The ethical collapse in Gaza: What's next after the Holocaust and apartheid?

After the 20th century, the Holocaust and apartheid, what ethical context does the tragedy of Gaza place us in? Is there a before and after? The philosophers Victoria Camps—under the title Gaza, an extermination camp– and Santiago Alba Rico –A simple question of scale?– answer the questions.

Gaza, an extermination camp

The 20th century was the century of the Holocaust and apartheid. In the 21st century, Gaza has become an immense extermination camp. Wars are not comparable, but they all bear witness to the failure of the most specific elements of human beings: reason and language. The difference, if it's worth establishing distinctions in what should already be erased from human existence, between the extermination of the Jews and the extermination of the Palestinians in Gaza, is that now everyone knows what's happening. The news tells us every day, with terrifying data, with the names and surnames of murdered children. Ethical scenario? The term is inappropriate, because ethics and war are antithetical concepts. The extermination of the enemy is an ethical monstrosity, without palliatives or excuses of any kind. From where, on what basis, or with what hope can we continue to speculate or glimpse hopes about the meaning of the good life?

The tragedy, for us, who are merely spectators of barbarism, is that all that remains is words, condemnation and rebuke that are purely verbal, that is, without practical effect. Neither diplomacy, nor the UN, nor public opinion have the power to stop the delirium of these crazed rulers and their followers. One day the extermination will end, perhaps when there is no one and nothing left to exterminate. What will we tell the survivors of Gaza about human "powerlessness" to stop the war? Will we be able, no? we will want do something to ensure that Gaza never happens again?

Adorno put it clearly in 1966: the answer to the quintessential moral question "What should I do?" is that Auschwitz never happen again. Only half a century has passed. The Jews who now support the Israeli government still have vivid memories of the Nazi extermination camps. The Kantian question remains unanswered: how can moral duty be binding? What can be done to make moral conscience work in practice?

A simple question of scale?

The Israeli genocide in Gaza hides the history of the last century, but it does not erase it. Its execution is, in fact, the result of three converging factors: the Zionist colonial project, Netanyahu's flight from problems with justice, and the breakdown of the international legal and ethical order. The response to Hamas's war crimes on October 7 made these three seams visible.

Let's leave Netanyahu aside, as he is only a temporary link. What is decisive is that his explicit action of extermination in Gaza updates and consummates the original Zionist plan, which, incompatible with the existence of the Palestinians, has continued to appropriate territory, displace populations, and violate international law since the 1948 Nakba. Israel, the world's only colonial state, by the world's only colonial state, a fait accompli, has decided to cross a point of no return.

I say "no return" because it's not merely a question of scale, or only in the sense that violence, at a certain scale, needs to displace its framework of legitimacy and propaganda. The brutal violence in Gaza is explicit and accompanied by nihilistic declarations from Israel's rulers, soldiers, and accomplices: "Kill them all." A genocide broadcast in real time can only legitimize itself, and it can only do so through the conscious and proud assumption of the same nihilism, which thus infects all of us who, complicit or powerless, have allowed or are unable to prevent the extermination. No international legal order, no UN, no democracy can withstand the onslaught of this active nihilism, which, by exhibiting its contempt for dead children, confirms and fuels all expressions of the new fascism. As both cause and effect, the genocide in Gaza institutes a new mental order, the matrix of the global far right (not coincidentally pro-Israeli), which accepts and, even more, desires the rule of brute force, war, and dictatorship as the new rules of the game.