Mourners gather around the bodies of Palestinians who were killed by the Israeli army, at al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza City on March 18, 2025 [Abdel Kareem Hana/AP]
Every house that the Israelis destroy, every life that they murder on a daily basis, and even every school day that they make the children of Palestine lose, take with them a part of the immense deposit of truth and wisdom that, in and for Western culture, was accumulated by the generations of the Diaspora, from the glorious or infamous misfortune of the ghettos, from the ferocity of persecutions old and new. A great Jewish Christian woman, Simone Weil, reminded us that the sword hurts on both sides. I dare add: it sometimes wounds on more than two sides. Each day of war against the Palestinians, or of false consciousness for the Israelis, means that a house, a memory, a parchment, a sentiment, a verse, a moulding, is imperceptibly humiliated and disappears from our lives and our homeland. A poet once spoke of the outlaw and his ‘calm and lofty gaze/ That damns a whole people around a scaffold’ [Baudelaire, “The Litanies of Satan”]: well, all around the ghettos of Gaza and the West Bank, every day the State of Israel risks a condemnation far more serious than that of the UN, a trial that will open within it, between it and itself, if it does not decide to get drunk as Babylon did before it.
Franco Lattes Fortini, “Letter to the Italian Jews”, lundimatin #467, (21/03/2025)
What is the power, or even usefulness of thought, before the physical violence of mass murder? Perhaps none in the end. But if that is so, then the end of human life should be openly desired, for we would be irredeemable.
We try, here, while acutely aware of the limitations of the exercise, to modestly reflect on the ongoing genocide in Gaza; to try to think through the conditions of possibility of a violence which seems to defy comprehension.
And we engage in this with Primo Levi, Hannah Arendt and René Schérer as our guides.
It is difficult not to think of the genocide in Gaza when reading the opening words of Primo Levi’s The Drowned and the Saved (1986) remain disturbingly powerful:
The first news about the Nazi annihilation camps began to spread in the crucial year, 1942. They were vague pieces of information, yet in agreement with each other: they delineated a massacre of such vast proportions, of such extreme cruelty and such intricate motivation that the public was inclined to reject them because of their very enormity. It is significant that this rejection was foreseen well in advance by the culprits themselves; many survivors (among others, Simon Wiesenthal in the last pages of The Murderers Are Among Us) remember that the SS militiamen cynically enjoyed admonishing the prisoners:
‘However this war may end, we have won the war against you; none of you will be left to bear witness, but even if someone were to survive, the world would not believe him. There will perhaps be suspicions, discussions, research by historians, but there will be no certainties, because we will destroy the evidence together with you. And even if some proof should remain and some of you survive, people will say that the events you describe are too monstrous to be believed: they will say that they are the exaggerations of Allied propaganda and will believe us, who will deny everything, and not you. We will be the ones to dictate the history of the Lagers.’
Atrocity after atrocity by the Israeli military and denial after denial by that country’s authorities and the complacency of all of those who presumably can see what all of “us” see and who have some means of bringing the genocide to an end, leaves us almost without words. And what if all of the Gazans are finally erased from this world, who will bear witness to this monstrosity? And will anyone even believe it? Do not Israeli officials speak as the SS militiamen did?
*
Nisrine Malik, columnist for The Guardian newspaper and writing about the genocide in Gaza, concludes a recent piece with the following:
Every corpse, every city pulverised into rubble, every bloodied child exists not in a hopeless land far away, but within people’s human hinterland. Because it is impossible for a world to be shown the daily ravaging of a people and become intimidated or exhausted into habituation. Some may choose to ignore it, or justify it, or even support it, but they can never normalise it. (The Guardian, 07/04/2025)
Yet what if the horror of the Israeli destruction of the territory and its people is this violence and more; what if the horror is precisely the ambition to normalise what should be horrible, to render “us” morally numb before the unacceptable, to make “us” incapable of thinking of the Palestinians as fully others and therefore equals?
On March 31st, at 7 p.m., U.S. Senator Cory Booker began what would be the longest recorded speech in the body’s history – twenty-five hours and five minutes –, surpassing the previous longest recorded speech in Senate history: Strom Thurmond’s twenty-four-hour and eighteen-minute-long filibuster against the Civil Rights Act of 1957. And on April 3rd, this same senator voted against a pair of resolutions introduced by Bernie Sanders to block $8.8 billion in new arms sales to Israel. (The Guardian, 08/04/2025)
However sincere Booker’s criticism of the second Trump presidency, they come to naught by his failure, his inability, to see the suffering and death of Palestinians – which U.S. governments have continually supported – on an equal level with those who suffer the consequences of the U.S. government’s authoritarian excesses. (In the same way, sadly and ironically, that Thurmond failed to see and understand the suffering of the U.S.’s black people.)
Gaza has become a litmus test for judgements of justice and those who cannot bring themselves to speak out and act against the genocide fail morally, and they do so abominably, because they cannot imagineand think of the Palestinians as others and equals.
*
Hannah Arendt’s concluding words about Adolf Eichmann, in her report of his trial in Jerusalem, remain more than pertinent.
Eichmann was not lago and not Macbeth, and nothing would have been farther from his mind than to determine with Richard III “to prove a villain.” Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement, he had no motives at all. And this diligence in itself was in no way criminal; he certainly would never have murdered his superior in order to inherit his post. He merely, to put the matter colloquially, never realized what he was doing. It was precisely this lack of imagination which enabled him to sit for months on end facing a German Jew who was conducting the police interrogation, pouring out his heart to the man and explaining again and again how it was that he reached only the rank of lieutenant colonel in the S.S. and that it had not been his fault that he was not promoted. In principle he knew quite well what it was all about, and in his final statement to the court he spoke of the “revaluation of values prescribed by the [Nazi] government.” He was not stupid. It was sheer thoughtlessness – something by no means identical with stupidity – that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period. And if this is “banal” and even funny, if with the best will in the world one cannot extract any diabolical or demonic profundity from Eichmann, that is still far from calling it commonplace. It surely cannot be so common that a man facing death, and, moreover, standing beneath the gallows, should be able to think of nothing but what he has heard at funerals all his life, and that these “lofty words” should completely becloud the reality – of his own death. That such remoteness from reality and such thoughtlessness can wreak more havoc than all the evil instincts taken together which, perhaps, are inherent in man – that was, in fact, the lesson one could learn in Jerusalem. But it was a lesson, neither an explanation of the phenomenon nor a theory about it. (Hannah Arendt, Eichman in Jerusalem, 1965)
*
In Bela Tarr’s film, Werckmeister Harmonies (2000), there is a sequence of a riot stirred on by a charismatic and ambitious figure referred to as the “Prince”. Inflamed, a mob armed clubs march and then run into a hospital, dragging inmates out of their beds and beating them. When the rioters finally find a helpless old naked patient, who is all skin and bones, they see in him their impotent, sad and powerless selves and withdraw silently.
It is a moment haunted by ambiguity, for the mob’s ability to see itself in the old, solitary, fragile man presupposes a capacity to imagine themselves as his equal and therefore to think of both him and themselves as worthy of the same treatment. But if this capacity were not present – if they could neither imagine nor think –, then the old man would be nothing more than another life to violate. And if we follow Arendt, this was precisely Eichmann’s – and that of so many others’s – failure.
*
From Jean-Paul Sartre to Emmanuel Levinas, and through so many other writers and philosophers, we find the idea that the other is not first thought to then be met with, but is “existentially” encountered first, to then be interpreted and comprehended. The other is a sort of bare fact that erupts into my world, shattering its desired narcissism, with which I must contend. As either a hell for me – Sartre –, or a primordial call upon my responsibility and concern – Levinas –, imagination and thought appear as a second order reality dressed over the initial encounter.
Yet perhaps what is necessary is to reverse the order, or at least make it simultaneous and complementary. If the other must be thought as my equal, I must first be able to imagine and think the other as other deserving of equal and just treatment. If we but feel the other – for example, through Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “pity” –, then our empathy must be continually fed with images of suffering in a sort of pornography of pain. And should they fail – which is inevitable –, then the other vanishes into the silenced darkness of oblivion. We were equals only to the extent that that I could pretend to feel the other’s pain. But this is an equality of identity, of an identity without difference, sustained only by the spectacle of fleeting images. And once the images wane, the other quickly vanishes into indifference.
To imagine and think justice is to imagine and think from a community of differences and singularities. If we are all identical, the loss of an other is irrelevant and morally meaningless, for there is always an other to replace them. The other as different from me demands an ability to imagine and to think the other as other, as my possible fellow.
*
Our thesis then is that ethically, the Israeli genocide in Gaza is made possible, is permitted, because “we” have not found the other in the Palestinians.
For there to be a face to face encounter, reciprocity, exchange, it is necessary that, in a certain way, there be formed, relative to the other, an a priori of encounter, a form of welcoming, a structure of hospitality “in me”. For there to be an alter, it is necessary to presuppose an ego, even if this ego, me, needs, to fully exist and understand itself, its other. For there to be an other’s point of view, it is necessary that I constitute them as an another point of view distinct from mine, that the two cross paths with each other, that they encounter each other to form the same world. Without this crossing of paths, there is nothing more than the absence of the other, the absence of alterity, or the absorption of this latter in a single, dominant vision. (René Schérer, Zeus hospitalier: Éloge de l’hospitalité, 1993/2005, 137-8)
… from me to the other, for them to become a face, to face, and an interlocutor, it is necessary that, from the place where I find myself, to them, a sort of transfer takes place. For their body to become the analogue of mine that I always experience, that, without my being able to slide “from the interior” into what they experience and live, their “lived experience”, I must attribute to them the existence of a subject, not that of a thing. (Ibid., 138)
The other is, from the presence of their body “paired” to mine, living and sensing, a pole of perception, of action, of interpretation, a pole of meaning. The other gives meaning because they have first taken on for me the meaning of another. (Ibid., 139)
… [it] is thanks to the constitution of their meaning, [that] they appear necessarily in “my primordial world, in the quality of an “intentional modification” of my self. (Ibid., 139)
… the common world [is] an interweaving of points of view emanating from the infinite multiplicity of subjects reciprocally constituted. For I depend on the other as they depend on me. (Ibid., 140)
Each of us carries “within ourselves” a world and rather than the multiplicity of worlds generating incommunicability and incommensurability, it is the essential condition for communication, because it implies that each makes contact with the other from the world that they carry with them. … I have not yet encountered “the other” if I am ignorant of what motivates them in their world, or if I do not accept it. It is only within the framework of such an acceptance, which accompanies the relativisation of the absolute pretensions of a single cultural world, that we can, in the strict sense, comprehend the other, “to take them with” all that they imply and bring. Modern hospitality must be an openness to other constituted worlds. (Ibid., 140)
“We” fail to see and comprehend and live with the other, because the other, the Palestinians, have ceased to be others equal to our “own” selves. And if Palestine is a template for the understanding of our times, then the genocide in Gaza teaches us not only of the potentially limitless violence of the state, but of our “own” erasure as self-conscious agents oblivious to the murder of others. The horror, finally, is that neither “we” nor “they”, nor “our” worlds, are comprehended or lived, and therefore, we have all become superfluous and slaughterable by power.
Endeavouring to think Gaza
Every house that the Israelis destroy, every life that they murder on a daily basis, and even every school day that they make the children of Palestine lose, take with them a part of the immense deposit of truth and wisdom that, in and for Western culture, was accumulated by the generations of the Diaspora, from the glorious or infamous misfortune of the ghettos, from the ferocity of persecutions old and new. A great Jewish Christian woman, Simone Weil, reminded us that the sword hurts on both sides. I dare add: it sometimes wounds on more than two sides. Each day of war against the Palestinians, or of false consciousness for the Israelis, means that a house, a memory, a parchment, a sentiment, a verse, a moulding, is imperceptibly humiliated and disappears from our lives and our homeland. A poet once spoke of the outlaw and his ‘calm and lofty gaze/ That damns a whole people around a scaffold’ [Baudelaire, “The Litanies of Satan”]: well, all around the ghettos of Gaza and the West Bank, every day the State of Israel risks a condemnation far more serious than that of the UN, a trial that will open within it, between it and itself, if it does not decide to get drunk as Babylon did before it.
Franco Lattes Fortini, “Letter to the Italian Jews”, lundimatin #467, (21/03/2025)
What is the power, or even usefulness of thought, before the physical violence of mass murder? Perhaps none in the end. But if that is so, then the end of human life should be openly desired, for we would be irredeemable.
We try, here, while acutely aware of the limitations of the exercise, to modestly reflect on the ongoing genocide in Gaza; to try to think through the conditions of possibility of a violence which seems to defy comprehension.
And we engage in this with Primo Levi, Hannah Arendt and René Schérer as our guides.
It is difficult not to think of the genocide in Gaza when reading the opening words of Primo Levi’s The Drowned and the Saved (1986) remain disturbingly powerful:
The first news about the Nazi annihilation camps began to spread in the crucial year, 1942. They were vague pieces of information, yet in agreement with each other: they delineated a massacre of such vast proportions, of such extreme cruelty and such intricate motivation that the public was inclined to reject them because of their very enormity. It is significant that this rejection was foreseen well in advance by the culprits themselves; many survivors (among others, Simon Wiesenthal in the last pages of The Murderers Are Among Us) remember that the SS militiamen cynically enjoyed admonishing the prisoners:
‘However this war may end, we have won the war against you; none of you will be left to bear witness, but even if someone were to survive, the world would not believe him. There will perhaps be suspicions, discussions, research by historians, but there will be no certainties, because we will destroy the evidence together with you. And even if some proof should remain and some of you survive, people will say that the events you describe are too monstrous to be believed: they will say that they are the exaggerations of Allied propaganda and will believe us, who will deny everything, and not you. We will be the ones to dictate the history of the Lagers.’
Atrocity after atrocity by the Israeli military and denial after denial by that country’s authorities and the complacency of all of those who presumably can see what all of “us” see and who have some means of bringing the genocide to an end, leaves us almost without words. And what if all of the Gazans are finally erased from this world, who will bear witness to this monstrosity? And will anyone even believe it? Do not Israeli officials speak as the SS militiamen did?
*
Nisrine Malik, columnist for The Guardian newspaper and writing about the genocide in Gaza, concludes a recent piece with the following:
Every corpse, every city pulverised into rubble, every bloodied child exists not in a hopeless land far away, but within people’s human hinterland. Because it is impossible for a world to be shown the daily ravaging of a people and become intimidated or exhausted into habituation. Some may choose to ignore it, or justify it, or even support it, but they can never normalise it. (The Guardian, 07/04/2025)
Yet what if the horror of the Israeli destruction of the territory and its people is this violence and more; what if the horror is precisely the ambition to normalise what should be horrible, to render “us” morally numb before the unacceptable, to make “us” incapable of thinking of the Palestinians as fully others and therefore equals?
On March 31st, at 7 p.m., U.S. Senator Cory Booker began what would be the longest recorded speech in the body’s history – twenty-five hours and five minutes –, surpassing the previous longest recorded speech in Senate history: Strom Thurmond’s twenty-four-hour and eighteen-minute-long filibuster against the Civil Rights Act of 1957. And on April 3rd, this same senator voted against a pair of resolutions introduced by Bernie Sanders to block $8.8 billion in new arms sales to Israel. (The Guardian, 08/04/2025)
However sincere Booker’s criticism of the second Trump presidency, they come to naught by his failure, his inability, to see the suffering and death of Palestinians – which U.S. governments have continually supported – on an equal level with those who suffer the consequences of the U.S. government’s authoritarian excesses. (In the same way, sadly and ironically, that Thurmond failed to see and understand the suffering of the U.S.’s black people.)
Gaza has become a litmus test for judgements of justice and those who cannot bring themselves to speak out and act against the genocide fail morally, and they do so abominably, because they cannot imagine and think of the Palestinians as others and equals.
*
Hannah Arendt’s concluding words about Adolf Eichmann, in her report of his trial in Jerusalem, remain more than pertinent.
Eichmann was not lago and not Macbeth, and nothing would have been farther from his mind than to determine with Richard III “to prove a villain.” Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement, he had no motives at all. And this diligence in itself was in no way criminal; he certainly would never have murdered his superior in order to inherit his post. He merely, to put the matter colloquially, never realized what he was doing. It was precisely this lack of imagination which enabled him to sit for months on end facing a German Jew who was conducting the police interrogation, pouring out his heart to the man and explaining again and again how it was that he reached only the rank of lieutenant colonel in the S.S. and that it had not been his fault that he was not promoted. In principle he knew quite well what it was all about, and in his final statement to the court he spoke of the “revaluation of values prescribed by the [Nazi] government.” He was not stupid. It was sheer thoughtlessness – something by no means identical with stupidity – that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period. And if this is “banal” and even funny, if with the best will in the world one cannot extract any diabolical or demonic profundity from Eichmann, that is still far from calling it commonplace. It surely cannot be so common that a man facing death, and, moreover, standing beneath the gallows, should be able to think of nothing but what he has heard at funerals all his life, and that these “lofty words” should completely becloud the reality – of his own death. That such remoteness from reality and such thoughtlessness can wreak more havoc than all the evil instincts taken together which, perhaps, are inherent in man – that was, in fact, the lesson one could learn in Jerusalem. But it was a lesson, neither an explanation of the phenomenon nor a theory about it. (Hannah Arendt, Eichman in Jerusalem, 1965)
*
In Bela Tarr’s film, Werckmeister Harmonies (2000), there is a sequence of a riot stirred on by a charismatic and ambitious figure referred to as the “Prince”. Inflamed, a mob armed clubs march and then run into a hospital, dragging inmates out of their beds and beating them. When the rioters finally find a helpless old naked patient, who is all skin and bones, they see in him their impotent, sad and powerless selves and withdraw silently.
It is a moment haunted by ambiguity, for the mob’s ability to see itself in the old, solitary, fragile man presupposes a capacity to imagine themselves as his equal and therefore to think of both him and themselves as worthy of the same treatment. But if this capacity were not present – if they could neither imagine nor think –, then the old man would be nothing more than another life to violate. And if we follow Arendt, this was precisely Eichmann’s – and that of so many others’s – failure.
*
From Jean-Paul Sartre to Emmanuel Levinas, and through so many other writers and philosophers, we find the idea that the other is not first thought to then be met with, but is “existentially” encountered first, to then be interpreted and comprehended. The other is a sort of bare fact that erupts into my world, shattering its desired narcissism, with which I must contend. As either a hell for me – Sartre –, or a primordial call upon my responsibility and concern – Levinas –, imagination and thought appear as a second order reality dressed over the initial encounter.
Yet perhaps what is necessary is to reverse the order, or at least make it simultaneous and complementary. If the other must be thought as my equal, I must first be able to imagine and think the other as other deserving of equal and just treatment. If we but feel the other – for example, through Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “pity” –, then our empathy must be continually fed with images of suffering in a sort of pornography of pain. And should they fail – which is inevitable –, then the other vanishes into the silenced darkness of oblivion. We were equals only to the extent that that I could pretend to feel the other’s pain. But this is an equality of identity, of an identity without difference, sustained only by the spectacle of fleeting images. And once the images wane, the other quickly vanishes into indifference.
To imagine and think justice is to imagine and think from a community of differences and singularities. If we are all identical, the loss of an other is irrelevant and morally meaningless, for there is always an other to replace them. The other as different from me demands an ability to imagine and to think the other as other, as my possible fellow.
*
Our thesis then is that ethically, the Israeli genocide in Gaza is made possible, is permitted, because “we” have not found the other in the Palestinians.
For there to be a face to face encounter, reciprocity, exchange, it is necessary that, in a certain way, there be formed, relative to the other, an a priori of encounter, a form of welcoming, a structure of hospitality “in me”. For there to be an alter, it is necessary to presuppose an ego, even if this ego, me, needs, to fully exist and understand itself, its other. For there to be an other’s point of view, it is necessary that I constitute them as an another point of view distinct from mine, that the two cross paths with each other, that they encounter each other to form the same world. Without this crossing of paths, there is nothing more than the absence of the other, the absence of alterity, or the absorption of this latter in a single, dominant vision. (René Schérer, Zeus hospitalier: Éloge de l’hospitalité, 1993/2005, 137-8)
… from me to the other, for them to become a face, to face, and an interlocutor, it is necessary that, from the place where I find myself, to them, a sort of transfer takes place. For their body to become the analogue of mine that I always experience, that, without my being able to slide “from the interior” into what they experience and live, their “lived experience”, I must attribute to them the existence of a subject, not that of a thing. (Ibid., 138)
The other is, from the presence of their body “paired” to mine, living and sensing, a pole of perception, of action, of interpretation, a pole of meaning. The other gives meaning because they have first taken on for me the meaning of another. (Ibid., 139)
… [it] is thanks to the constitution of their meaning, [that] they appear necessarily in “my primordial world, in the quality of an “intentional modification” of my self. (Ibid., 139)
… the common world [is] an interweaving of points of view emanating from the infinite multiplicity of subjects reciprocally constituted. For I depend on the other as they depend on me. (Ibid., 140)
Each of us carries “within ourselves” a world and rather than the multiplicity of worlds generating incommunicability and incommensurability, it is the essential condition for communication, because it implies that each makes contact with the other from the world that they carry with them. … I have not yet encountered “the other” if I am ignorant of what motivates them in their world, or if I do not accept it. It is only within the framework of such an acceptance, which accompanies the relativisation of the absolute pretensions of a single cultural world, that we can, in the strict sense, comprehend the other, “to take them with” all that they imply and bring. Modern hospitality must be an openness to other constituted worlds. (Ibid., 140)
“We” fail to see and comprehend and live with the other, because the other, the Palestinians, have ceased to be others equal to our “own” selves. And if Palestine is a template for the understanding of our times, then the genocide in Gaza teaches us not only of the potentially limitless violence of the state, but of our “own” erasure as self-conscious agents oblivious to the murder of others. The horror, finally, is that neither “we” nor “they”, nor “our” worlds, are comprehended or lived, and therefore, we have all become superfluous and slaughterable by power.