Their Life Has Been Taken; Their Death is Denied

Didier Fassin. 2024. Moral Abdication: How the World Failed to Stop the Destruction of Gaza. London: Verso.

Israel’s nearly two-year assault on Gaza and the West Bank has generated a bewildering split-screen reality difficult for many of us to assimilate. On one side are the governments of the US, UK, EU, Canada, and Australia, offering Israel a steady flow of arms and unflagging ideological justification. Even states with the strongest rhetorical condemnations of Israel’s conduct, Ireland and Spain, have not touched their arms transfers. On the other is a ballooning global movement decrying Israel’s genocide in Gaza and activating legal institutions to pursue its perpetrators. In response to a suit alleging genocide by South Africa, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued three provisional orders demanding that Israel immediately halt its offensive and allow in humanitarian aid, pending the court’s investigation of the genocide charge. A separate ICJ opinion found Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza unlawful. And the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Demonstrators in New York, Geneva, Lyon and scores of other cities staged solemn funeral corteges, carrying coffins and cradling small shrouded forms, symbolizing murdered Palestinian children (over 16,000 as of this writing).

In both North and South, record-breaking mass demonstrations show no signs of abatement. London, the Hague, Jakarta, and Dhaka saw their largest demonstrations in decades. In the US, researchers found that pro-Palestine actions constitute the largest protest wave about a foreign event since tallying began 2017. Solidarity extends beyond demonstrating and petition-signing to strikingly embodied forms of protest. Demonstrators in New York, Geneva, Lyon and scores of other cities staged solemn funeral corteges, carrying coffins and cradling small shrouded forms, symbolizing murdered Palestinian children (over 16,000 as of this writing). Football players of Chile’s Deportivo Palestino walked onto the pitch holding hands with an empty space—a tribute to the “invisible children” killed in Gaza. Students on several U.S. campuses engaged in dayslong hunger strikes, calling on their universities to divest from weapons manufacturers. Twelve activists, including a member of the European Parliament, set sail on the Madleen to challenge Israel’s unlawful 18-year blockade of Gaza; they were intercepted in international waters and unlawfully detained by Israeli forces.

Didier Fassin captures the disorienting feeling of living this disjunctive reality: “Stunned and powerless, we were witnessing a major event in contemporary history whose moral consequences, political fallout and intellectual implications would be considerable” (5). Moral Abdication: How the World Failed to Stop the Destruction of Gaza is at once anatomy and testimony, dissecting the policing of thought in Europe and the US during the first eight months of Gaza’s annihilation. It is also a record for posterity, “to attest to the existence of a refusal, shared by many, of consent to the obliteration of Gaza” (94).

A physician, anthropologist, and social theorist with an abiding interest in the inequality of lives, Fassin’s prose is phlegmatic and precise (as rendered by Gregory Elliott from the original French). The first five chapters are an efficient précis of the Israeli campaign’s first six months, particularly the furious war over language to control public perceptions and manufacture consent for Gaza’s extermination. Fassin begins with the Hamas attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023, reviewing how Israel and its allies, and their major media outlets, framed the attack in an exclusively presentist mode. Thus detached from any context, October 7 could be endlessly presented as an unprovoked spasm of ancient antisemitic bloodlust. 

Moral Abdication: How the World Failed to Stop the Destruction of Gaza is at once anatomy and testimony, dissecting the policing of thought in Europe and the US during the first eight months of Gaza’s annihilation.

Countering what he calls this “refusal of history” (19) Fassin calmly points out that the daily dispossession and killings of Palestinians before October 7 warranted no mention. Erasure was the norm. He reminds us of when Prime Minister Netanyahu stood before the UN General Assembly on September 22, proudly brandishing a ‘New Middle East’ Map of a greater Israel completely absorbing Gaza and the West Bank. This brought to mind another surreal moment: the boast by Jake Sullivan, president Joe Biden’s National Security Adviser, days before October 7: “Although the Middle East remains beset with perennial challenges, the region is quieter than it has been for decades…we have de-escalated crises in Gaza and restored direct diplomacy between the parties after years of its absence.”

Fassin’s summary in these pages will not surprise readers versed in Gaza’s ordeal before and after October 7. Still, there is a cumulative power to re-reading a sustained reconstruction of our sordid present. We are reminded of the overwhelmingly peaceful weekly demonstrations that Gazans organized for over a year in 2018-2019, the Great March of Return. Ignored by mainstream media and Western governments, the demonstrations were met with live ammunition from the Israeli military that killed 214, including 46 children, and wounded 36,100. Turning to post-October 7, and using publicly available news sources, human rights reports, South Africa’s submission to the ICJ, and scholarly works, Fassin details some of what Israel has done to Gaza.

We learn anew that the ‘flour massacre’ of 29 February 2024 (118 killed and 760 wounded) was preceded by 14 similar, albeit less deadly attacks. We are stunned into silence when reminded that Gazans’ drinking water was reduced to one-tenth of the minimum threshold required in conditions of famine. That the number of prisoners who died in Israeli torture camps in the first six months of Israel’s genocide was four times greater than the number of prisoners who died in Guantanamo over 20 years. That relative to their respective populations, 185 times more Palestinians than Israelis had been killed by April 2024.

Even when their deaths are acknowledged in the West, they are bereft of the animating details that move publics to empathize or feel anything more than fleeting pity.

With Chapter 6, Moral Abdication pivots in tone and depth of engagement, bringing us face-to-face not only with the staggering loss of Palestinian life, but how that loss is repeatedly denied and belittled. “I have no confidence in the number that the Palestinians are using,” declared Joe Biden in late October 2023, enabling months of media and government disavowals of the Gaza death toll, despite the Gaza Health Ministry’s track record of reliable fatality counts, always issued with name, age, sex, and ID number. “This querying of the number of dead is a double punishment for the victims of war,” writes Fassin, “Their life has been taken; their death is denied” (64).

The deep inequality in life and death is at the core of Palestinians’ experience. Even when their deaths are acknowledged in the West, they are bereft of the animating details that move publics to empathize or feel anything more than fleeting pity. Herein lies the significance of the embodied protest performances around the world—cradling shrouded dolls representing murdered children; reciting aloud the names of those killed; filling plazas with babies’ shoes and clothes to make visible the scale of killing. “Many of those who have demonstrated to demand a ceasefire were expressing their refusal of this inequality in lives” (68).

The resonant indignation in the book’s second half comes from Fassin’s body of research. In an earlier book, he explored the contradictions in democratic societies where life in the abstract is valorized as a supreme good, while concrete lives are denigrated based on their social positioning. This chasm between a professed respect for life and the debasement of actual lives is one way of understanding why Palestinians are simultaneously hyper-visible and invisible in the Euro-American metropole. In the halls of government, establishment media, and pro-Israel cultural spaces, they are visible only as threats and faceless numbers. But on the streets, in university quads, and in the hearts of more and more people, they are becoming names, faces, stories, bearers of a history that is beginning to be more widely known.

One comes away from Moral Abdication edified and inspired, not least by the lyrical last paragraphs. Concluding on a measured note of hope, as customarily expected of authors treating heavy subject matter, Fassin envisions a future where truth is restored and language reborn. He gives the last word to murdered poet and literature professor Refaat Alareer, whose poem entreated, “If I must die/let it bring hope/let it be a tale.” 

Yet I closed the book with a nagging sense that something was missing. A persistent feeling of déjà vu. We have seen before the paradox that Fassin identifies, of powerful states abdicating morality in the name of morality (combating antisemitism). In Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, there is an intimate familiarity with “great powers” inverting values and hijacking language as they debased others’ achievements and rubbished their lifeways. I remembered Aimé Césaire’s unforgettable dismantling of colonial officials’ conceptual armature: the rule of law; progress; a sacred trust of civilization. In one of the most powerful perorations in Discourse on Colonialism, he counters: “I am talking about societies drained of their essence, cultures trampled underfoot, institutions undermined, lands confiscated, religions smashed, magnificent artistic creations destroyed, extraordinary possibilities wiped out” (43, emphasis in original).

Tragically for us all, his words remain evergreen.

Featured Image: Manifestation à Genève en soutien à la Palestine. Source: Wikipedia.

References

Césaire, Aimé. Discourse on Colonialism. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000.

Fassin, Didier. Life: A Critical User’s Manual. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2018.