How the World Failed to Stop the Destruction of Gaza
Didier Fassin examines how most Western governments have acquiesced in and contributed to the destruction of Gaza.
The following is an excerpt taken from Moral Abdication: How the World Failed to Stop the Destruction of Gaza by Didier Fassin.
The present crisis is one of the deepest experiences since the time, nearly eight decades ago, when people first proclaimed: ‘Never again.’ But here, the word ‘crisis’ does not refer to the situation in Gaza. For it is the wrong descriptor for a military operation aiming to destroy a people as such, its memory, its material culture, the possibility of a livable life – whether or not jurists and historians may one day decide to characterize it as ‘genocide’, following symbolic power struggles in which Western governments will pit all their weight against it. Even to speak of a ‘humanitarian crisis’ – however legitimate it is to assert the right to survival of men, women and children reduced to extreme conditions, and to demand they accede to the minimum assistance they have been denied – is to avoid naming things for what they are, by designating the effects without stating the cause; and to justify a demand for ‘humanitarian corridors and pauses’ while permitting the continued bombardment of civilians in apparent respect for international law.
No, the crisis at stake concerns the world that has watched with indifference the progressive erasure of the Palestinian Occupied Territories for more than half a century, and has allowed the abrupt disappearance within a few months of part of what defines them. In the case of most European and North American countries as well as various others, this has meant not mere passivity but unconditional political and military support for Israel. This alliance has elicited indignation from those who, while condemning the bloody acts that triggered it, refused to condone the massacre being perpetrated, and who have been stigmatized and repressed for it.
Language is damaged when demands to stop killing civilians are ‘antisemitic’, when an army that dehumanizes its enemies is ‘moral’, when an enterprise of obliteration is a ‘riposte’, when a military operation openly conducted against Palestinian civilians is the ‘Israel– Hamas war’. Thinking is suffocated when debates are prevented, lectures banned and exhibitions cancelled, when the police enter institutions of higher education and prosecutors are imposed to ensure orthodoxy. An oppressive atmosphere of suspicion and accusation has endangered freedom of speech. An attempt to misuse words and invert values has put political understanding and moral discernment to the test. In a reflection on the language of genocide, entitled ‘Who are the assassins of memory?’, the French historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet analysed the way in which the use of a ‘coded language’ had served, at different moments, discursive strategies to rewrite history, quoting Thucydides on the Peloponnesian War: ‘Even the usual meaning of words in relation to acts was changed in the justifications given for them.’ These falsifications justify that social scientists, with humility but determination, make their truth heard, however fragile it may be.
In particular, they can explore the past in search of examples capable of cutting through the opacity of the present to imagine the possibility of a future. At a time when the spirit of vengeance predominates on the Israeli side, when war is an end in itself, when any peaceful solution is rejected, when the very existence of the Palestinian people is denied, such a prospect seems inconceivable. And yet, it is enough to think of South Africa in the final years of apartheid. The parallel between the two historical situations may find some justification in two facts. The country which has initiated the proceedings against the State of Israel for its violations of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide is South Africa. The ruling of the ICJ declaring the occupation of the Palestinian Territories by Israel unlawful refers explicitly to situations of segregation and apartheid.
Certainly, in 1994, South Africa had not experienced slaughter and destruction on a par with those in Gaza. But it was on the brink of civil war, attacks had been carried out, the repression of opponents was ferocious, and racial supremacism had reached levels that have rarely been equalled. Nevertheless, the transition to a democratic regime was achieved. Treating ‘South Africa as a model’, Barbara Cassin has identified the three conditions of success that had to come together to make the transition from war to reconciliation, and thereby deal with hatred: ‘a policy of remembrance, a policy of justice, and a policy of speech’. None of them is unambiguous – remembrance between amnesia and anamnesis, justice between amnesty and reparation, speech between performative discourse and linguistic exhaustion – as was demonstrated by the divisions and resentment that emerged a little later. But the worst was avoided, and cohabitation between the erstwhile oppressor and oppressed was made possible.
For negotiations to begin between the White government and the Black majority, three historical factors were combined: the existence of internal resistance mobilizations of various stripes, from the Black Consciousness Movement and the Mass Democratic Movement to trade unions and Christian churches, whose struggles converged; the proliferation of external forms of pressure, notably boycott, disinvestment and sanctions campaigns by some Western countries, including the United States, and even an arms sales embargo decided at the UN, which undermined the regime; finally, the presence of a charismatic, visionary leader, Nelson Mandela, and a pragmatic president, F. W. de Klerk.
The gulf between the historical South African situation and the current Israeli situation is unquestionably abyssal. Firstly, the left sympathetic to the Palestinian cause in Israel is crushed and inaudible, and where there is strong opposition to the government it essentially concerns internal issues, whereas surveys show that adherence to the destruction of Gaza and its population is very widespread. Secondly, Western countries wholeheartedly support the Israeli government and several of them even criminalize boycott, disinvestment and sanctions campaigns, something that has earned France the condemnation of the European Court of Human Rights for illegal repression. Thirdly, and finally, the highly popular leader Marwan Barghouti, cast by many as a possible negotiator and future president of the Palestinian Authority, has been sentenced to five life terms, while no Israeli politician seems ready to entertain the possibility of talks. Yet voices have made themselves heard on both sides for a just and lasting peace: what is to come is therefore not yet written.
‘In the short run history may be made by the victors,’ wrote Reinhart Koselleck, ‘but in the long run gains in historical understanding have come from the vanquished.’ Since 7 October, victors’ history is what is being written, by Israel on the ground and by Western countries through the construction of a narrative that brooks no dissent. But a different history will probably be written one day. It will place in perspective the decades of oppression and resistance, dispossession and hope, peaceful struggles and violent revolts, and a culture that has survived beyond destructive passion. A voice will be restored to the Palestinians and with it a language will be reborn. Words will find their true meaning again. A war of annihilation will no longer be called a ‘riposte’. An army practising torture on civilians will no longer be regarded as ‘moral’. ‘Antisemitism’ will no longer be used to describe a call for justice and dignity. People will no longer dare to claim that some people’s lives are worth less than others’ and that the death of the former is not as grievable as that of the latter. It will be understood that the dehumanization of the enemy entails the loss of humanity of those who articulate it. Like Walter Benjamin’s angel, ‘his face turned toward the past’ where he sees a ‘catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage’, while others perceive only ‘a chain of events’, we will realize the scale of the strange defeat experienced by the Western world.
This other history will no longer be inspired by lies and hatred, but by truth and hope.
Moral Abdication: How the World Failed to Stop the Destruction of Gaza by Didier Fassin is out now. It is part of the Verso Palestine Pamphlets series.
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