Abstract At stake in the Gaza genocide is the world itself. To grasp just how “worldly” the stakes are, all we need to do is face the single most distinct feature of this genocide: its prosecution as a genocide necessary for the global order at all costs—even at the cost of the order itself. In its insistence on the genocide, the west has cannibalized the very institutions it had used to shape the world. How, then, do we explain the radical necessity of genocide here? Here, I argue that we need to come to terms with how, since the 1970s at least, Zionism has co-constituted the object we call western civilization. And it has done so primarily by operating as a geopolitical and ideological impasse to decolonization. Zionism is the west’s postcolonial alibi, deferring any reckoning with the west’s colonial history and enduring racial regimes. But the genocide at once reaffirms and destabilizes Zionism’s vocation. Intersecting with the irreversible decline of US empire, the genocide appears as the death knell for an entire age, accelerating the effective unraveling of the international order that stands in for the world, and potentially heralding a kind of unworlding.
Nasser Abourahme (Thu,) studied this question.