The Gaza War: How the Language of Destruction about Israel and the Palestinians Misses the Larger Tragedy of the Nation-State

Abstract

In the worldwide war over public opinion about the 2023-24 Gaza War, and more specifically on US university campuses, the historical complexities of the geopolitical situation have been reduced to slogans about the absolute “right” of one side or the other to not only ignore but potentially also destroy the other. Thus the catchphrase “From the River to the Sea Palestine will be Free” is easily interpreted as recommending the removal or destruction of the seven million or so current Jewish residents of the area and equating the Islamist group Hamas with all Palestinians as deserving of elimination makes the same claim for nihilistic destruction on the other side. The history is more complex. In creating a state, Israel, that could be a refuge from persecution of a widely dispersed group, Jews could be shielded from the animus and consequences of a historic anti-Semitism. In doing so, of course, any Palestinian collective political future would necessarily be compromised for the longstanding historically predominant population in the area. So, the competing claims to the same territory this thereby entails cannot be resolved by simply adopting “better language.” The language war confuses the real issue at hand: Israelis and Palestinians alike are inheritors of the logic of the territorialized (ethno-) nation-state imported from nineteenth-century Europe. This points to the tragedy of the nation-state that the Gaza War represents. Shared political space is impossible to comprehend while locked into this logic.