THE GENTRIFICATION OF GAZA

A screen grab from a video shows Palestinians searching for survivors following an Israeli airstrike in the Jabaliya refugee camp north of Gaza City. (Picture Alliance via Getty Images)

Comrades,

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Google defines gentrification as “the process whereby the character of a poor urban area is changed by wealthier people moving in, improving housing, and attracting new businesses, often displacing current inhabitants in the process.” Decades ago, when I stayed with friends in a flat around Tompkins Square in Lower Manhattan, I was able to witness how gentrification actually proceeds.  First, the police gradually cleansed the area around the square, thereby forcing the homeless and drug dealers to concentrate in the square; then, in a big and well-coordinated action, the police cleaned the square itself of its inhabitants, claiming the square is in any case not their home, so the whole area was gentrified, the real estate prices went up, new stores opened all around…

Is what is going on now in Gaza not the same gentrification? First Israel allowed the Palestinians from their territories to concentrate in Gaza (where practically all the population is from elsewhere), and now it has decided to throw them out since in any case this is not their home… the prohibited motto “from the river to the sea” is now acquiring a new meaning: Great Israel, and we tend to forget that this motto originally meant: all living between the river and the sea should be free, not with Jews thrown out. Plus we should add to this motto: “From the river to the sea… and beyond the river” - are Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia free? Can there be freedom and peace in Palestine if the domain beyond the river remains the way it is? Do the states beyond the river not need Israel as their main enemy in order to postpone their own emancipation?

Along the same lines as the Israeli gentrification of Gaza, Dmitry Medvedev, deputy chairman of the Security Council of Russia, remarked in an interview with Russia's state-run news agency RIA Novosti about war goals for Russia in 2024: "The special operation will continue, its goal will remain the disarmament of Ukrainian troops and the renunciation of the current Ukrainian state from the ideology of neo-Nazism."[1] Russian attack on Ukraine is thus a humanitarian act whose aim is to gentrify Ukraine… So how do the two wars, in Gaza and in Ukraine, relate to each other?

There are many variations that circulate in our media. First, a pseudo-Leftist version: Ukraine is like Israel provoking a war by slowly terrorizing Donetsk/Gaza so that Russia/Hamas could no longer tolerate it. Then, the Rightist version of the same parallel: in Ukraine as well as in Israel, a democratic European state is brutally attacked by a primitive Oriental despotic state or society (Russia, Palestinians), so Ukraine and Israel deserve our full support. Finally, there is the stance of peaceniks: war is always evil, so we should demand ceasefire in both cases, in Ukraine and in Gaza. I disagree also with this stance because one forgets that peace as a rule serves occupiers: after they finish their conquest, they of course want peace…

On January 6 2024 Donald Trump suggested at a campaign event in Newton, Iowa, that the Civil War could have been avoided through “negotiation,” arguing that the fight to end slavery in the US was ultimately unnecessary and that Abraham Lincoln should have done more to avoid bloodshed: ““So many mistakes were made. See, there was something I think could have been negotiated, to be honest with you. I think you could have negotiated that. All the people died. So many people died.”[2] Trump is here applying to the past his idea that, if he were to be a president, he would end the Ukrainian war in 24 hours with negotiations. And one can just imagine other similar views on the missed past chances: in July 1940 Great Britain should have accepted the “generous” German peace plan which would allow it to keep its empire intact; etc.   

So in my view the only correct position is: armed resistance to Russia in Ukraine, but peace and negotiations in the Gaza war. Why? Is this stance not inconsistent? No, because although Israel is an occupier on the West Bank and in Gaza, the parallel between Israel and Russia is not perfect. In the Middle East, we have a properly tragic situation where a total war would be destructive for both sides, while Ukraine presents a clear case of a sovereign state brutally attacked by a neighboring state.

In this situation, an accurate critique of Israel is a sine qua non of any solution. The most disgusting thing with regard to this critique is that many Germans who publicly attacked me for my stance on Israel/Gaza war approached me later in private, telling me that they agree with me, but that now is not the moment to say this publicly. My interpretation of their act is: yes, now it's not the moment to say it publicly because doing this MAY HAVE SOME REAL EFFECT - we will be allowed to say it when it will mean nothing.

Critique begins by analyzing the background of what goes on in and around Gaza. By “analyzing the background” I certainly don’t mean the utter fatuity masquerading as a deep wisdom: “An enemy is someone whose story you have not heard.” Really? I heard Hitler’s story (when I was young I read Mein Kampf), and this made me even more horrified… While insisting that the holocaust cannot be “understood,” Primo Levi introduced here a key distinction between understanding and knowing: “We cannot understand it, but we can and must understand from where it springs /.../. If understanding is impossible, knowing is imperative, because what happened could happen again."[3] This is why the truth of the elevation of the Hamas attack into an unrepresentable Evil – an act of wild freedom not grounded in any specific causes – is its exact opposition: we are all the time bombarded by representations (photos and clips) of the horrors committed by Hamas, with the underlying command: just look and be horrified, don’t think and analyse! One should also note how, while the Hamas attack is treated as an abyssal Evil which cannot be contextualized or relativized, Israel’s counter-attack is mostly read as wholly determined by circumstances: many were brutally slaughtered, so what can Israel do but crush the threat and destroy Hamas? There is no serious choice here… The paradox strikes the eye: in a perverse way, Hamas appears as the only truly free agent.

If, after the October 7 Hamas attack, one just mentioned that Palestinians are also suffering, one was immediately accused of relativizing the horror by way of contextualizing it – “Hamas has no context,” as a title of a comment in a big German daily said. Are we ready to claim the same apropos the massive destruction of Gaza with thousands of children dead, or should we here evoke the context which renders this horror understandable? (Today, one is allowed to deplore the suffering of Palestinians and to demand from Israel to show more restraint; but only the suffering Palestinians are the – potentially – good ones. If they actively resist, they instantly become terrorists…) Things get really obscene when Israel does not only commit openly brutal unjustifiable violence but even presents it as a humanitarian act: emptying Gaza (and maybe, in the near future, the West Bank) is the best humanitarian solution for the Palestinians (since if they are thrown out, IDF will of course stop killing them…); in the calculated bombings of Gaza, IDF is setting new humanitarian gold standards of bombing a country… The official goal of IDF is to destroy Hamas, but what they effectively achieved was to destroy Gaza and in this way gave new strength to Hamas as the only force which really fights for the Palestinians.

Some of my pro-Zionist German friends claim that we should unconditionally support Israel because, in spite of its problematic acts, it is the only island of freedom and democracy, in short: of Western civilization, in the Middle East… My reply: yes, and the whole world can see in Gaza day after day what Western civilization and humanitarianism mean in actual practice. Even in the developed West, the majority of people are for ceasefire, so a gap is growing between the population and governments, and this gap can lead to unpredictable and dangerous consequences. Our basic moral edifice is not just hypocritical (as it always-already was), with the Gaza war it lost even the hypocritical force of appearance – in it and with it, appearance effectively becomes just an appearance, no longer an appearance which contains its own truth. Along these lines, Arundhati Roy’s remarked that, if the Gaza bombing will go on, then “the moral architecture of western liberalism will cease to exist. It was always hypocritical, we know. But even that provided some sort of shelter. That shelter is disappearing before our eyes.”[4]

Crucial here is the idea that, in spite of its hypocrisy (or, why not, because of it and through it) the liberal moral edifice nonetheless “provided some sort of shelter.” Recall the Tiananmen protests in 1989: the protesting crowd built a simple copy of the Statue of Liberty and danced around it. It would be too easy to dismiss this as an infatuation with the American ideological dream: what the Chinese crowd projected into the statue was in all probability a mixture of political and personal freedoms plus social justice and common welfare – a quite respectful emancipatory desire. Was it not the same when, a decade or so ago, the protesting students in Hong Kong cried for Donald Trump to protect their autonomy? And when in the last decades “rainbow revolutions” took place in Ukraine, Belarus, etc.: their demand do join the EU was motivated by what “Europe” stood for in their eyes: freedom and safety, welfare… much closer to an elementary social-democratic idea than to the reality of the EU. In some sense, they were more European than the majority of actual Western Europeans. It is in this sense that the Western European moral edifice “provided some sort of shelter”: it served as a moral compass.

But why should we not simply say that the disappearance of the hypocritical shelter is a good thing since, in the US at least, as Malcolm X said, “democracy is hypocrisy,”[5] so that, by way of dispelling hypocrisy, it will enable us to construct a more authentic moral edifice? The answer is that hypocrisy is infinitely superior to brutal display of violence: it keeps alive standards which allows us to judge what we are doing. At a more general level, the same goes for universal human rights: yes, they were hypocritical, but they set in motion a long process of their self-rectification. Brutal dictatorships dispel with appearances of formal freedom, and what we get is not actual freedom but the rule of naked force. This is why one should insist on “universal” topics like human rights and resist the temptation to “deconstruct” them as a tool of imperialist domination, against the anti-Western self-destructive stance of cancel culture. We can see what awaits us outside this space in the new non-aligned group of BRICS, especially now that even Saudi Arabia and Iran joined it: tolerance… of each other’s crimes. However, the true problem is how to keep the Western emancipatory legacy really alive. In Germany, the words “Never again” (Nie wieder) are often repeated, indicating that we should make everything possible to prevent something like the Shoah happening again. However, Franco Berardi[6] recently wrote that today;

“from a German point of view the words ‘Never again’ have to be interpreted this way: after killing six million Jews, two million Rom people, three hundred thousand communists, and twenty million soviets, we, the Germans, will protect Israel no matter what, because they are no longer the enemy of our superior race, but a part of it.”

These lines may appear too ruthless, but it is important to note that Juergen Habermas, the last great representative of the Frankfurt School who co-signed a letter of full support to Israel which is the main target of Berardi’s critique, is a great partisan of the legacy of Enlightenment – one of his best-known books is The Unfinished Project of Enlightenment, a critique not only of the French postmodern thought but also of Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. To put it succinctly, Habermas dismisses the horrors of the last centuries, from colonialism to mass murders of millions, as mere signs that the project of Enlightenment is not yet fully actualized, while Adorno and Horkheimer see in these horrors the actualization of the innermost potentials of Enlightenment and not just remainders of the oppressive past not yet annulled by Enlightenment. Berardi reminds us of the lines written by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno back in 1941:

“the very concept of Enlightenment contains the germ of the regression that is taking place everywhere today. If Enlightenment does not embrace the consciousness of this regressive moment, it is signing its own death sentence. If we leave the reflection on the destructive side of progress to the enemies of progress, thought, blinded by pragmatism, will lose its capacity.”

This, exactly, is also what is happening in the problematic support of what Israel is doing in Gaza and West Bank by many Western intellectuals: they perceive Israel as an embodiment of European Enlightenment in a less-progressive part of the world and thereby ignore how the fate of the European Jews as well as what Israel is doing to Palestinians bear witness to the “destructive side of progress.” A  Black American recently visited Hebron to check the prevalent opinion that the situation there is very complex; what he saw is that the situation is very simple: no complexity, just open and brutal apartheid… The general lesson of all this is that, if we really want to confront the destructive phenomena that has plagued us in the last decades, from the rise of new populisms to new forms of social control, we have to turn out critical gaze on the very philosophical foundation of today’s liberal democracy, the thought of Enlightenment.

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[1] Putin Ally Admits Russia's Ultimate Goal Is to Get Rid of Zelensky (newsweek.com).

[2] Trump says Civil War ‘could have been negotiated’ | CNN Politics.

[3] Primo Levi, If This Is a Man * The Truce, London: Abacus 1987, p. 396.

[4] Arundhati Roy: The siege of Gaza is a crime against humanity. The world must intervene (scroll.in).

[5] Malcolm X Speech "Democracy is Hypocrisy" - YouTube.

[6] In a text circulated by private communication.