In the hands of Israel’s genocidal settler-colonial society, the state of exception is a relentless nightmare that will not stop at the borders of Palestine, writes Ramzy Baroud.
Displaced people in April 2024 try to return to northern Gaza Strip by crossing the bridge over the estuary of the Wadi Gaza. (Ashraf Amra /United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East/ CC BY-SA 3.0 igo)
While many nations occasionally resort to a “state of exception” to deal with temporary crises, Israel exists in a permanent state of exception.
This Israeli exceptionalism is the very essence of the instability that plagues the Middle East.
The concept of the state of exception dates back to the Roman justitium, a legal mechanism for suspending law during times of civil unrest. However, the modern understanding was shaped by the German jurist Carl Schmitt, who famously wrote that the “sovereign is he who decides on the exception.”
While Schmitt’s own history as a jurist for the Third Reich serves as a chilling reminder of where such theories can lead, his work provides an undeniably accurate anatomy of raw power: it reveals how a ruler who institutes laws also holds the power to dismiss them, under the pretext that no constitution can foresee every possible crisis.
It is often argued that Israel, a self-described democracy, still lacks a formal constitution because such a document would force it to define its borders — a problematic prospect for a settler-colonial regime with an insatiable appetite for expansion.
But there is another explanation: by operating on “Basic Laws” rather than a constitution, Israel avoids a comprehensive legal system that would align it with the globally accepted foundations of international law.
Without a constitution, Israel exists in a legal vacuum where the “exception” is the rule. In this space, racial laws, territorial expansion and even genocide are permitted so long as they fit the state’s immediate agenda.
Isolating specific examples to illustrate this point is a daunting task, primarily because nearly every relevant pronouncement from Israeli officials — particularly during the genocide in Gaza — is a textbook study in Israeli exceptionalism.
UNRWA, For Example
UNRWA staff member comforts a distressed child at a school shelter in Nuseirat camp, Gaza Strip, March 2025. (Ashraf Amra/UNRWA/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 4.0)
Consider Israel’s relentless assault on UNRWA, the U.N.-mandated body responsible for the survival of millions of Palestinian refugees. For decades, Israel has sought the dismantling of UNRWA for one reason: it is the only global institution that prevents the total erasure of Palestinian refugee rights.
These rights are not mere grievances; they are firmly anchored in international law, most notably via U.N. Resolution 194.
While UNRWA is not a political organization in a functional sense, its very existence is profoundly political. First, it stands as the institutional legacy of a specific political history; second, and more crucially, its presence ensures the Palestinian refugee remains a recognized political entity.
By existing, UNRWA preserves the status of the refugee as a subject with the legal right to demand a return to historic Palestine — a demand that the “state of exception” seeks to permanently silence.
In October 2024, Israel unilaterally legislated the closure of UNRWA, once more asserting its “exception” over the entire framework of the United Nations.
“It is time the international community … realizes that UNRWA’s mission must end,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had already declared on Jan. 31, 2024, signaling the coming erasure. This rhetoric reached its physical conclusion on Jan. 20, when the UNRWA headquarters in occupied Jerusalem were demolished by the Israeli military in the presence of National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir.
Far-right Israeli minister Itamar Ben-Gvir supervised as bulldozers demolished UNRWA’s headquarters in occupied East Jerusalem on Tuesday.
The destruction comes as Israel clamps down on NGOs providing humanitarian aid to Palestinians. pic.twitter.com/Py8tIRqi7i
— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) January 20, 2026
“A historic day!” Ben-Gvir announced on that same date. “Today these supporters of terror are being driven out.” This horrific act was met with bashful responses, mute concerns, or total silence by the very powers tasked with preventing states from positioning themselves above the law.
By allowing this Israeli “exception” to stand unchallenged, the international community has effectively sanctioned the demolition of its own legal foundations.
Dropping Pretensions
In the past, Israeli leaders masked their true intentions with the language of a “light unto the nations,” projecting a beacon of morality while practicing violence, ethnic cleansing and military occupation on the ground.
The genocide in Gaza, however, has stripped away these pretenses. For the first time, Israeli rhetoric fully reflects a state of exception where the law is not just ignored, but structurally suspended.
“No one in the world will let us starve 2 million citizens, even though it may be justified and moral until they return the hostages to us,” Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich admitted on Aug. 5, 2024.
This “justified and moral” stance reveals a localized morality that permits the extermination of a population as an ethically defensible act. Yet Smotrich also lied; the world has done nothing practical to dissuade Israel from its savage pulverization of Gaza.
The global community remained idle even when Smotrich declared on May 6, 2025, that Gaza would be “entirely destroyed” and the population “concentrated in a narrow strip.” Today, that vision is a reality: a genocide-fatigued population is confined to roughly 45 percent of the territory, while the remainder stays empty under Israeli military control.
Netanyahu himself, who has stretched the state of exception beyond any predecessor, defined this new reality during a cabinet meeting on Oct. 26, 2025: “Israel is a sovereign state… Our security policy is in our own hands. Israel does not seek anyone’s approval for that.”
Here, Netanyahu defines sovereignty as the raw power to act — genocide included — without regard for international law or human rights.
If all states adopted this, the world would fall into a lawless frenzy. In his seminal book State of Exception, Giorgio Agamben diagnosed this “void” — a space where law is suspended but “force of law” remains as pure violence.
While his recent stances have divided the academic community, his critique of the exception as a permanent tool of governance remains an indispensable lens for understanding the erasure of Palestinian life.
Israel has already created that void. In the hands of a genocidal, settler-colonial society, the state of exception is a relentless nightmare that will not stop at the borders of Palestine. If this “exception” is allowed to become the permanent regional rule, no nation in the Middle East will be spared.
Time is of the essence.
Dr. Ramzy Baroud is a widely published and translated author, an internationally syndicated columnist and editor of The Palestine Chronicle. His latest book is The Last Earth: A Palestinian Story (Pluto Press, 2018). He earned a Ph.D. in Palestine Studies from the University of Exeter (2015), and was a non-resident scholar at Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies, UCSB. Visit his website.
This article is from Z Network, is funded solely through the generosity of its readers.
Views expressed in this article and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
The reason Zionist, fascist Israel gets away with breaking every law pertaining to human rights and human freedom, is because the whole of the western world strongly supports Israel’s disdain for the rich Middle Eastern culture, and way of life. We have Gaza, West Bank, and East Jerusalem, Lebanon, Syria etc. as evidence of this. The west allowed Israel to go for it! Murder, rape, imprison, starve! Oh! and steal their land while you’re at it!
Perhaps we should ask ourselves what international laws did the United States and its western allies abide by when James Baker, US Secretary of State, informed us that he intended to ‘bomb Iraq back to the Stone Age?’
It is a historical fact that the United States and its western allies did just that. They destroyed every rich magical, magnificent historical structure they came across. They literally destroyed the cultural environment and history of a race of people.
And what international laws did the United States and its western allies abide by when, for a total of twenty-eight years, under four US Presidents (George Bush Senior, Bill Clinton, George Bush Jnr. and Barack Obama) they murdered millions of unarmed defenceless Iraqi people by way of sanctions, starvation, secret torture centres, depleted uranium bombs, phosphorous bombs, all sorts of other bombs and many poisonous gases. Like Israel, the United States and its western allies murdered millions of Iraqi babies and small children. Like Israel, when asked about the dead children, another US Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, told us that this was necessary.
This represents one tiny example of how the United States and its western allies are no different to Israel when it comes to being lawless, marauding criminals out to destroy, terrify, murder, torture, pillage and rape. The difference is they hide behind that overused and sickeningly abused word ‘Democracy’.
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Well, considering that they are already deep inside Lebanon and Syria, I think we can take it as a given that “they will not stop at the borders of Palestine.” Israel would have to retreat and give up territory to get back within “the borders of Palestine.” And of course, we know from history that Israel does not retreat and give up territory, not even when ordered to do so by the UNSC in resolutions like UNSC 242.
Making the Abolition of War A Realistic Goal = Monday, 3/2/26 – 5:00-6:30pm Sponsored by Science for Peace. Based on article by Gene Sharp (I can share via email).
Exceptionalism: the US has practiced exceptionalism since its founding. Exceptionalism is embedded in most country cultures in Europe as well. We are seeking horrific evidence of the role of exceptionalism manifest by the accumulation of wealth and power in the portion of the Epstein Files now public (in spite of the blatant misuse of redaction).
Cultures, such as ours in the US, that are based on aieirarchy breed exceptionalism … those at the top are considered exceptional. :Capitalism and the concomitant poverty matched by extreme wealth of the. few is but one aspect.
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“Light of Nations” Nation doesn’t seem to see a contradiction between that and the destruction of a largely un-armed population of 2 million +. Many, if not most Jews outside of Israel have no problem seeing Gaza and the West Bank as a genocide, but within, nothing doing. Palestinians are not human : they don’t bleed, need food and water, hospitals, housing or schools for their kids…
What happens when the same mindset – if one can call it that – decides there are too many people on the planet? And they have the Hydrogen Bomb (with a 100 sq. mile fire ball radius)?
We need to put an end to this craziness before it puts an end to us! Life is more fun, interesting and lasting than destruction and premature death.
“What happens when the same mindset – if one can call it that – decides there are too many people on the planet?”
Perhaps an anti-science response to the COVID virus that kills millions? Could that happen to reduce the human population by tens of millions? To reduce the US population by probably several millions? If you want to look, remember to look at “extra-deaths” statistics, which show how the death-rate has escalated even while governments play BS games with COVID death stats.
Remember, humanity had the knowledge about how to contain a deadly respiratory disease, and had successfully applied it in previous cases, ranging from Ebola to SARS1 to MARS to flu outbreaks. This time, the response led to the deadly disease becoming endemic. Only China made a serious effort at containment, but had to abandon it as they were the only ones in the world doing so. And the Elites were celebrating its “endemic” status, because they could do away with those pesky “pandemic” restrictions that limited their profits while attempting to limit the spread of the disease that is still killing people by the tens of thousands per year in America.
The Elites don’t need wars to kill us, although that has historically been a very effective tool.
Donald Trump’s First Term set the American Record for Number of Dead Americans during a four year Presidential term.
Joe Biden’s Term almost certainly topped that, and reset the American Record to the new Joe Biden standard for Dead Americans in a four-year term.
This particular American Record is not reported on the Evening News, but stats are kept. The yearly number of Dead Americans spiked to around 3.4 million a year under Trump starting 2019. That gave Donald Trump the American Record for Dead Americans. It then stayed that high all the way through Biden’s years, roughly 3.4 million a year. This should mean that Joe Biden is now the American Record Holder for Dead Americans during a four year Presidential term.
Biden claimed COVID deaths went down, but he apparently made up for it in other areas such as Occupational Deaths and “Deaths from the Police or while In-Custody”, which I believe all went up under Biden.
See also “Rogue State” and other books by the late Bill Blum.
Then humanity must act to defend itself, or it will become extinct.
It is difficult not to descend into a state of despair over the world’s capitulation to Israel’s genocide. The monsters definitely have the upper hand. How did we allow this to happen and how will we reverse the trend? I fear for the young ones. What kind of world are we leaving them?
If you can believe Noam Chomsky and a book coauthored with another, that tells the truth about what the USA has done all over the world in opposition to our stated ideals, we should be up in arms. Our government does not represent us and hasn’t for a long time. The history shows. You need to find that history in books. Ain’t online, is being banned. Yeah, they want to keep us proprogandised which is how they get away with their lies to the American people. We are one of the most ignorant nation in the world.
“the state of exception is a relentless nightmare that will not stop at the borders of Palestine. If this “exception” is allowed to become the permanent regional rule, no nation in the Middle East will be spared.” My thoughts exactly, and no nation be spared from a genocide of the poor and others not deemed useful to a horrible capitalistic regime that cares nothing for human life or for any life on earth, because the basic thing is, those in power only care about enriching themselves at the expense of all life forms that the poor of the world are dependent on.
Am reading a book by Chomsky and Robinson and it leads me to believe that capitalism is something that needs to be destroyed and taken over by a world order that is NOT ruled by these intermarried elites to protect their wealth and have no care for the nations who want their own resources for their own people. I read that capitalism was all about the elite, but that communism was always their target because the idea a government should be responsible for the people who give them their taxes, are not a part of capitalism. What has capitalism done for the people of the world? Kept them down, taken their resources that they could use for their people and trying to become a TRUE democracy.