In the Palestra of Victimhood: Kingdom of Ends and State of Nature in the Palestinian War — Reading Kantian Dignity Against Hobbesian Fatalism

Abstract This paper approaches the Palestinian war as a palestra of victimhood: not a scene of passive suffering awaiting humanitarian recognition, but an agonistic space in which rival grammars of political order are tested against one another with irreversible consequences. Its guiding concept is the manufactured state of nature. The argument is that Gaza and the West Bank do not merely resemble the Hobbesian condition of pervasive insecurity. They are subjected to a political order that actively produces, for a particular population, the vulnerability Hobbes takes to justify sovereign power in the first place, enforcing a fatalistic acceptance of security-driven domination. Against that structure, the paper reconstructs Palestinian practices of endurance, education, cultural persistence, and legal claim-making as enactments of what Palestinians themselves name sumud and what a Kantian vocabulary can illuminate, though never exhaust, as the refusal to be treated merely as means. The paper argues that any settlement confined to Hobbesian fatalism will leave intact the underlying structure of domination. A political order adequate to the Palestinian case must instead be judged by the Kantian Kingdom of Ends and by the juridical demands that follow from it in Perpetual Peace and the Doctrine of Right. That claim is advanced not as a blueprint for ideal institutions but as a regulative standard for comparative judgment. The final section evaluates the Trump Peace Plan of 2020 and related settlement logics against these criteria, arguing that peace without Palestinian republican self-government, enforceable right of return, and institutional acknowledgement of historical wrong cannot count as peace in any philosophically serious sense.