The months-long Israel-Gaza war is ongoing and with much blood being shed. The number of dead, physically and mentally wounded, kidnapped, and missing is unfathomable; hundreds of thousands have been evacuated from their homes in the south and north of Israel, a million and a half displaced from their homes in the Gaza Strip; dire food shortages, and cruel and brutal captivity. It is a war without respite, without end. Even when it finally ends, it will not be over. Israel’s leaders foresee a generational war and promise that today’s children will be tomorrow’s soldiers in Gaza. The rehabilitation of Gaza, if at all happens, will be long. The interminable war also marks the end of the world of yesterday and the beginning of a new one whose new order, so far unclear, is nevertheless unfolding before our eyes. We do not know the depth of the abyss into which we are sliding, whether we will be able to climb out of it or will have to learn to live in it. The war is an existential event shaking the whole of Israel/Palestine.

The majority of the Israeli public is living in a state of denial: about the destruction in Gaza, the army’s actions and the looming famine there. It seems as if on October 7 time stood still and everything that came after is a derivative and reflection of that day. The unconstrained fighting in Gaza is an attempt to overcome, to defeat—not Hamas, but what happened on that day. Yet, the longer it continues, the more it fails: days accrue, military maneuvers are reported, the number of dead continues to rise, but the wheel of time grinds in place; the war continues, and over it all hovers the shadow of that awful, frantic day. Disavowal of what has been happening in Gaza for the past months is also to dismiss Israel’s emerging status as a leper state, from which whole communities around the world are repulsed, and its fast becoming the ultimate signifier of political injustice in our time. Local explanations for this, which hinge on ancient, eternal foundations (archaic antisemitism) and are blind to the historical factor (current policy of the Israeli government), present the reality as destiny, a people that dwells alone, in a strait with no way out. Therefore, beyond the walls of denial, the closing ranks, boasts about the people’s unity, the much anticipated yet slow to come victory, sizzles an atmosphere of desperation in a place whose future is unclear, and with it unspent rage at the abandonment of state apparatus; and in smaller sections of the public also shame at what has been wrought in our name, with our tax money, purportedly for our welfare and security.

This special issue of Theory and Criticism is dedicated to critique of the war. A little over a century ago, in his essay “On the Critique of Violence,” Walter Benjamin examined the different modalities of violence of the governing power. Benjamin claimed that violence is not only a means to achieving a goal, that it connects between the constitution and the preservation of political structures, and that it has a special mode, lethal but not bloody, that unravels the very cycle of violence. One hundred years later, we seek to examine critically the modus operandi of endless war, and we do so while such a war is being waged, from the uncertainty it creates, and without knowing its aftermath. The writers in the issue interpret war as a catastrophe and as anti-event, ask how one might awaken from the nightmare, wonder who the “self” is in self-defense, examine the function of photographs of horror in wartime, analyze the various attachments to elimination fantasies, and outline the specter of the state in a neo-imperial conflict. The issue is written from an anti-nationalist stance that rejects the decree of war and living by the sword and opposes the destruction in Gaza. In the face of mainstream media in Israel, where the news coverage literally conceals the reality, and the social media, where information sequences do not accrue knowledge, this issue is an attempt to provoke an urgent, in-depth thinking about our present.

This attempt is being made on unstable ground. The possibilities for a theoretical-critical discussion of the Israel-Gaza war have been greatly curtailed. At the beginning of the war sharp objections to critical theory were already being raised in Israel. It was claimed that the rupture of October 2023 necessitates intellectual self-examination, and many of the mainstays of critical theory—postcolonial discourse, the settler colonialism paradigm, the non-national approach, and the call for an Israeli-Palestinian co-existence—are hollow in the face of the new political reality that surpasses imagination and supersedes any structure and demands a complete leveling of those positions. It seemed that the theories, their main proponents and their many students on campuses around the world, turned out to be wrong. The “global left,” the “progressive public,” and “American academia” were presented as real entities with great political power; and the rejection of critical theory—as if there were such a thing, with a single forged position, and which was, in its entirety, retroactively anti-Israel—became an escape hatch for those telling a narrative of sobering up and seeking return to the bosom of the national consensus that had since hardened its borders. On the opposite side, those holding fast to familiar critical trajectories, as if these were not created in relation to a concrete historical reality that could therefore also initiate change in them, and as if predetermined modes of action were automatically derived from them, also deserted to the realms of dogma. This issue of Theory and Criticism is positioned between ban on critique and the catechism of theory. It offers preliminary thoughts on the direction of critical-theoretical inquiry in the shadow of the cursed war. At its foundation, and from each of the essays, emerge questions of what is, what can be, a critique from Israel, written in Hebrew, in wartime.                                 

The issue was published on the Theory and Criticism website over the months of June and July 2024, with a new article appearing every week. The order of the articles in the printed issue is the order in which they were published on the website. The articles reflect the period in which they were pondered, written, edited and finally published, and they bear testimony to that. The articles are of the moment, of that moment—they have something to teach about it and they seek, each in their own way, to learn from it.

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In the opening article of the issue I claim that October 2023 turned the far into the near, that for a moment, Israel and Gaza became intertwined. What was distanced, its existence repressed, pushed beyond the pales of darkness, suddenly crossed the divide, was present inside, in the very interior of the country, and became inescapably close. The article asks about the meaning of that proximity [kirva]: about its connection to the battle [krav], to the upcoming, face-to-face, brutal and deadly battles that are taking place in this war; on digital media as a medium of battle, which fans endless duplicate performances; on the absence of a victim [korban] that will rescue us from the mimetic merry-go-round; and finally also about the Israel-Gaza war as a war between kin, blood relatives [krovey dam], a war that is also between brothers, a family war. The article concludes with the question of what close critique would look like—infinitely close to the reality of the war, internal to it—that is not absorbed in the destruction of the war, not being a spokesperson for or justifying it, but also does not observe it from a safe distance.

One of the most familiar words in contemporary Hebrew is eru’a, “event.” Ever since Benjamin Netanyahu declared during the judicial reform that he was freeing himself from the legal restrictions and “entering the event,” every incident or happening became an event, including the war. They say that the war is an event unlike anything ever known. They say it is a wake-up call and that we must rouse ourselves from all previous political illusions; that even if unwelcome, sobering up is now of necessity. They say it began with a traumatic event that is beyond any context and that any moves must be carefully planned. In his article, Yuval Kremnitzer examines these concepts—event, disaster, sobriety—and claims that precisely in the call for sobriety from previous ideologies and adherence to calculated realism hides the greater danger of the apparently rational choice. Kremnitzer examines the prevalence of “catastrophic realism” in the political discourse in Israel, the subjective position it expresses, and the impasse that is the outcome, and asks what is required of us in order to be able to demand the end of the war.

On October 7, 2023, live videos of the murder, kidnapping and assault of Israeli citizens, filmed by Hamas terrorists wearing Go Pro cameras, were uploaded and broadcast across social media. In her article, Vered Maimon returns to the political and visual shock of that day and tries to decipher its meaning. She claims that these images not only accompanied the action of Hamas terrorists, who documented it and distributed it everywhere; they were an inseparable part of the action, of its political and theological logic, of the system of revenge and redemption at its core. They not only portrayed brutal acts of assault but attacked the very ability to observe and be a spectator. These were images that documented violence and took an active part in its instigation and amplification. Maimon comprehends them in her article beyond any referential logic, as a way of establishing affective communities that are created from viewing images and their distribution. The more real, raw and uncensored they seem, the more strongly they evoke the phantasmal and spectral dimension of violence. In her article, Maimon discusses the change that occurs to the status of an image with the transition to the body camera: The camera is no longer an extension of the eye, rather its use fluctuates between computer game, sports competition and terrorist act. It is not clear to whom the images belong—who is being called to be party to an act whose images are internal to.

Philosopher and cultural researcher and member of the Ljubljana School Alenka Zupančič poses a similar question, albeit from a different direction: Just as the image no longer stands opposite the world but is completely contained in it, without any exterior, so the nightmare is no longer external to the reality of life in the current period but at its very basis. In a world of unresolved serial crises, is it even possible to wake up from the political nightmare that surrounds us? In her essay, Zupančič describes the rise of the populist right, the climate crisis, the Russia-Ukraine war, and now also the Israel-Gaza war, as a series of overlapping crises that converge into a static and dense crisis that is far removed from the active and productive crisis and its central role  in the progression of history. She shows how the claim to solve the crisis, to do something to eliminate it, often denies the psycho-political conditions that led to it and are at its core. Solving the crisis, awakening from the nightmare, sobriety or awareness are another form of treading in place. To ponder the nightmare seriously does not mean to awaken from it, that is, to deny its real existence, but to experience it as a sign of reality itself. This is the opening essay of Zupančič’s next book, Disavowal, which will be published by Polity Press, and it is published here following a conversation we, a group of Israeli and Palestinian researchers, held with her at the end of December 2023 in which these ideas were discussed.

Raef Zreik’s essay questions how we arrived at the current nightmare situation where, in the name of Israel’s self-defense and maintaining the security of Israelis, Gaza must be demolished along with the lives of its inhabitants. In the constant state of emergency that has accompanied Israel since its establishment, self-defense had a central place in defining the role of the state. However, Zreik claims that after 1967 and with the Palestinian resistance to the occupation, Israel used self-defense as a pretext for suppressing diverse forms of resistance. Thus narrowed the horizon of Palestinian resistance to a point where any act, violent or non-violent, was perceived by Israel as an attack on its very existence. Self-defense became the form of blocking every avenue of Palestinian resistance. Zreik asks in his essay who is the self that has the right to self-defense; is it solid and fixed, taking precedence over how it is defended, or is it an expanding and emanating self that is created beyond the varied ways it defends itself, that is, attacking others? Zreik shows how the State of Israel operates within the context of territorial expansion where the very existence of the occupation is so marginalized in public discourse as to become normalized, a transparent and unshakable reality, while what is perceived is only Palestinian resistance, which allegedly is forcing Israel to respond with brutality. And yet, he asks about viable conditions for a conversation between conquerors and conquered—even now, during the war, and after it.

The next two articles in the issue deal specifically with the paradigm of settler colonialism and the question of decolonization. In view of the “domicide”—demolition of the personal, symbolic and national home—which has become one of the symbols of the war, whether as an attempt to wipe out the settlements of the Western Negev or the actual destruction of most of the buildings and infrastructure in the Gaza Strip, Ariel Handel and Mori Ram ask what a decolonization process would look like that would allow for the two national communities who share the land to live together. The article seeks to offer a different conceptualization of settler colonialism, which does not involve classical colonialism which sees it as a form of “violent dwelling”—dwelling that removes or displaces the previous inhabitants of the land. Handel and Ram offer a different horizon of dwelling, one that allows the creation of a safe haven for the two nationalities that inhabit the land, in a way that challenges the binary distinction between settlers and indigenous. A dwelling of this kind, they well know, will never arise spontaneously; in order for it to take place, it must be based on a complete transformation of the methods of subjugation of Palestinians and the conditions of inequality between them and Israelis.

In her article, Hagar Kotef deals specifically with the elimination fantasies that are prevalent in the Israeli colonial discourse and the Palestinian anti-colonial discourse. During the war, the idea of ​​elimination burst onto the surface of public discourse in Israel in an unprecedented way. It seems that this was also in response to the fantasy of elimination on the Palestinian side and the actual elimination of October 7, which was understood as a momentary but explosive realization of this fantasy. Kotef examines the intellectual origins of this fantasy, which are apparently located in the writings of Frantz Fanon, and shows how one can read Fanon differently—not through the fantasy of the elimination of the settlers, but as an exploration of the phantasmic dimension of this removal. With the help of Lauren Berlant’s concept of cruel optimism, Kotef writes about cruel decolonization, about the desire for it that encapsulates its own failure, and examines other frameworks of decolonization, in which solidarity and coexistence will make it possible to overcome the disastrous present in which we live.

Gal Hertz and Yehonatan Alsheh broaden the perspective and place the analysis of the Israel-Gaza war beyond the framework of the national and the colonial. They perceive the war as an ever-expanding multi-site crisis whose basis is not an inter-state struggle but an expression of an era characterized by the rise of non-state organizations—international corporations, militias and proxy organizations. Hertz and Alsheh lay out the theoretical basis for this transition from the “Age of the Leviathan” to the “Age of the Crocodiles” through a renewed reading of Thomas Hobbes and Carl Schmitt. From it they understand the battle between the Leviathan and the Behemoth; between the state as a unified and rational body, which organizes society and ensures the security of its members, and between the behemoths—a chaotic, instinct-driven and violent, lawless miscellany. The struggle between them is not a one-directional and one-time event, a battle in which the worthy and orderly Leviathan will be victorious over the primitive behemoths and usher us from the natural state to the world of culture. This is a tension that exists in society and within government itself, and in each period creates different modes of social regulation and destruction, a clash of behemoths and leviathans. In our time, the age of the crocodiles, with the behemoths at one pole and the leviathans at the other, while it seems as if the sovereign state order is disintegrating, it still does not descend into all-out war but instead evolves into different forms of government, into multiple ways of exercising and transferring power, of bodies that are adjacent to the failure, before or after, of the nation state.

The issue concludes with the essay “The Unforgivable,” the final chapter in the book Forgiveness (1967) by the French-Jewish philosopher and musicologist Vladimir Jankélévitch. In this essay, Jankélévitch formulates a bold idea of ​​forgiveness—forgiveness that goes beyond any measure of guilt, charity and atonement. Real forgiveness, Jankélévitch claims, is given for what is unforgivable, that is, for deeds that can be neither understood nor justified. It is given spontaneously, not in response to a request for forgiveness and outside the logic of punishment and atonement, and it oscillates between two extremes that share no middle ground: the radical evil that must be eradicated, and the love of humanity and brotherhood between humans. The book, written in the shadow of Auschwitz, rests on a clear distinction between victim and executioner. However, the translation for this issue as its concluding essay was done in a completely different political-ethical context, where the question of what is unforgivable and who can forgive it hangs in the air. The translator Guy Jacoby has added a preface to the translation in which he develops the historical and philosophical context of Jankélévitch’s book, insists on the paradoxicality inherent in the book itself as well as in Jankélévitch’s other references to the question of forgiveness, and leads this question to the contemporary reality in Israel/Palestine as a proposal for an ethical discussion on war crimes. Loaay Wattad wrote an afterword to the essay, in which he integrates Jankélévitch’s forgiveness  with that in Jean Améry and the Egyptian poet Amal Dunqul. Wattad asks what is between forgiveness and reconciliation, who can forgive collective crimes, and is not the impossible forgiveness but an act of abstraction and sublimity delegated to one side only.

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The publication of the critique of the war issue—first on the Theory and Criticism website and now in print—would not have been possible without Anat Shalem, the journal’s departing editorial coordinator. Anat shepherded the work on ten issues of the journal and was involved in every aspect, large and small, as well as in the conferences, zoom broadcasts, conferences and research workshops that took place under the umbrella of Theory and Criticism in the last six years. She has been a partner, and I thank her from the bottom of my heart.