Zionism is a war machine

From Lundi matin #478, 02/06/2025

If you have never read the dialogue between Gilles Deleuze and Palestinian writer Elias Sanbar, entitled The Indians of Palestine, it is available here. In this vein, we have received these brief comments on the ongoing genocide, based on the concept of the war machine developed by Deleuze.

Comments on the ongoing war genocide…

Pretending to flee exile, Zionism becomes the exile of others. It rejects the nomadic flows stemming from the tradition it claims to uphold, imposing a rigid order: walls, a flag, oblivion erected on ruins that are still alive.

It organises territory, bodies and truths according to a colonial logic, disguised as a narrative of wandering and refuge. It relies on a planned, technological and brutal occupation apparatus that erases names, expels inhabitants, razes houses, burns land and redraws maps. From this violence arise forbidden zones, illegal statuses and children deprived of rights.

These are some of the contradictions inherent in Zionism, which it has continued to deepen. To conceal them, it produces a self-perpetuating security-oriented newspeak, designed to justify the ongoing dispossession of the Palestinian people.

Today, Israel, which has made Zionism its state ideology, functions as the high-tech interface of the old colonial world. The modernity it deploys in occupied Palestine, whether military or civilian, outlines new forms of domination that can be exported elsewhere.

In this sense, support for Palestine is not just a cause or a stance taken in the West: it embodies a radical otherness in the face of “a civilisation at its end, and undoubtedly beyond”, ossified in stupidity, racism and generalised control.

Zionism thus assumes one of the central functions of the war machine: operating outside direct state frameworks (in this case European and American), building an ideological and military border between the West and its forms of otherness or dissent. It is therefore not a question of an anomaly linked to political conjecture, but rather an outpost of the system. Financed, armed and justified by those who have always wanted empire, that is to say, where “the normal situation reigns”, lethargy.

What is happening in Gaza marks a new phase in the agony of the empire, engaged in a slow separation from itself. The colonial war machine that it had subjugated to control its margins no longer responds to its centres.

Like divided Rome, which gave birth to Constantinople as its dissident sister, Israel, initially positioned as an outpost of the West, now acts according to its own logic: no longer a vassal, but centrifugal, excessive. Gaza is becoming the fault line where this dissociation is unfolding. Where the West remains mired in its dead rationality, Israel is pushing to its climax a logic of war that has become its own end. The war machine, instead of returning to the empire, is going haywire, becoming monstrous, in a self-perpetuating genocidal enclosure.

The war machine no longer ensures the protection of the empire, but produces its deformation. In Gaza, it is genocide that is exposed, and with it, the crisis of what still linked imperial reason to its instruments.