Opinion Sur
Without authentic mutual recognition and forgiveness between the opponents, a conflict can be “frozen” without a consistent and sustained resolution. This is what is most likely to happen in the Holy Land and in Ukraine. The current geopolitical multipolarity is not conducive to true peace.
The shocking terrorist attack by Hamas (the organization that controls the Gaza Strip) against Israel on October 7, 2023, appeared in front of the world as a catastrophe in the purest etymological sense of the word. The word derives from the Greek καταστροφή and means “ruin,” “destruction.” Strictly speaking, it means “turning upside down,” or changing things for the worse. What was turned upside down was Israel’s long “disregard” of the Palestinians and the Western (and not just Western) complacency with sidelining them. The ancient Greeks, as addicted to the theater as we are to movie and television screens, did not use the word to describe a natural disaster, but a “theatrical coup,” and especially the denouement of a tragedy.
In the Middle East, the tragedy began with the founding of the state of Israel on a land hitherto inhabited by shepherds and peasants with a different culture and religion – without vestiges or outlines of a state. This population was displaced and thus forced into a different nomadism: that of refugees out in the open and at the mercy of the charity of others instead of the traditional fruit of their labor.
The surrounding Arab states – deniers of the centuries-old secular suffering of Jews in Europe and of the right to existence of the state of Israel – used the Palestinian cause as a pretext to try to annihilate the Jewish state inserted into their midst by the powers of the day. The failed.
For their part, the displaced Palestinians began a painful process of building a national consciousness[1] and seeking recognition in the diaspora to which they were forced. Arabs, Jews, and Palestinians embarked on an—often fierce—struggle for recognition of each at the expense of the other. That struggle has since been the driving force of tragedy – in the purest Greek sense. From a geopolitical point of view, this tragedy is located in a larger conflict: that of the great powers. In that conflict, the Palestinians have been and continue to be cannon fodder.
That the struggle for recognition by the other is the driving force of history and one of the root causes of human misery is not a new thesis.[2] In the history of Western ideas, its most convincing formulation is that of Hegel. Who would have guessed that the short passage of an old philosophy could illuminate the tide of blood that now bathes the Holy Land? And yet it does so with the power of reason.
The Dialectic of Master and Slave is one of the most famous passages in Hegelian philosophy. In a snippet added at the last minute to his Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel describes the struggle between two consciousnesses that both seek the recognition of the other. The dialectic of master and slave ends in domination and imperfect recognition[3].
In geopolitical matters, armed conflicts sometimes end not as a surpassing peace but as a “frozen conflict” that the parties reluctantly accept until a new confrontation. Examples: the Cold War, the case of Malvinas, the relationship between the two Koreas and what is very likely to happen in Ukraine. It is an imperfect dialectic because the antagonism repeats itself in a fateful and fatal way. The master/slave relationship can be reversed (it often does) but it does not resolve itself into a higher synthesis (Aufhebung –a nearly untranslatable word from German[4]).
The economic and strategic interests of world powers undoubtedly play a role in the Israel/Palestine conflict and constitute the majority of the analyses and commentaries that both the media and academics present to us on a daily basis. In general, however, opinions ignore what I believe to be the heart of the matter, namely, the dialectic of recognition and its difficulty in overcoming it.
The best projections of the development of the conflict are, as expected, economically and/or strategically biased. However, we can take advantage of their scenarios from the point of view of a possible overcoming of the conflict according to the dialectic of recognition[5], an indispensable prelude to a (distant but possible) reconciliation.
One scenario proposes that the conflict is limited to the Gaza Strip, without spreading throughout the region. In this scenario, Israel does not destroy but erodes the military capacity of Hamas, leaves a toll of many civilian victims, and the conflict remains for the moment “frozen,” with loss of life, material and image on both sides. Those who undoubtedly will replace the current Israeli prime minister do not change the status quo, and those who replace Hamas in control of Gaza do so precariously with or without international aid. There is no overcoming of the conflict and the current relationship of domination (master/slave) is maintained.
A second scenario suggests that the current war is being followed by regional normalization and a more lasting peace. Israel’s campaign against Hamas succeeds in defeating that organization without producing “too many” civilian casualties. Moderate forces (the Palestinian Authority or a coalition of Arab countries) proceed to administer the territory of the strip. Prime Minister Netanyahu resigns and is replaced by a centrist government of one tendency or another, left or right, inclined to “solve” the Palestinian question with serious concessions, while at the same time normalizing its relations with Saudi Arabia. Such a government would also calm its relationship with Iran, which would lead to the lifting of some Western sanctions on that country by a Democratic government in the US. This peace is incomplete, without reconciliation, but a little more stable. This is what Hegel would call “an imperfect recognition.”
The third scenario is on the contrary more catastrophic, with the entry of the Iranian-backed Hezbollah group into the war, forcing Israel to have another battlefront. In that case, it is very likely that Israel will attack nuclear centers in Iran, with logistical or kinetic support from the United States. It may lead to the replacement of the Iranian clerics in power by a more moderate leadership, representative of the “bazaar” or bourgeois sector of Tehran, with rapprochement with the international community, but not an abandonment of the nuclear aspiration in that country. It is the hope of some hawks in Washington. But it can also produce the opposite: it backfires; the current Iranian regime is maintained and tightened. A second presidency of Mr. Trump in the United States would make this outcome more likely, with its foreseeable consequences: oil shock, global recession, and hardening of all regional conflicts on the planet. It would be a more decisive step towards a third world war. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict cannot be resolved and, on the contrary, metastasizes.
The fourth and final scenario is a radical version of the second, namely: a lasting peace with reconciliation between Jews and Palestinians, with plans to rebuild the Gaza Strip with strong international support as an experimental dual state in which the two major enemy ethnicities coexist, as Nelson Mandela attempted in South Africa. From a Hegelian point of view (to which the current Catholic pontiff would not be oblivious), the experiment requires historical and historical understanding. Mutual forgiveness.
Let’s dig back into the etymological roots of the words as I did at the beginning of this article. The word “for-give” comes from Latin per-donare and it means “to give completely, to forget a fault, to free someone from a debt.” Its lexical components are: the prefix per– (completely, total) and donare (gift). For Hegel, such a step on the part of two contenders is the complete resolution of a conflict, the abandonment of repetition, the genuine and authentic Aufhebung.
Given the geopolitical reality, the probability of each of the above scenarios is very uneven. According to the estimation of some experts[6], it ranges from 50% for the first, 35% for the second, 15% for the third, and barely 5% for the latter. As it is often the case in human history, the most generous and peaceful solution is the one that is least interesting. It is worth considering. It may be that one day, not from the outside but from the very heat of the battle, the conviction will arise among the combatants that it is better to die than to hate and be hated, to fear and be feared, not out of fatigue or weakness, but because of the possibility of forgiveness that comes with the same strength. On that day, the warriors will break the sword, as Nietzsche said. A paragraph from that philosopher makes the following prophecy:
And perhaps a great day will come when a people distinguished by wars and victories, by the highest development of military order and intelligence, and accustomed to make the heaviest sacrifices for these things, will exclaim on its own free will, “We break the sword,” and will smash its entirely military establishment to its lowest foundations. Rendering oneself unarmed when one has been the best-armed, out of a height of feeling, that is the means to real peace, which must always rest on a peace of mind; whereas the so-called armed peace, as it now exists in all countries, is the absence of peace of mind. One trusts neither oneself nor one’s neighbor and, half from hatred, half from fear, does not lay down arms. Rather perish than hate and fear, and twice rather perish than make oneself hated and feared: this must someday become the highest maxim for every single commonwealth, too![7]
In this dark time in which we are there is, as always, a glimmer of hope. This year I had scheduled a Christmas gathering in Jerusalem with several friends. Given the circumstance of the war, we will not do so. This is not a time to celebrate but to reflect.
In France, I once heard an ancient Jewish toast. It is a prayer that applies to all religions and all disputes, and it reads as follows: Pour que le pire cesse d’arriver (So that the worst stops happening). Let the worst stop happening. In these sad holidays of 2023, let’s bet on 5%.
[1] See Benedict Anderson’s reflections, Imagined Communities, new edition, London: Verso, 2016.
[2] In particular, read the book by Barrington Moore, Jr., Reflections on the Causes of Human Misery and upon Certain Proposals to Eliminate Them. Boston: Beacon Press, 1972.
[3] The anxious search for recognition is at the heart of today’s preoccupation with “identity” in the political field of contemporary societies.
[4] We read on Wikipedia: Aufhebung is a German word with several seemingly contradictory meanings, including “lift,” “abolish,” “cancel,” “suspend,” or “sublimate.” The term has also been defined as “abolish”, “preserve,” and “transcend”. In philosophy, aufheben is used by Hegel in his works on dialectics, and in this sense it is mainly translated as “sublimate.”
[5] Sometimes a single word of recognition opens the door to a peace process and a path of reconciliation. This happened in the Middle East when at the end of the Yon Kippur war in 1973, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat used the word “Israel” and not “the Zionist entity” in a message and led to a meeting with Prime Minister Golda Meir. The episode was dramatized in the film Golda, released in 2023.
[6] Ver Nouriel Roubini, “The Economic Consequences of the Gaza War,” Project Syndicate, Nov 10, 2023.
[7] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Wanderer and His Shadow, Buenos Aires: Edimat libros, 2006. The paragraph is quoted from one of the most exciting texts on war, almost ignored today but greatly admired by Hannah Arendt: J. Glenn Gray, The Warriors, New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1970 edition.
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