Looking at Gaza today, we are looking not only at a single event, but at the model of our present. The future is darker.
Human rights proved to be a lie.
Freedom of speech proved to be a lie.
Democracy was a lie.
We live in a time of monsters.
George Galloway
In conditions of historical shock, individual events sometimes become a paradigm. They proceed to function as a model of knowing another events and even the full past process. They uncover the conditions of chance to find the horizon of modernity and then become a tool for knowing and explaining the past.
Giorgio Agamben presenting the thesis that this camp constitutes a paradigm of knowing modernity – and its hidden biopolitical matrix – tried to specify this paradigmic component not according to the interior rules of its functioning, but from its historical and political conditions of possibility. "Instead of introducing a definition of the camp from the events in it, we will ask: what is the camp, what must be its legal and political structure, so that akin accidents can happen? This position will let you to look at the camp not as a historical fact, a certain anomaly belonging to the past (even if it sometimes occurs at present), but as a kind of hidden matrix, nomos The political space in which we live today"[1], he wrote.
The transformation of historical fact into paradigm besides changes its functioning in the language. The names of these peculiar events cease to mention only to a circumstantial context of their occurrence, and begin to act as their own names of history, transform themselves into contexts for its research. This was the case with Auschwitz, Yalta or Sarajevo. There is no request to explain to anyone what these names mean, but at the same time their semantic scope undergoes extraordinary expansion and sometimes radiates throughout the ages. Paradigmatic events make past understandable.
Today, the paradigm that sheds light on our common political actuality is called “Gaza”.
The Paradigm of Despair
Gaza is primarily a figure of closure in its name of the gloomy and tragic destiny of the inhabitants of 1 of the most densely populated parts of the earth. More than 2 million people have been trapped there, bombarded for a period by the Israeli army, cut off from the supply of fuel, food, and water. all day, full families vanish from the face of the earth, sometimes leaving their individual members in hard to imagine and disrupted by another hecatomba, mourning.
Within a period Israel killed more children in Gaza than they die annually in all conflicts around the world. At the same time, more civilians died under the rubble than in over a year and a half of the war in Ukraine.
Gaza is so the name of something that can lead to the eventual failure of hope. The inhabitants of this place are in an impossible situation. If they stay, they'll be sentenced to further genocide. At the same time, they cannot leave this territory due to the fact that it has been under Israeli blockade for years, which controls not only the movement of the population, but besides almost entirely controls the supplies needed for the life of the goods. They do not want to leave due to the fact that they consider it their native land. erstwhile the Gazans protest peacefully against their destiny – as in 2018, erstwhile they organized the large March of Return – they die under sniper bullets who killed more than 2 100 people and injured thirty-six thousand! erstwhile the people of Gaza – or, rather, part of it – are armed against illegal occupation, as the global treaties give them, repression is even more ruthless. The massacre Hamas committed on October 7 [2023 – ed.] can be understood as the eruption of this spelled ellipse of violence. It is brutality in which decades of humiliation accumulate, returning to Israeli society and its innocent victims with full ruthlessness.
When you look at the world's reactions after this event, they are struck by the repetitiveness of 1 item that no 1 seems to take with appropriate surprise. No 1 seemed to uncertainty that the Israeli army's reaction would be to another armed assault on Gaza, as if this kind of automatic force were Business as user. It is this seemingly apparent conclusion that we should look forward to, due to the fact that it shows the hidden rules of this conflict for years.
Israeli politicians item the unprecedented nature of the October 7 massacre, comparing it even to attacks on the planet Trade Center on September 11, 2001. In these statements, however, something rather contrary is missing: that their consequence to Hamas' attack is strictly precedent.
While the precedent marks a judgement in the law preceding the procedure, which outlines the general framework of the ongoing trial, it can be said that everything that happens present in Gaza precedes the erstwhile sentence, and present by many Israeli politicians even proudly repeated, the death conviction on Palestinians. And based on it, the Israeli army has been operating for decades not only in Gaza, but besides in the West Bank. No substance what the Palestinians do, they will be subject to the policy Ilan Pappé called incremental genecide, a genocide spread over time[2]. present in Gaza this time has simply been condensed.
The business paradigm
The Gazans are citizens without citizenship, citizens without rights. erstwhile you look at the function they play in the statements of Israeli politicians, you can get the impression that they are something fleeting, negotiable. Actually, they are not, due to the fact that according to president Herzog, “there is no specified thing as civilians in Gaza”, if they already exist, it is only as a tool, human shields utilized by terrorists, an addition to Hamas.
This kind of construction reveals primarily the hidden beliefs and prejudices of the authors of these statements, who seem to believe that they are dealing, as the Israeli Minister of Defence said, with “human animals”[3].
The Gazans do not have and cannot have political cause—which would require them to be granted the right to their own state—but they can be held liable for supporting Hamas. In this way, whenever Israeli politicians say Hamas, they mean all Palestinians to whom they apply the strictly criminal regulation of collective responsibility, but as shortly as individual claims Palestinians, then they are turned back into Hamas, thus creating a perfect excuse for mass crimes and a rhetorical run that clears their perpetrators of responsibility.
If we were to read seriously the intentions of the Israeli government from these statements, we would gotta recognise that Palestinians should become refugees among refugees, in a dual sense. First, due to the fact that they themselves are already mostly refugees, descendants of people displaced from their homes in 1948. Now they should become them again, and it is best to go to Sinai, where they will live as biopolitical hostages of humanitarian aid. The second plan to decision neighbors into the desert dreamted by politicians constantly referring to the Bible has an additional symptomatic aspect making Palestinians a kind of people chosen à rebours. Secondly, within the diaspora itself, they must not remember where they come from, due to the fact that Palestine as a political being is simply a taboo subject for modern political awareness of Israel.
Gaza present shows that Palestine can only act as a ghost state that exists only to disappear, and erstwhile it disappears, it must cover all traces of its past existence. As Giora Eiland of the National Institute for safety Studies in Israel stated: “The gas will become a place where no man can live and I consider it alternatively a means than a goal”[4]. But specified statements, and unfortunately more, uncover not only the plan for the future for the people of Gaza, but besides the historical matrix of dealing with Palestinians. Finally, the perfect script from the point of view of Zionist ideology, whose implementation is announced by Israeli bulldozers already operating in Gaza, is to admit that Palestine was terra nulliuswhich only European settlers civilized. This is simply a strategy of colonial thinking, whose political complement must be, and is, the decade-long apartheid regime.
What changes the ongoing massacre of Gaza? Masks are falling, which for years acted as a smokescreen for politics, to which present members of the government of Benjamin Netanyahu admit openly.
He himself compared Hamas with the Bible Amalekites in his speech of October 28, 2023: “I will punish Amalek for what he did to the Israelites as he stood against them in the way they went from Egypt. So now go, beat Amalek and curse all that is his own; do not pity him, but kill both men and women, young men and children, oxen and sheep, camels and asses." (1 Sam 15:3-4.) To date, naming policy towards Palestinian apartheid has been the domain of Israel's external or interior critics and the conclusion of humanitarian organizations reports that politicians on the ground questioned. Today, they openly admit their genocidal intentions without betraying any sense of shame.
The light cast back by today's events in Gaza shows the full past of the alleged Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a masquerade in which diplomatic rhetoric and the appearance of a political process hid the brutal fact about the desire to purify Palestine from all Palestinians, especially those who in any way feel for state autonomy. What is now happening in the West Bank, where non-Jewish residents are terrorised and displaced despite the deficiency of Hamas's threat, is another example. This brutal repression is besides surrounded by the collusion of Western politicians, who only have empty words hiding their full consent and a willing association with Israel's policy[5].
The Paradigm of Eternal War
Today's massacre of Gaza and everything that is happening around it besides allows for a better knowing of the real rates of war in Ukraine. Western mainstream media usage precisely the same script they utilized after February 24, 2022.
Anyone who is disturbed by the mass killing of civilians is surely a lover of Hamas, just like before – erstwhile the headlights aimed at our east neighbours were not switched off – anyone who did not feel the lofty historical mission fighting the barbary of the Ukrainian army had to be a lover of Putin.
It should be admitted that, in the case of Israel, possibly as a consequence of long-term recircumcision, the creative achievements of pro-war propaganda are much little modest. There are no inventions specified as “westsplaining” meaning a reluctance to share the imagination of the planet offered by the U.S. Department of State or even “rassism”, or, as it were, a sense of superiority over another nations or another specified stories about an iron wolf. Rather, a somewhat dusty script from the war on panic was dug up: the fight of Good against Evil, Light against Darkness, Civilization with Barbarianism.
Watching this automation that governs the mainstream media transmission, it is hard not to think whether it is possible that CNN or AP wars were telling the truth, since they could have specified impotent propaganda here. In Poland, what's interesting, however, any of the environments have stood up for freedom of speech and journalism standards by observing regular misinformation and misinformation from corporate media. Interestingly, there is inactive no desire to ask for the same values erstwhile reporting on Ukraine and Russia. In the meantime, it seems that the bias of the Polish press with respect to the conflict beyond the east border is inactive unsurpassed even by the echoes hasbars. possibly we are besides close to afford any objectivity or to keep standards that we would be happy to request immediately in relation to events on another continent.
Among any environments, especially left-wing ones, there is simply a request to look for an analogy between the 2 conflicts, which seems to point to the limitations of paradigmic thinking, for which analogy is simply a natural tool for ordering the world. As a pure fantasy, I consider the recognition of Palestine's destiny with Ukraine, a fantasy that falsifies reality and replaces real alliances, dependence and affiliation introduces a characteristic of our current public debate moralizing. Meanwhile, Volodymyr Zelenski never hid that Israel was a model for Ukraine's future development, which besides seems to confirm the geopolitical puzzle of both conflicts[6].
Ukraine is an east European Israel in the sense that, like Israel, the U.S. needs to destabilize the mediate East (led by Iran), so Ukraine is needed to destabilize Russia (and the lump sum of keeping in the chess of Europe).
This is why American politicians fund the military of both countries abundantly and supply them with political and diplomatic immunity. Their insensitivity to the destiny of Palestinians in Gaza is best demonstrated by the fact that in Ukraine they do not fight Putin due to the fact that he is simply a bad man, just due to the fact that he is simply a man they cannot subdue. The morality of his behaviour is completely irrelevant here as irrelevant to the alliance with Israel will be all 100 civilians murdered in Gaza.
It is besides worth noting that in both cases the U.S. is absolutely utilizing and taking hostage the people of both of these allied countries. And just as Ukrainians die thousands in vain due to the fact that the US is not curious in diplomacy[7], so the Israelis can be victims of global allies of their government in the close future. As Jarosław Pietrzak late wrote, Europeans will besides pay for both disasters[8]. By the way, you can arm your attention to the upcoming war of the United States against China, which will be Taiwan or the Philippines. We will most likely see another replay of the amusement and possibly then – at least at our place, due to the fact that it's truly far distant – we will yet be able to look at the eyes, which is besides late.
Zombie paradigm
Gaza should besides be a name for the eventual disgrace of Western states as a block in any way representing the ideals of democracy and human rights. The European Union and the United States will not halt talking about themselves that way, but I truly don't know who else they want to convince. However, there is simply a problem here that possibly the drasticness of Palestinian destiny will let for a better exposure. It would make no sense if the West had not fallen in the past. Meanwhile, as the eye can see, its past is simply a string of specified embarrassments. And in no way does this change the pretension of Western politicians to represent a better part of humanity, nor their instinctive instruction to everyone around them on issues of ethics and democracy. 1 might even say that the impression of a fall is only possible from the position of an earlier rhetorical high, or Western discourse on its own subject. In another words, we number the fall only in our own eyes, outside for a long time no 1 had any illusions about us.
It is time to admit openly that the political West present simply resembles zombies who live and operate despite having repeatedly reported his death.
When we look at Europe represented by Ursula von der Leyen or Olaf Scholz, it is hard not to get the impression that we are moving among surviving fossils whose political skills are comparable to those enclosed in mummy museum cabinets. What deeper conclusion can we draw from the fact that the countries of our part of the planet have already entered into the condition of uncompromising organizations? What does this incomparability of the West prove? I am afraid that George Galloway, 1 of the more superb British politicians and commentators, is right erstwhile he states that “we live in a time of monsters.” possibly alternatively of pointing out lies and hypocrisy to politicians, shelters request to be built. We're alone, and nothing will change that.
Political Suicide Paradigm
The situation in the mediate East besides reveals the deep crisis of the policy itself, which has actually disappeared from sight. The concept of ‘policicy’ is recalled [polyticide] coined by Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling, author of the celebrated and reminded by any of the statements that Gaza is “the largest concentration camp always existed”[9]. The killing of politics means excluding from the top any possible of non-violent resolution of conflicts, which is again characterized not only by Israel's current consequence to the events of October 7, but by its deep attitude towards this issue, as evidenced by the method of facts made by which the country has been torpedoing for years the anticipation of a two-state solution. In this perspective, the Palestinians are subject to biopolitical operations, not a partner for discussion or even a political rival.
However, the twilight of politics is not only about Gaza itself, but it shows the condition of the full modern. Firstly, there is simply a complete compromise of global law and institutions representing them.
It turns out that realists like John Maersheimer were right, who preached that in the final analysis might is rightPower is the law. This means that under the protection of the U.S. and their own military force, Israel can actually drive a million people out of its homes overnight and will not be met by any kind of diplomatic confrontation. The actions of any states breaking diplomatic relations with Israel or recalling its ambassadors are only a very fewer exceptions to the rule. Similarly, with an interesting trend of returning to the UN as a platform for building a possible global cooperation. However, the veto of 1 of the members of the Permanent safety Council and the force of military blackmail will inactive be stronger than any effort to regulate the situation peacefully.
Secondly, we are facing a fall in diplomacy, especially in the West. The United States, at its own request and known for its vanity, caused by its power, diplomacy is simply not interested,
thus turning voluntarily into a large warehouse with weapons supplied to selected participants (most frequently fueled by themselves) of conflicts. For the war in Ukraine, the US provided more war, limiting its diplomacy to photograph shoots with Zelenski and torpedoing any peace negotiations with Russia. In the case of Palestine, American politicians repeat like a tight evidence that “Israel has the right to defend itself”, which, given their degree of dependence on arms sponsorship, should alternatively be translated as “we have the right to make money and in this war”.
It is worth noting that the destiny of Europe present – and this is the 3rd aspect of the killing of politics – is besides a silent but profound and possibly irreversible fall of the public sphere. The mainstream media area is already an authoritative "psychological operation" (dogs-op), in which the services model our heads according to the requirements of the current phase of information war. Double standards in reporting war events reached specified strength in Gaza that they became almost comical. For those who are inactive incapable to get into collectively generated emotions, there are inactive a number of old and fresh forms of repression and censorship. Here possibly the most crucial motion inactive was to cut off Europeans' access to RT channels, as if listening to any radio station were to be compared to supporting its powers. Western companies should take a deep look at this decision, due to the fact that erstwhile the recipients have established this sign of equality, they themselves can become victims of it. But the specified fact that in democratic societies, it is said that individual has decided from the top what the people of the continent should consider is symbolic.
Today, organisations supporting Palestinians, as well as a number of independent journalists, spread through YouTube and Twitter channels, experience the fact that speaking about freedom of speech has become a gag today.
And criminalization of certain wordings specified as Free Palestine whether (for now ineffective) the ban on pro-Palestinian manifestations in France or Germany sets the direction towards which the Old Continent is inevitably heading. And in this metaphorical sense, erstwhile global institutions no longer stand to uphold our rights, our political representatives, or even access to democratic public space, are all slow beginning to change in Palestinians.
A Paradigm of Historical Disaster
Many present wonder why Gaza’s destiny is causing specified widespread interest worldwide. Why was no 1 with a akin commitment curious in the civilian war in Yemen or Ethiopia? It is hard not to find a distraction in these opinions. In an uneven distribution of attention there is surely besides widespread ignorance in global matters, which everyone as children raised by systematic dogs-op We share our media in any way. There are besides individual and collective wedges that can't be helped, since everyone cares more about what straight – virtually or metaphorically – concerns him.
But there's something else.
W The Palestinians meet and cross 2 large historical formations, 2 large historical paradigms, whose coexistence, as it turns out, forms a number of tragic clashes alternatively than a constellation of a fresh global order based on peace. Of course, it's about doom and colonization.
The heir to 1 line is Israel, heir to the another – Palestine. Only that they both look at each another in their stories and compete for their precedence by participating in a peculiar historical psychochemistry. Since the State of Israel, as its authoritative doctrine proclaims, was created to give shelter to a people who have fallen victim to specified a terrible crime as the genocide of European Jews by Nazi Germany, the right to be cannot be denied. However, since, as the Palestinians believe, it was created as a colonial task that deprived millions of indigenous Palestinians of their rights to their own land, its existence is not absolute, or possibly even forms a formation that should be abolished as shortly as possible. Palestinians who consider themselves victims of cultural cleansing, or Nakba, live alongside Israelis who consider themselves descendants of the victims of the Holocaust. On the another hand, since Israel means the anticipation of a safe asylum for Jews in the world, will the conflict for the liberation of Palestine not always appear in the heads of at least a large condition of this society as a forerunner of another extermination?
This difficult-to-resolution interplay of historical disasters has another crucial drive, which may be liable for the "popularity" of this conflict in the world. The point is that the Holocaust and colonialism are the 2 most shameful elements of the heritage of European history, the 2 unresolved and never full repaired remorse. And Europe seems to have only 1 idea: to shift the problem. In this perspective, the emergence of Israel, referred to as “No More” policy, meant in fact the beginning of a policy that should be described as “No More Here”. The extermination practices of the Nazis yet constituted, as many authors led by Hannah Arendt, the transfer of methods utilized in colonies to the interior of the European continent. After the Holocaust, the consequence of the European colonial authorities (i.e. the United Kingdom) was to establish a fresh colonial state in Palestine, as if this could exorcise the nightmare of the fresh war and the work of Europe for the destiny of the Jews surviving there.
Today, erstwhile genocide is taking place on the outskirts of the Old Continent, will the mechanisms of colonial force gotta return to their origin and their victims become Europeans again? You can foretell a dark scenario.
We are already seeing force inside Israel[10] where repression meets all opponents of power. In Europe, which has completely lost its legitimacy, only force can keep the population in check. In this sense, Gaza is simply a paradigm and laboratory of a fresh phase of European Fascism, which will come to us not from outside, nor from margins, but from the very core of what American politicians, representing yet another country sitting on a postcolonial clock bomb, call present Rules based order And all the prestigious institutions that seemed to defend us from his return. The dark future facing us, unfortunately, means something else: a suspension of all the rules to which our political planet was expected to obey. Since even the appearances of this order are falling – and the rhetoric of Israeli politicians shows that they have stopped caring about their behaviour – this means that we will be able to do everything and no 1 will ask for us. Look at Gaza present and weep, due to the fact that possibly you are looking at your close future and this is the last minute to weep about it.
Footnotes:
[1] Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer. Sovereign Power and bare LifeMatthew Salwa, Prószyński and S-ka, Warsaw 2008, p. 227.
[2] Ilan Pappé, This Myths About Israel, Verso Books, London & fresh York 2017, p. 316/448.
[3] Emanuel Fabian, Defense Minister anounces ‘complete siege’ of Gaza: no power, no food or fuel’, [accessed 11 November 2023)
[4] Giora Eiland, It’s Time to Rip Off the Hamas Band-Aid, [accessed 11 November 2023)
[5] Cf. Rashid Khalili, The U.S. Should Think Twice About Israel’s Plan for Gaza, “New York Times”, October 15, 2023, [accessed November 11, 2023)
[6] Daniel B. Shapiro, Zelensky wants Ukraine to be ‘a large Israel’. Here’s a road map, [accessed 11 November 2023)
[7] Cf. https://scheerpost.com/2022/09/01/report-russia-Ukraine-tentatively-agreed-on-peace-deal-in-april/, [accessed 11 November 2023)
[8] Jarosław Pietrzak, Europe will pay again, [accessed 11 November 2023)
[9] Baruch Kimmerling, Politicide: Ariel Sharon’s War Against the Palestinians, Verso Book, London & fresh York 2020, p. 169.
[10] Lieutenant Isaac KD, Ronit Kory, Oren Schweitzer, Israel Is Cracking Down on interior Dissent, [accessed 11 November 2023)
