“The reason of the strongest is always the best/ We will show how a little later.” That is the opening line of the fable The Wolf and the Lamb by the 17^th-century French poet Jean de la Fontaine, in which he demonstrates the powerlessness of reason and logical argument in face of the violence of force driven by vengeance. “I have been told: I must avenge myself,” said the wolf before devouring the lamb, “without any other form of debate”.

The late French philosopher Jacques Derrida placed those lines by La Fontaine as an epigraph in his 2003 book Voyous (published in English under the title Rogues: Two Essays on Reason) in which he went about deconstructing the blind emotion that gripped the United States amid the shock of the September 11^th 2001 terrorist attacks. A decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union, this blindness set off a devastating cycle in post-Cold War international relations, one that has only become more intense, in which power is given to those who assume the right to suspend the application of law.

The US dismissed its targets as “rogue states” – and notably, in the headlong rush in which unreasoned ideology won the day over political reasoning, Iraq, which had nothing to do with the attacks on the World Trade Center.

The devastation in the Shujaiya district of Gaza City on October 7^th 2024. © Photo Omar Al-Qattaa / AFP

“The first and most violent of Rogue States are those which ignored, and continue to violate, international law which they pretended to be the champions of, in the name of which they speak, and in the name of which they set off for war every time their interests drive it,” wrote Derrida.

A war against the very existence of Palestine

Israel is today the most emblematic of “rogue states”. Its leaders do not even try to appear to adhere to a common humanity in the name of which nations, whichever they may be, are compelled to uphold fundamental rights. The country is fighting “human animals” in the words of Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant while announcing, in the aftermath of the October 7^th Hamas attacks, a war without pity or rules – not against Hamas but against the Gaza Strip, its civilian population, its dwellings, its living quarters.

With contempt and disregard towards any factual and historical truth, the assimilation of the issue of Palestine with the terrorism perpetrated by Hamas serves as an end that justifies every means employed. Despite the blackout of media coverage imposed in its war by the Israeli army, the whole world is a witness, to the point whereby there are no words to describe so many crimes, recognised, claimed and trivialized, of which an initial inventory is provided in a book published this month in France, Le Livre noir de Gaza (The black book of Gaza).

It is truly a war against Palestine that Israel is engaged upon, not only against the existence of a state of that name, but against the survival of the very idea of its existence, a war of destruction against the people who represent it, and of occupation of the land which bears its name.

If ever one doubted this, the intensification of military operations in northern Gaza and southern Lebanon (and even beyond) in which civilians are the primary victims confirm this; Israel could have decided to suspend its offensive with the boast of having decapitated the organisation of Hamas and that of its regional ally Hezbollah.

Instead, the Israeli government has chosen the opposite path, that of a war without end, in the mad hope of annihilating all others who contradict the identity to which it lays claim. That was summed up by the current Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, in a statement that followed a July 2018 Basic Law that defined Israel as “the nation-state of the Jewish people”. In early 2019, Netanyahu declared: “Israel is not a state of all its citizens […] Israel is the nation state of the Jewish people – and only it.”

This colonial imagery by which Israel is “a villa in the jungle” (former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak in 2008) which must eternally “protect ourselves from wild beasts” (Benjamin Netanyahu in 2016) is a path towards ruin. The reasoning of the strongest, who ensure military victory, reveals itself to be a political unreason that promises an existential defeat, one that Rony Brauman, a former head of the NGO Doctors Without Borders, described in his contribution to Le livre noir de Gaza as “a collective suicide”. For it is this ideology, one that regards Israel as a frontline post of the West, facing not only the peoples that surround it but, more essentially, the diversity of the world, which offers a hand to that which produced the genocide of the Jews of Europe.

Origin protects from nothing, and only in the present is proof. Racism, supremacism, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, expulsion, extermination, etc. – as French journalist Sylvain Cypel has already documented in his book The State of Israel vs The Jews, the Israeli far-right, whose presence in government guarantees the political survival of Netanyahu, is not shy regarding any of the murderous obsessions that can feature in glossaries of studies of fascism. It is a sinister and tragic reversal that the state which gained international legitimacy from the recognition of crimes against humanity becomes a contemporary laboratory for the return, with a vengeance, of those very ideologies. Among them is anti-Semitism which, inevitably, proliferates in the wake of all other racisms, such it is their modern core.

The catastrophe that results from this stretches beyond the fate of the Palestinian and Israeli peoples. Its reach is worldwide: the impunity that the state of Israel benefits from, as it flouts the human rights of a whole population and tramples over international law showing neither restraint nor shame, is an invitation for generalised savagery. In their various attires and in all latitudes, whether they be already in power or seeking power, authoritarian, identitarian, nationalist and xenophobic forces can only find encouragement from this.

What is at stake is nothing other than the erasure of the mobilisation of awareness that came about following the Second World War when, amid the rubble of fascism and Nazism, the international community recognised the immeasurable devastation caused by the notions of hierarchical civilisations, of their hatred of equality and their sanctification of racial identity. To not halt the criminal rampage of Benjamin Netanyahu is to destroy the democratic promise of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, to cover over its emancipating light and, as a result, plunge the world into darkness.

It is already late but, as long as there is still time, everything should be done to prevent this collapse. Having turned Israel into a rogue state, its current leaders should be sanctioned by those of this West they claim to belong to. Namely, by the European Union and the United States. It is the only manner they can be constrained, using diplomatic bans, economic boycotts, and the drying up of military aid. Alas, there is good reason to believe that will not be the case, given such dominating blindness in Brussels, Paris, Berlin and Washington.

Already a heavy cloud, the resentment of the rest of the world against our nations will only become weightier. And we will have to affront it with this muted shame of having been incapable of preventing anything, even though we were witnesses, eyes wide open, to this march into the abyss.

Edwy Plenel

Words fail us in face of the unfolding catastrophe, all the more so given that none can prevent it. Which is why this op-ed article is relatively brief, and solemn. Alongside the general mobilisation of Mediapart (see here the latest op-ed by Mediapart publishing editor Carine Fouteau), it follows on my numerous other op-eds on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (which you can find in English and French by clicking on the “appendices” button here), and my book published in France in September by Éditions La Découverte entitled Le Jardin et la jungle.