ETIENNE BALIBAR: The Genocide in Gaza and its Consequences for the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
This text is Etienne Balibar’s memorandum for the conference that took place in Johannesburg during September 18th–20th of 2024, organized by the New South Institute as part of the series “African Global Dialogue” with the title “Narrative Conditions Towards Peace in the Middle East”.
Memorandum
In this memorandum, I express the positions that I intend to defend in our Dialogue in a very direct manner, which obviously should receive nuances. Hopefully the discussion will make room for that.
I need three preliminaries (3):
First, I must say that I am deeply pessimistic about the situation in “historic Palestine”. In the statement that I issued on October 21 of last year, I asserted that the combination of the murderous attack of Hamas and the exterminist war of retaliation launched by Israel against Gaza prepared for a destruction of Palestine as a people and a land. Palestine à la mort (4). This is even clearer today, after months of massacres whose genocidal character is manifest. Add the responsibility of the states which, despite repeated calls from the UN’s Secretary General, actively or passively support the Israeli war. This is true for the U.S., which deliver the bombs for the annihilation of Gaza and veto the resolutions against the continuation of the war, but also for the Gulf states, and for Europe. However, the Palestinian people has demonstrated in the past extraordinary capacities to survive and fight for its rights. Pessimism should not deter us from trying the impossible, which is also a duty.
Second, I speak here as an intellectual, a Socialist, and a Jew (among other things, since I don’t believe in exclusive identities), because Israel claims to be a “place of refuge” for all Jews of the world threatened by the continuation of antisemitism, and this would justify that it uses every means to “defend” itself. The grandson of a victim of the gas chambers myself, I find it unbearable that the memory of the Holocaust is instrumentalized to justify colonization, apartheid, oppression, extermination, in the name of the defense of the ”Jewish People”. Admittedly, this means that I am not “unbiased” in this debate. But tell me who is?
Third, I grieve every human victim on every side of the conflict, even those who could be said to bear a collective responsibility in their fate. This holds for the past and the present, but also for the future, because I believe that the catastrophes generated by this war will continue and threaten everyone in the region. There will be more “innocent” and “not so innocent” victims. Their deeds are not equivalent, but their deaths belong to the same tragedy. […]
My position is not that the State of Israel as such (when recognised by the UN in 1948, albeit not unanimously) was illegitimate, but that its legitimacy was conditional. And I submit that it has now practically lost the conditions.
Now, summarily, my positions on three points of debate:
First, about what happened on October 7 and after. Hamas’ assault on Israeli villages, fortifications, a music festival, etc., involving killings of civilians, rapes and other atrocities, and abduction of hostages, came after years of oppression and State terrorism against the Palestinian population in Gaza. As a military operation, it was made possible by the ineptitude or complacency of the Israeli administration towards Hamas, its “preferred enemy”, which the violence of the retaliation is now supposed to obliterate and compensate for. It was not a “pogrom” (“pogroms” are rather carried on by colonists against Palestinian villages), but undoubtedly it was a terrorist operation. Historically, terrorism is not incompatible with resistance, although it may undermine its legitimacy. It is my conviction that Hamas knew in advance that its assault would be retaliated with a process of extermination. They took this responsibility and sacrificed their own people for the sake of a strategic “victory” over the enemy. The terrible price will be long paid for. On their side, however, the Israeli military and extreme-right government, deeply penetrated by fascist forces, but also facilitated by the nationalist self-righteousness and the indifference of the majority of the Jewish population in Israel regarding the fate of the Palestinians (exceptions to this are all the more admirable), exploited cynically the trauma suffered by the population and seized what they saw as a “miraculous opportunity” to “finish the job” (in David Ben Gurion’s words), i.e. carry on a second Naqba, expand the colonization in the West Bank, uproot and decimate the Palestinians, erase the monuments of their history and culture. They accepted, planned, and carried on a mass massacre of civilians with few equivalents in recent history, which it is hard not to call a genocide, at least in “tendency” (in the words of the International Court of Justice). Which now means : a genocide in the making. News that we receive day after day are unbearable, and they are very partial. This does not obliterate the crimes committed by Hamas (as rightly indicated by the ruling of the International Criminal Court), but it raises the violence to a qualitatively different dimension, which should modify irreversibly our perception of the adversaries.
Second, the so-called Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which was always completely dissymmetric in terms of power relations and moral legitimacy, becomes now even more unequal. Since 1948 and before, the Palestinians have been subjected to colonization, forced expropriation, ethnic cleansing, racial discrimination, political disenfranchisement, which together lead to a process of erasure of a whole people, with its memory and civilization, and expulsion from their historic homeland. I am not saying that the Palestinians – or some of them – bear no responsibility at all in this process, which now reaches a new level of cruelty. But there is no symmetry. This situation creates on their side an absolute right to resist, whether politically, culturally or militarily (which is not to say that every strategy of resistance is good, or every form of counter-violence is just).
Turning to the other side, what needs to be discussed carefully in order to lay the conditions for any future settlement of peace are the vicissitudes of the legitimation and subsequent delegitimation of the existing political entity. My position is not that the State of Israel as such (when recognised by the UN in 1948, albeit not unanimously) was illegitimate, but that its legitimacy was conditional. And I submit that it has now practically lost the conditions. Israel’s moral and political legitimacy did not rest on the myth of the exiled people “returning” to its ancient Biblical land (which, in Golda Meir’s words, was supposed to be “a land without a people for a people without a land”). It does also not rest on the history of the Zionist movement and the continuous migrations of European Jews to Palestine since the 19th century, although in ideal conditions these exiled Jews could have become part of a Palestinian society which always had a cosmopolitan dimension. As the Israeli historian Shlomo Sand recently wrote, the European nations “vomited us”, with their virulent antisemitism and the resulting persecutions, after which the Zionist Jews ironically conceived of themselves as pioneers of the European civilization in the Orient… But this created no obligation for the natives to open their arms for the incomers. The unique foundation for Israel’s legitimacy as a State was its capacity to provide a refuge and recreate a collective future for the survivors of the Holocaust, rejected from every other part of the world. And it was a very strong foundation. But implicitly at least (and contrary to certain deep tendencies of the Zionist ideology, which is a European nationalism in the purest form), this went with two conditions : 1) that the Zionist settlements be “accepted”, through negotiation and alliance, by the historic inhabitants of the land, instead of seizing it by force, and claiming to be its “true proprietors” since immemorial times; 2) that the State of Israel become a genuinely democratic (and secular) state, granting equal rights and dignity to all its citizens. Instead of that, facilitated by various circumstances that include wars waged or prepared by the Arab states, we had ethnic discrimination, State terrorism and policies that permanently contradict international law (as if Israel, by virtue of its messianic origin and destination, enjoys absolute immunity). This orientation culminated with the decision in 2018 to officially redefine the country as “Nation-State of the Jewish People”, a racialist definition that legitimizes apartheid, and prepares for the current criminality. Therefore – I repeat not with Schadenfreude but with sadness and concern – Israel has delegitimized itself, threatening its own existence.
Hence, my third point. Every people has a “right to exist” (which means conversely that denying any people – I insist : any people – its right to exist, is a crime against humanity). That also includes the idea of protection or security, hence self-defense. However, this does not mean that the right to exist can be exercised in any constitutional form, under any name, within any conquered borders, through any type of sovereignty that ignores the other peoples, as if in a singular dialogue with God or History. The problem here comes from the fact that Palestine in the 20th century, through a tragic chain of violences and resistances, has become a “land of two peoples”, where men and women of two different genealogies and cultures bury their dead parents and raise their children. The possibilities for them to coexist, sharing the resources and the rights, which was always weak (or utopian), has become almost unthinkable after the current war. Palestinians may bear some responsibilities for that (especially when their politics is governed by such ideologies as jihadism). But it is overwhelmingly Israel’s continuous imperialism, with very little effective internal resistance despite the “democratic institutions” of the State, that has destroyed the possibility. To break the circle would mean to invent a federal constitution of some sort and find the steps towards its imposition and acceptation on both sides, with the support and monitoring of international agencies. “One State” and “Two States” are abstract formulas, which beg the question. The absolute precondition was once formulated by Edward Said in perfect clarity : “Equality or nothing”. Therefore righting the wrongs already done and reversing the current tendencies. We are far from there, but we can ceaselessly reinstate the principle.
However, the Palestinian people has demonstrated in the past extraordinary capacities to survive and fight for its rights. Pessimism should not deter us from trying the impossible, which is also a duty.
Supposing we can move in that direction, the immediate imperatives are obvious :
First, unconditional cease fire in Gaza, exchange of surviving hostages and political prisoners, complete evacuation of what remains of Gaza by the invading army, and its transference – at least provisionally – to humanitarian organizations supervised by the UN. This could also involve an open negotiation with Hamas and other Palestinian forces.
Second, an interdiction of the colonial violence in the West Bank and Jerusalem, and the progressive dismantling of all the illegal settlements. This might of course require a regime change in Israël and lead to a new Palestinian “authority”.
Third, a complete and rigorous implementation of the decisions and rulings adopted – at the request of South-Africa, whose decisive role we must hail in this circumstance – by the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice, including the penal sanctions and the interdiction of providing arms to a State and an Army that exterminates a whole population.
Fourth, a lifting of the ban imposed by the United States and followed by other States on the recognition of the State of Palestine, and its admission to the UN with full membership rights. No more, but no less.
To which on a personal note I would add a “subjective” condition, which is also political : “Jews” everywhere in the world must dissociate themselves from the idea that defending or protecting the Jewish People involves supporting Israel’s colonial policies, which are criminal and self-destructive, and they must reject the idea, which has been officialised in several countries, that antizionism is a form of antisemitism. Jews are concerned with the fate of Israel and the consequences of its actions. Their collective attitude can make a difference. It is also their “naming” in history that is at stake. They have no special right to support the Palestinian cause (critically, as every support should be), because, as I wrote a long time ago, “this is a universal cause” (5), but perhaps they have in this moment a special mission.
NOTES
1. I am superficially acquainted with Dr Chipkin, whom I had met in Paris years ago when he was a PhD student there (albeit not supervising his doctorate, contrary to what has been written). Recently we exchanged a correspondence in which he denied having rejected the procedure before the ICJ after it was successfully completed, albeit admitting to have expressed reservations about its legal validity ex ante.
2. See, for example, https://www.pressreader.com/
3. Skip a fourth one, which is expanded in the above preface.
4. Etienne Balibar : « Palestine à la mort », Mediapart (online), samedi 21 octobre 2023 : https://blogs.mediapart.fr/
5. Etienne Balibar : Palestine, a Universal Cause, Le Monde Diplomatique, May 2004 (French and English).