Introduction: The Embodied Witness

Two hours before Israel’s missiles struck Tehran in June 2025, my body registered the coming catastrophe. Despite rumors of an Israeli attack, Iranian media maintained Israel would not strike. People inside Iran worried about escalating tensions but received no guidance about what to do or where to find safety. In Toronto, thousands of kilometers from my parents’ home near the attack site, I experienced a sudden panic attack. Hours later, news confirmed what my body somehow knew: Israel had launched strikes on Iran, including areas near my family’s home. When I tried to contact them, I discovered communications severed—the Iranian government had implemented a nationwide internet blackout “for security purposes.”

From my position in diaspora, I found myself caught between contradictory narratives: Israeli claims of “unprecedented military precision” versus the reality of missiles landing in residential neighborhoods. This contradiction illuminates a fundamental question: In contemporary warfare, what is the ethical duty of states toward citizens, both those they claim to protect and those they target?

I argue that states violate the social contract not merely through physical violence but through deliberate information control that denies citizens their fundamental rights to know and communicate. This dual violence creates a crisis of political legitimacy that demands reimagining the social contract beyond national boundaries.

To interpret this crisis, I employ two classical Greek tragedies: Oedipus Rex and Antigone. In Oedipus Rex, a plague ravages Thebes. King Oedipus, renowned for solving the Sphinx’s riddle, vows to find the murderer of the previous king, unaware that he himself is that killer—having unknowingly slain his father and married his mother. Despite his intelligence, Oedipus remains blind to his own identity until too late.

In Antigone, following Oedipus’s downfall, his sons kill each other battling for Thebes’ throne. Their uncle Creon decrees that Eteocles will receive proper burial, but Polynices—considered a traitor—must remain unburied, a profound religious dishonor. Antigone defies this decree, performing burial rites for Polynices despite knowing the punishment is death. When confronted, she acknowledges her actions openly, claiming divine law supersedes human law.

These tragedies provide frameworks for understanding our contemporary moment. Oedipus represents technical rationality’s blindness; contemporary states similarly exhibit “Oedipal blindness”—deploying sophisticated weaponry with claimed “precision” while remaining blind to human consequences. Antigone represents conscious ethical resistance—knowingly violating state authority to fulfill deeper moral obligations.

The State’s Triple Violation

The June 12-13, 2025 attacks on Iran revealed three patterns through which states violate their obligations to citizens during armed conflict, demonstrated also in Gaza (2023-2025) and Ukraine (2022).

First, states engage in linguistic erasure that renders civilian victims conceptually invisible. Israeli military spokespersons described operations using exclusively technical terminology: “precise preemptive strike,” “specific military targets,” “minimal collateral damage.” IDF spokesperson Rear Admiral Hagari emphasized they were carrying out “precise military strikes in Iran,” targeting missile facilities rather than population centers. This language performs what Levinas (1969) calls “ontological violence”—reducing humans to abstract categories that deny their concrete existence. Iranian civilians weren’t acknowledged as specific lives lost but subsumed under sterile abstractions like “collateral effects.” According to Iran’s UN ambassador, the strikes killed 78 people and wounded over 320, with most injuries being civilian.

This erasure parallels how Creon reduced Polynices to the abstract category of “enemy of the state.” The state’s refusal to recognize the dead as grievable lives constitutes what Butler (2004) terms “derealization” that renders certain deaths unmournable. In Precarious Life, Butler writes: “Those who are unreal have, in a sense, already suffered the violence of derealization,” highlighting how media and political frames often strip enemies of reality and human value.

Second, states maintain contradictions between ethical claims and battlefield realities. When Israeli officials claimed their missiles struck “only military targets” despite landing in civilian neighborhoods, they enacted what Arendt (1963) terms “the banality of evil”—normalizing immoral actions through bureaucratic processes. This contradiction parallels Oedipus’s tragedy: proclaiming commitment to justice while unknowingly being the source of injustice.

The operation—code-named “Operation Rising Lion”—involved approximately 200 Israeli aircraft hitting about 100 designated targets, including Iran’s nuclear facilities and military sites. While Israel claimed to target only military sites, Associated Press photographs documented a blast-charred residential compound and debris-strewn streets in Tehran. This creates what Žižek (2008) calls “fetishistic disavowal”—”I know very well (that civilians are dying), but all the same (I act as if my actions are precise and justified).” When states claim to act in accordance with ethical principles while violating them, they destroy the foundation upon which legitimate authority rests.

Third, states disrupt communication during crises, depriving citizens of their right to access life-saving information. The shutdown of internet networks following the 2025 strikes had life-threatening consequences. Without communication access, citizens couldn’t locate family members, receive information about dangerous locations, access emergency services, or document civilian casualties.

This disruption violates what Habermas (1984) identifies as “communicative rationality”—the foundation of legitimate social interaction. Democratic legitimacy depends on uncoerced communication where validity claims can be openly questioned. The right to information during conflict is central to the social contract. Citizens surrender freedoms to the state with the understanding that the state will provide protection—but protection requires knowledge of threats. When Iran cut internet access, it violated this covenant, transforming from protector to threat.

These three patterns—linguistic erasure, ethical contradiction, and communicative disruption—systematically violate the social contract during armed conflicts, revealing the fundamental contradiction at the heart of the modern state: an institution that claims to protect citizens while undermining the conditions for their survival.

The Oedipal Blindness of Precision

Contemporary warfare operates through a discourse of “precision” that parallels Oedipus’s tragic condition. Modern military technology, with claims of “surgical precision,” exhibits profound blindness to its destructive consequences.

Israel’s strikes exemplify this dynamic. Military spokespersons emphasized “unprecedented precision” and “exclusive targeting of military facilities.” Prime Minister Netanyahu cast the strike as necessary to thwart an “imminent” Iranian nuclear threat. An official IDF communiqué stated: “The State of Israel reserves the right and duty to protect its citizens.” Yet evidence emerged of missiles striking residential areas. This contradiction reflects the paradox at the heart of Oedipus’s tragedy: knowledge that serves power while remaining blind to its limitations.

The discourse of precision warfare operates through what Foucault (1972) calls “power-knowledge”—a regime of truth that legitimizes certain forms of violence while rendering others invisible. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault writes, “Power produces knowledge… [and] power and knowledge directly imply one another.” Terms like “precision-guided munitions” create an epistemic framework that positions civilian deaths as technical failures rather than ethical catastrophes.

This blindness manifests as instrumental reason detached from ethical reflection (Horkheimer & Adorno, 1944). Military technicians can calculate a missile’s blast radius but remain institutionally blind to the human relationships their calculations destroy. This recalls Oedipus—brilliant at external puzzles while ignorant of his position within Thebes’ ethical fabric.

My personal experience during the attacks revealed this contradiction. Initially accepting official narratives of “precise targeting,” I experienced cognitive dissonance between abstract technical language and the reality of my parents’ neighborhood being bombed. Only when seeing images of familiar streets reduced to rubble did this technical veil fall away.

Military planners operate within specialized frameworks that normalize violence through abstraction. Like Eichmann, whose bureaucratic language about “transportation” masked concentration camps’ horror, contemporary military spokespersons use jargon about “targeting packages” to obscure the reality of dismembered bodies and destroyed homes.

What makes this Oedipal blindness particularly dangerous is that it’s not simply individual but structural—embedded in institutions that claim to secure justice. Just as Oedipus represented both Thebes’ salvation and pollution, contemporary state violence embodies both the promise of security and its systematic violation.

Environmental Consequences and Future Generations

While immediate casualties dominated headlines following the 2025 attacks, a more insidious threat remains unacknowledged: the environmental consequences of strikes against nuclear facilities. This silence represents not only a failure of current responsibility but a violation of intergenerational justice—extending the social contract beyond contemporary citizens to include future generations.

The Israeli strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities pose environmental risks that transcend temporal and geographical boundaries. The Natanz uranium enrichment site was a primary target, with IAEA Director General Grossi confirming that Israel’s strike destroyed the entire above-ground pilot enrichment plant. The Natanz facility sits above the North Isfahan Aquifer, which provides drinking water to over 4.5 million people.While Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization spokesman reported some radioactive contamination inside the Natanz facility, he emphasized that “this contamination did not spread outside the facility.” IAEA chief Grossi similarly assured that “radiation levels outside the Natanz facility remained unchanged.” Experts note that the strikes were calibrated to avoid a Chernobyl-like event.

Nevertheless, the potential for long-term environmental harm remains a concern. Unlike buildings destroyed by explosions, radiation damage is imperceptible to human senses. This invisibility creates what Nixon (2011) calls “slow violence”—environmental harm that occurs gradually and out of sight, “a violence of delayed destruction dispersed across time and space.”

The environmental consequences parallel Oedipus’s tragic blindness. Just as Oedipus couldn’t see that his actions had contaminated Thebes, creating a miasma that poisoned the city, contemporary military planners appear blind to how their “precision strikes” contaminate environments across generations. The Greek concept of miasma—pollution that spreads invisibly—provides an apt metaphor for radiation’s invisible spread.

The near-complete absence of environmental considerations in official discourse constitutes what Fricker (2007) terms “hermeneutical injustice”—where significant aspects of experience remain obscured from collective understanding. Future generations affected by today’s environmental damage lack representation in current discourse.

Hans Jonas (1979), in The Imperative of Responsibility, argues that technological capacity to affect distant futures creates a corresponding ethical obligation to consider those futures in present decisions. Jonas reformulated Kant’s categorical imperative: “Act so that the effects of your action are compatible with the permanence of genuine human life on Earth.” The failure to acknowledge environmental consequences represents a fundamental abdication of this responsibility.

This abdication mirrors Creon’s ethical failure in Antigone. Just as Creon was warned by Tiresias that his refusal to bury Polynices would bring pollution upon Thebes, contemporary leaders are warned by environmental scientists that attacks on nuclear facilities create intergenerational contamination. And just as Creon dismissed these warnings as politically motivated, current leaders dismiss environmental concerns as distractions from security imperatives.

Antigone’s Ethics of Testimony

If Oedipus represents technical rationality’s blindness, Antigone offers an alternative ethical stance—consciously choosing testimony and responsibility over obedience to state power. Unlike Oedipus, who remained ignorant of his role in Thebes’ suffering until too late, Antigone acts with full knowledge of both state prohibition and the consequences of defiance. When asked if she was aware of Creon’s decree forbidding her brother’s burial, she responds: “Yes, I was aware. How could I not be? It was clear.” Nevertheless, she chooses ethical obligation over state command.

This conscious choice offers a model for ethical agency in our time. As an Iranian witnessing from diaspora, I face a similar dilemma: Should I remain faithful to official narratives of “precision strikes,” or should I testify to what I know through direct communication with family members and my own embodied experience? Antigone’s example suggests that ethical responsibility begins with the decision to bear witness despite institutional pressure to remain silent.

This decision involves what Oliver (2001) calls “bearing witness beyond recognition”—an ethical practice that exceeds mere observation to become active testimony. When I document both the physical violence of the attacks and the epistemic violence of information control, I engage in ethical witnessing—refusing both detached observation and uncritical acceptance of official narratives.

My position between worlds—physically in Canada while emotionally connected to Iran—creates what Arendt (1943) describes as an “in-between space” with unique epistemic advantages. In “We Refugees,” Arendt writes that refugees and exiles inhabit a space where “we have lost our past, but we still stubbornly try to possess a future.” From this space, I can observe how Israeli claims of “precision” are uncritically amplified while Iranian civilian casualties are minimized or ignored.

This pattern is not unique to the Iran-Israel conflict. In Gaza, Israel repeatedly imposed telecommunications blackouts during military operations. In Ukraine, one of Russia’s first moves upon seizing Ukrainian towns was to cut off internet and mobile networks. As one analysis concluded, today’s stronger powers often try to “leverage [their] conventional power to take an adversary offline altogether,” seeing control of information as key to victory.

During the 2025 attacks, both Israel and Iran engaged in what Butler (2009) calls “frames of war”—selective representation that determines “which lives will be recognizable as lives and which will not.” By testifying to lives rendered unrecognizable by these frames, I enact an ethical obligation to “critically evaluate the conditions under which certain lives become recognized and others do not.”

Like Antigone burying her brother despite state prohibition, this act of testimony constitutes ethical resistance—not merely political opposition but affirmation of obligations that transcend state authority. The obligation to testify to civilian suffering derives not from state permission but from ethical principles that precede and exceed state authority.

Conclusion: Beyond the Body Politic

Our examination reveals a profound crisis in the conventional social contract. States fail in their basic duty—protecting citizens’ lives and rights to know—through both physical violence and systematic information control.

This crisis recalls Hobbes’s concept of the Leviathan—the state granted power through citizens’ consent in exchange for security. But the events of June 2025 expose the breakdown of this bargain. Iran’s internet shutdown following Israeli strikes represents a perversion of the Hobbesian contract. Similarly, Israel’s invocation of “self-defense” against nuclear threats functioned to override ethical considerations about civilian casualties.

This mirrors what Hegel identified in Antigone’s tragedy as the conflict between state law (Creon) and moral-divine law (Antigone). When does the state’s claim to protect the whole justify sacrificing individual rights? When does state necessity become tyrannical, and when does ethical resistance become necessary?

These conditions push us toward reconceptualizing political responsibility beyond national boundaries. In an age of transnational threats, we need to redefine the social contract at the global level. Nussbaum’s “capabilities approach” argues that all humans, regardless of nationality, have the right to basic capabilities (including life, health, and expression), and the global community has the responsibility to guarantee these rights.

Perhaps we need a concept of politics beyond the traditional “body politic”—toward what Deleuze and Guattari call the “body without organs.” Against the organic state with hierarchical functions (head/ruler, hands/military, eyes/surveillance), the body without organs is a surface of intensities with no fixed organs—a field where each point can see, hear, and feel.

This offers a way to reimagine political responsibility beyond national boundaries and temporal limitations—based not on sovereignty but on networked responsibility acknowledging our interconnection across borders and time. Just as environmental contamination recognizes no political boundaries, our ethical responsibilities cannot be confined within the nation-state framework.

The starting point for this reimagined politics is recognizing the value of our own experiences and narratives. Trust in lived experience is the first step in breaking the cycle of passivity. Only after this self-awareness can we fulfill our ethical responsibility to support the voices of those silenced.

As I write from diaspora, documenting both physical violence and information control, I enact “responsibility to the other”—a duty that exists before any social contract. This responsibility begins with awareness of our own experience and then calls us to bear witness, moving from Oedipal blindness toward Antigone’s ethical stance—from passive acceptance of technical narratives toward active testimony to experienced truth.

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