* Originally published in Spanish in
December 2023: «Palestina, democracia
humanista y genocidio», in El Ciudadano (December 2, 2023) and in Machina
et Subversio Machinae (December 10, 2023). María Emilia Tijoux is doctor in
sociology from the Université de Paris and professor at the Department of
Sociology at the Universidad de Chile. Gonzalo Díaz-Letelier is a doctoral
candidate in Hispanic language and literature, and an associate instructor in
the Department of Spanish at the University of California Riverside.
https://www.elciudadano.com/columnas/palestina-democracia-humanista-y-genocidio/12/02/
https://contemporaneafilosofia.blogspot.com/2023/12/gonzalo-diaz-letelier-maria-emilia.html
PALESTINE,
HUMANIST DEMOCRACY AND GENOCIDE
Gonzalo
Díaz-Letelier & María Emilia Tijoux
Our days are
filled with noise and silence. The horrendous and exhausting noise of the war
machines of extermination and their wake of bustle in the media and political
speeches in international forums, the flood of propaganda. But in addition to
propaganda, censorship proliferates, and this occurs in multiple ways. Not only
as an act of silencing, but also as active silence. We are not referring to the
sensitive silence we keep when there are no words to express the horror,
but rather that silence, that dull thud—when there is something to say
and for some reason it is not said. Because there are multiple ways to remain
silent. One of them is to keep silent. It can also be holding back the
word so as not to be singled out as another enemy. Another one may be to
remain in the moralizing discourse that appeals to the dispositive of condemnation
to close the issue, either in the general equivalencing of all violence, or,
based on the secret judgments from which they condemn: political thinkability of
the question is closed, from a support in principle to, a denial of, or a
cryptic silence on the genocide.
In the grayest and harshest years
of the civil-military dictatorship in Chile, attention to the media interface
of those years was directed to programs on State and Catholic television: the Festival
de la Una or the Japenning con Ja show were watched at home, as if
nothing was happening, while the dictatorship orchestrated the nightly order of
disappearance and torture in the streets and poblaciones. Today, the genocide in Palestine appears
spectacularized through an expanded media interface (with “Western” propaganda
predominating in the official media and the atrocities circulating on social
networks and the peripheries of the internet) and, even so, it resonates with a
dull sound behind the Netflix screens, as if nothing was happening.
Desensitization due to the profusion and saturation of atrocious images? Maybe,
at some level. But it seems that desensitization rests deeper, in a naturalization
of the atrocity in Palestine, given that the dynamic has been the normalization
of a genocide that is not new, that has been ongoing for several decades. If
someone has not heard about it, that is precisely the effect of such
naturalization.
Another of those thunderous
silences is that of a large part of the intelligentsia of the social
sciences and humanities. The “fear” of speaking publicly or writing about the
genocide envelops a silence that may not only be the result of scholarly
prudence regarding the object, or a mere reflection of the fearful positioning
of intellectuals in a field where “criticism” is trapped in the machinery of a
managerial social science emptied of all critical conatus. It may not be
just a prudent or fearful silence, it may not be just a silence to avoid the
haste of insufficiently informed judgment or reckless action, but one full of
silent, even unnoticed, judgments. At a first level, then, it may be a typical
overadaptation of the university teaching bureaucracy, of “mental habits” that
induce the intellectual to evade difficult issues and takes of position, as
Edward Said described it years ago:
You do not
want to appear too political; you are afraid of seeming controversial; you need
the approval of a boss or an authority figure; you want to keep a reputation
for being balanced, objective, moderate; your hope is to be asked back, to
consult, to be on a board or prestigious committee, and so to remain within the
responsible mainstream; someday you hope to get an honorary degree, a big prize,
perhaps even an ambassadorship. For an intellectual these habits of mind are
corrupting par excellence. If anything can denature, neutralize, and
finally kill a passionate intellectual life it is the internalization of such
habits. Personally, I have encountered them in one of the toughest of all
contemporary issues, Palestine, where fear of speaking out about one of the
greatest injustices in modern history has hobbled, blinkered, muzzled many who
know the truth and are in a position to serve it.
Such “habits of mind” would have to do with taking
care of one’s own university career, in the face of “the abuse and vilification
that any outspoken supporter of Palestinian rights and self-determination earns
for him or herself,” as Said describes. What would be at stake here is the
question that Michel Foucault pointed out by referring to the parrhesía, a Greek term that points to the courage
to “say everything”, to speak up “without reserve” things before others and
before the powerful (in front of whoever it may be, without shutting up, with
frankness and without fear).
But this does not mean that the thing is as simple as
speaking without fear or remaining silent out of fear. What is at stake, for
example, when intellectuals remain silent about Palestine in a “field” where
there is so much “critical” talk about colonization and decolonization (of
bodies, thought, methodologies, etc.), where a lot of publications deal about
injustice, suffering or poverty? Could it be that they only do it so as not to
jeopardize their positions on the field? Terms relating to “decoloniality”
prevail and circulate as currency on university campuses (from course syllabi
to everyday conversations and takes of positions), except, of course, when it
comes to Palestine. Then the category is conspicuous by its absence.
That something is conspicuous by its absence means that its absence announces
something. What does the absence—the silence—symptomatize or reveal in this
case?
Elizabeth de Fontenay has drawn attention to two terms
that during the 20th century were used to refer to situations of sacrificial
violence: “hecatomb” (sacrifice of one hundred cattle) to refer to the First
World War, and “holocaust” (animal sacrifice by cremation, without leaving
traces) to refer to the victims of the genocide of the Third Reich. In the use
of such terms, a displacement of their meaning has been practiced from animals
to humans: since the scapegoats are human, the displacement alludes to an
“animalization” of humanity—or “dehumanization”, or reduction to “bare life” (homo
sacer). So, it is considered “natural” that certain members of the
community of living beings must be sacrificed in the name of the
“spiritualization” of humanity as such. In the name of what spirit is it
perceived that Palestinians “die” (as animals—natural language) and Israelis
are “murdered” (as people—theological-legal category)? For the genocide to be
naturalized, the Gazans must be animalized—from the particular human-animal
difference determined westernly in the thread of a certain maximized
conception of human language (logos, reason, spirit, technique, history,
freedom, etc.) by contrast with “nature”. So here we have a question that today
is revealed with the greatest clarity: modern racism is the reverse of
humanism. If Western civilization monopolizes the anthropological
norm (inclusive/exclusive definition of the human), then its negative
side is the animalization of non-Western peoples. Omnis determinatio est
negatio (Spinoza, Hegel, Marx). Zionism, Lebensraum, “manifest
destiny”: if humanist democracy—today’s (neo)liberal democracy as Lebensraum—monopolizes
the production of the world of life (cosmogenesis, anthropogenesis), then its
negative or sacrificial reverse is necropolitics and genocide (production of
the world of life as a work of death).
The spirit—“in the name of which” animals are
sacrificed—seems to be constituted modernly in the equivalence between
significance and value: the Euro-North American axis centered in the
Atlantic—today in the midst of a turbulent and challenging intra-imperial reaccommodation
of global capital, with other relevant actors—, as a (neo)liberal, militarized
and spectacularized “Western democracy”, advocating and defending its
socio-political values (exceptionalist sovereignty and economic
government), aesthetic values (more or less sublimated between the
phenotypic and the cultural, between the suprematism of biological whiteness [blancura]
and the axiomatics of cultural whiteness [blanquitud]), Christianity
(more or less sublimated between the cultural and the guilty-generator ethos),
techno-scientific rationality and freedom of capitalist enterprise (deregulated
capital or capital anomie). These would be some of the most
general features of the consensus within which the imaginary and
governmentality of Western democracy moves, the constitution of its
constitution. All of this is framed, of course, as a fight for global hegemony
of values. In his 2003 preface to his 1978 book, Said wrote:
Even with all
its terrible failings and its appalling dictator (who was partly created by US
policy two decades ago), were Iraq to have been the world’s largest exporter of
bananas or oranges, surely there would have been no war, no hysteria over
mysteriously vanished weapons of mass destruction, no transporting of an
enormous army, navy and air force 7000 miles away to destroy a country scarcely
known even to the educated American, all in the name of “freedom.” Without a
well-organized sense that these people over there were not like “us” and didn’t
appreciate “our” values—the very core of traditional Orientalist dogma as I
describe its creation and circulation in this book—there would have been no
war. So from the very same directorate of paid professional scholars enlisted
by the Dutch conquerors of Malaysia and Indonesia, the British armies of India,
Mesopotamia, Egypt, West Africa, the French armies of Indochina and North
Africa, came the American advisers to the Pentagon and the White House, using
the same cliches, the same demeaning stereotypes, the same justifications of
power and violence (after all, runs the chorus, power is the only language they
understand) in this case as in the earlier ones. These people have now been
joined in Iraq by a whole army of private contractors and eager entrepreneurs
to whom shall be confided everything from the writing of textbooks and the
constitution to the refashioning and privatization of Iraqi political life and
its oil industry. Every single empire in its official discourse has said that
it is not like all the others, that its circumstances are special, that it has
a mission to enlighten, civilize, bring order and democracy, and that it uses
force only as a last resort. And, sadder still, there always is a chorus of
willing intellectuals to say calming words about benign or altruistic
empires, as if one shouldn't trust the evidence of one’s eyes watching the
destruction and the misery and death brought by the latest mission
civilizatrice.
Regarding the materiality of the massacre—of Gazans in
the first place, due to the discursive dehumanization of the Palestinians and
the genocidal practice in question here, but also of Israelis and foreigners,
and of non-human animals, since they are all part of the same battle’s canvas—let
us pause for a moment on a phrase by Said regarding the denial of genocide: “as
if one shouldn’t trust the evidence of one’s eyes watching the destruction and
the misery and death.” Denialism rests on a regime of visibility and
sayability. Regarding the materiality of the extermination, it could be said
that it has not been “proportionate” to the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023,
but it has been completely consistent in relation to the
disproportionate extermination that the Israeli Zionist government has systematically
and consistently carried out in Palestine over several decades—oriented to ethnic
cleansing, the repression of revolts and the
“retaliation” of attacks by the armed resistance to the occupation. Regarding
the latter, a few days ago, Claudio Aguayo, concerning a political observation
that Lev Trotsky made, namely, that in war the methods are symmetrical, but
not necessarily the belligerent parties—that is, all methods are
symmetrically atrocious, but power relations can be qualitatively asymmetrical,
oppressor-oppressed—, he formulated the question like this: that in war there
are no good guys with bad methods and bad guys with bad methods, that this
Manichaeism only serves to rescue the oppressors when they are suddenly beaten
and that, furthermore, ignores the fact that the world’s pity for Israeli
bodies and the silence about Palestinian bodies is unconsciously equivalent to
saying that white bodies must hurt us twice as much.
Regarding the consistency and systematicity of the
genocide, at this conjuncture even the problematic question of the “intention”
or not of genocide on the part of the political-military command looks
pristine: it is not a mere assignment of intention (in the paranoid sense of
security law or conspiratorial delirium), but of its explicit declaration in a
theological-necropolitical key: the scene of Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu
revisiting the rhetoric of Amalek in order to biblically justify the military
operation and the sacrifice of the enemies of his god and his people). But despite all the facts and statements
of the genocidaires themselves, certain expressions of denialism still
proliferate in university discussion, if not silence—as can be seen, for
example, in the discussion in France between Didier Fassin (who used the
concept of “genocide” to refer to the Israeli campaign) and Eva Illouz (who
suggested that it was better to speak of “war crimes”, since genocide would imply
the “intention to exterminate”, something that according to her there has not
been in this case). Jürgen Habermas—a leading man of “critical
theory”, the “public sphere” and European “unity”—, for his part, in a letter
signed together with other German intellectuals, states that the current situation has
been “created” (geschaffen) by “the extreme atrocity of Hamas and Israel’s
response to that” (as if the Palestinians had not suffered more than
seventy years of ethnic cleansing and forced displacement, occupation of
territories, configuration of concentration camps, economic blockade, siege by
land and sea, regular massacres and daily repression in a state of exception); they
further maintain that “the criteria of judgment (Maßstäbe der Beurteilung)
fail completely when genocidal intentions are attributed to Israel’s actions.” Habermas
and the other signatories appear “in solidarity with Israel and the Jews in
Germany”, concerned about the “anti-Semitism” unleashed by Israel’s actions (as
if the Palestinian genocide were not anti-Semitism), and about the threat that looms over the
Western values of democracy and human rights; but not a word about the killing
of Palestinians. At most, they point out that the way “how these reprisals are
carried out, which in principle are justified, is the subject of a
controversial debate”, but instead of questioning the way, they start reciting—as
if they were fulfilled—the “guiding principles of proportionality, the
prevention of civilian casualties and the conduct of a war with prospects for
future peace” (even if we leave aside the police-civilizational logic of
“pacification” at play here, it is naive to think that the current massacre
will leave “peace” as a balance for the coming decades). In this rhetoric, the
displacement to formal questions of principle is precisely what makes the
historical suffering and extermination of Palestinian bodies invisible (logic
of disappearance, erasure machine). As occurs in fascist aesthetics, which
based on its (re)invention of the body (subjects, social bodies) abounds
in forms and symbols, while erasing the sacrifice of the flesh.
In this sense we are witnessing the conversion of the
“public sphere” into a space of propaganda in the context of permanent war:
liberalism becomes neofascism—in its figure of neoliberal fascism—and
“communicative action” coincides with the propaganda of “democracy” as a
representational dispositive occupied by the neoliberal war machine—which
affirms itself as “the West” and has one of its spearheads in the racist and
theological-necropolitical project of the Zionist State of Israel. In that sense, also, in relation to
the apparent bewilderment produced by the attitude of the “international
community” towards what is happening in Gaza—active silence, negligent
diligence—, remember Rwanda 1994 and Srebrenica 1995,
among other episodes. Racism and fascism are not something that happens to the
“democratic and liberal West” as a mere historical accident, but rather they
are inherent to the logic in which such a geopolitical and cultural entity
affirms itself as such. Racism and fascism are involved in their own humanist
and civilizational logic, since racism as the sacrificial reverse of
humanism, and the police closure of the world that is fascism, are
inherent to the teleology of civilizational progress (“Western democracy”, “democracy
for Jews” in Israel, on different scales, co-belong each other as logics of
inclusion/exclusion and hegemonic vocation).
So, the scenario is ominous. A decisive part of the
international community supports genocide “in principle” clearly and profusely,
whether by action or omission. Those who are well-thinking and humanistic send
discreet amounts of boxes and money of “humanitarian aid” to Palestine and
advocate for peace in international political forums, at the same time they do
not stop supplying the war machine of extermination by maintaining the validity
or promoting enormous technological-military contracts with Israel—humanism
fuels catastrophe, and humanists limit themselves to doing damage control
accompanied by humanitarian assistance, without questioning their own
imagination and political ecology. Military-technological contracts are not cancelled
“for security reasons,” it is said. But today more than ever it is evident that
we live in a world where it turns out that the greater the “security”, the
greater the terror. And so we have to witness one of the most terrifying
genocides in history, supported by the “West of democracy and freedom”—once the
representational dispositive of hegemonic democracy has been occupied by the
neoliberal war machine (that which was previously extreme right, now occupies
the political “center”, in the language of “cultural battles”).
The Israeli army intensifies the bombing, the tanks
have entered Gaza and there is a total blackout of the internet and
communications. The world is witnessing a colonial genocide—which is
intensifying today, but which has not stopped occurring for decades, absolutely
naturalized. The so-called “international community” (that is, the Western
international oligarchy led by the American government machine) not only
witnesses, but supports the State of Israel in its carnage. Europe, reduced to
a theme park, lagging behind everything and self-destructing, does nothing but
fall and fall. With this, the 21st century begins to know the depths of its
ignominy. “Freedom”, “democracy”, “civilization”, all the modern concepts that
sustained the “Western” political imaginary today are nothing more than
categorial husks that burn on the barricade of history—of that temporality
whose figuration as “progress” (advance of evangelization over paganism,
advance of civilization over barbarism, advance of neoliberal democracy over
tyranny and underdevelopment) today is revealed as a dispositive of sacrificial
hierarchization of life, as unconditioned devastation, that is, as nakba.
Foucault
thematizes the question of parrhesía in the course of 1981-1982, «La hermenéutica del sujeto» (1981-1983), as an ethical issue related to the
practices of direction of consciousness and the techniques of self-care; later he
address it as a political issue linked to the birth of democracy, in the last
two courses at the Collège de France, «El gobierno de sí y de los otros» (1982-1983) and «El coraje de la verdad» (1984), as well as in a
seminar he gave in Berkeley, published under the title «Discurso y verdad» (1983).
On the night of
October 28, three weeks into the campaign against the Gaza Strip, the Prime
Minister of the Israeli regime, Benjamin Netanyahu, shamelessly tried to
justify the horror by describing the Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement
(HAMAS) as the repetition of Amalek, the biblical tribe that, according to the
holy books, God ordered them to annihilate. The verses cited by Netanyahu (from
Deuteronomy and Samuel, books of the Jewish Torah and the
Christian Old Testament) are among the most violent and have a long history of
being exploited by Zionists to justify the slaughter of Palestinians. Cf. Deuteronomy,
25:17: “You must remember what Amalek has done to you (…), we must remember”;
“You shall blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven. You will not
forget”; and Samuel, 15:13, a passage in which God orders King Saul to
kill every person in Amalek, a rival nation of the ancient Jews, and completely
destroy everything that belongs to them: “Now go and attack Amalek, and
completely destroy everything they have and do not forgive them. But kill the
man and the woman, the child and the suckling, the ox and the sheep, the camel
and the donkey.”
