Reflecting on the last fifteen months, it has almost become a cliché to evoke the end of history as we have witnessed the hollowness, and then collapse, of the fundamentals of the international liberal order. Israel’s aggression against the Gaza Strip killed at least 47,500 Palestinians (widely seen as an underestimate), with bodies being recovered daily from the rubble since the ceasefire began, as well as annihilated infrastructure and livelihoods. Not only have respected international organizations, experts, scholars, and lawyers named Israel’s war a genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza, this period revealed the total deficiency of international law and the barrenness of the US-backed ‘rules-based international order’, which has been uncovered as a lattice of total impunity for the cataclysmic violence of Western states (if it hadn’t been already).
This is the context, in which some scholars have returned to the Hegelian idea of the end of history. The notion was popularized by Francis Fukuyama in The End of History and the Last Man (1992) to understand the historical collapse of Soviet states and the apparent ‘triumph’ of liberal democracy. This time, the ‘end of history’ is seen in the guise of its Fukuyamanian opposite: the collapse of the post-WW2 liberal international order. In this piece, I want to explore the kernel of Hegel’s philosophical project within his Lectures on the Philosophy of History, to interrogate this current moment and what it can tell us about the circular impasse of world history today. Then, I attempt to link the unprecedented horrors we have seen in Gaza with a glimmer of hope for the emergence of a philosophical notion of freedom that was embedded in Hegel’s project on history — an unlikely coupling on the face of it.
Repurposing the question Susan Buck-Morris started with in her pivotal Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History, we must ask: why is ending the silence on Hegel and Gaza important? This is especially relevant to ask as Hegel’s corpus is replete with depictions of non-Europeans that are unabashedly racist, which as Hamid Dabashi argues informs Zionist ideology, and we have access to the work of Palestinian intellectuals who have far more comprehensive critiques and urgent analysis of Israel’s genocidal mayhem, even as Israel tries to wipe them out. I argue here that Gaza, the location of the most heinous crimes of this era, starkly reveals the repetitious ruination of the Hegelian project of a universal history that never really was, with historical progress unable to be actualized outside of fictitious technological forms that contain apocalyptic violence. To make this argument, I place Hegel in Gaza as a heuristic, so that we can see, through him, a different structure and meaning of history that not only unravels the Hegelian historical project but may contrarily redeem it through a new perspective on universal freedom — not simply putting Hegel on his head, à la Marx, but situating Hegel so that he can find his head and perhaps his heart, both of which have eluded a coterie of contemporary European philosophers.
It is worth reviewing, if briefly, Hegel’s argument in Philosophy of History. Broadly, Hegel posits various stages in world history that he contends supersede one another. The dialectical development of human reason powers this movement of history, which ensures the realization of Spirit (Geist) (Spirit can be crudely considered as ‘collective consciousness’). This, then, allows the unfolding of freedom, the ‘essence of Spirit’. As pointed out by numerous scholars, the ‘progress’ or movement of history in Hegel travels from the East to the West, with the most ‘advanced’ stage being the Western secular state of Hegel’s time. Evidently, Hegel posits a hierarchy of cultural forms and modes of consciousness that supersede each other to make up human history, where ‘backwards’ people are succeeded by white Europeans. This overt cultural racism in Hegel, and broader German idealist philosophy, has long-since justified colonizing projects and the imposition of democracy as a military crusade, all to develop ‘reason’ in the Global South. As Susan-Buck Morris argues in Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History, this historical schema set forth by Hegel is a teleological one where the whole world is destined to follow an ultimate purpose of actualizing freedom, still ingrained in Western political discourse today.
In Philosophy of History, Hegel details a forward march of history where Spirit is constantly consumed and destroyed to then succeed itself as a more ‘exalted, glorified…purer’ Spirit; meaning that each ‘stage’ of history dialectically overcomes (Aufhebung) its prior stage in a new, ‘exalted’ form, which retains elements of its antecedents but is also progressively improved. And so, when we are looking back through history from our given chronological standpoint, we are experiencing our own epoch as the absolute end of history through this Hegelian viewpoint, as Žižek puts it in Less Than Nothing (which is also why the phrase is oft-repeated). However, if we take Hegel outside of provincial Germany and place him in the Jabaliya refugee camp, this story of a liberal history of progress melts away. For fifteen months, the chronology of time persisted with the same certainty that brutal massacres, destruction of hospitals, and incineration of schools would continue in Gaza (and does now in the West Bank) – rather than progress, history felt like a repetitive nightmare that no one could wake up from, echoing Joyce in Ulysses.
Hegel’s clear Eurocentrism, mixed with cultural racism, ensured he saw a superficially progressive Aufhebung of Spirit throughout history. In 1806, Hegel wrote to his friend Niethammer, exclaiming in wonderment at witnessing Napoleon Bonaparte riding on his horse through Jena, on the way to defeat the decaying Prussian Empire. In Hegel’s letter, Napoleon personified the progressive movement of world Spirit, with history evolving at that moment in the wake of French legions. Stepping outside his home amidst the staggering devastation of Jabaliya camp, one would imagine Hegel witnessing a US-supplied Mark 84, 2,000 pound bomb soar overhead, one of the most lethal in use by Western armies with a 350-meter kill radius, dropped by an Israeli F-16 fighter jet supplied by Lockheed Martin from a global supply chain, into a school. Needless to say, concentrating the entire edifice of Western military power on an educational facility housing mostly displaced women and children does not arouse conceptions of progress. Superficially, technological development may be evoked as a form of progress in and of itself, but the content contained within such technological fetishism is barbarous violence.
Indeed, from Hegel’s epistemological standpoint in Gaza, it would be impossible to see a ‘forward march’ of history or any kind of progressive movement. In his immediacy, Hegel would witness the massacre of Palestinians, the unadulterated destruction of life-sustaining infrastructure, Israeli troops separating men from women to march them off to notorious prison camps, and the Israeli Army restricting aid to enforce starvation and deadly infant hypothermia. In attempting to ‘think historically’ during this moment in Gaza, the great German idealist would only perceive a stillborn world history, compressed into cyclical, unending liminal time. Rather than a forward march of history, in these events Hegel would see the relived, compressed horrors of the Warsaw Ghetto, Srebrenica, Abu Ghraib, 1943 Bengal, Rwanda, the American frontier, Fallujah, the Second Boer War, 1945 Dresden, the 1948 Nakba and other uncountable historical atrocities simultaneously; as if history was frozen, paralyzed in time, unable to wake up from itself – with 19th century settler colonial ideology even reinvigorating itself in Israel’s undefined, expansionist borders today. In a global context of polycrisis and ‘compulsive’ emergencies, Israel’s genocide in Gaza is paradigmatic of the abortion of the idea of world history, and Spirit with it, replaced by an unfolding of a repetitious cycle of historical violence, where the pace of tragedies far outstrips the ability to process, mourn, or comprehend them; it is not impatience for the flight of the Owl of Minerva that prohibits understanding of the cascading, hourly tragedies in Gaza, but that the Owl has been shot down by an Israeli ‘iron butterfly’ explosive bullet.
Even visions of Gaza across time betray a collapse into a total, compressed historical negation. Previously, the United Nations have noted that Gaza would be unlivable by the 2020s. Today, in a perverse Deus ex machina, Israel’s genocide appears to have been an unparalleled effort to make this prediction become reality. For the future, Netanyahu’s vision for Gaza is a macabre, AI-generated free trade zone set to complete the epistemic erasure of the Palestine-ness of Gaza. The past, present, and future of Gaza, from the standpoint of Hegel’s philosophical project within Israel’s genocide on the enclave, is purposely frozen to deny it of any historical movement whatsoever.
There is an undeniable feeling that the ‘horizon of our world is folding in upon itself’, as Fabio Vighi notes, whether through the seemingly repetitious but ever worsening destruction of the environment or the compression of centuries of historical horrors into the tiny Gaza enclave. For the Hegelian historical project, from this standpoint in Gaza, how can one see progress of human reason with the passage of time? When Walter Benjamin wrote on the Angelus Novus painting, very much with the Hegelian thesis on history in mind, he described the image of an angel who contemplated the past while being forced into the future by the storm of progress. With a reimagined Hegelian viewpoint that clearly sees a paralysis of the philosophy of history, we might reinterpret the Angelus Novus to instead be looking towards an unrealizable future while dragged violently back into the past. In a sense, is this not the feeling that is given by the modern marvels of barbaric bloodletting today? Israel innovates the latest military technology, such as the Lavender AI targeting system, representing an entirely hollow, fetishistic form of progress, and deploys it to enact the most un-sophisticated form of mass slaughter.
On the basis of this essay so far, one might ask: what does a particular Hegelian view from inside Jabaliya refugee camp amid the genocide in Gaza matter for world history? The answer is that this is not a particular view, but a universal one, which can be revealed by the connection this aborted world history has with the similarly languishing idea of freedom, the kernel of Spirit. Hegel’s project of a philosophy of history has not only stalled today because of the repetitious circularity of historical horror that Hegel would himself directly observe in the Jabaliya camp, but it has also been crippled due to the obstruction of the very idea of universal freedom.
For Hegel, history only properly ‘ends’ when freedom becomes accessible for all, as Todd McGowan argues in Emancipation After Hegel. In 2025, it seems that we are further away from the universality of freedom more than ever. Whether on the automated killing fields of Gaza, the militarized and authoritarian Western streets, the impoverished back-alleys of unprecedented inequality, or the rising ocean tides around the world, where can one honestly find what freedom could entail, for us all, today? Our conceptual imagination has been entirely perverted and eroded by the rapacious violence of capital for centuries and the obfuscating mirages of liberal democracy, both of which profited from the bloodbath in Gaza. The most horrifying realization is not that history has stalled, mired in the circular repetition of its most barbaric episodes today, but that history has not ended because freedom is further away than ever before.
Even amid this lamentable state, there are shining glimpses of universalism that may still realize Spirit through a resuscitation of freedom. One of Hegel’s tasks in Phenomenology of Spirit was to lead the everyday person to see themselves not in their own particularity, but as part of a wider, universal humanity. The individual could only move past their particular, narrow view that anchored them to their immediate life, by taking a broad perspective that saw themselves within the universal movement of Spirit through history — the movement of freedom towards something different, towards a liberated reality.
Reading this summary of Hegel’s aim in the early 1800s, is it not a striking encapsulation of the work Palestinians are doing every day in connecting each of us around the world to universalist ideas of humanity, collectivity, and freedom? In faithfully documenting Israeli crimes in the Gaza strip, horrors that the Western political and media edifice would happily otherwise hide, tirelessly calling for international solidarity, and unflinchingly standing resolute (ṣumūd) against fascistic desires of settler colonialism, Palestinian journalists, workers, and people are embodying human universalist values that are at the center of Hegel’s project. We can see this work in real-time liberating the global consciousness of collective humanity, especially in the West, which has forgotten the violent conditions of its own existence, and catalyzing a moral disposition that is out of sync with the condoned, ‘official’ principles that govern our lives – opening possibilities to view what a collective freedom could look like, in university encampments, millions marching for liberation in the streets, or workers refusing to work in the service of brutal violence.
Returning to Susan Buck-Morris in Hegel, Haiti and Universal History, the author makes a point that is crucially relevant here. In the West, witnessing the gratuitous violence in Gaza livestreamed on our phones, brought to us by Palestinians themselves, an undeniable political feeling of guilt emerges from the gaping contradiction between our own sense of moral right and the ‘principles that govern our everyday world’. The truth of the genocide, which we can all plainly see thanks to tireless Palestinian efforts, is simultaneously disavowed by political leaders who benefit from the established order, and so our own moral feelings are found to be in absolute conflict with social obedience. As Buck-Morris goes on to write, refusing to do our socially prescribed duty, which is to ignore (or even support) the massacring of people just like us in Gaza, entails being a traitor to our respective nation, which is why we see such a brutal response to those who dare speak out, whether they be students in encampments, academics in universities, protestors in the street, or workers in their workplaces. The moral universality to which actions in solidarity with Palestinians appeal to is the ‘register of the negative’ – these are not ‘right’ when judged by the ‘official values’ themselves, but break the official silence that sanctions the wrong state of things – an approach to human universality that values collective actions that are out of order of the narratives of Western progress and civilization. For us in the West, repeating Angela Harutyunyan, there ‘is a historical path to futurity that is being paved by those who are murdered on a daily basis and those who refuse to die, those who resist in camps, in universities and in art institutions as well as beneath the wreckage of liberal humanist post-history’. In this sense, the very center of where history has seemingly been immobilized today, in Gaza, is contradictorily the place where a new, revitalized idea of freedom has begun to emerge, a view that ‘opens up into the unbounded future’ quoting Kant.
There is a profound irony that a Hegelian view of history from the perspective of Gaza generates for the classical Hegelian project. In Philosophy of History, for Hegel, the only people who could contribute to the development of freedom were those considered ‘world historical’ – namely, white European colonizers. Moreover, the conditions for freedom were only met with the development of a state. In this analysis, it is ironic that the Palestinian people are the ‘world historical’ people who are catalyzing collectivities around the world that give us a glimpse of what freedom could mean; a people who are categorically denied the possibility of statehood, yet their flag can be found on every street corner around the world. While Hegel noted that ‘Abraham wandered forth into mountainous Palestine’ in Philosophy of History, it is almost certain that he would write, today, from his perspective within Jabaliya camp, an observation that a new dawn of Spirit has seemingly strode forth out of Palestine.