Gaza against the bare lives of the Zionist dominant order

The insolence Israel displays today in violating all the rules is not a simple lawlessness; it is the show of sovereignty of today's prevailing world order itself. Through the Palestinian, whom it has condemned to live outside every kind of law, Zionism shows, not only to the Palestinian but to the whole of humanity, a sovereign order that is to rule the entire world. Killing by starvation is, even in terms of the law on which today's dominant order rests, or claims to rest, among the gravest crimes against humanity that could exist. But when Israel is concerned, this crime ceases to be a crime, and by repetition even turns into a norm.

Arguments such as "the right to self-defense" or "the right to exist," which up to now had some validity in some fashion, are seen in the face of Israel's serial, systematic crimes as a disgusting brazenness. But it does not matter at all; Israel in any case has a claim to sovereignty such that it does not even need such arguments, regarding itself as above, and exempt from, all laws, all moral rules, all religious prohibitions. It is protected enough to be as reckless, as insolent and as spoiled as possible in practice.

Of course it only thinks it is so protected, but this supposition also constitutes its greatest weakness. That where the dangerous, destructive, sovereign power rises excessively, the redeeming power also emerges is a historical rule, a divine law. Let us note this here for now and move on.

Our subject is how the order of sovereignty, in which Zionism stands out as a hidden and open actor, condemns people to live outside the law, and how it operates through "bare life." The paradigmatic figure of this bare life was, according to Giorgio Agamben, "homo sacer." For Agamben, who took up this logic of sovereignty through the Nazi example, homo sacer was the Jew in the concentration camps. All the exceptional violations of law applied to the Jew were in fact a demonstration that, when the occasion arose, this could be applied to everyone.

If the Jew can be made an exception, this exception can become a rule for everyone. Humanity will have to watch its step in the face of this sovereignty. A sovereignty that claims lordship (rububiyya) is an example of Pharaonic excess and rampancy. Today Israel, or the world order that puts the claim of sovereignty into practice through it, is embodying the same understanding of sovereignty by reducing the whole of humanity, through Gaza, to the level of homo sacer.

Homo sacer is a being who is sacrificed but has no sanctity. It means "sacred man," but here "sacred" means one who may be killed and yet cannot be sacrificed. He is both inside and outside the legal order: his killing is not counted as a crime, but his ritual sacrifice is also forbidden. According to Agamben, modern politics has made all citizens potential "homo sacer." In return, bare life is merely biological existence, that is, life without any political recognition or right.

According to Agamben, modern states take people out of being rights-bearing political subjects (bios) and turn them into beings reduced to mere survival (zoê). All the rules violated today before humanity, with humanity made a witness, are a show of power by the sovereignty of the dominant order, which is able to impose the exception. Through this show, the masses whose voice is cornered, whether into silence or by being made to cry out, are removed from being subjects and turned into beings reduced to mere survival. In the face of the protests, the rising voices, the uprisings of conscience in every part of the world, the Zionist sovereigns, in all their insolence, as if nothing were happening, continue to commit crimes of genocide against the Gazan, whom they are trying to turn into homo sacer.

In fact, this insensitivity is repeated today through figures such as the "stateless," the "refugee," the "migrant," the "terror suspect." In many cases, the violations committed against such categories are even excused by the masses. All the criminal procedure rules or detainee rights that are expected to be applied to the ordinary citizen are seen as normal to suspend when the person in question is a migrant. There, the "migrant" has committed the most unlikely of crimes: he has crossed the borders in which he lived and sought a life within the borders of another country. What kind of law is it, or is it a law at all, that turns this into an unforgivable crime? Bare life produces precisely a state of exception that renders every law inoperative. A state of exception that gives the sovereigns an opportunity for the immoderate exercise of power...

According to Agamben, the human rights discourse is also founded on this bare life and is ineffective, because the bond of citizenship, which is the basis of rights, has disappeared. Today the plan of Israel and the US to occupy Gaza does not rest merely on an understanding displayed after setting out. It rests on the theo-political understanding that has grounded Israel's occupying presence on Palestinian land from the beginning. Before Israel, Palestine is a "land without people." That land needs "to be made a homeland for people, that is, for the Children of Israel, for the Zionists." Those who live there and are called Palestinians are absolutely bare lives. Beings without feeling, history, personality or importance, on whose lives every kind of disposition can be made. Beings not even worth applying the law to. What are human rights anyway; they are not even human, they are human-like beings.

In this order of sovereignty depicted by Agamben, homo sacer, who is sacrificed for the sake of the sovereign's own sovereignty but is not even deemed worthy of the sanctity of a sacrificial victim, finds his target directly in the Palestinian in the case of Israel. But there is a difference here: when Agamben depicts the modern order of sovereignty, the homo sacer before it is a passive victim resigned to his fate. A victim who cannot gain sanctity through his victimhood, that is, who cannot be even an Isaac or an Ishmael. Yet in the face of the same claim of sovereignty by Israel, the Gazan has not at all been willing to be homo sacer; he has not accepted bowing his head before Israel's immoderate, spoiled and rampant sovereignty. On the contrary, the Palestinian has from the beginning never failed to voice his objection to this understanding of sovereignty by Israel, but especially on October 7, in the face of this sovereign power that the whole known world has acknowledged and almost pledged allegiance to, and in whose race to "normalize" relations it has been engaged, he displayed a breakout that adorned all bare lives with the garment of honor, dignity and existence.

The interesting side of the matter is that the Gazan does this willing to be sacrificed in the way of God, in the way of freedom, in the way of honor and the existence of faith.

The homo sacer is truly a Holocaust that destroys the human being. But the Gazan, with his resistance, with the alternative path of existence he points to against the dominant order, even while giving up his body and his life, proves his existence and represents the birth of the redeeming power against the growing dangerous power.

Here, in the face of the Zionist power claiming absolute sovereignty, there is no bare life; there is a real subject of resistance.

This subject drives Israel and the dominant order mad.