“Striking Hard at Civilians”: A Supremacist Ideology Underlies Israeli Policy

Part of the Series

Struggle and Solidarity: Writing Toward Palestinian Liberation

Israel’s recent brutal attack in Gaza resulted in the killing of predominantly women and children. It involved some of the most fatal attacks on Gaza that we have witnessed in 17 months. Given the degree to which the Israeli state formation has made clear its disregard for the worth of Palestinian lives, it was not surprising to me this month when Benjamin Netanyahu welcomed former National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and his ultranationalist party, Otzma Yehudit, which means “Jewish power,” back into the government. Bear in mind that it was Itamar Ben-Gvir who advocated the position back in January that electricity, fuel, water and humanitarian aid must be “completely stopped” from entering Gaza in an effort to force Hamas to release its remaining captives. There is nothing about such an inhumane position that honors saving the lives of Palestinians. It is the language of genocide. And as Rabbis for Ceasefire has argued so powerfully, there is nothing about the recent deadly attacks in Gaza that respects the Jewish spiritual principle of pikuach nefesh (“saving a life”).

In an interview with Judith Butler, I gestured toward the importance of a radically new discourse that might move the minds and hearts of Israeli Jews to rethink their violent relationship to Palestinians and that would prove beneficial to themselves as well. Butler responded, “I am not sure that a humanistic appeal to Israeli Jews will do the trick, for the roots of the problem are in a state formation that depended on expulsions and land theft to establish its own ‘legitimacy.’” It was there that I thought of James Baldwin, who argued that the “price of the ticket” for European immigrants to become assimilated into U.S. society was to become white, which meant that the core of who they became was antithetical to Black existence. In short, the root of the problem of whiteness is linked to anti-Blackness and it is that anti-Blackness that establishes the “legitimacy” of whiteness. I see this sense of “legitimacy” played out in the Israeli state’s history of racism against, and killing of, Palestinians for the maintenance of Israeli identity and state formation.

To understand the existential devastation of Palestinian lives, it is important that we come to terms with the fact that the numbers killed are, as Muhammad Ali Khalidi argues, “staggering and unprecedented in the modern history of Palestine.” I want to know what it is that drives the Israeli state to engage in such acts of unconscionable violence, and why against literally thousands of Palestinian civilians. Is this something new or has this been the ongoing banality of perniciousness against Palestinians by the Israeli state? Has the establishment of a Palestinian state ever been a real option for the Israeli state, or has its rhetoric always been a position of bad faith, where Israel’s hegemony and control over the movements of Palestinians has always been its aim? If we want to support Palestinian liberation, what must we do and continue to do, especially now that Donald Trump is back at the helm in the U.S.? It is important that we seek the truth as we think about Israel’s devastation of Gaza. To get greater clarity on these issues, I conducted this exclusive interview with Muhammad Ali Khalidi, who is presidential professor of philosophy at City University of New York Graduate Center and author of the recent book, Cognitive Ontology: Taxonomic Practices in the Mind-Brain Sciences. The interview that follows has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

George Yancy: I feel so much outrage toward the Israeli state. It is an outrage born of bearing witness to the continual massive and inhumane existential devastation of Palestinian lives. As you know, just this week, Netanyahu said that the recent vicious bombing of Gaza was “only the beginning.” Over 400 people were killed, including “at least 183 children, 94 women, 34 elderly people, and 125 men. At least 678 others have been injured, many critically, with more still trapped under the rubble.” It is false to say “only the beginning” when there has been no end and where the “beginning” began decades ago. Please speak to this most recent act of violence perpetrated by the Israeli state.

Muhammad Ali Khalidi: In some ways, the Zionist project has succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of the early settlers, and in other ways, it is an utter failure. It is a failure because it is premised on eliminating the Palestinian inhabitants of the land, and the Palestinians have not been eliminated, nor have they been reconciled to the status of a permanent underclass. There is a passage that haunts me from an essay published in 1907 by Yitzhak Epstein, a Russian-born Jew who was part of the first wave of Zionist settlers in Palestine in the 1880s: “While we feel the love of homeland, in all its intensity, toward the land of our fathers, we forget that the people living there now also has a feeling heart and a loving soul. The Arab, like any person, is strongly attached to his homeland.… The lament of Arab women on the day that their families left Ja’uni — Rosh Pina — to go and settle on the Horan east of the Jordan still rings in my ears today. The men rode on donkeys and the women followed them weeping bitterly, and the valley was filled with their lamentation. As they went they stopped to kiss the stones and the earth” (excerpted from Adam Shatz’s edited book, Prophets Outcast: A Century of Dissident Jewish Writing about Zionism and Israel). There is a direct through line from that early act of Zionist expulsion to this latest act of Israeli violence. Here we are, 120 years later, still listening to the lamentation of Palestinian mothers and fathers, as they mourn not just the loss of their land, but too often, the loss of their children to Israeli state violence.

In an article published back in 2015, you write that “by the admission of its own top military commanders, Israel deliberately targets civilians.” You also discuss how then-Deputy Speaker of the Israeli Knesset Moshe Feiglin argued for “the wholesale destruction and depopulation of Gaza, leading to the eviction of Palestinians from their homes and their permanent ‘elimination’ from their homeland.” Since October 7, 2023, more than 62,000 Palestinians have been killed. This includes Israel having murdered at least 17,400 children in Gaza, which amounts to one child murdered every 30 minutes. This doesn’t include what the British aid group Save the Children reported as the more than “17,000 children [who] are believed to be unaccompanied and separated and approximately 4,000 children [who] are likely missing under the rubble.” You also mention what’s known as the Dahiya Doctrine, named after Israel’s leveling of the Beirut suburb in its 2006 war against Lebanon, which has been cited as a potential guiding principle for Israel in its genocide in Gaza. What is Israel’s motivation behind its use of this kind of disproportionate, wholesale destruction?

The numbers are staggering and unprecedented in the modern history of Palestine. They may also be severe underestimates, according to research recently published in the medical journal, The Lancet, which found that the number of dead may have already been over 64,000 by last June. What’s more staggering to contemplate is that behind each number is a life that was cut short, and that each victim has parents, or children, or cousins, or neighbors, or coworkers — all of whom are now grieving. The entire population of Gaza is bereft and collectively traumatized, and many of them are physically and psychologically injured, so the effects will be with us for decades to come. Moreover, the dead are predominantly innocent, unarmed civilians who were simply trying to survive — so why this unprecedented carnage?

When I wrote the article in 2015, Israel had launched four major attacks on the Gaza Strip in the previous 10 years (2006, 2008-2009, 2012 and 2014), and there were another three major assaults before October 2023. Between 2000 and 2023, the Israeli military killed almost 8,000 Palestinians in Gaza, most of them civilians. With every successive assault on Gaza, it becomes clearer that Israel lashes out indiscriminately against Palestinian civilians and is using what even the New York Times has called “loosened standards” for bombing civilian targets, an “expanded list of targets,” and crude means of “target generation,” including artificial intelligence. There is also plenty of evidence that the Israeli military has extensively used Palestinian civilians as human shields in Gaza, as well as in the West Bank, even according to the mainstream media in the United States. So why does Israel target civilians when it has the precision weaponry and ability to distinguish combatants from noncombatants? I think that there are two main reasons.

The fact that articles justifying Israeli war crimes were published in academic refereed journals is itself telling.

First, there is a long-standing Israeli military doctrine that striking hard at civilians, in both Palestine and Lebanon, puts pressure on militant groups. This was most notoriously articulated by former Israeli military chief of staff Gen. Gadi Eisenkot with reference to Lebanon. He stated in 2006 that the Israeli military would apply disproportionate force to civilian areas and that it would even consider such areas military bases. This became known as the “Dahiya Doctrine” (after the southern suburb of Beirut) and Eisenkot indicated that it was an “approved” plan. I have argued that this doctrine is grounded partly in a couple of papers published in academic journals, coauthored by the former head of Israeli military intelligence and a philosophy professor, which purport to justify flouting the principle of distinction between combatants and noncombatants in international humanitarian law. The fact that articles justifying Israeli war crimes were published in academic refereed journals is itself telling; I’ve tried to respond to their spurious moral arguments elsewhere. This work, which is just a small indication of the ways in which Israeli academia is complicit in war crimes, claims to provide moral justification for prioritizing the lives of Israeli soldiers over Palestinian civilians. Of course, explicit rejection of the principle of distinction is morally repugnant, as is the idea that militancy will be stamped out by attacking civilians.

The second reason is that one of the aims of this entire onslaught has been to render Gaza unlivable and to try to drive its population out. Quite simply, Israel continually attacks Palestinian civilians with the intention of coercing them to leave their homeland. The Israeli leadership hopes that the sheer level of death and destruction will be a prelude to deportation or will lead to mass migration. This continues a policy of ethnic cleansing that began with the inception of the Zionist project and culminated in 1948, when most of the population of Palestine was driven out of their towns and villages in the Nakba (catastrophe). That’s why Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and government ministers have called for mass displacement of Palestinians from Gaza, and why another Israeli cabinet member has called the war on Gaza “Nakba 2023.” And that’s why Donald Trump has said the quiet part out loud, announcing plans to “clean out” the Gaza Strip by deporting Palestinians to Jordan and Egypt.

Continuing with your article, Muhammad Ali, what lessons are we learning from Israel’s ongoing military devastation of Gaza? I say “ongoing” because you argue that “Israel requires a war every two or three years to test its arsenal” and that “Israel cannot tolerate Palestinian unity.” From what you argue, it seems that it isn’t a question of if, but always a question of when Gaza will be devastatingly bombed again by Israel.

Gaza is, almost literally, a thorn in the side of the Israeli state. Its population consists predominantly of people and their descendants who were driven out of their ancestral towns and villages in southern Palestine in 1948 directly before and after the establishment of the state of Israel. Most of them are refugees who just want to return to their original homes, some of which are located on land that is largely uninhabited in Israel, a stone’s throw away from where they now live. The only thing that stands in their way is Zionist ideology, which insists on maintaining a state that is designed exclusively for Jewish people, no matter the cost for Palestinians. Israel realizes that Palestinian refugees in Gaza will not give up their right to return and, consequently, it will engage in periodic military action to suppress the resistance. This is what Israeli officials have euphemistically called “mowing the grass,” the regular process of subjecting the Gaza Strip to overwhelming military force, every couple of years at least since 2005. As long as Palestinians in Gaza continue to resist military occupation and demand their basic rights, the thinking goes, they need to be crushed by the Israeli military machine.

Given that a “ceasefire” is a temporary suspension of fighting, there was nothing about the ceasefire that guaranteed that the siege on Gaza would not continue once there was an exchange of Israeli hostages for those Palestinians who were imprisoned by Israel. In fact, Israel routinely violated its ceasefire agreement many times, and has fully resumed, as I mentioned, its bombardment of Gaza with massive airstrikes that killed more than 400 Palestinians in one day. However, even if Israel was to permanently stop its bombing campaigning in Gaza, there’s the issue of rebuilding Gaza’s infrastructure, issues of malnourishment, starvation, medical aid, and so on. As Seraj Assi writes, “Starting in 2006, in what amounted to a collective punishment of a civilian population, Israel imposed a stringent blockade on Gaza, during which it regulated food imports into the besieged strip in accordance with calories consumed per person, to limit the transfers of food and medicine to a ‘humanitarian minimum.’” If the issue of a blockade isn’t addressed, we still have genocide by another name. What are your thoughts?

There is a fiction that Israel gave Gaza its independence in 2005 when it dismantled its settlements and withdrew its military forces to the perimeter of the Gaza Strip, in line with the “disengagement plan” devised by then-Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. But the goal was never to give Gaza sovereignty or to enable it to unite with the West Bank in a viable Palestinian state. The aim was to maintain the military occupation of Gaza by remote control, without Israeli boots on the ground. As Sharon’s top aide Dov Weisglass admitted at the time, the plan was intended to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, with the blessing of the United States. Israel continued to dominate all aspects of life in the Gaza Strip: all movement of people and goods in and out of the territory; a regime of complete surveillance via control of the population registry; and access to water, electricity and fuel, as well as airspace and the sea. This 20-yearlong siege was so draconian that it regulated the number of calories per capita that could enter the Gaza Strip, as you mentioned. The blockade is part and parcel of a system dedicated to the suppression of the Palestinian people so that they cease to demand their full civil and political rights. Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said recently that blocking humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip is “justified and moral” even if it causes 2 million civilians to die of hunger. So there is clear genocidal intent at the highest levels of the Israeli government.

Israel realizes that Palestinian refugees in Gaza will not give up their right to return and, consequently, it will engage in periodic military action to suppress the resistance.

Black people in the U.S., largely because of historical legacy and current anti-Black racism, continue to suffer. As a Black person, I don’t want to be “accepted” into a system that is still anti-Black. There is no real existential and political security there. After all, to be Black in the U.S. is to be constantly under the surveillance of the white gaze. So, too, I think that it is necessary to talk about what I would call the Zionist gaze, which sees Palestinians an “inferior,” “primitive” and “subhuman.” Do you see any possibility of getting the Israeli state to confront its deeper anti-Palestinian racism? What do you think it would take to do so?

Zionism is Jewish nationalism. Just as Christian nationalism is an inherently supremacist and exclusionary ideology, so is Jewish nationalism. Moreover, just as Christian nationalism is not Christianity, Jewish nationalism is not Judaism, as demonstrated by the fact that many Jews are now and have been non- or anti-Zionist. Christian nationalism in most of its manifestations is a thinly veiled white supremacist ideology, which is inherently exclusionary. Similarly, Jewish nationalism as we know it is also a supremacist ideology, which dehumanizes the people it has dispossessed and stripped of their rights in order to establish and maintain an exclusionary nation-state. The “Zionist gaze” that you mention, which dehumanizes the Indigenous inhabitants of Palestine, is necessary because of the need to privilege Jews over non-Jews. So confronting deeper anti-Palestinian racism requires dismantling Zionist ideology as we know it. That means that Israel needs to shed Zionism, just as South Africa abandoned the Afrikaner nationalist ideology that bolstered apartheid. This may not entirely end racism against Palestinians, just as ending Jim Crow did not lay to rest anti-Black racism in the United States, but it would be a huge step forward for Palestinians living under occupation who are denied citizenship and voting rights (recall Dred Scott), in addition to their basic civil rights.

Today, thanks to the concerted efforts of every Israeli government since 1967, there are Israeli settlements throughout the West Bank and there is no possibility of territorial separation or a two-state solution. Instead, we have a “one-state reality”: The Israeli state rules over a territory that contains roughly equal numbers of Jews and non-Jews, yet the only people with full political and civil rights are those who happen to be born Jewish or have converted to Judaism. In light of what Israeli leaders call the “demographic threat,” Israel perceives its only option as either to exterminate and expel the Palestinians, or suppress them to the point that they are incapable of resisting and demanding their rights. There is no reason that Jews cannot live safely in Palestine, freely practicing their religion and expressing their culture, without creating a supremacist regime that regards non-Jews as inferior. But that would require Israel to “de-Zionize” and become a state of all its citizens, including Palestinians, who now comprise around half the people within its borders.

Lastly, we are both philosophers. As you know, there were a group of philosophers who collectively signed a letter showing our support for Palestine, calling “on our colleagues in philosophy to join us in overcoming complicity and silence.” What aren’t philosophers doing that you think they should be doing or doing more of vis-à-vis the genocide that is taking place on our watch?

Many academics, including philosophers, are already doing their part in solidarity with the people of Palestine, supporting the cause with their time and resources. In fact, I think that the upsurge in solidarity with the Palestinian people on American university campuses is largely the product of the rise in knowledge and awareness among the scholarly community of the history and current reality, as reflected in both research and teaching. It’s no coincidence that U.S. and Canadian campuses rose up in protest against the war: Students and faculty are generally better informed than the public at large about the situation. But the response we’re seeing now on university campuses is effectively an attempt to reestablish and enforce ignorance, akin to what the late philosopher Charles Mills called “white ignorance.”

So academics have a duty to keep learning, talking, writing and protesting in order to push back against attempts at quashing dissent. In particular, philosophers who are supposedly good at making distinctions need to insist on the difference between Judaism and Zionism, and hence antisemitism and anti-Zionism — despite what university administrators are saying under pressure from right-wing politicians and corporate and private donors. To give just two examples, Harvard has just adopted a definition of antisemitism that conflates it with anti-Zionism, and NYU recently extended Title VI protections to Zionists, which is absurd, since Zionism is a political ideology, not a race, religion or ethnicity. These McCarthyite attempts at censorship and suppression of academic freedom need to be resisted on every campus, especially by faculty with tenure. This is a task that philosophers would seem to be particularly suited for, contributing some time and resources to debunking and fighting against Zionist ideology. This is also a good time to join Palestinian civil society in a boycott of Israeli institutions, including academic institutions, which, as I already mentioned, are deeply complicit in military occupation and war crimes. This is the least we can do to combat racism and work for a future in which all people live with equal rights between the Mediterranean Sea and Jordan River.