The idea of humanity all too often means ‘people like us’

Fintan O’Toole’s piece in The Irish Times yesterday makes for an interesting read.

The great political philosopher Hannah Arendt told us that the worst thing to be in the modern world is stateless. 

She knew what she was talking about: as a Jew, she was stripped of her German citizenship by the Nazis and lived as a stateless person for 18 years.

In her hugely influential reflection on the horrors of her time, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt identified statelessness as the most terrifying of conditions. 

For those who were deprived of citizenship, “the abstract nakedness of being nothing but human was their greatest danger  It seems that a man who is nothing but a man has lost the very qualities which make it possible for other people to treat him as a fellow-man.”

Being “nothing but a man”, woman or child means that there is no limit to what can happen to you. You can be spat at, humiliated, raped, murdered, plundered, driven off your land, turned into a refugee and, in the end, systematically exterminated.

It is one of the most tragic of ironies that the route out of this appalling circumstance for Jews – the establishment of Israel – simultaneously rendered another people stateless. 

By failing to support the creation of a Palestinian state, Israel and its allies have condemned millions to live in the very condition that Arendt described.

This much has been obvious for 75 years now. What has been less obvious is that by surrounding itself with stateless people, Israel was making its own existence as a state more and more precarious.

Even before the sickening Hamas attacks of October 7th, it was clear to most thinking Israelis that their state was at a point of existential crisis – not because of the Arab threat but because of the messianic extremism that is now at the heart of its own government.

Internal threat

Last July, for example, I read a powerful essay in the Times of Israel by Yossi Klein Halevi, written in the middle of the night in Jerusalem because he could not sleep: “Like many Israelis, I have become a political insomniac. 

The disruption of sleep is a small reflection of the dread so many of us feel for the long-term viability of the Jewish state.”

Halevi’s fear, shared by very many of his compatriots, was that the state they thought they belonged to – a secular democracy – was being liquidated before their eyes by its own far-right government. 

And that this new kind of statelessness would again render Jews defenceless in the face of those who want to exterminate them.

He wrote: “This government, which promotes itself as the guarantor of Israeli security, is the greatest internal threat to our security in the nation’s history. Israeli security isn’t only a matter of toughness and posturing. 

It depends on a complex web that includes national solidarity, a strong economy and civil service, confidence in the competence and judgment of our leaders, moral legitimacy of the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) among our allies, trust among legal authorities abroad that Israel will monitor itself without intervention from the International Court in the Hague. This government threatens every one of those essential preconditions of our self-defence.”

These premonitions proved to be appallingly accurate. A government obsessed with humiliating Palestinians on the West Bank, and beating its own young people off the streets when they protested against its drift towards outright authoritarianism, left its citizens undefended.

And, as a result, a new generation of Jewish people experienced, at least on one day, what it is to be stateless. There was no limit to what could happen to them at the hands of messianic jihadist fanatics seeking collective revenge.

None of this was inevitable. Even while he was on his way to join in the attack on Gaza last week, Nir Avishai Cohen, a major in the IDF reserves, wrote in the New York Times that “I’d like to say one thing clearly, before I go to battle: There’s no such thing as ‘unavoidable.’ This war could have been avoided, and no one did enough to prevent it. 

Israel did not do enough to make peace; we just conquered the Palestinian territories in the West Bank, expanded the illegal settlements and imposed a long-term siege on the Gaza Strip.”

Pitiless terror

The folly of that failure is that it allowed the condition of statelessness, imposed on the Palestinians, to fester and grow in all its pitiless terror, so that it could engulf Israel too. If you live amongst those conditions and put vast resources into keeping them alive, you cannot expect to be uncontaminated by them.

It is now the turn of the children of Gaza to experience “the abstract nakedness of being nothing but human”. Being human ought to be enough to ensure that you have the right not to be obliterated. 

But it was not enough for the young people at the Supernova music festival at Kibbutz Re’im, and not enough for the terrified kids in the crowded neighbourhoods of Gaza City.

Humanity is insufficient because, too often, it only means “people like us”. We have seen yet again, both in Israel and Palestine and among activists in other countries, the ease with which those who are the wrong kind of humans in the wrong places are stripped of individuality and abstracted into membership of a group that “deserves” whatever happens to it.

There is no escape from this terror that does not involve the construction (and in Israel’s case the reconstruction) of states to which people can belong as full citizens with all the legal rights and moral responsibilities that citizenship implies. Israel can, for a time, live as a military hyper-state that reduces its own complex and deeply uncertain existence to the capacity to crush the existence of its enemies.

But all that levelling Gaza will achieve in the longer term is to remind Israel itself that it borders on an abyss. The abyss, as we see time and again, has a way of creeping under every wall constructed to keep it out.