The other day I heard Bernie Sanders proclaim that “Israel has a right to defend itself”, as he made the case for a Harris presidency. He spoke in his trademark gruff manner, a tone whose charm has long faded since it has been co-opted to the service of empire—of making the empire marginally more progressive.
“…but”, he went on to deliver a call for moderation and limits to Israel’s violence. And then to insist we should still vote for politicians who enable genocide and glory in the lies that justify it. I’m not here to debate whether or not someone should vote. This is a morally and strategically complex issue that is mostly inconsequential to the mad trajectory our planet is spinning along.
What interests me more is the construction of the oath: “Israel has a right to defend itself”, that Bernie and others feel the need to recite before delivering any critique of Israel’s war on Palestine. Curiously, it is the same line used by Biden and Harris to justify sending the weapons that are doing the killing that Sanders claims to find abhorrent. And it is used by the genocidaires themselves, Netanyahu and others, along with their cheerleaders. This should be enough to make us pause and consider what this supposedly self-evident truth says and does not say.
So, once again: “Israel has a right to defend itself.”
Let’s start with the “Israel” part. In what sense does the identity of being Israel constitute a set of rights? Is it that Israel, as a nation-state, has a right to defend itself, because, apparently, nation-states have a right to self-defence?
A lot of legal minds don’t think international law supports what Israel has done to Gaza. In any case, I doubt that many people are weighing the UN charter in their heads when someone is droning on about Israel’s righteous violence. They are more likely to reach for whatever commonplace ideas of fairness they have accumulated in their everyday lives.
For instance, the way I typically understand self-defence is that, when someone is attacking me, I have the right to use violence to repel their violence. So if someone comes into my house and strikes me with a baseball bat, I can use the counter-violence of my cast iron wok or electric fly swatter until they stop, and preferably leave. The right to self-defence does not endorse finding out where my attacker lives and blowing up their house, killing them, their families and their neighbours as well.
This is obviously not a perfect analogy for many reasons. Individuals and nation-states are different kinds of entities, and also, the Hamas attacks on October 7 took place in the context of Israel’s long genocidal campaign against Palestine. It is not some random home invasion.
I make the analogy to show that even if we were to agree that nation-states have a right to use violence to make themselves safe, in the case of Israel, this right applied only when Hamas was attacking the rave, kibbutzim and military bases along the borders of the Gaza concentration camp. Once Hamas left, that licence expired.
What about the rockets? Given that they have caused very few civilian casualties, the right to self-defence does not extend to obliterating apartment buildings, schools, universities and hospitals on the faintest whiff of conjecture that someone is hiding a rocket launcher in an MRI machine.
Perhaps Israel does understand self-defence to mean that when someone attacks you, you have an unlimited right to strike back with no consideration of proportionality. An eye for an eye doctrine, or at the latest count 250 eyes for an eye, according to the Lancet journal (and not just eyes, but arms, legs, jaws, skin–hundreds of thousands of human lives obliterated).
If this is the case, then the right to violence extends in all directions—physical, temporal—and to all actors in the bloody drama of human existence. Israel justifies its violent war on Gaza based on the October 7 attack. Fine. But in this infinite regress, Hamas can then say the October 7 attack was justified by, for instance, Israeli snipers shooting out the knees of peaceful protesters. Or the kid you pushed around when you were 13 can show up at your work and break your legs, so you can never ever bully them again. This concept of self-defence bloats and degenerates to the point where it can justify virtually any act of violence, by anyone, committed anywhere—because there will always be some act of violence preceding it.
I don’t think that’s what Israel or its defenders want to imply. In fact, I see the outlines of something much more ominous lurking beneath the surface.
Let’s circle back to the question of what “Israel” signifies. Perhaps they are saying that Israel has a right to defend itself not as any old nation-state, but because it is Israel. What then is the elusive quality of “being Israel” that grants it special rights to use violence against its perceived enemies?
The way I see it, Israel’s right to self-defence is not about the October 7 attacks or the fleeting barrages of rockets that disturb the sky over Tel Aviv. Rather, it is coiled with a desire to repress the memory that Israel was created very recently on lands upon which others lived and who were violently expelled. The Nakba haunts the lands upon which the nation-state of Israel stands.
So it is the mere existence of Palestinians at all that constitutes a psychic and existential threat to the state of Israel, against which Israel feels emboldened to unleash unending waves of slaughter until those they perceive as a threat escape into permanent exile or turn into dust. This would go a long way to explain why so many fading empires and settler-colonies are backing Israel’s genocide with moral support and military aid. Also, why Israel’s war on Palestine has no end in sight; why parents carry their children home from school as bags of meat; why Gaza sometimes looks less like a city under siege and more like the cratered surface of the moon.
However you interpret it, none of the many implications of the dirge that “Israel has a right to defend itself” withstand scrutiny—unless you are inclined to partake in a nihilistic orgy of retributive violence, or you think that certain ethnic enclaves possess special rights to commit genocide.
So we should just stop saying it.
