https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/politics-of-impunity
Raymond Geuss
07 January 2026 Ideas

One of the founding documents of Western philosophy deals with the phenomenon of being exempt from punishment. In Plato’s Republic, Glaukon challenges Sokrates by telling a story: there was a shepherd, Gyges, who found a ring which granted him invisibility, allowing him to do whatever he wished without fear of retribution. What reason could he possibly have not to do what he wanted no matter the consequences for others? Plato’s answer doesn’t get Western philosophy off to a propitious start – it is both too optimistic and too morally and politically disengaged. Doing harm to others (‘acting unjustly’ as Plato puts it) results, he claims, from a soul that is not in harmony, and leads the soul to become further disordered. Only someone with a harmonious soul can lead a happy life; consequently, only someone who is ignorant would wish to harm others. For Plato, then, there is no need to worry about impunity per se, because those who understand this will never harm anyone even if they know they can escape punishment, and those who are ignorant will be unhappy.

This line of argument presupposes a kind of cosmic moral order which few people (apart from some traditionalist religious believers) are likely to accept: ‘What goes around comes around, and if you harm others, this will come back to haunt you in the form of unhappiness.’ Even if we accept that Gyges will be wretched if he commits harm, what consolation is that to his victims? Plato’s approach might lead to quietism: let us see this as a learning experience for Gyges, who will come to realize that harming others is incompatible with leading a fulfilling life. The focus is on the psychological deficiencies and needs of the perpetrator rather than the suffering of his potential victims, or the need to ensure even minimal social order. Politically, however, impunity is not, as Plato suggests, something we can simply dismiss. It is a very bad state of affairs for a member of society to enjoy impunity from punishment – and this is true whether you are thinking about a citizen of Ancient Athens or a nation state in the modern international system.

It has often been noted that Israel enjoys a remarkable degree of impunity. The situation is even worse than in the case of Gyges, because what Israel does is not invisible. On the contrary, it commits crimes against humanity in plain sight. Indeed, Israel glories in and boasts about them. A very large portion of the citizens of the world condemn these actions in the most vigorous terms, and yet unstinting support for Israel has such a chokehold on Western political and economic life that no serious sanctions have been forthcoming, despite years of protests against the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Rarely has the gap between the moral outrage of Western populations and the policies of their governments been so great.

When the International Association of Genocide Scholars, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, B’Tselem and many others accuse Israel of carrying out a genocide, Israel’s supporters often rebut the accusation on the grounds that if Israel had wanted to kill all the Palestinians, they would have done so already. This assumes that it would be straightforward to exterminate the Palestinians if the Israelis put their minds to it, so their failure to do so indicates that this is not their intention. That surely is incorrect. The extermination of millions is not at all easy for the perpetrators, either technically or psychologically. There are signs that Israel is finding the task a full-time job, that the monomania which the project requires is economically ruinous and drains the oxygen from other forms of social and cultural activity. It is also clear that the Israeli state perceives international (and especially American) public opinion as a limit on its ability to act.

Is there not, however, perhaps another reason why Israel has yet to ‘finish the job’? Could it be that in some sense the Israelis do not want the Palestinians to disappear altogether, that in a perverse way they would miss them if they were gone?

Supporters of Israel often speak of it as a refuge for Jews, the only place in the world in which they can be sure of being safe. There is, of course, no such thing as absolute safety, and the quest for it breeds fanaticism. To speak of something as safe is always relative; it means that the thing in question is safer than some imagined alternatives and relative to some envisaged threats. But what exactly are the terms of reference supposed to be here? Does anyone think an individual Jew is safer in Jerusalem than in Montreal or Boston or Buenos Aires? Netanyahu and his government are now telling Israelis essentially to prepare for endless war.

Although they live in greater safety in the West, there is one thing Jews cannot do in London, New York or Paris, but can do in Israel, and that is show contempt for and actively mistreat a stigmatized and subject population without fearing any negative consequences. In this respect Israel is unique in that it gives its Jewish citizens social sanction to do just that: oppress a subordinate population whose members can be abused almost ad libitum. Israel appears to many outside observers to be a society held together by a collectively chosen scapegoat. This often crosses over into sadism. The sadist, however, does not wish for the object of their sadism to disappear, because if it does, their desires are no longer fulfilled. They wish it to instead remain in a state of degradation, as testimony to the effectiveness of their desires in the world. Israelis may begin by dehumanizing the Palestinians to be able to oppress and eradicate them, but find themselves enjoying the process of dehumanization itself.

Aristotle has a completely instrumental attitude towards slaves, describing them as ‘living tools’, required to undertake mindless drudgery without the master having to soil his hands. Nietzsche saw this as a shallow way to approach the subject: the master needs the slave not merely to get tedious work done but to reaffirm his own sense of self. The existence of the slave is a continual reaffirmation of the master’s superiority. To put it another way, if the Palestinians did not exist, or if they stopped existing, what would be the point of being an Israeli?

The impunity of a slave-owner who maltreated his slaves in a slaveholding society was rooted in the social institutions of his world and the basic norms which his society professed to respect. Israeli impunity in the twenty-first century, by contrast, is an anomaly: radically contrary to all the values which we claim to hold and in conflict with the large-scale institutional structures we have created purportedly to enforce them. This impunity can be maintained only through political, economic and social coercion directed by Israel and its allies against both international institutions and Western populations. That means, however, that it is not an immutable feature of our world, but a construct that could shatter under pressure.