What more can "deconstruction" do to the "collapsed" philosophy in the face of the Al-Aqsa Flood?

We watched how the Israeli military spokesman's attempt to show Hamas's footprints in Al-Shifa Hospital made Zionist propaganda ridiculous in the eyes of the whole world. In fact it is not only this: everything Israel has tried to do since October 7, every step it has taken to defend itself, every word it has spoken, every image it has shown, only shows its injustice, its guilt, its savagery all the more. Whoever did not know until now learns what a loathsome calamity, what a great danger, and what a shameless lie has been upon the world's head. We say it cannot find a sack in which to fit the spears it has stolen.

We already know and see this, but we also see it from the revolts, protests, popular demonstrations and uprisings of conscience rising against Israel all over the world since October 7. The Al-Aqsa Flood is blowing from everywhere, affecting everywhere. It is changing perceptions about Palestine, Hamas and Israel, warning cowering hearts, watering parched consciences, and preparing all the conditions necessary for the establishment of an entirely new world.

In the meantime we also see how great a distance there is between peoples and administrations, particularly in the West. Yet we are generally very accustomed to forming such a sentence about Arab societies. To say that there is a very great distance between state and people in Arab countries is an ordinary observation. The states do not represent their own peoples; they virtually govern their own peoples on behalf of other countries. They approach their own peoples with the distance, the feeling and the gaze of an occupier. Their armies are not instruments prepared to defend the country against other countries, but work like surveillance and suppression apparatuses protecting regimes against their own peoples.

These descriptions we make of Arab countries we can now say more comfortably about European countries, especially in the context of the Israel-Palestine issue. All American and European cities, with their rights, are on their feet in solidarity with Palestine against the crimes against humanity Israel is committing. But their own rulers continue to remain as indifferent as possible to the plain witness of their peoples, who see Israel's spears that it cannot fit into sacks, in this uprising of their conscience.

Then we understand who the addressees are of Israel's propaganda, whose vulgarity could not fool even children right now. This propaganda gives leaders who have become toys in Israel's hands rote lines to repeat when needed. That it is not deemed necessary for these rote lines to be convincing shows how disrespectful Israel is even toward its own puppets. And isn't it normal for it to be so anyway?

At the press conference with President Erdoğan, in response to Erdoğan's speeches, which were the voice of the eye, of conscience, of reason, of insight, the only thing the President of Germany could say, as if he had not even heard all these words, was "Israel's right to defend itself." Without making himself the addressee of even the simple question of how, for 43 days, massacring with all its might, by planning and targeting, children, women, the elderly, the sick, refugees, could be explained as "self-defense." From the legacy of Immanuel Kant, who defined Enlightenment as "daring to use one's own reason," this is all the legacy that remains for the man at the head of today's Germany: having handed his reason over to Israel's fifth-rate propaganda apparatus.

Erdoğan expressed this matter, through him against all of Europe, as a "state of indebtedness to Israel." Without doubt this expression will have a "deconstructive" effect in itself. The state of indebtedness of Europe and especially Germany toward Israel resembles the state of helpless bankrupts fallen into the hands of a usurer who recognizes no rules. But as we have noted before, this situation has gone beyond even this debt. Having given up, with one's own hands, the courage to use one's own reason even in the face of so much reality has to do with remaining stuck on certain dogmatic rote beliefs that take the mind away.

The many truths that are opening the eyes of ordinary people or of their own citizens are not even visible to the rulers and especially the country's philosophers.

We saw how Jürgen Habermas, regarded as the greatest living philosopher for his discourses on the public sphere, emancipation, undistorted ideal communicative action, living together with the other, and ethical and critical thought, talked nonsense when he opened his mouth on the subject. Not to mention what Seyla Benhabib, who is also a member of the Hannah Arendt Society and who flexes discourses on deliberative democracy and the rights of the other in the same lanes as Habermas, said, which we have touched on. Leaving everything aside, if only she had had a little share from Hannah Arendt, to whom she attributes herself. Would Yıldıray Oğur's excellent piece on the encounter between Habermas and Arendt remind Benhabib of something, I wonder?

Thus, while the winds the Al-Aqsa Flood is stirring touch everywhere, they are also preparing the philosophical conditions needed for the rebuilding of the future's world. Within these conditions, it lowers and demolishes all the masks of Western humanism, beneath which in fact there lies only a racism in its most archaic form.

The interesting and perhaps ironic side of the matter is that the Frankfurt School, of which Habermas is also the last representative, had years ago become famous for exposing the fascism, the despotism, or the deeper and hidden mythological dimensions lying beneath the emancipatory, demythologizing claims of the Enlightenment. In this way, by pointing to the Negative Dialectics beneath modernist Enlightenmentism in Europe, it had claimed the more libertarian, more humane limits of contemporary philosophy. It emerged years later that nearly all of the Frankfurt School members, while doing all this, were at the same time, in complete composure, preparing reports for the CIA. We will write this subject, recalled by our esteemed thinker-politician Prof. Dr. Nabi Avcı, in detail sometime.

In the years when the members of the Frankfurt School were speaking of Negative Dialectics, the French philosopher Jacques Derrida was trying to implement a "deconstructive program" against the metaphysical origins on which all European philosophy rests. Derrida's deconstructive program was in fact little by little eroding, while also drawing attention to the imperialist activities of all of Europe and especially of France, regarded as the pioneer of the Enlightenment. The Algerian experience was very important for concretizing some very deep philosophical considerations, but even so there was a very sophisticated and powerful resistance of philosophical discourse against what he said. In "The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity," Habermas

was virtually scolding such attempts to erode European modernism.

If Derrida were alive, would even he excuse Israel today in the name of the "right to self-defense," or would he begin the one or two words with which he would criticize Israel by first mentioning "Hamas's aggression" and "intention to destroy the Jews"? We cannot know.

But he would probably see that everything he tried to subject to subtle deconstruction has been "collapsed," in the simplest sense of the word, in the face of the Al-Aqsa Flood. Whether he would grieve over all the trouble he took or salute Hamas, we cannot know; let us not speak on his behalf, of course.