Panel Session 4: SHATTERED HUMANITY: CRUELTY AND DEHUMANIZATION IN CONFLICT ZONES

Radmila Nakarada

Memo

Homo Manicus 

The current conflict in Gaza did not begin on October 7, as UN SG and many analysts have pointed out. Behind the brutal Hamas attack on innocent Israeli civilians lies a protracted conflict lasting a century. Seeking paths to peace requires recognising that the current conflict is not the consequence of one historically dislocated event of the ‘barbaric’ enemy, but it is an act emerging from a long line of accumulated grievances, repression, violation of rights, disrespect of mutual traumas, needs, aggressive indifference, uncompromising politics, invented lines of civilisational superiority and inferiority and, in the last chapter, the 16-year siege, occupation of Gaza. Cut off from the world, the Palestinian citizens have been, for more than a decade, under surveillance, their election vote not recognised, reduced to living a dehumanising crisis. However, the contextualisation of the tragic conflict attempts to understand its entangling paths has to include, besides the historical framework, a glance at the nature of the current world order, as well. 

Following two devastating world wars, almost half a century of Cold War, that together have resulted in millions of victims, the experience of the Holocaust and Hiroshima, Nazi and Stalinist concentration camps, after widespread destruction of cities, cultural monuments, nature, poisonous ideological divides, an numerous proxy wars, we are now experiencing in the post-Cold War era, according to the UN, a moment characterised by the highest number of conflicts, since 1945. Military expenditure is increasing, as well as concentrated investment into perfecting the destructiveness of arms. New military bases are appearing in new geographical locations, and expansionist aspirations are encompassing cyber space, sea and outer space. The legal framework of arms control has been practically dismantled, energies are invested in resuming old and initiating new hostilities, interventionist killings and, in spite of the danger of the Third World War, the moment is perceived as a ‘not yet time for peace”’ i.e., as yet not time for unconditional affirmation of life. Instead of ‘never again’ becoming, after all the experiences of bloodshed, an imperative of the human species, instead of the wisdom of brotherhood transcending the invented divides between human beings, and contributing to the  evolvement of a species coalition invested in the wellbeing of the majority (common good), concentrating its efforts on prevention, we are confronted with the high propensity toward wars, a new scramble for hegemonic domination, brutal inequalities, an irrational discarding of co-existence, compromise and non-killing. The distorted priorities (poverty vs. unprecedented wealth), the use of new, digital technology for discipline and control, the arrogance of power, erosion of norms of international law (law turned into ad hoc rules of the powerful), the decline of democracy, marginalisation of UN and the increasing ecological drama, tell us that we are living an order created by the Homo Manicus and not the Homo Sapiens. The systematic display of irrationality moving the human species toward the abyss is spoken of, but it has not generated an effective agency of a transformative turnabout. 

This means that the current conflict in Gaza is not only the latest episode of a historically protracted conflict in one region of the world, but part of the larger drama expressing the profound failings of the human species to decisively transcend the impetus of (self)destruction and dedicate itself to the preservation of  life.  

Atrocities

Live streaming of brutalities is a novel dimension that the Gaza conflict brought. We are witnessing these atrocities, from torture in the prisons, to famine, to the bombing of all the infrastructure that are the prerequisite of durable life existence, the killings of children and women, civilians by famine, sickness, bombs. Estimated casualties run from 40 to 120,000 thousand. The world reconciliation is erased from the discourse, for, after the experience of mutual, but disproportional/asymmetric (1,300:40,000) brutality, it seems an unreachable goal. Force is treated as the magic state-creation wand, and a wand of desperation, as the effective way of finally ‘resolving’ a 100-year-long conflict. It is, in fact, a wand of a graveyard. Two questions linger on: accumulated desperation is understandable, but why was brutal force chosen, i.e., what did Hamas expect to achieve on October 7 with its brutal attack on the Israeli civilians – i.e. what kind of a response did it expect? What did the Israeli government expect after 16 years of dehumanising occupation of Gaza − eternal pacification? And why did it not choose police and court actions in response to the massacre? Why an escalation of apocalyptic proportions? An escalation based on the collective guilt of ‘human animals’, on the aim of razing Gaza to the ground, turning it into unlivable patch of land, and at the same time self-appropriating moral superiority (“Israeli army is the most ethical army”). The atrocities as well as their asymmetry were contained in the responses to the entanglements of desperation and the entanglements of seeking an ethnically clean state which could only be finally constituted in the flames of war. 

Resisting the shattering of humanity

Although there are bold critiques (resisting censorship), mediating initiatives, responses from the international courts, UN, demonstrations in many countries of the world, efforts to deliver humanitarian aid and the innocent Palestinian civilians these are in fact alone in their plight. The severity of fragmentation of actions of empathy and protest, their limited reach results in despairing powerlessness. They reflect the nature of the global order, the very limited capacity for fraternity between human beings, altruism toward the other and for non-killing politics. Congo, Sudan and Yemen, reside behind the wall of invisibility; migrants are perceived as insolent intruders, whose fate is perceived as totally disconnected from the consequences of the expansive, greedy privileged global exploitative minority, and the homeless and poor in our own cities are treated as aliens, as we willingly accept the labyrinths of misery and suffering as a normal ambiance, to which we have no way of efficiently responding to. 

Concerning Palestine/Israeli conflict, it is clear that a two-state solution, or a creative one-state federal solution with two units, are by the current brutal chapter destroyed as possible options. It is much more likely that the conflict may end, as some indications have appeared, and indirectly confirmed by the latest attacks on the western bank, where Hamas, the allegedly prime target of Israel actions, is not present, by turning the two enclaves into a ‘land without people’, and forcefully creating a ‘tent city’ of the remaining Palestinian citizens on the Egyptian territory. There seems to be no agency, institution or movement that can prevent the unravelling of such genocidal acts. Nevertheless, continuing to affirm life instead of death, peace instead of war, fraternity instead of divisions between the civilised and barbarians, to invest effort in analyses that do justice to the history, complexity of conflicts and offer alternative choices/possibilities to war, remains an unending moral responsibility. But there is the urgency of the moment, and it imposes the cease-fire as the prime task. All the resistance towards the continuing onslaught of the Israeli military operations and empathy toward the plight of the innocent Palestinian civilian victims, as well as towards the fate of the Israeli hostages, have to globally unite the fragmented efforts into bold, effective ,nonviolent actions that have transformative power to stop the carnage.