The Violated Human in Palestine

“Bare life” is the title of a book by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben (born 1942), originally published in Italian in 1995 as Homo Sacer, Il potere sovrano e la nuda vita (Homo Sacer, Sovereign Power and Bare Life) before being translated into English and other languages. It is the first volume in a series of four books sharing the same original title, with variations in their subtitles. In this work, as he explains in his introduction, Agamben draws upon the usage in the Greek language, as found in Aristotle, of two distinct terms to express the concept of “life”: the word zoē, which designates simple life as such, common to all living beings (animals, humans, or gods), and the word bios, which signifies a form or way of life proper to an individual or a group. Agamben elaborates on the difference between these two meanings to conclude that life in its first sense, zoē, is “bare life,” which possesses only organic existence and is devoid of what makes it a human life. As for the second meaning, bios, it designates a social and political life endowed with the components of human existence.

It is to this first form of life, which is merely simple organic existence, that Homo Sacer (“sacred man” in Latin pronunciation) belongs. Although this expression literally means “sacred man” in Latin, it conventionally designated in archaic Roman law, as Agamben explains at length, a person whose status was defined by two characteristics: first, anyone was permitted to kill him at any time without the perpetrator being considered a murderer or the author of a crime in the eyes of that law; second, it was forbidden to offer him in sacrifice to the gods because of his impurity. One might translate Homo Sacer as the impure man, the taboo, the outcast, the cursed, or the outlaw… Yet the term “bare” or “exposed” seems more appropriate, because it emphasizes the essential characteristic inherent in Homo Sacer, namely that his killing is legally permitted without his murderer having to answer for it or stand trial. This availability derives its legitimacy from the fact that Homo Sacer is not a fully human being, but a mere living creature endowed with organic existence yet deprived of human existence.

The Palestinian Homo Sacer

What is the connection between this Homo Sacer, that is to say the “bare man,” and Palestine, as indicated by the title of this article? This connection manifests itself in the fact that Israel’s actions in Palestine in general and in the Gaza Strip in particular—especially after October 7, 2023—consisting of massacres of the population without any requirement to account for them or face trial, can only be explained by the fact that it treats the Palestinian as a “bare man,” in the sense meant by the term Homo Sacer in ancient Roman law as explained by Agamben. Every Israeli, whether a soldier or an ordinary civilian settler, has the right to kill a Palestinian at any time without this implying that he has committed an illegal act or perpetrated a crime; this assassination constitutes in itself a legitimate act authorized by the Palestinian’s status as a “bare man,” exactly mirroring the status of Homo Sacer in antiquity. And if the Palestinian is a “bare man,” it is because in the eyes of Israel, the United States, and their allies, he has not yet risen to the level of human life (bios) protected by law, religion, and morality, the extinction of which exposes its perpetrator to prosecution and sanctions; on the contrary, he is a mere living being, that is to say zoē, with no difference whatsoever from animals, which share an organic life with him but lack the attributes of human life. This was clearly stated by the Israeli Minister of Defense when he declared on October 9, 2023: We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly (click here to access the source). A statement that the Moroccan writer Tahar Ben Jelloun practically reinforced by writing that animals would not have done what Hamas did (click here to access the source). We therefore observe that what unites the Roman Homo Sacer and the exposed Palestinian human being is that the Israeli who kills this Palestinian is subjected, much like the murderer of Homo Sacer, to no prosecution or obligation to account. This is precisely what encourages Israel to persist in the massacres of Palestinians in a terrifying and horrific manner.

Power as the Source of the Right to Kill

If the Roman citizen derives his right to kill Homo Sacer from the law that ensures his protection, from where does Israel draw the right to massacre Palestinians, and who protects it to make its crimes tolerated and “legal”?

If Agamben entitled his book Homo Sacer, this does not mean that the latter is its sole subject. Rather, the author summoned him as a simple example to illustrate the fact that this Homo Sacer condition remains a reality still widespread and practiced in modern and contemporary societies. However, the condition of the new Homo Sacer differs from that of ancient Rome in that the latter derived its legitimacy from (ancient Roman) law, whereas the former, in modern and contemporary societies, finds its foundations in “sovereign power” (Sovereign Power), which forms the subtitle of the work. Sovereignty designates, as a political and legal concept ever since its definition by Jean Bodin (1530-1596), the absolute and perpetual power of a Republic [over] citizens who are subjects. It is thus the absolute right to exercise power in an unlimited and unconditional manner over a person, a region, a country, or a people, making sovereignty an inherent characteristic of the State according to the means of force, coercion, deterrence, and punishment at its disposal. Sovereign power is therefore the power possessed and exercised by a given State. Herein lies the foundational source of the Homo Sacer condition—namely, the authorization to kill without the perpetrator being considered a criminal—which resides not in archaic Roman law, but in the sovereignty of the State, manifested through a force that no lesser power can limit. And because Israel remains, thanks to the direct and unconditional support of the United States, the militarily strongest State in the Middle East region, it consequently authorizes itself to treat anyone it considers its enemy as a mere Homo Sacer whom it has the full right to kill without being disturbed or called to account.

Agamben explains that the condition of Homo Sacer represents a form of “state of exception” where the application of the law is suspended, and where governments are granted the right to act outside of all constitutional rules and provisions, even though the authority that decrees the state of exception is precisely sovereign power itself, that is to say the State that enacts laws applicable to ordinary (non-exceptional) situations. The ancient Roman law that punished the perpetrator of a crime of murder was the very same law that authorized the execution of Homo Sacer without this homicide being classified as an offense. The paradox here regarding the “state of exception,” much like the example of Homo Sacer, lies in the fact that this condition is by no means “exceptional” once it proves to be permanent rather than temporary, dictated by particular circumstances. This permanence is precisely what risks turning it into a “normal” state. The same observation applies to the Palestinians: the right to assassinate them, decreed by the dominant and hegemonic sovereign power, namely the State of Israel, does not stem from an exceptional and transitory situation, but rather from a permanent condition linked to their existence in Palestine. The normal situation where the law forbids killing the Palestinian under penalty of punishment constitutes, in the eyes of Israel, the situation where they are absent from Palestine. Consequently, as long as the Palestinians persist in affirming that Palestine is their land and struggle to recover the portions seized by Israel, the latter applies the rules of the permanent state of exception to them, granting it the right to gun them down without this act constituting a crime, exactly as in the case of the permanent state of exception inherent to Homo Sacer.

In the third and final part of his work, Giorgio Agamben discusses Nazi concentration camps as the illustration of a space where the detainee is transformed into Homo Sacer—that is, into a bare organic existence devoid of any human component, over whom the Nazi regime holds complete rights of action. Whether subjecting them to medical experiments within what Agamben, borrowing the concept from Foucault, terms “biopolitics,” executing them by firing squad, burning them, or condemning them to death by starvation, the regime answers to no one, having drawn this right from its dominant and hegemonic sovereign authority. Paradoxically, the Jews who made up the majority of the inmates in those Nazi camps have turned the Gaza Strip, by suffocating it with an airtight blockade, into a quasi-concentration camp open to the sky—before the Israeli death machine transformed it into a truly incandescent thicket following the offensive launched by Hamas fighters into the occupied territories inside Israel on October 7, 2023. There, the population leads the existence of Homo Sacer, exposed to the right to death exercised by those very same Jews without fear of accountability or prosecution, insofar as they derive this privilege from their dominant and hegemonic sovereign power, backed by the arrogant might of the United States. Consequently, concepts such as “justice,” “law,” “good,” “terrorism,” “democracy,” “aggression,” “humanity,” “truth,” “sincerity,” “crime,” and “peace” are stripped of any meaning other than that assigned to them by this very power, which is the tangible manifestation of the strongest state’s sovereign might.

Force as the Source of Human Values

This demonstrates that force—which encompasses everything that procures supremacy, hegemony, and predominance—governs not only relations among groups, peoples, nations, and states, but also shapes all human values, such as law, truth, justice, probity, and goodness. These are forged by the dominant sovereign power, meaning the strongest state, as an expression of its own interests. Subsequently, as a component of its power and hegemonic sovereignty, this state strives to impose upon others the definition of these values that it deems acceptable. Thus, the strongest state invariably remains the one that holds the right, possesses the truth, embodies justice, cherishes equity, accomplishes and promotes the good, and proves truthful in its words and deeds—even if, through its practices, behavior, and relations with other nations, it stands as the greatest contemptuous violator of the law, the greatest falsifier of truth, the greatest purveyor of evil, and the most prolific author of injustice and aggression. Law is therefore defined neither by the general, mandatory, and consensual rules that constitute the principles of justice, whether natural or positive, nor by anything other than what the exercise of force authorizes. Aggressors who attack others and take their lives outside the framework of self-defense are, by the yardstick of these rules, criminals guilty of homicide and liable to punishment. These rules constitute a force superior to your own. Nevertheless, the strongest state can annihilate thousands of civilians of another nation or wipe that state off the map—in other words, treat it as mere Homo Sacer—while proclaiming that it has merely applied the rules of law and the principles of justice, acting identically to the ancient Roman citizen when he eliminated “bare life” on the grounds that he was enforcing the precepts of the law. Admittedly, this aggressor state acts in accordance with legal rules and principles of justice emanating from its own strength rather than from other foundations. This hegemonic state is not content with claiming the legality of its act with regard to law and justice; it also works to accredit its legitimacy among allied states, which constitutes another facet of its supremacy. As for the vanquished state, although it endures the status of victim to the dominant power, it will be assigned the role of aggressor, wrongdoer, and transgressor of the law, exactly as demanded by the strongest state, which arrogates to itself the exclusive monopoly to define the meaning of law, legality, and justice.

This explains why the whole truth about Israel’s recent war against Gaza—whether determining who is the aggressor and who is the victim, who practices brutal aggression and who defends themselves, who bombs civilians and who protects their lives, or who occupies another’s land and who resists to recover it—is precisely the truth that Israel wants and proclaims as the strongest state, thanks to the support of the United States, the world’s leading superpower. This truth does not reflect reality, but rather the power of Israel and the United States—a power that shapes this very truth, which in turn is relayed by countries subservient to American influence. Here, factual truth carries no weight and has no value in the face of the truth of the balance of power, which creates and imposes its own realities before conferring a universal character upon them once they are endorsed by Western countries orbiting within the American sphere. From this are born values, morals, and rules that the strongest state and its allies strive to present as universal principles and a system conforming to human nature. As for the state that rejects these principles and this system, judging them to be iniquitous, it is immediately labeled as dictatorial, terrorist, a violator of human rights, an enemy of democracy, and an adherent of repression and authoritarianism. No matter how well-founded its position of rejection may be, anchored in the force of law, it will find no attentive ear because it does not rely on the law of force, which is the true source of what the hegemonic power intends to impose as a world order and universal values. Thus, the law of force determines, in practice, the force of law—that is, the aggregate of legal rules and principles of justice.

This Israeli war against Gaza thus offers us a vivid and explicit illustration of the victory of the law of force over the force of law, which, as a result of this victory, finds itself subordinated to the former and drawing its legitimacy from it. Everything that Israel commits in the way of genocide against children and civilians, everything it practices as ethnic and racial cleansing, everything it imposes as a blockade, starvation, destruction, and displacement, and everything it executes as bombardments of schools, hospitals, and ambulances falls, according to the logic of the law of force, under the right to self-endense. Based on this same logic, it is a right exercised in the strictest respect for the rules, ethics, and laws of war. Conversely, the attack led by Palestinian resistance fighters against Israeli localities that the Hebrew state had previously annexed by force constitutes a condemnable terrorist act, incompatible with the rules, ethics, and laws of war. Why such a double standard? Simply because the criterion defining the rules, ethics, and laws of war in this conflict is the law of force, embodied and applied by Israel and the United States which support it, as well as by the Western nations vassalized to Washington. Nor is the question limited to this single juncture where Hamas “triggered” hostilities: this right to use force, amalgamated with the force of law, has characterized Israel’s attitude since its founding in 1948 in its relations with the Palestinians. This was true long before the emergence of any Palestinian organization whatsoever, whether Fatah, the Popular Front, Islamic Jihad, or Hamas. Even at that time, it was Israel that took the initiative in aggression, without responding to the slightest provocation from the Palestinian side.

Western Intellectuals Support the Right of Might

The gravest aspect of equating the right of might with the expression of the might of right is that it is no longer merely a narrative specific to the United States, its Israeli protégé, and Western nations subservient to Washington. This narrative has now been internalized and repeated by Western journalists, intellectuals, and analysts who proclaim loudly and clearly in their interviews, articles, and statements—when questioned about their stance on the massacres perpetrated by Israel against children, women, and civilians—that the Hebrew state is merely exercising its right to defend itself, which is to say its right to kill and exterminate. As for intellectuals and politicians who express indignation at Israeli actions, they are immediately demonized by the propagators and apologists of the American-Israeli narrative, who present them with being accomplices to terrorism and defenders of Islamist fascism, while finding themselves barred from television sets controlled by the lobbies of this very same narrative.

Therefore, how can renowned thinkers and intellectuals view the appalling massacres committed by Israel in Gaza as legitimate acts performed in accordance with the rules, ethics, and laws of war? The answer shines through these questions: how could a thinker and writer as illustrious as Victor Hugo (1802–1885), celebrated for his defense of the oppressed, the vulnerable, and the destitute—as evidenced by the title of his masterpiece—support European colonization of Africa by justifying it with the formula: “God offered Africa to the Europeans”? And how could brilliant minds consider, from the sixteenth century until the early twentieth century, that the deportation of Black Africans as slaves to Europe and America to be sold and bartered was a perfectly legitimate action, devoid of any violation of fundamental rights? How could they judge that the colonization of lands in America, Africa, Asia, and Australia, the appropriation of their wealth, and the extermination of their indigenous populations by European powers constituted humanitarian acts aimed at spreading civilization, progress, and refinement? Formerly, this narrative—which elevated the forced enslavement of peoples and the invasion of other people’s lands not only to legitimate acts, but to works of charity and generosity—dominated minds as a system of values entirely devoid of any contradiction with justice and law. And with good reason: its architect was none other than the holder of the right to use force, namely the European nations devoted to slavery and colonization, elevating these practices into sacred values endorsed by the thinkers and intellectuals of the era. We observe precisely the same dynamic today in occupied Palestine, under the thumb of the hegemonic American-Western narrative. The latter transforms the right of might—that is to say, the exercise of murder and extermination against those it relegates to the rank of mere holders of “bare life”—into a legal and legitimate act, endorsed and defended by intellectuals and ideologues.

As long as the United States remains the superpower that shapes the world order through a system of values it wishes to be universal, and as long as Israel draws its strength from the power of this same ally—whose president, Joe Biden, declared that if Israel did not exist, the United States would have invented it—the entire panoply of crimes, mass assassinations, summary executions, racism, blockade, famine, and forced displacement conducted by the Hebrew state in Palestine for more than seventy years will not provoke any international reaction of sufficient effectiveness to compel Israel to cease its crimes against the Palestinian people.

Remark

It should by no means be deduced from this analysis that I am defending the Hamas movement or that I condone its call for the eradication of Israel—knowing that the latter has continuously instrumentalized Hamas, not to mention contributed to shaping it, in order to divide Palestinian ranks and weaken the Palestinian Authority to the point of annihilating the prospect of a two-state solution. For those who may not know, I have never harbored any particular sympathy for the Palestinian cause from the angle of its instrumentalization in Morocco. I insist firmly on this nuance: “from the angle of its instrumentalization in Morocco.” This means I do not oppose it absolutely, regardless of the forms it may take in other Arab and Islamic countries outside North Africa. In those regions, and most particularly in Morocco, the Palestinian cause is employed as a formidable lever of Arabization (see our article on this subject by clicking here). It is a matter of propagating Arabness and Islam there, not for their own sake, but as instruments intended to evict Amazighness. This instrumentalization therefore has nothing to do with genuine support for Palestine: it aims to complete the identity makeover of Moroccans, that is to say, to strip them of their Amazigh essence to transform them into borrowed Arabs, through an identity communion modeled on the Palestinian cause elevated as the exclusive cause of Arabs. Furthermore, numerous Palestinian factions, including Hamas itself, actively support the separatist “Polisario” front in its aspirations to establish an independent state on a portion torn from Moroccan territory. According to the maxim “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” these Palestinians effectively position themselves as enemies of Morocco and its territorial integrity. That being said, once stripped of its nationalist and Islamist garments, the Palestinian cause remains a fundamentally human and just cause, inherent to a situation of occupation of foreign lands—as recalled by United Nations Security Council Resolution 242 of November 22, 1967—to expropriation by force, and to the physical elimination of anyone attempting to recover their usurped property.

Consequently, this article does not constitute in any way a plea for Hamas nor for its Islamist ideology. It is rather a critical reflection on the concepts of law, justice, and legality through the prism of the duel between the right of might and the might of right. By drawing upon the Gaza war, which crudely highlights the supremacy of the former over the latter, this text demonstrates how the holder of the right of might treats the herald of the might of right as a flouted human being, whose elimination the right of might authorizes with complete impunity, much like the ancient Roman figure of homo sacer.

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