Raymond Geuss: “Without Causes”

If you want to understand why so many young people in the United States think that they live in an effective one-party state, where the labels ‘Democrat’ and ‘Republican’ are nothing but marketing ploys to sell the same policies, Hillary Clinton’s recent article in the Financial Times is a useful primer. The former secretary of state calls on ‘Europe, regional partners and the broader international community’ to support the 20-point plan for Gaza proposed by Donald Trump, who defeated her in the 2016 election. If even such an ‘implacable opponent’ of Trump can see this is ‘the best option in a terrible situation’, she insists, then ‘surely others can too’.

There is a whiff of unreality about her intervention. History has moved on, far beyond the 20-point plan – unveiled in September 2025 during a White House press conference with Netanyahu – not least because much of it concerned the exchange of hostages between Israel and Hamas, an issue which is now moot. At its centre is the Board of Peace, whose eleven-member Gaza Executive Board is composed of such luminaries as disgraced former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, a New York real estate developer and friend of Trump (Steve Witkoff) and Trump’s son-in-law (Jared Kushner). Clinton does not see fit to mention that it includes not a single Palestinian; perhaps it didn’t cross her mind.

Her discussion of what she calls ‘the crisis in Gaza’ also contains glaring lacunae. Clinton does not try to justify the slaughter on the basis of Israel’s right to self-defence, presumably because she knows the argument was lost long ago. In fact she does not even mention it. When Clinton must refer to conditions on the Strip her sentences break down and suddenly lack a grammatical subject: ‘Reconstruction frozen. Investment absent. Civilians trapped in dependency and despair, with reportedly up to 1,000 killed since the ceasefire.’ We are not told who killed them. There is no mention of the use of starvation as a weapon of war, the bombing of hospitals, snipers targeting children, or any of the strategies deployed in what various international organizations deem a genocide. The ‘crisis’ seems to have been caused by nobody – other than, implicitly, Hamas, whose ‘political and practical influence over a devastated population’ must be dismantled.

When Clinton attempts to make the case that the 20-point plan is the only realistic framework available, the fantasies that structure her thinking come to the surface. She claims that ‘without demilitarization and a transition away from Hamas rule’, there will be no Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, the implication being that there would be under these circumstances. Does anyone believe that for a moment? Certainly no one in Israel. Clinton claims that the Israelis ‘cannot indefinitely support the broad goals of stabilization and normalization’, but what does ‘normality’ mean for an ethnosupremacist state? The form of ‘normalization’ which Israel has been supporting is one that amounts to keeping more than 2 million people in an open-air prison for decades. Is this really a contribution to ‘stability’?

Is there really no alternative, as Clinton insists? What about the implementation of the numerous UN resolutions requiring Israel to withdraw from all occupied land? If that is ‘unrealistic’, then why so – and according to whose realism? Clinton invokes the spectre of what she calls ‘paralysis’. ‘Prolonged paralysis weakens moderate voices’, she writes. I’d add that the systematic assassination of negotiators tends to weaken moderate voices too. Paralysis, she claims, is not a ‘neutral position’ and ‘delay has consequences’. When the EU failed for years to condemn the genocide in Gaza, that was taking a side. I do not recall Clinton speaking out against paralysis then, when Israel was confident of its power and wanted a free hand to continue its land grabs and massacre of civilians.

Now that plans for Greater Israel have definitively stalled, Israel wants international intervention to try to salvage as much from the debacle as possible. What Clinton and her ilk fear is not paralysis, but its opposite – the situation is moving very fast, just not in the direction Israel wants. World public opinion, particularly among young people in the US who are crucial for Israel’s future, is increasingly revolted by Israeli actions and attitudes. Meanwhile, the policies themselves are failing – Hamas, Hezbollah and Ansar Allah are still operational; Iran is in a stronger position. The US, Israel’s superpower backer, has visibly come up against the limits of what it can do.

It is an indication of how desperate the pro-Israel side are that they are wheeling out political has-beens like Clinton, who writes as if oblivious of the import of events over the past year. Besides a euphemistic allusion to ‘international attention’ having ‘understandably drifted elsewhere’ in recent months, the US-Israeli war on Iran is absent. Yet it is fundamental to the situation she is describing. By linking the opening of the Strait of Hormuz to the question of Israeli aggression in the territories it is occupying (Palestine), or trying to occupy (South Lebanon), Iran has radically shifted the framework for discussion of the question of Palestine.

It is of course part of Israeli strategy to try to break this linkage. For years Israel and its supporters have complained about the global focus on Gaza: ‘Look at the wider security situation, the danger to the world from Iran’. Now the tune has changed, and Clinton is enjoining us to stay focused on Gaza: ‘Please just talk about Gaza, which has no connection with the attempted ethnic cleansing of East Jerusalem and the West Bank, with Israeli land grabs in Syria, the occupation of Southern Lebanon, programmes of assassination and decapitation across the region, the unprovoked attacks on Iran (in both cases while peace talks were in progress), Iranian demands for cessation of hostilities on all fronts as a precondition of any talks…’

The irony is that she is partly right – Israeli oppression of the Palestinians is a root cause of the current conflicts – but she invokes it for completely obfuscatory reasons. The attempt to cast Gaza as a causeless, isolated humanitarian ‘crisis’ is more obsolete than ever. Even Trump seems to see this, but not his ‘implacable opponent’.

Read on: Alexander Zevin, ‘Trump’s Gulf War’, NLR 158.