Being accustomed to Israel's routinized crimes

The genocide that has been going on in Gaza for 22 months is a far greater crime also in the dimension that it has been shown live to the whole world in the history of humanity. Thus it is not only that children are being slaughtered in Gaza and that all the crimes pertaining to humanity are being committed against a defenseless people on a tiny piece of land; the dignity, honor and souls of the people who are made to witness it and are not allowed to do anything are also being subjected to systematic torture and aggression.

People have thus been accustomed to the slaughter of children by bombing. While the corpses of hundreds, thousands of children, whose bodies were torn to pieces before they even saw their first year, pass in front of their eyes, people have also been accustomed to the bombing of hospitals, schools, mosques and churches. The targeted killing of doctors and nurses treating the wounded at first caused outrage; then, with one more, and then another, as the numbers increased, people became thoroughly familiar with it.

Journalists, several times the number of those killed in all the wars of the world, were targeted and killed, one by one or in groups. The outrage caused by the death of the first journalist, in time, led this too to become routine.

Her little grandfather's "soul of my soul, Rim" was brutally slaughtered, and just as one wondered how the world could bear this tragedy, her little grandfather was targeted and slaughtered too.

Even a single one of these is a great crime that should bring humanity to its feet. At first, in the face of the abnormality of the bombing of Shifa hospital, Israel felt the need for a defense and put forward the lie that it had been done by Hamas itself. Later it quickly moved on to not needing even those defenses. Openly, ostentatiously, it bombed hospitals, schools, mosques, churches, places where journalists were present. Every day it crossed the threshold a little further in this matter and increased the dimensions of rampancy and criminality still more. Gradually, what it was slaughtering was not only the people there, but it was also accustoming to this the people all over the world who witnessed it and felt the helplessness and the pangs of conscience of being unable to do anything.

People are going out of their minds from helplessness, from being unable to do anything. Was not the whole human order, the international institutions and organizations, established so that these things would not befall any human being? Who will protect humanity against such villainy? Who can guarantee that what is happening to the Gazans today will not happen to everyone tomorrow? Were not law, morality, order, all of them, to function as the guarantee of protecting each and every one? Was there no sanction for violating them?

When Iraq tried to occupy Kuwait because it was a weaker country than itself, the international community acted immediately; how can it behave so helplessly against Israel? How can the human rights that, because women's rights were being violated in Afghanistan, engraved an occupation of nearly 20 years into people's heads like a norm be so ineffective in Gaza?

We all understand now that Israeli exceptionalism has been a rule operating from the beginning. The sovereign is the one who can impose the exception, but what is the point of rubbing it so much into the eyes of the whole of humanity, to the point of cracking its patience?

We always said that, in fact, it is not only Gaza that is being punished; all of humanity is being punished through Gaza; a show of sovereignty is being put on, as it were, for all of humanity. Protests of ever more massive dimensions are being held for Gaza every passing day in every part of the world. Israel and everyone who supports it are being condemned. Even countries such as Britain and France, which first opened the Israel problem on the world's head, have found this rule-defying exceptionalism of Israel excessive and have put recognizing the Palestinian state on their agenda as a punishment for it. But whatever happens in the world, Israel, that rule-defier, continues to display its exceptionalism as a show of sovereignty of the power behind it, and moreover, at every stage, exceeding the limits still further.

Killing the people of Gaza by starvation before the eyes of all humanity is like killing all humanity. Whereas the most fundamental divine warning given to the Children of Israel was not to kill people unjustly. It was decreed for the Children of Israel: "whoever kills a person is as if he had killed all humanity, and whoever gives life to a person is as if he had given life to all humanity." Today we are confronted with a very terrible example of the Children of Israel's targeting of all humanity by killing one person. By making humanity witness the slaughter, live on air, they kill with the lowest, most treacherous, most immoral, most cruel ways of slaughter.

With an insolent, spoiled self-confidence that no one will ever be able to hold them to account. The feeling given by the sense that everything they do is an exceptional right granted to them is extremely dangerous for all humanity, but they are also increasingly teaching the whole world that all humanity is defenseless in the face of this danger. Thus, in fact, they are not only killing the Gazan; by the manner of killing him, they are also targeting all of humanity, which they make a witness while killing.

On one side of this exceptionalism there is the theological belief they hold about their own elect status, but on the other side there is a status attributed to the Palestinian who is the target of their massacres. That status too has theological grounds. Of course this status rests on their own perverse theology. Just as the Jew himself, as God's chosen servant, has an exception, a privileged immunity from law, rule and order, the enemy at whom they aim, the Palestinian, has the opposite exceptionalism. He is a human being on whom every kind of treatment can be carried out, who has no share and cannot have any share in the book (of course, in the book as they perversely interpret it, as they perversely interpret it).

This exceptionalism of the Palestinian is a kind of form of sovereignty as depicted by the contemporary philosopher Giorgio Agamben in his famous book Homo Sacer. In fact, it is a form of sovereignty that is being attempted to be applied to the whole world, to all of humanity, through the Palestinian. The modern order of sovereignty works through "bare life," which it condemns to live outside the law; and the paradigmatic figure of this bare life is "homo sacer." Granted, Agamben largely set out for this theory from the Auschwitz practices to which the Nazis subjected the Jews. But today, in the face of Israel's genocide, his theory, with a small revision, can be much more meaningful and explanatory. 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. Perhaps with one difference: the Palestinian does not bow to it like an oppressed-victim, he resists, and thus creates a hope of resistance against that sovereign power all over the world. Let us continue with this.