree to settle the score with the Third Reich’s murder of Jews by codifying a not terribly binding rule of conduct for the world’s states. How binding it is can be seen by the hearings on the case that South Africa brought before the competent UN court. This case is aimed, improperly enough, indirectly against the USA, which habitually uses human rights to measure the illegitimacy of all other states. Even more improperly, it is aimed directly against Israel, which demands recognition for its entire existence being precisely the way to prevent another genocide of its own very special people.

For that is the flip side of the way America applied its victor’s justice to fascist Germany. It set up a whole system of lastingly binding rules based on its own bourgeois constitution for the entire world of states to follow, thereby installing a world order under its leadership. Now this system of rules formally applies, in this case entitling South Africa, strictly in accordance with the Convention, to react to Israel’s war to destroy Hamas by taking legal action and having the competent court examine the suspicion of genocide. Subsequently, all those involved in the proceedings demonstrate what the Convention involves in legal terms, and what its proper use and real role is in political terms.

c)

In legal terms, South Africa is trying to prove that Israel’s war in the Gaza Strip is a case of genocide, and it is doing so entirely in accordance with the logic and spirit of the Convention. What it sees as crucial when it comes to deadly achievements such as the current war is whether there is a provable intention for a certain “group” that meets the criteria of the Convention to be wiped out as such. The sheer number of people killed is an important element and indication, but by no means sufficient for making this serious accusation. It is the other way around: the overriding viewpoint from which the acts of violence play a role reduces all real violence and all real victims to the status of being elements of the evil deed and indications of evil intent. And because the Convention is interested in the ultimate consequence of exterminating disagreeable masses only because it is upholding the egalitarian, non-discriminatory protective-power principle that states must adhere to, it legally categorizes, i.e., prohibits, punishable violations of this principle prior to a subpopulation defined as improper and harmful being violently eliminated; the ban already applies when attempts to make such a definition and put it into effect become known.^[7] In any case, South Africa cites the facts it considers to be the relevant arguments showing that enough of the legally defined elements of the crime are present: the whole history of Israel’s land seizure and expulsion, discrimination of the Arab inhabitants;^[8] Israel’s previous wars against the Gaza Strip and its blockade in the interwar periods; the mass deaths of civilians now; the particular mass deaths of women and children — which South Africa’s lawyers interpret in terms of genocide law as preventing the biological reproduction of the “group” in accordance with article II; the destruction of infrastructure and economic foundations to the point of driving the Gazans back and forth within the Gaza Strip; Israel’s intermittently voiced idea of transferring the Gazans to Egypt; the destruction of mosques, churches, and museums; the Israeli authorities’ failure to investigate, punish, and prevent such misdeeds… All this is pervaded by the fixed starting point that what the Convention is protecting in this case is the “group” of Palestinians — and that happens to be more, or something other, than the sum of its individual members. That is why neither all Palestinians nor the majority of them need to have been ‘physically destroyed’ for one to speak properly of the deliberate destruction of the group “as a whole or in parts.”^[9] At least according to one version of legal reasoning that is in play here.

The same logic is obviously followed by the adversary’s legal defense strategy, which works in a congenial way. There is practically no dispute about the gruesome facts. Instead, Israel’s representatives emphasize in court that the brilliant achievements of its military force can be had without any genocidal intent whatsoever.^[10] They do not deny the fact that morally arming one’s people in this war — as in any other — involves quite a bit of rabble-rousing that inevitably involves collectively condemning as worthless those it throws to the wolves as immediate enemies, supporters, or collateral damage. They emphasize, however, that no matter how much incitement, it does not determine the Israel Defense Forces’ operational doctrine in practice, and that the most humane army in the history of modern machineries of violence is investigating the many individual cases in which incited military personnel have violated the non-genocidal active service regulations. In Israel’s view, even at the cost of many civilian casualties, it must in any case and above all be permitted to act in self-defense. Without this it would itself become a potential victim of an anti-Jewish genocide by Hamas, who along with its fighters are responsible for the dead produced in the Gaza Strip as maneuverable human pawns or merely as involuntary neighbors. No militarily unnecessary casualties are deliberately caused, all difficulties in supplying civilians are due to Hamas, and so on.

All in all, this vividly shows that the accusation of ‘genocide’ is easy to make and hard to prove. This is not due to the Convention being unclear and defining genocide too narrowly and thus actually too vaguely for its own historical reasons, or any such thing, but due to the matter itself. In today’s international legal order, the always exclusive and excluding power that states have over their peoples is recognized, and at the same time surrounded by positive and negative requirements. Superficially these requirements take the form of legal provisions, but in terms of their political substance they are due to the use of force being reserved by America and its elite allied powers for themselves vis-à-vis all the others. It is on the basis of the fact that this reservation has been completely established and legally generalized that South Africa, a much smaller but still considerable power, now also uses the form and level of the law to express its political dissatisfaction with the creator of the fine world (legal) order and its creation Israel.

Politically, South Africa is looking at Israel’s Gaza war from the standpoint of a power claiming to speak and act not only for itself but, as an African BRICS^[‡] member, for the rather vaguely defined group of ‘Global South’ countries. These are states that are doing their best to get what they can within the permitted and required competition of states for economic wealth and political weight, and are formally allowed to act, just like all other states, in the dual role of obeying international law and at the same time shaping this law and judging all the others. However, they are constantly confronted with the fact that a small elite of states is claiming the monopoly on setting and changing the rules for international dealings between states, but above all on defining violations of the rules and thereby justifying the force they use to take action against the offenders they identify. Israel strikes these states as being an annoying constant exception to the order they have (been) committed to, regardless of the specific relations they maintain with this important supplier especially of means of violence and surveillance for the police and military. And Israel is indeed an exception to the Convention-equipped American order of a civil world of states that is modeled on capitalist America and intended to benefit it. For Israel is not only forever in a state of war, it regards permanent war against its enemies as the only possible way to exist. It defines its people as all the Jews in the world, whom it needs to protect across every national border, and whose ancestral land it has yet to completely conquer. It defines the Arabs living in the area under its rule as second-class citizens or even non-citizens, and treats them in a way that defies the code of decency applying to a modern capitalist state power, even though Israel is one. But the really annoying thing is that Israel has the ability and freedom to constantly wage war outside its borders and conduct never-ending ethnic sorting within them because America allows and supports it. The case of Israel constantly demonstrates to South Africa, and all other similarly dissatisfied states it claims to represent, that America puts itself above the civil order it commits the world to. Israel demonstrates how great the real freedom is that America takes for itself, and concedes to its ally, to block or eliminate any objections from other powers solely with superior weapons. When South Africa and the other representatives of the ‘Global South’ designate Israel as a ‘Western settler colonial project’ — even before the ICJ — they are clearly projecting the objection they have with the fine American world order, and the current status of this protest,^[11] onto the special case of the militant Zionist state of the Jews. Their attempts to meet this world order’s standards of success within it and by means of its rules are ultimately thwarted by the sheer superior force that America and its allies have, which ‘the West’ uses to lay down the law for all the other states.

d)

That also characterizes the way the representatives of the USA and other Western states deal with being more or less in the dock of a court that is part of the world order that they generally so firmly uphold because they determine it and successfully make use of it. (Some are directly in the dock; Germany is facing a charge of aiding and abetting genocide that it must likewise defend itself against before the ICJ.) The relations of power that are the basis for the United Nations’ complex of rules and agencies, that this complex generalizes in legal terms and thus disguises, are of course not altered by South Africa taking legal action against America’s ‘unique ally,’ against America’s good intentions. South Africa is a nation that sees a loftier place for itself in the hierarchy of nations, but still stands where it stands for the time being. And that is why, for the time being, the war just goes on the way Israel is waging it, with Israel’s allies supplying it and shielding it from any hostile attempt to intervene militarily or to discredit it politically.

But Israel, the USA, and the rest of the West do not want to simply ignore the charge, but respond. Israel owes it to its belligerent rights-standpoint, and the USA to its standpoint that its national claims for all other states to comply are at the same time more than that — they are recognized law, which other states should obey not just out of fear of America’s deterrent power, but because they recognize (as America’s power helps them to) how useful a binding international law is for every legitimate national materialism. This contradiction is reflected in every way the legal affair initiated by South Africa is dealt with. Israel announces that it will not make its war dependent on any court ruling and sends its representatives to the ICJ to act according to its rules there. The USA criticizes South Africa’s step and is at the same time optimistic that the judges will make the right judgment.^[12]

And Germany too, with its double — both political and moral — integrity, is only briefly vexed and quickly finds its way of dealing with being hauled to court, for aiding and abetting genocide, by Nicaragua, “itself no beacon of freedom.” German politicians and public opinion need not in any way water down the one credo that their nation like no other stands up for the egalitarian rules-based world order and the role of its agencies and rules that all must accept, when at the same time upholding the other credo that Israel’s violence is per se self-defense which it is Germany’s reason of state to support so as to come to terms with its past. Germany sends its lawyers to The Hague, where they get to do all kinds of legal detail work but above all demonstrate how offended they are about Germany, of all countries, being suspected of such a thing in the first place, even though it has always been opposed to unlawful bloody murder and is currently not only Israel’s second biggest supplier of arms and ammunition, but also one of the biggest donors of humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip. And out of court, after a moment of shock, the German nation is sure that the genocide accusation confirms its hermetic official morality equating criticism of Israel’s violence with anti-Semitism. Since genocide puts a state power absolutely in the wrong, i.e., the accusation aims at totally delegitimizing such a state, anyone who accuses Israel of this proves that he is out to rob the world’s Jews of their legitimate protective power — their only effective protection from soon becoming victims of genocide again themselves. It does not bother Germany's representatives to present their fine nation and its history as proof of this negative equation: without a totally superior Israeli state power that takes the liberty to do whatever it deems necessary, there can be no Jewish life in the world — we’ve shown you! After Germany’s orgy of extermination of European Jews was ended by Allied military force, it seized the historically unique opportunity to transform its defeat on the battlefield into a moral admission of guilt, turning the associated guilty conscience it presented into the clear conscience of the reformed criminal. So now this nation acts as judge of all the others and tells them how state power has to be managed, and this fine nation’s representatives are quite sure about a couple of things. Firstly, in view of their German past, every Arab victim of Israeli force is basically acceptable because Israel is only using force to make up for the force the Jews didn’t have back then, i.e., it is avenging the eliminatory force that Germany used on them.^[13] And secondly, that makes it clear, in all brazen German self-reference, that the genocide accusation against Israel is anti-Semitism and therefore itself genocide in intent. So that every condemnation of Israel proves it is absolutely wrong simply by being voiced.^[14]

4. Public opinion, protests and counter-protests in the West: On the mistake of morally taking sides in an ongoing war

Though this equation is officially valid in Germany, it is not the end of the debate, even there. Rather, it is just one of two positions in a fierce dispute that is stirring up the democratic public in a number of countries, including the USA. Not least because in this case, even more than in other murderous conflicts, more clearly even than in the criminal case of Putin vs. Ukraine, partisanship is required.

The first reason for this is of course — as always — that the many, vividly publicized victims cannot leave anyone cold. Especially the particular victims presented to particular audiences. On one side, light-hearted party guests, people like you and me, in good spirits, suddenly attacked, raped, kidnapped, and murdered. On the other side, families with children who are bombed out of their already miserable living conditions and plunged into famine, having relatives in democratically accepted communities in this country (Germany). Both Jews and Palestinians are quite a bit closer to the public humanism of the purposefully informed First World than massacred black Africans (about whom one really only knows that that’s what they’re supposed to be called nowadays). Only that doesn’t exactly give well-informed moralists any criterion for deciding which victims make the other side the offenders. All the lively debates that, sometimes with certain moral reservations, weigh insidiousness against the number of victims and vice versa, actually only prove that the horrific facts that are supposed to convince only count to those who are already convinced; not as arguments, but as evidence that they have picked the right side. These debates therefore often end with the concession that offenders and victims are to be found on both sides somehow. However, this must definitely not be the last word, since with such cheap neutrality one is withdrawing from a political dispute that, even among moralists, is not just about being upset by offenders and victims, but about state morality in a higher sense.

Those keeping up the dispute are in any case not content with showcasing the victims as proof of the offenders’ guilt. One position is to pay tribute to Israel as the — only safe, but now endangered — haven for a community scattered around the world, constituted and held together as such by common points of reference in terms of religion and customs, and by a collectively suffered two-thousand year history of persecution, which they even got through when the Third Reich tried to exterminate them. This history gives the Jews an unparalleled, absolute right to a robust state-power, a right that can no more be denied them than any other member of the modern family of nations. The other position is to condemn Israel as the product of Western imperialism. Just when the fine democratic decolonization process of the post-war period was starting to give all native peoples their own states, the imperialists, in a final show of colonial strength, foisted a foreign immigrant people as a dominating power on the native Arab population living on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean, depriving them of their right to their own state even today. In this way, both positions reproduce and propagate the warring parties’ rationale for fighting. The Israeli government sees the existence of a sovereign Palestinian state as negating the existence of its own; on the other side there is the nucleus of a Palestine that is being oppressed by an expansive Jewish state with misguided Western aid. Both sides are thus making it clear that it is not about the right of states to wage war, or this right being violated in war. It is rather about the right of people with their ethnic distinctiveness, in other words, the human right, to a state. The Jews are entitled to a definitely robust state; the Palestinians to a state of their own. Whereby in both cases there is an additional feature that makes this right especially legitimate in the view of those championing it (whether in action or in words). For Israel, there is the oddly open definition of the state-entitled community as not living in one place but being scattered around the world and therefore being only all the more in need of a local, war-proof homeland. For the desired Palestine, there is the status of people driven out of their ancestral land.

This matter of dispute makes the dispute irreconcilable, compelling those involved to be partisan, and partisan in a way different from other wars, because here it is about the right to state existence as such. For all those not involved, the solution is of course quite simple: two states side by side; good neighbors, as exist elsewhere admittedly only out of calculation and nowhere free of conflict; but what else! But the decades-old and now escalating bloody enmity is the clear answer: there is no real state monopolist on the use of force as another’s concession. So a Palestinian sovereign would only exist as the contradiction of being a superior power’s licensee or as negating the indivisible security rationale of the state of all Jews. A “two-state solution” would do nothing but perpetuate the incompatibility of the two sides — which, by the way, does not mean that imperialism may not ultimately achieve a contradiction like that among its many others. For sympathizers of each side, this nice “suggestion” only opens up the next question anyway: which side is preventing it from being implemented? This question again pits the two warring parties’ elementary rights-standpoints irreconcilably against each other and demands partisanship.

What this war is about is thus the human right to a state; and it consequently makes brutally clear what that means. The people really affected “on the ground” are partisan; without being asked. As citizens of a complete or quasi-state sovereign power and, when it comes to war, as recipients of its orders, they represent the will of a state they have to obey. They survive or die for the right to monopolized force that their commanders assert against their enemy. Their existence as human individuals depends on how their rulers’ power struggle goes; it revolves around their political identity as Israelis or Palestinians. Equipped with the human right to a state, once their ruler entangles them in the deadly conflict, they cannot avoid seeing it as their protective power. This fatal circle replaces any free decision to take sides: war makes them partisans who need their commanders to succeed so they can survive. This is their situation in life, and this determines what they must want and what they can hope to do. The standpoint of coping with their rulers’ war agenda is inescapable in a world that has no other form of existence to offer its inhabitants than to belong to a state and be subsumed under sovereign power. There is of course the alternative of nameless non-existence as a stateless person. Such people are practically forced by this form of existence to have the false consciousness of affirming the power that possesses its people as its mass of pawns and uses them accordingly.

However, no one is forced to get all indignant and take sides, upholding either “Israel’s right to exist” or the “Palestinians’ right to their own state,” as the general public are required to do and widely deliver on. Some of these people identify themselves with one ethnic group or the other and voluntarily recognize the struggle forced on that group as their own. They take part from afar; with demonstrations, if the force monopolist in charge lets them. That is, they only take part in spirit but as the fiercest of supporters of the force used by the rule they favor. In this way, they are professing that they, too, consider a human being to be essentially an available member of a nation’s people: a Jew or a Palestinian.

But the majority of those who take sides as required are not so consistent. They do so with a caveat: they don’t support the war, but only its purpose. They do not approve of the excesses, either Hamas’ attack or Israel’s many acts of destruction, but only the right that each side is asserting that way. They do not endorse the violence, but only its success. That’s nice. But it’s no use — even in this version, they are still supporting the purpose and success of state force. That is what they are recognizing and affirming; even and all the more explicitly when this force is actually ruining people as the state’s material. The moral imperative “not to remain silent” when there is fighting in the Middle East calls up the false consciousness that people have their identity as legal citizens of a state; that the collisions of state powers is a fact that people have to live with; and that it is morally apt to take sides and place the blame, distinguishing between good and evil. This wrong thinking does not get any better when one recognizes the lack of alternatives to this fact, mentally submitting to armed rule as a matter of course, and is so free-thinking as to rise above every necessary clash of incompatible claims to sovereignty, and grant neither Israel nor the Palestinian state-founding project the favor of taking its side. Posing as an impartial judge does not make one’s false consciousness reasonable, but silly.

Taking part actively or silently in the controversy over the Gaza war basically achieves nothing more and nothing less than exercising one’s ability and right to have an opinion on the ongoing war events. But in view of the horror, this cannot be enough. A freely reflecting individual without any influence on those waging the war will demand a way to influence them, and find ways of doing so. The first and main way is to call on one’s own state to intervene against the violent actions of this or that side or even both. This corroborates that nothing can be had in the world of states without force, while entertaining the democratic illusion that one’s belonging to a state, i.e., one’s status as human possession of a state power capable of effective international action, is — somehow, ultimately — the opposite: one sees oneself as possessing some power, which is small but can be put into effect by demonstrations and appeals, over the doings of one’s state. One believes one’s state has both the sovereign might and the obliging willingness to force war-waging rulers to act in accordance with the opinion one feels best with as an outraged citizen. One’s inevitable disappointment leads to the next level of escalation: a polemic against one’s own rulers and their wrong partisanship. Still combative, after achieving nothing here or anywhere else, one seeks and finds an outlet arguing with the like-minded on the other side. Ideal battlegrounds are educational and cultural institutions, because the protagonists of this dispute like to operate with values-based justifications. We then see the neocolonialist injustice of a white settler-state robbing the Palestinians of their homeland with mainly the USA to blame, versus the historical injustice, anchored in the world’s subconscious, of the anti-Semitism that Jews have suffered from since Christianity was invented. Among outraged moralists there are always some foot soldiers too, who will strike without wasting a lot of breath on explanations. When such efforts to make oneself heard go too far for the liking of those officially in charge, they assert some of the monopoly on the use of force entrusted to them. And so the culture of democratic discussion takes its predetermined course: from outrage about facts, to accusations passed back and forth of ignoring them and not wanting to hear the truth about the war events; this is followed by petitions for bans, and the offended honor of those whose are not heard but dismissed; in the end it is — once again — about the supreme Western value of free speech that the authorities are attacking. However shocked one might have been or still be about the months of horror, one is now all up in arms about the fundamental question of being allowed to have and demonstrate an opinion and upholding Western values. The good citizen’s moralism has ended up at itself.

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