Gonzalo Díaz-Letelier & María Emilia Tijoux / Palestine, humanist democracy and genocide

 

* 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.[1]   

              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.[2] 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.[3]

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,[4] 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[5] 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).[6] 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.[7]

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,[8] 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).[9] 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).[10] 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,[11] 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),[12] 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.[13] 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—,[14] 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).[15]

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.

---

[1] Although one of the symbolic violences usually at play is the reduction of the Palestinian nakba to stark figures, we cannot fail to record them. As of November 24, 2023 (day 49 of the Israeli invasion), according to Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, the toll is 20,031 murdered (16,460 civilians: 8,176 children, 4,112 women), 36,350 injured, 1,730,000 displaced, a colossal destruction of urban infrastructure and industrial facilities, and attacks on hospitals, schools and media buildings.

[2] Pablo Larraín (dir.), “Tony Manero”, Fábula Prodigital Producciones, Chile, 2008.

[3] Edward Said, «Representations of the Intellectual. The 1993 Reith Lectures», Vintage Books, New York, 1996, p. 100-101.

[4] 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).

[5] Elizabeth de Fontenay, «Le silence des bêtes. La philosophie à l’épreuve de l’animalité», Fayard, París, 1998, p. 209.

[6] Claudio Aguayo, “El odio a los palestinos: Slavoj Zizek, el orientalismo y la masacre”, in Ficción de la Razón, November 3, 2023 (https://ficciondelarazon.org/2023/11/03/claudio-aguayo-borquez-el-odio-a-los-palestinos-slavoj-zizek-el-orientalismo-y-la-masacre/).

[7]  Edward Said, «Orientalism», Penguin Modern Classics, London / New York, 2003, pp. xv-xvi.

[8] Cf. Ilan Pappé, «La limpieza étnica de Palestina», translated from English into Spanish by Luis Noriega, Editorial Crítica, Barcelona, ¹2008.

[9] 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.”

[10] See Didier Fassin, “Le spectre d’un génocide à Gaza”, in AOC, November 1, 2023 (https://aoc.media/opinion/2023/10/31/le-spectre-dun-genocide-a-gaza/); and Eva Illouz, “Genocide in Gaza? Eva Illouz replies to Didier Fassin”, in K., November 16, 2023 (https://k-larevue.com/en/genocide-in-gaza-eva-illouz-replies-to-didier-fassin/).  

[11] Nicole Deitelhoff, Rainer Forst, Klaus Günther & Jürgen Habermas, “Grundsätze der Solidarität. Eine Stellungnahme”, in Research Center “Normative Orders” at the Goethe University Frankfurt, November 13, 2023 (https://www.normativeorders.net/2023/grundsatze-der-solidaritat/).

[12] Mauricio Amar, “El antisemitismo de Israel”, in Revista Disenso, Santiago de Chile, October 31, 2023 (https://revistadisenso.com/el-antisemitismo-de-israel/).

[13] León Rozitchner, “’Plomo fundido’ sobre la conciencia judía”, in Página 12, January 4, 2009 (https://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/elmundo/subnotas/117692-37474-2009-01-04.html).

[14] Although frequently, along with this active silence or inaction, there is also a split in the behavior of the “leaders” of the countries enrolled in such an “international community”: they display a humanistic and well-thinking declarative performance that condemns the indiscriminate bombing of civilians by part of the Israeli army (or that incurs the equivalencing of all violences, condemning “all of them,” as Chilean President Gabriel Boric did), propose daring solutions and send “humanitarian aid”; but, at the same time, in substantive practice they maintain valid contracts with Israel for the purchase of weapons duly “tested on the battlefield”… against the Palestinian population. During these days the case of Spain has come to light; something similar happens in Chile, which also buys these weapons to colonially besiege the Mapuche people in Wallmapu.

[15] See Alberto Toscano, “The War on Gaza and Israel’s Fascism Debate”, in Verso Books Blog, October 19, 2023 (https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/the-war-on-gaza-and-israel-s-fascism-debate); and Frédéric Lordon, “Totalitarian Catalysis”, in Verso Books Blog, November 2, 2023 (https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/totalitarian-catalysis).