A Palestinian girl stands against the backdrop of buildings destroyed amid the ongoing conflict in Deir al-Balah, central Gaza Strip on May 13, 2026. (AFP/Yonhap)
By Slavoj Žižek, Global Eminent Scholar at Kyung Hee UniversityIt is generally known that, till now, the only serious opposition to the Netanyahu government in Israel came from the secret services, Mossad and Shin Bet. Netanyahu has now decided to finally bring them under his control, so he has tapped Roman Gofman, an IDF colonel known for his brutal oppression of the Palestinians on the West Bank, a guy with no intelligence experience who doesn’t even speak English, to serve as the head of Mossad. I was understandably surprised when I learned that my writing provided the intellectual grounding for his activity: “Gofman has been accused on several occasions of misleading his commanders and acting without authorization. As an IDF colonel in the occupied West Bank, he ran Palestinian agents in unsanctioned, rogue activities. And he firmly believes he has the right, no matter the rules. During his military studies, Gofman wrote that a commander must at times act even without formal authority, exceeding his mandate to fulfill the perceived will of policymakers—even when that will has not been explicitly defined. He claimed to have drawn intellectual grounding for this approach from the writings of the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, a neo-Marxist philosopher and author known for peppering his many books, articles and speeches with obscene jokes and politically incorrect provocations. In Gofman’s adaptation, a military commander operates within a ‘discursive space,’ identifying an external ‘anchoring point’ beyond himself and the system and acting accordingly — in other words, outside the lines,” according to Yossi Melman.I didn’t have to wait long for the malevolent reactions. Joerg Lau (who attacked me back in 2003 as a theorist who supports terror) wrote: “Stunning: The next Mossad chief draws inspiration from — yes, you guessed it — Slavoj Žižek!” Plus there is Scott Long: “The new head of Mossad says he takes his ‘intellectual grounding’ from Slavoj Žižek. IMPOSTOR, THAT JOB IS RIGHTFULLY MINE.” As for myself, I am not sure how to take Gofman’s reference to me – seriously, as a joke, with irony (“I use the very theorist who is known as a supporter of the Palestinians”)? So I’ll take it literally, in all naivety. It is obvious that Gofman tries to provide a justification for how the IDF and settlers systematically break the (Israeli!) law and oppress Palestinians — so it is not those who resist Israeli occupation who violate the imposed Israeli law; it is the organs of the Israeli state themselves who violate their own laws. Gofman is thus the military counterpart of Daniella Weiss, the godmother of the West Bank settlers who has, for decades, organized the occupation of Palestinian land. When, in an interview with Louis Theroux, she explains the strategy of expanding settlements, her description of how settlers relate to the Israeli state power cannot but strike us as pure and simple truth:“We do for governments what they cannot do for themselves. Even if you take Netanyahu now, who is very happy about what we do here and also [about] our plans to build a Jewish community in Gaza. He’s happy about it but he cannot say it. He says the opposite. It’s not realistic. Good! We will make it realistic. It’s not forcing the government. It’s helping the government. It’s step number one in politics. You don’t force the government. You [give] the government the ability, the courage, the public support, the political support.”Crucial here is the duplicity between the civic movement (of settlers) and the official public policy of state organs: the civic movement does what the state officially denies it wants and even condemns, and in this way gradually creates conditions for the state to accept what is already a fact. Gofman admits that the state is now doing the same — the masks of law and order are falling: the “external ‘anchoring point’ beyond himself and the system” is the ethnic cleansing of Gaza and the West Bank. This is now the reality of Israel, the “only democracy in the Middle East.” This is why Netanyahu has to make sure that Mossad and Shin Bet are under his control: from the Israeli secret services, we often hear a quite different message. Efraim Halevy, the ex-chief of Mossad, said immediately after the Oct. 7 attacks:“We don't have the luxury to wait. We have to have a viable policy which would deal with the presence in this area of the Jews and the Palestinians. And we are doomed to live together. I don't want to say we are doomed to die together. And if our approach is that we are doomed to live together, we can't simply live together with one part of the equation having the upper part and ignoring the aspirations of the other side. There has to be the beginning of a meeting of minds.”Ami Ayalon, a former leader of Shin Bet, said on Jan. 14, 2023, something quite similar: “We Israelis will have security only when they, Palestinians, will have hope. This is the equation.” Israel will not have security until Palestinians have their own state, and Israeli authorities should release Marwan Barghouti, jailed leader of the second intifada, to direct negotiations to create one:“Look into the Palestinian polls. He is the only leader who can lead Palestinians to a state alongside Israel. First of all because he believes in the concept of two states, and secondly because he won his legitimacy by sitting in our jails.”This is the choice, the only true choice: some form of coexistence of Jews and Palestinians with full mutual recognition or genocidal war. And, as Yuval Noah Harari made it clear, to follow the second path means nothing less than a symbolic suicide of the Jews, the renunciation of their historical legacy: “Judaism has survived; it has become the world champion in surviving catastrophes. But it has never faced a catastrophe like we are dealing with right now, which is a spiritual catastrophe for Judaism itself. The worst-case scenario that we are facing right now — we can still prevent it — is the potential of an ethnic cleansing campaign in Gaza and the West Bank resulting in the expulsion of 2 million, maybe more, Palestinians. From there, the establishment of Greater Israel, the disintegration of Israeli democracy and the creation of a new Israel based on an ideology of Jewish supremacy. The worship of what were completely anti-Jewish values for the last two millennia.”There are, of course, honorable defenders of the authentic Jewish legacy, among them Maj. Gen. Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi, the Israeli military’s top lawyer, tasked with enforcing the rule of law within the nation’s armed forces. In November 2025, she was arrested as part of the criminal investigation into the leak of a video showing the abuse, including sexual torture, of Palestinian detainees in a notorious Israeli military prison, Sde Teiman. Tomer-Yerushalmi was put under terrible pressure and even attempted to kill herself.“There are things that cannot be done even against the worst of the detainees. Officers of the [legal] unit have faced repeated personal attacks, harsh insults, and even real threats. All of this because they stood guard over the rule of law in the IDF — together with the commanders and alongside them,” she wrote. The last traces of dignity are erased from public life in Israel, a country in which Itamar Bin Gvir, the minister who controls security in the West Bank, is a racist criminal convicted by an Israeli court. Today, his shadow hovers above the terror to which West Bank Palestinians are exposed on a daily basis, and Gofman follows his line. In Israel today, one can be punished for obeying the existing law, so Gofman is in no danger. Nonetheless, a question remains: why me? Why did Gofman choose me?The first thing to note is that my theory being appropriated by Gofman is not an exception. Already more than a decade ago, in order to conceptualize the IDF urban warfare against the Palestinians, the IDF military academies systematically refer to Deleuze and Guattari, especially to “Thousand Plateaus,” using it as “operational theory” — the catchwords used are “Formless Rival Entities,” “Fractal Manoeuvre,” “Velocity vs. Rhythms,” “The Wahabi War Machine,” “Postmodern Anarchists,” “Nomadic Terrorists.” One of the key distinctions they rely on is the one between “smooth” and “striated” space, which reflect the organizational concepts of the “war machine” and the “state apparatus.” The IDF now often uses the term “to smooth out space” when they want to refer to operation in a space as if it had no borders. Palestinian areas are thought of as “striated” in the sense that they are enclosed by fences, walls, ditches, road blocks, and so on.“The attack conducted by units of the IDF on the city of Nablus in April 2002 was described by its commander, Brigadier-General Aviv Kokhavi, as ‘inverse geometry,’ which he explained as ‘the reorganization of the urban syntax by means of a series of micro-tactical actions.’ During the battle soldiers moved within the city across hundreds of meters of overground tunnels carved out through a dense and contiguous urban structure. Although several thousand soldiers and Palestinian guerrillas were maneuvering simultaneously in the city, they were so ‘saturated’ into the urban fabric that very few would have been visible from the air. Furthermore, they used none of the city’s streets, roads, alleys or courtyards, or any of the external doors, internal stairwells and windows, but moved horizontally through walls and vertically through holes blasted in ceilings and floors. This form of movement, described by the military as ‘infestation,’ seeks to redefine inside as outside, and domestic interiors as thoroughfares. The IDF’s strategy of ‘walking through walls’ involves a conception of the city as not just the site but also the very medium of warfare ‘a flexible, almost liquid medium that is forever contingent and in flux,’” writes Eyal Weizman.Among cases nearer to us, one should definitely mention the way Peter Thiel, the ideologist of digital neofeudalism, appropriated Rene Girard (the US Vice President JD Vance was also Girard’s student), plus, of course, the omnipresence among the new rightist populists of references to Antonio Gramsci (the topic of ideological hegemony and the characterization of our time as a time of “morbid phenomena” which emerge when the old is dying and the new is not yet born). In all these cases, we can easily discern how the appropriation falsifies its source, using only parts in a way that mystifies the whole. Thiel takes from Girard only his idea of mimetic desire, totally ignoring Girard’s idea of Christ’s death as the sacrifice of the innocent which interrupts the very logic of sacrifice — although he declares himself a defender of Christianity, he is one of today’s big figures of antichrist, as are Trump and Vance in their ridiculous polemics against the Pope. This, however, is not the whole truth: one must also admit that the Trumpian populists practiced the struggle for ideological hegemony in a much more effective way than today’s left.And my case? Is there something in my theory that offers itself to Gofman’s appropriation? Unambiguously no: what Gofman presents as my view are some moments of my critical depiction of how today’s openly cynical ideology functions, i.e., of how today’s state power is more and more violating its own legal order and mobilizing illegal violence to reproduce itself. It is difficult to miss the supreme irony of such a situation: the oppressors use the critical theory about them to perfect their criminal activity. That’s why, as I put it in my last Substack text, “law and order” is not just a motto serving to oppress minorities, it can also function as a motto to protect them. The case of Gofman (and the general trend on what goes on in the West Bank) stands for the worst possible situation: the victims are not just oppressed by the legal order imposed on them by the colonizers; on top of it, they are exposed to the illegal violence of the colonizers who violate their own law. They have no legal protection against illegal violence, since state power not just turns a blind eye to this violence but directly supports it. Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]
