Gaza is the compass. These phrases—emblazoned on giant banners on the 2025 Folks’s Convention For Palestine in Detroit, and steadily invoked by comrades within the Palestinian Youth Motion at speeches and rallies—include a fact with which a lot of the world has but to reckon, although it should sweep them alongside regardless.
In different phrases, Gaza is the place—and the occasion—in reference to which we should orient our actions, our ideas, our lives. It’s crucial place on this planet proper now, as a result of the genocide going down in all of historic Palestine, with Gaza as its most brutal flashpoint, reveals the inspiration of violence and domination on which the structure of the current world order has been constructed, in addition to the horrible wrestle that will probably be essential to tear it down.
It’s comprehensible, then, that so many writers have turned their consideration to Gaza since 2023. Certainly, this consideration is strictly what’s required of us. A failure to consider Gaza means a failure to assume in any respect: Any thought which bears no hint of absolutely the inhumanity of the current has already taken the facet of the murderers. Excited about Gaza implies a accountability as properly: to deal with the topic with the requisite seriousness and a spotlight in order that one doesn’t add to the numerous trove of poor, cynical writing on the Palestinian individuals and their wrestle; to grasp one’s limitations whereas concurrently making an attempt to achieve outdoors them; to assimilate horror, sure, however to assume past it in the direction of liberation as properly.
Many Western thinkers have, predictably, collapsed earlier than this accountability. “Collapse” isn’t fairly proper—wishful considering, maybe—as a result of they sadly proceed to jot down. One expects racist invective, false histories, and motivated reasoning from these on the political proper like Ben Shapiro or Bernard-Henri Lévy, or from liberal Zionist thinkers like Michael Walzer (the “simply conflict theorist” who, by crocodile tears, has supported each one in every of Israel’s wars whilst he has decried a few of its techniques). One expects it as properly from ostensibly left-wing German thinkers, like Rainer Forst and the lately deceased Jurgen Habermas, who, one month into the genocide, declared their unwavering solidarity with Israel in an open letter revealed by Goethe College Frankfurt. However theirs is a particularly German psychosis, and one expects higher from these on the left writing from outdoors the zone of contagion.
As one appears round, one sees failure after failure: a mix of an insufficiently developed anti-imperialism among the many U.S.-European left, a long-dormant internationalism, and a latent (or not so latent) racism. These thinkers might agonize over the genocide and the reactionary Israeli regime, however it’s clear that they like a silence over the horrible sounds of the wrestle for liberation.
Within the pages of Venture Syndicate, for instance, the thinker Slavoj Zizek has written a collection of articles by which he condemns Israel for its slaughter of the Palestinians, and Hamas for resisting that slaughter. Within the curiosity of equity, he writes, “Hamas and Israeli hardliners are two sides of the identical coin”—as if there might be an equivalence between an uncompromising insistence on extermination and an uncompromising insistence on survival. In a special piece, Zizek levels an imaginary cellphone name between the Israeli authorities and Hamas, by which the previous asks the latter to assault so as to distract from the sluggish annexation of the West Financial institution, and the latter calls for in return: “You have to bomb civilians in Gaza, killing 1000’s, particularly youngsters. That can foment anti-Semitism world wide, which is our true objective!” This cellphone name “shouldn’t be a part of actuality,” the thinker admits, “however it’s actual” however.
Others on the left—greatest exemplified by a chunk in Internationalist Perspective—decry the genocide however keep that “the enemy shouldn’t be this or that state, not this or that military” however capitalism itself, and that Palestinians could be higher served by refusing “each camp and each flag” and carrying arms solely in service of sophistication wrestle. After all, one can’t hope to battle capitalism if one has been murdered by “this or that military” which has certainly declared itself an enemy of humanity, whether or not the authors at Internationalist Perspective can see it or not.
Maybe most irritating amongst this rising physique of failures, nevertheless, is septuagenarian Italian thinker Franco “Bifo” Berardi’s new e book Considering Gaza: An Essay on Ferocity. Berardi has lengthy been a distinguished thinker on the European left—a veteran of the Italian Autonomia Operaia motion, his eclectic oeuvre, drawing from Marxist and Freudian thought, contains work on subjects like faculty shooters, synthetic intelligence, and finance capital. That he ought to flip his consideration to the Gaza genocide isn’t any shock.
What’s shocking is that over the course of Considering Gaza’s 200 or so pages, it turns into clear that Berardi has not been paying very a lot consideration in any respect. The e book—written in a collection of repetitive, aphoristic, and shallow declarations—as a substitute evinces a deep and at instances racist ignorance of Palestine’s historical past, its individuals, its political panorama, and the ethical stakes of the second. Certainly, for lengthy stretches of the e book, Gaza is faraway from the image solely—muscled out of body by a collection of trite digressions on AI, international delivery fee declines, Donald Trump, and, bafflingly, Congressman Jamie Raskin’s memoir. As an alternative of a sustained engagement with Gaza and its that means for the world, what emerges is a scattered and facile cry of despair. With Considering Gaza, Berardi has did not assume.
Because the e book’s title suggests, Gaza right here features as an event for occupied with the idea of “ferocity,” which Berardi defines as “an animal reflex inscribed within the intuition of self-preservation.” Ferocity, in Berardi’s telling, is pre-rational, a bodily response to ache. He permits that it could coexist alongside cruelty—a “perverse want” to inflict ache—however not like cruelty, ferocity is a bodily relatively than a psychological phenomenon. As a result of ferocity is pre-rational, it is usually pre-linguistic, and thus for Berardi pre- or anti-civilizational. As he writes, civilization is nothing greater than the try and “submit ferocity to politics and intuition to will, which might collectively be summarized because the submission of chaos to language.” The place ferocity guidelines, “the dimension of historical past is left behind, and we totally reenter the sphere of nature.”
However is that this violence actually so blind? The idea of self-preservation is neither harmless nor pure: The “self” to be preserved is mediated by social processes. It presents not as a mere lump of flesh which hits out towards damaging stimuli, however as a group of needs and drives and wishes which fluctuate throughout time and place, and which correspond to the financial and political group of the society by which that “self” was fashioned. These issues which one requires to breed themselves—the safety of which we’d name self-preservation—will fluctuate from context to context, and thus “ferocity” will in every single place be triggered by basically totally different sorts of assaults. Ferocity, if conceptualized as an computerized bodily response, can’t be submitted to politics, nor would such submission—which might start to appear to be the abnegation of the desire to dwell—be conducive to the development of “civilizations.” Bifo’s conception of ferocity contra civilization or ferocity contra language should entail extra.
Self-preservation, then, may higher or extra actually be articulated as “self-interest.” Berardi by no means cites him, however right here he’s merely recapitulating one in every of Sigmund Freud’s most simple insights from Civilization and Its Discontents: that to ensure that individuals to dwell collectively, the pleasure precept should bow to actuality, sure drives and urges should go unsated out of respect for the autonomy of the opposite and of the communal authority which permits the social to emerge within the first place.
That ferocity and wish should be mediated if they’re to have any form of political sense stays true, per pressure, on the extent of the state, for which self-preservation can’t in any sense be conceived of as purely instinctual or bodily besides by strained metaphor. On the extent of the state, self-preservation turns into a matter of preserving a political system, of preserving a place of privilege on this planet system, of preserving entry to useful sources, and so on. When talking of Western states, self-preservation typically appears just like the preservation of ill-gotten positive aspects, or of the best to dominate. The domination, subjugation, enslavement, and extermination which have marked the ascent of Western civilization haven’t been the results of a regressive “ferocity,” however relatively the results of “progress” itself. Instrumental motive—by which humanity got here to dominate nature and assemble the fashionable world—ends by turning individuals into nature in flip. Folks turn into inputs, materials for use and discarded.
The gap from Berardi’s preliminary bodily definition of ferocity and the precise contours of the time period thus develop even wider as soon as we predict by the idea extra severely than its writer ever dared. This may maybe be a much less vital shortcoming if it weren’t for the truth that it’s precisely on the extent of the state or on the extent of civilization—and never the person—that Berardi seeks to discover the idea of ferocity all through Considering Gaza.
The Israeli response to Tufan al-Aqsa, Berardi writes, was a product of each ferocity and cruelty. The nation was attacked by Hamas and different armed teams, and responded out of an intuition of self-preservation, with an added perverse want to trigger struggling. In any case, he writes, Hamas had carried out a “pogrom” precisely like these “towards the Rohingya inhabitants in Myanmar, the pogrom that the Islamists of Daesh carried out towards the Yazidi individuals, and likewise the pogroms that the Israeli settlers performed within the occupied territories of the West Financial institution.” It was thus “utterly comprehensible that Jews felt the hazard of anti-Semitism reemerging. The trauma of the Holocaust resurfaced, upsetting an comprehensible, and even sharable, response of self-defence.”
Drawing this form of rancid equivalence between Israel’s decades-long domination of the Palestinians and Palestinian revolutionary violence, happens repeatedly all through the e book, as does the repetition of the Zionist insistence on Holocaust trauma as each an ex-ante and ex-post justification for Israel’s crimes. In a single notably egregious line, Berardi writes, “There’s something monstrous within the minds of the Palestinians who’ve lived in terror. And there’s something equally monstrous within the minds of the Israelis.” Each Palestinians and Israelis, he suggests, are motivated by ferocity, and every of their violences heralds a world by which violence is the rule.
Violence and the need to commit it refer right here to a form of pre-political hurt. However once more, considering calls for extra. Palestinian ferocity, to make use of Berardi’s phrases, is kind of actually self-preserving within the bodily sense: The Israelis are searching for to exterminate the Palestinians of Gaza by siege, hunger, bombs, and bullets. In a broader sense, it is usually geared toward preserving the potential for freedom from domination, at preserving the horizon of liberation—at preserving any prospect of a “self” that may dwell in dignity. Israeli ferocity is in service of the upkeep of that regime domination and extermination. That is additionally in a way “self-preservation,” as a result of Zionism is coextensive with the homicide it enacts: Because it started, the Zionist venture might solely pursue its goals—so pithily described by Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich as “most territory, minimal [Arab] inhabitants,” or as Palestinian scholar Fayez Sayegh articulated it in 1965, “racial purity and racial exclusiveness within the land”—by expulsion or extermination. Self-preservation within the Israeli sense appears solely like genocide or ethnic cleaning, as a result of the “self” is simply actually realized when the territory of (better) Israel is below unique Jewish political and demographic management.
Regardless of Berardi’s acceptance of Zionist premises all through this e book, I don’t imply to counsel that he’s himself a Zionist. It’s clear from Considering Gaza that Berardi understands the extent to which Israel and the Zionism that birthed it can’t be allowed to proceed. As he explicitly states halfway by the e book: “Anybody who shouldn’t be performing in unhealthy religion should acknowledge that peace can solely return to the realm when the State of Israel has been erased from the map.” Or, just some pages later: “The state of Israel was from the start a man-made building that might solely be sustained by oppression and by violence.” However this recognition of the character of Israel solely makes his failure to really take into consideration Palestine and Palestinians that rather more disappointing.
If, as Berardi accurately identifies, the Israelis symbolize a negation of human solidarity and coexistence, then his refusal to differentiate their violence from Palestinian counterviolence leads him down some actually unforgivable paths. Think about the next passage:
“Ethics is the analysis of motion from the viewpoint of the great of the opposite as a continuation of the self […] Ethics is lifeless, and piety is lifeless. There is no such thing as a ethics within the habits of younger individuals who grew up within the jail of Gaza, as a result of their minds can’t think about the opposite (the Israeli soldier who awaits them together with his weapon drawn, at each crossroads) besides as a jailer, torturer, mortal enemy.”
The younger individuals of Gaza see the Israeli as a jailer, torturer, and mortal enemy as a result of for them he’s a jailer, torturer, and mortal enemy. The relations of domination are such that the kid from Gaza can’t exit the strip to hitch their good Israeli tormentors on the seashores of Tel Aviv, can’t see the soldier in his civilian garments fortunately consuming espresso on the cafe, as a result of the aim of the Israeli soldier is to violently implement the racial hierarchy such that this sight is unimaginable. The happiness of the great Israeli tormentor on the seashores of Tel Aviv is premised exactly on the absence of the Palestinian, and so, when referred to as, he’ll assume the position of the jailer, torturer, and mortal enemy at some point so as to safe his continued satisfaction the following.
This doesn’t, after all, imply that “there is no such thing as a ethics within the habits of younger individuals who grew up within the jail of Gaza”—a line that might properly have been uttered by Benjamin Netanyahu or any variety of Israeli genocidaires. That the bonds of social solidarity persist inside dilapidated tent encampments, that widespread individuals have demonstrated unusual heroism and ingenuity below situations designed to interrupt them—that’s an ethics price emulating.
If the Palestinians had been allowed to talk in Considering Gaza—if Berardi bothered with their political aspirations, writing, or humanity—then he might have prevented passages just like the above. However all through the e book, Palestinians play solely a secondary position: directly victims of and the backdrop to another person’s story. A few of that is the results of a defective historic understanding of the Zionist colonization of Palestine, which Berardi situates as each motivated by and justified by the Holocaust. As Sabri Jiryis’s lately republished The Foundations of Zionism so completely demonstrates, the Zionist venture of colonization started properly earlier than the Holocaust, and was motivated by the racial and nationalist ideologies sweeping Europe across the flip of the nineteenth century as a lot as by anti-Jewish persecution.
In Berardi’s telling, nevertheless, the Zionist venture is a continuation of the Holocaust, not its negation. In a single sense, that is correct: Zionism is certainly a recapitulation of the identical racial considering, instrumental rationality, persecution mania, and colonial violence that the Nazis enacted throughout Europe. However Berardi doesn’t imply it on this sense. Fairly, as a result of Palestine is “probably the most harmful place on this planet for the Jews,” he sees the Jewish colonization of Palestine as “the continuation of the loss of life machine that Nazism constructed for the Jews of Europe.” He goes as far as to erroneously assert that “it isn’t the Jews who wished to return to Palestine. It’s the European (not solely German) Nazis who pushed them to depart.” The best victims of the Zionists, in Berardi’s telling, haven’t been the Palestinians, however the Jews. Zionism, he writes, was “a lure” for the persecuted Jews of Europe, as if the Palestinians had been mendacity in wait to be exiled and slaughtered solely so as to defame them and convey about their religious spoil.
Even when Berardi mentions these resisting Zionism, Palestinians are largely sidelined for Jewish actors: “Gaza has turn into the nucleus of an moral revolt of world proportions” he writes, with Israel and the White World “besieged by the rising hatred of the International South and likewise by the revolt of younger individuals—firstly, by the revolt of American Jewish college students.” Once more, the Palestinians are mere props in a Jewish and Western story. On this regard, Berardi has fulfilled the ideological future of so many white European leftists: bog-standard liberal orientalism. The Arab generally is a sufferer, an object of pity, however motion is for the West. When the Arab does battle for nationwide liberation, Berardi marks them as “fascist,” as he did in a 2024 interview within the Important Inquiry weblog. There are protagonists to historical past; in the event that they can’t be discovered among the many white world Berardi claims to despise, properly, then historical past should have ended.
That is precisely Berardi’s prognosis: The religious spoil wrought by the Israelis can also be the irreparable religious spoil of the world. If the Jewish victims of the Holocaust have themselves perpetrated their very own in flip, Berardi writes, this demonstrates that “racism and conflict have returned with nice fanfare […] and now evidently all hope has been extinguished in Gaza […] there is no such thing as a longer any level in persevering with. There is no such thing as a hope that humanity can ever be human.” That is “the ultimate century […] ‘Considering Gaza’ means to assume no future, no hope, no universality, no humanity.” Drive—or ferocity, as Berardi would have it—would be the solely rule from right here on out: The genocidal destruction of the world’s political and financial surplus populations, of every particular person state’s hated Different, will turn into commonplace. There may be good motive to consider this past the genocide in Gaza: the U.S.-Israel conflict towards Iran, the U.S. murders within the Caribbean, the U.S. blockade on Cuba, ICE and Frontex, the genocide in Sudan, state-sanctioned anti-Muslim violence throughout India.What Berardi misses is {that a} disaster shouldn’t be an finish, however a starting. The rising reliance on pressure is an indication of decadence on this planet system and in its hegemon: the U.S. empire. Issues are breaking down, however this isn’t a everlasting state of affairs. The genocide in Gaza—which, greater than every other catastrophe, reveals the contradictions on the core of the disaster—is the tip of this world, however solely within the sense that one thing else should and can come to switch it. Whether or not that one thing will probably be higher or worse is as much as us.
Via their steadfast refusal to capitulate to Zionist aggression, the Palestinians have proven the world one strategy to climb out of hell. Berardi presents a special imaginative and prescient, one by which hell is already presumed victorious. There is no such thing as a future, he writes, and we should embrace this reality. We should perceive that we’re on the finish. And “those that have the braveness to grasp,” he writes, “won’t contribute to reproducing the human race, as a result of the human experiment has failed, and this time the failure is with out enchantment […] There is no such thing as a hope that humanity can ever be human.” There is just one choice left: a refusal to procreate, anti-natalism as international coverage, mass suicide for individuals who want to not wait.
The resignation Berardi advocates for in Considering Gaza, then, can solely be the results of his constant incapability to see the Palestinians as individuals. Bifo universalizes and dehistoricizes the specificities of Zionist particularism—the drive for racial self-segregation and the negation of the Different on ever better swaths of territory—and thus imagines the world to be locked in a genocidal cycle of Zionist design. Right here, he implicitly recapitulates a favourite Zionist justificatory fantasy (a favourite of regimes of domination all through historical past) even in his ostensible condemnation: that the Palestinians would behave simply because the Israelis do ought to they ever win their freedom, thus necessitating ever crueler measures to stop this eventuality.
The world is presently locked in a cycle of more and more cataclysmic violence as a result of the situations which have led to the numerous Holocausts of capitalist modernity proceed to persist. Zionism is the up to date avatar of those situations, and it’s, on this sense, an anachronism. It loudly celebrates all these evils which the liberal worldwide order had publicly however falsely disavowed: colonialism, racism, ethnic chauvinism, apartheid, and genocide. It’s much less a return of the repressed than the unhealthy conscience of a world order which all the time stored one finger on the set off, lest somebody take it at its phrase.
Considering Gaza begins with an epigraph taken from Theodor W. Adorno’s Destructive Dialectics, which reads: “Auschwitz demonstrated irrefutably that tradition has failed. […] All post-Auschwitz tradition, together with its pressing critique, is rubbish.” True sufficient, however Berardi stops the passage too early, excluding the dialectical flip. Adorno continues: “Whoever pleads for the preservation of a radically culpable and tacky tradition turns into its confederate, whereas those that surrender tradition altogether instantly promote the barbarism which tradition reveals itself to be.” Berardi, in his Western solipsism, embraces defeat, and in so doing, he throws his lot in with absolute horror and the killers who create it as a substitute of those that can nonetheless in some way see the sunshine of redemption.
On the similar time that I used to be studying Considering Gaza, Omar Hamad and Ibrahim Massri—two Palestinian writers in Gaza—managed, amidst the best bodily and ethical spoil, to complete constructing a library from the rubble of Gaza Metropolis. These younger males in Gaza—in whose habits Berardi sees “no ethics”—might humble the world with their humanity if solely the world would look.
Omar doesn’t know me and I have no idea him, however I’ve been following him on-line because the genocide started. He has suffered immensely, greater than any of us within the West can comprehend. Whereas his writing has been crammed with anguish and bitterness and rage, he has by no means succumbed to resignation. He has refused to die; he has refused defeat.
And now he has constructed a library. And now he proclaims the long run to anybody who will pay attention.
