We know what has and is happening in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank – where violence has bred violence and more violence. After Hamas attacked and killed 1,200 civilians and soldiers in southern Israel, Israel killed over 15,000 people in Gaza by December: terror and more terror against civilians who have no fault in the conflict.
Let me, therefore, reflect here on violence and power, based on Hannah Arendt’s political thoughts – especially her essay On Violence (1970, Norwegian edition in 1971) and the book On Revolution (1963). The question is whether violence actually leads to anything.
Power, as in acting together
The world’s military-industrial complex, including the media, is engaged today in fear-and-enemy-creating activities. And Mao Zedong already said, «power grows out of the barrel of a gun.» But Arendt describes power in an unusual way. For her, power corresponds to the human ability to act together. It means belonging to a larger group – as long as it holds together – that has authority by virtue of established laws. Or free organisations that have legitimacy due to a high level of support – where decisions are made and agreements are reached without the use of violence and coercion. Rather than ‘physical power’ that is exercised through violence, the use of weapons, and military repression, we are talking about a leading authority that is joined by conviction and peaceful means, as opposed to persuasions such as propaganda, coercion, and violence. The expression of opinions that can be convincing takes place in freedom between (equal) people. If not, the political space ceases to exist – which even today is often replaced by fake news, platform denial, offence, and labelling. According to Arendt, power and violence are opposites: Where one is exercised absolutely, the other is absent. Violence can destroy power but is utterly incapable of creating its forms of cooperation and order.
According to Arendt, the use of violence, weapons, and bombs – as we see today in Ukraine and Gaza – renders us speechless. With Aristotle, she rather refers to man as «a political being by virtue of his gift of language.» According to her, political thinking cannot go very deep when it comes to wars and violence. She sees this as more instrumental and relegates the use of violence to more pragmatic or ‘technical’ judgments.
Well, you might ask whether Arendt, as a political thinker, seems somewhat detached or naïve today – as major politicians such as Biden, Putin, Zelenskyj, or Netanyahu are in favour of violence and military repression – as in Ukraine or Gaza.
But read the interview with Jeremy Corbyn. Had he become prime minister, he would at least maintain solution-oriented talks with Russia in 2021-22 rather than escalating the use of arms, as Boris Johnson favoured. Corbyn talks about ‘localism’ rather than more top-down control, hope rather than fear, safety rather than security, and a belief in long-term change. He also avoids putting a ‘terror’ label on Hamas. All in the spirit of Arendt.
What did Hamas think they could achieve with their terrorist action on 7 October?
Hamas and the violence
But what did Hamas think they could achieve with their terrorist action on 7 October? They imperceptibly broke through the so-called impenetrable security fence at around 30 locations, took the Erez border crossing, and then violently killed 1,200 civilians and soldiers, as well as taking 240 hostages back with them. After decades of Israeli repression and violence against the people of Gaza (and the West Bank), it is possible to explain (if not understand or defend) how this very violent backlash finally occurred.
Let me illustrate this with a similar example: the uprising in eastern Algeria in May 1945, after a long repression by the French settlers. A French commission of enquiry subsequently stated the following: «103 Europeans were killed and several women, including one aged 84, were raped. Most of the bodies were mutilated. The genitals were cut off and placed in the mouth, women’s breasts were torn off, and the rebels attacked the bodies with knives.» According to Le Monde diplomatique (November 2023), the French colonial power and European settlers in Algeria responded with violence that killed between 6,000 and 30,000 Algerians. This led to the War of Liberation (1954-62).
If you call something a terrorist organisation, it is considered the very incarnation of evil. Hamas was already labelled by the EU in 2001. Well, they also received 40 percent of the votes in the 2006 parliamentary elections. But ‘terrorists’ are then considered impossible to compromise with; they should rather be exterminated – to ensure that ‘good’ wins. But often, yesterday’s terrorists are tomorrow’s leaders – as freedom fighters. South Africa’s Nelson Mandela is not alone.
Violence and power
So how political – in Arendt’s or Aristotle’s sense – are today’s politicians in, for example, the USA, the EU, and Norway as they exercise Western hegemony? They support Israel’s ‘right to defend itself’ with a blindness to the proportionality of the current levelling of Gaza. As Arendt has put it, the problem is not that ruling politicians and advisers are cold-blooded enough to think the unthinkable, as people are currently being bombed and killed on foot – but that they don’t really think. Politics is about creating legitimate arrangements (the Minsk agreements…), not just exacerbating conflicts as NATO challenged Russia to do in return.
But Arendt was no pacifist either. She previously supported the Six-Day War in 1973 and then the Yom Kippur War but opposed the Vietnam War. She also references Frantz Fanon’s Earth Damned in her book On Revolution: He wrote of the Algerian peasants that «only violence pays» and that «hunger with dignity is preferable to bread consumed in slavery.» Powerlessness or impotence breeds violence. Think of Hamas here. Arendt has also been known to support violence as the only means of liberation. But according to her, if violence can be justified, it will never be legitimate.
Violence also destroys the power Arendt prescribes – where power is restricted, violence is unfortunately invited in. Power requires that many people can act together and create institutional power. She also describes suicide groups (as we know from the second intifada) – but hardly calls them political, even though they ‘act together’ with a strong sense of brotherhood behind their collective violence.
The realism school sees the world as a ruthless security competition.
Liberal or realist?
Finally: Where liberal geopolitics exists in the West, the stated aim is to spread democracy and prosperity – with tolerance for diversity of opinion, recognising that individuals will never fully agree on the best way to live together or be governed.
On the other hand, the realism school today criticises this liberal policy for being too naïve. For example, American political science professor John Mearsheimer believes realism is a better political theory for understanding conflicts and international politics today. Without an overarching authority – yes, we keep seeing that the UN is no good… – that can protect areas such as Gaza, it’s more about balances of power. And ‘weakness’ makes you vulnerable, so NATO’s rearmament spreads to country after country.
The realism school sees the world as a ruthless security competition. The US has also supported violent autocrats, such as Muhammad Reza Pahlavi in Iran and Augusto Pinochet in Chile, and has long backed Israel – as evidenced by the current military forces in the eastern Mediterranean. At the same time, the US dresses up with liberal buzzwords such as ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’…
For her part, Arendt would accuse the realist school of thought of not caring about the international peaceful institutions that are the key to a rule-governed world order. But the US, Israel, and others just don’t care anymore. At the same time, read the speech by Russia’s foreign minister, in which he calls for respect for the UN Charter at the UN – but also be sceptical of Russian totalitarianism. Read about a «world without weapons» in John F. Kennedy’s speech (1963) and the review of Ingeborg Breine’s book.
And Palestinian journalists are killed, trying to use language rather than violence. The Palestinians are in a terrible situation (I have filmed in Israel and the West Bank four times and seen this for myself). The Middle East is struggling, but it has been going on for a long time.
Israeli ministers and military leaders now want to «reconfigure Gaza» – the landlocked territory that has already experienced six wars in seventeen years. So what will happen? Will we get a two-state solution or a displaced people to the Negev or Sinai – like a new nakba (disaster) twice as big as in 1948?
The violence has at least dramatised the situation for Gaza – with enormous attention. But how short-sighted is the Fanonian expression «violence pays»? Doesn’t one imagine how the next generation will hate the Israeli or Palestinian aggressor who killed their siblings and parents? In the long run, this is a long-term vicious circle that will be difficult to replace with legitimate institutions and laws.
At the same time, violent revolutions can also bring about change in a short time (see the article on Pier Paolo Pasolini and Paul the revolutionary). For Arendt, a revolution (On Revolution) nevertheless requires the establishment of subsequent organising institutions – just as she applauded the American Revolution, while the French and Bolshevik revolutions eventually failed – ending only in violence and terror.
