In the hands of Israel’s genocidal settler-colonial society, the state of exception is a relentless nightmare that will not stop at the borders of Palestine, writes Ramzy Baroud.
Displaced people in April 2024 try to return to northern Gaza Strip by crossing the bridge over the estuary of the Wadi Gaza. (Ashraf Amra /United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East/ CC BY-SA 3.0 igo)
This Israeli exceptionalism is the very essence of the instability that plagues the Middle East.
The concept of the state of exception dates back to the Roman justitium, a legal mechanism for suspending law during times of civil unrest. However, the modern understanding was shaped by the German jurist Carl Schmitt, who famously wrote that the “sovereign is he who decides on the exception.”
While Schmitt’s own history as a jurist for the Third Reich serves as a chilling reminder of where such theories can lead, his work provides an undeniably accurate anatomy of raw power: it reveals how a ruler who institutes laws also holds the power to dismiss them, under the pretext that no constitution can foresee every possible crisis.
It is often argued that Israel, a self-described democracy, still lacks a formal constitution because such a document would force it to define its borders — a problematic prospect for a settler-colonial regime with an insatiable appetite for expansion.
But there is another explanation: by operating on “Basic Laws” rather than a constitution, Israel avoids a comprehensive legal system that would align it with the globally accepted foundations of international law.
Without a constitution, Israel exists in a legal vacuum where the “exception” is the rule. In this space, racial laws, territorial expansion and even genocide are permitted so long as they fit the state’s immediate agenda.
Isolating specific examples to illustrate this point is a daunting task, primarily because nearly every relevant pronouncement from Israeli officials — particularly during the genocide in Gaza — is a textbook study in Israeli exceptionalism.
UNRWA, For Example
UNRWA staff member comforts a distressed child at a school shelter in Nuseirat camp, Gaza Strip, March 2025. (Ashraf Amra/UNRWA/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 4.0)
Consider Israel’s relentless assault on UNRWA, the U.N.-mandated body responsible for the survival of millions of Palestinian refugees. For decades, Israel has sought the dismantling of UNRWA for one reason: it is the only global institution that prevents the total erasure of Palestinian refugee rights.
These rights are not mere grievances; they are firmly anchored in international law, most notably via U.N. Resolution 194.
While UNRWA is not a political organization in a functional sense, its very existence is profoundly political. First, it stands as the institutional legacy of a specific political history; second, and more crucially, its presence ensures the Palestinian refugee remains a recognized political entity.
By existing, UNRWA preserves the status of the refugee as a subject with the legal right to demand a return to historic Palestine — a demand that the “state of exception” seeks to permanently silence.
In October 2024, Israel unilaterally legislated the closure of UNRWA, once more asserting its “exception” over the entire framework of the United Nations.
“It is time the international community … realizes that UNRWA’s mission must end,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had already declared on Jan. 31, 2024, signaling the coming erasure. This rhetoric reached its physical conclusion on Jan. 20, when the UNRWA headquarters in occupied Jerusalem were demolished by the Israeli military in the presence of National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir.
“A historic day!” Ben-Gvir announced on that same date. “Today these supporters of terror are being driven out.” This horrific act was met with bashful responses, mute concerns, or total silence by the very powers tasked with preventing states from positioning themselves above the law.
By allowing this Israeli “exception” to stand unchallenged, the international community has effectively sanctioned the demolition of its own legal foundations.
Dropping Pretensions
In the past, Israeli leaders masked their true intentions with the language of a “light unto the nations,” projecting a beacon of morality while practicing violence, ethnic cleansing and military occupation on the ground.
The genocide in Gaza, however, has stripped away these pretenses. For the first time, Israeli rhetoric fully reflects a state of exception where the law is not just ignored, but structurally suspended.
“No one in the world will let us starve 2 million citizens, even though it may be justified and moral until they return the hostages to us,” Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich admitted on Aug. 5, 2024.
This “justified and moral” stance reveals a localized morality that permits the extermination of a population as an ethically defensible act. Yet Smotrich also lied; the world has done nothing practical to dissuade Israel from its savage pulverization of Gaza.
The global community remained idle even when Smotrich declared on May 6, 2025, that Gaza would be “entirely destroyed” and the population “concentrated in a narrow strip.” Today, that vision is a reality: a genocide-fatigued population is confined to roughly 45 percent of the territory, while the remainder stays empty under Israeli military control.
Netanyahu himself, who has stretched the state of exception beyond any predecessor, defined this new reality during a cabinet meeting on Oct. 26, 2025: “Israel is a sovereign state… Our security policy is in our own hands. Israel does not seek anyone’s approval for that.”
Here, Netanyahu defines sovereignty as the raw power to act — genocide included — without regard for international law or human rights.
If all states adopted this, the world would fall into a lawless frenzy. In his seminal book State of Exception, Giorgio Agamben diagnosed this “void” — a space where law is suspended but “force of law” remains as pure violence.
While his recent stances have divided the academic community, his critique of the exception as a permanent tool of governance remains an indispensable lens for understanding the erasure of Palestinian life.
Israel has already created that void. In the hands of a genocidal, settler-colonial society, the state of exception is a relentless nightmare that will not stop at the borders of Palestine. If this “exception” is allowed to become the permanent regional rule, no nation in the Middle East will be spared.
Time is of the essence.
Dr. Ramzy Baroud is a widely published and translated author, an internationally syndicated columnist and editor of The Palestine Chronicle. His latest book is The Last Earth: A Palestinian Story (Pluto Press, 2018). He earned a Ph.D. in Palestine Studies from the University of Exeter (2015), and was a non-resident scholar at Orfalea Center for Global and International Studies, UCSB. Visit his website.
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