Schmittian Fascist Moments 7
Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent statements and policies exemplify the political logic described by Carl Schmitt, particularly the fascist form that centers on sovereign decision, existential threat, and the friend-enemy distinction. Schmitt famously argued that sovereignty is defined by the ability to declare the state of exception—that is, to suspend the normal legal order in the name of preserving the political community. Netanyahu has unambiguously assumed this role, presenting himself as the one who will determine when the war ends, on what conditions, and who qualifies as a legitimate political subject. His insistence that Israel will only end its war against Hamas when certain “clear conditions” are met—including the disarmament, exile, or death of Hamas leaders and full Israeli security control over Gaza—reflects a sovereign power unconstrained by international law or diplomatic process.
These are not policy preferences, but existential decisions: Gaza is to be pacified by force, its leadership eradicated, and its population governed under Israeli authority.This logic mirrors Schmitt’s conception of politics as founded on the absolute distinction between friend and enemy. For Netanyahu, Hamas—and by extension, much of Gaza—is not a political adversary with whom one negotiates, but an existential threat to be eliminated. Hence, negotiations are not genuine political processes but tactical pauses in the pursuit of total domination. The only acceptable end to the war is one in which Hamas no longer exists as a political or military force. This creates a dynamic of permanent war and exception: the state becomes a war machine sustained by the ongoing production of enemies.
Netanyahu extends this binary logic inward, as well. In his response to opposition MP Yair Golan—who accused the Israeli state of war crimes and predicted its descent into pariah status—Netanyahu did not offer rebuttals or legal counterarguments. Instead, he framed Golan’s dissent as an act of betrayal that fuels antisemitism and undermines national unity. In so doing, he delegitimizes political opposition by recoding it as a form of treason. For Schmitt, the mark of the fascist leader is not just the suppression of external enemies but the internal purge of pluralism, where disagreement becomes heresy and loyalty to the leader defines citizenship.
Even the management of humanitarian aid in Gaza, as we shall see in more detail in a moment, follows the Schmittian logic of sovereign decision. Netanyahu’s three-stage plan bypasses existing international relief infrastructure, replacing it with aid distribution points operated by US companies and secured by Israeli forces. His justification—that 10% of aid is being captured by Hamas—serves to recast aid not as a right or a necessity but as a tool of war, subject to sovereign discretion. Who eats and who starves becomes a political decision, not a humanitarian imperative. Aid is militarized, controlled, and distributed under occupation—further evidence that the zone of exception has overtaken the political.This entire structure is presented under the banner of security, yet what emerges is the fascist form of order: total control, total domination, and total unity under a single sovereign will.
Netanyahu no longer acts within the ordinary frameworks of law, diplomacy, or proportionality. He asserts the right to define the conditions of war and peace, life and death, political legitimacy and criminal annihilation. As such, he fits Carl Schmitt’s template of the fascist sovereign with unsettling clarity: the leader who rules by exception, abolishes political plurality, defines enemies absolutely, and governs through perpetual crisis.
Let's look at this in a little more detail. Israel’s invocation of self-defence after October 7 and its ongoing military operations in Gaza are framed by Netanyahu and his allies as acts of sovereign necessity, outside the normal legal order, justified by reference to existential threat and historical persecution. Yet this sovereign act is challenged by a series of counterclaims asserting that the legal order still binds even in extremis. Janina Dill’s insistence that “even wars have rules” expresses the liberal-juridical attempt to constrain sovereign violence through normativism—a belief that law can and must prevail even in the face of the enemy.
However, the Schmittian critique reveals the fragility of this legal formalism. The war is no longer simply a conflict between states or armed actors; it is framed by both sides as an existential conflict, in which the enemy is not merely an adversary, but a foe who threatens the substance of the political community. Netanyahu’s rhetorical strategy uses the Holocaust and the pogroms as mythic founding moments that define the political identity of Israel through suffering and survival, reactivating the katechon—the restrainer of chaos. The invocation of Bialik’s poem positions the state of Israel as the final line of defence against the return of anti-Semitic annihilation.
In contrast, critics such as Helena Kennedy and Jan Egeland appeal to international law as a normative order that transcends state sovereignty. But for Schmitt, this appeal is insufficient if it does not address what he claims is the core political reality: law does not bind the sovereign in the moment of exception. The ICC’s attempt to prosecute Netanyahu and Gallant can be interpreted as a liberal-juridical assertion of a global normativity, but its force depends entirely on the political power backing it. The US veto at the UN, and sanctions against ICC judges, shows where the real decision lies—it lies with the state that retains the capacity to enforce or suspend the law.
Thus, the ICC's attempt to function as a universal sovereign—capable of declaring a state outside the law—merely displaces the sovereign decision to another locus of power, one that lacks the monopoly of the political. This renders it vulnerable to the charge of political partiality, especially when it is perceived to blur the friend-enemy distinction by placing Hamas and Israel under the same legal scrutiny. For Schmitt, this moral equivalence is intolerable because it evacuates the concept of the political. To treat both sides as symmetrical legal subjects is to ignore the concrete order of enmity, which, for Netanyahu, defines the struggle.
Lord Sumption’s view that Israel should have learned from its own history implicitly appeals to a liberal teleology, but from a Schmittian perspective, this ignores the fundamental nature of the political as agonistic. The past becomes not a moral constraint, but a resource for political myth-making—an instrument for justifying the sovereign exception. Netanyahu’s claim that Israel’s war is “the most just since the Holocaust” fuses ius ad bellum with existential necessity, erasing the distinction between law and will.
Finally, the debate over genocide hinges on the question of intent, but this legalistic criterion is, for Schmitt, subordinate to the primary reality of enmity. Whether or not Israel intends genocide is less important than the fact that the designation of genocide functions as a political weapon, used to delegitimate the enemy by placing them outside the nomos of the earth. That same mechanism is activated when Netanyahu accuses critics of resurrecting the “blood libel”—a discursive move that renders them enemies of the Jewish people, rather than mere political opponents.
We see further evidence of the Schmittian logic when we consider the issue of aid distribution in Gaza. The attempt to institute humanitarian order via the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), bypassing the UN and long-standing international norms, marks a reordering of space not merely through logistics, but through sovereign imposition. This reordering is inseparable from the suspension of the prior legal and humanitarian framework; it is an exceptional space where new forms of political authority emerge and old forms disintegrate.
What appears on the surface as a humanitarian crisis is, from the Schmittian perspective, a struggle over the right to define the enemy and thereby to constitute order. The GHF, backed by Israel and the United States, functions not merely as an aid distributor but as an apparatus of friend-enemy distinction. By arming anti-Hamas Palestinian clans and creating new zones of aid controlled by private US contractors, a new internal schism is being engineered within the Palestinian population—an attempt to generate proxy sovereignty among actors deemed “friendly” to Israeli strategic aims.
The resulting violence at the Tal al-Sultan distribution site is not mere “chaos” but the eruption of competing claims to political legitimacy under conditions of suspended normativity. The emergence of armed, masked men attacking civilians at the aid site—some allegedly coordinated with or protected by Israeli military forces—can be seen as a manifestation of partisan war, in which the line between civilian and combatant, friend and enemy, legal and criminal is blurred. The mask, in Schmittian terms, symbolises not only anonymity but irregular warfare—a zone beyond the jus publicum Europaeum, where the previous spatial-legal distinctions of sovereign war no longer apply.
The IDF’s statement that it is “looking into the reports” of civilians being killed performs the role of deferral that Schmitt would identify with the liberal inability to decide. Liberalism, for Schmitt, evades the existential nature of the political by converting every conflict into a technical or administrative problem. Yet here, decision cannot be deferred: the bloodshed forces a re-politicisation of aid itself. The line between humanitarian action and military strategy collapses, and aid becomes the new terrain of enmity.
The Israeli claim that Hamas steals aid, and the US-Israeli solution of bypassing the UN with a “secure” system, posits a new nomos grounded in suspicion, securitisation, and biopolitical control. It is not neutrality but control of population under exceptional conditions that becomes the guiding principle. The UN’s rejection of the GHF's method as violating humanitarian principles echoes Schmitt’s critique of liberal universalism: appeals to abstract norms fail when confronted with the necessity of the Schmittian (fascist) political decision. Israel and the US, by asserting their own aid structure, are effectively claiming sovereign prerogative over humanitarian space—deciding not only who receives aid, but under what conditions and through what moral framing.
The accusation by civilians that the gunmen appeared to coordinate with Israeli forces further complicates the friend-enemy schema. If “Palestinian” identity becomes internally fractured, with some clans or militias marked as collaborators, then the friend-enemy distinction becomes internalised, breaking the unity of the political subject and introducing a civil war logic. The state—or its surrogate in the GHF—creates friend-enemies within the population, splitting the enemy camp into useful allies and disposable others. This is a Schmittian move par excellence: to maintain control not by law, but by producing new cleavages of loyalty and enmity under conditions of existential threat.
Finally, the spatiality of the aid routes—mapped through Israeli military zones—reasserts Schmitt’s insight that nomos is spatial. Distribution is not merely movement of goods, but an inscription of new lines of order and exception across the terrain. Those who attempt to cross these lines without aligning with the imposed friend-enemy distinctions become targets. The aid route becomes a threshold space, a site of liminality where law is suspended and the sovereign decides who may live and who must die.
Law, in this register, becomes an instrument of decision and exception rather than neutral adjudication. The Geneva Conventions, though universal in aspiration, function here as a nomos—a spatial order that imposes a juridical frame on the reality of enmity. When these conventions are flouted, it is not merely a failure of humanitarianism but a transgression of the nomos itself, a disruption in the political theology that undergirds international law.
October 7, 2023, was a moment of rupture—a foundational act of violence that reactivated the enemy-image in absolute terms. For the Israeli state, the attack by Hamas constituted not simply a crime but a declaration of existential enmity, one that calls forth the full prerogative of the sovereign to decide on the exception. Netanyahu’s immediate invocation of vengeance, the imagery of cities reduced to rubble, and the call for “freedom of action” signaled a shift from juridical restraint to sovereign assertion. In Schmitt’s terms, the enemy was no longer merely a combatant but an existential threat to the order of the state—a hostis rather than an inimicus.Yet the imposition of total enmity does not erase the juridical order; it reveals the limits of that order and the political theology that sustains it. The Geneva Conventions, as articulated through institutions like the ICRC, attempt to contain the friend-enemy distinction within a procedural framework—rules for killing, protections for the noncombatant, a ratio of violence. But Gaza, as it stands today, exposes the fragility of this containment.
The humanitarian crisis, the siege and starvation, the massive asymmetry in death tolls—all this erodes the plausibility of a legal-political order that can still claim legitimacy.The refusal to allow foreign journalists into Gaza is more than a tactical decision. It is the sovereign control over visibility, the management of perception, the power to define the real. The exception here is epistemological as much as it is military: a war without witnesses becomes a war without accountability, a war that is increasingly indistinguishable from annihilation. Schmitt’s friend-enemy distinction operates not just materially but symbolically: to withhold access is to withhold the capacity to frame, name, and narrate the enemy’s suffering.
In the Israeli counteroffensive, the doctrine of proportionality, so central to international humanitarian law, collapses under the weight of total war. When entire populations are subjected to siege, when hunger is deployed as a “pressure lever,” when children become the statistical debris of aerial bombardment, the juridical figure of the civilian becomes unstable. The civilian becomes suspect, potentially complicit, a body indistinct from the hostile collective. This is the moral disintegration that Schmitt intuited: the escalation of enmity to a point where the enemy is denied not only legal protection but human status.The Gaza war thus recasts the Geneva Conventions as a relic of a vanishing jus publicum Europaeum—a legal order predicated on mutual recognition among sovereign states. But what happens when the enemy is no longer a state, or when the sovereign itself becomes lawless in its exercise of exception? What happens when one party to the conflict ceases to recognize the enemy as a political subject at all, but only as a criminal, a virus, a non-entity to be eradicated?
This is the catastrophe now unfolding. In asserting its sovereign right to act outside the law, Israel confirms Schmitt’s axiom: that the true sovereign is the one who decides the exception. But in so doing, it empties the legal order of its normative force. It is not simply that laws are being broken; it is that the law is being made irrelevant, displaced by the naked decision of the sovereign will.
In such a world, the civilian becomes not a protected subject of humanitarian concern, but a contingent figure whose survival depends on the shifting calculus of military strategy and political expedience. This is why the words of ICRC President Mirjana Spoljaric carry such weight: when she speaks of humanity failing, she is not merely mourning a humanitarian breakdown. She is signaling the unraveling of a postwar international order in which law was supposed to regulate violence, not be suspended by it.
The horror of Gaza, then, is not only the humanitarian suffering. It is the deeper terror that we are witnessing the dissolution of the very categories that make humanitarian concern possible. When every child can be construed as a future enemy, when hunger becomes a military tactic, when rubble is justified as righteous vengeance, then we are no longer in a world governed by law. We are in a world ruled by the sovereign’s decision on who may live and who must die.This, in the end, is the Schmittian truth of Gaza: a war that reveals not only the cruelty of political power but the fragility of the legal order meant to restrain it. A war in which the enemy is denied every form of recognition except that of annihilation. A war where the nomos of the earth is not just contested but desecrated.