The standard refrain about Israel is that “it is the only democracy in the Middle East”. Some stand by this claim; others reject it. Many argue that Benjamin Netanyahu has been eroding democratic values in Israel over the last decade; others insist that so-called Israeli democracy is premised on the oppression and killing of Palestinians, which thus undermines the universalist principles of liberal democracy. But we might ask: what do people mean by the term “democracy” when it is attached to Israel?

Democracy in this context appears to be both a specific and abstract term. Specifically, it refers to Israel’s extension of minimally democratic practices or rights, such as formally free elections, freedom of the press, or the right to assemble. Broadly, it suggests that, on some level, Israel institutionally mirrors Western states, and it has embraced the kinds of neoliberal economic and social policymaking that the West now associates with contemporary liberal democracy.

To put it another way, Israeli democracy reflects the limited institutional and public basis of Western liberal democracy today, in which so-called democratic states have expunged any radical potential of democracy and are themselves steeped to their eyebrows in blood. While many disagree on Israel’s democratic credentials, what underpins these debates is an implicit understanding of liberal democracy as an inherently pacifying political and social system. One that, as Achille Mbembe puts it in Necropolitics, has “if not banished brutality and physical violence, then at least brought them under control.” Violence is thus imagined as, not necessarily external to democracy, but something that democratic societies have learned to manage through a variety of political, social, and legal institutions.

Of course, such an assumption is only true if we pay no attention to the history of democracy, and paying no attention — or perhaps selective attention — to history seems to be in vogue today. For Mbembe, this pacifying vision represents democracy’s “solar body”, the one that sees the light of day. This is the body that we most often invoke in debates such as those around Israel’s democratic status.

Even for those who accept that war punctuates movements towards democracy, there is a widespread assumption that once (liberal) democracy has been reached, history bends toward justice through largely non-violent means. Mbembe’s theory of necropolitics — where sovereign power is deployed to exert control over who can and cannot be killed — is useful here precisely because it insists on the intertwinement of liberal democracy and colonial violence, rather than seeing such violence as external to, or as a corruption of, liberal democracy. Although Mbembe is not a Marxist, his critique of liberal democracy resonates with the Marxist view that it is structured by the violence of capitalist imperialism.

Violence against democracy is seemingly the only violence that democratic states and institutions recognise as violence, one that is often then used to justify violence on behalf of democracy — although of course this latter violence is often reconceived and legitimated as defence. The violence enacted on behalf of democracy is apprehended very differently to the one enacted against it because, as Judith Butler wrote in Frames of War referring to the US response to 9/11, the democratic state is “able to render [its] own destructiveness righteous and its own destructibility unthinkable.” You only have to listen to a slew of international leaders call for “proportionate”, “controlled”, “precise”, “targeted” action from Israel in its indiscriminate siege on Gaza to see how liberal democracies legitimise Israel’s right to inflict violence on Palestinians as necessary, just, and righteous. And even when, in reality, Israel’s actions are clearly none of the things these leaders have called for, it is merely the calling for them to be otherwise that matters in securing democracy’s solar body.

Mbembe contends that

the brutality of democracies has simply been swept under the carpet. From their origins, modern democracies have always evinced their tolerance for a certain political violence, including illegal forms of it.

The examples of such violence are too numerous to even begin to list here — from colonialism and slavery to prisons and austerity — but what we might argue is that what has sustained democracy as a political system is not the likes of the public sphere, increased emancipation, human rights, or quasi-universal suffrage, as liberal political theorists like to claim, but violence. Uncompromising and relentless violence.

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In 2021, a headline on a Jacobin article about Israel’s bombing campaign in Gaza asked: “what kind of democracy kills children?” The answer we are supposed to come to is “not a real democracy”. But democracies have been killing children for decades, sometimes directly through military violence, sometimes indirectly, for instance through such instruments as enforced famines. To even ask such a question requires us, borrowing Mbembe words, to “envelop [democracy] in a quasi-mythological structure” so that violence appears to be democracy’s other rather than internal to its operating logic. But even a cursory look at the history of democracy illustrates that Israel is not a unique case — it is a pariah among pariahs.

The solar body thus conceals a history that is lodged in what Mbembe calls “the nocturnal body” of democracy — a body that has grown out of the “plantation and the penal colony.” The ongoing practice of settler colonialism, evidenced in ramped up Israeli occupations in the West Bank, only further problematises the relationship between democracy and violence, especially when intermingled with surveillance technologies and ever more sophisticated death machines. Mbembe notes that “[d]emocracy bears the colony within it, just as colonialism bears democracy, often in the guise of a mask.” Violence is the flesh that intertwines democracy and colonialism.

But the solar body cannot hide its nocturnal sibling forever. Eventually, Mbembe tells us, this violence

latent on the interior and exteriorised in the colonies and other third places, suddenly resurfaces, and then threatens the idea that the political order was created out of itself (instituted once and once and for all) and had more or less managed to pass itself off as common sense.

In such moments, Israel’s nocturnal body eclipses its solar body. The dark violence that is exported to the periphery, to Gaza, is suddenly right there at the heart of the solar body. The “boomerang effect,” as Aimé Césaire famously called it in Discourse on Colonialism, allows violence to return to its origin — the civility of liberal democracy comes face-to-face with its violent alter-ego.

This eclipse could, and really should, precipitate a reckoning with the history of violence that undergirds liberal democracies, but it usually engenders a reflexive, blood-thirsty will to revenge, to annihilate, to massacre. Butler made this point, again in the context of the US response to 9/11, in which the exposure to vulnerability, precipitated by the violence of the attacks, led the US “to produce itself as impermeable, to define itself as protected permanently against incursion and as radically invulnerable to attack.” Given modern Israel’s specific history, founded in the shadows of Jewish extermination, the desire for radical invulnerability is rooted in the literal and cultural memory of the state, even if the pursuit of invulnerability requires other acts of extermination.

In response to democracy’s eclipse, widespread massacre and genocidal intentions become the dominant mode of war because only irrevocable annihilation of the Other, in this case the Palestinians, can get close to producing the impermeability desired on the part of the revenging subject. Netanyahu’s “Gaza 2035” plans, which envisage Gaza as a new Dubai, illustrate the extent to which complete extermination of Palestinians in Gaza structures the political imagination of Israel’s siege. Israel’s solar body will only emerge once its nocturnal body has been brutalised beyond return.

What is also revealing in these plans is that democracy itself is not even part of the vision for Gaza’s afterlife in Netanyahu’s imagination. Instead, Gaza is envisaged as a site of primitive accumulation that gives way to renewed expropriation and exploitation — especially of migrant labour — that exist beyond democratic oversight, modelled on Gulf states like Dubai. Falling back on democracy as legitimation for genocidal violence, in this scenario, becomes a means to imagine an undemocratic future, one that will rest on old and new forms of violence.

What we learn in these moments of eclipse is that democracy is a flimsy basis upon which to mount a defence of Israeli violence, or, as numerous world leaders put it at the time of the October attack by Hamas, “Israel’s right to defend itself”. In fact, the democracies that are so invested in accentuating Israel’s democratic credentials are the same democracies that sell billions of dollars of weapons to Israel so that they can kill tens of thousands of unarmed civilians, while starving tens of thousands more to death. Those who hide behind democracy to legitimise Israeli violence are complicit in this genocide. The scenes in Gaza today are not liberal democracy’s Other, a momentary and violent blip that will eventually lead us back to a nonviolent future in which democracy will be fully realised. Gaza is liberal democracy manifest.

Image: Khalid Kwaik