The decisive question is not what democracy is, but what democracy does. Liberal tradition conceives of it as an end, as the culminating political form of modernity, when it is only a means: a procedure intended to channel conflicts, administer legitimacies, and confer authority on those who govern. To mistake democracy for an end is the beginning of a moral alibi: it shifts responsibility onto the procedural mechanism, onto the form, and neglects what that form produces. And what it produces are lives exposed to the raw elements of a power that exploits, excludes, or eliminates them. A democracy can produce horrors, and when it does, it produces them “democratically.” That is its blind spot.
The Palestinian question exposes this knot with clarity. We are not dealing with a “dictatorship” or a “fundamentalist theocracy,” but with the action of a state that proclaims itself “democratic” and that, despite this—or driven by it—has for decades carried out policies of siege, expulsion, occupation, and ethnic cleansing. To produce this horror, Israel has not suspended democracy: it has acted in its name. Procedural democracy has granted moral legitimacy and a license to kill Palestinians indiscriminately. The brake has turned into an accelerator.
Gideon Levy states this without ambiguity. After October 7, he says, Israel changed its mask: the impulses that had lain in wait beneath the surface of its democratic exceptionalism emerged without resistance. Israeli society—not just its government—has validated a genocidal response, has embraced the idea that “there are no innocents in Gaza,” and has naturalized the notion that Palestinian life is expendable. This is not a deviation, but the ripening of a political mentality formed under occupation, consolidated by decades of moral exceptionalism, and sustained by international complicity. The polls he cites are clear: a social majority supports a policy that constitutes genocide. Any gesture of compassion toward Gaza is perceived as suspicion, crime, or treason. Silence becomes a mandate. Censorship ceases to be imposed: it is demanded. When a society demands censorship, democracy ceases to act as a limit and becomes its guarantor. As Levy notes, “Israelis don’t want to know.”
That is why Levy maintains that Israel too has been destroyed. Gaza has been physically razed—Palestinian lives eliminated or reduced to insignificance—but Israel has been morally devastated. This devastation entails the breakdown of the collective capacity to distinguish between justice and injustice, between truth and propaganda, between humanity and cruelty. A country that legitimizes genocide goes beyond its own ruin: it becomes inscribed in history as a negative example of collective moral degradation.
It is at this point that we should pause over an intellectual dispute that sharply illuminates this moral devastation: the clash between Judith Butler and Eva Illouz. It is not a marginal episode, but a symptom of the affective and ideological capture of Israeli intellectual life. The harshness with which Butler was attacked—for maintaining that October 7 forms part of the long history of siege and colonization, without thereby absolving Hamas—and the vehemence with which Illouz denounced the supposed “insensitivity” of the global left reveal that the impulses shaping Israel’s public reaction are the same ones at work in its cultural elite: existential fear, tribal morality, cognitive closure, and a growing intolerance toward any historical contextualization that might destabilize the national narrative.
Butler’s intervention—in El País and in her lecture in Paris—begins from an irreducible ethical principle: there is no contradiction between mourning the lives lost on October 7 and denouncing the genocidal project directed against Gaza. To understand violence historically is not to justify it; to situate Hamas within a movement of anticolonial resistance does not mean absolving its crimes; and to demand non-violence requires analyzing the conditions that generate war. This position, complex and politically demanding, was reduced by Zionist sectors to complicity with terrorism. In France, she was even treated as a public threat. The episode reveals the fragility of democratic space when it collides with identitarian narrative.
Illouz’s response reveals something different yet complementary: the affective transformation of Israeli liberalism under the sign of fear, resentment, and the construction of an absolute enemy. Her denunciation of the global left embodies the very pattern she describes in The Emotional Life of Populism: the emotional closure of a group that perceives itself as besieged, the incapacity to feel the suffering of others, and the drift toward a selective universalism, activated only to defend one’s own. Illouz denounces dehumanization but preserves intact the framework that makes it possible to justify state violence; she defends the state as moral repository, and relegates occupation to a secondary phenomenon. Her stance—which presents itself as rational and balanced—is deeply marked by the state’s pedagogy of fear: the systematic teaching that the Palestinian is always a threat and that understanding their resistance is a form of treason.
Even so, some nuance is needed: Illouz is not an apologist for the Israeli government. For years she has denounced Netanyahu’s corruption, the erosion of democratic institutions, structural discrimination against Mizrahim, and the theocratic drift of the right. Her warnings about Israeli populism lucidly anticipated the internal struggle that now tears the country apart. But that critical gesture coexists with a persistent insensitivity toward Palestinian reality. Her accusation against Butler—according to which the global left supposedly displays moral coldness toward Israeli victims—is revealing: behind her ethical argument there is a discernible affective component that operates as a selective filter of suffering. That emotivism—which she herself analyzes in her work—permits intense empathy for one’s own group while dissolving, diminishing, or moralizing the violence inflicted on Palestinians. Illouz can condemn occupation as a tragic mistake, but she fails to inscribe it within a historical structure of domination; she can denounce misogyny and racism within Israel yet struggles to recognize coloniality as the overarching political framework. Her critique is sharp when directed inside the Israeli demos but grows faint—almost abstract—when it must direct that sensitivity toward those living under siege. In that tension between internal lucidity and external blindness lies the ethical contradiction that the dispute with Butler laid bare.
Added to this tension is a deeper problem, derived from Illouz’s own emotional theory of populism. In The Emotional Life of Populism, she clearly identifies the affective economies that fuel Israel’s authoritarian drift, but she does so without integrating occupation and structural racism against Palestinians as formative conditions of that very political culture. Democratic deterioration appears as the result of emotional manipulation by the right, while the colonial structure that sustains legal inequality and systematic violence is relegated to a barely mentioned background.
The effect is clear: Israeli society is presented as a psychological victim of its leaders, trapped in an affective regime that pushes it toward cognitive closure and fear, but not as an agent responsible for a structure of domination that produces—and naturalizes—the dehumanization of Palestinians. By locating the democratic crisis exclusively on the emotional plane, Illouz shifts responsibility onto an internal dynamic of the Israeli demos and minimizes the racial and colonial matrix that organizes everyday life in the occupied territories. The racist and punitive response of Israeli society after October 7 thus appears as a product of affective co-optation, not as the manifestation of a structural inequality that precedes and exceeds populism.
This displacement not only softens the colonial dimension of the conflict; it helps shield the Israeli demos beneath an interpretive veil that exonerates it from participation in oppression. The right would be responsible for emotional manipulation, society, merely its hostage. But if occupation is not incorporated as a constitutive element of Israeli political subjectivity, the critique loses its structural dimension. The problem ceases to be the institutionalized violence of the state and becomes an emotional failing of the electorate. Occupation appears as background noise, not as the foundation of the Israeli democratic order.
What is decisive is not the controversy itself, but what it reveals: even critical sectors of Israeli thought remain trapped within the ethnonationalist logic that makes genocide possible. To think the conflict politically—as Butler does—comes to be suspected as antisemitism. This impossibility of thinking the other is a precondition for structural violence. Western media reinforce this blockage by shifting responsibility into a depoliticized humanitarian narrative— “tragedy,” “crisis,” “conflict”—and erasing the colonial structure that Butler seeks to restore. In this way the taboo that forbids interrogating the Israeli demos is consummated.
This point allows us to grasp the core of Francesca Albanese’s argument: the fabrication of a moral narrative that preserves Israel’s image without confronting its historical responsibility. Between the impossibility of thinking politically and the Western need to protect its “only democratic al ally,” the ground is laid for what she calls the future “museum of genocide.” This is not an innocent metaphor. It names the device by which structural violence will be converted into managed memory: the forgetting of complicity, the forgetting of democracy as an organ of violence, the forgetting of a people that—as Levy has shown—embraced the destruction of another people as an acceptable moral horizon.
In this framework, Albanese’s intervention—as UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967—takes on a specific relevance. When she describes Gaza as a possible “museum of genocide,” she does not introduce a new element, but rather precisely names the logical outcome of the trajectory the text has been tracing: the conversion of political crime into a pedagogical object. She anticipates the fate that Western powers reserve for those crimes they do not wish to confront politically: to transform them into managed memory, into neutralized pedagogy, into historical narrative administered by institutions that never assumed responsibility for the original suffering. Gaza thus runs the risk of becoming a retrospective exhibition, a moral example, a contemplable ruin. This operation is already under way, as shown by the speed with which Western governments shift responsibility into the depoliticized category of “humanitarian tragedy.”
If expulsion and annihilation are consummated, the day will come when guided tours are organized to “what Gaza once was,” with explanatory panels, UN reports, and archival photographs. Genocide will have been translated into pedagogy. The intolerable will have been accommodated as past.
This mechanism—the conversion of political crime into a pedagogical object—is not new. Wendy Brown analyzed it in studying how certain museums transform violence into an individualist moral lesson, compatible with the continuity of the very structures that made it possible. The museum operates as a technology of absolution: it preserves the ruin but erases the structure that produced it; it remembers the victims but blurs the logic that turned them into victims.
Applied to Gaza, this device assumes its sharpest form: the destruction of a population is turned into the occasion for reconstructing a tolerable narrative for the Western democracies that were complicit—by action or omission—in the crime. The future museum of genocide will be the place where colonial responsibility and international complicity fade into the sentimental register of belated lament.
But the underlying issue is not memory, it is democracy. If democracy is a means, responsibility falls upon the demos. It is not enough to blame the Israeli government. In a democracy, responsibility is distributed capillarily: those who endorse, those who keep silent, those who look away, those who decide to convince themselves that everything is justified. A democratic regime cannot shield itself behind obedience: its legitimacy arises from popular will. If popular will consents to horror, that horror belongs to the people.
This is the truth that the West tries to avoid: that democracy does not protect against barbarism but can legitimize it; that a free people can choose injustice; that suffering can be voted on, administered, normalized.
Gaza is not just the moral failure of a state. It is the ethical failure of a democratic society. And it is the warning that future memory—that “museum of genocide” already beginning to take shape—must not serve to close the wound, but to prevent it from closing. Because the intolerable must not be turned into past. It is our present.
Bibliography
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Brown, W. (2006). Regulating aversion: Tolerance in the age of identity and empire. Princeton University Press.
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https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n20/judith-butler/the-compass-of-mourning
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