Has Israel Learned Europe’s Gaze?
There is an uncomfortable question that Israeli political language rarely allows itself to ask: has the State of Israel begun to produce Palestinians through a structure similar to the one through which particular European secular, colonial, and administrative regimes historically produced “Islam” as a political and social problem? This is not an argument that Israel is simply Europe, that Zionism can be reduced to colonialism, or that Jewish and Muslim histories can be collapsed into the same moral story. Such comparisons are too easy and therefore usually misleading. The question is narrower: who is allowed to appear as a full political subject, and who appears mainly as an object to be interpreted, managed, monitored, controlled, or feared?
Modern Europe did not merely disagree with Islam. In different historical settings, it repeatedly constructed “Islam” as something to be interpreted, regulated, modernized, integrated, tolerated, surveilled, secured against, or explained. European institutions retained the authority to ask the questions, while Muslims increasingly became those about whom the questions were asked. This asymmetry matters because it shapes political intelligibility itself. A political subject can calculate, hesitate, make mistakes, revise strategy, contain internal disagreements, pursue conflicting interests, and learn from failure. A security object can threaten, radicalize, destabilize, or require control. One inhabits history as an actor; the other appears primarily as a problem.
Something disturbingly similar can be detected in the political language through which Palestinians increasingly appear in Israeli discourse. Israel is allowed strategy, while Palestinians are more often assigned intention. Israel makes mistakes; Palestinians reveal what they are. Israel responds to circumstances; Palestinians become the circumstances to which Israel must respond. Israeli violence can be described as excessive, badly planned, politically costly, tactically mistaken, or strategically counterproductive. Palestinian violence, by contrast, is much more easily treated as evidence of a deeper and more permanent nature. This is not merely a rhetorical difference. It determines which explanations remain politically available.
Israeli politics can be described in great detail. We speak of ministers, generals, intelligence agencies, coalition pressures, ideological factions, institutional rivalries, military doctrines, strategic miscalculations, and public opinion. Palestinian society, however, can suddenly collapse into a small number of categories: “Hamas,” “terror infrastructure,” “the population of Gaza,” or simply “the threat.” One side retains complexity while the other loses it. No conspiracy is required for this to happen, and no central censorship is necessary. The effect can emerge through ordinary political vocabulary, especially through the language of security, which often presents itself as neutral description while quietly deciding which differences matter and which disappear.
Once an entire population becomes understandable mainly as a security environment, something fundamental has already changed. Its suffering may still be acknowledged, humanitarian aid may still be delivered, deaths may still be counted, and displacement may still provoke concern. Yet none of this automatically restores political subjecthood. Humanitarian visibility is not the same as political visibility. A population can be intensely visible and still remain politically absent because being seen as suffering is not the same as being recognized as capable of judgment, disagreement, strategy, responsibility, memory, error, and change.
The European history of Islam is instructive precisely because Muslims were never simply invisible in modern European thought. Quite the opposite: Islam became extraordinarily visible. It was studied, classified, represented, debated, translated, administered, and governed. But this intense visibility often came with a restriction. Muslims entered political discussion through categories prepared in advance by states, churches, colonial administrations, universities, courts, and later security institutions. The deeper question was therefore never only what Europe said about Islam, but who possessed the authority to decide what Islam was allowed to be.
Israel should be willing to ask a similar question about Palestinians. Who decides which Palestinian actions count as political actions and which are treated merely as expressions of hostility? Who decides whether Palestinian fear has political meaning or is only an obstacle to Israeli security? Under what conditions can Palestinian disagreement, calculation, strategic failure, historical memory, moral reasoning, or internal conflict become understandable without first being translated into Israeli security categories? These questions do not require romanticizing Palestinian politics, nor do they require minimizing responsibility where responsibility exists.
Political subjecthood does not mean innocence. Recognizing Palestinians as political actors does not reduce the responsibility of Hamas for atrocities. In fact, responsibility becomes fully meaningful only where agency is first recognized. You cannot seriously hold someone politically responsible while simultaneously treating them as nothing more than an expression of danger. Reducing an adversary to a security object therefore does not strengthen moral judgment. It weakens it, because judgment requires distinctions, and distinctions begin to disappear once an entire population is understood primarily as a carrier of threat.
When that happens, the militant, the voter, the child, the doctor, the civil servant, the refugee, the opponent of Hamas, and the politically uninvolved person begin to occupy the same conceptual space. They remain different administratively and biologically, but they become less and less different politically. This is the point at which security logic begins to consume political judgment. What disappears is not information but differentiation: the capacity to recognize that different actors occupy different positions, possess different intentions, and carry different forms of responsibility.
Jewish history should make this problem especially difficult to ignore. For centuries, Jews knew what it meant to live inside categories produced by others, to be defined in advance as theological error, alien population, social danger, racial type, or minority problem. Modern emancipation did not immediately abolish this structure; often it merely altered the conditions under which Jewish existence became acceptable. The historical irony would therefore be severe if Jewish sovereignty began to reproduce, toward another population, a structure in which one side retains the power to define how the other side is allowed to appear.
This does not mean that Israelis are “the new Europeans” or that Palestinians are “the new Jews.” History does not repeat itself so neatly, and analogies of that kind obscure more than they reveal. What may repeat are not identities but operations. A state can inherit a way of seeing without inheriting the history that originally produced it, and institutions can reproduce forms of classification long after the ideological language that first justified them has disappeared.
This may be one of the deeper questions facing Israel today. The issue is not only what policies Israel pursues toward Palestinians, but what kind of Palestinian reality must already be assumed for those policies to make sense. Can Palestinians appear as political actors whose actions may be criminal, strategic, irrational, internally disputed, morally indefensible, or simply mistaken? Or must they first pass through the narrower category of security before anything else about them becomes politically intelligible?
If the second possibility increasingly dominates Israeli political perception, then the problem goes beyond policy. Policies can change relatively quickly, while ways of seeing change much more slowly because they determine in advance what can count as a reasonable political question. Europe spent centuries constructing Islam as something simultaneously close, threatening, fascinating, and administratively difficult. Israel should ask whether it has begun constructing Palestinians through a comparable political grammar: permanently present, endlessly discussed, intensely managed, yet increasingly deprived of the qualities through which political actors are normally recognized.
The most dangerous form of exclusion is not always silence. Sometimes it is a language that speaks about someone constantly while making it almost impossible for that person to appear as anything other than the object that language already expects to see. A population can remain continuously visible, endlessly measured, discussed, and governed, while the possibility of appearing as a political subject quietly disappears.
Yochanan Schimmelpfennig
