By EMILIO CAFASSI*
From the laboratory of impunity in Gaza to the complicit silence of Europe: a genocide that exposes the ethical bankruptcy of modern reason
International public opinion is finally beginning to shake off its stupor of indifference. With increasing attention — and horror — it is watching the unfolding of a sustained and systematic genocide that not only takes lives, but also devastates territories, cultures and memories. It is observing the practices of human and material desertification that the terrorist and imperialist theocracy of Israel imposes on Gaza, but not only on this already decimated and narrow strip of land. It also affects the entire Palestinian geography, undisguised under the pretext of self-defense.
But this infamy does not break out like a sudden flash of lightning: it is merely a new step in the long escalation of horror, the first steps of which were legitimized amid the still smoldering ruins of the Second World War. In its genesis, the State of Israel was born as the geopolitical exit of a Europe that, in expiating its guilt, had erected another catastrophe. The current subjugation is nothing more than the aberrant continuation of this design.
Neither the rubble of the Palestinian soul nor the stench of charred flesh seem to penetrate the borders of Western consciousness. Europe, aged and armored, turns its face away, even though its diplomatic and commercial radars are perfectly tuned with surgical precision. Gaza bleeds in high definition, but the moral thresholds of the old continent have been hardened by centuries of colonialism and selective extermination.
No horror moves her more if she is not white or does not have an EU passport or Nordic phenotype. She is horrified by a refugee's improvised dagger, but subsidizes the industry of supposedly surgical missiles. She does not even shed tears.
There, in the trap of history, a strip of dry, fenced-off land has become synonymous with suffocation. It is an open-air laboratory of imperial impunity. It is not the first massacre, nor will it be the last, because genocide has become normalized as routine. There is no truce possible when the truce itself is used as an alibi to raze entire neighborhoods.
Every child mutilated by shrapnel, every school turned to dust, every hospital closed by a precision bomb, is a slap in the face to the very idea of humanity. Europe is silent. And not just silent: it persecutes those who flee, imprisons those who protest, and lets those who escape sink.
The mass grave of the Mediterranean and the rubble of Gaza are made of the same moral clay. The same clay that the West has kneaded over centuries of selective legality, denied asylum and rights fenced off by borders. The right to exile, once a sacred cry in the wandering voices of the 19th century, the First World War or Nazism, is now drowned between the fence of Melilla and the sanitized concentration camps of the Greek islands or Lampedusa.
There is no living memory in European capitals, only the cold marble of symposiums with non-binding resolutions and scholarships to study peace while trading arms. Double standards are not dissonance, but doctrine: they have become a regime.
Europe, once hailed as a beacon of civilization, has become its sinister parody. It offers not refuge, but electrified fences. It offers not asylum, but deportation. It offers no aid, but calculations of shipwreck. After tearing down the sinister Berlin Wall, it has erected new walls.
Old Europe, the tomb of enlightened utopias, has transformed the Mediterranean into a mass grave deeper than its waters: it is the abyss into which international fraternity and legality sink. Under the rhetoric of security, it denies asylum in the name of security to those fleeing the horrors sown by its own weapons and those of its allies.
Passports, like weapons, also kill. Not with gunpowder, but with absence: the absence of rights, of solid ground, of all empathy. A mistaken geographical origin or dark skin are enough to make one illegitimate, dispensable. While Gaza burns under the bombs, Europe restricts visas, cuts humanitarian funding and orders ships that watch, not save. It protects itself from the smoke that history raises as if its soul were not already stained by centuries of colonialism, slavery, pogroms and exterminations. Today's walls are direct heirs of the walls that Europe never dared to tear down.
For those who escaped the bombs, the weather. For those who fled the occupation, confinement. European solidarity comes with exclusion clauses: not too many, not too close, not too different. But this accounting of suffering brings it closer to its former tormentors than to the ideals it once defended. When it comes to considering how many refugees a country can “support”, there is no longer a compass, only a calculation. Because it is not a question of demographic weight, but of ethical burden. And Europe, with Gaza before its eyes, has declared the bankruptcy of humanity.
Latin America, which knew how to sing its rebellion against empires and open humanitarian corridors when bullets fell like lightning on sister nations, today barely murmurs, if it even utters a word. Gone are the photos of presidents defending the Palestinian cause in global forums. Today, official silence and lukewarm diplomatic statements weigh like tombstones on a history that should have been one of solidarity and now lies buried.
In Gaza, as with our missing people, there are also death flights. The bodies are not thrown away, but germinate in the territory. But now, our governments, even progressive ones like Uruguay's, keep a prudent distance so as not to upset Washington or hinder trade: this shames us.
The Global South has lost its reflexes and its pulse. Only a few solitary voices and a few still irreverent countries dare to call genocide genocide, apartheid apartheid. The rest calm their inaction with euphemisms. Or worse, by calling ethnic cleansing war. They appeal to the “complexity of the conflict” as if hiding a crime under the haze of chaos. They call for “restraint on both sides,” as if there were symmetry between those who throw white phosphorus at schools and those who defend themselves with stones, homemade rockets and statements. It is the language of equidistance, which is in fact the language of the executioner.
The founding project of nation-states, as it emerged from the Peace of Westphalia, presupposed a fixed territory, a constant population and recognized sovereignty. The nation-state implied not only a legal-administrative structure, but also a certain cultural or ethnic homogeneity, or at least a legitimizing narrative forged a posteriori. In this context, the State should articulate individual interests under the protection of the law and legal rationality, in the name of the common good.
Hegel took this notion to its philosophical apex. The state, in his view, is not merely a legal structure: it is the embodiment of reason itself, the moment when subjective freedom becomes the general will. And the absolute spirit is historically realized. The Hegelian state does not merely govern: it reveals and realizes the deep meaning of universal history through the dialectical mediation of contradictions.
Marx, in his critique of Hegel's philosophy of the state by conceiving that the bourgeois state is not a historical culmination but a starting point, continues to think that capitalist modernization is not only an order of rationality superior to the preceding one, but also the condition of possibility for the transition towards its overcoming. Perhaps encouraged by the Darwinist enthusiasm of the time, he induced an evolutionary reading of history that still permeates certain contemporary leftist movements.
The rationality of modernity is built on an unprecedented trust in human reason as the ordering principle of the world. Not dogma or inheritance, but the Enlightenment will to build a political order based on individual autonomy, popular sovereignty and the desacralized legality of the human contract.
The French and American revolutions, fruits of this new rationality, definitively displaced the theological-political matrix of absolutism and enshrined the right to self-determination, universal legal citizenship, freedom as the foundation of the modern subject and equality before the law as its normative horizon. They were more than political outbursts: they constituted the founding myth of emancipatory modernity, surpassing even the Pact of Westphalia, which still retained monarchical residues and a static conception of power.
However, this proclaimed universalism, although often sincere, was never neutral: it was extracted from the European center, with pretensions of totalizing expansion, and relegated cultural singularities and colonized peoples to the margins of exception, backwardness and barbarism. Modern universalism, by its very nature, therefore bears the shadow of its own limitations: it claims to include everyone, but on the basis of a model that excludes all differences that cannot be assimilated.
Under the guise of law and the promise of universality, modernity has also illuminated its abyss, its most atrocious flaw: the coexistence with political tragedies and the very possibility of human beings without rights. Hannah Arendt formulated one of the most radical warnings of the 20th century. She warned that dehumanization does not begin with murder, but much earlier: when someone is excluded from the political community and loses the “right to have rights.”
This is not just a legal dispossession, but an ontological mutilation: the human being without citizenship is no longer even a degraded citizen, but a non-subject, expelled from the common world. Thus, stateless people, those expelled, and those detained without documents embody the paradox of a modernity that proclaims inalienable rights but only makes them enforceable under a recognized sovereignty.
Where there is no belonging, there is no humanity. And where one is reduced to a mere biological life without history, without name, without community, barbarism begins not as a rupture with modernity, but as its perverse culmination.
From this perspective, the Israeli model does not align with the Hegelian ideal of the state as an embodied reason that transcends particular interests. On the contrary, it preserves the particularity of an ethno-religious community as the cornerstone of the state from its origins. Arab-Israeli citizenship, although formally recognized, remains a second-class citizen, subordinated both symbolically and legally. Can this type of state be considered an expression of universal reason or, better, a modern form of representative democratic theocracy, or even an oxymoron: a democratic ethnocracy?
Israel is a case that defies the categories of modernity. Formally, it presents itself as a modern parliamentary democracy, with a separation of powers and its own legal system. However, its founding in 1948 was sustained not only by political reasons, but also by a national-religious claim and an ethnic genealogy that substantially contradicts the Enlightenment model of universal citizenship.
The Israeli state is not only the home of citizens born in its territory, but the homeland of all Jews in the world. On the one hand, the Law of Return, which grants automatic citizenship to any Jew regardless of his or her place of birth; on the other, the Law on the Nation-State of the Jewish People (2018), which enshrines the Jewish character of the state above the principle of equality, constitutes an ethno-religious conception of the state that radically departs from the principle of equality (still exclusively formal for citizens) of modern legal universalism.
The concept of theocracy, traditionally reserved for regimes where the clergy holds direct power—as in Iran or the Vatican—has undergone mutations in the contemporary era. A priestly caste is no longer necessary in government for a state structure to be governed by sacred mandates. It is enough for a religion to normatively condition laws, education, civil customs, and even foreign policy, for power to derive its legitimacy from a transcendent narrative.
Israel, though not governed by rabbis, intertwines its legal structure with religious principles that permeate everything from civil law—such as marriage—to territorial policy, symbolically enshrined as possession of a “Promised Land.” Theology operates as the backbone of sovereignty. Even from the founding principles of the Westphalian system, a question as basic as it is disturbing arises: Does Israel, strictly speaking, have borders?
This hybrid amalgam of representative institutions and religious legitimation raises more than a mere ontological ambiguity: is Israel a modern state in the rational-Hegelian sense, or an imperial theocracy disguised as liberal institutions? Is it governed by the general will or by the will of a community historically marked by the memory of exile and the “divine pact”?
I prefer to think of it as an ethnic state, theocratically structured, which imposes, through violence inscribed in the logic of identity extermination, an order of structural exclusion on peoples not integrated into the Jewish national narrative, such as the Palestinian people.
Thus, the question is not only whether Israel realizes reason, but what form of reason materializes in its own existence: a universal, enlightened and civic reason, or an identitarian and exclusionary reason, legitimized by faith? This tension—between Hegel and Josephus, between Westphalia and Sinai—remains unresolved, but it defines the contemporary drama of a State that invokes progress, dramatically confirmed in its techno-warlike development, while proudly displaying a political and cultural archaism.
In 2008, I began publishing a series of articles in the back pages of the Sunday newspaper The Republic, through which he intended to typify terrorism (for example, “Three sad terrorisms”): individual or partisan terrorism (such as that practiced and happily abandoned by the anarchist movement — which fortunately discontinued — and today, on another scale, Hamas, which uses hatred and revenge as a moral alibi, under the guise of a resistance that dissolves blind acts); state terrorism (such as that which has devastated our southern nations); and imperial terrorism (such as that practiced by the United States throughout the world and by Israel in the Middle East, bombing with the arrogance of elected officials while legislating over corpses). The three converge tragically, like rivers of fire, on the same victim: the defenseless civilian population.
In Gaza, all fires intersect: those in the sky, those on the ground, those of hatred. Imperial bombs with an Israeli-American seal and European collaboration, the reactionary fanaticism of militia groups that claim revenge as their identity, and the already obscene and deafening silence of international organizations, complicit by omission.
There is no possible symmetry between the besieged oppressed and the armored oppressor. There is no parity in either the body count or the monstrous asymmetry of fire. Yet neither the terror of one nor the other can be redeemed: the blood of a child killed in the name of a flag is worth no more or less than that of a child killed by a faceless drone.
Naming Hamas a terrorist without naming Israel an imperial terrorist is an act of intellectual cowardice. Just like romanticizing despair or transforming homemade rockets into symbols of resistance. Terror does not liberate. It does not raise awareness or organize hope. On the contrary, it poisons it. Gaza does not need martyrs, mines, tunnels or military drones in the sky, but it does need clean water, sovereignty and schools open to the future: rights. And, above all, it does not need to be forgotten amidst massacres and massacres, as if its right to exist depended only on how much it can suffer without disappearing.
There is no neutrality in the face of genocide, just as there was none in the face of Treblinka or the ESMA. Silence consents. Those who hesitate, postpone. And in this delay, a woman is buried on the border, an elderly man agonizes without water in the heart of Gaza, and yet another child suffocates under a collapsed building. This is not about taking sides or assessing proportionality: it is about the radical defense of human life, without distinction of faith, passport or geography.
Brilliant articles have been published recently in Uruguay, such as that of Gabriela Balkey, extolling Jewish culture in dialogue with Eastern nationality, but demanding that this never be done in its name, or that of Federico Fasano, emphasizing the nefarious conversion of Jews from recent victims to current executioners. It has not gone unnoticed to me that the almost hegemonic option among the left and progressive movements has been the constitution of two States.
On the contrary, I believe that it constitutes a dangerous illusion in the face of the Palestinian-Israeli drama. Because not only has it become impractical in geopolitical terms, but it is also profoundly regressive in terms of civilization. Far from guaranteeing peace, it would consolidate fragmentation, backwardness and barbarism in a region torn apart by pre-modern and theocratic conceptions that feed off each other in their violence, distancing itself increasingly even from the Jacobin phase of the French Revolution.
Current events do not induce me to change this position, which I defended in that series of articles almost two decades ago. The only fair, possible and ethical solution lies in the foundation of a single, modern and secular State, which overcomes the ethnocentrism of the apartheid Israeli and the patriarchal logic of the Palestinian leadership, to name just one aspect of each. A State where citizenship is not defined by creed, ethnicity or lineage, but by equal membership in the common political space.
A secular state, with full freedom of worship, that recognizes all languages, cultures and memories, and restores the legal and ontological dignity of those who today live excluded from the right to have rights. As South Africa once tried after apartheid, or Bolivia when it constitutionalized its ancestral pluralism, this is the only way to enroll this torn land in democratic and emancipatory modernity, pulling it out of the swamp of backwardness in which they have mutually nested.
Hell is not a place: this is the time. And Gaza, its proper name. But there is another possibility, still latent: that anger be organized, that sadness be transformed into judgment, that memory not be buried under the rubble. That resistance not be confused with revenge, nor denunciation with rhetoric. That the South remember its vocation for solidarity. That words not always arrive too late.
Gaza is not just an open wound: it is a mirror. And we are looking at ourselves.
*Emilio Cafassi is senior professor of sociology at the University of Buenos Aires.
Translation: Arthur Scavone.
