Reading Nietzsche in the Wake Of the 2008-09 War on Gaza

Abstract

This paper argues for a psychological understanding of Nietzsche's categories of master and slave morality. Disentangling Nietzsche's parallel discourses of strength, superiority, and spirituality in the first essay of On the Genealogy of Morals, I argue that master and slave morality are better understood as ethical practices of the self than surrogates for either a binary classification of strength and weakness or a political demarcation of oppressor and oppressed. In doing so, I offer an application of this analysis to the horrific violence visited upon the Gaza Strip by Israel in its 2008-09 military assault. 1 IN LATE JANUARY 2009, I SAT DOWN to re-read Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals. I remember this otherwise uneventful event so distinctly because, at that moment, Israel's war on Gaza was brutally and unremittingly underway. During this 3-week-long military attack, Israel killed over 1400 Palestinians, most of whom were civilians and approximately 400 of whom were children. Israel, in fact, deliberately targeted civilians—including children and humanitarian aid workers—assaulting Palestinians simultaneously by air, land, and sea, and deploying white phosphorus against them, a chemical intended to operate as a smokescreen for troop movements but when used as a weapon burns people's flesh down to the bone. 2 The brutality of Israel's war was all the more agonizing