Six weeks into the war, mid-December 2023, the „commentators“ were all abuzz about the alleged 20.000 dead Hamas — “Gaza Health Ministry”, as these terrible clowns styled themselves — had announced after roughly two and half weeks of invasion. I marveled in admiration at how extraordinarily low that figure was, compared to my off-the-cuff expectation weeks earlier.

I put two war outbreaks side by side in my mind, Russia-Ukraine and Hamas-Israel, the war against Hamas was a robust, if ugly, local clash at best by comparison. Yet, strangely, even minds whose profession it is do handle these events in public seemed to have gone into cervical arrest.

I thought if the invasion of Ukraine had been a Russian Chainsaw Massacre1, Gaza was something closer to Israeli nano-surgery. The initial Hamas invasion bore parallels to Russian behavior - with the notable difference that Russia intended to hold ground while Hamas sent its forces into near certain death, aiming to draw in the IDF onto its’ own ground afterwards.

By now I felt that Hamas had not merely gone to war against the State of Israel who would in turn “mow the grass” one more time as it had done for 17 years. This war, by all its features, indicated that a war had been declared on the Jewish people as such worldwide, all 14 million of us. Our pogromists in the Diaspora - “Galut” in Hebrew, meaning “exile” - were chanting in the streets and on US campuses like it was 1968 all over again – but against Jews.

It was stunning to me that an organization like Hamas would be given any credence whatsoever — Israel none at all — by news professionals, diplomats, alleged military experts of all kinds across the board. The gatekeepers of the info-space, worldwide, were not merely laundering the communication strategy of Jew killers – they were willingly falling in line with Hamas itself. There must be some form of orgasmic jubilation in unloading on Israel and Jews generally.

Weaponry

I noted the issue of weaponry. Israel made extensive use of fighter‑bomber aircraft and publicly tracked sorties and “targets struck.” These platforms and their munitions are among the most sophisticated weapons systems ever fielded; the guided bombs and shells they deliver rely on GPS/INS targeting and, when used properly, routinely achieve impact points within around 5 meters of the aimpoint. They are also very expensive. An F‑35 can take to the skies with up to roughly 8,000 kilograms of weapons on ten stations; in a heavy precision‑strike configuration that means an aircraft carrying millions of dollars’ worth of guided munitions in a single sortie.

In purely financial terms, saturating the Strip from outside with a few hundred thousand unguided 155mm shells and rockets would have been cheaper and simpler to execute. The cost that matters for Israel is not primarily monetary but legal and political: the cost of being seen by professionals of the craft (allied militaries) to violate distinction and proportionality in full view of an adversarial media ecosystem—costs that Russia or Hamas, by their own conduct, discount entirely.

The underlying physics is unforgivingly simple. Given a projectile’s muzzle velocity (or drop altitude), mass, drag, and launch angle, one can compute its trajectory, impact point, and residual kinetic energy. Given the explosive type, mass and environment, one can model the expected crater, the over-pressure and fragmentation patterns, and the probability that a human of a given mass and posture at a given distance will be knocked down, injured, or killed. It is “just math” in that sense. But as we saw in Ukraine, the human factor does not disappear entirely beneath elegant equations as illustrated below:

The bomb launched in WW2 dropped from 10 km height and hopefully hit in the general vicinity of the intended target (by few hundred meters), which is why dozens or hundreds or so were dropped at once. Drones are incomparably more precise, with first-person remote pilot and visual zoom-in to target capability.

Tube artillery either is not always what it once was anymore, merely firing blind in the general direction of the adversary. First of all, canons are often digitalized, a fire control computer solving firing tables on the fly sets the right angle and orientation of the tube, sensors measure tube wear, temperature and other parameters. There too, shells can be given parameters as they pass the muzzle and steer towards the target in-flight – there are guided2 (down to 4 meters radius impact precision) and unguided3 shells (150 meter radius).

While the math formulas involved are arcane to laymen, the computational load is not exotic. One can build an algorithm that models an entire tactical sector—weapon types, charge settings, terrain, likely blast effects—on a commercial desktop. Given high‑resolution satellite imagery and some ground truth, one can, in principle, work backwards: classify crater signatures, reconstruct how a building must have been hit and by what ordnance, estimate munition types, and derive a statistical picture of how a campaign was actually fought.

The uncertainties are real; you get ranges and probability distributions, not a divine audit of every impact. But a competent programmer can build a solid tool which will tell when a narrative is physically impossible. So when the Lancet published libelous letters by alleged scientists, who show no sign of having done the most basic ballistics sanity checks, you can almost hear simulation and wargame designers howling at their screens in despair.

And then there is law. Using these means “effectively” under the Hague‑Geneva regime does not just mean hitting what you aim at; it means choosing weapons and methods that allow you to uphold distinction and proportionality in the circumstances as you reasonably understand them. That, in practice, requires substantial advance and real‑time intelligence, because you must be able to say not only “we can hit this window” but also “we have good reason to believe this window currently contains a command cell, not a family.”

Has anyone really asked why Western customers have spent decades pouring billions into 5‑meter CEP4 munitions, collateral‑damage estimators, and AI‑enabled ISR (Intelligence, Surveillance, Reconnaissance) that answers the question: Where is the enemy, what are they doing, and what around them is civilian? Partly because they want more military effect per round—but also because, in an era when every strike is recorded and litigated, states that still care about the Hague and Geneva Conventions insist that their weapons make compliance at least technically possible.

An Israeli artillery officer recounted to me his experience. He was one of the soldiers who had spontaneously, without orders, raced into battle with his brigade on October 7th. He participated in the subsequent campaign, where he sustained an injury. Unable to return to his former position, he was assigned to targeting duty. It involved feeding the targeting data into the systems, verifying each target, choosing what ammunition should be used etc… He was still traumatized and “spun up” from the October 7th atrocities by Hamas. His superior sent him a legal officer to verify compliance. Numerous verbal clashes ensued, the legal officer imposed his judgements on the targeting choices. We can be proud of the officers involved, the clashes and their results. How often do we have such clashes in NATO armies? Let alone such officers.

Western numeracy crisis?

Even the Washington Post barreled headlong into the naughty ditch, emphasizing a „historic human toll“, that 1% of the Gaza population had died. I thought that Jew-killing Germany had rightfully lost 12,5% of its population overall to be brought to unconditional surrender and the Washington Post certainly found that usually worthy of praise. Lets do some numbers, if that’s a problem.

The claim kept being made that the casualties were „the highest ever in such a time-frame“. This discourse made no sense to me intuitively, so I decided to do some math myself.

In the preceding year, Russia had besieged and mercilessly bombed Mariupol in Ukraine, and numerous other urban centers for weeks during the initial invasion and the casualty count was incomparably higher. For Mariupol alone, at least 87.000 deaths within two months (pre-war Mariupol had 423.000 strong population).

In Gaza, the IDF indicated in December 2023 that in its estimate, up to 40% (5-8.000) of the 20.000 victims were Hamas fighters, with estimates of Hamas overall strength ranging between 40,000 and 50,000 combatants.

We now know, from a January 2026 IDF briefing, that Israel itself views the cumulative toll of approximately 71,000 dead as plausible, with an approximate 22,000 being Hamas combatants. That would yield a tentative 2:1 civilian to combatant ratio - already an impressive performance.

In April 2026, Hamas reportedly announced it would distribute stipends to approximately 50,000 families of those it classifies as “martyrs” — a category it controls and which excludes many Gazan families who lost members in the war. It subsequently communicated that 2/3 of the deaths were combat age males.

This is selective patronage to mark loyalty. The program signals that Hamas claims roughly 70% of Gaza’s war dead as aligned with its political-military apparatus in some capacity — whether as armed fighters, administrative personnel, or civilian supporters whose families accept the “resistance martyr” framing.

This matters because Hamas was not merely a militia; it was a governance structure with 40,000–50,000 employees spanning military, security, municipal, health, education, and welfare institutions. Many of these roles were dual-function by design: medical personnel or clerks doubled as tunnel engineers; municipal workers coordinated weapons storage; hospital administrators provided cover for military command centers. Under international humanitarian law, individuals who perform combat-enabling functions are targetable regardless of whether they wear uniforms — targetability follows function, not title.

IDF for Nobel Peace Prize!

The IDF’s claim of ~22,000 confirmed combatant kills out of ~70,000 total dead likely undercounts the true number of legitimate military targets, because it excludes:

• Dual-function administrative personnel whose roles directly supported military operations

• Non-uniformed Hamas political leadership (lawful targets under IHL)

• Police and internal security forces integrated into Hamas’s military command structure

• Logistics, tunneling, and weapons-fabrication personnel (quasi-combatants)

Conversely, it likely includes some casualties who were genuinely non-combatant civilians caught in strikes on dual-use structures. The leaked Israeli intelligence database figure of ~8,900 confirmed operatives almost certainly undercounts by using a narrow definition of “fighter” that excludes the extensive support infrastructure Hamas embedded in civilian institutions.

The actual civilian-to-combatant ratio is therefore contested. Analyses of Hamas’s age‑sex casualty data, however, find adult men — especially those aged 18–45 — vastly over‑represented among the dead relative to their population share, which is exactly what you would expect if targeting were heavily focused on fighters and combat‑enabling personnel embedded in the civilian population. This would bring the ratio between 1:2 and 1:3 — two to three combatants per civilian — which inverts the NATO baseline expectation of up to 4:1 for dense urban warfare .

What is not contested is that Hamas engineered a battlefield where the distinction between civilian and military infrastructure was systematically erased, and then accused Israel of failing to maintain a distinction Hamas itself had destroyed. Israel, operating in one of the densest urban environments on earth against an enemy that had fifteen years to booby-trap it, inverted that ratio!

If that is not a military-ethical achievement deserving international recognition, I am at a loss for what would be. The Nobel Committee gave its 1994 Peace Prize to the man who invented this battlefield. It could do worse than to notice who cleaned it up.

Proportionality

Russia, unlike Israel, had not given gracious four-week evacuation warning before moving in either. It had overrun towns and villages whose inhabitants were often butchered on the spot, those Ukrainian civilians who fled the fighting through Russia were routed into „filtration camps“ where, as Russia later boasted, 800.000 minors had been abducted from their guardians and dispersed across Russia to be russified by force. Couples were split up, men often tortured to death. Any structure with signs of civilian life was targeted for that reason. The ICC, presented with extensive evidence, accepted that the threshold was met for the charge of genocide.

Show me a Russian war, I will show you a genocide. There are nearly 100 minorities in the Russian Federation - if you examine each one, you will often discover that they are the remnants of peoples whom the Mongols and later Muscovites mercilessly slaughtered over centuries, stripped of their identity and dispersed.

Many of the talking points centered on „proportionality“. By every rule on the books, Israel had a mandate as a State to invade the Gaza strip to comprehensively remove the threat to its integrity – both under it‘s own Basic Law and under all international conventions, starting with the UN Charter itself. No one earnestly disputed that.

Figuratively leap-frogging over the Israeli pre-strike repeated evacuation warnings and a laundry list of measures to mitigate non-combatant hits that no NATO army ever dreamt of, Israel stood accused of “excessive“ force. The talking heads ignored that urban warfare is by itself a most deadly type of battlefield and that Israel had to change the makeup of the environment the enemy had carefully constructed to be a sniper and urban guerrilla death trap.

Even ignoring enemy fire and concealed explosive devices, soldiers moving among rubble are at high risk of injury from obstacles and sharp items they might stumble upon while looking elsewhere – like steel bars sticking out or holes obscured by debris in which a foot can be caught, for example.

As for the notion of proportionality, Israel was facing an enemy emphatically vowing to repeat the initial assault again and again. This organization itself backed by a largely fanatized population who had supplied the organization with the human capital required for the operation of October 7th. Laborers from Gaza working in Israel over the years had supplied detailed plans of the surrounding localities and kibbutzim, indicating exactly where civilians could be found and murdered. Thousands of civilians, from children to elderly on crutches, were filmed as they entered devastated Israeli localities to participate in the plunder and slaughter. It was “bring your family to pogrom party day” for Gaza.

Still, when freed hostage Mia Schem — released in December 2023 after fifty-four days in captivity, shot in the arm at the Nova festival and held by a Gazan family — said in her first television interview: “There are no innocent civilians there. Families there live under Hamas.” I take her word for it – she was there, none of us were. Every hostage reiterated the observation that not a single person they encountered ever made a gesture of humanity towards in their entire captivity - that includes those hostages who were held in families.

Nearly all buildings had been booby-trapped and had to be collapsed in advance for the security of Israeli troops. Furthermore, every ammunition fired carried the risk of killing an Israeli hostage purposefully planted there by his or her captors, as tragically occurred on some occasions. In one instance, soldiers could not hear the order to cease fire because a tank rolling too near drowned out his voice.

The other belligerent meanwhile had spent 15 years building a battlefield dedicated to maximizing the exposure of its population to Israeli fire. The tunnels for military use under the towns themselves are war crimes.

I also had looked at the demographic makeup of the Gaza Strip, finding that between 2005 and 2023, the population doubled – which means 50% of the population is below 18 years, had known nothing else but Hamas in their lives. 2.1 million persons, which roughly breaks down as follows: 523.000 adult males (24,9%), 590.000 adult females (28%), 520.000 minor females(24,9%), 460.000 minor males(22%). 2.6% of the total population is above 65 years. This is the overall distribution of ages and sexes.

Statistically, if Israel had been firing randomly into that mass – if it had simply poured explosives into the crowd – you would expect the victims to mirror that age‑sex distribution. That they do not, even in Hamas’s own casualty lists, is an inconvenient piece of evidence that too few in a television studio seemed interested in exploring. What Hamas did, as it developed its underground fortifications, was also to develop its pool of future recruits and of future splattered corpses for Western screens. It built a war machine padded with the flesh of a hyper‑youthful population, and it fights in ways that guarantee that its own children’s bodies will be part of the imagery. The propaganda economy of the West needs those images; Hamas organized its battlefield to supply them.

Yet even on this front, it became clear at length that Israel defeated Hamas. Tens of thousands of AI-generated distressing images of wounded and killed youths saturated the internet, sometimes slurped up cravenly by legacy media as crispy blood-libel material for the days headline. The battle itself was not producing a sufficient supply of genuine splattered children corpses, Hamas had to use AI platforms to help out.

There was also a specific genre called “Gazawood”, in which the same individuals filmed themselves sustaining severe injuries in various locations on the same day and despite repeated deaths, proceeded the next day with new adventures. Another favorite was body-bags with corpses moving uncomfortably inside - this is the Holy Land, people routinely come back from the dead as we well know.

While attribution for many clips is murky and some alleged fakes were later shown to be real, the net effect was the same: a visual environment in which Western audiences were saturated with emotionally calibrated images, often divorced from verifiable context.

One of these superheroes, Hamas member Saleh al-Jafarawi, became a celebrity, earning himself a nickname online “Mr FAFO5” . He finally found out in October 2025, reportedly killed during a firefight between Hamas and the Doghmush clan in Gaza City; Hamas‑linked channels and local media circulated footage of his body.

Humanitarian aid? Plenty

Lastly, there were screaming matches over numbers relating to humanitarian aid. It was held as article of faith that “Israel illegally blocked aid”. Have a look here:

COGAT humanitarian aid dashboard

Lets not forget the legal frame as well:

The highlighted passage does not support the slogan that any interference with aid is “illegal”; it does the opposite. It expressly allows a state to refuse or condition free passage if there are serious reasons to fear diversion, lack of effective control, or a definite advantage to the enemy’s war effort — exactly the pattern you get when Hamas systematically confiscates and resells UNRWA‑bound consignments, and uses control over food as a lever of recruitment and punishment.

As for volume, 2.1 million tons of aid came in throughout the war - that’s literally 1 ton/person in the Gaza Strip. If furthermore combat operations are taking place, aid will be interrupted. Several Egyptian truck drivers were even lynched by the crowds when they drove in.

These lynchings have a prosaic explanation. The trucks were destined to UNWRA warehouses under Hamas control. Hamas would then confiscate these loads and sell them at high prices to the population - War crime #1. The main income for families in turn was salary given by Hamas, so males would have to join Hamas to get the money that had been gouged from them in the first place for their families to buy the goods. War crime #2. However, Hamas controlled the delivery circuits, so that families who rejected Hamas were barred from buying aid. War crime #3.

Thus, the throngs of Gazans sought to intercept them before Hamas could. UN truck cabins were reinforced, fortified, so that the drivers could hit the hammer to plow through regardless (there’s about 20 tons of goods on that truck). In the desperate rage to stop the vehicle, some men succeeded in prying open the cabin and dragging out the drivers. Israel is entirely innocent of the conditions that led to these acts.

Israel warned population in advance of operations by all means of communication at its disposal: direct phone calls to activated simcards inside target buildings, flyers, social media posts and more. Israel went to great lengths and at great cost - in treasure, lives and operational advantage - to ensure as much as operationally possible, under the given conditions of a purpose built battlefield, compliance with a standard that no other military feels compelled to meet, above and beyond applicable legal requirements, including in ensuring aid deliveries. Israel did not cave to the most vengeful rhetoric and impulse of certain public figures.

Were soldiers driven by a desire for revenge? Naturally so, I myself unreservedly am on the “Bomber Harris do it again” team and I mean it too - killing Jews should come at a entirely unacceptable cost for the aggressor, ideally impose a multi-generational trauma on it. That does not imply that acting on that virulent impulse is what should be done, quite the opposite: to consciously hold against it is what’s at the heart of Jewish civilization. By any measure, it’s far superior - even as it might feel almost like self-harm in the moment.

Part 1

The events following October 7th 2023 forced me, by December, to discard a number of notions I had carried since childhood. I had no ready-made replacements and had to improvise new ones as I went.

While friends and acquaintances – and numerous Jewish public figures – saw relationships with gentiles brutally snapped, I had the impression the universe was quietly rewarding my pickiness: my private orbit held. Even better, as if oddly charmed, it expanded apace.

I must also add that I had few people to lose to begin with. So on a personal level, it was all gravy, we were planning a wedding in the spring.

Outside of that comfortable sphere, it was a hurricane of fire and Jew hatred the likes of which centenarians who remembered pre-Shoah days later said had surfaced feelings from childhood - a once in a century event. It was not new that a person expressing positive attitudes towards Israel would experience breaking relationship and be shunned in Germany, an acquaintance had mentioned such an experience of hers dating back to the 1990s. The systemic scale was new.

At work, not a syllable so far had been uttered by me or my colleagues about what was going on. Only in late February or March, the illusion of indifference began slipping. It's an IT company, all-male cast, computer engineering nerds and I'm the single token Jew at hand.

The danger zone is the lunch break - when the honking clueless chap passing as my senior manager is in the mood for carnival time. It started with “ah, the Jews, they are so ubiquitous, you know, they just stick out somehow…”, and by the following year one of the duller underlings ventured a concentration camp joke – which I countered and topped with a similarly themed inmate joke recorded by Tadeusz Borowski, a former Auschwitz prisoner, in his stories. That particular incident started with the question “Are you a Zionist?” and ended with Tadeusz Borowsky1 within 10 minutes.

I turned these exchanges into stand-up routines, designed to expose the stupidity of the remarks, and I basked in the palpable embarrassment in the room. In reality, relations with a number of colleagues were imbued with silent mutual disdain as a consequence and one of them even, face to face, implied that Israel should not have been founded.

From the very day the Hamas invasion was ongoing, sympathizers of Hamas masquerading as “pro-Palestine” took to the streets while accusing Israel of “genocide” and of being an “apartheid state” (which is interesting coming from people who would refuse to recognize its existence as a State at all and usually go for the comical “Zionist entity” terminology). The discourse that inundated media and streets bore almost no relation to events in the physical world.

I was genuinely appalled to see governments in Europe picking it up. Elected officials gradually waded into it too and six months later electioneering with it.

It compelled me to review some cardinal notions of my worldview.

Belonging

The first and most obvious one was the notion of belonging - that was fairly easy to address. The circumstances of life and History had equipped me with more than one citizenship from birth and I had reclaimed another because it was my right to do so.

In the pandemonium of antisemitism, I realized I belonged to none of the peoples of these States. These documents were merely that: papers indicating registration with certain states and saying nothing of identity per se2. My people, for all intents and purposes, is the Jewish people exclusively - I jettisoned my inner attachments to the others during these weeks.

It was bizarre, bemusing perhaps, to think the one State I felt I would belong to was the one whose document I did not yet possess. I sensed the others whose documents I did have could, eventually, turn against me as their peoples on the streets were hounding Jews in their midst.

Vocabulary

The initial invasion on October 7 flew the “Palestinian” banner and claimed to act in that name, loudly cheered on by much of the so‑called pro‑Palestine Diaspora. In response I found myself stripping the term back down to history and description. Rather than grant a national label, I began to think of the perpetrators and their supporters as “Mandate Arabs”: Arabs of the British Mandate territory who, after their leadership’s decision to reject partition and wage war in 1948, and losing, found themselves stateless or under sovereignty of neighboring Arab States. The name is a reminder that their current condition is not primordial but the result of political choices.

On the other side stand the resident non‑Jews under Jewish sovereignty – Israeli Arabs, Druze, Christians and others – who accept basic moral law and live within the framework of a Jewish state. In Jewish terms, they resemble what our sources call gerim toshavim, resident aliens: non‑Jews entitled to live in the land, bound by the Noahide code, for whom the Torah demands “one law for the stranger and for the citizen” in matters of justice and protection. They should therefore enjoy equal civil rights and, precisely as a minority, specific collective rights and privileges. When a Jewish society treats such people with contempt, it is more than injustice to them; it is violation of the very way we are bound to inhabit this land.

Oslo Process

Concomitantly on the chopping block was this whole “Oslo process” affair. In essence, the question that it was once believed to answer positively was “Can victorious Jews live next to a State of Mandate Arabs in peace and cooperation after three decades of chronic war?”. October 7th and what I later learned while examining the Mandate Arab Authority in Zones A and B of the administered territories led me to the unremarkable thesis that when both the political leadership and population recognized defeat and renounced both right of return and sovereignty involving military capabilities.

Reading some thicker books subsequently, among others Yazid Sayighs extraordinarily dense account of the history of the PLO, published in 19973 , showed the frail political footing these accords stood on, especially on the Arab side. I concluded that Oslo was an agreement born of a coincidental alignment of voluntary misunderstandings. I understood that the assassination of Rabin was evidently not primarily at fault for its failure by the time of the Camp David 1999 summit.

October 7th was the demonstration in practice some core assumptions Rabin and his supporters at the time had operated with were false. By extension, popular European dogmas on “the conflict” finally were shown as irrelevant and even harmful self-delusions. Israel would likely have to break out of the post-1945 political order Europe had built to recover from thirty years of destruction – an order that now again demands Jewish vulnerability as its price.

The Veil

Up to that point, Israel appeared to me as if behind a veil. It was a decision branch open to me, but not necessary. It flared into view whenever its policies attracted inordinate – and usually negative – attention, and then receded again. The standard procedure was to deflect questions and protests with the rote line that Jews in the Diaspora have nothing to do with the policies of Israeli governments. Zionism, as I understood it then, had done its work: it had brought forth a state; it was now very much alive and very much kicking. End of story.

Israel, in that phase, occupied roughly the place of a rumored embarrassing third cousin twice removed whose adventures with law enforcement are the talk of the town. You roll your eyes and say: “yeah, him is him, me is me; he’s basically a good guy but he does things I don’t quite understand at times.” The gossip is mildly irritating, occasionally alarming and safely external.

Until one day he is nearly lynched, and your neighborhood is frantically demanding his death – and, for good measure, the death of his relatives (YOU, yes YOU) and friends. On closer inspection you discover that the “distant cousin” is both way less naughty than the stories suggested and far less distant than you had been led to believe. You got tangled up in the stupid family tree again: it is first cousin, and not removed. The gap you assumed turns out to have been a capital error.

And while you are at it, you realize that “law enforcement” in this story is not what you thought either. The squad that was supposed to keep the peace runs a major side hustle during office hours: belting out Torquemada’s greatest hits on crack cocaine. The police‑chief‑pope in charge is a small, grey Antonio G. in an ill‑fitting costume. When they are high enough, that uniformed crew styles itself “the United Nations.”

When the veil lifts, it leaves you with a chilling binary choice: step to the left to live, or step to the right to become the token “good Jew” of the lynch party. If that Jew is really lucky, he may only be slaughtered as an afterthought, once all the others are dead; more often, by then he has already extinguished himself beyond recognition. Today those people call themselves “Jewish Voice for Peace” – for their disappearance, perhaps. Their forebears, and they are many, are dissolved into oblivion.

Political coordinates

Colloquial political classification distinguishes blissfully simply a “left” and a “right”. It then proceeds to a self-evident declination of nuances as if it were a continuum of paint tubes in an arts-and-crafts store. If pressed to define what defines the virtual line between “left” and “right”, interlocutors will often offer rather muddled answers.

The original crucible to place oneself in that frame were three questions the revolutionary National Assembly in August 1789 in Paris:

1. Ultimate royal veto against laws of Parliament

2. State religion

3. Universal human rights

Left: 1+2 == NO and 3 == YES

Right: 1+2 == Yes and 3 == NO

That’s how the delegates arranged themselves in the room relative to the Speaker presiding over the session. The left carried the day as we know, as the Declaration of Human Rights was adopted.

For a person today, it is not self-evident to gauge the world-breaking radicalism of this idea at the time. Though much of the Assembly harbored various degrees of prejudice against Jews and even more evidently towards Blacks, they abolished slavery on account of recognizing Blacks as humans and gave equal rights to Jews as to Christians, on account again of Jews being humans. There was major catch for Jews: individuals were recognized as full citizens, at the cost of denial of Jewish peoplehood. French republicanism had antisemitism welded into it from birth.

As for slavery, the same Republic that abolished it in 1794 saw Napoleon re‑establish it eight years later with the law of 20 May 1802, condemning hundreds of thousands back into bondage. Then, the British Parliament outlawed the slave trade (1807) and the Royal Navy’s West Africa Squadron was beginning a decades‑long campaign of hunting down slaving ships and freeing their human cargo – including Arab and other non‑European slavers – at the cost of over 2,000 British sailors’ lives.

Within these coordinates, I place myself on the left: no veto for the head of State (a Supreme Court veto is better), no theologian State (there should be a Berlin Wall between the sacred and the mundane) and in favor of universal human rights. Evidently, defining the coordinates is often less straightforward for a great number of people, whose political culture is frequently fuzzy at best and organizes itself around a few popular slogans.

In the post-October time, this theoretical positioning held, while the political, operational translation of it vanished. It seemed like there was now a ternary choice: left, right or Jewish. Since 2014 in fact, I had had a recurring thought that Europe as whole was merely returning to its pre-1914 normalcy: periodic wars in the East instigated by Russia, identitarian psychodramas domestically and inter-state posturing, with the latent threat of war looming in the wings. I confess I had not envisioned gesturing Jews back toward the ghetto would be part of this return to business as usual.

Regarding the “identity politics” dimension, bear in mind that nearly all States on the continent existed before they invented nations inside themselves in the 19th Century - roughly six generations4 ago - often as loose contrafacta5 of the Jewish people themselves: retrofitting near biblical time‑depth, chosen‑people myths and ancestral “character” onto peasant dialects and tax districts. Israel had a nation for about 85 generations before the Jewish State was fought back into being. Hence the inherent brittleness of “national identities” of European polities in which Jews will, in truth, never fit at all anyway. Why else would French romantics spin ancestry fables about inheriting ancient Gauls “national character” ?

Unexpected fellows

I mentioned earlier that my private sphere held up and even expanded. While I sensed alienation outside of it, there were also unexpected new acquaintances - practicing Christians of various denominations and exiled Iranians. The latter were there immediately in the days following 7.10 everywhere in the Diaspora, banners flying high among Israeli flags. As weeks turned into months, relationships expanded and deepened. It is a rare thing to watch and experience two peoples embracing each other like exiled Iranians and Jews did after 7.10. Beyond the common enemy, there were frequent reminders of the age-old relations between the two peoples, on a four digit timescale that made the encounter feel almost pre‑ordained.

In Germany, modest networks of anti-Nazi resistance had frequently formed around clergymen, both Catholic and Protestant. A number of them had even perished in the extermination camps alongside Jews. Besides the political opponents to Nazism, the role of the Christian faith in resisting that ideology at the time is a striking feature of German history. After 7.10, similar convictions led many Christian communities to express solidarity with Jews – sometimes in costly ways. In one case in Darmstadt, a Protestant congregation was disbanded by church authorities after publicly backing Hamas.

What October 7 and its aftermath finally made explicit was that the three pillars that had carried my quiet European Jewish liberalism – citizenship, “the peace process,” and a distance from the Jewish state – were all illusions, and oddly aligned ones. The same post‑1945 order that promised universal rights turned out to require a Jewish state permanently on the scaffold and Jews in Europe politely invisible and apolitical as a community.

Once the scaffold and the invisibility were refused, the coordinates shifted. The line no longer ran between left and right but between those for whom Jewish peoplehood, memory and sovereignty are negotiable, and those for whom they are not. In that split I discovered strange allies – exiled Iranians, serious Christians – and understood that they were not so strange at all, but the sort of companions Jews have have when the world reverts to type. The red rose of October 7 was a startling discovery: that the choice wasn’t between “left” and “right,” but between being a Jew among Jews, or a citizen among people who can cease to see you as one overnight.

Part 3

The State was not invented as a theory and then applied to reality; it was abstracted from experience. Its form evolved and the way it operated over time and across the world has been wildly varied. Today, 2026, is probably a time in which the architecture and overall behavior of States have been the most standardized ever.

The modern State is usually described in terms of law, coercion, and territorial control. That description captures part of the picture, but it is too narrow for analyzing how contemporary political violence actually works. Sovereignty is better understood as the capacity of a political community to maintain the integrity of the institutional, material, and symbolic domains through which it sustains a common world over time.

States were never made for the comfort of people; they were made for coordinated action. That may feel counter‑intuitive—most of us have suffered agony at State inaction, staring at a file that seems to wait 25 million years for a stamp from an obscure office. In the language of the State, there is no such thing as “action”; there is policy.

Again, a semantic examination of the words used for State in various languages give helpful clues. There are three main strands:

First, the Latin–Indo‑European strand. English “state” comes from Latin status, from stare “to stand”, itself from the Proto‑Indo‑European root ∗sta−∗sta−: to stand, set, make firm. Here the State is that which stands—the enduring configuration of legality and authority that remains upright while rulers and governments come and go. From this root family we also get “statute” and “stability”: a State is literally the standing framework that holds a political order together over time.

Second, the Greek strand. Classical Greek does not name the State with a sta- word, but with polis: originally “citadel, fortified height, city,” from a root meaning enclosed elevated place. The State appears here as an enclosure: the walled, structured space within which law, cult and common life are contained—the city as both physical architecture and body of citizens. From polis we derive politeia, the form of government and civic order, and later politics itself.

Third, the East Asian strand. Classical Chinese guó (国) and Japanese kuni/koku (国) both denote the “state/realm” as an enclosed territory under a center of rule. The character itself combines an enclosure with a weapon or emblem of authority; in Zhōngguó (“central state”), the State is the central walled domain, the civilised heartland surrounded by barbarians. Here the intuition is not “standing” but “centered enclosure”: a bounded space where a particular order holds.

Taken together, these strands hint at what follows. The State is not just a power‑pyramid or a legal fiction. It is a standing, enclosed, centered metabolic order—a structured set of domains through which a polity maintains itself in time and space.

Weberian State Max Weber’s1 famous definition of the modern State as the human community that successfully claims the monopoly of legitimate physical violence within a given territory captures only one, ultimately narrow, aspect of its political existence.

This definition, while influential in twentieth-century international relations theory, reflects a tradition invested in tracing sovereignty to the Peace of Westphalia (1648)---a genealogy that recent scholarship has questioned as historically inaccurate and normatively selective2 3.

For present purposes, the Weberian formula is doubly insufficient: it reduces sovereignty to coercive capacity and leaves conceptually invisible the very structures that contemporary agoraclastic violence actually targets.

Metabolic State From the standpoint developed here, the State should instead be understood as a complex metabolic entity that continuously produces, maintains, and repairs a Cosmos—a structured order of norms, infrastructures, and symbolically mediated relations—against the centrifugal tendencies of social, economic, and geopolitical chaos.

Ignoring fiscal constraints or alliance dynamics is like ignoring gravity: you can step off the roof in theory, but you will still fall. The irreducible basic components of the State are individuals, who possess their own agency and are invested with the power to choose whether, and how far, to align their behavior with the order of norms propagated by the State.

This point is central to understanding why the theory of the State as it evolved since Hobbes has persistent problems with individual human behavior. A State, by its nature, operates on a statistical plane and designs its policies for aggregates rather than singularities.

Individual cases are statistical edge‑cases that gum up the works. Tyrannies reach for the eraser and delete the annoying datapoint named “Ms Karen Smith”; a liberal State may be strongly tempted to do likewise when Ms Smith appears for the 157th time with the same request, but will usually abstain—at least until Ms Smith has successfully lobbied to have the law changed to accommodate her case.

Hobbes applied to political thought what Copernicus had applied to astronomy. Copernicus studied the course of the stars and posited that the Earth revolves around the Sun, inverting the dogma of his time enforced by the Catholic Church under pain of death. Hobbes similarly stripped man of his inherited nature and reconstituted him theoretically, rebuilding society from scratch like an automated model. He also reduced man to a binary construct—at once victim and predator—requiring a supreme predator to impose order upon him.

Though this core move has gradually washed out over the centuries, a residue persists in Western political thought: the tendency to treat man as a political actor who ought to fit cleanly on lines in charts. Where Aristotle had stressed the humanity of man, his non‑linear and sometimes perverse behavior, post‑Hobbesian thought has invested vast efforts in forcing humans to conform to statistical regularities, denying agency and pathologizing irrational or “defective” decision‑making. Between the individual and the abstract State there stretches, nonetheless, a hierarchy of offices, administrations, associations, relations of kinship and informal networks: the fragile living tapestry in which sovereignty actually resides.

Political violence does not strike an abstract monopoly of force; it hits specific nodes in this metabolic order. Structural effects it causes may be grasped once that order has been analytically articulated.

Sovereignty Against Carl Schmitt’s dictum that “sovereign is he who decides on the exception”4 I propose: sovereignty is the faculty of a political community, through its institutions, to maintain the integrity and effective operation of the domains that constitute its existence as a State. The exception is not the proof of sovereignty but the crisis in which sovereignty is tested and may be lost. The official who suspends law to “save” the State does not exercise sovereignty; he commits Nomoktonia and begins the dissolution of the very order he claims to protect.

In this view sovereignty is not exhausted by the capacity to coerce, but consists in the coordinated regulation of multiple domains whose interaction enables a shared world in which political life unfolds, and whose disruption by targeted violence threatens not merely the State apparatus, but the very intelligibility and habitability of the common space.

This becomes apparent when considering contemporary challenges: a cyberattack targeting the domain of communication infrastructure does not merely disrupt military or financial systems---narrow Weberian concerns---but threatens the very conditions under which citizens can perceive the State as a unified and coherent actor capable of exercising legitimate authority.

Fracturing reality Similarly, coordinated disinformation campaigns that target the domain of public discourse fracture the epistemic commons on which legitimate authority depends. These attacks are not primarily violent in the coercive sense, yet they strike at sovereignty more deeply than conventional warfare precisely because they undermine the shared symbolic order that allows political life to be recognizable as such. The State’s monopoly on physical force becomes functionally irrelevant when the public space itself---the Agora in which the State’s legitimacy is either affirmed or contested---has been compromised at the level of perception, discourse, and shared reality. This I call logoclasm.

Certain military doctrines integrate this idea as part of a strategic toolset, as Dimitri Minic masterfully shows in his recent study of Russian military doctrine5. Political violence can target the States structural integrity not by destroying its capacity to coerce, but by eroding the discursive coherence of political language. By infusing the informational space with moral inversions, recasting the meaning of political keywords or introducing new ones with the aim of disrupting discourse by recoding their emotional connotation - it is possible to significantly impair an otherwise functioning polity.

Mapping sovereignty This distinction between domain-specific attacks on sovereignty grounds the analytical framework developed in the following sections, where we systematize the multiple vectors of political violence. If what is today called “terrorism” is in fact better described as a family of attacks on the State’s metabolic order, then we require a map of that order---a taxonomy of the domains through which sovereignty is exercised inwardly and outwardly.

Only then can agoraclastic violence be classified in terms of the specific domains it targets.

The Dual Structure: Inward and Outward Sovereignty

Sovereignty therefore exhibits a dual structure that renders the State inherently Janus-faced.

Outward sovereignty It encompasses the ensemble of practices through which a polity relates to other polities: diplomacy, the conduct of war and defense, the regulation of cross-border flows of persons, goods, capital and information, and the negotiation of international norms that shape its external environment.

Inward sovereignty By contrast, this part concerns the ordering of the internal space: the construction and maintenance of infrastructures, the regulation of labor and taxation, the administration of justice and civil liberties, the organization of education and knowledge production, and the protection of public health, all of which sustain the everyday conditions of life in common.

Distinct and integrated These two faces are analytically distinct yet practically intertwined, since external shocks---wars, sanctions, global crises---and internal dislocations---failing infrastructures, legal erosion, epidemics---feed back into one another, so that any attempt to grasp the effects of agoraclastic violence must map precisely which aspect of inward or outward sovereignty is being targeted.

Tyranny vs agoraclasm The framework reveals a critical distinction at times obscured in policy discourse: tyranny constitutes the perverted exercise of inward sovereignty (the State turning its monopoly on force against its own population), whereas agoraclasm targets the integrity of sovereignty itself across both inward and outward domains. This difference proves analytically decisive.

State “terrorism”---whether as Nomoktonia or incipient tyranny---operates across all domains simultaneously: it suspends or mutilates law, establishes precedent and cross-domain policy doctrines, erodes legitimacy, controls information, militarizes police, restricts mobility, creates or breaks interstate alliances, concentrates or compartmentalizes power and rigidifies the State all at once.

Agoraclastic violence, by contrast, characteristically attacks a single domain or cluster of related domains---a cyberattack on communication infrastructure, a bombing of transportation networks, a coordinated disinformation campaign targeting epistemic commons---with effects that may cascade into other domains but do not necessarily compromise sovereignty’s integrity at every point. Understanding this asymmetry is essential for analyzing how political violence functions in the contemporary State.

The Fourteen Domains of Governance

To move from an abstract notion of sovereignty to a diagnostic anatomy of political vulnerability, we propose a fourteen–domain taxonomy of State activity. Rather than treating “the State” as a single, undifferentiated actor, the framework dis-aggregates sovereignty into functional domains that correspond to the recurrent tasks any modern polity must perform in order to maintain a habitable common world. These domains are not meant as a sociological description of every government on earth, nor as a normative blueprint. They constitute an analytical map: a way of making visible where, and how, political violence can strike.

The standard starting point in international law is Article 1 of the 1933 Montevideo Convention, which defines a state as an entity possessing:

• (a) a permanent population,

• (b) a defined territory,

• (c) a government, and

• (d) the capacity to enter into relations with other states.

These four criteria remain the closest thing international law has to a formal definition of statehood, and they are deliberately declaratory — a State exists by satisfying them, not by being recognized. But Montevideo was designed as a threshold test for entry into the international system, not a map of how States remain functional or become vulnerable. It tells us what a State is; it says nothing about what a State does continuously to stay intact.

That gap is exactly what the present taxonomy addresses. Each Montevideo criterion implies a cluster of ongoing activities: a permanent population requires governance of borders, public health, and social reproduction; a defined territory requires infrastructure, domestic security, and law; a government requires taxation, legitimacy, and institutional capacity; and the capacity for external relations requires diplomacy, commercial regulation, and communication beyond borders. Expand those clusters systematically and fourteen functional domains emerge — not as an arbitrary count, but as the recurrent architecture that any modern State must maintain to keep the Montevideo threshold meaningful in practice rather than merely nominal.

There is an apparent tension between the Montevideo framework and the present taxonomy that is worth naming. Article 3 of the 1933 Convention holds that “the political existence of the State is independent of recognition by the other States” — the declaratory theory of statehood, by which an entity becomes a State the moment it satisfies the four criteria, regardless of whether others acknowledge it. Under that principle, recognition is not constitutive of statehood but merely declaratory of a pre-existing fact.

The present taxonomy, however, treats legitimacy and external recognition as a domain of sovereignty that can be attacked, eroded, and strategically destroyed — exousiapoleia. This is not a contradiction. The Montevideo declaratory principle operates as a threshold test: it determines whether an entity qualifies as a State for the purposes of formal legal personality.

It does not describe how that State functions or what it must continuously do to remain a credible, operative actor in the international system. A State may formally satisfy the four criteria and simultaneously suffer a systematic campaign to strip it of diplomatic relations, expel it from multilateral forums, or delegitimize its claim to represent its population. The entity persists as a legal subject; its functional sovereignty is being dismantled. Exousiapoleia targets precisely this gap between formal and functional statehood — the space that declaratory theory leaves open and that no threshold test can close.

Empirically, these tasks tend to crystallize in the familiar architecture of ministries and core State functions: foreign affairs, defense, finance, interior, justice, health, education, infrastructure, and so forth. The present taxonomy systematizes these recurrent functions into fourteen domains, grouped under the dual structure of outward and inward sovereignty developed above.

On the outward side, five domains capture how a polity appears and acts in the international environment: legitimacy (its recognition as a rightful actor), diplomacy,defence and intelligence, regulation of means and standards (currencies, technical norms, legal benchmarks), and the circulation of persons and goods. To these we add two further domains that mediate between the internal order and the outside world: regulation of commerce and communication/soft power, which govern how the State projects itself symbolically and economically beyond its borders.

On the inward side, seven domains structure the State’s ordering of the internal space:infrastructures (transport, energy, water, communications), labor and productive activity,taxation and redistribution, rights and civil liberties, domestic security and public space, research, preservation and transmission of knowledge, and public health. Together, these domains define the conditions under which daily life in common remains materially possible, normatively ordered, and symbolically intelligible.

Two clarifications are important. First, the domains are analytically distinct but empirically intertwined. A single policy decision – for example, the imposition of financial sanctions – may simultaneously implicate legitimacy, commerce, standards and circulation. Likewise, a coordinated bombing campaign against transport nodes is not only an attack on infrastructure; by paralyzing mobility, it also affects labor, taxation, and ultimately public trust.

The value of the taxonomy does not lie in forcing messy reality into rigid compartments, but in allowing analysts to specify which aspects of sovereignty are primarily being targeted, and how cascading effects propagate across domains.

Second, the schema is deliberately modest in its ontological claims. It does not assert that there are exactly fourteen and only fourteen “real” domains of sovereignty. Rather, it condenses patterns that recur across very different constitutional and cultural settings into a tractable analytical grid. In federal systems, for instance, some domains will be vertically fragmented; in weak or hybrid regimes, entire domains (such as rights and civil liberties) may exist largely on paper. The point is that when such a domain is attacked or hollowed out, something structurally similar is happening: a particular way in which the State holds the Agora together is being damaged.

With this map in hand, agoraclastic violence can be re-described with greater precision. Instead of saying that a given act “attacks society” or “threatens democracy” in the abstract, one can identify whether it is primarily directed at infrastructure (ypodomoclasm), at the epistemic commons (logoclasm), at fiscal sovereignty (demoklasia), at external legitimacy (exousiapoleia), or at the core of public space itself (agoraclasm in the strict sense). The following table (pdf to download) summarises the fourteen domains and the corresponding names proposed for characteristic forms of aggression against each of them.

Table

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From Fear to Structural Effects Schmid’s revised academic consensus definition attempted synthesis by identifying common elements across 109 scholarly definitions. Yet even this consensus framework, by privileging psychological intent (’instilling fear’) over structural effects, perpetuates the analytical limitations we seek to overcome. The Agoraclasm framework shifts the definitional focus from terror’s manifestations and methods to a systematic analytical anatomy of state vulnerability. It seeks to be flexible enough to apply to any act we today lump under the heading of “terrorism”, introduce a discriminating criteria to distinguish such an act from a common criminal one, from a war crime and from an illegitimate use of State power.

Fracturing community The characteristic aim of this form of violence is not merely to harm civilians outside of a war as defined by international law1, but to fracture by means of such and other acts the rich living human tapestry of visibility, trust, and interaction2 that sustains collective self-government by transforming public places, institutions, and symbols into theaters of mortal risk and instruments of political paralysis.

Agoraclasm To capture this specificity, the theory advances Agoraclasm — the deliberate destruction of the Agora — as a replacement for “terrorism” in the core conceptual vocabulary of political philosophy and terrorism research, and argues that through this shift can the phenomenons’ implications for state theory, legitimacy, and institutional resilience be systematically grasped. It further argues that contemporary democratic States face a strategic paradox: their defensive measures against Agoraclasm frequently accelerate the institutional decay they seek to prevent. We call this self-inflicted damage Nomoktonia. Through understanding the metabolic structure of the State, we can design strategies and tools that defend without destroying.

Agoraclasm: destruction of public space

Agoraclasm designates the deliberate destruction of the public space and the severing of the social bond that constitutes a polity as a visible, speaking, and acting we. Unlike “terrorism,” which names the psychic state of those who undergo fear, Agoraclasm shifts the analytical focus from individual victims to the political community whose shared spaces, institutions, trust, and circuits of interaction are fractured, rendering collective life less intelligible, less trustworthy, and ultimately less governable.

Public space is uncomfortably vague as a concept, at this stage, while at the same time deceptively easy to understand intuitively. The layman, legal and the philosophical understanding of what is “public space” do not always correlate. The layman will understand as “public” whatever space he enters when he steps out of the premises of his home, the latter counting as private space.

The law distinguishes

• private from public property,

• private property used as public space: a theater,

• private property used as private space: your apartment,

• public property used as public space: the plaza where people hold a rally,

• public property used as private space: nonpublic areas of government-owned buildings - chambers of a Judge, publicly owned social housing…

Property owned by the various administrative entities composing the State as a whole will be treated as private property with respect to each other (for example: Government property vs municipal property).

Functional public space is what is relevant for agoraclasm. Intuitively, it is whatever we step into when we leave our homes and enter environments of anonymous co-presence. Juridically, it cuts across state‑owned property, privately owned but publicly accessible venues, and spaces whose status depends on regulatory regimes.

What matters for agoraclasm is neither ownership nor access rights as such, but function: public space is the ensemble of material and symbolic environments in which anonymous members of the polity encounter one another under conditions of presumed safety, mutual visibility and contestability. A privately owned shopping mall or train station can therefore function as public space in this sense, whereas a closed corporate boardroom does not, despite being the site of important decisions. These are the spaces whose immunity the State is presumed to ensure.

Modes of Public Space

Doctrinal significance Classical State theory thinks of the State primarily as an instrument of exercise of power over the multitude to pursue an end set by the ruler. Plato posited that the ultimate end of a State should always be subsumed under an idea of Justice. Today, it is common custom for States to indicate their ultimate purpose in Constitutions: the USA dedicated itself to pursuing “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” as inalienable rights; the German Federal Republic in 1949 enshrined protection of Human Dignity as an absolute immunity at the pinnacle of its hierarchy of norms.

Yet these doctrinal commitments remain abstract until they are tested in practice. This theory proposes that how a State manages functional public space---the ensemble of environments in which the polity appears to itself---constitutes an operational criterion for assessing the type of State in presence.

Functional public space can stand in three basic relations to the State, with virtually endless gradations between them:

A public space entirely run by the State culminates in a tyranny. A public space insulated against the State culminates in full impunity3 . A public space autonomous from the State culminates in self-organization (the definition of anarchy: a normative order without a ruler).

Public spaces and risk mitigation These regions of functional public space are not mutually exclusive; all three typically coexist within a given State. A tyranny seeks to impose State-run public space as the only legitimate form, suppressing autonomous and insulated zones. A liberal State, by contrast, aims to coexist with all three without eliminating their distinctive logics - guided the principle of risk mitigation and minimization to its various areas of responsibility.

Viewed through these lenses, fields of tension become visible between the modes of public spaces. Both the insulated and autonomous spaces will be viewed with suspicion if not hostility by the State. A mafia organization for example, whose nature is to seek to both substitute itself for and to subvert the State for its own aims, will dwell in the insulated spaces and radiate into the other spaces. Insulated spaces can be entirely innocent, like religious or otherwise particular self-contained minority communities. These occupy the self regulation continuum - from the religious sect to the autonomous tribe (example: Amish people in USA, certain Haredi communities in Israel).

A liberal State lives, in fact thrives, on the interplay of the fields of tension between these spaces. A tyranny will seek to maintain the illusion of such spaces---sham elections, captive civil society organizations, nominally independent media---precisely because the appearance of pluralism is itself a legitimacy resource. Jürgen Habermas built a sophisticated body of work focused on the public space in a liberal society4.

Layered Structure of the Agora

The modes outlined above transcend the fabric of social life. There are also layers of public space, from the effective face to face interaction to televised interactions to internet forums. In the digital space too, there are insulated spaces (darknet, crypto transactions, encrypted platforms), State spaces5 (Intranet of NASA), autonomous spaces (company intranets).

A liberal State has the exceptional hability to embrace this complexity and seeks, ideally, to preserve it.

Agoraclasm can operate across all these layers at once. The 2015 attacks in Paris, for instance, transformed everyday venues—newsrooms, concert halls, cafés, stadiums—into theatres of mass killing, while also feeding logoclastic campaigns in traditional and online media that polarized discourse about Muslims, security, and national identity. Attackers exploited the physical permeability of urban conviviality and the symbolic permeability of digital and broadcast discourse, fracturing both public space and the epistemic commons.

Typologies of Specific Aggressions

Before introducing the agoraclasm typology, it is worth situating this framework within existing approaches to classifying terrorist violence.6 influential ‘Four Waves of Modern Terrorism’ framework—organizing terrorism chronologically by dominant ideological motivations (anarchist, anti-colonial, New Left, and religious waves)—represents the field’s most widely adopted historical typology.

The agoraclasm framework offers a complementary but orthogonal classification system: rather than organizing by perpetrator ideology or historical period, it classifies attacks by which domain of state sovereignty they target. This domain-specific approach enables more precise diagnosis of what is under attack and therefore what countermeasures are appropriate.

In practical terms, this means that two ideologically opposed groups can commit structurally similar acts if they attack the same domain, while a single movement may employ different modes of violence across domains. An Islamist cell bombing metro stations, a far‑right shooter attacking a synagogue, and a left‑wing urban guerrilla attacking a shopping mall all fall under agoraclasm because they weaponize functional public space, regardless of doctrine. The very same movement might also engage in logoclasm (propaganda operations) or ypodomoclasm (critical infrastructure attacks), which are analytically distinct event types.

For statecraft and law, this reframing solves two chronic problems. First, it provides a sharper threshold between ordinary crime and truly structural attacks; second, it supports domain‑specific counter‑measures instead of generic “War on Terror” toolkits that tend to erode law and liberties across the board.

Up to this point, I have treated Agoraclasm from the side of its object: functional public space as the critical infrastructure of democratic life. To understand both the violence and the self‑destructive responses it provokes, we now have to turn to the subject that is being destabilized. In the next post, I will shift focus from the Agora to the State itself, treating it not as a black box with a ‘monopoly of legitimate violence’, but as a complex metabolic order composed of fourteen distinct domains of sovereignty. Only once this anatomy is on the table can we say, with precision, which part of the State a given attack destroys—and how to defend it without killing the law in the process.

The Semantic Crisis: Genealogy of a Weak Concept

Etymological Deconstruction

The starting point for a conceptual clarification is the etymological structure of the word terrorism itself. The noun terror derives from the Latin terreo, terrere, which designates an uncontrollable fright that manifests as trembling and stupefaction, and can be traced further back to the Sanskrit root tras, “that which causes trembling,” evoking a state of inner petrification and incapacity for action rather than any determinate political project. It is related to Latin stupeo (stupor, numbness) derived from the Sanskrit stud, to strike.

The term thus names, at its core, a psychological affect — collapse of volitional capacity of the subject in the face of overwhelming threat1 — not a strategy, intention, or objective structure of violence, which already indicates a profound mismatch between the word’s semantic nucleus and the complex, organized practices it is supposed to capture.

The Suffix: -ism

The suffix -ism derives from the Greek suffix -isma, signifying ``a particular mode of action and/or thought.’‘ It is an abstracting suffix that transforms a simple noun into an abstract word designating a manner of thinking and acting. Consequently, words ending in -ism are inherently difficult to circumscribe, being lexical derivative---the expansion of a simple idea to the rank of general concept.

The suffix -ism affects words comparably to helium in a balloon. It can cause them to explode through over-extension (activism: anything can become “activism”), or the word becomes so gigantic and abstract that it becomes a lens through which one perceives the world, coloring and deforming everything indiscriminately (modernism), or the word rises into the sky until it becomes elusive and incomprehensible (socialism). ’Terrorism’ has suffered all three fates at once.

This becomes even clearer when contrasted with the related notion of panic, linked to the Greek god Pan, whose sudden, disorienting cry induces not freezing but chaotic flight: panic, in this mythological and semantic constellation, appears as a deliberately triggered breakdown of collective self-control, a primitive technique of psychological warfare that weaponizes anticipation and imagination rather than sheer physical destruction.

Panic designates a state contrary to that of terror. While terror is a form of constrained interior immobility---an immobilizing trembling---panic evokes instead the body animated by sudden fear, becoming uncontrollable in its movements. Terror makes one take root; panic gives wings in flight. Both are forms of expression of the same reaction.

The word panic is linked to the Greek god Pan. Pan was a mortal god of the Ancient Greek pantheon, associated with shepherds, forests, mountains, and nature. He was the son of Hermes.

Hermes was the god of thieves, travelers and vagabonds, commerce, spies and diplomacy, medicine and magic, and purveyor of dreams. He thus represented cunning, communication, and intelligence, moving swift as air through the shadows of night and without sound---a messenger of the gods.

Legend has it that Pan accompanied Dionysus to India for a military campaign that failed. During this expedition, he attempted to rape a nymph named Syrinx, who could find no other way to escape him than to transform herself into a reed by the riverside. The wind blowing through these reeds gave him the idea to cut them into tubes of different lengths, which he tied together and, blowing into them to make music in order to call back the vanished ravishing nymph, he thus invented the Pan flute.

Pan is the god of raw and primitive masculine sexual desire (in contrast to Eros, more inclined toward seduction, voluptuousness, and shared pleasure), but also of money and the itinerant comedian-performer. King Midas, for example, was charged with arbitrating between Apollo playing his harp and Pan on his flute. Midas declared Pan the victor, and the latter gave him the power to transform into gold everything he touched. Midas the miser believed supreme serenity was attained, but died of hunger and thirst, since all food and liquid became solid gold at the contact of his hands.

Pan is thus also the god who feeds addictions and excesses of all kinds, just as Dionysus is renowned for intoxication.

His sacred hour was noon. If he felt disturbed, he would frighten the flocks which, without apparent reason, would scatter in blind and frenzied flight, seized by panic (note that a sheep fleeing thus risks breaking its legs and usually had to be culled as a result).

He intervened, it is said, in the battle opposing Athens and Persia near Marathon in 490 BCE, where he gave victory to the Athenians with a strident cry of such power that all the Persian forces dispersed, seized with terror. It was following this victory (announced by that messenger who ran without pause the 42 kilometers to announce the news to Athens and collapsed dead from exhaustion upon arrival---the origin of the long-distance running discipline of the marathon) that a temple in honor of Pan was erected in Athens2. Pan’s cry triggers panic.

This is his dark aspect. Pan unleashes this quasi-animal fright before the unspeakable immediately threatening, which has the potential to be catastrophic and yet may not actually occur. It is an existential destabilization, the total loss of self-control, either in the form of petrification or in the form (or followed by) involuntary frenzied flight. It is the growing dread of something terrible that looms, that ineffable feeling, that intuition that an imminent threat lurks in the shadows, the impression one might have of being observed when alone in a ruin, a vineyard, or a forest, particularly at night.

His aggression, if he becomes aggressive at all, is a reaction to a disturbance---that is, the violation of his hour or his territory. He acts because he feels unjustly treated. His action is above all unexpected, triggering panic (literally: flight before Pan), the most strident expression of the survival instinct and flight before Death.

Pan subjugates and seduces through his music, has a penchant for debauchery, even for rape. He watches over shepherds and flocks, roams the forests, has an affection for mountains, and radiates terror, so much are his fits of rage feared. Pan’s anger is Nature’s anger avenging a felt injustice.

Pan is also the god of the marginal and marginalized (the other gods of Olympus avoid him), of ugly people, of the oppressed and the failed.

Let us retain, however, Pan’s cry as the trigger of terror. The cry is the announcement of violence, its possibility rather than its reality. It is thus a psychological weapon, a cry capable of breaking down mental defenses and activating survival impulses. Pan is the master of psychological warfare.

Conceptual Problems

This etymological analysis reveals that ``terrorism’‘ makes sense only from the perspective of those who suffer it. This fact means the word constrains us to approach the phenomenon from the victim’s viewpoint. The term essentially states: “I recognize these acts by the fact that I have mortal fear of them and do not know how to protect myself or escape them.” The semantic content is too restricted to designate the phenomenon adequately.

Furthermore, contemporary usage has expanded to over 200 different definitions of terrorism3, rendering the term analytically useless. The confusion has generated compounds like “state terrorism” (a pleonasm, given Burke’s original usage) and “terrorist group” (an oxymoron).

We must therefore create new terminology, approaching the phenomenon not through emotional effect but through the question: What is destroyed by this type of violence?

From Burke and Robespierre to Czarist Secret Police: The Inversion of Meaning

The historical trajectory of the term terrorism reveals a fundamental inversion of its original meaning. When Edmund Burke popularize the word in the context of the French Revolution, he used it to designate the practices of the revolutionary government under Robespierre4—state-organized executions, arbitrary repression, and the instrumentalization of law as a weapon against the very population under its jurisdiction—so that “state terrorism” would have been, from this perspective, a pleonasm rather than a distinct category.

In this classical horizon of political theory, spanning Aristotle to Locke, such terror marked a sovereign’s betrayal of the social contract and could ground a right of resistance, not a special crime of private actors operating against an otherwise neutral State. It should be remembered that Thomas Hobbes wrote his “Leviathan” for the King of England in the midst of the English Civil War against Oliver Cromwell, to justify the Kings claim to absolute power. John Locke authored his Second Treatise on Government as a pamphlet for a politician, the Earle of Shaftesbury, as a revision of Hobbes absolutist theory, later serving as a key reference for Glorious Revolution of 1688.

In our context, this is the “right of resistance” which - abusively - serves as reference point to the apologists of “terrorism”:

Whenever the Legislators endeavor to take away, and destroy the Property of the People, or to reduce them to Slavery under Arbitrary Power, they put themselves into a state of War with the People, who are thereupon absolved from any farther Obedience, and are left to the common Refuge, which God hath provided for all Men, against Force and Violence. 5

For Locke, this is a remedial power that returns to the political community when government breaches its fiduciary duty, not a standing license for any self-appointed vanguard to wage clandestine war on civilians.

Proponents of “terrorism as freedom fighting” use the widely accepted moral right of a populace to use violence against tyranny as a device to negate the inherently criminal nature of what they defend. Conveniently, this argument usually dispenses with the constraints that both just war theory and most philosophical accounts of justified revolution impose, especially the requirements of last resort, proportionality, and discrimination. The moral absolution of this “freedom fighting” requires:

1. an immanent oppressor narrative, pursuing sinister motives, whose moral depravity must be revealed;

2. an oppressed narrative, whose past happiness was disrupted by A, suffering continued exploitation by A, deceived into accepting A’s narrative (”brainwashed”);

3. a grandiose self-image of being a select “elite” with special knowledge whose mission is to liberate B to bring about the return of past happiness. That narrative structure is known as a gnostic-type myth. I use “gnostic” here in the sense developed by Eric Voegelin6, for political movements that reconfigure religious patterns of fall and salvation into a secular myth of historical redemption achieved by a privileged elite through the radical transformation of existing order.

Political Gnostic mythmaking

This narrative structure is gnostic in the extended, political sense: it posits

1. a lost golden age of purity disrupted by the oppressor,

2. a present condition of alienation and corruption, and

3. a future redemption accessible only through the insight and violent mission of a select vanguard.

Even rigorously secular clandestine groups thus adopt a quasi-religious temporal structure and self-understanding, with ideological doctrine playing the role of revelation and the promise of a restored order functioning as a secularized eschaton. To archetypal embodiment of this political gosticism is the palestinist ideology developed from 1964 onwards by the PLO.

Imbued with this pattern of thinking, the perpetrator confers upon his actions a kind of transcendent veil of faith on his actions. The narrative used consequently reflects this absolutist move, so that systematic rape and butchering of civilians at the Nova Festival on 07 October 2023 in Israel becomes a meritorious gesture of “resistance”.

Shifting to private actors

As Laqueur showed in his foundational study of terrorism’s historical evolution , over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, however, as Czarist secret police and later authoritarian and totalitarian regimes perfected (both clandestine and overt) techniques of intimidation, surveillance, and elimination, the term progressively shifted away from naming abuses of sovereign power toward denoting clandestine violence by non-state groups.

Indeed the Okhrana, viewing the Russian anarchist and later communist armed groups seeking to overthrow the Czar as admirers of the french Jacobins and their Terreur 70 years or so previous, resorted to using the word “terrorist” to demonize and de-legitimize the perpetrators, while discursively justifying its own lawlessness towards suspects.

Hence “non-state terrorism” became the paradigmatic usage and the original idea of terrorism by the State all but disappeared from legal discourse, rather it remained anchored in political discourse when - genuine or alleged - excessive use a State oppression was vehemently castigated.

This confusing use of the term, both for private violence against the State or non-State organizations and for State violence created this sterile knot of highly contentious hyper-moralized and emotionalized, if not for some like Frantz Fanon7 even idealized state of affairs on this subject. It remains though that perpetuating the use of a tool of tyranny of the Czarist secret police as a working definition is highly unsatisfactory. It can’t be good for modern statecraft.

While Burke originally applied the term to State violence (The Terror), modern statecraft rightly distinguishes between legitimate coercion (Sovereignty) and illegitimate violence (Agoraclasm). The danger is not that the State ‘is’ a terrorist, but that by reacting excessively to Agoraclasm, it risk eroding the very distinction — Legitimacy — that justifies its monopoly on force.

The Interstitial Void of International Law

Normative orders The juridical status of terrorism is shaped less by a clear positive definition than by its location in an interstitial void between two normative orders:

• ordinary criminal law, oriented toward individual culpability and due process,

• and the law of armed conflict, which presupposes identifiable parties, territory, and chains of command.8

Grey zone warfare Offensive transnational operations that neither fit

• the model of inter-state war,

• nor that of a purely internal armed conflict,

• or standard criminal activity (trafficking, money laundering etc...)

thus occupies a grey zone where Geneva-type protections do not fully apply, yet states are reluctant to treat perpetrators as ordinary offenders subject to standard procedural guarantees.9 The reluctance stems from the desire to enforce deterrence on perpetrators, namely make the consequences of engaging in this activity unacceptable for them.

When perpetrators however view death as desirable outcome (e.g martyrdom) as a matter of course, the State faces an insoluble dilemma which inverts traditional military strategy of assuming the enemy values his own life more than his counterparts death or achievement of its objectives. Drifting into dehumanization of such perpetrators becomes a perilously easy move.

Choice or no choice?

Much like the debate surrounding the death penalty, so too the debate surrounding “terrorism” is pervaded by a notion that there would be “no choice” but to use methods otherwise deemed unacceptable in the face of certain risks or acts. Hence “extraordinary rendition” (in fact, closer to kidnapping and forced disappearance), torture and more were the order of the day in years following 9/11. It is beyond the scope of this article to explore this dimension. It has been extensively examined by others10. Underlying this question of choice is the fundamental decision whether an ethos is an end in itself and what is the operational criteria - if there is or should be one - which can be determined that allows for temporary exception to commit atrocity.

Hybrid legal hydras In the post-9/11 context, this structural ambiguity facilitated the invention of hybrid categories such as the “enemy combatant,” which explicitly evade both the status of prisoner of war and that of criminal defendant, and underpinned measures like the suspension or hollowing-out of Habeas Corpus for terrorism suspects11, the proliferation of special tribunals, and the normalization of indefinite detention and extraordinary rendition at the margins of, or entirely outside, established legal frameworks.12 13

Weak concept to structured target The genealogy above shows that “terrorism” has become a semantically weak and politically overloaded label:

it oscillates between naming state terror, clandestine violence by non‑state actors, and a polemical epithet deployed wherever convenient, without marking a determinate kind of political act. If the term no longer identifies a stable object of inquiry, then neither philosophical analysis nor statecraft can rely on it to diagnose what is actually being attacked.

What contemporary debates loosely gather under the heading of “terrorism” are, more precisely, a heterogeneous set of aggressions against the structural conditions of political order—against the very architecture through which a State constitutes, maintains, and presents itself as a legitimate authority. To understand these aggressions, we must therefore shift focus from the psychology of terror to the anatomy of the State itself, and map the distinct domains of sovereignty that can be targeted, damaged, or destroyed.

Developing my theory of terror for a decade and now writing about Israel and Jews today feels incomplete if I do not recount how October 7 affected my own thinking. When that singular event took place, I instinctively perceived it first through that lens, long before I allowed myself - or indeed was even able - to feel what was happening around me.

Rousseau wrote in his Confessions that he “felt before [he] thought”; he claimed this was the common lot of humanity. In my case it was the opposite: my mind ran months ahead of my feelings. Partly this comes from a principle I have, for whatever it is worth, that walking onto a battlefield dressed in feelings is walking in badly dressed – like trekking naked across Greenland. Partly it comes from having learned very early to strip information of emotion by habit1: what, who, when, why, how. The rest is footnotes. Most information arrives wrapped in negative emotion anyway; that is usually why someone thinks it worth telling.

Consider how Christianity first spread across the Roman Empire. A sloppy news wire would have roughly looked like this (remember, virtually no one had maps in those days):

That is the wire-service pitch of the story, the stripped-down dispatch version that could have been sent from Jerusalem to Rome. It was enough to found a civilization – and to plant, very early, a seed of permanent suspicion about Jews.

Stripped of emotion, it becomes:

No clear villain, no outrage. A routine provincial execution. Which is, of course, exactly what it was to Rome.

Now imagine a different wire - the one that never was written:

That non-story dispatch just barely makes it from Jerusalem to Haifa and twenty-one centuries later erudite scholars would be dissecting the life and times of a little-known Jewish sect in the Levant under Roman rule.

The attack

The night before, I had attended a public debate about the war in Ukraine. During the Q&A, an elderly German rose to demand that the killing must stop, that the destruction of the cities was horrible, that he had grown up in a bombed-out city after the war and that they should stop fighting immediately — because it had to stop. A young member of the German Parliament defense committee responded with the memorable phrase: “I’m completely with you emotionally, the problem is: reality”.

Then I went home and the next day was a beautiful weather, we had switched off our phones for sabbath as usual and walked 6 km to the community. When we arrived, there was an ominous sign on the step at the door. Someone had gone to the trouble of procuring a beautiful red rose - in October! - and laid it down there, ostensibly as a sign of solidarity. But the rose said enough: something had occurred since the evening previous involving Jews on the wrong end of it. I didn’t recall it was the anniversary of the Yom Kippur war 1973.

Until early February, people kept piling flowers at the door of our synagogue week after week. The first bundle of them was placed there on October 8th after mass by group of Catholics with the handwritten note “Catholics stand with Israel”. Since then, that pattern has solidified - practicing Christians, of various denominations, have been the most consistent and principled allies of Jews in the Galut (Diaspora) since October 7th by far.

As we stepped in inquiringly, the doorman merely mentioned that Hamas had breached the border that morning and was attacking communities. A few minutes later, another person came running down the street, agitated, saying that the attack was huge and that intense fighting was ongoing, the border had been breached in dozens of places.

Shortly after sunrise on October 7th, a paramilitary organization dedicated to killing Jews set out to kill Jews on a large scale in the Jewish State during the day dedicated to religious worship and rest, which happened to be also a minor festival. OK, I thought, another war.

While waiting for Shabbat to end to get more information, I ran the logic forward. If this was indeed an operation of the scale it appeared to be, the IDF would have to invade the Gaza Strip — a densely populated, heavily urbanized area, with an extensive tunnel network I knew from earlier reports.

That meant two things simultaneously: high military casualties from close‑quarters urban combat, and the systematic destruction of built-up structures that would probably be necessary to establish lines of sight, disrupt enemy positions, and collapse tunnel access points. Combined with air bombing to break subterranean structures, there would inevitably be severe civilian losses. It was noon on October 7th and I was bracing for up to 250,000 dead within six to eight weeks. I said to myself: so be it, buckle up, what must be done will be done.

Evening came with its swirl of conflicting reports. I waited until noon the next day before going deeper into the coverage. What I read first was not about the attack but about the response: Israelis and Jews from all over the world flocking to airport terminals to fly to Israel. Soon there were “evacuation flights” — into Israel more than out of the country. An Israeli descending from the Himalayas to catch the next flight. Another, who had spent years running a falafel stand in Malaysia, going to enlist. Even those who had signed pledges of conscientious objection turned up despite earlier promises never to bear arms. Hundreds and hundreds of such instances were mentioned. Jews were not running from a bloodbath, rather - they ran into the line of fire.

Later I learned that entire battalions had reported for duty that Shabbat morning and moved into combat without receiving orders to do so, as off-duty soldiers and reservists took upon themselves to get their guns and uniforms, drove to the bases and took their combat positions. Soldiers coordinated each other via WhatsApp…

While all this was going on, I was also watching demonstrations across democracies in support of the Hamas invasion — celebrations, even. It was jarring. At first I told myself that there are hateful idiots everywhere, and that those living in free societies enjoy the privilege of facing, at worst, a little tear gas and perhaps a night in a police station, while their counterparts in unfree states risk far deadlier consequences. They even get a vote and the point of democracy mainly resides in keeping them a minority forever.

Then other soundbites began to circulate: clips of Hamas officials and their allies on Arabic and Islamist media calling for a “day of jihad” and urging Muslims worldwide to take to the streets, framed by the now-familiar slogan “Globalize the intifada.” In one oft‑cited 2019 speech, a senior Hamas figure had already told “seven million Palestinians abroad” that “there are Jews everywhere” and that “we must attack every Jew on the globe by way of slaughter and killing, if God permits.”

There have been exactly two intifadas in Israel, and both were campaigns of mass‑casualty attacks deliberately targeting Jews in streets, buses, cafés, and markets. “Globalizing” that is not a metaphor. It means what it says. By Monday 9th, a “global day of rage” was proclaimed for the first Friday after October 7 — a worldwide mobilization where Hamas and its sympathizers clearly hoped that somewhere, in some Western city, a mob would cross the line from chanting to lynching Jews and Israelis. In Germany, only one newspaper ran a front page of the first pictures of the victims: DIE WELT. All others were already visually priming audiences for libelous coverage to come, showing Merkava tanks under headlines warning of a ground invasion.

The problem is: reality.

These calls, I thought, might perhaps give some of the progressive, left‑wing, obsessive human‑rights choir — the “never again” hobby anti‑fascists — pause for a moment. I entertained the unwarranted optimism that displeasure with Israel is one thing and cheering on the butchering of Jewish neighbors next door is another. I obviously think too much. As the days wore on towards the ominous Friday, they joined the chorus baying for Jewish blood, in nearly every country on every continent — even down under, in Australia. The United Nations itself has chimed into that chorus repeatedly since, under the aegis of António Guterres.

By Tuesday, the scale of the pogroms was emerging and that numerous hostages had been taken. At that point, I assumed none of the hostages would ever be returned alive by Hamas, because Hamas kills Jews, does so very well and would make these hostages die slow painful deaths on Telegram for weeks and months - but never release them alive. I had to revise my initial estimation from Saturday, there would be an invasion and it would mean for the IDF sending soldiers into much deadlier situations. Evacuation orders were already being propagated to the inhabitants of certain areas of Gaza by Israel - as mandated by the Hague Conventions of Armed Conflict - with a quite generous, I thought, deadline of one month.

On Wednesday, four days into the war, my Jewish WhatsApp threads exploded. Someone timidly inquired “Is everyone ok?” and it caught fire from there - no one was OK. The initial blast shock had subsided a little, now people were catching their breaths. Indeed, anecdotes and testimonies flooded in from all quarters at once of how non-Jews had slammed the door shut on their Jewish friends on account of their Jewishness exclusively.

They had been ghosted, ignored, insulted, assaulted, spat on, screamed at, shunned at work and worse. It was not singular experiences, it was a social behavioral pattern transcending social class, countries, languages, milieus, political affiliation, genders, professions… Western societies as a whole were actively expelling Jews from their midst and I was seeing it unfold in real time related by the individuals on the receiving end in their own words. It resulted in a Jewish networking frenzy that rumbled on for months. Jews found that they could talk and find comfort exclusively with other Jews.

It started on digital platforms with invite-only and obligatory pre-screening groups and chatrooms. Jews who had been far removed from the humdrum of the Jewish community were initially annoyed at times with the invasive questioning to ascertain their authenticity but eventually felt safe in these spaces. Slowly, it has been transpiring into real life, the October 8th digital ghetto is being beamed from the digital space into the analog space.

But that was still months away. During that first week, on day five, I was already taking stock. The institutions and social groups I had believed - along with countless others - to be the load-bearing pillars of civil society in liberal democracy, imperfect but real buffers against authoritarianism and other fascistic racial delusions, were buckling visibly at pace, and the hostility oozed through every pore. I said to my then future wife: "Hey, we might have to move to Israel much earlier than we ever envisioned. Europe, it’s over."

On that Friday, the day of rage, numerous virulent demonstrations occurred, no lynchings were reported. In our community, the women who prepare the meal for Shabbat after the service refused to come, for fear of being assaulted on their way there or back. In Frankfurt, Jewish parents kept their children at home - 70% of the students in the Jewish school there were absent that day.

The best lack all conviction

I was, at the time, a member of the German SPD — then in government, chancellor Olaf Scholz — a centre‑left, boringly mainstream party that likes to think of itself as the mother of German democracy. I was the speaker of a small local workgroup dedicated to international affairs and it was soon clear that there was resistance to even touching on the issue of Israel. I was myself not well equipped for this battle.

Though I had read certain books and absorbed over time an impressive collection of fun facts and background in the history of Zionism and Israel, I was by no means in sync with Israel. I had only been there once many years ago on my own and for a few days. My understanding was sympathetic but shallow, my knowledge had gaps and blind patches. So in this question I mainly operated on principle: between Jews and antisemites, the problem is never Jews or Israel: it’s always the antisemites. They will hate Israel and Jews regardless, therefore what they do or don’t is entirely irrelevant to the conversation.

Something was fraying there in the party at large too. Reactions to October 7 were punctual and timid, standard expressions of dismay, full of relativizing, contextualizing, prevarication at every level - mostly dainty avoidance. Five months later, my Heidelberg SPD branch in my area put on an event about the war in Gaza. I had never heard of the invited speaker and assumed it would be the usual type of “Israel critic” these circles prefer: someone who can be gently slanderous about Jews with guns while maintaining a semblance of moral superiority and feeling terribly clever.

It turned out to be Helga Baumgarten, a blazing Hamas apologist for decades. In a 2006 book she had portrayed Hamas as essentially an Islamic welfare organization that evil Zionists had forced into taking up arms — at a time when Hamas already had twelve years of suicide bombings welded into its brand. This was who the mother party of German democracy put on stage, in 2024, to help its members “understand” the war in Gaza.

In a room of some 200 greying heads — the local respectable bourgeoisie — it became, for two hours, one long firestorm of Israel hatred. You could see in the gleaming eyes relief in the room: the sense of being licensed, at long last, to indulge their hostility to Jews without cost. The images of ruined Gaza that flickered behind the talk seemed to echo, in their minds, the carpet‑bombed German cities they had grown up in. In the association that hung in the air, both destructions — theirs then, Gaza now — came, somehow, from the same place: the Jews and the Americans.

They were the first generation that was supposed to have been “re‑educated” into democracy after 1945. Many of them had marched against their parents’ generation, had confronted, at least in their own telling, the crimes of that earlier Germany — even if some were already half‑captured, in the 1960s and 70s, by the Soviet campaign that rebranded antisemitism as “antizionism”. Now here they were, in comfortable retirement, humming the same old tune in a new key: decaying drones of Jew‑hatred, convinced they were still on the right side of history. The core electorate of the SPD.

A few weeks later, the same group invited the crème de la crème of the BDS movement to speak. Here too, universal indifference save some eyerolls and sighs of distaste from certain members.

I and other members raised the alarm over this choice to local and federal leadership in Berlin, both did exactly nothing besides expressing disapproval in private. The local leadership, Tim Tugendhat (also pursuing a career as reserve officer in the Bundeswehr), sought to placate us with a resolution draft intended to condemn Israel hatred. Six months later, he was campaigning for parliament (thank heavens he lost) and I asked him what became of the resolution he had himself written. He answered casually that it interested no one and had been buried. A man of no conviction.

That was 9 November 2024, as the ceremony commemorating Kristallnacht Pogroms drew to a close. I understood at that moment that the SPD had fallen beyond repair into nonredeemable depravity, much like the US Democratic Party would be doing as months wore on. It took me until the release of the bodies of the German-Jewish Bibas children by Hamas to complete my letter of resignation - on that day, the cold rage I felt reached the temperature (measured in single digit Kelvins) required to complete it.

Part 2

The Conceptual Stagnation of Terrorism Studies

War on Terror After the spectacular shock of 11 September 2001, terrorism research entered what may be called a phase of conceptual stagnation, even as publications on the subject multiplied exponentially. While military doctrine, police practice, and intelligence cooperation rapidly adapted to the operational challenges posed by transnational clandestine violence, the core categories used to name the phenomenon remained essentially frozen in the vacuous formula of a “War on Terror.”

Philosophy, having largely ceded the theory of the State to legal scholars and political scientists, for the most part stood at a distance and commented on the flames rather than attempting to extinguish or redirect the conceptual conflagration. As Israeli philosopher Igor Primoratz1 observes—while himself making a valiant attempt to address the issue—“before the terrorist attacks... on September 11, 2001, the topic of terrorism did not loom large in philosophical discussion.”

Fog of emotion The emotional charge of the term “terrorism” has generated a strategic deficit. By focusing on the psychological intent—namely, the production of fear2—policymakers have struggled to map the structural targets (infrastructure, legitimacy, data, and so forth) that are actually under attack. This leaves the State defending itself against a feeling rather than securing the critical nodes of its own existence.

Disjointed efforts Rather than clarifying the political nature of this violence, philosophical and academic discourse has largely oscillated between denunciation, apologetics3,and decontextualized moral thought experiments4, circling around the suffering of victims or the motives of perpetrators while leaving unexamined what, precisely, is being destroyed institutionally when such acts strike at the heart of contemporary polities. While policymakers, whose mandate is indeed to be effective on a practical level, have focused on threat management, academic reflection on the phenomenon has, with mixed success, sought to define coherently what it is.

Terrorism Studies Scholars such as Crenshaw5 , who examined the structural causes of terrorism, and Jenkins6 , whose work established terrorism as a form of political communication and psychological warfare, provided more sophisticated analytical frameworks. Yet even these contributions remained bound to “terrorism” as their central organizing category, perpetuating the definitional confusion that Weinberg7 document as a persistent obstacle to the field’s advancement.

A distinct school known as Critical Terrorism Studies (CTS) emerged after 9/11 in reaction to the perceived excesses of the War on Terror. Rather than clarifying the phenomenon itself, CTS has largely focused on deconstructing the term “terrorism” as a politicized label allegedly deployed by states to evade legal and moral constraints, and on collapsing the distinction between non‑state terrorism and abuses of state force.

By neglecting state theory and the differentiated structure of sovereignty that my work explores, CTS reduces “terrorism” to a contested discourse about “freedom fighters” and “state repression,” without offering an operationally usable account of how contemporary attacks structurally damage the State as such. The present analysis therefore proceeds within the orthodox terrorism studies paradigm, but seeks to remedy its conceptual deficit by replacing the vacuous category “terrorism” with a precise typology of agoraclastic attacks on specific domains of state sovereignty.

The recent Hamas invasion of Israel on October 7th, 2023 has turned into a live-action crucible for academics and particularly scholars in the field of counter-terrorism. With Critical Terrorism Studies focus on “state terrorism” (a pleonasm, as I will show during the course of this series) - “critical” in the name should be read as “critical of state responses to” terrorism - a significant portion of scholars drifted into, in some cases intense, vitriol against Israel8 while matter-of-factly acknowledging Hamas acts.

The fields’ flagship journal “Critical Studies in Terrorism”, founded by Richard Jackson9 in 2007, has an editorial board of 37 international scholars (Jackson included). Of these, I counted 15 (including Jackson, referenced above) who actively publicly followed Hamas narratives to varying degrees in public interventions or publications in the wake of the 7 October 2023 Hamas attacks on Israel.

Gaza October7 Academic Positions Report

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This includes inverting responsibility for the severity of the war, using post-colonial theory language and even espousing the 1970s era KGB antizionist lexicon10, hence appearing alarmingly close to aligning with patterns of demonization, delegitimization, and double standards commonly identified in contemporary antisemitism discourse11 12; more subtle but no less revealing was framing Israel as greater malevolent threat to the world than Hamas and its allies. Others, by stark contrast with, colleagues apparently abstained from joining this chorus.

State Theory The challenges posed by this situation touch on foundational concepts of State theory, such as the legitimacy of State power and the consent—both Lockean tacit consent and explicitly expressed consent13 —to its exercise, which underpins the liberal state of laws.

Roots of legitimacy Contemporary Western notions of political legitimacy originated in thirteenth-century Catholic ecclesiastical law14, where legitimacy served to validate temporal authority through spiritual approval. Legitimacy denotes the moral and symbolic right recognized to the State to exercise power over its population. Grounded in alignment with transcendent principles rather than coercive capacity alone, the concept underwent profound secularization from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries, not least through the Catholic Church’s efforts to insulate its internal procedures from royal activism.

Mutation of legitimacy Over this period, legitimacy mutated from a religious sanction of secular power into a political-juridical framework grounded in procedural correctness, rational law, and the consent of the governed—a transition later reflected in Max Weber’s typology of traditional, charismatic, and legal-rational legitimacy15.

The liberal State The Second Thirty Years’ War (1914–1945) resulted in the emergence of the modern liberal State. It entailed the integration of collective (“national”) rights to self-determination16 as the ostensibly recognized basis of State existence and the exercise of public power. More acutely still, an apodictic doctrine of universalist secular rights has introduced a structural dissymmetry17: individual rights are treated as absolute, while the legitimacy of State authority rests solely on procedural rationality, including the perpetual reproduction of aggregated individual consent.

Consent This aggregated consent is itself obtained through a ritualized procedure known as “elections.” Among the core duties the State is expected to discharge is ensuring the safety of the population within the territory it controls. The space in which aggregate consent emerges is what is commonly called, in English, “the commons” or the agora.

In Jürgen Habermas’s discourse theory of law, the legitimacy of legal norms rests on their potential acceptability in rational public deliberation, not merely on their formal enactment18. Agoraclasm therefore attacks not only institutional procedures but the communicative infrastructure that makes such acceptability intelligible in the first place.

Such has been the power of this notion that even tyrannies resort to elections as a means of projecting the illusion of legitimacy by aggregate consent.

Legitimacy as a target Contemporary “terrorism” targets legitimacy itself, seeking to erode the tacit consent and public acceptance upon which State authority depends, thereby attacking not merely the State’s infrastructure but the very recognition that constitutes its capacity to rule.

Even so‑called “Islamist terrorism” is not merely a politics of grievance or revenge but a project to replace existing sources of political authority with a rival, allegedly transcendent one. Classic jihadist groups present their violence as the vanguard action of a community that owes ultimate allegiance not to the positive law of actually existing states, but to a totalising vision of the sharīʿa or “Islamic order” that they alone are entitled to interpret and enforce.

Their repertoire of targets makes this clear: attacks on parliaments, elections, courts, schools, media outlets, and “apostate” mosques all aim at delegitimizing any alternative norm‑source – democratic procedure, national law, inherited religious institutions – that might compete with their claim to define the permissible and the forbidden. In this sense, the point is not simply to punish enemies or force tactical concessions, but to annihilate every rival framework in which humans might understand themselves as political subjects, so that only the pseudo‑religious, quasi‑transcendent order envisioned by the movement remains thinkable as a basis for law and rule.

Objective This paper seeks to disaggregate the notion “terrorism” into analytical components mapped from a model of State sovereignty. It was necessary to develop a terminology for that, notably including a term to designate the “destruction of the Agora”. Agoraclasm therefore, by inducing nomoktonic behavior (the State destroying the law to save the law), seeks to dissolve the procedural mechanisms from which the State derives its legitimacy.

This paper employs conceptual analysis and political philosophy to propose a framework; empirical validation through comparative case study analysis will be done during this series.

The Problem of Definition

The definitional landscape of terrorism is marked by a paradoxical excess that borders on conceptual emptiness. In legal, diplomatic, journalistic and academic contexts, more than two hundred distinct definitions coexist. Schmid’s comprehensive survey identified 109 academic definitions in 1984, later revised to encompass the proliferation across legal, governmental, and media contexts19, ranging from the broad enumerative formulas of European Union instruments to the intention-focused clauses of the United States Code relying of common law precedent and the even looser usages that proliferate in policy and scholarly writing.

Such proliferation reveals not theoretical refinement but a generalized dilution: almost any politically motivated act of violence, or even its threat, can be subsumed under the label “terrorism,” so that the term no longer distinguishes a determinate genus of political violence from neighboring phenomena such as guerrilla warfare, insurgency, civil war, or ordinary vandalism. Anything might be “terrorism”.

Conceptual Overreach A concept that can wantonly be stretched to cover nearly everything — from state repression to minor acts of sabotage — risks signifying nothing determinate at all, thereby becoming available primarily as a tool of stigmatization and legal exceptionalism rather than as an instrument of understanding, let alone a tool of statecraft.

Semantic examination This inflation underscores the relevance of returning to philological and philosophical discipline: a careful consideration of the word’s semantic history, from Burke’s original focus on state violence to its contemporary moralized usage, and a systematic effort to replace emotive shorthand with terms whose extension and intension can be precisely justified. In logical terms, I use extension to denote the class of acts or actors the term properly covers, and intension to denote the essential properties a phenomenon must have in order to fall under that concept, whereas intention refers simply to the purpose or aim of a given action.

Below for example, the concept “Agoraclasm” can be described in formal terms with

• x — an act (element of the extension D): the candidate event being classified, drawn from some universe of politically motivated acts

• s — a sovereignty subdomain (element of D): a specific structural component of the public sphere, drawn from your 14-domain taxonomy

The formula then reads: act x is agoraclastic if and only if there exists some agoric subdomain s such that x attacks s, x is deliberate, and x targets civic-communicative infrastructure.

Thesis Statement

Beyond “Innocent Life”20 At the center of this article lies the claim that what is commonly subsumed under the name “terrorism” cannot be adequately understood as an undifferentiated assault on “innocent human life,” but must instead be read as a targeted attack on the structural integrity of the State, relatively more frequently the Agora — the shared public and political space in which a polity appears to itself, in which conflicts within the State are processed (ideally without kinetic violence). The Agora fulfills the function as the Critical Information Infrastructure of democracy.

From Fear to Structural Effects Schmid’s21 revised academic consensus definition attempted synthesis by identifying common elements across 109 scholarly definitions. Yet even this consensus framework, by privileging psychological intent (’instilling fear’) over structural effects, perpetuates the analytical limitations we seek to overcome. The Agoraclasm framework shifts the definitional focus from terror’s manifestations and methods to a systematic analytical anatomy of state vulnerability.

Fracturing community The characteristic aim of this form of violence is not merely to harm civilians outside of a war as defined by international law, but to fracture by means of such and other acts the rich living human tapestry of visibility, trust, and interaction22 that sustains collective self-government by transforming public places, institutions, and symbols into theaters of mortal risk and instruments of political paralysis.

Agoraclasm To capture this specificity, the article advances Agoraclasm — the deliberate destruction of the Agora — as a replacement for “terrorism” in the core conceptual vocabulary of political philosophy and terrorism research, and argues that through this shift can the phenomenons’ implications for state theory, legitimacy, and institutional resilience be systematically grasped. This thesis further argues that contemporary democratic States face a strategic paradox: their defensive measures against Agoraclasm frequently accelerate the institutional decay they seek to prevent. We call this self-inflicted damage Nomoktonia. Through understanding the metabolic structure of the State, we can design strategies and tools that defend without destroying.

Roadmap of the Argument

The argument unfolds in five steps, each corresponding to a major section of the article.

1. a semantic and historical analysis reconstructs the genealogy of the term “terrorism,” showing how its etymology, political usage, and legal codification have produced an overextended and theoretically barren concept, thereby motivating the search for a more rigorous vocabulary.

2. the article elaborates an anatomy of the State as a differentiated structure of inward and outward sovereignty, articulated into multiple domains (legitimacy, circulation, infrastructure, law, public health, and so forth), in order to provide a precise map of what can be damaged by political violence.

3. drawing on this framework, it introduces Agoraclasm and key related neologisms as a typology of distinct forms of aggression against specific state domains, thereby recasting so-called terrorist acts as mode-specific attacks on the Agora rather than as generic productions of fear.

4. it analyzes the typical patterns of state reaction to agoraclastic events—the “choreography” of emergency laws, militarization, and erosion of rights—as a pathology of response that often culminates in Nomoktonia, the self-destruction of law and legitimacy.

5. the thesis sketches a philosophy of resilience grounded in institutional respiration, domain-specific countermeasures, and legitimacy-preserving constraints, arguing that a conceptually disciplined understanding of Agoraclasm can orient democratic polities toward responses that defend the Agora without dismantling the conditions of its possibility.

As a student of philosophy in Heidelberg in 2014-15, I was looking for a subject to write about for my bachelors thesis. For several weeks, I was fruitlessly picking on concepts, books and authors much as if I were prodding dead fish washed up upon the shore in hopes one might react.

Finally I seized on the most ubiquitous term in daily life: terrorism. As an avid news reader since childhood, I found this word haunting the news cycle like none other and yet, throughout my years at university, had hardly permeated through the walls into my university classes. Unless there was some quirky point to be made about an ethical or moral topic.

I went to look if there were any philosophical works done on this concept as a concept of political philosophy and found a shockingly scant range references. Perhaps some analytical philosophers bandied about the word accompanied by the sloppy shorthand “politically motivated violence to coerce the government or public opinion” without much more reflection than this1, before proceeding to some thoroughly superfluous moral or ethical hypothetical considerations with custom-made constructed scenarios (“Ticking bomb”-style scenarios) to illustrate or “test” obscure “principles”. Some European philosophers pontificated on its justification2 or why it’s all the fault of capitalism3 and maybe after all the US is at fault of everything. Still no engagement with it as a concept to be found here.

I was not interested at that point in counter-terrorism studies - whose existence at that time I hardly was aware of - because I was looking for the theoretical underpinnings of the concept itself, not the policy-making industry whose output could be admired on the evening news. At length, when I found a textbook compiling some 190 or so different types and definitions of “terrorism” worldwide in law, I thought this is not merely silly, it’s an abysmal hole in the matrix.

Hence I resolved to write myself the book I had not found. Initially, I deliberately avoided existing scholarly literature — it had already organized itself around definitions I considered incoherent or insufficient — and built my conceptual machinery from scratch in relative isolation.

What I found, as the theory took shape, was that terrorism had not been properly defined because it had never been located — placed within a theory of State to determine what it actually attacks. I discovered that central concepts of European political philosophy had deep theological roots, such as “legitimacy” and that they had , as a result, an evanescent nature that had lent itself to intellectual mysticism.

Methodological Constraints

Noting the abuse of that spurious concept of “terrorism” by tyrannies, unsurprising as it was invented by a tyranny, I had to contend with certain constraints adjacent to my project.

This new framework would have to be intrinsically useless for tyrannies while simultaneously remain an effective tool-set for democracies. Further, it would have to be sufficiently precise to be useful at all while containing no emotional charge at all - descriptive rather than a cudgel. I would need to develop a vocabulary which rendered the existing one a brutish knuckle-dragger.

Ideological constraints

While working on the model of State specifically, I encountered other tripwires, namely Marxist and Heideggerian thought. Humanism, as it turned out, had suffered such a traumatic ideological evisceration by the events of what I like to call the “Second Thirty Years War” between 1914 and 1945 that, ironically, Nazi philosophy and a range of Marxist schools of thought survived the butchery while Humanism was “institutionalized” (pun intended) in the crutches of laws and policy of the free world, losing much of its polemical freshness.

I resolved to exclude outright both schools of thought, which cleared the deck quite efficiently. It means that, with the exception of Albert Camus, who was captured by neither current and who had been active in French Resistance, as well as Guy Debord - indeed a Marxist, but whose analysis of the information society I found very valuable -, most of post-war French political thought was excluded on principle, infected as it was by Heidegerrian Nazi existentialism and opportunistic Marxism (out of guilt for wartime collaboration under the Occupation).

The Marxist Case

Karl Marx himself is, contrary to popular belief, not a political philosopher, as he has no concept as State whatsoever in his writings- save for a shockingly primitive idea of it as “a tool of class power of the bourgeoisie”. Beyond that characterization, he is mostly a mediocre economist, whose core arguments shatter into utter ridicule by a mere examination of mundane forward costing and backward costing trade calculations.

The followers of Karl Marx built their thought on fragmentary accounts, paraphrases, soap-box slogans and summaries of his writings. Rather than creating a Marxist model of State, the aim was to capture the existing State with its full oppressive apparatus - dislodge the Bourgeois from its seat and replace it - and use it as a social engineering machine. Real world consequences: historical estimates of deaths caused by communist regimes in the 20th century generally range from roughly 65 million to around 100 million, depending on methodology, besides sponsoring Agoraclastic organizations everywhere for decades to destroy free societies.

The Heidegger Case

Martin Heidegger was not merely a member of the Nazi party, he ardently desired to be its leading philosopher instead of Alfred Rosenberg (the latter was sentenced to death at the Nuremberg Trials and executed, as Heidegger should have been as well). Despite participating in drawing up the Nuremberg Race Laws, he succeeded with no small help from Jean-Paul Sartre in 1945-46, in rebranding his Nazi thought into a fashionable post-Hiroshima “technology critique” that made him marketable to Marxists eager to agitate against the US under the pretense of “serious metaphysics”.

Thirty years in, this confused scholarly drift produced such Frankensteinian results as Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, who thoroughly absorbed Heideggerian Nazism and combined it with Marxism, both working in unison as a vector of virulent Jew-hatred4 5 6. Yet today, eagerly still cited is his “State of Exception”. In this work originally published in 20037, he assumes from the first lines that all States ontologicaly have a Nazi totalitarian State dormant in them, making it a template towards that all States would ultimately tend.

From Metaphysics to Policy

The theory moved through three registers over time: metaphysics, State theory, and policy — three galaxies that seldom meet and that scholarship, working in silos, touches one or two of.

The first register was unavoidable. To understand why terrorism had never been properly defined, I had to understand why legitimacy — the concept at stake in every act of political violence directed at the State — had resisted precise definition for so long. The answer lay in its origins: Western political legitimacy has theological roots, having mutated slowly from its 13th-century ecclesiastical function — validating temporal authority through spiritual approval — into the procedural-rational category Max Weber later described.

That genealogy left an evanescent residue. Legitimacy is neither fully visible nor fully operational; it is the invisible emanation of the sacred into the political domain, transforming mere power into justified rule. Grasping that made it possible to understand what can destroy it. Once the metaphysical scaffolding had served its purpose, it was dismantled: the mature model has no need for theological premises.

The second register was the load-bearing structure. Against Weber’s reduction of the State to a monopoly on legitimate force — a definition that leaves invisible the very structures political violence actually targets — I proposed understanding the State as a metabolic entity continuously producing and repairing a structured order of norms, infrastructures, and symbolically mediated relations.

From this functional model, I derived a 14-domain anatomy of sovereignty, articulated across inward and outward dimensions: legitimacy, diplomacy, defense, standards, circulation, commerce, communication on the outward face; infrastructure, labor, taxation, rights, domestic security, knowledge, and public health on the inward. Each domain represents a distinct way in which the State holds political order together — and therefore a distinct axis along which that order can be attacked.

The third, and most arduous, register was policy. Philosophy in the service of statecraft means the conceptual precision achieved in the second register must translate directly into operational tools: domain-specific diagnosis, domain-specific defense, and constraints against the pathological self-destruction — Nomoktonia — by which States, under pressure, progressively kill their own law in the name of protecting it.

From this evolution over a decade emerged the term that gives the framework its name: Agoraclasm — from the Greek agora and klasis (breaking). The Agora is not merely a public square. It is the space in which a polity appears to itself, in which anonymous members of the community encounter each other under conditions of presumed safety, mutual visibility, and contestability. It is the functional mechanism by which aggregate consent is produced and from which the State derives its legitimacy. To attack the Agora is not primarily to kill bodies or destroy buildings — it is to attack the process by which the State acquires the right to rule. That is what 200 definitions of terrorism uniformly failed to see, because they approached the phenomenon from the viewpoint of the victim’s fear rather than from the anatomy of what is being structurally destroyed.

Three years ago, I visited with a group of Jews and Sinti the only Nazi forced labor camp on French soil, Natzweiler-Struthof in Alsace. It is not a sprawling complex like the extermination complexes in Poland, but a small sinister place huddled atop a mountain surrounded by forests. The view in spring and summer is beautiful and contrasts jarringly with the atrocity perpetrated there. It operated between April 21st, 1941 and November 25rd, 1944: 1314 days.

I walked around the complex bouncing from an explanatory sign to another like a stone falling down a ravine and bumping haphazardly on the rocks. Then at last I found myself in the room of the single crematorium of the camp, of the same Topf & Söhne model as in the other camps. It is estimated that up to 22,000 bodies of murdered prisoners were cremated, first outside the camp in 60 km distant Strasbourg; in that particular crematorium only from October 23rd, 1943 onwards, it operated 399 days .

Envision this absurd routine of a lorry loaded with long wooden crates with bodies inside driving daily 120 km down a mountain to Strasbourg and back, once if not twice a day.

It was the first concentration camp discovered in western Europe by the US Army. The sign outside specified that “corpses in that crematorium would be ashes within 30 minutes.” 30 minutes… that was when I reconstructed in my mind the entire circular economy model that made the camp what it was. I understood how an SS guard could obtain a cup of hot coffee early in the morning.

Following the fate of Night & Mist prisoners

In the present article, I would like to walk you through this model. It reveals the mindset that created it.

This camp had a particular role in the Nazi camp system, as there were some Jewish deportees and mostly partisans from across occupied Europe. There was a category of detainees called “Nacht und Nebel” (NN). These were their clothes, marked NN for the guards:

On December 7th, 1941 (the day of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor), Hitler ordered that certain prisoners be “disappeared”, like vanished into the “night and fog”. The initials N.N are believed to have referred to the Latin legal expression “Nome Nescio” (name unknown), but the Nazis being fans of Richard Wagner, at length associated it to a curse in his play Rheingold, Scene 2 (here, “Nebel” - mist - is incorrectly translated as “darkness” - probably to render the alliteration in German):

Popular culture had been turned into camouflage for state murder. Random lesson #1: BEWARE OF EUPHEMISTIC EXPRESSIONS IN POLITICAL LANGUAGE. That is how euphemism works in politics: it launders the smell. Whoever reaches for ornate phrases instead of plain words is usually putting lipstick on a pig, and often on a dead, decaying one.

Families of N.N prisoners were not notified of their whereabouts or fate, their remains were cremated and dispersed, no paper trail was available to track them. This camp was a facility dedicated to holding many of them.

The gallows

When you enter the camp through the main gate, as the prisoners once did pushed and harassed by the SS guards, you will see on your left a gallows. Further downhill, there’s a green building with a steel smokestack, back then there would have been black smoke rising and possibly, depending of the wind, a smell of burnt flesh lingering in the air. That was the crematorium. You will not find the gas chamber there, it is concealed inside a repurposed civilian house 2 km from the camp.

As you have never delved into the technicalities of the executioners craft, you will be forgiven for noting its existence and moving on with a shudder. There is something wrong with this gallows, the 80 cm high platform is too low. For comparison, the U.S. Army codified detailed specifications for executions by hanging, including the design of the scaffold. The platform was to stand roughly three meters (10 feet) above ground, with a trapdoor allowing a controlled fall. British authorities had gone further since the 1870s, using standardized “long drop” tables to calibrate the fall by body weight, in order to break the neck cleanly and avoid the spectacle of a slow, botched death. Saddam Hussein’s hanging in 2006 – where a miscalculated drop tore off the head – showed what happens when this calculation goes wrong.

The point of the professional “long drop” is simple: enough kinetic energy to snap the neck and cause almost immediate death. It is a formula using high-school math and physics. Too short a drop, or none at all, is not hanging in that sense; it is strangulation under the weight of the body, where the victim jerks and gasps for minutes on end. The low platform at Struthof is not a design flaw. It is evidence of intent. The gallows was a machine for slow, public death.

Water

Moving further we learn that, above the camp, there is a reservoir of fresh water that was built by the Germans for the operation of the camp and has been since 1945 repurposed to supply water to the village below. The water is cold, being rainwater, but how is it heated? The SS need a cup of coffee in the morning.

An underground pipe (to avoid it freezing in winter) connects the reservoir to the green building. Next to the crematorium room, there is a room with shower heads. Real showers with water, for the guards. Ten meters behind the green building, at the foot of steep embankment, there is the cesspit. That is where, each day, a prisoner from each barrack emptied the bucket of excrement of his block.

Contrary to the guards who walked a smooth gently sloped paths, prisoners were allowed to move about the camp exclusively on the steps - high granite steps (circa 30 cm high). Today ironically, visitors are banned from walking up and down the steps and move inside the camp on the SS paths. How many exhausted prisoners were beaten to death early in the morning for stumbling down these steps barely lifting a stinking bucket full of diarrhea and spilled it?

There is a fire in that green building, burning long hours day and night, 30 minutes per body, reducing murdered prisoners to ash. Indeed, a water pipe runs through the crematorium oven itself, heating the water which then feeds into the guard showers. There is a tap to draw from it too, so that a prisoner working in the kitchen up the hill could come down to draw hot water to make the thin broth three times a day.

Food

Outside the fence, just next to the camp, there’s a small vegetable garden. The vegetables grown there were for the prisoners sustenance and some privileged ones were allowed to tend to it. A mere 100 meters further is the master house, where the camp commander lived with his family.

The prisoners manning the crematorium had to take out the ash after each incineration. Some prisoners ashes were placed in urns stored on room further down the hall, just before the quarters of the prisoners held awaiting “medical experiments” - torture - sessions. The urns were intended to be sold to the family of the detainee notified of the death of their loved one.

Other ashes were to be carried out of the building and mixed into the cesspit, in order to enrich it with nitrogen. The gardeners in turn collected buckets of the mixture from the cesspit to use as fertilizer for the garden. These vegetables, fertilized with yesterdays dead ashes and excrement, were harvested and put into the water heated by the fire that burned this mornings dead.

One crematorium, 30 minutes per body, 24 hours per day - capacity of 48 dead daily to have a continuous supply of hot water, so the SS working in shifts could shower and have a cup of coffee. Murdered by slow hanging in public during morning roll call, by torture, by gunfire, by injection as well, by freezing in winter or sweltering heat in the summer, by exhaustion during work at the stone quarry - men and a few women, fed into this devious machine of death.

A 100 meters further, the camp commanders children played on the lawn and the SS had a coffee between shifts.

The machinery was designed to process people as material; it operated efficiently across categories. But Jews were not just one category among equals — they were the category for whom the system was ultimately rationalized. The others were collateral to an ideology; the Jews were its object.

The end of the experiment

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On the 8th of October 2023, an experiment failed--- not through a state decision, not through legislation, but through the societies themselves. What had been built over the preceding century and a half: the idea that a Jew in Europe could be a full citizen, was voided within hours across large parts of the Western European-shaped democracies.

Since then, the question has been: how can the extinction of Jewish life in the free world be delayed for as long as possible?

The First Experiment: The German Jew (62 Years) and the French Jew (148 Years)

The project began with Bismarck. On 22 April 1871, the legal emancipation of the Jews was extended to the entire German Reich --- after decades of back and forth, of rights given and taken away again between 1815 and 187112. Before that, the Wars of Liberation and Napoleon had opened the ghettos, and many German princes who sought to repel the ideas of the French Revolution had pushed the Jews back once more.

Bismarck emancipated out of tactical calculation--- to win liberal delegates--- but the result was real: for the first time, Jews in the German Reich were full citizens.

What followed was not an unbroken rise, but a project of conditional assimilation. Jews in the German Reich integrated into bourgeois society and became German Jews, fought in World War~I for Germany, developed an identity as German citizens of the Jewish faith --- not as Jews who happened to live in Germany, but as Germans who happened to be Jewish3. The Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish Faith (Centralverein) attempted during the Weimar period to declare the republican constitution the actual foundation of German-ness~--- a form of constitutional patriotism that conceived of Jewishness as reconciled with German-ness.

This experiment ended in 1933. Not gradually. With a precision that Arendt would later describe as symptomatic: first the Jews were excluded from the legal community~--- rendered de facto stateless~--- and only then was their right to life attacked4. The annihilation was the last link in a chain whose first link was the stripping of rights.

And crucially: the Western community of states watched. The USA had passed the Johnson-Reed Act in 1924, which structurally prevented immigration from Eastern Europe~--- where most Jews lived5. This Act remained in force unchanged between 1933 and 1941; the United States did not revise its immigration laws when the annihilation began6. Not a bureaucratic oversight, but political will --- or its demonstrative absence. In the standard work of diplomatic practice, Satow’s Diplomatic Practice 7, we read literally on p.16:

If Hitler had not declared war on the United States after his ally, Japan, attacked it at Pearl Harbor and in the Philippines in December 1941 it is possible that the United States would have remained a bystander in the European War.

Correspondingly, it must be assumed today that a USA under its current leadership will refuse to militarily support Europe against a Russian campaign.

France followed a different model--- the republican one. There, emancipation had its own logic: the Jew was permitted to be Jewish in his home, but in public he appeared exclusively as a citizen: the “indoor Jew” and “outdoor citizen”. This splitting of the person was the guiding principle of the recognition of Jewish membership in humanity--- also known as ``emancipation’‘--- throughout the entire long 19th century (1789--1918).

Particular tradition belonged to the private sphere. That was the core of the republican Jewish status~--- and it was broadened in 1905 with the Law of Separation into the general laïcité: what once governed the relationship with the Jew now applied to all religions, especially political Catholicism 89. Laïcité is structurally the universalisation of the Jewish status to all citizens. Seen in this light, the French Republic treats any religious community only by treating them as if they were another variant of the Jews.

The deep division that lasted almost 50 years in France over the Dreyfus Affair takes on its own coloration and partly illuminates France’s participation in the Shoah~--- both as a state and as a society, although out of the 40 million Frenchmen, approximately 800,000 to 900,000 actively, often in the shadows, resisted the occupation. The most acute mortal danger stemmed far more from the denunciatory delight of the other 39 million fellow citizens than from the German occupiers themselves.

The Second Experiment: The Jew in Europe, 78 Years

After 1945, the follow-up experiment emerged under altered conditions. The Federal Republic of Germany gave itself in 1949 a constitution that set the principle of equality in absolute terms and sought to make the disenfranchisement of the Nazi era constitutionally irreversible1011. The Allied Control Council had already annulled the Nazi citizenship laws in 1945; the formal restoration of citizenship for persecuted Jews was possible under Basic Law Article 116, but in practice was accompanied for decades by restrictive decisions12.

The new Jewish community in Germany was not a continuation of the old one. It was a different one: survivors, displaced persons, and after 1990 a large wave of Soviet Jews, which brought approximately 220,000~people to Germany between 1990 and 200513. These people defined themselves as Jews living in Germany --- not as Germans of the Jewish faith. The shift is not merely semantic. It shows that the identity construction of the first experiment was not reproducible.

Both models --- the assimilationist German and the republican French---rested on a shared premise: that the Jew as a person, as a citizen, was legally and politically equal to all others. This premise was not a moral appendix to democracy. It was its founding principle, its test under pressure. The Jew as citizen was the test case of the modern rule of law: when the principle of equal dignity comes under pressure, it does so first for those for whom its application has historically been most fiercely contested.

8.October 2023: The End of the Second Experiment

What began on 8.October 2023 --- the day after the Hamas massacre --- was not a relapse into National Socialism. It was something structurally different, and for that very reason analytically harder to grasp.

The numbers are clear: RIAS documented over 8,600 antisemitic incidents in Germany between 7 October and the end of 2024~--- an increase of 77 percent compared to 2023, which itself already showed 83 percent more than 20221415.

An average of 24 antisemitic incidents per day in 2024. Among them 186 physical attacks, 300 threats, 8 cases of extreme violence. Antisemitic assemblies: 1,802 in 2024, corresponding to 35 per week.

But the numbers tell only the visible part. The study conducted on behalf of the Federal Anti-Discrimination Agency reveals the inner reality: Jewish people report social isolation in schools, universities, workplaces, and doctors’ offices1617. Long-standing friendships broke not because of state pressure, but because non-Jewish friends, neighbours, and colleagues showed little empathy. People conceal their identity --- they do not wear a kippah, tuck the Star of David under their shirt, refrain from speaking Hebrew in the street1819. According to the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights, 76 percent of European Jews conceal their identity at least occasionally20.

In Berlin, the Police Commissioner publicly recommended in 2024 that visibly Jewish people be more careful21. In Stuttgart, the Jewish community published a list of city districts that Jews should avoid--- de facto no-go zones, not by state order but due to the risk of physical violence at pro-Hamas demonstrations22. The Simon Wiesenthal Center considered issuing a travel warning for the city. At German universities, 450 antisemitic incidents were documented at 56 different locations; Jewish students choose courses no longer by interest but by their sense of safety23.

The Decisive Asymmetry: State versus Society

Here lies the systematic difference from the first experiment~--- and it is the key to the diagnostic in democratic theory.

The first time, the disenfranchisement came from the state, after it had been captured by fascist currents within society. It was state legislation, state bureaucracy, state violence that excluded Jews from the legal community. The liberal rule of law had failed because it had been violently destroyed.

This time, something different is failing: society itself. Civil society actors--- NGOs, universities, cultural institutions, social movements, friendship networks--- are the ones enforcing the de-citizenization of Jews as a moral imperative. It is the ``progressive’‘ academic discourse that reframes solidarity with Jews as moral collaboration with colonialism. It is universities that become spaces in which Jewish students do not feel safe24.

It is organized civil society that frames the exclusion of Jewish voices from cultural events, political coalitions, and academic discourse as anti-racist practice25. It is the intellectual mother of German democracy, the SPD, within whose ranks hatred of Israel has found free rein. The public broadcaster ARD, flagship vessel steaming full speed ahead, eagerly followed by the frigate ZDF, has popularized Hamas narratives and dubious framings of war events~--- and decorates itself with journalism awards for doing so26.

The state reacts~--- partly decisively, partly incoherently. Germany has banned Hamas, sharpened its definition of antisemitism, increased funding for the Central Council of Jews to almost 24~million euros annually27, added twelve questions about Judaism and Israel to its naturalization test28, passed a controversial (!!!) NON-BINDING Bundestag resolution on the IHRA definition (with no legal effect whatsoever)29. The Interior Minister spoke of an alarmingly high level of antisemitic crime30.

But state protective measures--- police presence at synagogues, metal detectors, security recommendations--- are symptom management. They address the physical danger, not the civil society exclusion, not the social isolation, not the fact that a Jewish citizen in a German democracy has since 2023 been carefully weighing whether to display a Star of David.

The November pogrom in Amsterdam in 2024 was paradigmatic: Dutch police officers refused weeks beforehand, for moral reasons, to protect Jewish institutions3132. Then, when a mob hunted Israeli football fans through the streets, the police largely stood by33. The Dutch King said afterward that the Netherlands had failed its Jewish community in the Second World War --- and had done so again. This self-diagnosis is accurate --- with a similar Jewish population to France before the Shoah, 20% of Dutch Jews survived compared to 80% in France.

The Secular Order Under Pressure

France brings the tension to a second level. The republican model --- the privatisation of religious identity as a condition for full citizenship --- was always fragile, but it functioned as long as all citizens accepted it. Jews held this pact for centuries: Jew at home, Frenchman outside.

The model today comes under pressure not from Jews who refuse the pact, but from a portion of the Muslim population that rejects it. Mass prayers on Parisian suburban streets --- as in Clichy-la-Garenne~--- are not merely a religious-legal problem34 . They are a direct signal that the republican grammar of laïcité no longer constitutes a binding norm for these actors. France has faced this issue for years: the separation of public civic space from private faith holds only as long as all parties accept it.

Between 2023 and August 2024, 1,660 French Jews made Aliyah~--- 50 percent more than in the same period the previous year35. Even more significantly: 5,700 people have filed Aliyah applications since 7.October, compared to 1,300 in the same period in 2023 --- an increase of 340 percent. Many are not leaving, but more and more are seriously considering it. The Grand Rabbi of Paris, Moshe Sebbag, put it directly: it was clear that Jews had no future in France36.

What Remains: Third Experiment --- The Jew with Citizenship(s)?

Here arises the question that 7 October has posed anew --- a question that Herzl had already raised in 1896: what is the Jew outside the Jewish national state?

Herzl had answered at the time: a person whose rights can be revoked at any moment, because his rights rest not on his own sovereignty but on the tolerance of others37. Arendt formulated it differently, but structurally analogously: without stable citizenship in a recognised political community, there is no right to have rights. Disenfranchisement does not begin with violence; it begins with the withdrawal of political status. Only once that is accomplished can organized mass violence follow.

What has been visible since 8 October 2023 is not a formal withdrawal of rights. But it is the beginning of a social status degradation that comes from below, from society --- and is therefore harder to combat than a state measure. The state can change laws. It cannot compel social moral orders by law, cannot legislate solidarity.

The Jew in democracy is entirely dependent on his neighbors finding incitement against Jews and against Israel suspicious, and leaving candidates and parties who play that tune to lie in the muddy political ditch on the left or right. The election results rather suggest that the neighbors apparently (global warming?) are wallowing quite happily in the cool mud of the ditch.

The result is a new category: the Jew with citizenship(s). Formally a citizen, factually excluded from parts of the social space. Legally equal, socially segregated. Physically safe, only as long as he remains invisible. At this point, a landmark case should be mentioned in which Jews were denied their citizenship rights by a European state since 7 October. In September 2025, the Belgian government passed a comprehensive package of measures tied to its position on Palestinian statehood. From October 2025, the Belgian Consulate General in Jerusalem and the Belgian Embassy in Tel Aviv suspended consular services for Belgian nationals living beyond the 1949 Green Line~--- that is, in East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Israeli settlements. The suspended services include the issuance and renewal of passports, the registration of births and marriages, and participation in Belgian elections.

In January 2026, a concrete case became public38 : a Belgian-Jewish woman in Jerusalem received a letter from the consulate informing her that her place of residence fell ``outside internationally recognized territory’‘ and that she had therefore been struck from the consular population register --- as had all family members at the same address, without individual review. Her lawyer, Julien Cohen, pointed to a legal absurdity: the consulate officially claims jurisdiction over Jerusalem and the Palestinian territories --- but declared that his client fell within neither of its jurisdictions.

This grotesque affair befell the family in Israel --- one can well imagine what would happen to this Jewish family were they stranded in another country. Only Israel, even if these Jews were not Israeli citizens, would have found a way to extract them from the predicament.

The decisive difference from 1933: today there is a Jewish state. Those who leave do not go into a void, but to Israel. This fundamentally alters the calculation for individuals --- but it does not alter the democratic-theoretical diagnosis for Europe.

The Democratic-Theoretical Consequence

If the equal standing of the Jew was the founding principle of modern European democracy --- the test case in which the universalism of the Enlightenment proved itself under real conditions --- then the systematic societal de-citizenization of Jews is not merely a problem for the Jewish community. It is an indicator of the condition of democracy itself. All citizens come into the line of fire of the vile mob that hounds Jews.

The argument runs as follows: European democracy is not merely a procedure. It is an order of values resting on the principle of equal dignity for all citizens. Jews were historically the hardest test of this order --- because they were excluded the longest and most systematically (the Roma and Sinti similarly), and because their inclusion therefore demanded the most explicit act of will. If that inclusion is today --- not by the state, but by society and civil society --- being reversed, then it is not only a guarantee of protection that collapses. The foundation itself collapses.

The naturalization tests with questions about Jewish history, the Bundestag resolutions, the police escort for synagogues~--- all of these are attempts by the state to repair this foundation. But they function like support pillars on a building whose masonry is dissolving from within.

The situation rhymes with the situation before 1914 in some respects --- Jews who are formally citizens but feel neither safe nor at home, who avoid public spaces, who conceal their identity, who maintain lists of antisemitic establishments and businesses where Jews are not welcome (as people do today as well).

The difference is one of consequence, not of diagnosis: in 1914 there was no Jewish state. In 2026 there is one. This means that the experiment does not simply fail --- it ends with a way out. But it is not a way out that saves democracy. It is one that leads out of it.

Outlook

In view of this situation, one may ask what lies ahead for Jews. The Belgian case demonstrates state antisemitism of the traditional variety, as told by great-grandparents in Western Europe and by parents in Eastern Europe. By now there are several states in Western Europe that may be considered antisemitic states --- they share, among other things, the fact that they have recognised ``Palestine’‘ and thereby rewarded Hamas’s invasion of Israel. None of these recognitions would have taken place in this timeframe without the political pressure that grew from the post-7th-October anti-Israel demonstrations. Thus state foreign policy followed that civil society mobilisation which simultaneously drove the social disenfranchisement of Jewish citizens~--- a finding that further blurs the boundary between state and societal responsibility:

• Ireland

• Spain

• Belgium

• France

• UK

• Portugal

• Norway

• Malta

• Andorra

• Luxembourg

Spain stands out particularly. Antisemitic incidents occurred there of a kind last written about some eight generations ago, for instance with the public burning of an effigy of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as Judas Iscariot as part of Easter celebrations in 20263940. Who knows, perhaps they will procure a living Jew of flesh and blood for next year, for the sake of realism?

One can imagine that one or more of the aforementioned states might, for example:

• Revoke El~Al’s overflight rights, in whole or in part;

• Ban El~Al from airports;

• Prohibit citizens, under penalty, from travelling to Israel;

• Issue travel warnings with consequences for insurance coverage and civil service status;

• Subject all business relations with Israeli firms, following BDS, to such conditions as to render them de facto impossible;

• Prohibit ritual slaughter (already enacted in some states);

• Prohibit circumcision;

• Act on demands from civil society for special taxation of Jews, e.g.\ ``for the reconstruction of Gaza’‘;

• Strip citizenship upon proof of Israeli citizenship (dual nationals)~--- the Belgian consular case is a precursor of this logic;

• Ban Israeli cultural institutions, academics, and sports teams (the Eurovision debate of 2024 as precedent);

• Freeze assets of all Israeli citizens living in the respective country, invoking ICC arrest warrants against Israeli leadership figures;

• Etc…

The consequences of the 2026 war against Iran, including the rising cost of fuel, are already being attributed to Israel and in the same breath to ``the Jews.’‘ With growing tensions with Russia and increasing estrangement from the USA, it is to be expected that, following the same logic, this too will be laid at the Jews’ door.

What can Jews do? The following is a table of the Jewish population by state, expressed as Jews per 10,000 inhabitants. So: try to keep on living --- Jews can do nothing to change these societies, as the recently concluded 78-year experiment demonstrates.

Ultimately, the same forces have been unleashed in free societies that extinguished Jewish life in the Muslim world and that drove the great part of the remaining Jewry of the USSR to emigrate. Against this, our neighbors are demonstrably not equipped, and only approximately one in five is willing to be equipped at all41, as the approval ratings for halting German arms deliveries to Israel in 2025 revealed.

The questions that remain open are not rhetorical: Can a democracy survive the failure of its founding conviction --- the equal dignity of all citizens --- as an indicator of decline? And what does it mean for Europe if the answer of its Jewish minority is no longer: We fight for our rights here --- but rather: Maybe we should leave this time. Alternatively, one can wait 20 years until the youth politicized over the past three years advances into political office and initiates the legal erasure of European Jewry. Like last time.

Das Ende des Experiments

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Am 8.Oktober 2023 ist ein Experiment gescheitert--- nicht durch eine staatliche Entscheidung, nicht durch ein Gesetz, sondern durch die Gesellschaften selbst. Was in den anderthalb Jahrhunderten davor aufgebaut worden ist: die Vorstellung, dass ein Jude in Europa vollständig Bürger sein kann, wurde innerhalb von Stunden in weiten Teilen der westeuropäisch geprägten Demokratien kassiert, von Malmö bis Sydney.

Seither stellt sich die Frage: wie lässt sich das Erlöschen jüdischen Lebens in der freien Welt möglichst lange hinauszögern?

Das erste Experiment: Der deutsche Jude (62 Jahre) und der französische Jude (148 Jahre)

Das Projekt begann mit Bismarck. Am 22.April 1871 wurde die rechtliche Emanzipation der

Juden auf das gesamte Deutsche Reich ausgedehnt--- nach Jahrzehnten des Hin und Her, der gegebenen und wieder entzogenen Rechte zwischen 1815 und 1871 12. Zuvor hatten die Befreiungskriege und Napoleon die Ghettos geöffnet, und viele deutsche Fürsten, die die Ideen der Französischen Revolution abwehren wollten, hatten die Juden erneut zurückgedrängt.

Bismarck emanzipierte aus taktischem Kalkül--- um liberale Delegierte zu gewinnen--- aber das Ergebnis war real: zum ersten Mal waren Juden im Deutschen Reich vollständige Staatsbürger.

Was folgte, war kein bruchloser Aufstieg, sondern ein Projekt der Assimilation unter Vorbehalt. Juden im Deutschen Reich integrierten sich in die bürgerliche Gesellschaft und wurden zu Deutsche Juden, kämpften in WK I für Deutschland, entwickelten eine Identität als deutsche Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens--- nicht als Juden, die zufällig in Deutschland lebten, sondern als Deutsche, die zufällig jüdisch waren 3. Der Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens versuchte in der Weimarer Zeit, die republikanische Verfassung zur eigentlichen Grundlage des Deutschseins zu erklären--- eine Form des Verfassungspatriotismus, der das Jüdische als mit dem Deutschen versöhnt dachte.

Dieses Experiment endete 1933. Nicht schrittweise. Mit einer Präzision, die Hannah Arendt später als symptomatisch beschreiben sollte: erst wurden die Juden aus der Rechtsgemeinschaft ausgeschlossen--- de facto staatenlos gemacht--- und erst dann wurde das Recht auf Leben angegriffen.4Die Vernichtung war das letzte Glied einer Kette, deren erstes Glied die Entrechtung war.

Und entscheidend: die westliche Staatenwelt schaute zu. Die USA hatten 1924 den Johnson-Reed Act erlassen, der die Immigration aus Osteuropa--- wo die meisten Juden lebten--- strukturell verhinderte5. Dieser Act blieb zwischen 1933 und 1941 unverändert in Kraft; die Vereinigten Staaten revidierten ihre Einwanderungsgesetze nicht, als die Vernichtung begann 6. Nicht ein bürokratisches Versehen, sondern politischer Wille--- oder dessen demonstrative Abwesenheit. Im Standardwerk des Diplomatischen Handwerks, Satows Diplomatic Practice7 heisst es gar wörtlich S.16:

If Hitler had not declared war on the United States after his ally, Japan, attacked it at Pearl Harbor and in the Philippines in December 1941 it is possible that the United States would have remained a bystander in the European War.

Entsprechend heute ist davon auszugehen, dass ein USA unter seiner derzeitigen Führung sich weigern wird, Europa militärisch gegen einen russischen Feldzug zu unterstützen.

Der französische Modell

Frankreich folgte einem anderen Modell--- dem republikanischen. Dort hatte die Emanzipation eine eigene Logik: der Jude durfte in seinem Hause Jude sein, aber in der Öffentlichkeit trat er ausschließlich als Staatsbürger auf: der Hausjude und Strassenbürger. Diese Personenspaltung war der Leitfaden der Anerkennung der jüdischen Zugehörigkeit zur Menschheit - auch bekannt als “Emanzipation”, durch das gesamte lange 19 Jahrhundert hinweg (1789-1918)

Das war der Kern des republikanischen Judenstatus --- und er wurde 1905 mit dem Trennungsgesetz zur allgemeinen laïcité erweitert: Was einst das Verhältnis zum Juden regelte, galt nun für alle Religionen, insbesondere den politischen Katholizismus8 9. Laïcité ist strukturell die Verallgemeinerung des Judenstatus auf alle Bürger. Anders gesagt, weiss die französische Republik jede beliebige Religionsgemeinschaft, ohne sie offizielle anerkennen zu müssen, nur so zu behandeln, als wären sie andere Varianten der Juden.

Unter diesem Winkel betrachtet gewinnt die tiefe über fast 50 Jahre andauernden Spaltung Frankreichs um die Dreyfus Affäre eine eigene Färbung und beleuchtet zum Teil die Mitwirkung Frankreichs an der Schoah - sowohl als Staat als auch als Gesellschaft, obzwar von den 40 Millionen Franzosen etwa 800.000 bis 900.000 aktiv, oft im Stillen der Besatzung die Stirn boten. Die akuteste Lebensgefahr rührte von der Verratsfreude der 39 Millionen anderen Mitbürger weit mehr als vom Deutschen Besatzer selbst. Es überlebten immerhin 80% Juden in Frankreich.

Das zweite Experiment: Der Jude in Europa, 78 Jahre

Nach 1945 entstand das Folgeexperiment unter veränderten Vorzeichen. Die Bundesrepublik Deutschland gab sich 1949 eine Verfassung, die das Gleichheitsprinzip absolut setzte und die Entrechtung der NS-Zeit konstitutionell unumkehrbar zu machen versuchte1011. Der Allied Control Council hatte bereits 1945 die NS-Bürgerrechtsgesetze kassiert; die formale Wiederherstellung der Staatsbürgerschaft für verfolgte Juden war mit Grundgesetz Artikel 116 möglich, in der Praxis aber jahrzehntelang von restriktiven Entscheidungen begleitet12.

Die neue jüdische Gemeinschaft in Deutschland war keine Fortsetzung der alten. Es war eine andere: Überlebende, Displaced Persons, und nach 1990 eine große Welle sowjetischer Juden, die zwischen 1990 und 2005 rund 220.000 Menschen nach Deutschland brachte 13. Diese Menschen definierten sich als Juden, die in Deutschland leben--- nicht als Deutsche jüdischen Glaubens. Die Verschiebung ist nicht nur semantisch. Sie zeigt, dass die Identitätskonstruktion des ersten Experiments nicht reproduzierbar war.

Beide Modelle--- das assimilatorische deutsche und das republikanische französische---ruhten auf einer gemeinsamen Prämisse: dass der Jude als Mensch, als Bürger, rechtlich und politisch mit allen anderen gleichgestellt sei. Diese Prämisse war kein moralischer Appendix der Demokratie. Sie war deren Gründungsprinzip, ihre Probe auf Ernstfall. Der Jude als Bürger war der Testfall des modernen Rechtsstaates: Wenn das Prinzip der gleichen Würde unter Druck gerät, gerät es zuerst bei denen, für die seine Anwendung historisch am stärksten umkämpft war.

Der 8.Oktober 2023: Das Ende des zweiten Experiments

Was am 8.Oktober 2023--- dem Tag nach dem Hamas-Massaker--- begann, war kein Rückfall in den Nationalsozialismus. Es war etwas strukturell anderes, und gerade deshalb analytisch schwerer zu fassen.

Die Zahlen sind eindeutig: RIAS dokumentierte zwischen dem 7.Oktober und Ende 2024 über 8.600 antisemitische Vorfälle in Deutschland--- ein Anstieg von 77 Prozent gegenüber 2023, das seinerseits bereits 83 Prozent mehr als 2022 aufwies1415.

Durchschnittlich 24 antisemitische Vorfälle pro Tag im Jahr 2024. Darunter 186 physische Angriffe, 300 Bedrohungen, 8 Fälle extremer Gewalt. Antisemitische Versammlungen: 1.802 im Jahr 2024, das entspricht 35 pro Woche.

Aber die Zahlen erzählen nur den sichtbaren Teil. Die Studie, die im Auftrag der Antidiskriminierungsstelle des Bundes durchgeführt wurde, zeigt das Innenleben: Jüdinnen und Juden berichten von sozialer Isolation in Schulen, an Universitäten, am Arbeitsplatz, in Arztpraxen1617

Langjährige Freundschaften zerbrachen nicht wegen staatlichen Drucks, sondern weil nichtjüdische Freunde, Nachbarn, Kollegen kaum Empathie zeigten. Menschen verbergen ihre Identität--- sie tragen keine Kippa, stecken den Davidstern unter das Hemd, sprechen kein Hebräisch auf der Straße1819. Laut EU-Grundrechteagentur verstecken 76 Prozent der europäischen Juden ihre Identität zumindest gelegentlich20 .

In Berlin empfahl die Polizeipräsidentin 2024 öffentlich, als sichtbar jüdischer Mensch vorsichtiger zu sein21 . In Stuttgart veröffentlichte die jüdische Gemeinde eine Liste von Stadtteilen, die Juden meiden sollten--- de-facto No-Go-Zonen, nicht durch staatliche Anordnung, sondern durch das Risiko körperlicher Gewalt bei pro-Hamas-Demonstrationen22 . Das Simon Wiesenthal Center erwog eine Reisewarnung für die Stadt. An deutschen Universitäten wurden 450 antisemitische Vorfälle an 56 verschiedenen Standorten dokumentiert; jüdische Studierende wählen Kurse nicht mehr nach Interesse, sondern nach Sicherheitsgefühl 2324.

Die entscheidende Asymmetrie: Staat contra Gesellschaft

Hier liegt der systematische Unterschied zum ersten Experiment--- und er ist der Schlüssel zur demokratietheoretischen Diagnose.

Beim ersten Mal ging die Entrechtung vom Staat aus, nachdem er von den faschistischen Strömungen in der Gesellschaft erfasst worden war. Es war staatliche Gesetzgebung, staatliche Bürokratie, staatliche Gewalt, die die Juden aus der Rechtsgemeinschaft ausschloss. Der liberale Rechtsstaat hatte versagt, weil er gewaltsam zerstört worden war.

Diesmal versagt etwas anderes: die Gesellschaft selbst. Die zivilgesellschaftlichen Akteure--- NGOs, Universitäten, Kulturinstitutionen, soziale Bewegungen, Freundschaftsnetzwerke--- sind es, die die Entbürgerlichung der Juden als moralisches Gebot durchsetzen. Es ist der “progressive” akademische Diskurs, der die Solidarität mit Juden zur moralischen Kollaboration mit dem Kolonialismus umdeutet. Es sind Universitäten, die zu Räumen werden, in denen jüdische Studierende sich nicht sicher fühlen25 .

Es ist die organisierte Zivilgesellschaft, die den Ausschluss jüdischer Stimmen aus kulturellen Veranstaltungen, politischen Bündnissen, akademischen Diskursen als antirassistische Praxis rahmt26. Es ist die Geistesmutter der deutschen Demokratie, die SPD, in deren Reihen Israelhass sich freie Bahn verschaffte. Der Öffentlich-Rechtliche Rundfunk, Flagschiff ARD volldampf voran eifrig gefolgt von Fregatte ZDF, der Narrative des Hamas und dubiose Framings von Kriegsereignisse popularisiert - und sich dafür mit Berichterstattungspokale dekorieren lässt27.

Der Staat reagiert--- teils entschieden, teils inkohärent. Deutschland hat Hamas verboten, schärfte seinen Antisemitismusbegriff, erhöhte die Mittel für den Zentralrat der Juden auf fast 24 Millionen Euro jährlich28 , fügte dem Einbürgerungstest zwölf Fragen zu Judentum und Israel hinzu 29, verabschiedete eine umstrittene (!!!)UNVERBINDLICHE Bundestagsresolution zur IHRA-Definition (ohne jegliche Rechtswirkung also)30 . Der Innenminister sprach von einem alarmierend hohen Niveau antisemitischer Kriminalität.31

Aber staatliche Schutzmaßnahmen--- Polizeipräsenz vor Synagogen, Metalldetektoren, Sicherheitsempfehlungen--- sind Symptombekämpfung. Sie adressieren die physische Gefahr, nicht den zivilgesellschaftlichen Ausschluss, nicht die soziale Isolation, nicht die Tatsache, dass ein jüdischer Bürger in einer deutschen Demokratie seit dem Jahr 2023 abwägt, ob er seinen Davidstern zeigt.

Das Novemberpogrom in Amsterdam 2024 war paradigmatisch: niederländische Polizisten verweigerten Wochen zuvor aus moralischen Gründen den Schutz jüdischer Einrichtungen32 33. Dann, als ein Mob israelische Fußballfans durch die Straßen jagte, stand die Polizei weitgehend daneben34 . Der niederländische König sagte danach, die Niederlande hätten ihre jüdische Gemeinschaft im Zweiten Weltkrieg im Stich gelassen--- und hätten es erneut getan.

Diese Selbstdiagnose ist akkurat - bei ähnlicher jüdische Bevölkerung wie Frankreich vor der Shoah, überlebten 20% der Niederländischen Juden und in Frankreich 80%.

Die laizistische Ordnung unter Druck

Frankreich bringt die Spannung auf eine zweite Ebene. Das republikanische Modell--- die Privatisierung der religiösen Identität als Bedingung für volle Bürgerschaft--- war immer fragil, aber es funktionierte so lange, wie alle Bürger es akzeptierten. Juden haben diesen Pakt jahrhundertelang gehalten: im Haus Jude, draußen Franzose.

Das Modell gerät heute unter Druck nicht durch Juden, die den Pakt verweigern, sondern durch einen Teil der muslimischen Bevölkerung, der ihn ablehnt. Massengebete auf Pariser Vorstadtstraßen--- wie in Clichy-la-Garenne--- sind nicht nur ein religionsrechtliches Problem35 . Sie sind ein direktes Signal, dass die republikanische Grammatik der laïcité für diese Akteure keine bindende Norm mehr darstellt.

Frankreich steht seit Jahren vor dieser Zumutung: die Trennung von öffentlichem Bürgerraum und privatem Glauben gilt nur so lange, wie alle Beteiligten sie akzeptieren.

Zwischen 2023 und August 2024 haben 1.660 französische Juden Alija gemacht--- 50 Prozent mehr als im Vorjahreszeitraum36 . Noch bedeutsamer: 5.700 Menschen haben seit dem 7. Oktober einen Alija-Antrag gestellt, verglichen mit 1.300 im gleichen Zeitraum 2023 --- ein Anstieg von 340 Prozent. Viele fliehen nicht, aber immer mehrdenken ernsthaft darüber nach. Der Pariser Gemeinderabbiner Moshe Sebbag formulierte es direkt: Es sei klar, dass Juden in Frankreich keine Zukunft hätten37.

Was bleibt, dritter Experiment: Der Jude mit Staatsbürgerschaft(en)?

Hier stellt sich die Frage, die der 7.Oktober neu aufgeworfen hat--- eine Frage, die Herzl 1896 bereits gestellt hatte: Was ist der Jude außerhalb des jüdischen Nationalstaates?

Herzl hatte seinerzeit geantwortet: ein Mensch, dessen Rechte jederzeit entzogen werden können, weil seine Rechte nicht auf eigener Souveränität, sondern auf der Toleranz anderer beruhen38. Arendt formulierte es anders, aber strukturell analog: Ohne stabile Staatsbürgerschaft in einer anerkannten politischen Gemeinschaft gibt es kein Recht, Rechte zu haben. Die Entrechtung beginnt nicht mit Gewalt, sie beginnt mit dem Entzug des politischen Status. Erst wenn dieser vollzogen ist, kann die Gewalt folgen.

Was sich seit dem 8.Oktober 2023 zeigt, ist kein formaler Rechtsentzug. Aber es ist der Beginn einer sozialen Statusminderung, die von unten, von der Gesellschaft kommt--- und die deshalb schwerer zu bekämpfen ist als eine staatliche Maßnahme. Der Staat kann Gesetze ändern. Er kann keine gesellschaftlichen Moralordnungen erzwingen, keine Solidarität gesetzlich vorschreiben.

Der Jude in der Demokratie ist lediglich darauf angewiesen, dass seine Nachbarn prinzipiell Hetze gegen Juden und gegen Israel suspekt ist und Wahlkandidaten und Parteien die in diesem Horn blasen links bzw rechts im schlammigen politischen Strassengraben liegen lässt. Die Wahlergebnisse deuten eher darauf hin, dass die Nachbarn offenbar (globale Erwärmung?) sich im Kühlen schlamm des Grabens puddelglücklich wühlen.

Das Ergebnis ist eine neue Kategorie: der Jude mit Staatsbürgerschaft(en). Formal Bürger, faktisch aus Teilen des gesellschaftlichen Raums ausgeschlossen. Rechtlich gleich, sozial segregiert. Physisch in Sicherheit, nur solange er unsichtbar bleibt.

An dieser Stelle sei einen wegweisenden Fall erwähnt, wo Juden von einem europäischen Staat deren staatsbürgerschaftliche Rechte verweigert wurden seit dem 7.Oktober. Im September 2025 verabschiedete die belgische Regierung ein umfassendes Maßnahmenpaket, das an ihre Position zur palästinensischen Staatlichkeit geknüpft war.

Ab Oktober 2025 stellten das belgische Generalkonsulat in Jerusalem und die belgische Botschaft in Tel Aviv konsularische Dienstleistungen für belgische Staatsangehörige ein, die jenseits der Grünen Linie von 1949 — also in Ostjerusalem, israelischen Ortschaften in Judäa-Samaria — leben. Die suspendierten Dienste umfassen die Ausstellung und Verlängerung von Reisepässen, die Registrierung von Geburten und Ehen sowie die Teilnahme an belgischen Wahlen.

Im Januar 2026 wurde ein konkreter Fall öffentlich39: Eine belgisch-jüdische Frau in Jerusalem erhielt vom Konsulat ein Schreiben, das ihr mitteilte, ihr Wohnort falle „nicht unter international anerkanntes Territorium” und sie sei daher aus dem konsularischen Bevölkerungsregister gestrichen — ebenso alle Familienmitglieder an derselben Adresse, ohne Einzelfallprüfung. Ihr Anwalt Julien Cohen wies auf eine rechtliche Absurdität hin: Das Konsulat beansprucht offiziell Zuständigkeit für Jerusalem und die palästinensischen Gebiete — erklärte aber, die Mandantin befinde sich weder im einen noch im anderen Zuständigkeitsbereich.

Der Familie widerfuhr diese groteske Angelegenheit in Israel - nun kann man sich durchaus ausmalen, wie es diese jüdische Familie erginge, würde sie in einem anderen Land festsitzen. Einzig Israel, selbst wenn diese Juden keine israelische Staatsbürger wären, hätte sich einfallen lassen, wie sie aus der misslichen Lage zu holen sind.

Die entscheidende Differenz zu 1933: Es gibt heute einen jüdischen Staat. Wer geht, geht nicht ins Nirgendwo, sondern nach Israel. Das ändert die Kalkulation für Einzelpersonen fundamental--- aber es ändert die demokratietheoretische Diagnose für Europa nicht.

Die demokratietheoretische Konsequenz

Wenn die Gleichstellung des Juden das Gründungsprinzip der modernen europäischen Demokratie war--- der Testfall, an dem der Universalismus der Aufklärung seinen Ernstfall bewies--- dann ist die systematische gesellschaftliche Entbürgerlichung der Juden nicht nur ein Problem für die jüdische Gemeinschaft. Sie ist ein Indikator für den Zustand der Demokratie selbst. Sämtliche Bürger geraten in der Schusslinie des niederträchtigen Pöbels, das Juden hinterher bellt.

Das Argument geht so: Die europäische Demokratie ist nicht nur ein Verfahren. Sie ist eine Werteordnung, die auf dem Prinzip der gleichen Würde aller Bürger ruht. Juden waren historisch die härteste Probe dieser Ordnung--- weil sie am längsten und am systematischsten ausgeschlossen wurden (ähnlich auch Sinti und Roma), und weil ihre Einbeziehung deshalb den deutlichsten Willensakt verlangte. Wenn diese Einbeziehung heute wieder--- nicht durch den Staat, aber durch Gesellschaft und Zivilgesellschaft--- zurückgenommen wird, dann kollabiert nicht nur eine Schutzgarantie. Es kollabiert das Fundament.

Die Einbürgerungstests mit Fragen zu jüdischer Geschichte, die Bundestagsresolutionen, die Polizeibegleitung für Synagogen--- all das sind Versuche des Staates, dieses Fundament zu reparieren. Aber sie wirken wie Stützpfeiler an einem Gebäude, dessen Mauerwerk sich von innen auflöst.

Die Lage reimt sich mit der Situation vor 1914 in manchem--- Juden, die formal Bürger sind, aber sich weder sicher noch zugehörig fühlen, die öffentliche Räume meiden, die ihre Identität verbergen, Listen von antisemitische Lokale und Geschäfte führen wo Juden nicht erwünscht sind (tut man heute ebenfalls).

Der Unterschied ist einer von Konsequenz, nicht von Diagnose: 1914 gab es keinen jüdischen Staat. 2026 gibt es einen. Das bedeutet, dass das Experiment nicht einfach scheitert--- es endet mit einem Ausweg. Aber es ist kein Ausweg, der die Demokratie rettet. Es ist einer, der aus ihr herausführt.

Ausblick

Angesichts dieser Situation, mag man sich fragen, was denn auf Juden nun zukommen kann. Der belgische Fall zeigt staatlicher Judenhass traditionneller Prägung, wie von den Urgrosseltern in Westeuropa und von den Eltern in Osteuropa erzählt.

Es gibt mittlerweile mehrhere Staaten in Westeuropa, die als antisemitische Staaten gelten dürften - sie haben u.a alle gemeinsam, dass sie “Palästina” anerkannt haben und belohnten damit Hamas invasion Israels. Keine dieser Anerkennungen hätte in diesem Zeitrahmen stattgefunden ohne den politischen Druck, der aus den post-7.-Oktober-Demonstrationen erwuchs. Damit folgte die staatliche Außenpolitik jener zivilgesellschaftlichen Mobilisierung, die gleichzeitig die soziale Entrechtung jüdischer Bürger vorantrieb — ein Befund, der die Grenze zwischen staatlicher und gesellschaftlicher Verantwortung weiter verwischt:

• Irland

• Spanien

• Belgien

• Frankreich

• UK

• Portugal

• Norwegen

• Malta

• Andorra

• Luxemburg

• Island: Anerkennung Palästina bereits 2011, Boykottiert aber Eurovision aufgrund der Beteiligung Israels.

Spanien tut sich besonders hervor. Es fanden dort antisemitische Umtriebe, von denen man zuletzt vor gut acht Generationen schrieb, etwa mit der öffentlichen Verbrennung einer Puppe von Premierminister Benjamin Netanjahu als Judas Iskariot als Teil der Osterfeierlichkeiten 20264041. Wer weiss, vielleicht beschafft man sich dort einen lebendigen Juden aus Fleisch und Blut für nächstes Jahr, zwecks Realismus?

Man kann sich vorstellen, dass einer oder mehrere genannten Staaten, zum Beispiel:

• Überflugrechte von ElAl ganz oder teilweise streichen;

• ElAl aus Flughäfen verbannt;

• Staatsbürger verbietet, unter Strafe, Israel zu bereisen;

• Fluglinien die in den jeweiligen Staat operieren verbietet, Israel anzufliegen;

• Androhung von Reisewarnungen mit Konsequenzen für Versicherungsschutz und Beamtenstatus;

• jegliche Geschäftsbeziehungen mit israelischen Firmen, BDS folgend, unter solchen Auflagen stellen, dass sie faktisch unmöglich werden;

• rituelles Schächten verbieten (in manchen Staaten bereits vollzogen);

• Beschneidung verbieten;

• Forderungen aus der Zivilgesellschaft nach Sonderbesteuerung von Juden, z.B “zum Wiederaufbau von Gaza” folge leisten;

• Aberkennung der Staatsangehörigkeit bei nachgewiesener israelischer Staatsbürgerschaft (Doppelstaatler) — der belgische Konsulatsfall ist ein Vorläufer dieser Logik;

• Verbot israelischer Kulturinstitutionen, Akademiker, Sportteams (Eurovision-Debatte 2024 als Präzedenz);

• Einfrieren von Vermögen aller im jeweiligen Land lebenden israelischer Staatsbürger unter Berufung auf ICC-Haftbefehle gegen israelische Führungspersonen;

• etc...

Die Konsequenzen des Krieges gegen Iran 2026, darunter die Verteuerung der Kraftstoffpreise, wird bereits Israel angelastet und im selben Atemzug auch “die Juden”. Mit einer Erhöhung der Spannungen mit Russland und die zunehmende Verfremdung mit den USA wird vorraussichtlich, jene Logik folgend, auch das Juden angelastet.

Was können Juden tun? Hier ist eine Tabelle der jüdischen Bevölkerung nach Staat, ausgedrückt als Juden / 10.000 Einwohner. Also, weiterleben versuchen - Juden können gar nichts tun diese Gesellschaften zu ändern, wie das beendete 78-Jahre zweite Experiment belegt.

Letzlich sind die gleichen Kräfte in den freien Gesellschaften entfesselt, die jüdisches Leben in der muslimischen Welt auslöschten und die den grossen Teil des verbliebenen Judentums aus der UdSSR zur Auswanderung bewegten. Dagegen sind unsere Nachbarn nachweislich nicht gewappnet und lediglich jeder Fünfte will sich beim besten Willen wappnen lassen42, wie die Zustimmungswerte für eine Einstellung der Waffenlieferungen Deutschlands an Israel 2025 herausstellte.

Die Fragen, die offenbleiben, sind: Kann eine Demokratie das Scheitern ihrer Gründungsüberzeugung--- die gleiche Würde aller Bürger--- als Niedergangsindikator überleben? Und was bedeutet es für Europa, wenn die Antwort seiner jüdischen Minderheit nicht mehr lautet: Wir kämpfen für unsere Rechte hier--- sondern:

Wir sollten wahrscheinlich gehen. Alternativ kann man 20 jahre warten, bis die seit drei Jahren politisierte Jugend in politischen Ämtern vordringt und die Löschung des europäischen Judentums gesetzlich einleitet. Wie das letzte mal.

Notwithstanding this completely unspectacular state of affairs, the world is visibly “shocked, shocked”1 indeed that legislation is still being discussed and voted on in this 120 member parliament of ever industrious minuscule State of Israel, as yet still fighting on 9 fronts, no less (Gaza, Judea & Samaria, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Yemen, global infospace, Diaspora).

This is the PDF link to the now world famous Israeli death penalty bill no one has actually read. It’s of course in Hebrew, which is quite alright if you can’t read it yourself, because your favorite AI engine will certainly read it for you, no excuses left anymore for anyone.

The page is blocked? Ah that’s a shame. With all these cyberattacks you see… ok, try this:

25 Ls2 12185958

1.82MB ∙ PDF file

Download

Bill adopted in the Knesset on death penalty for Arab terrorists, 2026

Download

Let’s clear two questions right away:

• has the bill been approved and is now law: POSITIVE, adopted by 62-48 simple majority.

• is it in force now: NEGATIVE

  • will an Arab imminently be harmed (not like harming Jews is an issue for the world, is it) in the making of this motion picture2? NEGATIVE and highly unlikely in the foreseeable future.

You are officially free to breathe now and go back to your merry life or find out why below.

A law designed to be gutted

Once upon a time, you might have heard Israel possesses three separate independent branches of government: executive, legislative and judiciary. This judiciary has a High Court, above which there is no higher judicial authority, whose task among others is to ensure that acts of the two other branches conform with the Basic Law, a series of 14 texts of constitutional rank.

This law therefore, to come into force, has to pass the examination of that High Court first if the High Court issues an interim order to that effect. Several petitions have already been filed to challenge its conformity. These petitions list EIGHT provisions that are very likely unconstitutional:

1. VIOLATION OF THE RIGHT TO LIFE (Section 2, Basic Law: Human Dignity)

2. MANDATORY DEATH PENALTY (Section 3(a)(d) of the law)

3. ELIMINATION OF UNANIMITY REQUIREMENT (Section 3(a)(e))

4. ABOLITION OF CLEMENCY/COMMUTATION POWERS (Section 3(a)(v))

5. 90-DAY EXECUTION TIMELINE (Section 5(a))

6. DISCRIMINATORY DUAL-TRACK SYSTEM (Sections 3 and 6)

7. KNESSET AUTHORITY OVER THE WEST BANK (Section 3)

8. SECRECY AND ISOLATION PROVISIONS (Sections 7, 52a-55b of amended

   Prison Ordinance)

Most likely outcome: PARTIAL CENSURE. The court strikes provisions 2, 3, 4, and 5 (at the very least) while possibly preserving the basic framework. This would:

• Restore judicial discretion (death as option, not mandate)

• Restore unanimity requirement

• Restore clemency powers

• Extend or eliminate the 90-day timeline

This would effectively gut the law’s operational teeth while technically leaving the death penalty as a statutory possibility — returning the situation to something close to the pre-2026 status quo where military courts theoretically could impose death but never did. So, no change at all to the status-quo and a completely superfluous law on the books.

Less likely but quite possible: FULL INVALIDATION on grounds that the law’s purpose (as revealed in the legislative record) is discriminatory and fails the “befitting the values” test entirely. Furthermore, the Knesset cannot legislate to instruct the military commander (it’s an office exercising military control of the territory in question, which is not part of the sovereign territory of the State of Israel as of yet) of Judea and Samaria.

Judea and Samaria

While we are here, let’s remind ourselves what is and what is not the case in Judea and Samaria (or “West Bank” of that mysterious river our loyal opposition struggle to name and locate).

1. It is not under Israeli sovereignty. It is merely under Israeli military control.

2. It is divided in 3 zones: A,B and C (pursuant of Oslo accords):

   1. A is under both civilian and military control of the Palestinian Authority (despite persistant rumours to the contrary, not a sovereign State!) based in Ramallah. Israeli citizens are banned from going there by Israeli law and at risk of death if they enter these areas, as indicated by big red signs displayed at their entrance. The Israeli army regularly rescues some such adventurers every week.

   2. B is under civilian authority of the PA and military control of Israel. Same situation as in A for Israeli citizens.

   3. C is under full civilian and military control of Israel; 60% of the territory in questions, 5% of the Arab population.

3. Since 1917, when the Ottoman Empire was defeated by the British Army the territory has not been officially claimed by any sovereign State. Jordan’s 1950 annexation was recognized only by a handful of states and was formally renounced in 1988 - having lost it in 1967 anyway.

4. Not under recognized Israeli sovereignty.

5. The British Mandate contained article 63, agreed upon by the powers assembled at the San Remo Conference in 1920, enshrined in the Mandate by the League of Nations in 1922 and confirmed by Article 80 of the UN Charter in 19454, which gives Jews the right to settle everywhere without restriction on the territory of Mandate Palestine west of the Jordan river. Israel was admitted in the UN in 1949.

6. Not being under the sovereignty of any State, the office of the Military Commander (MC) - as of today, an office exercised by Maj.Gen. Avi Bluth at IDF Central Command HQ in Jerusalem - has administrative authority there.

   1. International Humaniarian Law (IHL), forbids the occupying power from applying its own laws on the territory - to be precise: Hague Regulations 1907, Article 43, backed by Geneva Convention IV, Articles 64–66.

   2. Arab inhabitants who have remained after 1967 in these territories are stateless “protected persons” (Geneva Convention IV, Art. 4), having only non-Israeli (often Jordanian, also Palestinian Authority) travel documents and no citizenship. Israel is banned by law to apply its own laws to them. Therefore, military law applies.

   3. Israeli citizens however are under Israeli sovereignty and therefore the Military Commander “mirrors” Israeli laws within the legal regime of his area of authority and applies that set of laws only on Israeli citizens.

   4. THEREFORE laws adopted by the Knesset are not applicable to Arab non-citizens under the authority of the MC in Area C.

   5. Therefore there is no “apartheid” either.

You see? very simple really. Now, lets complicate this charming theoretical world with reality.

If the bill will be killed by the High Court, why was it made in first place?

REASON ONE: There are new elections in October 2026 and the country is fighting - extraordinarily successfully so far - it’s most complex and longest war for three years, following severe initial military disaster. The sponsors of the bill (Itamar Ben Gvir, Bezalel Smotrich and others) are setting the stage for the type of populist agitation against the High Court in which they have been engaged in since the election of the current.

REASON TWO: As a consequence of October 7th 2023 and the large support it visibly enjoyed both in the Gaza stateless Arab population and the Judea and Samaria stateless Arab population - not to mention the “Palestinian” arena abroad, there is no trust at all that the stateless Arabs will earnestly revive negociations after 22 refusals since 1937 - the last major negociation with Israel was refusal #20, Ehud Olmerts Annapolis offer 2008.

Conversely, the Abraham Accords with Arab and Muslim States are already a great success.

As legally covered by the Oslo Accords, the Israeli military carries out arrests and engages hostile armed Arabs in Area A, B and C every day. Conversely, hostile armed stateless Arabs happily engage IDF forces in areas A, B and C every day too. Astute readers will have flagged that Area A is supposedly under full PA military control. That is correct. The PA forces are operationally and politically weaker than the armed stateless Arabs they would be supposed to fight, so that the IDF moves in to engage itself or in support of PA forces.

Knesset member Aida Touma-Suleiman estimated in recent interview that 250 stateless Arabs were being prosecuted for acts of terror involving killing of Israelis that would potentially be affected by this law, which, as we have seen, is extremely unlikely to ever be implemented.5

Now will I be asked, what about the Israeli citizens reportedly attacking stateless Arab civilians? Out of circa 540.000 Israeli citizens, the suspects involved in these acts make up circa 300 individuals - i.e 1 out of 1800 Israeli citizens living under the area of authority of the Military Commander.

There’s a war on nine fronts to annihilate Israel and world opinion loses its mind over 300 Jews in the hills of Judea ( Jew means “person originating from Judea”. There’s exactly one such territory). No kidding.

Anyway, the IDF will not use lethal force against Israeli civilians (who are very much armed, I might point out). The PA forces will not either because the Military Commander will immediately place his entire area on lockdown. PA forces however have used lethal force against Arab civilians under their authority - it’s just completely uninteresting for the usual international news outlets when it happens.

So both parties, in practice, leave the inhabitants to fight it out and wait to see who prevails while making sure the incidents remain circumscribed. It’s an issue of policing dependent on domestic political expediency weighed against expected foreign relations reputational costs and also domestic political costs (like risking collapsing a government coalition). The dynamics of the news cycle appear to have more importance than consistent policing for its own sake.

Finally, to illustrate just what the architecture is, heres are a couple diagrams I made for your benefit (if your screen is too small, you might want to “blow up” the images). One illustrates which legal framework is relevant for Judea and Samaria, the second is the command structure involved and the third shows the interactions between these two planes:

Now back to the question: why this law?

We have seen that A) the law has multiple points of failure constitutionally; B) the law is so constitutionally exposed in Judea and Samaria that it is unlikely ever to be used there in practice. It’s “dead as a doornail”, in Scrooge’s eternal words in Dickens “Christmas Story”.

The bill defines the offenses falling under this law as two things. First it refers to the Counter-Terrorism law of 20166. A “terror offense” (עבירת טרור) under that law requires all of the following:

• Commission of a criminal act (murder, grievous bodily harm, kidnapping, etc.)

• Political, religious, nationalistic, or ideological motive

• Intent to intimidate the public, cause panic, or coerce a governmental authority to act or refrain from acting

• The act causes or is likely to cause: severe harm to persons or personal freedom; severe harm to public safety; severe damage to property or religious sites; or severe disruption to critical infrastructure

The current bill adds a new subsection 301A(c) to the Penal Law 1977:

“Notwithstanding subsection (a), one who intentionally causes the death of a person with the aim of denying the existence of the State of Israel, in the circumstances set out in subsection (a)(10), shall be liable to death or life imprisonment, and only one of these penalties.”

Though beyond the scope of present article, I will venture to say that that latter definition happens to correspond almost exactly to the theory of Agoraclasm I developed about terrorism (I’ll tell you about Agoraclasm in another post). It actually raises the bar of what is a terror act compared to the other existing definition. It’s very good.

REASON THREE: the Palestinian Authority - created by the Oslo PEACE Accords - has perpetuated an ostensible incentive to kill Jews the PLO has had since its foundation in 1964, which is colloquially known as “pay for slay”. Formalized around 1995 by the PA in law , the total budget of this program is about as large as a mid-level ministry and corresponds to circa 7% of the PA Budget with payments being received by circa 35.000 to 40.000 families (some of them also abroad)7.

Here’s a more detailed document about that, with all the primary sources you need if you feel compelled to go even further down that sinister rabbit hole:

Pa Pay For Slay Report

62.7KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

So in an ostensible attempt to counter that, the idea of executing perpetrators of these acts might seem effective - spoiler: it is not all the case. If we were to modelize what this payment represents, we would discover that, by my reckoning, it is the combined result of at least 25 different parameters, ONE of them being death of the perpetrator. In other words, that the perpetrator will most definitely die is irrelevant to the issue of Arab terror threat in Judea & Samaria.

Modelizing the incentives: “Support your family, kill a Jew!”

We could model the Palestinian Authority (PA) stipend system as a two-sided equilibrium between the household’s Minimum Acceptable Compensation (MAC) for losing a family member and the ideological/security benefits that partially offset that loss. There are both material and immaterial incentives and counter-incentives. It would be an interesting research project for a masters sociology student to conduct an empirical study to find out the approximate values of the 25 factors, such as sketched out in the following document:

Pay For Slay Structure

94.1KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

Visually, the curves would roughly look like a typical supply-and-demand situation:

R or Risk Reduction Benefit encapsulates the ideological benefit the entourage of the perpetrator perceive in his act, as if one person attacking Israel and dying would be equivalent to externalizing the risk onto one individual of the group while reducing it for the rest. The classic social welfare system as we know in European countries exists in very summary form in the PA (like unemployment, poverty relief), usually largely supplemented by NGOs, this particular compensation system functions as a supplement to welfare.

It was reported after the hostages-for-murderers exchanges after 10/7 that several of the released Arab prisoners were millionaires as a result of this system. 8

In other words, if you are very poor, with a defective or non-existent familial or tribal solidarity network around you and are eligible for welfare under the PA area of responsibility, if furthermore there is a social utility for your relatives in your death in an ambush against Israeli soldiers, there is a real likelihood you will carry out this otherwise senseless attack - while your ever helpful cousin, who’s a stringer for Associated Press, Reuters or AFP, (see my last post on this here) will happily report the tragic news as yet another demonstration of Israeli callousness for the benefit of the progressive/”left-wing”/liberal audience in Europe and America - who will of course blame Israel.

REASON FOUR: I mentioned the millionaire murderers above. The aim, longer term, would be to exclude such perpetrators from any future potential such exchanges. That is also a doubtful outcome, because the Military Commander has powers inherited from the British Mandate which allow him to retain bodies, so that the same situations would probably recur in the future, trading dead Arab murderers for living Jews. Furthermore, as I noted earlier, the cost of the death of the perpetrator has so far never superseded the ideological benefit it accrues.

To sum up:

1. It’s an unconstitutional law

2. It’s an ineffective law

3. It does not affect the incentive structure the PA already upholds

4. It’s unlikely to prevent, in the future, macabre exchanges.

In that imagined world, journalism is slow, deliberate and fundamentally honest. Hard-working information hunters produce reliable and adequately framed reports, driven by a sense of duty towards enlightening the citizenry.

What could there possibly be not to like here?

Sadly, this is 2026, not 1926 (and even then, tendentious and misleading reports were already a professional plague). Today we have information machines, some capable of inventing content on demand. We have a digital infrastructure that enables the mass production, standardization, and real‑time worldwide distribution of information.

We have fewer diligent correspondents, more information, shorter delivery timelines and more demand.

And we have Israel, brought to you by the Jews, since 15th century BC.

Reports datelined from this very small landmass occupy so much space in the infosphere - both for-profit user driven like social media and for-profit driven professional legacy media - that it can feel like about a third of world events alone happen daily within one hour or so drive from Jerusalem. An hysterical place, by the looks of it.

Meanwhile, there are fifty-four countries in Africa, most of whom you generally hardly hear about unless a plague (time to get masks!) or a famine (donate rice packages!) or some sinister heavily armed group on pickup trucks wrecks sufficient misery there to qualify as newsworthy.

Now that we have a firm grasp of the obvious, lets turn to the topic at hand: why is the information pipeline, as it is designed today, structurally geared for hostility towards Israel and ultimately Jews worldwide?

A correspondent abroad for extended periods is expensive for a publication, which is why it is not infrequent that several publications share the same one. Much less expensive is buying bulk information from a single source with an acceptable degree of reliability: that’s a “news agency”. These are for-profit enterprises who have thousands of customers and a desk in nearly every country. Those desks employ a mix of permanent staff and freelance stringers who are paid per story.

Agency staff in turn rely heavily on local contacts for leads, which are payed as needed. A stringer calls the agency office with a story; someone there does a quick verification, rewrites it according to house style and linguistic conventions, and packages it into a short item that answers the usual “who, what, when, where, why, how”. That item is then pushed into the agency database, tagged, and propagated into the live feeds delivered to clients – who in many cases automatically inject it into their news streams with little or no human intervention.

Upon receiving this item, an outlet may decide it is worth a little more attention and commissions a staffer to work that story - it’s then a rat race between journalists. Who will get the officials reaction first, who will find a witness etc… By the time an error or misleading framing is flagged in the original item, these have already spread across the infospace. That is the point where “debunker stories” which garner far less attention start appearing.

So how does all this play out in Israel? Consumers have various channels of information and are fundamentally disinclined to believe official spokespersons, let alone military spokespersons. Furthermore, a story-line requires an inherent emotional hook, ideally that hook is “injustice” or “unfairness”. Something happened to someone that should not have happened to this person, in this way, at this time, for this reason, in this place, with this consequence…

As we have outlined earlier, the information pipeline starts with this stringer and the person who applies the stylebook to his product. If you have a stringer who is inherently part of the conflict, you have the advantage of having a source close to events. You have the disadvantage of his emotional proximity to it, so that inevitably, it will color the hook he will bake into his item.

In Israel and its immediate environment, foreign news agencies and outlets eagerly embrace the advantage and ignore the disadvantage. During the recent war against Hamas, this dynamic was laid bare when a number of prominent local contributors and “stringers” turned out to have open links to, or employment within, Hamas’s communication apparatus – so that much of the global infosphere was, for a time, relying on material effectively custom‑made by a terrorist organization for its own purposes. Hamas was considered as the gold standard of information even by the UN.

Given the design of the information pipeline — its speed, its dependence on embedded local sources, its legal architecture that places responsibility at the bottom of the chain — corrections to initial reports are almost always too little and too late. The emotional hook laid in the first item travels; the correction does not. This is not primarily a story about readers who are credulous or about journalists who are dishonest, though both exist in ample supply.

It is a story about a system whose normal operation, absent any malice at all, reliably produces a distorted picture of Israel. When you add the malice — and it is frequently present — the system does not need to be gamed. It just needs to be used.