Commentary
The ethical challenge of permanent war
In Israel, the political and cultural antibodies that could neutralize this ferocious Jewish supremacism are growing weaker and weaker. It’s all proceeding according to the classic pattern: a state of emergency leads to the curtailing and, finally, the suspension of democracy.
Now that the Assad regime in Syria has been swept away with surprising speed, by fundamentalist militias with ties to the history of Al Qaeda and the Islamic State and with unpredictable intentions, Israel is pushing its military presence across the Syrian border.
Pleased at the fall of a Tehran ally, Netanyahu (who, nevertheless, has no reason to trust his new neighbors) is seizing the opportunity to take one more step toward “greater Israel” and expand the de facto borders of the Jewish state.
Meanwhile, as Syria is no longer stealing the focus as much from the increasing number of “incidents” in Lebanon, it is becoming increasingly clear that the cease-fire in Lebanon is not, after all, a first small step toward peace. It is only a truce, a tactical pause to replenish energy and momentum for the war. One might even call it a ploy to widen the war front and allow Israel to attack and invade the Lebanese state as a whole, no longer making any distinction between Hezbollah and the rest of the Lebanese, and then push on to Syria as needed.
This highly likely development is entirely consistent with the fact that the Israeli war cannot and will not end. It’s enough to listen to and take seriously, as one should, the extreme messianic and ruthless right-wingers holding up Netanyahu's government – which, after all, is not so ideologically distant from them – to understand that their minimum goal is the annexation of Gaza, the West Bank and a piece of southern Lebanon. All with the expulsion of the Arab and Palestinian population. Their maximum goal is an even greater territorial expansion and unchallenged power that would give Israel control over the entire region.
Thus, it is hardly surprising that even the mildest and meekest calls for caution and restraint from Tel Aviv's allies have always gone unheeded, and that Western support is being systematically channeled towards this expansionist design. The settler movement and the political forces representing them have made this explicit time and time again, without, however, concealing the extreme violence that they are willing to use to achieve it: first in war, then in persecution.
In Israel, the political and cultural antibodies that could neutralize this ferocious Jewish supremacism are growing weaker and weaker. It’s all proceeding according to the classic pattern: a state of emergency leads to the curtailing and, finally, the suspension of democracy. It is similar to the institution of “dictatorship,” which in ancient Rome was activated on a temporary basis whenever the Republic was deemed to be in danger. By more or less artificially prolonging the state of exception into a permanent state of war, that institution is able to consolidate into a new form of government.
There have been countless regime changes and wars of conquest motivated by the security of the nation. Wasn’t it with the same argument of Russia being threated with encirclement by the supposedly hostile West that Putin justified the invasion of Ukraine and consolidated his autocratic power?
Similarly, Israel's security has been transformed, far beyond its actual needs, into the motivation for a permanent war, which aspires not to some kind of mutually agreed peace, but to the annihilation of the adversary and a balance based essentially, if not exclusively, on military force.
Such permanent war can no longer afford the luxury of democracy, much less the questioning of those in command. And, indeed, the cracks have already become visible: the expansion of the police state and repression, the judicial impunity of the prime minister, attacks on the freedom of the press and the suspension of all normal democratic checks and balances.
Meanwhile, in Gaza, the escalation in words to describe the situation, evoking the apocalypse and all the circles of hell, only accompanies the inaction, impotence and finally the whimpering resignation of the international community. No one at this point would think of showing approval, or even a willingness to hear any justifications, for the monstrously disproportional Israeli retaliation and the strategy of massacre put into practice by the IDF. But it’s easy to notice all the signs of a growing habituation to this state of affairs, with the ritually indignant accounting of the helpless victims and, finally, an attitude of hopeless surrender.
As we’ve seen, the media doesn’t show many images from Gaza, and even fewer videos. But the ones we are shown resemble far more the aftermath of an earthquake than images from a war.
Desperate people standing above piles of rubble, caravans of the displaced and carts laden with household goods moving between two wings of completely collapsed buildings, white or gray body bags lined up in the dust at the feet of health staff, rescuers digging through the rubble.
What has vanished from the picture – or appears only rarely and in minimal form, such as the shadow cast by a tank – are the perpetrators of this destruction. It is displayed to us rather as a natural catastrophe, or, for those who want to believe in it, as divine retribution. The specific, unmistakable, savage face of war, of violence wielded with determination by human beings, so clearly conveyed to us long ago by the stills and footage from Vietnam, remains hidden within the besieged borders of Gaza.
And yet, beside historical readings, it is only based on these endless daily tragedies, on the suffering endured and on those who inflict it at the very moment it happens, on individual victims and individual perpetrators, on the basis of a material ethics of contingency, of a horrified and responsive common sense, that one could judge this war, see and determine its limits and fight those cheering it on.
Otherwise, the International Criminal Court’s translation of the Gaza disaster into the categories of law, with its indictment of Netanyahu and Gallant, immediately ran head-on into the wall of power relations and the interplay of supranational interests. A number of countries, members of the ICC and which tout themselves as blameless defenders of human rights, have engaged in grotesque legal contortions to dodge the principles they subscribed to in the particular case of Israel, while at the same time trying to show that they didn’t want to disavow them altogether. Finally, the idea was put forward to offer Israel a way out by letting it investigate the crimes its army allegedly committed and those who ordered them.
That would be no different from letting the Mafia conduct an impartial investigation into its own interests and crimes.
Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/la-sfida-etica-della-guerra-permanente on 2024-12-11