Gaza is the compass. These words—emblazoned on large banners at the 2025 People's Conference For Palestine in Detroit, and frequently invoked by comrades in the Palestinian Youth Movement at speeches and rallies—contain a truth with which so much of the world has yet to reckon, though it will sweep them along regardless.
In other words, Gaza is the place—and the event—in reference to which we must orient our actions, our thoughts, our lives. It is the most important place in the world right now, because the genocide taking place in all of historic Palestine, with Gaza as its most brutal flashpoint, reveals the foundation of violence and domination on which the architecture of the present world order has been built, as well as the terrible struggle that will be necessary to tear it down.
It is understandable, then, that so many writers have turned their attention to Gaza since 2023. Indeed, this attention is exactly what is required of us. A failure to think about Gaza means a failure to think at all: Any thought which bears no trace of the absolute inhumanity of the present has already taken the side of the murderers. Thinking about Gaza implies a responsibility as well: to treat the subject with the requisite seriousness and attention so that one does not add to the significant trove of poor, cynical writing on the Palestinian people and their struggle; to understand one’s limitations while simultaneously attempting to reach outside them; to assimilate horror, yes, but to think beyond it towards liberation as well.
Many Western thinkers have, predictably, collapsed before this responsibility. “Collapse” isn’t quite right—wishful thinking, perhaps—because they unfortunately continue to write. One expects racist invective, false histories, and motivated reasoning from those on the political right like Ben Shapiro or Bernard-Henri Lévy, or from liberal Zionist thinkers like Michael Walzer (the “just war theorist” who, through crocodile tears, has supported every one of Israel’s wars even as he has decried some of its tactics). One expects it as well from ostensibly left-wing German thinkers, like Rainer Forst and the recently deceased Jurgen Habermas, who, one month into the genocide, declared their unwavering solidarity with Israel in an open letter published by Goethe University Frankfurt. But theirs is a specifically German psychosis, and one expects better from those on the left writing from outside the zone of contagion.
As one looks around, one sees failure after failure: a combination of an insufficiently developed anti-imperialism among the U.S.-European left, a long-dormant internationalism, and a latent (or not so latent) racism. These thinkers may agonize over the genocide and the reactionary Israeli regime, but it is clear that they prefer a silence over the terrible sounds of the struggle for liberation.
In the pages of Project Syndicate, for example, the philosopher Slavoj Zizek has written a series of articles in which he condemns Israel for its slaughter of the Palestinians, and Hamas for resisting that slaughter. In the interest of fairness, he writes, “Hamas and Israeli hardliners are two sides of the same coin”—as if there could be an equivalence between an uncompromising insistence on extermination and an uncompromising insistence on survival. In a different piece, Zizek stages an imaginary phone call between the Israeli government and Hamas, in which the former asks the latter to attack in order to distract from the slow annexation of the West Bank, and the latter demands in return: “You must bomb civilians in Gaza, killing thousands, especially children. That will foment anti-Semitism around the world, which is our true goal!” This phone call “is not part of reality,” the philosopher admits, “but it is real” nevertheless.
Others on the left—best exemplified by a piece in Internationalist Perspective—decry the genocide but maintain that “the enemy is not this or that state, not this or that army” but capitalism itself, and that Palestinians would be better served by refusing “every camp and every flag” and carrying arms only in service of class struggle. Of course, one cannot hope to fight capitalism if one has been murdered by “this or that army” which has indeed declared itself an enemy of humanity, whether the authors at Internationalist Perspective can see it or not.
Perhaps most frustrating among this growing body of failures, however, is septuagenarian Italian philosopher Franco "Bifo" Berardi’s new book Thinking Gaza: An Essay on Ferocity. Berardi has long been a prominent thinker on the European left—a veteran of the Italian Autonomia Operaia movement, his eclectic oeuvre, drawing from Marxist and Freudian thought, includes work on topics like school shooters, artificial intelligence, and finance capital. That he should turn his attention to the Gaza genocide is no surprise.
What is surprising is that over the course of Thinking Gaza’s 200 or so pages, it becomes clear that Berardi has not been paying very much attention at all. The book—written in a series of repetitive, aphoristic, and shallow declarations—instead evinces a deep and at times racist ignorance of Palestine’s history, its people, its political landscape, and the moral stakes of the moment. Indeed, for long stretches of the book, Gaza is removed from the picture entirely—muscled out of frame by a series of trite digressions on AI, global birth rate declines, Donald Trump, and, bafflingly, Congressman Jamie Raskin’s memoir. Instead of a sustained engagement with Gaza and its meaning for the world, what emerges is a scattered and facile cry of despair. With Thinking Gaza, Berardi has failed to think.
As the book’s title suggests, Gaza here functions as an occasion for thinking about the concept of “ferocity,” which Berardi defines as “an animal reflex inscribed in the instinct of self-preservation.” Ferocity, in Berardi’s telling, is pre-rational, a bodily reaction to pain. He allows that it can coexist alongside cruelty—a “perverse desire” to inflict pain—but unlike cruelty, ferocity is a physical rather than a mental phenomenon. Because ferocity is pre-rational, it is also pre-linguistic, and thus for Berardi pre- or anti-civilizational. As he writes, civilization is nothing more than the attempt to “submit ferocity to politics and instinct to will, which can together be summarized as the submission of chaos to language.” Where ferocity rules, “the dimension of history is left behind, and we fully reenter the sphere of nature.”
But is this violence really so blind? The concept of self-preservation is neither innocent nor natural: The “self” to be preserved is mediated by social processes. It presents not as a mere lump of flesh which hits out against negative stimuli, but as a collection of desires and drives and needs which vary across time and place, and which correspond to the economic and political organization of the society in which that “self” was formed. Those things which one requires to reproduce themselves—the protection of which we would call self-preservation—will vary from context to context, and thus “ferocity” will everywhere be triggered by fundamentally different kinds of attacks. Ferocity, if conceptualized as an automatic physical response, cannot be submitted to politics, nor would such submission—which would begin to look like the abnegation of the will to live—be conducive to the construction of “civilizations.” Bifo’s conception of ferocity contra civilization or ferocity contra language must entail more.
Self-preservation, then, might better or more honestly be articulated as “self-interest.” Berardi never cites him, but here he is simply recapitulating one of Sigmund Freud’s most basic insights from Civilization and Its Discontents: that in order for people to live collectively, the pleasure principle must bow to reality, certain drives and urges must go unsated out of respect for the autonomy of the other and of the communal authority which allows the social to emerge in the first place.
That ferocity and need must be mediated if they are to have any kind of political sense remains true, per force, on the level of the state, for which self-preservation cannot in any sense be conceived of as purely instinctual or bodily except by strained metaphor. On the level of the state, self-preservation becomes a matter of preserving a political system, of preserving a position of privilege in the world system, of preserving access to valuable resources, etc. When speaking of Western states, self-preservation often looks like the preservation of ill-gotten gains, or of the right to dominate. The domination, subjugation, enslavement, and extermination that have marked the ascent of Western civilization have not been the result of a regressive “ferocity,” but rather the consequences of “progress” itself. Instrumental reason—by which humanity came to dominate nature and construct the modern world—ends by turning people into nature in turn. People become inputs, material to be used and discarded.
The distance from Berardi's initial bodily definition of ferocity and the actual contours of the term thus grow even wider once we think through the concept more seriously than its author ever dared. This would perhaps be a less significant shortcoming if it weren’t for the fact that it is exactly on the level of the state or on the level of civilization—and not the individual—that Berardi seeks to explore the concept of ferocity throughout Thinking Gaza.
The Israeli response to Tufan al-Aqsa, Berardi writes, was a product of both ferocity and cruelty. The country was attacked by Hamas and other armed groups, and responded out of an instinct of self-preservation, with an added perverse desire to cause suffering. After all, he writes, Hamas had carried out a “pogrom” exactly like those “against the Rohingya population in Myanmar, the pogrom that the Islamists of Daesh carried out against the Yazidi people, and also the pogroms that the Israeli settlers conducted in the occupied territories of the West Bank.” It was thus “completely understandable that Jews felt the danger of anti-Semitism reemerging. The trauma of the Holocaust resurfaced, provoking an understandable, and even sharable, reaction of self-defence.”
Drawing this kind of rancid equivalence between Israel’s decades-long domination of the Palestinians and Palestinian revolutionary violence, occurs again and again throughout the book, as does the repetition of the Zionist insistence on Holocaust trauma as both an ex-ante and ex-post justification for Israel’s crimes. In one particularly egregious line, Berardi writes, “There is something monstrous in the minds of the Palestinians who have lived in terror. And there is something equally monstrous in the minds of the Israelis.” Both Palestinians and Israelis, he suggests, are motivated by ferocity, and each of their violences heralds a world in which violence is the rule.
Violence and the desire to commit it refer here to a kind of pre-political harm. But again, thinking demands more. Palestinian ferocity, to use Berardi's terms, is quite literally self-preserving in the bodily sense: The Israelis are seeking to exterminate the Palestinians of Gaza by siege, starvation, bombs, and bullets. In a broader sense, it is also aimed at preserving the possibility of freedom from domination, at preserving the horizon of liberation—at preserving any prospect of a “self” that might live in dignity. Israeli ferocity is in service of the maintenance of that regime domination and extermination. This is also in a sense “self-preservation,” because Zionism is coextensive with the murder it enacts: Since it began, the Zionist project could only pursue its aims—so pithily described by Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich as “maximum territory, minimum [Arab] population,” or as Palestinian scholar Fayez Sayegh articulated it in 1965, “racial purity and racial exclusiveness in the land”—through expulsion or extermination. Self-preservation in the Israeli sense looks only like genocide or ethnic cleansing, because the “self” is only truly realized when the territory of (greater) Israel is under exclusive Jewish political and demographic control.
Despite Berardi’s acceptance of Zionist premises throughout this book, I do not mean to suggest that he is himself a Zionist. It is clear from Thinking Gaza that Berardi understands the extent to which Israel and the Zionism that birthed it cannot be allowed to continue. As he explicitly states midway through the book: “Anyone who is not acting in bad faith must recognize that peace can only return to the area when the State of Israel has been erased from the map.” Or, just a few pages later: “The state of Israel was from the beginning an artificial construction that could only be sustained by oppression and by violence.” But this recognition of the nature of Israel only makes his failure to actually think about Palestine and Palestinians that much more disappointing.
If, as Berardi correctly identifies, the Israelis represent a negation of human solidarity and coexistence, then his refusal to distinguish their violence from Palestinian counterviolence leads him down some truly unforgivable paths. Consider the following passage:
“Ethics is the evaluation of action from the point of view of the good of the other as a continuation of the self [...] Ethics is dead, and piety is dead. There is no ethics in the behavior of young people who grew up in the prison of Gaza, because their minds cannot consider the other (the Israeli soldier who awaits them with his weapon drawn, at every crossroads) except as a jailer, torturer, mortal enemy.”
The young people of Gaza see the Israeli as a jailer, torturer, and mortal enemy because for them he is a jailer, torturer, and mortal enemy. The relations of domination are such that the child from Gaza cannot exit the strip to join their good Israeli tormentors on the beaches of Tel Aviv, cannot see the soldier in his civilian clothes happily drinking espresso at the cafe, because the purpose of the Israeli soldier is to violently enforce the racial hierarchy such that this sight is impossible. The happiness of the good Israeli tormentor on the beaches of Tel Aviv is premised precisely on the absence of the Palestinian, and so, when called, he will assume the role of the jailer, torturer, and mortal enemy one day in order to secure his continued satisfaction the next.
This does not, of course, mean that “there is no ethics in the behavior of young people who grew up in the prison of Gaza”—a line that could well have been uttered by Benjamin Netanyahu or any number of Israeli genocidaires. That the bonds of social solidarity persist within dilapidated tent encampments, that common people have demonstrated uncommon heroism and ingenuity under conditions designed to break them—that is an ethics worth emulating.
If the Palestinians were allowed to speak in Thinking Gaza—if Berardi bothered with their political aspirations, writing, or humanity—then he may have avoided passages like the above. But throughout the book, Palestinians play only a secondary role: at once victims of and the backdrop to someone else's story. Some of this is the result of a faulty historical understanding of the Zionist colonization of Palestine, which Berardi situates as both motivated by and justified by the Holocaust. As Sabri Jiryis’s recently republished The Foundations of Zionism so thoroughly demonstrates, the Zionist project of colonization began well before the Holocaust, and was motivated by the racial and nationalist ideologies sweeping Europe around the turn of the 19th century as much as by anti-Jewish persecution.
In Berardi’s telling, however, the Zionist project is a continuation of the Holocaust, not its negation. In one sense, this is accurate: Zionism is indeed a recapitulation of the same racial thinking, instrumental rationality, persecution mania, and colonial violence that the Nazis enacted across Europe. But Berardi does not mean it in this sense. Rather, because Palestine is “the most dangerous place in the world for the Jews,” he sees the Jewish colonization of Palestine as “the continuation of the death machine that Nazism built for the Jews of Europe.” He goes so far as to erroneously assert that “it is not the Jews who wanted to return to Palestine. It is the European (not only German) Nazis who pushed them to leave.” The greatest victims of the Zionists, in Berardi's telling, have not been the Palestinians, but the Jews. Zionism, he writes, was “a trap” for the persecuted Jews of Europe, as if the Palestinians had been lying in wait to be exiled and slaughtered only in order to defame them and bring about their spiritual ruin.
Even when Berardi mentions those resisting Zionism, Palestinians are largely sidelined for Jewish actors: “Gaza has become the nucleus of an ethical revolt of global proportions” he writes, with Israel and the White World “besieged by the growing hatred of the Global South and also by the revolt of young people—first and foremost, by the revolt of American Jewish students.” Again, the Palestinians are mere props in a Jewish and Western story. In this regard, Berardi has fulfilled the ideological destiny of so many white European leftists: bog-standard liberal Orientalism. The Arab can be a victim, an object of pity, but action is for the West. When the Arab does fight for national liberation, Berardi marks them as “fascist,” as he did in a 2024 interview in the Critical Inquiry blog. There are protagonists to history; if they cannot be found among the white world Berardi claims to despise, well, then history must have ended.
This is exactly Berardi’s diagnosis: The spiritual ruin wrought by the Israelis is also the irreparable spiritual ruin of the world. If the Jewish victims of the Holocaust have themselves perpetrated their own in turn, Berardi writes, this demonstrates that “racism and war have returned with great fanfare [...] and now evidently all hope has been extinguished in Gaza [...] there is no longer any point in continuing. There is no hope that humanity can ever be human.” This is “the final century [...] 'Thinking Gaza' means to think no future, no hope, no universality, no humanity.” Force—or ferocity, as Berardi would have it—will be the only rule from here on out: The genocidal destruction of the world’s political and economic surplus populations, of each individual state’s hated Other, will become commonplace. There is good reason to believe this beyond the genocide in Gaza: the U.S.-Israel war against Iran, the U.S. murders in the Caribbean, the U.S. blockade on Cuba, ICE and Frontex, the genocide in Sudan, state-sanctioned anti-Muslim violence across India.What Berardi misses is that a crisis is not an end, but a beginning. The growing reliance on force is a sign of decadence in the world system and in its hegemon: the U.S. empire. Things are breaking down, but this is not a permanent state of affairs. The genocide in Gaza—which, more than any other disaster, reveals the contradictions at the core of the crisis—is the end of this world, but only in the sense that something else must and will come to replace it. Whether that something will be better or worse is up to us.
Through their steadfast refusal to capitulate to Zionist aggression, the Palestinians have shown the world one way to climb out of hell. Berardi offers a different vision, one in which hell is already presumed victorious. There is no future, he writes, and we must embrace this fact. We must understand that we are at the end. And “those who have the courage to understand,” he writes, “will not contribute to reproducing the human race, because the human experiment has failed, and this time the failure is without appeal [...] There is no hope that humanity can ever be human.” There is only one option left: a refusal to procreate, anti-natalism as global policy, mass suicide for those who prefer not to wait.
The resignation Berardi advocates for in Thinking Gaza, then, can only be the result of his consistent inability to see the Palestinians as people. Bifo universalizes and dehistoricizes the specificities of Zionist particularism—the drive for racial self-segregation and the negation of the Other on ever greater swaths of territory—and thus imagines the world to be locked in a genocidal cycle of Zionist design. Here, he implicitly recapitulates a favorite Zionist justificatory fantasy (a favorite of regimes of domination throughout history) even in his ostensible condemnation: that the Palestinians would behave just as the Israelis do should they ever win their freedom, thus necessitating ever crueler measures to prevent this eventuality.
The world is presently locked in a cycle of increasingly cataclysmic violence because the conditions that have led to the many Holocausts of capitalist modernity continue to persist. Zionism is the contemporary avatar of these conditions, and it is, in this sense, an anachronism. It loudly celebrates all those evils which the liberal international order had publicly but falsely disavowed: colonialism, racism, ethnic chauvinism, apartheid, and genocide. It is less a return of the repressed than the bad conscience of a world order which always kept one finger on the trigger, lest someone take it at its word.
Thinking Gaza begins with an epigraph taken from Theodor W. Adorno’s Negative Dialectics, which reads: “Auschwitz demonstrated irrefutably that culture has failed. [...] All post-Auschwitz culture, including its urgent critique, is garbage.” True enough, but Berardi stops the passage too early, excluding the dialectical turn. Adorno continues: “Whoever pleads for the preservation of a radically culpable and shabby culture turns into its accomplice, while those who renounce culture altogether immediately promote the barbarism which culture reveals itself to be.” Berardi, in his Western solipsism, embraces defeat, and in so doing, he throws his lot in with absolute horror and the killers who create it instead of those who can still somehow see the light of redemption.
At the same time that I was reading Thinking Gaza, Omar Hamad and Ibrahim Massri—two Palestinian writers in Gaza—managed, amidst the greatest physical and moral ruin, to finish building a library from the rubble of Gaza City. These young men in Gaza—in whose behavior Berardi sees “no ethics”—could humble the world with their humanity if only the world would look.
Omar does not know me and I do not know him, but I have been following him online since the genocide began. He has suffered immensely, more than any of us in the West can comprehend. While his writing has been filled with anguish and bitterness and rage, he has never succumbed to resignation. He has refused to die; he has refused defeat.
And now he has built a library. And now he announces the future to anyone who will listen.
