10 articles
Since 7 October, the Palestinian cause has reinvigorated Tunisian civil society, creating a wave of public activism reminiscent of the revolution of 2011. But today there is a major difference: perceived western hypocrisy over Israel has severely damaged the credibility of the democratic agenda.
Europe has learnt the need to protect human dignity as inviolable, refuting the myth of national sovereignty and ethnically-based citizenship. But it also embraces these principles as forms of emancipation for Jews and previously colonized nations. This inconsistency endangers both Europe and its past victims.
For Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, freedom of movement is non-existent. But to flee and thus to lose one’s right of return places Palestinians in a situation that is even worse. How international law underpins Israel’s policy of ethnic cleansing.
Do the violence and oppression against Palestinians in Gaza and the discrimination and surveillance against migrants trying to cross European borders have more in common than meets the eye? A Belgian activist of the international Freedom Flotilla Coalition speaks out about the Israeli arms industry, institutionalized violence and human rights abuses.
Student anger at Israel’s assault on Gaza has been directed at their own universities, whose refusal to condemn the Israeli aggression they see as a moral failure. By closing down protests to ‘protect’ the neutrality of the academic environment, universities only appear confirm this.
It has become axiomatic in our distrustful age that truth stands in tension with friendship. But the traps of identitarianism require that we rehabilitate our relation to truth – and understand it not as the opposite of friendship, but its very condition.
It is often maintained that the slogan ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free’ expresses a genocidal and antisemitic intention. But this is generally not the case. On the contrary, the slogan has historically been used to articulate a wide variety of political strategies for Palestinian liberation.
For many, Germany’s unconditional support for Israel since 7 October confirms that its memory culture has ‘gone haywire’. But particularly when it comes to German reservations about using terms associated with the Holocaust, postcolonial criticism is often markedly one-sided.
On both sides of the Israel–Palestine conflict, rights of free speech are being violated. Whether the silencing of critics of Hamas in Gaza or repressions against Palestinians in Israel seen to be voicing support for the Palestinian cause, the eradication of dissent will only deepen the conflict.
Travelling to Jordan soon after the beginning of the Israeli onslaught on Gaza, Belgium-based artist Samah Hijawi witnesses Palestinian people’s fear, anger, guilt and confusion. Reflections on proximity and positionality at a moment of intense crisis.
The EU and individual European countries are not bystanders to the ‘Israel-Palestine conflict’ but enmeshed in it both historically and today. Using charges of antisemitism to preempt criticism of Israel doesn’t just erode the concept morally and politically, but also excuses Europe of its responsibility for the Palestinians’ oppression.
Syria, Ukraine, Nagorno-Karabakh and now Gaza: connecting all recent wars is disregard for national sovereignty as recognised by international law. Confident of impunity, anti-democratic regimes cite sovereign interests as justification for their politics of annihilation.
International humanitarian law forbids neither resistance nor self-defence. But it does set strict limitations on any party that engages in armed conflict. Both Hamas’s and Israel’s defiance of jus in bello is an assault on universal values.
Israel’s devastating response to the Hamas attacks is based on the untenable belief that military supremacy translates into strategic advantage, and that security can only be delivered by permanently suppressing the Palestinians.
In this war, any standards of bellum justum are not worth the paper they are written on. More violence lies ahead, yet escalation is essentially a political choice.



