A political ethos of justice and human commonality

Pearls and Irritations
John Menadue’s Public Policy Journal

 

A political ethos of justice and human commonality

By Angela Smith

Feb 8, 2025

On 24 December 2023, Benjamin Netanyahu declared, “This is a battle not only of Israel against these barbarians, it’s a battle of civilisation against barbarians.”

His words echoed the rhetoric adopted by violent aggressors throughout history to deny their own atrocities. A hierarchy of humanity: good against evil barbarians intent on annihilating civilisation.

At the time of Netanyahu’s statement, Israel had killed at least 20,424 Palestinians in Gaza in response to the atrocities committed by the military wing of Hamas on 7 October 2023. More than 54,000 Palestinians had been wounded. Many thousands more were decomposing under the rubble of buildings that Israel had destroyed in its carpet-bombing campaign.

J.M. Coetzee’s allegorical novel Waiting for the Barbarians concerns itself with individual choice and responsibility: complicity with an oppressor’s dehumanisation of those whom it oppresses, or a political ethos of standing up for justice for the oppressed. In order to universalise the themes, the novel is not tied to a specific time or place. The unnamed nation state is imagined as Empire because it defines itself by asserting its power through violence over non-citizens, whom the servants of Empire call barbarians. Excepting Israel’s apologists, contemporary readers would have little difficulty recognising the parallels between the Empire and the settler-colonial apartheid state of Israel.

Coetzee’s novel takes its title from C.P. Cavafy’s poem “Waiting for the Barbarians”. The poem ends with the lines “Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians? Those people were a kind of solution.” The barbarians in Cavafy’s poem and Coetzee’s novel are an ideological construct, just like Netanyahu’s barbarians. A construct that provides a pretext for the erasure of Palestinians from their homeland by the IDF, “the most moral army in the world”.

The novel sets up boundaries between citizens and barbarians, only to subvert and invert them. The main “character”, an unnamed magistrate, a functionary of Empire and a purported dispenser of justice by reason of his position, is imprisoned for taking a barbarian prisoner back to her people.

Witnessing the torture of naked barbarians in the public square before an applauding crowd, the magistrate calls out “No! No! No! … You are depraving these people!” As he watches a little girl beat a prisoner with a cane, the magistrate examines his own complicity:

“Would I have dared to face the crowd to demand justice for these ridiculous barbarian prisoners with their backsides in the air? Justice: once that word is uttered, where will it all end? … Easier to lay my head on a block than to defend the cause of justice for the barbarians: for where can that argument lead but to laying down our arms and opening the gates of the town to the people whose land we have raped?”

Violence is the necessary origin of the coloniser as we have seen in the state of Israel, founded upon the killing, dispossession, ethnic cleansing and disenfranchisement of the indigenous Palestinians. Unless Israel confronts its origins — which it shows no signs of doing — the state condemns itself to ongoing violence as a means of perpetuating itself. Hence the need for a political rhetoric that calls Palestinians “barbarians” and “human animals” and smears its critics as antisemitic.

The targeting, intimidation and attempted silencing of critics of Israel’s egregious violations of Palestinians’ human rights is gathering pace around the world. While visiting Zurich recently, Palestinian-American journalist Ali Abunimah was forced into an unmarked vehicle by plain-clothed police. The journalist was in Switzerland to talk about accountability for Israel and justice for Palestinians. He was accused of “offending against Swiss law” and detained in a Swiss prison for three days without charge before being deported. Abunimah’s books include The Battle for Justice in Palestine.

As Jewish Israeli scholar Raz Segal wrote recently in Jacobin, anti-Zionist Jews including Holocaust and genocide studies scholars whose work draws on what Segal describes as “the vast and growing body of sources on Israel’s genocide in Gaza”, are being denounced as antisemitic. “But accusing us of antisemitism for the way we identify as Jews reproduces the antisemitic view that denies plural Jewish identities to cast all Jews as one and the same, ‘The Jews’.”

The same tactic is being used here in Australia. In an attempt to silence Jewish critics of Israel, the Murdoch press and right-wing pro-Israel groups are engaging in a smear campaign against Sarah Schwartz, executive director of the Jewish Council of Australia. As the JCA’s article in Pearls and Irritations explains, Schwartz’s presentation at a Queensland University of Technology comedy event critiqued the racist stereotypes of Jewish people promoted by Peter Dutton and the far-right. In order to use Jews to push their divisive agenda, Dutton and others are attempting to suppress the voices of Jews like Schwarz and the JCA who don’t fit their stereotypes. The JCA works against all forms of racism, criticises Israel’s crimes, and advocates for human rights and justice for Palestinians.

Our spineless politicians continue to provide Israel with diplomatic and moral cover. Conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism, they utter abstractions such as Israel’s “right to defend itself against terrorism”, thereby rationalising Israel’s atrocities in a shocking display of indifference to the mass slaughter and maiming of Palestinian men, women, children and babies, and the obliteration of Gaza.

At this critical moment with an impending federal election, we would do well to remember Coetzee’s magistrate. We have a choice. Do we obey our politicians and remain silent out of fear of being labelled antisemitic, or do we insist that advocating for equality for Palestinians is an anti-racist position? Do we continue our public demands for justice and equality for Palestinians while opposing all forms of racism including antisemitism, or are we cowed into silence by those who stand by Israel, no matter how blatant, egregious and well-documented its continuing violations of international law are?

As Hannah Arendt observed, cohabitation with diverse others is not a choice, but a condition of our political life. Coetzee’s novel demands that we reject the false dichotomies between “civilisation” and “barbarians”, citizen and disposable “other”, opting instead for a political ethics of justice and equality for all, anchored in our human commonality and democratic plurality.

We are standing on a moral precipice. As well as condemning all forms of racism, including the increasing incidence of antisemitic attacks, we must continue to condemn Israel’s genocide of Palestinians. The two positions are not mutually exclusive as some politicians and commentators would have us believe.

Demanding justice and equality for Palestinians is an anti-racist cause.





Angela Smith

Angela Smith is a former lawyer with broad legal experience including in refugee law and the university sector. Her writing has been published widely and can be found in such places as The Guardian (online), Griffith Review, Meanjin, New Philosopher and Overland.