This essay began in a conversation with a friend, a literary critic who found himself angry and speechless at the bombing of Iran. He made a distinction between civics and international relations. Civics carries the intensity of nearness, touch and neighbourhood. International relations implies the metaphysics of distance, alienation and abstractness. My friend felt there was a new attempt at storytelling to create an ethics of international relations. There were even the rudiments of a new social science and fragments of epic poetry.
He cited the example of conversations around the Gaza Strip. Everyone implied that there was a Gaza Strip in all of us—a map that erased all forms of territory. It was a paradigm of death and desire which eliminated of all forms of hope and belonging. Gaza Strip was a triage that was banalised into a ration card of death. Tens of thousands of children have died, many from bombing and starvation. This enactment of war was horrific and needed a new text in response.
My friend pointed out that there was a barrenness to groups working on Palestine. He contrasted it to the earlier struggles that centred around the Vietnam war. The Russell-Sartre Tribunal of 1967 had turned Vietnam into an international forum for ethical choices. The Bengali slogan “Amar naam, tomar naam Vietnam” (My name, your name is Vietnam) captured the essence of this ethical solidarity.
He added that one has to look at the bombing of Iran in this context. The campaign has three obvious characteristics. Donald Trump described it as act of ‘culling’ of Iran’s more aggressive leadership, including counter-intelligence experts. It was also a ‘whittling down’, a softening of Iranian policy towards uranium enrichment. For Trump and Bibi Netanyahu, the bombing of Iran was also like a behavioural exercise—an attempt to teach Iran and parts of the Arab world how to behave. What was central was that the other was treated as a subject of erasure.
This has to be seen within the framework of the Zionist classic I and Thou by Martin Buber. The Israeli philosopher wrote about a way of looking at the other, as an object of classification and genocide. One can think of the relation between the modern and the primitive, the capitalist and the worker. Buber tries to encompass the other in the cosmic and the sacred. He tries to create a dialogicity that creates a deep sense of friendship based on difference.
Netanyahu must have been aware of Buber. And yet he follows Trump in a new banalisation of evil. In American philosopher Hannah Arendt’s book Eichmann in Jerusalem, the concentration camp is seen as just another clerical organisation with rules and orders of a standard bureaucracy. Arendt warned us that evil need not be monstrous; it can be banal, bureaucratic, procedural.
Today, that banality acquires a new form. Violence is no longer only administered—it is preceded by a deeper act: erasure. Entire peoples are rendered abstract before they are rendered expendable. Trump goes further than Eichmann in banalising genocide by creating the object itself as an act of erasure. When one mentions Palestinian or Iranian, one has already erased them out of existence. The bombing as culling is a prelude to such a banality. The presence of Trump cannot be concealed in the silence of statecraft. Silence might be diplomacy, but it is bad ethics. One has to confront the event. Retell the story if necessary. Only then can ethics be a possibility.
One has to visualise another set of questions around the bombing. What if the current Iranian or Palestinian leadership had all been under age 40? Would the memories and paradigms have been the same? Would their sense of the nuclear have been determined by the Second World War? After all, this generation of leadership—from Vladimir Putin and Trump to Netanyahu—has been marked by memories of nuclear war and genocide during the Second World War. The question is an open one. A new generation with a new kind of memory and a new set of concepts can come with a solution. One needs invention as part of ethics; instead, what one sees is a repetition of the old triteness.
The second question raised repeatedly was what the Indian leaders felt when they responded to Trump—not just on tariffs, but also the bombing of Iran. This question was particularly focused on S Jaishankar, whose father was an outstanding nationalist and defence expert who wanted India to be ethically and nationally bold. It would have been interesting to know what this sensitive man thought about his profession and responsibility at this moment of crisis. Perhaps a later biography would not quite redeem the response.
The other possibility one can consider is to extend an Indian ethics to the Israeli situation. Three suggestions were made. Firstly, there was a repeated suggestion that an institution like the langar, a sign of openness and hospitality as a symbol of service, could have been opened at the Gaza Strip. Secondly, Mother Teresa’s nuns could have flown down to create anecdotes of love and caring in a war-ridden Israel. The third suggestion was constant: the Israel-Palestine issue offered a chance for the satyagrahi to go beyond the Buberian idea of I-and-thou.
Ethics desperately needs new inventions. Gandhi saw himself as an inventor. But satyagraha-ic invention in international relations has been sparse or negligible. The Red Cross and the UN do not meet the requirements. One needs an ethically exemplary act to challenge the Trumps and the Netanyahus. Genocide cannot be met through mere moralising.
My friend paused. Then he said civil society must create its own model of international relations. One needs a new poetics of peace. Pedagogy retains the politics of memory and learning. Palestine and the Gaza Strip as problems have to be taught in schools so that they become metaphors for a new set of ethical choices. A new sense of morality that challenges the banality of genocide. One has to challenge the very presence of warmongering leaders by questioning their legitimacy in the domain of morality. Civil society has to desperately move to such a framework of action. The number of children dying every day adds urgency to such a quest.
Shiv Visvanathan | Social scientist associated with the Compost Heap, a group researching alternative imaginations
(Views are personal)