While the eyes of the world were diverted to the recent hostilities between Israel and Iran, Israel’s genocide has continued unabated in Gaza, including through the infliction of conditions of life that have created a deadly mix of hunger and disease, pushing the population past breaking point. (Agnès Callamard, Secretary General of Amnesty International)
Introduction
The devastation in Gaza is not merely a regional conflict – it is a global ethical crisis. This essay explores the philosophical dimensions of the Gaza war through the lens of Jacques Derrida, focusing on the concept of autoimmunity and the failure of liberal democracies to uphold international law and human rights. It integrates recent legal developments, humanitarian data and scholarly consensus to argue that Gaza represents a textbook case of genocidal warfare. The essay also examines corporate complicity, the metaphysical limits of justice and the pedagogical implications of witnessing atrocity in real time, calling for a reimagined global ethics rooted in justice, hospitality and accountability.
The tragedy of Gaza is not merely a geopolitical crisis – it is a profound ethical rupture in the fabric of global humanity. In the shadow of sustained military aggression, the language of war crimes and crimes against humanity demands more than legal adjudication; it calls for philosophical reflection. Drawing on the work of Jacques Derrida, I argue that the violence inflicted upon Gaza exemplifies a form of autoimmunity – a self-destructive logic wherein liberal democracies, in the name of security and sovereignty, undermine their foundational principles of justice, human rights and international law.
Jeremy Moses argues that the complete absence of any significant invocation of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine during Israel’s devastating assault on Gaza, widely condemned by experts as genocide, starkly reveals R2P’s fundamental weaknesses and confirms Hobson’s critique of its detachment from reality. Despite over three months of military operations, at the time of writing, killing more than 20,000 Palestinians (including over 8,000 children) and reducing much of Gaza to rubble following Hamas’s October 7th attack, R2P has played no meaningful role in international response debates. Israel’s campaign, recognised as causing civilian deaths at a higher rate than any other 21st-century war, continues with the stated aim of eliminating Hamas while promising worse destruction to come.
As of July 3, 2025, the Gaza Health Ministry reports over 59,600 people killed in the Gaza war, including 57,645 Palestinians and 1,983 Israelis; fatalities also encompass 180 journalists, 120 academics and over 224 aid workers (179 from UNRWA). Scholars estimate that approximately 80% of Palestinian fatalities are civilians, while an OHCHR study found that 70% of Palestinians killed in residential buildings were women and children.
Illingworth argues that key Western states’ policies during the Israel-Gaza conflict expose a critical flaw in the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine: its failure to address how states themselves can be complicit in the international structures enabling mass atrocities elsewhere. This creates a conceptual gap in R2P’s preventive agenda, as the doctrine overlooks the vital point that successful atrocity prevention requires states to curb their ‘own’ harmful international actions that contribute to or exacerbate atrocities. The article, therefore, proposes using a cosmopolitan lens to integrate R2P’s framework with the duty to prevent harm, specifically by recognising states’ negative obligation to avoid actions that facilitate atrocity crimes.
As Arta Moeini argues, the Gaza War represent the twilight of international moralism:
All this heated debate over each side’s supposed entrenched racism and international legal theory, however, masks a greater truth: the power and authority of international law since the Second World War depended on a monopoly over its interpretation enjoyed by the United States as the world’s chief hegemon. In the postwar era, despite Washington not recognising the jurisdiction of international courts, international law was advanced as a tool of American statecraft and routinely weaponised to maximise US global power. But in the increasingly multipolar world of today, appeal to such discursive tools is no longer the exclusive domain of Washington and its allies but available to other competing powers seeking to advance their disparate geopolitical interests.
As Amnesty International pointed out well over a decade ago, several bodies of international law apply to the conflict in Gaza:
- International humanitarian law (IHL) governs the Gaza conflict, imposing rules on all parties – including non-state armed groups – to protect civilians and those hors de combat, regulate warfare methods and obligate occupying powers.
- International human rights law (IHRL) remains binding on states during peace and conflict, guaranteeing civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights, and ensuring victims of serious violations have a right to remedy, including justice and reparations.
- International criminal law (ICL) establishes individual criminal responsibility for grave breaches of IHL and IHRL, prosecuting acts such as war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide, torture, extrajudicial executions and enforced disappearances.
Israel is the occupying power in the Gaza Strip: ‘As the occupying power in Gaza, Israel has specific obligations under international humanitarian law. It must comply with the provisions of international humanitarian law applicable to belligerent occupation.’ Measures of control or security must be ‘necessary as a result of the war’ (Article 27, Fourth Geneva Convention). As the occupying power, Israel is forbidden from destroying the property of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, unless it is militarily necessary to do so. As the occupying power, Israel must ensure the population of Gaza has adequate access to food, essential supplies, medicine and medical care. The Fourth Geneva Convention specifically prohibits collective punishment. In terms of the Geneva Convention, Israel, prima facie, is in breach of international law in committing both War crimes and Crimes Against Humanity.
South Africa has initiated a case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), alleging that Israel’s military operations in Gaza violate its obligations under the 1948 Genocide Convention. The ICJ issued provisional measures in January 2024, ordering Israel to take immediate steps to prevent genocidal acts, ensure humanitarian aid reaches Gaza and preserve evidence, finding a ‘plausible risk’ of genocide – a ruling Israel strongly disputes while pledging compliance with the measures. The case, which centres on whether Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, remains ongoing at the ICJ for a final ruling on the merits, while South Africa continues to file additional requests for urgent provisional measures, citing the escalating conflict and humanitarian crisis.
Autoimmunity and the Paradox of Protection
Jacques Derrida’s concept of ‘autoimmunity’ – wherein a system’s self-protective mechanisms inadvertently trigger its degradation – offers a critical lens for analysing the international response to Gaza. This paradox manifests starkly as powerful states, invoking ‘security’ to justify military actions, actively erode the very legal and normative frameworks designed to prevent atrocities. For instance, despite the International Court of Justice’s January 2024 binding provisional measures ordering Israel to prevent genocide and ensure humanitarian aid, civilian infrastructure faced accelerated destruction, and famine conditions deepened. The ICJ’s July 2025 ruling reiterating Israel’s non-compliance underscores the ‘enforcement breakdown’: international law’s ‘immune system’ is sabotaged by those meant to uphold it.
This autoimmunity extends beyond Israel’s actions to its enablers. Legal scholars highlight how Western powers – notably the US, UK and Germany – intensified Gaza’s devastation through sustained arms transfers and diplomatic shielding, as evidenced in Nicaragua v. Germany. By prioritising geopolitical interests over legal obligations, these states weakened the structures intended to hold perpetrators accountable, thereby accelerating systemic collapse.
The crisis exposes a foundational hypocrisy: liberal democracies, while championing rules-based orders, subvert their principles when confronted with politically inconvenient atrocities. This contradiction reveals international law’s fatal flaw – its reliance on states that may themselves be complicit in the violence they purport to regulate. The result is a self-consuming system where ‘protection’ legitimises harm, and enforcement mechanisms disintegrate under the weight of their architects’ refusal to comply.
Terrorism, Asymmetry and the Erasure of Civilians
Gaza epitomises the lethal paradox of postmodern warfare: a profoundly asymmetrical conflict where Israel’s technologically advanced military engages Palestinian resistance groups – routinely framed as ‘terrorists’ – resulting in catastrophic civilian displacement, dehumanisation and death. This framing weaponises the language of counter-terrorism to obscure the structural violence of occupation, blockade and settlement expansion that constitutes what critical scholars like Eyal Weizman term a slow-motion genocide. The asymmetry is not merely tactical but ontological: one side leverages F-35s, AI-targeting systems and siege tactics against a population confined to 365 km², 80% of whom are refugees or their descendants.
The discourse of terrorism functions as an erasure mechanism, stripping Palestinians of political subjectivity. As Peters warns, echoing Benjamin Barber’s provocation: when children are excluded from ‘citizenship-to-come,’ they are reduced to ‘terrorists-to-be’ – a logic that rationalises pre-emptive violence against Gaza’s youth. This narrative licenses what Mbembe calls necropolitics: the power to dictate who may live and who must die. Israel’s systematic bombardment of homes, hospitals and schools – killing over 75,000 Palestinians (including 32,000 children), destroying 80% of housing and pushing 95% of pregnant women into acute malnutrition – reveals a policy of civilian erasure disguised as counter-terrorism.
Cultural annihilation accelerates this erasure. Universities, archives, mosques and museums – repositories of Palestinian identity – have been deliberately reduced to rubble, severing intergenerational memory. Such destruction satisfies the dolus specialis (specific intent) criterion of genocide under the Genocide Convention. Israel’s necropolitical project thus operates through a double movement: framing resistance as terrorism to legitimise mass civilian targeting, while materially dismantling the conditions for collective existence.
Legal Frameworks and Their Ethical Limits
The post-WWII legal architecture defining war crimes and crimes against humanity – enshrined in instruments like the London Agreement and Geneva Conventions – proves tragically inadequate in addressing Gaza’s asymmetrical violence. While these frameworks provide mechanisms for prosecuting atrocities, they fail to ethically confront the systemic power imbalances enabling industrialised militaries to wage annihilation against trapped civilian populations. Jacques Derrida’s (1990) deconstruction of law’s foundations in ‘The Force of Law’ exposes this limitation: he distinguishes law (codified, enforceable rules) from justice (an incalculable, infinite ethical demand that is ‘always to come’ [à venir]). In Gaza, this schism manifests as legal technicalities – debates over proportionality or intent – obscure the undeniable reality of mass civilian extermination. Legal mechanisms alone, Derrida implies, cannot deliver justice when the system itself is built by perpetrators of historical violence.
This ethical void is now recognised in scholarly consensus. In March 2025, over 800 genocide experts declared Israel’s campaign a ‘textbook case of genocidal warfare,’ citing three interlocking dimensions:
- settler-colonial intent: Israeli officials’ explicit goal to render Gaza ‘uninhabitable for generations’ (e.g., Minister Ben-Gvir’s call for ‘voluntary migration’) mirrors logics of indigenous erasure;
- real-time execution: The systematic destruction of 80% of homes, 100% of universities and life-sustaining infrastructure fulfils the Genocide Convention’s Article II(c): deliberately inflicting conditions calculated to destroy a group;
- complicit legality: Western states’ weaponisation of international law to shield Israel (e.g., vetoing UN ceasefires) perverts legal institutions into tools of impunity.
As critical scholars like Raz Segal assert, Gaza thus represents a crisis of legal epistemology: the frameworks designed to prevent genocide are structurally incapable of constraining it when perpetrators are core architects of the international order. Justice, in Derrida’s terms, demands transcending these frameworks through radical ethical reckoning – one that centres the infinite responsibility to the Other over the finite logic of state sovereignty.
Corporate Complicity and Economic Interests
The ethical crisis in Gaza extends beyond state actors to implicate global capital in the machinery of destruction. In her 2025 report to the UN Human Rights Council, Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese documented over 60 multinational corporations – including Caterpillar (supplying armoured bulldozers that raze homes), Lockheed Martin (providing F-35 jets and guided bombs) and Amazon (hosting AI-driven surveillance infrastructure for targeting) – as materially enabling Israel’s campaign through dual-use technologies and military logistics. These corporations operate within accountability vacuums: while international humanitarian law (IHL) prohibits aiding war crimes (Article 16, ILC Draft Articles), domestic legal systems shield firms through jurisdictional barriers and ‘end-use certification’ loopholes.
This complicity reflects what Saskia Sassen (2014) terms ‘predatory formations’ – globalised networks where profit converges with state violence. The critique extends beyond direct contractors to financial enablers: BlackRock, Vanguard and Capital Group collectively hold $25 billion in shares of top Israel-defence contractors, turning institutional investors into silent stakeholders in mass displacement.
Western academia is deeply entangled in this matrix. Universities like Harvard, Oxford and Heidelberg:
- invest $4.7 billion in defence contractors tied to Gaza operations;
- host ‘dual-use’ research partnerships with Israeli arms firms (e.g., Rafael Advanced Defence Systems at MIT);
- silence Palestinian scholars through politically motivated funding suspensions.
This academic-military-industrial complex institutionalises what Martin Shaw calls ‘degenerate war’ – conflict where civilian annihilation becomes economically productive. When universities profit from bomb components while teaching international law, they embody capitalism’s moral schizophrenia: decrying genocide in syllabi while financing it through endowments.
The Metaphysics of Humanity and the Limits of Forgiveness
In On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, Derrida interrogates the paradoxes at the heart of forgiveness, particularly when it confronts the extremes of human violence. For Derrida, authentic forgiveness must be unconditional and forgive the unforgivable. The moment forgiveness becomes conditional, mediated by legal, political, or strategic aims, it is no longer forgiveness in its purest ethical sense but a form of negotiated reconciliation or diplomatic transaction. This distinction is profoundly relevant in the context of Gaza, where appeals to peace, dialogue and reconciliation are often deployed without confronting the structural violence, historical trauma and ongoing occupation that underlie the conflict. In such settings, forgiveness risks becoming a rhetorical device that obscures the absence of justice and the persistence of impunity.
Derrida’s critique extends further, to the metaphysical and juridical concept of ‘crimes against humanity.’ In questioning who has the authority to speak in the name of ‘humanity,’ Derrida destabilises the presumed universality of the concept. As Banki argues, the category of ‘crimes against humanity’ often presupposes a sacred image of the human, derived from a Judeo-Christian moral framework that equates suffering with redemptive value and enshrines a particular vision of the human community as ethically inviolable. This imagined ‘We, Men’ – a phantasm of universal inclusion – masks the historical exclusions and geopolitical asymmetries embedded within the institutions claiming to uphold human rights.
In the case of Gaza, Derrida’s insights expose the selective invocation of human rights discourse and the profound inconsistencies in international responses to violence and suffering. The same powers that champion universal values often remain silent – or complicit – when those values are violated by their allies. The metaphysical promise of humanity is thus fractured by political realities, revealing the limits of forgiveness as a redemptive gesture in the absence of justice, responsibility and equal recognition. Rather than offering closure, forgiveness in such conditions must remain aporetic – an open wound that resists premature healing in the face of ongoing injustice.
Pedagogy and the Ethics of Witnessing
Gaza has been systematically engineered as what Peters (2023) terms a ‘death space’ – a territory not merely subjected to war but strategically designed for the dismantling of life itself. Within this spatial politics of annihilation, the deliberate destruction of educational institutions and the targeted killing of over 94 professors constitutes what can only be described as an epistemicide – the erasure of a people’s intellectual, cultural and historical memory. This goes beyond the destruction of infrastructure; it is the violent unmaking of Palestinian knowledge systems, traditions and modes of social reproduction.
Raphael Lemkin’s original definition of genocide – emphasising both physical and cultural extermination – finds a chilling contemporary application here. The concept of scholasticide has emerged to name the weaponised assault on schools, universities and educators. Israel’s destruction of all 12 universities in Gaza and over 85% of its schools cannot be understood as ‘collateral damage.’ It is, rather, a strategic assault on the very conditions of Palestinian futurity. Institutions like the Islamic University of Gaza, bombed repeatedly, represent more than buildings – they are repositories of memory, aspiration and intellectual sovereignty.
By targeting archives, assassinating scholars and obstructing any form of educational reconstruction, Israel enacts what de Sousa Santos might describe as a colonial ‘monoculture of knowledge’ – a regime in which only certain knowledges are deemed legitimate, while others are silenced or obliterated. This is epistemological warfare, and Western universities, through their entanglement with Israeli arms firms, silence around Gaza and suppression of pro-Palestinian scholarship, become accomplices in scholasticide. Their complicity reveals the structural entanglement of global higher education with systems of empire, capital and racialised state violence.
Yet against this backdrop, a counter-pedagogy emerges – a pedagogy of resistance and witnessing. In Gaza, the very act of continuing to learn, teach and document becomes a form of defiance. Satellite imagery, AI-organised casualty logs, encrypted journalism and digital archives form a new kind of pedagogy of witnessing – one that operates in real time, in defiance of the epistemic erasure being waged. This documentation challenges the epistemological frameworks of denial and delay often employed in Western discourse. It compels us to confront, not abstract injustice, but live-streamed atrocity.
The pedagogical implications of this moment are profound and unsettling. How does one teach justice, ethics and humanity in a world where atrocity is normalised and suffering is algorithmically indexed yet politically ignored? Peters (2009) urges an education that does not reduce global ethics to Western norms of civility or assimilation but instead embraces a genuinely cosmopolitan dialogue – one grounded in mutual recognition, radical openness and historical accountability. This vision aligns with Derrida’s call for the ‘unconditional university,’ a site of critical openness, where no question is forbidden and no voice is silenced.
In this light, Gaza becomes both a site of unbearable tragedy and a test of the moral foundations of global pedagogy. Future generations will not lack for evidence – they will study the footage, the data, the destruction. What they will question is our silence. The task for educators, then, is not only to bear witness, but to transform witnessing into ethical response: to ensure that pedagogy becomes a mode of solidarity, not complicity.
Conclusion: Historical Memory and Moral Reckoning
The destruction of Gaza is not an isolated event; it now stands among the graveyards of global moral failure – alongside Rwanda, Srebrenica and the Rohingya crisis in Myanmar – where international actors either looked away or intervened too late. But Gaza also marks a turning point. What distinguishes this catastrophe is not only the severity of the violence, but the unprecedented visibility of its unfolding. Satellite imagery, AI-verified casualty data, live-streamed videos and independent UN reports have provided a real-time archive of atrocity. The clarity of intent – manifest in the systematic targeting of civilians, hospitals, journalists and schools – renders any future claims of ignorance ethically untenable.
Western governments, particularly those with deep military, financial and diplomatic ties to Israel, now face a profound crisis of legitimacy. Their failure to enforce ceasefires, uphold international law, or hold perpetrators accountable has not gone unnoticed. In fact, their silence – punctuated at times by vetoes, arms shipments and disinformation – will be remembered not as neutrality, but as complicity. As the Washington Post editorial bluntly stated: ‘We should say it plainly. A genocide is happening in Gaza.’ When major institutions of liberal democracy themselves begin to break ranks with political leadership, it signals the beginning of a broader moral reckoning.
This is no longer merely a regional conflict; it is a global indictment. The refusal to act – despite overwhelming evidence – will become a defining subject of historical scholarship, international legal proceedings, human rights curricula and museum exhibits dedicated to the 21st century’s darkest chapters. The institutions that pride themselves on promoting human rights, peace and multilateralism must now confront their impotence – or hypocrisy.
Yet the question is how this will be remembered and what will be done. If legal rulings – such as those from the International Court of Justice – are to hold any weight, they must be enforced. If survivors are to rebuild, reparative justice must go beyond humanitarian aid and address the political and material conditions that made this possible. And if education is to play a role in shaping a more just future, it must include the voices of Palestinians, the documentation of their struggle and the structural critique of the systems that enabled such devastation.
The history books are already being written – not just by scholars and jurists, but by the people of Gaza who have documented their erasure with courage and precision. The task ahead is to bear witness and ensure that witnessing becomes action. Without accountability, the phrase ‘never again’ becomes an empty ritual. With it, we may yet reclaim the possibility of a global order rooted in justice, memory and moral responsibility.
Michael.Peters@waikato.ac.nz