Israel's Settler Colonialism And The Depravity Of Habermas' Philosophy

If dominant powers of the current world (dis)order become its followers in the future, the Palestinians—who the power-happy media dehumanisingly call “terrorists”—may well emerge as heroes. Dubbed as “terrorists” in 1908, the British regime hanged the young anti-colonial activist, Khudiram Bose; with India’s independence in 1947, Bose had become an official hero.

Israel justifies its ongoing assault against Gaza as “retaliation” to the “terrorist” attack by Hamas on October 7. This narrative elevates October 7 as the benchmark to rationalise Israel’s wanton murder of over 12,000 Pales­tinians—more than 50 per cent among them are children and women—against the 1,200 Israelis killed by Hamas.

Germany’s Jürgen Habermas, considered the most prominent living philosopher and engaged in defending “the project of modernity and universalism”, exactly echoed this Israeli line. On November 13, Habermas issued a statement with the following key points.

First, “the current situation” is ‘crea­ted by Hamas’…atrocity”. Second, Israel’s “retaliation” against Hamas is “justified”. Third, worried not about planetary justice, but Germany’s (inter)national image, Habermas rushes to say that its “democratic ethos” “oriented toward…human dignity” rests on “a political culture for which Jewish life and Israel’s right to exist are” central due to crimes of the Nazi era. With the mention of Palestinians only once, it is clear how their lives, traditions and dreams have little—if any—value for Habermas.

Upon examining these points, let’s note that Habermas’ past is fascist; in many ways, he was a führer. Aged 10, he joined Hitler Youth. Manning anti-aircraft defences during WWII, he fought against the allies. The third point, therefore, is linked also to Habermas’ youth.

Deafening Silence about Settler Colonialism

That Hamas created the current situation is a fantastically anti-historical statement. This declaration focused on the present alone that erases the history of Israel’s settler colonialism of which the attack by Hamas was merely an outcome. In fact, history goes further back than Israel’s creation in 1948.

I mean not only justice-flouting the 1917 Balfour Declaration, but also the Christian restorationism preceding Zionism. Born out of Protestant reformation in the milieu of which Habermas grew up, restorationism foregrounded the authority of the Hebrew scripture and Christian significance of Palestine. Before Theodor Herzl, the founder of Jewish Zionism, published The Jewish State, William Hechler, an Anglican Christian Zionist, had published Restoration of the Jews to Palestine According to Prophecy in 1893.

To singularly highlight Hamas’ October resistance is to erase this long history. However, Habermas insists on history when it pertains to us: “We thus have to stand by our traditions if we do not want to disavow ourselves.” Why apply one standard to Germany and quite another to Israel/Palestine? Why speak of anti-Semitism “in our country”, but fall silent about Islamophobia in Germany? Obviously, Habermas cancels the history of oppression that Israel, in cahoots with Western plutocracies, has routinely inflicted on the Palestinians.

Furthermore, Habermas seems scared to discuss the causes of Hamas’ “atrocity”. This expulsion of causes is vital to Habermas’ strategy to protect Germany’s interests—rather than pursue intellect and truth—predicated on the security of Jewish lives and the Israeli state. Everything else, including the Palestinians lives and thoughts, is no more than an et cetera.

Notably, Habermas’ youthful enc­h­antment with Nazism prevents him from recording similarity between the Warsaw ghetto under Nazi rule and the current Gaza as a far bigger ghetto. Forced to choose between dying with dignity and dying like hunted animals—not between life and death—the Warsaw Jews, like the Gazans, mounted an armed resistance. Unable to move backward to Warsaw in the 1940s and forward to post-1948 Palestine, Habermas’ concern about “human dignity” seems to rarely go past the border of the Federal Republic of Germany, formed in 1949.

A philosopher concerned with human dignity cannot privilege the Hamas attack and obliterate the gory history of Israel as a settler colonial state. Through elimination, expulsion and assimilation, settler colonialism precisely attacks the natives’ dignity. Without saying why, Habermas objects to the “genocidal intentions attributed to Israel’s actions”. This position violates the criticality and integrity of works by scholars like Norman Finkelstein, Ilan Pappe, Rashid Khalidi, and Patrick Wolfe, who I was lucky to meet in Melbourne shortly before he died in 2016. Contra Habermas’ fixation with the Hamas attack as an event, Wolfe theorised genocide as a processual structure.

Here, a stark divergence appears bet­ween Habermas and Finkelstein. As a young Christian recruit to Hitler Youth, while Habermas puts his philosophy at the service of Germany and Israel as nation-states, as a son of Jewish parents who survived the holocaust, Finkelstein summons the moral courage to articulate the Palestinians’ condition as well as critique Israel’s settler colonialism. Though Habermas famously distinguished between strategic/instrumental and communicative action, his own latest statement on Gaza/Israel, as I see it, is markedly instrumental. Finkelstein, in contrast, defies Habermas’ binary to signal a new type: truthful action radiant with beauty and justice.

Violent Settler Formation and the Trajectory of a Philosopher of “Universalism”

After the 2001 terrorist attack, when asked to define terrorism, Habermas replied: “Palestinian terrorism… revolves around murder, around the indiscriminate annihilation of enemies, women and children—life against life.” Here, Habermas makes the Palestinians typify a form of terrorism: indiscriminate guerilla warfare. He presents Al-Qaeda as a case of global terrorism, which is “new” but not political; hence, outside Habermas’ pre-determined boundary of rationality. Such expositions leave us to wonder if there is a line separating philosophers from security study experts like Peter Neumann, a partisan of “new terrorism” who made it identical with Islam.

Habermas’ above (mis)use of the Palestinians again shows how he hides Israel’s establishment and operation as a settler colonial formation. Here, more useful is Israel’s comparison—as political theorist Mahmood Mamdani observes—with America, where settler colonialism prevailed rather than South Africa, where it was routed. Unlike colonialism, which extracts resources from a given land and denies its population political sovereignty, settler colonialism ultimately aims to dispense with the population itself and own the land. Cleansing the land of its people is at the core of Israeli settler colonialism, which is evident, for example, in Israel’s militant opposition to the Palestinians’ right to return to their own homes. That is, unlike colonialism, where at stake is the loss of political independence, under settler colonialism, the loss of the very land where the Palestinians have lived for ages is at stake.

The effacement of the violent structure of settler formation by Habermas and his de-contextualised focus on “Palestinian terrorism” is better understood in relation to his positions on many other issues.

Matt Sheedy’s argument that Haber­mas’ post-9/11 writings are a “soft version of the ‘clash of civilisations’” seems almost correct. Already in 1991, in the name of universal principles and constitution, Habermas had supported the war against Iraq, dismissing thereby the “barbarism of the constitutional orders themselves”. In 2003, Habermas didn’t support Iraq’s invasion. But his position was quite problematic. To counter America’s unilateralism, he advised members of the European Union to add a “European dimension” to their “national identities.” To Habermas, the heart of this European identity is the “form of spirit” “rooted in the Judeo-Christian tradition.” So Eurocentric was his advice that Habermas felt compelled to say that he didn’t favour Eurocentrism.

The popular view that Habermas’ philosophy is universal, therefore, is untenable. It is indeed ethnic in the way, as I argue in Religion as Critique, Immanuel Kant’s is and in whose tradition Haber­mas works. Habermas takes universalism as “open to all”. The (t)error of this axiom is obvious: based on his so-called Judeo-Christian tradition, Habermas makes a theory to tell the world that it is open. It doesn’t occur to him, as it did to Kant, that universal must also be from all. That is, Habermas disregards intellectual traditions such as Islamic culture. He scarcely engages with scholars like Ghazali, Muhammad Iqbal, Şerif Mardin, Talal Asad or B D Chattopadhyaya, not even Peter van der Veer, who lives close to Dusseldorf, Habermas’ birthplace.

To expect Habermas to engage with these authors is perhaps too demanding, even “odd”. In Limited Inc, the French philosopher, Jacques Derrida, wrote that Habermas didn’t cite a single work by him even as in Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, the latter devoted 25 pages to criticise the former.

If my analysis is correct, it is fitting to retitle Habermas’ statement as “Princi­ples of Absurdity”, not “Principles of Solidarity” as it currently reads. Tho­ugh signed by three others, I have foc­used on Habermas because of his global stature or reputation as a philosopher. Of the three other signatories, while the second is Habermas’ student, the third one worked on a project he directed.

To conclude, Derrida described Habermas as a “philosopher of consensus”. What the world, however, needs is not philosophers of truth-molesting consensus, but philosophers with a conscience. Do we have such philosophers, especially when Israel, to realise its dehumanising settler colonial project, is engaged in destroying a whole form of life in Gaza and beyond?

(Views expressed are personal)
(This appeared in the print as 'The Stone Philosopher')

Irfan Ahmad is Professor Of Anthropology-Sociology At IBN Haldun University, Turkey