Reading Nietzsche in the Wake of the 2008-9 War on Gaza

In late January 2009, I sat down to re-read Nietz sche’s Geneal-ogy of Morals. I remember this otherwise uneventful event so distinctly because at that moment the first of Israel’s series of twenty-first-century wars on Gaza was brutally and unremit-tingly underway. During that three-week-long military attack, Israel killed over 1,400 Palestinians, most of whom were civil-ians and approximately 400 of whom were children. Israel, in fact, deliberately targeted civilians — including children and humanitarian aid workers — assaulting Palestinians simulta-neously by air, land, and sea, and deploying white phosphorus against them, a chemical intended to operate as a smokescreen for troop movements but when used as a weapon burns people’s flesh down to the bone.1 The brutality of Israel’s war was all the more agonizing due to the fact that the people of Gaza were not allowed to leave there, Gaza itself being among the most dense-ly populated areas on the earth. This unrelenting, intentional, and indiscriminate massacre, conducted by one of the largest military powers in the world against a largely unarmed, civil-ian, refugee, and subject population, resulted in mass murder, rampant homelessness, devastation of Gaza’s infrastructure, and destruction of the major institutions and workings of Palestin-ian daily life, including schools, universities, mosques, hospi-tals, and roads.