Gaza notes

“The question of the qualification of the enemy is at the heart of the modern law of war. Without a doubt, since antiquity one has distinguished the private enemy (inimicus) from the public enemy (hostis), and that last from the brigand and the criminal. The distinctions were taken up by theoreticians of the rights of man in the 18th century. The question, thus posed, is not only who is one’s enemy, but what type of enemy one is dealing with.”

These magisterial lines open an essay by Michel Senellart entitled “The Qualification of the enemy in Emer de Vattel” , an obscure name to introduce one of the great turning points in Western “civilization” – which is more often an alibi than a description, but what the hell: one can hope.

Senellart’s topic is the civilizing of warfare in the eighteenth century – and by extension, the “barbarization” of warfare in the 20th and 21st century.

“I want to examine, in this article, the way in which the division between a combattant force and a non-combattant population was established in the law of modern war, and what consequences ensued. This distinction, as we know, is the foundation of the laws of war formulated for the first time by the Brussels conference in 1874 and then that of the Hague in 1899 and 1907, with the view of “serving the interests of humanity and the progressive demands of civilisation.” It cannot be separated from another distinction, the object of bitter controversies, between legitimate and illegitimate combattants. It is in the work of jurisconsul Emer de Vattel (1714-1767), author of a celebrated treatise on human rights (droit des gens), that their articulation appeared most clearly. However, it gave rise to two opposed readings, the conflict between which manifested the tensions inherent in the modern law of war.”

The use of this distinction has been, of course, utterly annihilated by the state of Israel, which has thus pledged its troth to a disastrous moral catastrophe, adopting the very means by which, once, the Jews of Europe were massacred and tortured to death.
One of the deep structural factors in racism is the unwillingness to recognize the Other’s imagination even to the degree of recognizing the other’s humiliation by the culture of violence and subordination visited upon him beyond the Pavlovian exterior marks that come with electroshock and reward. Sense, in the Other, doesn’t develop into sensibility. That is, from the point of view of the temporary Master. But the Other knows the master’s moves and the supposed rules of that Master utopia, civilization.
Within the Other a judgment forms. A sort of Last Judgment. It is shaped by every bomb dropped, every child smeared across the landscape, every widow and widower, every leg or arm torn away.
Having done away with the difference between inimicus and hostis, the government of Israel has endangered its population – and by propagating the myth that Israel “represents” the Jews of the diaspora itself, it has, with sinister intent, tossed that population into the same trap.
We’d do well, or at least we would be less satanic, to listen to the word that came out of the prophets and exile:
“Vanity[a] of vanities,” says the Preacher;
“Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.”
What profit has a man from all his labor
In which he toils under the sun?
One generation passes away, and another generation comes;
But the earth abides forever.”

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3Patrick Pritchett, Roy Skodnick and 1 other