Lorna Finlayson in The Boston Review:
German philosopher Jürgen Habermas—both inheritor and critic of the Frankfurt School, best known for his theories of discourse ethics, communicative action, and deliberative democracy—died in March at the age of ninety-six. One of his last public political acts, five weeks after the beginning of Israel’s war of annihilation against the people of Gaza following the attack by Hamas on October 7, 2023, was to publish a statement, entitled “Principles of Solidarity,” with three colleagues at Normative Orders, a research network based at Goethe University in Frankfurt. The statement sought to identify “some principles that should not be disputed” amid the “cascade of moral and political statements and protests” following “Hamas’ extreme atrocity and Israel’s response to it.”
The solidarity in question, the authors made crystal clear, was not with the victims of what is now widely acknowledged to be a genocide but rather with “Israel and Jews in Germany.” Israel’s retaliation was “justified in principle,” they wrote—although it ought to be conducted in accordance with the “guiding principles” of “proportionality” and the “prevention of civilian casualties.” The authors did not hazard a judgment as to whether these conditions were being observed in Israel’s offensive, which at the time had already killed over eleven thousand people, but they did assert, without argument, that “the standards of judgment slip completely when genocidal intentions are attributed to Israel’s actions.”
More here.
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