Étienne Balibar on Gaza

Étienne Balibar interviewed by Luca Salza [1]

Translated from the French by David Broder

Luca Salza: I’d like to start with a question that’s troubling many of us today — a simple philosophical question, yet also a horrible one. How and what can we think, faced with what is happening in Gaza? How can we think Gaza? How can we think in Gaza? In short, what is the value of thought, faced with a genocide?

Étienne Balibar: I will get to your question, which is, indeed, a horrible one, but not at all simple, my dear Luca. 

But first, I want to tell you about the feelings that led me to accept your proposal, despite the difficulties and risks that it involves. One is that, for the first time, I will be contributing in writing to a journal that I admire and which I hope will continue to make its voice heard for a long time to come.

Most importantly, there is this feeling of anger and despair, this shaking of all our certainties that the name Gaza stirs up. It’s something that I share with you, and which was well expressed in your call for contributions, citing Mahmoud Darwish. We must seek inspiration from Darwish, and a few others (including his friend Edward Said), so as not to compound the ongoing crime with a dismal silence. Speaking out to express one’s own powerlessness is terribly humiliating, but remaining silent is impossible: it is already a kind of complicity. When I read the questions you suggested to me, I immediately understood that I would inevitably fall short of giving an adequate answer to them. But I also understood that I mustn’t shy away from them. So, I will address all of them and say what I can. Worüber man nicht sprechen kann [oder denken], darüber muss man [doch nicht] schweigen! (“Whereof one cannot speak [or think], thereof one must [not] be silent”) — to alter the final line of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus logico-philosophicus.

So, you asked me about thinking Gaza, thinking in Gaza. Despite the images and stories that do filter through (and reporters are losing their lives there every day), we are not there, in Gaza, under the bombs and in front of the tanks, watching our homes being razed to the ground, our children starving, our wounded being finished off even in the hospital wards, and burying our dead in the bare earth. We can only think about it night and day, replaying our horror in our minds over and over. We rack our brains over the history of the Israeli-Palestinian “conflict”, searching for what has made it so irredeemable and why there seems no longer to be any possibility of an overturning of the balance of forces. We try to learn everything we can about the extermination plan and its enactment, but also about the resistance, because it remains beneath the rubble, in the gestures of defiance or the distress-signals of those condemned to death. In their dignity, faced with their murderers. They do this, so that the world knows — so that the world remembers, even if it did not put up any opposition.

But I understand that your question extends beyond the fact of thinking about what is happening. It concerns its truth-content and moral significance: what are we capable of thinking that then commits us to further action, and what truly necessary thoughts do we still have when we say “Gaza”? I believe we must admit that it will always be too little, inadequate faced with the enormity of the crime. A crime in which we are also complicit, lest we forget. We must put aside excuses, protections and precautions; doing so is the condition for us arriving not only a circumstantial description, but at radical questions, the answers to which will take a long time to find and to get right. Your formulation contains a valuable suggestion in this regard: “What is the value of thought, faced with a genocide?” Thought is worth what it can be: nothing, or something, depending on whether it takes the measure of its own destitution and its own urgency. For genocide is one of the names given to this extreme situation which subverts rationality in the ordinary sense: it goes far beyond deduction, representation, the evaluation of the pros and cons. But what does “a” genocide mean in this case? That we have recognised all the criteria, the distinctive features listed in its legal definition and which can be identified by historical analogy? Undoubtedly. For a long time already, the murderer’s lackeys and mouthpieces — or “friends of the Jewish people” for whom truth matters less than blind, communalist solidarity — have been alone in stubbornly denying the reality of genocide. They have completely debased themselves. Unfortunately, Gaza is not a “possible” genocide, some future to be warned against it is genocide in progress, executed before our eyes with unyielding determination and without any real opposition, with only the final solution still uncertain. Already Gaza no longer exists, while two million spectres, deprived of food and driven from one point of extermination to another, wander among its ruins... But to say “a” genocide also suggests that we must compare. Genocides do not happen every day and not just anywhere. And yet, there are others besides Gaza, in the past and even in the present: in Sudan, to name but one genocide whose concealment is, in many respects, as unbearable as the exposure of Gaza, and is part of one same catastrophe (and I will come back to this). The death drive sweeps across the world, leaving a trail of devastation and corpses. But to say this is only to give another name to the problem.

However, each genocide — what an expression: each genocide! — has unique historical, political and moral characteristics. It is these that we must “think” about. What makes Gaza unique, and stirs up our feeling of unbearable contradiction, is not only the fact that the genocide is being perpetrated by Jews who are (at least some of whom are) descendants of the victims of the Shoah — the genocide of genocides. It is also the fact that, after the institutionalisation of the memory of the Shoah, it is being exploited to prepare, motivate, organise and gain acceptance for the genocide in Gaza. The Shoah — as a destructive and foundational event, now inseparable from what Jean-Claude Milner has called “the Jewish name”, and through which this name and those who bear it are, whether they like it or not, attached to an unparalleled example of the annihilation of man by man, witnesses to its monstrous possibility, warning of its repetition — constantly contributes to the justification of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. It does this in its support for the assertion that the “victims of genocide” could obviously not themselves perpetrate genocide in turn. But it also does so in a contradictory way, insofar as it allows these “victims” to break, with impunity, all the limits of law and humanity in order to “protect” themselves from the eternal return of genocide by which they say or believe themselves to be threatened. “Not us” and “only us”, proclaim the Israelis as their own self-justifications demand, invoking the name of Auschwitz and the pogroms that prepared the way for it. Thus, in a “diabolical” causality (Poliakov), through its heirs the Shoah as a first genocide engenders the genocide in Gaza, and thus there it loses its meaning — not only for Jews, but for all of us.[2] How are we going to be able to situate this tragedy in history, or in “reality”, and how are we going to react? What will we do with it, in our thoughts and in our lives?

I say that this is what we must “think” on, but I am not sure how, or by what logic. For it is both the source of its appalling effectiveness (who would dare contradict the heirs of the Shoah?) and the reversal of all moral and intellectual values (who would still dare utter the words “never again”?). Perhaps our conversation will help to break us out of this deadlock. 

The question may then be said even more directly: what should we do with philosophy while Gaza and the Gazans are being annihilated? After Auschwitz, authors of Jewish origin helped us to deepen and refine our critique of the subject, of belonging, of identity, of the state, by contributing to a genealogical deciphering of the violence of the logos. Indeed, it was perhaps mainly from them that we started again when Europe was nothing but rubble. Your philosophical journey is part of the tradition of a certain universalism also closely linked to Judaism, the Marxist current, which was also an attempt to combat the retreat into identity and the violence of nationalisms. Nevertheless, today we wonder: what is the value of our cultural heritage?

I still remember a quote from Lenin that I learned by heart in my “Marxist” youth, as you say: “All culture is divided into two parts, a clerical and reactionary component, and a progressive and revolutionary component”, or something to that effect. I would surely find it very difficult today to endorse Lenin’s idea of the universality of class struggle, or the categories into which he divided the “camps” of history and politics. But I still believe that there is never any unity or homogeneity in what we call culture, which, of course, includes art, science and philosophy, all of which encroach on each other — or, rather, their unity is a permanent conflict, for which any common language may remain elusive (in this regard, I like the category of “the differend” developed by Lyotard [3]). To speak of culture is undoubtedly to totalise, but it is never to reconcile. What you call our “cultural heritage” obviously today includes the entire legacy of this “critique of the subject, of belonging, of identity, of the state” and the “genealogical deciphering of the violence of the logos” to which you refer. This ranges from Adorno (in whom Benjamin’s warning survives in a certain way [4]) to Günther Anders and from Antelme to Primo Levi or Kertész. To which I would obviously add Arendt’s great undertaking, however debatable it may be, but unparalleled in its historical and analytical depth, up to and including Eichmann in Jerusalem. And even the work of bastards like Heidegger and Carl Schmitt, compromised up to the neck in the perpetration of genocide, but indispensable for understanding its background and strategy. I will not go into detail, here. I believe that we must try, more than ever, to draw from these works (and others), in their different ways, the tools for understanding what Gaza represents in our experience, and the modes in which, once again, history is split in two by genocide, the aftermath destituting the past from which it nevertheless proceeds. But this requires a complete shift in cultural references, identities and temporalities, which we will have to consider.

I would place the following phenomenon at the heart of this great displacement: as per the argument that Arendt masterfully advanced in her Origins of Totalitarianism (the same argument that the first French translation sought to obscure [5]), the Nazi genocide that targeted European Jews (but also Romani people and “abnormal” people) was only possible through the importation, into Europe, of the methods of concentration and extermination that Europeans had been enacting and perfecting in the rest of the world (particularly in Africa) since the start of colonisation. This goes hand-in-hand with the fact that the Nazis aimed to establish a colonial empire in the “Eurasian” space, dominated by the Germanic race, where the indigenous populations were condemned to slavery (in the case of the Slavs) and extermination (in the case of the Jews [6]). This “repatriation” or ‘boomerang effect” of colonialism (as Aimé Césaire put it in his Discourse on Colonialism) is, of course, not “the cause” of Nazism and the Shoah (whose main determining factor remains antisemitism). It is, still, an essential part of its conditions and of the “universal” significance of the political forms that it brings to light. If we then turn our attention back to Gaza, perhaps it would not be so ungrounded to see a symmetrical configuration, in which a European invention — expressing some of the most inveterate destructive tendencies of its politics — is exported to the Middle East, where it contributes to perpetuating, re-establishing and exacerbating colonialism. Let’s consider the version favoured by Palestinian national historiography — and the least that thinking on the Palestinian genocide can do is listen to the voices of the Palestinians and begin by learning from those who are suffering the genocide and saw it coming, from the Nakba to the current eradication of the populations of Gaza and the West Bank (using distinct yet complementary approaches). In this historiography, this scenario takes the following form: the colonisation of Palestine is an intrinsic “moment” in the history of European imperialism (beginning with the British Empire, followed by the French Empire, and continued to this day by Israel’s close association with the “Western” powers, which provide it with funding, weapons and diplomatic protection). It enacts its extreme forms (settler colonialism, which replaces the indigenous people with settlers, directing their expulsion and then elimination) and extends the imperialist enterprise even beyond its supposed historical endpoint. It uses the consequences of the extermination of the Jews of Europe as an opportunity, a (demographic and intellectual) resource, and an ideological cover.[7] I would propose a critical variation on this scenario which, I hope, does not disregard its general truth. It is certainly true that Zionism, since its founding fathers (Herzl, Weizmann), has been both a typically “European” nationalism (among the oppressed nationalities) and an “Orientalism” steeped in the idea that European culture is superior to Eastern barbarism. It is surely true that this ideology has given free rein to the “secular messianism” of the State of Israel and its will to technological and military power.[8] However, the idea of an Israeli colonisation enterprise serving a Euro-American “collective imperial metropole” is a fiction that has the serious disadvantage of minimising the way in which Europe “vomited out” its Jews (Shlomo Sand [9]). It downplays the role played, in the foundation of Israel, of the consequences of Nazism and antisemitism, the violence of the European civil war in which Jews were the main victims, and thus the complexity of the motives that led the postwar United Nations to confer legitimacy on the new state on part of the territory of “historic Palestine”…

It also has the drawback, following on from this, of obscuring the complicity of the Arab states (I am not talking about the peoples), which were themselves subject to imperialism but ended up using this complicity to conquer dominant positions within it (as is today true of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, also involved in the genocide in Sudan). Their policy towards the Palestinians has constantly veered between impotent bluster, cynical manipulation and self-serving bartering.

So, it seems to me that a balanced view of Europe’s “historical responsibility” for the colonisation of Palestine, which today has led to ethnic cleansing, genocide and the devastation of the country, has to include other elements. It must integrate the antagonisms and contradictions that have shaped European history over the last two centuries (a history of self-destruction) and also reflect on the Arab world’s capacity for resistance and autonomy (a capacity that has been constantly neutralised or betrayed [10]). Integrating these considerations does not remove the general sense of the relationship of domination, but it avoids reducing it to an abstract binary schema, or essentialising it.

However, the hazardous symmetry that I am sketching out here, based on a comparison of the two genocides — the Shoah and the one in Gaza — and the “genealogy” that links them, contains a general lesson concerning the philosophy of history. That is, every genocide is a singular event, charged with “local” determinants, but it is also immediately imbued with a global significance — I would be tempted to say a “cosmopolitical” one, if this term did not evoke, in our culture, an ideal of civilisation rather than a march to death. It is global in its distant causes, its means and objectives, the complicity or blindness that facilitates it, its effects that spread throughout the world, the upheaval it causes in our imagination of the sense of history, and the “global” dividing lines it draws between individuals, nations and ideologies. Gaza is a global event that will leave nothing unchanged in our thoughts and in our mutual relations. It is appalling that such a transformation should have its origin, and have its cost, in the extermination of the Palestinians and the destruction of Palestine.

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When I spoke of a “cultural heritage”, I was above all thinking about the philosophical tradition. The philosophies of otherness have enabled us, for example, to deal as best we can in Europe with the post-Auschwitz world. But Emmanuel Levinas — the philosopher of difference, who goes so far as to conceive of otherness to the point of replacing the “I” with the “you” — late in life succumbed to a highly ambiguous reading of the Jewish-Palestinian conflict, which casts a sinister light on his theses on vulnerability and ethical responsibility. In Levinas’s work, we find both a political and ethical defence of Zionism (it is here, moreover, that the antinomy between ethics and politics, according to Levinas, is said to be broken): ‘The Zionist idea, as I now see it, stripped of all mystique, of all false immediate messianism, is nevertheless a political idea that has an ethical justification … We defend our neighbour when we defend the Jewish people; each Jew, in particular, defends his neighbour when he defends the Jewish people” (Emmanuel Levinas with Alain Finkielkraut, Israël: éthique et politique, radio conversation, 28 September 1982). Bearing in mind that this interview took place a few days after the Sabra and Shatila massacres, I ask: what should we do with the philosophy of otherness when it attributes an ethical, original foundation to the politics of a state?

I do not believe it is of much interest to put Levinas on trial. He is a philosopher whose work spans the century and which — through the concepts it formulates, the problems it raises, and the reactions it provokes — transcends the political choices of its author, although it is certainly not independent of them. Since you mention the great tradition of philosophies of otherness (I would say of constitutive otherness, in which the relationship to the other, i.e. a dissimilar other, irreducible to the alter ego, precedes and informs the subject’s self-awareness), it would be important to mention earlier formulations within the Jewish tradition, in particular those of Martin Buber, whose relationship to Zionism and Israeli politics is both much more intrinsic and much more critical, and whose great book I and Thou dates from 1923.[11] You cited the phrase, “We defend our neighbour when we defend the Jewish people”, which has such an ominous resonance today. So perhaps it is more interesting to note the reversal that took place in his conception of Jewishness or “belonging” to the Jewish people. I refer to the 1947 text, Being Jewish, in which he expresses the idea that “to be Jewish is not only to seek a refuge in the world but to feel for oneself a place in the economy of being”. He explains, further on, that this means “to treat the world, to treat ourselves, as we treat the people around us whose biographies we do not know, who, torn from their family, from their social circle, from their interior, are all ‘of an unknown father,’ abstract in some way, but who for precisely this reason, are given immediately.” If I understand Levinas correctly, this amounts to defending or loving one’s neighbour, whoever they may be, through the Jewish people, rather than the other way around. Hence Levinas’s explicit refutation of the idea of election as a “preference”, national or otherwise.[12] It is true that, in the letter to Maurice Blanchot that follows, Levinas also characterises the election he believes he benefits from through filiation as “the feeling of being born into the absolute.” It is undoubtedly this conviction of closeness (or “brotherhood”) with God that helps to reverse a Judaism of responsibility towards the Other into a Judaism understood as a civilising mission that has “God on its side”.[13] I believe that this ambivalence is also what Derrida’s uncompromising critique addresses, when he reproaches Levinas for always having “magnified” the figure of the other to designate him as a capital Other and confer exclusivity on the God of Israel in his revelation: “every other is wholly other, I responded to Levinas one day”.[14]

But the real problem is not the ins and outs of Levinas’s changing approaches, but the very notion of the “Jewish people”. I believe that this notion has always carried a profound ambiguity (which in a sense has enriched it and nourished its prophetic as well as messianic interpretations) and that it is currently undergoing a dramatic change, which places “each Jew” before a heart-wrenching choice while also lumbering them with an overwhelming responsibility. The “Jewish people” of the last two millennia were descended from the same “ethnic group” or ancient nation only through an ethical-religious tradition centred on the transmission of a text(and respect for its letter), coupled with a genealogical fiction.[15] Their dispersion or diaspora in Greek (galutin Hebrew), experienced as an ontological “exile”, could be expressed in multiple community affiliations (and linguistic, therefore literary and poetic) affiliations, such as Yiddishland or the Sepharad. Yet, it also provided a framework for solidarity in beliefs, knowledge and transnational hopes that was radically incompatible with any state organisation or project. It was the nineteenth century, bound up with the rise of European nationalism and a backdrop of antisemitic persecution, that gave rise to Zionism, i.e. the idea of a “Jewish state” (to which, it should be noted, not all Jews ever subscribed, and to which not all its theorists attributed the same exclusive character). And it was in the twentieth century, in circumstances that are by now well-known, that this state emerged as a “sovereign” power, as part of a broader process of European colonisation and a magnet for Jewish populations worldwide (particularly “Eastern” Jews " Jews from Islamic countries), in open or latent war with other states. The ideological characteristic that emerged after the founding of the State of Israel (and which was carefully cultivated by its propaganda apparatus, not without success among many Jewish communities, but again without ever achieving unanimity) is the imaginary coupling of Israeli citizenship with belonging to world Judaism in a single “Jewish people” of which Israel is cast as spiritual centre and bearer of political and religious legitimacy. Thus, every Jew in the world is said to have “two countries” one of which takes precedence over the other, or imposes duties on them, particularly in relation to Israel’s enemies, ipso facto designated as “enemies of the Jewish people”.[16] With the current constitutional shift, one might think that this totalitarian conception of belonging to the Jewish people will become irreversibly established: Israel, as a “refuge” established in the promised land from which its ancestors were expelled two thousand years ago, claims, in a sense, a dual population, the internal and the external. The Jewish people will definitively coincide with a messianic and geopolitical “Greater Israel”. I believe that the opposite will be true. For the active (positively “embraced”) or passive (“tolerated”) complicity of Israeli citizens (or the majority of them) in the genocide of the Palestinians (without which the genocide could not have been carried out, even after the collective trauma of 7 October 2023) will create increasingly deep divisions within the “diaspora”. Since the “diaspora” cannot return to the millennia-long conception of an exilic community (because something irreversible has happened in the becoming-state of the Jewish people that Israel has brought about and which is now turning into a catastrophe), my conviction is that the very notion of the “Jewish people” has entered into crisis and is exposed to dissolution. At least, if it is to survive, it will have to rebuild itself outside Israel (if not without all of Israel’s inhabitants) and, if necessary, against it — which, it must be admitted, is hard to imagine. Then, the questions of the articulation of ethics (in particular, the ethics of collective “historical responsibility”) and politics (in particular, the politics of coexistence with the other, and of sharing the “world” or the “earth” between hereditary enemies) can be re-examined. But we do not know how. And the prerequisite is that the Palestinian people must not be dead.

 Given that response, I am prompted to ask you to examine the political aspects of the Palestinian question. For it has always had the particularity that it presents itself as an essentially, intrinsically political issue. Jean Genet emphasised this point. At a time when European democracies are trying to reduce Palestine to a humanitarian issue — even in the best of cases — and when the Israeli government is systematically annihilating the Palestinian people, how can we bring Palestinian political subjectivity to the fore? (I am overly optimistic, but I do believe that even in the face of genocide, the resistance of the Palestinian people will not die).

I agree with you that the Palestinian people “will not die”. And yet, at this very moment, we are seeing Palestinians perish en masse. Even in death, therefore, they do not die, or not yet. What does this paradox mean? The idealistic, moral and non-political answer, which I believe we must avoid (even if my comparisons between different genocides may have seemed to justify it), would be to say that the Palestine people will survive symbolically, in the figure of the absolute victim, beyond the death of its children, as an eternal idea to which we hope it will one day be possible to give substance. The political, materialist answer is a different one: that this people survive in its resistance and in the unity of that resistance, which even genocide cannot break.

This calls for several remarks. Firstly, the unity of the resistance is spiritual rather than organisational or strategic (although, from this point of view, since 1948 and the Nakba, and even before that, counting the great revolt of 1936–39 and the two intifadas, there have been extremely contrasting phases: in retrospect, it can be suggested that Arafat and the PLO almost succeeded in strategically unifying the resistance, and that Oslo broke it up, leading to the current division, carefully manipulated by Israel and fuelled by rivalries between clans, individuals and ideologies). This unity is a shared determination to exist in the present and for generations to come. It has proven extraordinarily resilient and effective, particularly in the form of solidarity between the different components of Palestinian society and the many forms of daily resistance: it includes, of course, forms of self-defence or armed resistance, periodic demonstrations of defiance and collective protest (such as the intifadas or the 2018 March of Return), but also, and above all, stubborn resistance against land grabbing, the occupiers’ brutality and repressive apparatus, and the destruction of culture.[17] I think that an essential characteristic of all these forms of resistance is that they do not separate the existence of the Palestinian people from its roots in the land of Palestine, in the countryside and in the cities. Elias Sanbar rightly emphasises this point. By resisting on their land, and with it, against the steamroller of colonisation, by refusing to leave it even when it became a pile of ruins, a “desert” of fields stripped of their olive trees and emptied of their herds, the Palestinians are defending, inch by inch, the very substance of their historical identity, which predates colonisation and will outlive it, continuing to stand in the way of the annihilation of their people. Mahmoud Darwish wrote: “And the land is transmitted like language”. This poem is recited every day by his compatriots.

This leads to a second observation. Since 1948, the “Palestinian people” has been split into three main parts: “Israeli Arabs” (treated as second-class citizens), residents of the West Bank and Gaza (who are currently under the main assault), and refugees scattered throughout the world, along with their descendants. The differences in their situations are immense, and there is no shortage of conflicts of interest. One might have thought that, over time, these would lead to a gradual dissolution of collective consciousness under the colonial order, exacerbated by differences between political organisations and fostered by the capitalist environment. However, it seems that the opposite is true, in that a fragmented Palestinian people has been forming and perpetuating itself for 77 years. This people has no state “representation”, but it has a voice and visibility. It is weakened by its component parts’ different relationships with the land of Palestine that it is defending, but on the other hand it is also beyond the reach of the decisions of the State of Israel, and this is itself a fundamental political fact. There is surely a kind of contradiction between the two aspects that I am highlighting: the deep roots of popular resistance in the land of their ancestors, and the fragmentation of the Palestinian people, who nevertheless preserve their unity. This contradiction is also political. But it is not doomed to self-destruction. It is living and evolving before our eyes.

So, I agree with you (and with Genet) that the question of the Palestinian people (its unity, its historical continuity, its survival, its individual and collective subjectivity) is political through and through, in the full sense of the word political, which ranges from community to struggle. On the other hand, I will not draw a radical distinction between the political and the humanitarian, as you seem to do. The point you make is true: we should “not reduce the Palestinian question to its humanitarian dimension”, that is, identify the Palestinians with the condition of victims. We can agree on that. But we cannot say (in my opinion) that the humanitarian dimension is absent or politically secondary in the current situation. Genocide is, by definition, both a collapse of humanity and a cry of distress. The inhabitants of Gaza are crying out for the urgent humanitarian aid that Israel is deliberately withholding from them in order to exterminate and drive them out. The “humanitarian organisations” that are the only ones really fighting to defend them (from UNRWA to Israeli organisations that are saving the honour of their people, such as B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights Israel, not to mention Médecins du Monde, Care, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, etc.) are absolutely clear about the political nature of their actions and demands. Their actions and their access to the theatre of war have become fundamental geopolitical issues. This is why Israel continues to attack them and seek to delegitimise them. Telling of the hypocrisy of the states that have called for Gaza to be opened up to emergency international aid (in terms of medical, food, material, and educational provisions) is their refusal to act on their words and exert the diplomatic and economic pressure on Israel that they have the means to exert… The Gaza Flotilla is taking the necessary risks to shed light on this cowardice. More than ever, the issue of human rights policy, once discussed in relation to the situation in the Soviet bloc countries, is now sharply posed as a central political issue, with Palestine as its most obvious example.

On the subject of human rights policy: what does it mean to advocate peace, faced with a situation of genocide? Can the pursuit of peace and pacifism be an adequate response to the violence of massacres and the sacrifice of a people to an obscure God? (Lacan). Isn’t another form of violence necessary — to take up this difference in violence as conceived by Benjamin, but also by Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze, or Nancy? Doesn’t pacifism risk obscuring the other scene of violence, the one that opens, reveals, suspends, even destroys, but does that in order to give birth to new relationships (Benjamin’s mythical violence)? In this light, isn’t the widespread use of the term “terrorism” to describe acts that disrupt the established order another way of making the internal difference within violence unthinkable and impracticable? Despite the vast differences between them, don’t pacifism and terrorism lead, in different ways, to a paralysing impotence?

These questions seem closely related to me, and I will try to address them jointly. First, it seems to me that the question of “peace faced with a situation of genocide” has two dimensions, one general, which we can try to clarify in the light of history, and the other referring specifically to what is happening in Gaza now. The second-dimension stems from the first, but it adds the urgency of “what should be done?” to the theoretical reflection on peace, which it completely overdetermines. One can have a principled answer to the problem and then find oneself in a situation where this answer is completely ineffective.

I note first of all that what I am writing (on 10 September 2025) will, at best, be read in several days’ time, and by then the massacre will have progressed further, because there is no immediate way to stop the perpetrators of genocide, who are methodically executing their plan with the support of the dominant imperialism in this part of the world, even if the UN and its agencies reiterate their warnings, and if the European “democracies” move from reprimands to sanctions, which I do not believe will happen. I also note that deterrent military interventions against the Israeli army are out of the question (which was not the case during World War II, or in Bosnia, or in Rwanda). Who would carry them out? What consequences would they have? I’ll also note that individual symbolic operations (which will immediately be labelled as terrorist acts but could fall under what you call “another form of violence”) such as yesterday’s attack in Jerusalem, demonstrate an individual capacity for resistance and defiance, but cannot change the course of events. In this case, therefore, there is no “choice” between several methods or forms of action to be opposed to genocide, since they all come up against the same radical imbalance in the balance of power. I find it difficult to write these radically pessimistic words (just as I found it difficult to write on 21 October 2023 that “the catastrophe will … carry to term” [18]), because they may seem like resignation. I will thus correct myself by stating that no historical situation, however desperate, is fatal or immune to the unexpected. Even for Israel to be forced to agree to a ceasefire at some point due to “international pressure” and pressure from its citizens hoping to save the last living hostages would be a victory against the genocidal state. It would change the course of events...

I will then observe that the notion of pacifism is extraordinarily ambiguous. It can refer to the principle which, as opposed to war as a means of politics and all the more so as a “value” of civilisation (a heroic, i.e. virile, “creative” or “mediating” value as in Hegel, or the “midwife of history” as in Marx), makes peace the only end, the only goal that is defensible. Or it can refer to the attitude that prefers to accept the worst, to renounce struggle for fear of the tragedies of war, or out of a calculation of what is to be gained or to be lost. In this matter, we must be careful not to lecture anyone from an armchair or keyboard. But there is no ban on thinking about examples. My teacher Georges Canguilhem was in his youth, following Alain, a militant pacifist, before becoming a fighter in the Resistance against Nazism who took all manner of risks (he never spoke of it). I do not believe that this was a conversion or a reversal. He fought the war as a pacifist. In reality, what this ambiguity reveals to me is that we must not think in binary terms, opposing peace to war, or “non-violence” to “violence” per se. We must always introduce a third term, which complicates the debate but may help to clarify it. When it comes to the response to destruction, enslavement or extermination, the third term, as we have just said, is resistance, which is “just war” (it is even the only form of just war, provided that the means are also appropriate to this). When it comes to the ultimate goal, the third term is justice for the oppressed, which means that only “just peace” is a true, acceptable, honourable peace, and that perhaps it is even the only lasting peace. Peace, war, resistance and justice are the four poles of the same problem, the four terms of a single decision.

Finally, I would like to point out your interesting slip of the pen regarding Walter Benjamin (don’t correct it!): unless I have misread you, it seems to me that you are confusing what he distinguished (in his famous 1921 essay, Zur Kritik der Gewalt) as “mythical violence”  (that which, behind the law or upstream of the law, gives force to the law and thus reinforces or restores the established order, conferring “sovereignty” upon it) and “divine” (or messianic, or revolutionary) violence which destitutes (I’ll borrow Agamben’s terminology for once) domination, reduces its agents to impotence or removes them from history, opening up (ideally) the possibility of another world. These are two absolute opposites, but they are perilously close (and sometimes caught in indecision). Benjamin’s text was written in a time and place where revolutionary radicalism was asserting itself while fascism was already mounting. It is part of a brilliant attempt to set the idea of revolution in an eschatological grammar aware of its tragic implications and risks, rather than hiding eschatology under sociological positivism and historicist evolutionism (from which Marx was not free). Like you, I return to this text constantly but also bearing in mind the changing times. In my view, this prevents us from literally “repeating” Benjamin today: because the revolutions did take place (or at least some revolutions, but on a global scale and with universal scope), and in the immediate term they all failed (or worse, only succeeded by turning into counterrevolutions [19]). Their political use of violence is at the heart of this failure, which requires a complete rethinking of the economy and the purpose of revolutionary violence, the relationship between the idea of revolution (and thus emancipation, liberation, and resistance) and the idea of violence. The names you cite are, in my view, part of the resources and recourse available to do this. Others could be mentioned.

I can thus attempt to answer your two main questions, without any hope of answering exhaustively. First, the question of the “appropriate response to the violence of massacres and the sacrifice of a people to an obscure God”. Yes, the obscure God is at work (what I referred to above as the death drive). But that means that there will be no “adequate” response. Even to defeat those who plan and carry out massacres in service of a delusion of domination and omnipotence is not an adequate response. There is always a remainder of the massacre, an indelible trace that cannot be redeemed or compensated for. However, some things are (or should be) obvious when it comes to the realm of responsibility. The ongoing genocide cannot be answered with peace programmes, but with the just (legitimate, sufficient, targeted) use of force. The Allies knew that the industrial extermination of the Jews had begun in the gas chambers. They could have bombed them, but they did not. This is one of the disastrous historical choices whose consequences we are still suffering today. The problem with Gaza (I always come back to this point) is that there is no force available to land (despite the Flotilla) or to bomb Tel Aviv (only the Houthis are trying, symbolically, which will cost them dearly). The “other violence”, i.e. a sufficiently large and different force, is indeed “necessary”. It must be found and deployed.

Is this force “terrorism”? At the risk of equating pacifism with terrorism — both reduced to a common impotence — you suggest that it is not. I agree with you. But we must think about this carefully, because we are on dangerous ground. Firstly, we must be aware that the classification of terrorism is subject to state manipulation through legal or pseudo-legal labels designed to place certain enemies of the hegemonic powers in the position of “outlaws”. This is what happens when a particular organisation or group is placed on international criminal lists. This obscures two facts of the most paramount importance: first, the fact that, in situations of war of liberation, today’s “terrorists” are tomorrow’s “legitimate interlocutors” with whom negotiations must take place, and they must therefore be lifted from their status as criminals. Sometimes negotiations begin “in secret” even while operations to eliminate terrorists are underway. This is what happened in Algeria between the French colonisers and the National Liberation Front, to the benefit of the latter. Or in South Africa, even if in different ways. This does not mean that there is no terrorism, but that we must not jump from recognising terrorist actions (even explicitly claimed ones) to essentialising movements and their specific organisations as “terroristic” and intrinsically evil ones, which must be eliminated by any means necessary. Hamas, however disastrous its programme and actions may be, is not Islamic State (Daesh). This means that the historical relationship between struggles for emancipation or resistance and “terrorism” as a tactic has always been (and is now more than ever) complex, impure and subject to change.

Most importantly, though, this also obscures the fact that the main purpose of official definitions is to conceal the reciprocity and asymmetry between terrorist actions and “counterterrorist” operations. In a completely arbitrary manner, the former are deemed criminal, while the latter are considered legitimate, regardless of how savage their means are. This problem is glaringly obvious in the case of Israel and Palestine. In my view, Hamas’s operation on 7 October 2023, breaking the blockade in which the population of Gaza was confined, can hardly be termed other than as terrorist, since it mainly targeted unarmed civilians (men, women, children, the elderly) and was accompanied by an outburst of brutality (torture, rape, kidnappings, summary executions [20]). But this cruelty cannot obscure the infinitely greater scale and disproportionate means by which the Israeli state — a truly terrorist state under the trappings of “democracy” — represses and brutalises the Palestinian population. The thousands of arbitrarily imprisoned people subjected to inhumane detention regimes are also hostages, intended to stifle any protest and prevent any free political life. The raids by settlers and the army on villages and refugee camps, the targeted assassinations of activists, journalists, intellectuals and young people, the collective punishments (particularly in the form of the destruction of houses or whole neighbourhoods), and daily humiliations (checkpoints, bans, beatings) designed to impress upon Palestinians the idea that they are at their masters’ mercy — all this is part of a system of terror that goes hand-in-hand with the seizure of land and the “cleansing” of national history. There is thus little point in splitting hairs about the morality of acts of resistance that constitute terrorism. On the other hand, there is much to be said for asking what effects these actions have on the balance of power, both within and outside the country, and in particular what responsibility the attack of 7 October 2023 will have had in triggering the genocide, and in the future of the Palestinian people. I wrote after 7 October and have repeated since then that Hamas (due to its ideology of inexpiable mutual hatred as well as its miscalculations about the balance of power and what it believed to be an imminent “mass uprising” of opponents of Zionism throughout the region) had “sacrificed its people” for unattainable strategic goals. This argument earned me sometimes vehement criticisms that I must take seriously. But I cannot pretend that the question does not arise.

But, of course, criticism of terrorism as a tactic of liberation or resistance — not in general but given the specific conditions of the conflict — only makes sense if one is able to propose alternatives, at least in principle. I can see only one such alternative in the current circumstances, even if it lags behind events or falls short of the necessary “critical mass”. This would be the development of mass solidarity with the Palestinian people’s struggle — a solidarity crossing the boundaries between North and South, East and West, which would break the Palestinians out of their isolation (which is also one of the reasons why terrorism may be attractive, as the last resort of the “wretched of the earth”, abandoned by all). Such an internationalist and anti-imperialist mass movement does not replace the struggle and initiative of the Palestinians themselves, but it can defeat states’ complicity. That is why it should come as no surprise that its supporters are subject to severe repression, on campuses and in the streets, in America and Europe. But we must not accept this either. Palestine will “win” in the sense that it will not die, but it will not win alone.

This brings us to the other side of the discussion on violence, which you term “pacifism” and which I prefer to link to the issue of peace and justice. I believe that genocide — any genocide — raises a demand for peace through justice. This is inseparable from its realisation in the forms of law, dignity, and the redress of wrongs and damages, which is even stronger than in any other situation of war, violence or oppression. Aiming for such a goal without confusing it with renunciation or disarmament means finding responses to oppressive violence (“mythical” violence, if you will) that are not its mirror image, but practising liberating violence while remaining mindful of the consequences of its use as well as its justification or goals. This is a lesson from both Max Weber and Gandhi. This is not a question of legitimacy but of effectiveness, where violence jumps back and forth between cause and effect and reacts against those who use it, whether they do so out of choice or necessity. This is what I once attempted to theorise as “civility”. But I realise that this is not a good term. I am looking for another one...

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Moving on to proposals for a diplomatic solution to the Palestinian conflict, you have often referred to the two-state political solution to end the war. In your opinion, is this still a viable way out of the conflict?

No, I have never referred to such a “solution”. Or, more precisely, following in the footsteps of Edward Said, I have always maintained that the alternative between the “two-state” and “one state” solutions — regardless of the variations in meaning that each of these two expressions conceals — is an abstract, bureaucratic and mystifying alternative.

The perspective from which any “solution” must be considered lies beyond this alternative: it is the principle of equality of voice, as well as historical rights, or rather, the right to exist. That means equality or nothing.[21] This condition is a matter of justice as well as of effectiveness: for it is obvious that peace based on the perpetuation of the domination of one party over the other, to one degree or another, is no peace at all. It will produce neither cooperation nor reconciliation (as the experience of the Oslo Accords and the subsequent discrediting of the Palestinian Authority have amply demonstrated). Any solution presupposes the dismantling of the postulate of inequality that lies at the heart of colonisation and, beyond that, of colonialism, of which Zionism has historically become the latest incarnation. But this condition is even more obvious (and at the same time more uncertain) given that, as we are forced to acknowledge, Israeli policy has deliberately worked to make the conflict “unsolvable” or to render impossible any “solution” that does not involve the completion of the conquest. The “two-state” solution, beyond formal proclamations, would require Israel to withdraw from the Occupied Territories (including East Jerusalem), remove its own settlers from the towns and forts it has built for them, destroy the walls and reserved roads, stop monopolising water resources, etc., and accept a sovereignty other than its own in Palestine, with its own military, administrative and fiscal “marks”. In other words, something impossible under current conditions, and perhaps forever. The “one-state” solution (meaning a binational state, in constitutional forms to be worked out) certainly has conditions shaped by the intertwining of populations and the reality of Israeli domination (to the benefit of Jews) over the entire territory.[22] Yet, this situation ought to be overturned through mutual recognition and reparation for the damage suffered over the past 77 years (including acceptance of the “right of return” for the Palestinians expelled from their land, even if this means negotiating its application). The difficulty also lies on the other side, of course. As Said — who defended this at least as a broad principle — explained, it would also require overcoming the understandable refusal of the Palestinians, for whom “abandoning the idea of an entirely Arab Palestine is tantamount to abandoning their own history”.[23] None of this makes sense as long as inequality is both the status quo and the presupposition of negotiations or proposed solutions.

The truth is that today in Palestine (or Israel-Palestine) there are two peoples with tragically intertwined histories, neither of which can eliminate the other or renounce its own right to exist. Israel has entered into a genocidal logic with no foreseeable limits under the impetus of its fascist component now in power, but it will not kill or displace the entire Palestinian people. The Palestinians do not have the capacity to reverse the effects of history by making the Jewish presence (and therefore the Jews themselves) disappear, as if returning to a point before over a century of immigration and colonisation which have created an irreversible “national” (political and cultural) fact. Two peoples on one land, with one crushing and destroying the other, and the other having no choice but to want to get rid of its oppressor — such are the facts of the historical equation to be resolved by a “politics” (or cosmopolitics) that remains to be invented, formulated, accepted by its own actors and imposed on the world. This is also the conclusion of Rashid Khalidi (whose book, it is true, was written before 7 October 2023): "perhaps such changes [in global geopolitics and the nature of local political regimes] will allow Palestinians together with Israelis and others worldwide who wish for peace and stability together with justice in Palestine to craft a different trajectory than that of oppression of one people by another. Only such a path based on equality and justice is capable of concluding the hundred years’ war on Palestine with a lasting peace, one that brings with it the liberation that the Palestinian people deserves”.[24]

Israel’s colonial dynamic is only possible within the framework of an imperial structure embedded in the international order. The major powers united under the label of the West have designated Israel as being central to their geopolitical interests. Francesca Albanese’s report has shown that the ongoing genocide is not simply destruction but is supported and fuelled by major industrial and financial interests (which it in turn supports and fuels). In short, there is an “economy of genocide”. I would like to highlight two aspects that I believe hardly secondary to this economy of genocide. The first is the US project, immediately approved by Netanyahu, to build a kind of tourist riviera in Gaza. The US plan for postwar Gaza involves displacing the entire population of the Palestinian territory, which would be placed under American administration for ten years in order to transform it into a tourist and technological centre, as reported on 31 August 2025 by the Washington Post.

This project reminds me of Godard’s film Socialisme, which understood what the Western white man’s tourism both reveals and conceals. In the case of Gaza, it is even part of genocide. It would truly be the end of the Mediterranean, as well as Europe.

Secondly, we are particularly interested in the relationship between the most advanced technology and war. Israel is at the forefront of the military development of AI, and now it seems that many European countries, including Italy, now depend on Israel for their cyber security.  According to many analysts, this is one of the main reasons for these governments’ silence in the face of the ongoing genocide.

I am not able to comment on all the points you raise from a technical standpoint. But I do believe that they are key — and reveal the deeper processes in the world we have entered into, of which the genocide in Gaza is both a symbol and an accelerator. It is anything but an “accident” of history.

I will start with Trump’s plan to build the “Riviera” on the site of what used to be Gaza. Like many, I am torn between disbelief (at the idea of the many conditions that would need to be met: it’s more difficult than going to Mars...) and disgust. This project is profoundly obscene, ostentatiously reflecting not only utter contempt for international law but also the acceptance of crimes against humanity as an instrument of economic policy (we might be tempted to say: the “at last discovered” form of Schumpeterian creative destruction, for the age of absolute capitalism). Assuming that its enthusiastic acceptance by the Israeli government is not simply a tactical play to ensure continued US support for its current policy — which, to be honest, I am not entirely sure about, as at least part of the Israeli far right has other plans for Gaza — it reflects, as you suggest, a kind of fusion between US and Israeli imperialism that closely combines military, territorial, economic and technological aspects. In fact, this fusion has been underway for a very long time, almost since the beginning,[25] and there continues to be fresh evidence of it.

But, in the broader context of the plan to annex Palestine, the current project suggests another line of thought: it is the incorporation of a trend that is constitutive of Israeli settlement (promoted by Zionism as a “pioneer” ideology) into the programme of artificialisation of the world that now characterises the capitalist mode of production. Anyone who has set foot in Israel cannot fail to be struck by the fact that the “return” to a land decreed to be ancestral (from which the Jews were “exiled”, not in a metaphorical or spiritual sense, but a historical and material one) can only be achieved by cleansing the territory of everything that reflects its millennia-long history, whereby the signs of Arab-Muslim civilisation (and incidentally Roman, Christian and Ottoman civilisation) are imprinted into the landscape and architecture of cities. All this must be replaced by a “modern” environment (and not much of a “Jewish” one for that matter, because such a culture does not exist as such, or it could only refer to the tradition of the “ghettos” which in Israel is the subject of contemptuous repression [refoulement]) designed and created ex nihilo.[26] “Actually existing” Zionism (the one which is implemented practically, in the creation of the Israeli nation and its territory) is so uncertain, in reality, of its supposedly essential link with the land of Palestine, that it must systematically destroy everything that it bears and, in a way, produced, in order to impose the ostentatious markers of a fictitious ownership. This tendency takes particularly brutal forms in the construction of fortified settlements and reserved roads that criss-cross the West Bank. In Gaza, where ethnocide, historicide and domicide or urbicide [27] combine, we have reached the ultimate stage where even the traces of the traces must disappear. After the buildings, universities and mosques, cemeteries are levelled by one-tonne bombs and giant bulldozers. But, at this point, the historical trend of Zionism fits directly into the programme of post-industrial capitalism (which I have elsewhere called absolute capitalism): an extractivist financial capitalism that uses the resources of technology revolutionised by AI and the use of synthetic materials to completely deterritorialise human habitation, “inventing” cities of the future that are not connected to any past, in which the behaviour of individuals is entirely governed by the circulation of money, remote working and preconditioned consumption. It is also important to note that in this form of capitalism, the destruction of the environment is not just a “negative externality” but itself a method of production. Gaza City (or whatever name it will be given if the Trump-Netanyahu project comes to fruition) will, in this respect, be the perfect double of Dubai or Shenzhen. Except that the completely artificialised soil there will be haunted by the ghosts of the tens of thousands of corpses it covers.

But, following your suggestion, I would also like to delve a little into the nature of the combination of militarism, technology and geopolitics that takes place in this “economy of genocide”, which your formulations demand that we confront. I have complete confidence in Francesca Albanese (confirmed by many other sources, including serious economists such as Yanis Varoufakis and Thomas Piketty [28]) to demonstrate the close links between trade, mutual interests and strategy. These have all be intensified by the “war” in Gaza (since the creation of the outright airlift of US ammunition decided by President Joe Biden, which has never been interrupted despite protests and the gradual revelation of the scale of the means of destruction — more than ten times Hiroshima! — and the number of victims). It seems to me that the meaning of this enormous (geopolitical, geo-economic) phenomenon needs discussing at two levels. One is its place within a new “geometry of imperialism” whose configuration we are seeking to describe.[29] The other is the role it plays in transforming Israel into a local imperialism with hegemonic pretensions, through Gaza and other operations that extend it throughout the region: Lebanon, Syria, Iran, the Arabian Peninsula.

Today’s imperialism (which, in this sense, takes to the extreme the tendency towards the militarisation of capitalism already inherent in its definition by the classics) is inseparable from an arms race which is itself accompanied by a technological revolution (or a series of technological revolutions) in the design and use of weapons. This all inevitably leads to their use. Here, more than ever, I am following the lesson of the great historian EP Thompson in his theory of exterminism:[30] the accumulation of weapons (from “individual” weapons to “weapons of mass destruction”, in a continuum which, incidentally, involves the same manufacturing, financing and marketing chains) is not a means of defence against the risks of war; it is fundamentally and in the long term a factor in the intensification of these risks, which can only lead to armed conflict. Weapons must be used, if they are to be mass-produced, perfected and continuously replaced in a “sector” of the economy that has become a structural component of capital reproduction. This is what we must bear in mind when we observe the gigantic military parades organised by Trump, Putin and Xi Jinping, the increase in the production capacity of drones and missiles in Russia, Iran and Turkey, and the adoption of new rearmament programmes in Europe.[31] The fact is that the world of the arms race (sometimes called “military Keynesianism”) is the same world in which, before our very eyes, deadly conflicts of “higher” or “lower” intensity (a difference that is often rather precarious) have been multiplying in recent years, involving the major military or economic powers either directly or “by proxy”. These conflicts involve several genocidal processes: I mentioned Sudan above, but we should add Myanmar, Congo, and several other processes of eliminating a “people” or a “community” as such (including that of the “wandering” people drowned in the Mediterranean, that mobile part of humanity eliminated as undesirable [32]). Of course, every war, every massacre, every extermination has its own specific causes, rooted in a unique history (and, in particular, in a specific form of national or colonial construction and the resistance it provokes, as we see in Ukraine as well as in Palestine). It does not simply result from the fact that the weapons accumulated on either side of a border (or a global super-border) have reached a certain “critical mass”. There must also be inflammatory ideological material and a situation of political deadlock or imbalance that pushes the “sovereign” (i.e. the state) to resort to “other means” (as Russia did to preserve its empire after the collapse of the Soviet system). But this overdetermination does not obliterate the general effect of the trend towards the militarisation of economies and societies that is constitutive of imperialism. Rather, it intensifies it at certain points and at certain times. It hastens the formation of what I would readily call “bandit-states” (as we once spoke of “rogue states”), which are both producers of weapons and instigators of their massive use. Yet, it is also characteristic of these states that far from being “ostracised” by the (international) community of other states, they are instead keenly sought after as partners and suppliers. Israel is clearly one of these (symmetrical to North Korea on the other side of the world?). Its technological and financial ties with various countries, which as a result cannot go “too far” in their criticism of Israeli policy, even when it poses a threat to their diplomacy or creates problems with domestic public opinion, are a crucial aspect of the “geometry of imperialism” in the current period. You are right to mention Europe in this regard (including France: only Pedro Sánchez’s Spain seems willing to cut ties). But I think it is worth pointing out that these ties are not confined to the “Western” sphere only: Brazil exports steel for military use to Israel, and China is a major purchaser of Israeli high-tech weapons and cybersecurity programmes. This, among other strategic or diplomatic considerations (China does not want comparisons with its own policies in Tibet or Xinjiang), could explain the moderation of Chinese reactions to the anti-Palestinian offensive after 7 October 2023.[33] In a sense, this is nothing new: the entire history of imperialism is made up of both collusion and confrontation between “camps”

There is one aspect of the problem, however, that does concern “the West” as such — always bearing in mind that its definition is ever-evolving and that Israel’s place within it is undoubtedly undergoing profound change. I am tempted to speak of a reversal of relations of dependency. The representation of Israel as the “joint colony” of the Western powers and, consequently, of Zionism as a mere instrument of the West’s will to power in the Middle East may well be a simplistic fiction of real history. And, yet, the fact remains that, for three-quarters of a century, the “Western” powers, united in a single military alliance and tending towards integration (above all through the power of the dollar) in a “free market” under US hegemony, have provided constant support for Israel’s development, its diplomacy and its colonial project. They have provided their backing, even at the cost of occasional “reprimands” about Israeli methods or “mediation” to maintain the prospect of a solution to the conflict with the Palestinians. Israel has been their bridgehead in the Middle East. However, this situation is now being reversed before our very eyes. On the one hand, the alliance of “Western” nations (Europe and America) is not only weakened but destined to break up. This results not from some sort of emergence of Europe as an autonomous power, but rather from the United States’ shift towards a narrowly nationalist stance, opening the way for all kinds of reversals in its alliance system, as demonstrated by the Trump administration. On the other hand, the new coalitions of interests that characterise the balance of power and the distribution of “camps” in the current imperialist space no longer coincide with the traditional geographies of the demarcation between East and West. The most significant is the strategy outlined since the “Abraham Accords” (2020), which Saudi Arabia was clearly considering signing up to on the eve of 7 October 2023. The aim is (or was) to form a triple alliance in which Europe no longer plays a fundamental role, but whose pillars would be US military power, the finance of the Gulf oil states, and Israeli technology, closely intertwined with one another. This leads me to propose — hypothetically and questioningly — that the West no longer coincides with the space of the “white Western man”, and that Israel has moved from the status of protégé to that of linchpin. At the very least, we could say that it is no longer the West that supports Israel, but Israel that upholds the West. But these hypotheses immediately call for a significant caveat: not only is the ‘Western triple alliance” exposed to all kinds of political pitfalls, burdened by internal and external “contradictions”, but it is also directly threatened by the effects of Israeli policy itself, through the reactions of public opinion in the Arab world and beyond. Governments cannot completely ignore these reactions, and they will also be exploited by the “outsiders” of this alliance, whom it has marginalised or downgraded. I think the question remains open as to whether and when the triple effect of genocide, the annexation of the West Bank, and the extension of Israeli military operations throughout the Middle East will force the collapse of this overhaul of imperialist alliances. But I must also say that I am not at all convinced that the Arab states concerned are prepared to give it up. Their support for Palestine has always been relative and self-serving.

Finally, however, as the heirs and bearers of a millennia-old European history that remains highly relevant today — a history shared with the southern Mediterranean, of which Gaza is now the epicentre — we must ask ourselves what “new alliance” could be forged (not on economic or diplomatic grounds, at least not exclusively, but on moral and political grounds), so that it does not become, as you write, the “end of the Mediterranean”, and thereby of Europe. From the Crusades to Bonaparte’s Egyptian Expedition, from the construction of the Suez Canal to the establishment of Zionist communities in Palestine, through the advance and retreat of Islam in Europe, colonisation and decolonisation, the relationship with the Arab and Turkish Other, Muslim or secular, is constitutive of European identity. It has nourished Europe’s culture, surely affecting each of the nations that compose it to varying degrees but leaving none aside — it is thus also an integral part of its future. It is often experienced in a conflictual and unequal manner (notably because of the tension that characterises the coexistence of monotheistic religions and which today leads to mass Islamophobia, but also to anti-Westernism and antisemitism). But not exclusively, nor without reversals of fortune that leave deep traces in the culture and political consciousness of European citizens. Moreover, as a result of population displacement and migration, a whole section of the population is simultaneously European and Middle Eastern (or from further East) or North African. If Europe is content to stand by and passively watch the destruction of Gaza — or, worse still, if it takes part in it through its complicity with Israeli policy or the indirect aid it provides — the consequence will not only be the development of immense resentment and “hereditary” hatred between the populations of the northern and southern Mediterranean. It will also mean the dissolution of the Mediterranean as a civilised space amidst the global “exterminisms”, and Europe sinking into division, culpability, and denial of its own history. To avoid this common “end”, Europe must therefore commit as quickly and resolutely as possible to the fight for the survival and freedom of Palestine. I will return to what I said earlier: mass solidarity with the Palestinians in mortal danger is the condition for their emergence from the dilemma of annihilation or self-destruction. It is also the condition (one of the conditions...) for our political rebirth and our survival as a historical entity. But for this to happen, this solidarity must develop by promoting encounters between citizens from both shores of the Mediterranean. The Global Sumud Flotilla (the “Freedom Flotilla” attempting to reach Gaza) shows us the way.

In discussing this play of alliances and recompositions of forces, I would like to talk about another bloc that may be forming around Israel. Even beyond the historical relationship with Western democracies, is it possible to say that a fascist and supremacist international is coalescing around Israel’s genocidal policy? One that ranges from Trump and Milei to Meloni, Le Pen and Orbán? Doesn’t what’s happening in Israel highlight an authoritarian spiral in liberal democracies, which may also want to do away with the repression of colonialism and the struggles against it? We are particularly struck by the role of intellectuals and the media, even democratic ones, in “supporting” this operation. Edward Said wrote still-important pages that shed light on intellectuals’ role in service of Israeli policy.

On the role of the media and the role of intellectuals (and I wouldn’t confuse the two, even if they cannot work without each other — a situation that is changing radically under the impact of the digital revolution), Edward Said did, indeed, get to the heart of the matter. The lesson I take from him especially concerns the vital need to free the main organs of the print and broadcast media from the combined power of financial conglomerates, political lobbies and academic feudalism. Then, at a deeper level, there is the role that certain interpretive communities play in the formation and consolidation of ideological “obvious truths” (such as equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism). They forge codes of representing history, while imposing certain voices to the detriment of others which “do not speak” (i.e., remain inaudible). This means that certain “subjects” are never allowed to represent themselves as historical actors (and this continues to be the case for a very large part of humanity in the “global South” despite the cracks that have opened up in the dominance of the Eurocentric “grand narrative”).[34] Sometimes they cannot even present themselves as victims, or can do so only at the cost of scandals and enormous sacrifices. Removing these two obstacles to the manifestation of truth can be considered a key aspect of a policy of “democratising democracy”, or, if you will, of liberating liberal democracy from its own institutional limitations. But this also constitutes a moment of confrontation with what you call an “authoritarian spiral”, which in the current situation is linked to the increasingly insistent push for fascist-style politics. Democracy is not a stable state or regime; it is a shifting balance between more democracy and less democracy. Those who do not constantly move forward will retreat, more or less far, in terms of freedoms and equality, and therefore justice.

Like you, I see the rise of fascism in our “liberal” (neoliberal, then “national authoritarian” [35]) capitalist states. One of the most indisputable signs of this is the formalisation of racist policies (targeting immigrants, ethnic and religious minorities, in particular, in France, Arab-Muslim communities). Another is the aggressive resurgence of a misogynistic and homophobic macho culture, whose link to the aforementioned tendency toward a militarisation of capitalism would not be hard to demonstrate. This ultimately leads to the emergence of a violently xenophobic nationalism, for which the “body” of the nation, based on descent and a community of (religious, family, patriotic) values, must be preserved from any foreign contamination, and even purged of the dissidents and abnormal individuals it contains. All of this fits into the definition of what you call supremacism (implying: white supremacy), except that the same tendencies are pushed in completely different cultural and “racial” contexts by groups that are incompatible with each other: just look at Modi’s India... So, I believe in the reality of the fascist threat, in the rise of fascist forces around the world (which Trump’s arrival in power has given a terrible boost to, and which have come to power in Israel by other means), but I do not believe in the emergence of a “fascist international”, at least in the strong sense of the term, which would imply a plan for world government, coordination of movements and national political leaderships. The rudiments of such coordination do exist, it’s true (for example, when Vladimir Putin subsidises the far right in Europe, or when the Trump administration supports the Alternative für Deutschland in Germany or tries to prevent Brazil from prosecuting Jair Bolsonaro for his attempt to overturn the elections, similar to Trump’s own). But they are incompatible with each other and counteracted by the effect of inter-imperialist conflicts. What made the formation of a fascist international possible in the 1920s to 1940s was the existence of… a communist international, of which it sought to be the antagonist, a revolution against which it organised a counter-revolution. There is no equivalent to this “friend-enemy” configuration today. The Israeli regime’s attempt to construct the Palestinian — identified as a terrorist, under the name “Hamas” — as an enemy of humankind, cannot take its place. What is true, though, is that the processes of fascisation of the state and politics influence and encourage each other throughout the world, that they correspond to the same need to break popular movements, and that support for Israel’s genocide, in the form of widespread repression of anti-Zionism denounced as “antisemitism”, is one of the touchstones of collaboration and alignment with the new American regime. This, it must also be said, is a disaster for the fight against genuine antisemitism, which perpetuates the discrimination of the past and is occasionally revived by the identifications and resentments encouraged by Israeli policy. Hence I also conclude — and perhaps we should agree on this practical aspect — that the revolt against genocide and everything that accompanies it or has made it possible must indeed take centre stage in our resistance to rising fascism, alongside other equally universal and equally tragic “causes” that reveal the evolution of contemporary regimes (among which, as you know, I include the cause of refugees and migrants, the other “wretched of the earth” of absolute capitalism). They are not incompatible with each other, to say the least.

I would like to conclude this conversation, for which I thank you warmly on behalf of the entire editorial team, by inviting you to discuss another pressing question: what remains of Judaism after the genocide, in view of what is happening in Gaza, but also in the occupied territories of the West Bank?

B’Tselem’s report entitled “Our Genocide” has caused quite a stir, and rightly so. I’m asking you about this because I noticed that you declared yourself to be “Jewish” in your most recent statements against the genocide in Gaza, whereas this issue had remained, it seems to me, in the background of your historical commitment to Palestine. I am thinking, for example, of this article:  Why, in these terrible circumstances, did you feel compelled to declare yourself “Jewish” (among other things)?

 I declared myself “Jewish” (along with being an “intellectual” and a “communist”) in the article you mention, and on a few other occasions (petitions, statements), for three reasons that I will summarise briefly (perhaps I will elaborate on another occasion).

The first is that I was speaking at a conference organised in South Africa (against the backdrop of the debates sparked by that country’s decision to take Israel to the International Court of Justice) by Jewish academics who believed that 7 October had led to a widespread attack on the State of Israel’s right to exist and intellectual censorship of ‘nuances’ in the examination of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This, in turn, led various organisations in solidarity with the Palestinian cause (including BDS) to denounce the conference as “whitewashing genocide”.[36] Since I went ahead with my participation in the conference and attempted to assert my position on the reality of genocide and its moral and political consequences, I wanted this to be seen as an illustration of the duty that Jews around the world have today to disassociate themselves from Israeli policy and to strengthen the Palestinian struggle. This argument carries all the more weight because it is made “from within”, as a Jew speaking to Jews and to all those they want to convince. I felt I had the right to do so as a direct descendant of a victim of the Shoah, my grandfather who died in Auschwitz after being deported by the Vichy police in the year I was born. In a subsequent dispute, I was led to clarify that, in my view, in the historical conditions of the 21st century, such descent (which I had never allowed myself to reference, but which I have no reason to hide) constitutes a title of “Jewishness” as valid as having been raised reading the Torah or belonging to a religious community and performing its rituals.

My second reason is a generalisation of the previous one. Laying claim to one’s “Jewish name” (in the term coined by Jean-Claude Milner, condensing the reference to one’s family name with the sign of the existence of a tradition transmitted by generations of the “Jewish people” [37]) seems to me to have a strategic function today. I mean that not in the sense of a little operation to carve up “camps” within Judaism (however far that belonging may extend), but in the sense of a historical stance taken toward the use of the Jewish name by a particular state policy (and institution). It is thus a performative operation, which has no meaning in absolute terms, but only in terms of its own modalities and context. The gesture that I find admirable, and to which I will refer here (all differences considered), is that of the former Speaker of the Knesset, Avrum Burg, who has just officially asked the Israeli administration to remove his status as a “Jew”, since, in Israel, this has become (by virtue of the constitutional decision passed in 2018) a mark of belonging to the “master race”, which distinguishes them from their subjects and protects them from a similar fate. Avrum Burg, living and speaking in Israel, does not want to be considered a Jew in times of genocide – a genocide legitimised by the “defence of the Jewish people”. Living and speaking outside Israel, but in the context of the debate on the value and function of Zionism on which our own political future essentially depends, I proclaim myself “Jewish” in order to show solidarity with all Jews around the world who oppose Israeli colonialism and protest against the way it appropriates the representation of Jews in general, and to contribute, with the means at my disposal, to highlighting the importance and dignity of their struggle. At the same time, I take care to specify that this proclamation refers to a symbolic Jewishness and not to a religious or communal Judaism (with which I have no connection). And would I emphasise that this symbolic “belonging” is non-exclusive (in relation to any other possibly “contrary” kind). This is, moreover, a good criterion for distinguishing between “Jewishness” and “Judaism”.[38] All Jews in the sense of Judaism are probably also Jews in the sense of Jewishness, but it goes without saying that not all Jews in the sense of Jewishness are Jews in the sense of Judaism. I therefore prefer to call myself “Jewish” rather than say that I am “a Jew”. And I prefer to say that it is a name rather than an essence (just as Avraham Burg, for the same historical reasons but from a different political and cultural perspective, claims the label “non-Jew” but does not thereby stop who he has always been).

Finally, to take things up another notch in the order of symbolic claims, I call myself “Jewish” because I am devastated by the idea that the moral and even religious, and consequently philosophical, meanings that Jewishness has carried throughout history — from the words of the Prophets of Israel to the discourse of those renegades or heretics who fed my intellectual development (Montaigne, Spinoza, Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, Freud, Kafka, Benjamin, Arendt, Simone Weil, Derrida, who was my teacher…) — could now be associated, for a long time and even forever, no longer with resistance to persecution and the quest for intellectual autonomy, with the imperative of morality and justice and the discussion of its means (including revolution), but with the oppression and extermination of another people under the invocation of this “name”. I believe that the honour of the “Jewish name” must be defended against this abomination, and that the rebellion against this has to express itself. It has universal significance, like Jewishness itself, but it must be given its full force by speaking in the first person, for it is an inner conviction and a call addressed to others. This is what I am trying to do. Thank you for helping me.

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[1] This interview was first published in the journal K – Revue transeuropéenne de la philosophie et des arts https://www.peren-revues.fr/revue-k/ and then, also in French, at Mediapart, https://blogs.mediapart.fr/etienne-balibar/blog/170925/penser-gaza-entretien-de-luca-salza-avec-etienne-balibar. I am most grateful to Verso Books, Sebastian Budgen, and the translator David Broder (whose skill I deeply admire), for allowing me to have this reflection on the genocide in Gaza presented to an English readership, and possibly discussed by them. The interview, as I indicate, took place in September 2025, i.e. before the agreement on a “cease fire” that was “mediated” by the US (10 October). Certainly, the new situation would call for some corrections and new reflections on the ways genocidal and ethnocidal strategies combine or alternate in Israeli politics. However, it has rapidly become clear that the cease fire was far from effective, and the destruction of the Palestinians as a people on its own land remains the ultimate goal. (Note from December 2025.)

[2] See Idith Zertal: La Nation et la mort: la Shoah dans le discours et la politique d’Israël, Paris: Éditions La Découverte, 2008. See also the statements and articles by Avrum Burg, for example ‘The Holocaust is over’, https://avrumburg.substack.com/p/the-holocaust-is-over

[3] Mathieu Potte-Bonneville has just highlighted the relevance of this in relation to Gaza: ‘Nier la presse à Gaza – sur un propos de Raphaël Enthoven’, in AOC, 2 September 2025, https://aoc.media/opinion/ 2025/09/01/nier-la-presse-a-gaza-sur-un-propos-de-raphael-enthoven/

[4] Michael Löwy, Fire Alarm. Reading Walter Benjamin’s ‘On the Concept of History’, London: Verso Books, 2005.

[5] Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1951. The first French translation (1972-1973) dismembered the book and removed the central section on imperialism (containing the famous theory of the ‘right to have rights’), which was published separately in 1982. The different sections were, however, brought together in the Collection Quarto Gallimard edition, which also includes Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem.

[6] See, in particular, Mark Mazower’s overview: Hitler’s Empire – Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe, London: Penguin, 2013.

[7] The most complete, best documented and nuanced version is Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine. A History of Settler Colonial Conquest and Resistance, London, Profile Books, 2020. Also worth reading are the books by Elias Sanbar, including Figures du Palestinien (Folio Gallimard 2004) and La Palestine expliquée à tout le monde (new edition, Seuil 2025).

[8] See my essay: ‘“God Will Not Remain Silent”: Zionism, Messianism, and Nationalism’, in Secularism and Cosmopolitanism: Critical Hypotheses on Religion and Politics, New York: Columbia University Press, 2018.

[9] Shlomo Sand, interviewed by Dominique Conil, ‘Vous voulez vraiment que je parle de ça?’, délibéré online, 21 April 2019, https://delibere.fr/shlomo-sand-voulez-vraiment-parle-de-ca/

[10] See the positions taken by Anoush Ganjipour in his dispute with Milner: Anoush Ganjipour, Jean-Claude Milner, Parler sans détours, Lettres sur Israël et la Palestine, Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 2025. Also ‘Les États arabes et la question palestinienne,’ Association France-Palestine Solidarité, October 2024: https://www.france-palestine.org/Les-Etats-arabes-et-la-question-palestinienne

[11] I would like to take this opportunity to mention the extraordinary text published by Roland Schaer in TQR: ‘Palestine: deux peuples, un pays’, TQR, 18 August 2025, https://lestempsquirestent.org/fr/numeros/numero-6/deux-peuples-un-pays , which comments at length on Buber’s ideas (and, more generally, those of the Brit Shalom group, which supports a binational solution and opposes Israel’s foundation as a ‘Jewish state’).

[12] Emmanuel Levinas, Être juif, suivi d’une Lettre à Maurice Blanchot, Paris: Rivages Poche 2015, p. 56 ff. This translation from Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Being Jewish’, Continental Philosophy Review 40 (3), 2007, pp. 205-210.

[13] Emmanuel Levinas, L’Au-delà du verset. Lectures et discours talmudiques, Paris: Éditions de Minuit 1982, p. 195 ff.

[14] Jacques Derrida, ‘Abraham, the other’ in Bettina Bergo, Joseph D. Cohen and Raphael Zagury-Orly, Judeities: questions for Jacques Derrida. New York: Fordham University Press, 2007, pp. 1–35. See my article ‘Derrida d’un Autre l’autre’, in Éthique, politique, religions, ‘Politiques de Derrida’, no. 12, 1/2018, pp. 23-44.

[15] Shlomo Sand has effectively ‘deconstructed’ this fiction in his book The Invention of the Jewish People(London: Verso Books, 2009). While its sources and arguments are surely open to debate, this work has been the subject of a purely ideological demolition by Zionist historiography,

[16] This construction is the driving force behind the identification of anti-Zionism with antisemitism, which is currently fuelling the more or less brutal repression of demonstrations in support of the Palestinian people in many countries (including France). We remember the saying variously attributed to American and French authors — “Every man has two countries: his own and France”. The same could have been said of the Soviet Union in communist propaganda (and, indeed, it probably was).

[17] As a long-standing member of the International Committee of the Freedom Theatre in Jenin, I have recently received a letter from its director, Mustafa Sheta, who has just been released from prison. He informs us that the theatre has survived the Israeli Defence Forces’ assault on the Jenin refugee camp and will resume performances of its inaugural show — George Orwell’s Animal Farm — against all odds. There are dozens of examples of this kind.

[18] Étienne Balibar, ‘Till Death Palestine’, Philosophy World Democracy, 25 October 2023 https://www.philosophy-world-democracy.org/posts/article/till-death-palestine.

[19] See my essay: ‘L’échec des révolutions ?’, in Ludovine Bantigny et al. Une histoire globale des révolutions, Paris: Éditions La Découverte, 2023, pp. 1109-1128.

[20] There is still dispute over the reality or otherwise of the cruel actions perpetrated on 7 October 2023 by Hamas fighters (and other organisations, as well as unorganised Gazans who broke out of the enclave following the commando raid that destroyed the barriers enclosing it). They have been exaggerated by Israeli state propaganda, which refuses to disclose its evidence (notably because it documents the failure of its army and intelligence services to protect the kibbutzim), but they are also denied by some in the Arab world and supporters of the Palestinian cause, despite the claims made in real time by some members of the commandos (we even read that the Israelis machine-gunned their own citizens in order to be able to blame Hamas...). See Elias Sanbar’s point of view in La Palestine expliquée à tout le monde, cit., p. 109.

[21] Edward Said, ‘The Only Alternative’, Palestine Internationalist, 1, 2, 2005, text online athttps://www.ihrc.org.uk/the-only-alternative/

[22] See Ariella Azoulay and Adi Ophir, The One-State Condition. Occupation and Democracy in Israel/Palestine, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012.

[23] Edward Said, Israël, Palestine: l’égalité ou rien, translated from English by Dominique Eddé and Éric Hazan, Paris: La Fabrique, 1999, p. 160.

[24] Khalidi, op. cit. p. 255.

[25] Much more than Canada, which Trump is dangling the prospect of annexing, Israel has been described as the USA’s ‘51st state’ — a phrase embraced also by American commentators: David G. Nes, ‘Israel—The 51st State?’, New York Times, 5 June 1971, https://www.nytimes.com/1971/06/05/archives/israel-the-51st-state.html

[26] Having myself spent two years as a ‘military coopérant’ [assistance-brigader] in Algeria immediately after its independence, I could not help but be struck by the similarity between this ‘constructive modernism’ (which was primarily destructive) and the kind enacted by French colonialism. With a few exceptions (mainly in its Saharan regions and in the west), Algeria (in this respect greatly differing from the French ‘protectorates’ in Morocco and Tunisia) is a country whose coloniser systematically erased its urban and monumental history (but cultivated archaeology...) in order to establish cities everywhere, many of them nothing more than Roman-style “camps” built with solid materials. This recreation of the territory, at the expense of memory, corresponded both to a strategy of appropriation and to a modernising ideology that would free the colony from all ‘conditioning’. For this, Saint-Simonism provided the intellectual framework: see Mohamad Amer Meziane, The States of the Earth: An Ecological and Racial History of Secularization, London: Verso Books, 2024.

[27] See: Justin Salhani, ‘Genocide, urbicide, domicide – how to talk about Israel’s war on Gaza’, Al Jazeera, 3 July 2024, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/7/3/genocide-urbicide-domicide-how-to-talk-about-israels-war-on-gaza; Valentine Faure, ‘L’urbicide, ou “la volonté politique de destruction de la ville”‘, in Le Monde, 17 April 2024, https://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2024/04/17/l-urbicide-ou-la-volonte-politique-de-destruction-de-la-ville_6228257_3232.html

[28] ‘Top Economists Back Francesca Albanese’s Report on the “Economy of Genocide” in Gaza’, Zeteo, 7 July 2025, https://zeteo.com/p/exclusive-top-economists-back-francesca

[29] I have borrowed this expression from Giovanni Arrighi: The Geometry of Imperialism. The Limits of Hobson’s Paradigm (1978), revised edition, with a new afterword, London: Verso Books 1983. See Étienne Balibar, ‘Geometries of Imperialism in the 21st Century’, Edward Said Memorial Lecture 2024, 14 November 2024, video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOJ4g5UnAxk

[30] EP Thompson, ‘Notes on Exterminism, The Last Stage of Civilization’, New Left Review, I/121, May-June 1980.

[31] See Gregoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, New York: The New Press, 2015

[32] I have defended this limit-thesis in several texts, including ‘Pour un droit international de l’hospitalité’ in Étienne Balibar, Cosmopolitique. Des frontières à l’espèce humaine, Écrits III, Paris: Éditions La Découverte, 2022, chap. 12; Étienne Balibar, ‘A call for an international right of hospitality on World Humanitarian Day’, openDemocracy, 18 August 2018.

[33] See Promise Li’s article: ‘China and Israel Have a Long History of Cooperating in Repression’, in Jacobin, 21 October 2023, https://jacobin.com/2023/10/china-israel-repression-military-trade-palestine-technology

[34] On this last point, see my study, ‘Politics and Translation: Reflections on Lyotard, Derrida, and Said’, positions: asia critique, 27, 1, February 2019, pp–114.

[35] The concept of ‘authoritarian national capitalism’ is advanced by Pierre-Yves Hénin and Ahmet Insel, Le national-capitalisme autoritaire : une menace pour la démocratie, Paris: Éditions Essais & Cie, 2021.

[36] See the grounds for my statement (‘Memorandum’) in the English version published on the Philosophy World Democracy website: https://www.philosophy-world-democracy.org/articles-1/the-genocide-in-gaza-and-its-consequences-for-the-israeli-palestinian-conflict

[37] See Jean-Claude Milner: Les Penchants criminels de l’Europe démocratique, Paris: Verdier, 2003.

[38] In Le dernier des juifs, Paris: Galilée, 2014, Jacques Derrida offers interesting considerations on the difference between Jewishness and Judaism, inspired by Yosef Yerushalmi commenting on Sigmund Freud’s Moses and Monotheism (see in particular p. 76 ff.).

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