Habermas Against Habermas? Gaza and the Crisis of Enlightenment Thought

On November 13, 2023 (a few weeks after Hamas’s attack on Israel), four German intellectuals—Nicole Deitelhoff, Professor of Political Theory and International Relations at the Max Planck Institute; Rainer Forst, Professor at the University of Göttingen and renowned theorist of global justice and political pluralism; Klaus Günther, Professor of Political Science and Constitutional Law at the University of Frankfurt; and Jürgen Habermas, the prominent philosopher—issued a peculiar statement. This statement raises fundamental questions about contradictions within Western thought and the broader crisis in Enlightenment philosophy. It was published in both German and English on “Normative Orders” (a research platform at Goethe University Frankfurt) and was republished three days later on “Reset Dialogues on Civilizations,” accompanied by a response from Hisham Omar al-Noor, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Nilein in Khartoum.

The statement by Habermas and his colleagues claims that the “atrocities of Hamas and Israel’s response” have led to heightened protests and increased polarization. According to them, this should not overshadow the necessity of solidarity with Israel and the Jews in Germany. They assert that Israel’s response is legitimate, although there are debates about how it is managed; however, accusations of genocide against Israel are seen as exaggerated. Nevertheless, Habermas and his colleagues argue that this does not justify the rise in anti-Semitic sentiments in Germany. Therefore, everyone should respect the protection of Jews from any harm in Germany, in line with the exceptional political and moral stance adopted to counter anything reminiscent of their persecution and extermination during the Nazi period.

Professor Hisham Omar al-Noor’s response was both political and direct, highlighting omissions in the statement by Habermas and his colleagues. Al-Noor argues that the statement defends Israeli rights but fails to address Palestinian rights, justifies Israel’s right to self-defense while denying Palestinians the right to resist, and omits any discussion of the occupation, blockade, settlement, racial discrimination, and violence inflicted on Palestinians by Israel.

There were other responses to this statement, but the most notable came from Assef Bayat, a Sociology and Middle Eastern Studies professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In a letter addressed to Habermas, Bayat asserts that Habermas’s statement encourages stifling discussion by deliberately conflating criticism of Israeli policy with anti-Semitism. Bayat questions what happened to Habermas’s concept of the “public sphere,” which advocates for “deliberation” and “rational dialogue,” especially when discussions about Palestinian rights are suppressed in Germany, and those who dare to call for a ceasefire or criticize the Israeli occupation and violence in Palestine are persecuted.

Bayat adds that critics of Israel do not argue against “protecting the right of Jews to live and Israel’s right to exist,” but they criticize the denial of “Palestinian rights and Palestine’s right to exist.” Bayat wonders about Habermas’s “moral indifference” in the face of the systematic killing and destruction of Palestinians in Gaza, suggesting that Habermas seems to fear that any sympathy for Palestinians might diminish his moral commitment to Jewish rights. This “twisted moral compass,” Bayat argues, is closely tied to what he calls “German exceptionalism” regarding Jews and Israel, which Habermas adopts. Bayat deconstructs this tendency toward exceptionalism, arguing that it places the rights of some (Jews and Israel) above those of others, thereby closing the door to the rational dialogue advocated by Habermas in his writings.

In conclusion, Bayat appeals to Habermas by asserting that in times of confusion and anxiety, humanity needs Habermas’s concepts of “communication, cosmopolitanism, equal citizenship, deliberative democracy, and human dignity.” However, Bayat argues that the notion of German exceptionalism and European self-enclosure empties these concepts of their content.

However, I hold a different view from Assef Bayat. I believe that Habermasian thought, along with Enlightenment philosophy and Western thought in general, has always been self-centered toward European and white identities (see Hamid Dabashi, “Thanks to Gaza, European Philosophy Exposed as Morally Bankrupt,” Middle East Eye, January 18, 2024, whose thesis I agree with, though I find his arguments a bit odd, angry, and not particularly constructive).

Habermas’s leading concept of the “public sphere” is deeply tied to the history of the development of the European bourgeoisie and democracy, which is natural. What is unnatural is that Habermas has never addressed in his writings how the rise of capitalism, the bourgeoisie, and the “public sphere” as a space for the exchange of ideas would not have been possible without the exploitation of non-European countries and the existence of colonial “explorations”, “pacifications” and “civilizing miusssions” that enslaved and deprived the peoples of the Global South of their sovereignty and resources.

Therefore, it is difficult for Habermas, who supports Zionism, to consider it a form of settler colonialism based on the displacement of the original Palestinian populations, as they, like colonized peoples, are irrelevant in his conceptual framework. While Palestinians challenge the idealistic narrative of return and redemption and a homeland that protects Jews from extermination, colonized peoples dismantle the idealism of the “public sphere” as a space for democratic deliberation because they resist exploitation, which is the foundation of the material structure that made possible the idealized rational and deliberative European societies that Habermas describes in his concept of the “public sphere.”

Just as Heidegger’s Nazism cannot be separated from his philosophy, as some (including Habermas) attempt to do, Habermas’s silence on settlement and occupation, and his conflation of criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism, cannot be separated from his philosophy’s focus on European self-interest. This philosophy, according to Bayat, pays no attention to the colonial and exploitative background of European wealth and prosperity, which is behind the rise of capitalism, the bourgeoisie, and democracy—i.e., the very infrastructure that was instrumental in the development of Habermas’s famous “public sphere.”