The opening scene says it all: Israel’s National Security Minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, struts at the port of Ashdod before the international activists recently abducted in international waters. He forces them to sit on the ground, calls them “terrorists” before the cameras, and turns that act of humiliation into a global spectacle. He does not hide: he circulates the footage himself. The message is clear: Israel enjoys total impunity and can act as a terrorist state in broad daylight.
From there, more than four hundred doctors, journalists, parliamentarians, and human rights defenders were transferred to Ketziot prison in the Negev desert, a facility with a long history of allegations of psychological torture, overcrowding, and medical neglect. Testimonies coincide: fifteen hours of interrogation without food or water, denial of access to lawyers, pressure to sign deportation documents equivalent to self-incrimination. Others, more defiant, refused to sign and were imprisoned without even an official list being published. The only thing that has leaked is that several have begun a hunger strike, without access to medication or independent verification.
An exhausted system
The central problem is no longer Israel’s brutality—amply documented through decades of apartheid and genocide—but rather the realization that all diplomatic tools have failed. The UN has become empty theater: resolutions no one in Tel Aviv reads, speeches archived without consequence. The International Criminal Court has been invoked a thousand times, yet it has not stopped a single bombing, not a single forced transfer. International humanitarian law is paper burned against drones, white phosphorus, and desert prisons.
The illusion of five exits
Those still clinging to the mirage of the old international order usually invoke five possible ways to restrain Israel: the UN, the ICC, economic sanctions, diplomatic pressure, and, in the last resort, war. Yet practice lays bare their inviability:
1. The UN.
It is an institution paralyzed by the veto. The Security Council has been neutralized by the United States, Israel’s unconditional ally, which vetoes any remotely coercive resolution. The General Assembly produces symbolic resolutions with no executive capacity. Far from limiting Israel, the UN has become a stage for its mockery: Netanyahu openly defies it, fully aware nothing will happen.
2. The International Criminal Court.
It is powerless against Israel. Not only because Israel does not recognize its jurisdiction, but because every attempt to investigate war crimes is stifled by political pressure and threats. The Prosecutor may accumulate files, but without coercive power. The ICC, in this context, is a simulacrum of justice: the image of an impotent tribunal incapable of altering the perpetrator’s conduct.
3. Economic or financial sanctions.
They are unworkable under the current system. Israel is shielded by the Western-dominated global financial architecture, particularly by the United States. Boycott attempts, even from social movements, are quickly criminalized or neutralized. States’ structural dependence on the Western banking system blocks real sanctions. Moreover, Israel plays a central role in the global arms and tech industries: sanctioning it would blow up multibillion-dollar deals. No state is willing to pay that price.
4. Bilateral diplomatic pressure.
A fiction. Europe, which for decades flew the banner of “human rights,” proves incapable of reacting even when its own citizens are abducted in international waters. It prefers submission to the U.S. ally and the network of entangled interests with Israel. Arab states, once loud in solidarity with Palestine, now remain silent to safeguard economic and security ties. Bilateral diplomacy, in this framework, is not an option: it is a wall of silence.
5. War as a last resort.
Unthinkable. No power is willing to launch a global conflagration over Palestine. Not even China, with its rising power, will risk confronting the United States and Israel militarily. Its strategy, consistent with the tradition of its diplomacy, is to wait, calculate, and prioritize what it deems essential for its development. Palestine, in Chinese realpolitik, is not cause for world war. The only violent path left is therefore Israel’s and its ally’s imposition—and that is already underway.
Thus, the five paths so often invoked as possible exits are in fact mirages. Naming them is almost an act of naivety. Reality no longer bothers to disguise itself: there are no exits within the current framework.
Philosophy of the simulacrum
The realization of these five exits’ inviability lays bare the essence of today’s world order: we live in a simulacrum. For decades, we were made to believe in an international community with rules, institutions, and courts capable of restraining the powerful. The Sumud Flotilla proves it was all fiction. What reigns is the law of the strongest, openly proclaimed by Netanyahu and Trump, turned into official doctrine of supremacist Zionism: a “divine right” to expand, exterminate, and redraw borders at will.
Carl Schmitt foresaw it: the sovereign is he who decides on the exception. And when exception becomes norm, legality dies. Giorgio Agamben deepened the thesis: we live in a permanent state of exception, where subjects reduced to “bare life” can be eliminated without consequence. Today, Israel embodies that absolute paradigm. Hannah Arendt warned that radical evil emerges when legality becomes bureaucratic administration of extermination. That warning now takes tangible form.
A reflection with the classics and the contemporaries
Seen academically, the Sumud Flotilla experience confirms what various thinkers warned:
Hobbes spoke of Leviathan and the absolute monopoly of violence. Israel, shielded by the U.S., acts as an unleashed Leviathan in a system without higher arbitration.
Carl Schmitt reminded us politics is the friend–enemy distinction. By labeling doctors, journalists, and parliamentarians “terrorists,” Israel imposes the category of absolute enemy, stripped of humanity.
Hannah Arendt showed how evil is banalized in bureaucracies that exterminate without reflection. The administrative transfer of hundreds of activists to Ketziot exemplifies that banality of evil.
Giorgio Agamben exposed the concept of “bare life”: humans reduced to bodies without rights. The flotilla detainees epitomize this figure.
Zygmunt Bauman described modernity as machinery capable of managing exterminations with cold efficiency. The Negev prison and the live broadcast of humiliation illustrate that machinery at work.
All this demonstrates that the international order is no longer functional or normative: it is decorative. The simulacrum of law has evaporated. What exists is naked force, backed by economic, financial, and military interests no one dares contradict.
Conclusion: greater Israel and humanity at the abyss
Trump and Netanyahu have imposed the new paradigm: global democracy and international law no longer exist, replaced by the law of the strongest. “Greater Israel” projects itself as the archetype of what is to come: a terrorist state endorsed by the world’s foremost military power. The BRICS’ attempts at another path were punished with brutal sanctions. Canada, even as a servile ally, was humiliated and subdued. Europe, now irrelevant, watches even its human rights banner trampled without reaction. Palestine, meanwhile, is erased from the map before the world’s eyes.
Humanity stands at an inflection point: accept barbarism as destiny or invent another paradigm of resistance. But that new paradigm will not come from dead diplomatic tools, but from the persistence of those who refuse silence, from the patient construction of memory, from the collective intelligence capable of countering the classroom bully with the tenacity of those who never surrender.
Meanwhile, our brothers and sisters of the Global Sumud Flotilla remain abducted in Ketziot. Their lives hang by a thread, and they know it. Israel may release them or let them die, and no one will be able to prevent it. That is the naked reality of power.
Epilogue: resistance and exhaustion
Much is said about building a new paradigm of resistance. Some imagine transnational networks challenging states; others place hope in economic pressure from social movements, digital disobedience, or grassroots sovereignty. These are not fantasies: Latin America, Africa, and even the Arab world offer examples of how persistent communities erode power structures. But one truth no analysis can conceal remains: every shift in forces exacts a price in exhaustion. And in that exhaustion, some die.
The question is not whether there will be victims, but how many can endure before a people becomes too fragmented to sustain its historical continuity. That is the core of genocide: not only killing in massive numbers, but dismantling the conditions of possibility of a Nation. As of today, one-third of Gaza’s population has been killed. More than half were children. Exile, once the means by which Palestine preserved identity in the diaspora, no longer guarantees cohesion: repeated trauma has diluted the social fabric, fracturing its coherence as a Nation. Erasure is not only physical; it is cultural, symbolic, political.
Within this frame, the alternatives so often proposed—international courts, sanctions, diplomacy—have proven to be mirages. There is no UN capable of halting the war machine; no ICC capable of imposing justice on a state shielded by the world’s top military power; no sanction possible against those who, with their ally, control global financial and technological circuits. Reality no longer bothers with disguise.
What remains, then? Perhaps only what Gramsci called the “war of positions”: dispersed, cumulative resistances, invisible at first but capable of undermining hegemonies over time. Perhaps the peoples of the Global South, seasoned by genocide and colonization, will forge new languages of articulation. Perhaps collective intelligence, the persistent memory of those who refuse silence, will achieve what diplomacy and law could not: keeping alive a narrative that prevents the perpetrator’s total triumph.
But even this perspective is cruel in its honesty: Palestine has no time left. What unfolds is not a slow process, but an ongoing liquidation. The Sumud Flotilla, its bodies abducted in Ketziot, embodies that tension: the dignified resistance confronting genocide, and the impotence before a power that may let them die and no one can prevent it.
The world stands at a threshold: either accept barbarism as destiny or attempt to found another paradigm of civility not yet born. And whichever path emerges—even the most hopeful—will be built upon ruins, traumas, and shattered lives. Because every shift in forces exacts a price in exhaustion. Because some will die in the process. And because, for Palestine, the cost has already been too high: a devastated people, an exterminated childhood, a Nation history may one day preserve only in the pages of an encyclopedia.
