'Think of Others' is the title and refrain of a well-known poem by Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008) who was, without doubt, the greatest Arab poet of modern times, a writer whose work cannot be reduced to just the Palestinian cause of which he was the champion.
“As you conduct your wars, think of others/ (do not forget those who seek peace),” runs the second verse. This poem is also a form of testimony because Darwish grew up aware of this concern for the other, even if they were the enemy, having lived in Israel until 1970, having learnt Hebrew as his first foreign language and having discovered European literature through this language.
Thinking of others. Not barricading oneself in a closed-off identity. Not letting emotion destroy empathy. Not turning others into barbarians at the risk of brutalising oneself. Not giving up on that basic sensibility through which we express our concern for the world and for life. Yet it's something of an understatement to say that the political and media scene in France does not encourage such an approach, and even rejects it.

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This rejection can even reach the level of disgrace, as when one hears a commentator draw a distinction between dead children depending on whether they were killed “deliberately” (in Israel in the October 7th attack) or killed “unintentionally” (in the bombing of Gaza ever since). The compassion for the former, who are declared to be victims of barbarity, is equal to the dehumanisation of the second, who are said to have been killed by civilisation.
Contributing as it does to rendering invisible the lasting injustice done to the Palestinian people – as long as Israel occupies and colonises the land (in breach of United Nations resolutions since 1967) and as long as its leaders refuse them the right to live in a sovereign state (in breach of the 1993 Oslo Accords) - the language that fuels this insensibility makes it sound as though history had stopped on October 7th 2023, with the massacre by Hamas fighters which left 1,200 victims.
Held up as a monstrous present with no past or future, no cause or effect, this horrifying event has become an alibi for the blindness of Israeli and its allies. Organised by Israeli state propaganda, the showing of images of the October 7th killings serves as justification for a response that itself violates the laws of war, turning a military counter-attack against Hamas into undefined deadly revenge against the Palestinian population of Gaza.
Never since World War II have so many civilians (15,800 dead at the last count carried out by the Hamas government), entire families, women and children, medical staff and humanitarian workers, journalists and media professionals – at least 56 killed, or more than one a day since the start of the Israeli offensive – lost their lives in an armed conflict in such a short time and in such a small area.
Nor, either, has such an enforced movement of a population, in catastrophic health and humanitarian circumstances, ever occurred in the same short period and in the same small area. Around 1.9 million people, some 80% of the Gazan population, have had to flee, leaving their homes, abandoning their property and quitting their familiar surroundings to become refugees and exiles. It is a flight without respite and without shelter, as the Israeli army is now attacking the very southern point of the Gaza Strip towards which these displaced crowds are heading.
With this scale of violence we are not talking here about collateral damage but rather a war strategy what attacks an entire population from which the specific enemy comes. The war aim proclaimed by Israel - the obliteration of Hamas - has before our eyes become the destruction of the Gaza Strip and its towns, its history, its social fabric, its past and its future, its homes and its workplaces. And the ultimate consequence is the removal of its people, expelled from their own land.
We are close to humanity's darkest hour.
Caught between despair and anger, the astonishment expressed by all international organisations, without exception, whether it be UN agencies such as the UNRWA or non-governmental organisations such as Doctors Without Borders, is in line with this unprecedented catastrophe. “We are close to humanity's darkest hour,” declared the representative of the World Health Organisation for the occupied Palestinian territories.
A rare official public statement by Mirjana Spoljaric, president of the International Red Cross, whose neutrality means it normally insists on keeping silent, also raised the alarm. “The level of people’s suffering is intolerable. It is unacceptable that civilians have no safe place to go in Gaza, and with a military siege in place there is also no adequate humanitarian response currently possible,” she said on a visit to Gaza.
Faced with the complicity and thus the inaction of Israel's Western allies, primarily the United States, the secretary-general of the United Nations, António Guterres, has tried in vain thus far to shake them out of their indifference. For the first time since he took office in 2017 he invoked article 99 of the UN Charter which gives him the right to bring to the attention of the Security Council “any matter which, in his opinion, may threaten the maintenance of international peace and security”. A UN spokesperson explained that this move was justified “given the scale of the loss of human life in Gaza and Israel, in such a short amount of time”. In the wake of the UN secretary-general's letter, a United Arab Emirates resolution to the Security Council demanding an “immediate humanitarian ceasefire” was vetoed by the US.
A repeat of the politics of fear that prompted the response of the United States to the terrorist attacks of September 11th 2001, the Israeli strategy is one of moral ruin. Whatever Israel's military successes might be, they will in the end signal its political and diplomatic defeat. Far from ensuring the security of its own people, these military actions will drag that people into endless war. Can one imagine Israel being able to live in the Middle East over the long term by seeing itself as a stronghold of a dominant West, scorning all the peoples around it? A West which is, furthermore, in the process of losing the world through arrogance and ignorance.
Preceded by shameless lies and accompanied by infinite breaches of human rights including the legitimisation of torture, the American response to 9/11 only increased international danger, devastating sovereign states, provoking new terrorism, humiliating entire populations and uniting them in lasting bitterness. All this has been to the huge benefit of China and Russia who, in the former case, rose to the ranks of the second and potentially the leading global economic power, while the other reverted to a mindset of imperial aggression, from Syria to Ukraine, and including Africa.
Far removed from the democratic ideals that the United States likes to adorn itself with - while trampling on them - its interventions did not in any way help those affected populations to win freedom and democracy. In fact, quite the opposite was true. The final result, after the pitiful withdrawal of American troops, was that the Taliban have been back in power in Afghanistan since 2021, to the despair of Afghan women in particular.
Meanwhile the Islamic Republic of Iran, which was a key target in the US's ambition to reorganise the region, has continued to extend its geopolitical influence, from Iraq to Syria, from Lebanon to Yemen, not forgetting Gaza via Hamas, while the theocracy that rules there represses hopes of freedom for Iranian men and women.
Finally, there is Saudi Arabia. The religious monarchy that was the ideological breeding ground for Al Qaeda is in no way bothered about its human rights violations but, on the contrary, sees itself more than ever at the centre of the world, to the point where it has been chosen to host the 2030 World Expo.
Benjamin Netanyahu's 'assault on Israeli democracy'
Two decades later, the Israeli reaction today is not, however, just a repetition of that blinkered American approach. It is making it worse through its ideological excess, at the risk of losing the entire planet. The government that is running Israel today, and as a result running this war, in fact represents a radical departure, having pushed to their extreme consequences the monstrous nationalistic mindset of colonisation, the superiority of civilisations and of a hierarchy of humanity.
Under the rule of Benjamin Netanyahu (who has been in power continuously since 2009 aside from a brief interlude from 2021 to 2022) a nationalist religious ideology has taken control of the state of Israel in an “assault on Israeli democracy” as the journalist Charles Enderlin has put it. Since 2018 a new basic law, the highest form of law in the country in the absence of a constitution, defines Israel as the “nation-state of the Jewish people”, with no reference to the democratic principle of equality of rights.
Legitimising a nationalistic supremacy which discriminates against Arab and Druze minorities, this basic law breaks from the 1948 declaration of independence which requires that Israel ensures “complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex.” Far from simply being a democratic shift, this ideological radicalisation marks the arrival at Israel's helm of political forces who are openly breaking from a universalist vision: no natural equality, no international law, no common humanity.
And what's worse is that this ideology is set to be exported, as evidenced by the awareness among the far right in the United States and Europe of its theorist and propagandist, the Israeli-American Yoram Hazony, author of 'The Virtue of Nationalism', a bestseller translated into around 20 languages. This work is nothing less than a modern recycling of the full-blooded nationalism of Charles Maurras, minus the anti-Semitism, and whose French edition has a preface by the far-right propagandist Gilles-William Goldnadel.
Criticising support for the “universal” and for “liberal internationalism”, this plea for the advent of an “order of national states” is intended to put an end to the supranational values promoted by the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights at the end of World War II, in full awareness that nation states could become the worst enemies of humankind. This radical nationalism implies that nations should be accountable only to themselves, and rejects the “transference of the powers of government to universal institutions”.
“We should not let a hairbreadth of our freedom be given over to foreign bodies under any name whatsoever, or to foreign systems of law that are not determined by our own nation,” writes Yoram Hazony. This rejection of all universal principles goes hand in hand with an ethnic conception of the nation, demanding “internal cohesion” faced with “national and tribal minorities” whose own demands could unravel that cohesion.
The chapter that opened in 1948, the same year as the birth of Israel, of a common humanity ruled by universal principles that are enforceable against nation states, would thus be closed again. It would be nothing less than a return to the very cause of European and then global catastrophe, that of self-seeking, oppressive and authoritarian nationalism at whose hands populations suffered destruction and crime in the first half of the twentieth century, and ultimately genocide as fascism and Nazism became the extreme products of this nationalism.
On top of the humanitarian emergency which, for the fate of the Israeli people as well as the Palestinians, requires an immediate and lasting ceasefire in Gaza, one can thus add another political imperative, one that concerns the entire international community if, that is, it still exists. This is to put an end to this bellicose and nationalistic headlong rush in which our humanity is dying.
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- The original French version of this op-ed article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter