“What is thinking worth in the face of genocide? Thinking is worth what it is capable of: nothing or something, as it takes stock of its deprivations and its demands.” Here, the once-great Étienne Balibar is of course correct. His recent Palestine, face au génocide (2026), however, only shows us the deprivation of revisionist thinking, and is at best illustrative of the theoretical backwardness of our reactionary period.

It has been a while since his still outstanding Cinq études du matérialisme historique (1974), and many things have happened since. In his interventions on the Palestinian genocide, Balibar reminds us of two in particular: we are all responsible for the continued carnage, and he himself has long abandoned revolutionary Marxism. Although he still identifies as a communist intellectual, and is firmly committed to a certain idea of Palestinian liberation, his renunciation of the mainstays of Marxism has rendered his analyses weak, sad, and increasingly hard to distinguish from the liberal doxa.

Thus he calls the left’s understanding of the state of Israel as a settler-colonial project and an “intrinsic « moment » of European imperialist history (inaugurated by the British and seconded by the French empire, and pursued until today by the close association of Israel with the « Western » powers, which procure for it finance, weaponry, and diplomatic protection)” a “fiction simplificatrice”, compromised by two “inconveniences”. The first, “severe inconvenience,” is that this reading, “privilégiée par l’historiographie nationale palestinienne”, minimizes the way in which Europe has not sent, but “vomited out its Jews” over Palestine. The second, “subsidiary” inconvenience is that this reading “occults” the complicity of the Arab states. While the historical significance of these two circumstances is beyond doubt, it is unclear how Balibar infers from them, except ideologically, the crucial righteousness of the legitimacy which was “conferred” to the state of Israel in the wake of the Second World War — nor why this “conferred legitimacy” would even matter much.

Although Balibar calls the rights historically “conferred” to Israel “conditional” (in a once possible present they would have been extended to the natives also), the Palestinian deadlock, which is presently expressed as genocide, is ultimately understood as one between different rights: the Jewish people’s right to exist, the state of Israel’s conditional rights, Palestinian human rights.

This is a striking regression from the fundamental critique of all rights-based philosophy by the Althusserian Marxism that Balibar once upheld. In Lire le Capital (1968), the aforementioned Cinq études (1974), and most clearly in Sur la dictature du prolétariat (1976), Balibar categorically and relentlessly attacked l’idéologie juridique bourgeoise. Whereas Balibar has always, against various strands of Vulgärmaterialismus and rigid structuralisms, allowed the “juridico-political instance” great pressures (under certain historical circumstances), and rightly problematized the superstructure’s “détermination « en dernière instance »” by the base, in no way would it have ever been imaginable for the Marxist Balibar to think from a rights-based framework outwards.

The same is true, functionally, for Balibar’s second, “subsidiary inconvenience” for our understanding of Israel as a settler-colonial project. The complicity of the comprador Arab states in the founding of Israel is an important historical fact. But what does it mean that some Arab states were more or less complicit in the founding of Israel? The Marxist theory of the state provides the answer. It is most certainly not that Israel should not be understood as a settler-colonial project.

Occupation and national liberation are not legal but political issues. Legal categories have been failing the Palestinian people for five generations. For a “communist intellectual” to cry “human rights!” anno 2026, face au génocide, is not only weak but perverse.

That late Balibar’s framework for the Palestinian genocide is not only weak but also opportunistic — and thus properly revisionist —becomes clear when we shift from the side of the butchers to the side of the victims, where we suddenly no longer find ourselves in a “problematic of legitimacy” but in a “problematic of effectiveness”. Although the Palestinian people’s right to armed resistance is admitted, instead of Fanon’s, we are reminded of the lessons of “Max Weber autant que de Gandhi”: that optics matter. Palestinian “cruelty” is to be rejected strategically.

So what do the Palestinian people have left to hope for? The “development of mass solidarity, traversing the borders of North and South, East and West” which could put an end to the system of Western complicity in genocide. As an extra, or maybe predilect benefit, this long-awaited mass solidarity will take the struggle of the Palestinian people “out of isolation” and thus make the “attraction of terrorism, as the ultimate resource of the « damnés de la terre »”, less viable.

While it is well-established by now that without the system of Western complicity the Palestinian genocide would not be possible, the goal of “mettre en échec” the enablers is not, in itself, an answer to the historical condition of the genocide, which is colonialism. But it is exactly this that Balibar’s rights-based paradigm obscures. Taking the presence of the settlers instead as an “irreversible national fact”, Balibar is incapable of imagining the dismantlement of the colonial project beyond vague expressions “en matière de liberté et d’égalité”. That young Balibar was valiantly committed to the struggle for Algerian liberation makes this all the more astonishing.

In this sense, Balibar’s interventions on the Palestinian genocide are the crowning achievement of his turn away from Marxism. After the theoretical “deconstruction” of the 90s, now follows the political reckoning. Having abandoned its socio-ontological tenets, Balibar’s “communism” has become vapid and powerless. While his politico-theoretical works of the 2000s never yielded to bourgeois ideology openly, and the Althusserian critique of the abstract juridical subject was still partially professed in his works on égaliberté, in the face of genocide we see the true worth of the theoretical oblations of the 90s.

Balibar’s adherence to the survival of the Palestinian people is honorable, but, ultimately, of little use outside the bourgeois bühne. Having renounced Marxism, foreclosing revolutionary paths and aggrandizing enlightened bourgeois ineptitudes, Face au génocide is a stark reminder of the forever-urgent need for revolutionary theory, and a sad illustration of our reactionary period. It is a measure of how badly “the class war in theory” was lost: defeated by liberalism, even Balibar abandoned historical materialism. Trading in Marx for bourgeois obfuscations, naturally he ends up entangled in ideological notions of the judiciary and bourgeois state — pathways of revisionism par excellence — that blind him to the fundamental settler-colonial structure of the Zionist project. Hence, for us Marxists, the only value of this text is symptomatic — the underlying condition of course being revisionism.

“More than ever the question of the politics of human rights […] acutely poses itself as the central question of politics, of which Palestine est le révélateur.”

The Palestinian genocide is indeed revelatory, but not in the way Balibar wants us to believe.