The crushing of Gaza, a ‘moral defeat’
Didier Fassin discusses the "guilty silence" of Western governments in the face of Israel's annihilation of Palestine.
This interview was originally published in Médiapart on 15 October 2024.
In his new book, a professor at the Collège de France examines the forces behind Western consent to the annihilation of the Palestinian territory. In his view, this is ‘the deepest moral abyss into which the Western world has sunk since the Second World War’.
Didier Fassin, professor at Princeton University and the Collège de France, where he holds the chair in ‘Moral Issues and Political Challenges in Contemporary Societies’, has published a book entitled Moral Abdication. How the World Failed to Stop the Destruction of Gaza. The book is particularly timely given the Israeli army’s latest bloody offensive in the north of the Palestinian enclave, once again greeted with a guilty silence by Western governments.
Joseph Confavreux: Do you think you can convince people who don’t share your views on Gaza in the ultra-polarised political and intellectual field you describe?
Didier Fassin: Convincing the defenders of the Israeli government’s murderous policy, who have accused those calling for a ceasefire of anti-Semitism, is not an option. On the other hand, I believe many people are asking themselves questions about what has happened over the past year. They would like to understand why the Western world allowed the Israeli army to devastate Gaza and decimate its inhabitants, why it did not react when children were killed, hospitals destroyed, schools bombed, journalists murdered, why it banned demonstrations demanding respect for international law, which Israel flouts with impunity. I hope, along with others, to help them understand.
What motivated you to write this book, above and beyond the controversies in which you have been embroiled?
I felt it was impossible to remain silent in the face of what is probably the deepest moral abyss the Western world has fallen into since the Second World War. While an official narrative was developed and alternative versions suppressed, I wanted to produce an archive of the first six months of the war in Gaza, to leave a trace for the future.
Why refer to the historian Marc Bloch and his analysis of the ‘strange defeat’ France suffered at the hands of Germany at the start of the Second World War to describe the indifference of the Western powers in the face of the annihilation of Gaza? [The French edition of the book is entitled Une étrange défaite: Sur le consentement à l'écrasement de Gaza]
The title came to me before I started writing, probably because I had recently become interested, while preparing my inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, in what Marc Bloch had written during the Second World War, the lucidity of his diagnosis of the debacle of the French army and the courage of his commitment to the Resistance. Without comparing myself to him, I saw my project as part of the same effort to analyse and bear witness to events as they were unfolding. He was studying a military defeat; I wanted to give an account of a moral defeat.
To what extent can it be said that consent to the crushing of Gaza in Europe, particularly in Germany but also in France, is a form of atonement for the Shoah?
If there is such a thing as atonement, we need to explain, as an Israeli jurist has written, why the price of the crimes committed by Europeans against the Jew over centuries, culminating in genocide, should be paid by the Palestinians, who had nothing to do with it. How can the Western world make amends for its responsibility for the destruction of the Jews of Europe by supporting the destruction of the Palestinians in Gaza?
The invocation of the Shoah, which in Germany has become a ‘raison d’état’ in the words of former Chancellor Angela Merkel, is designed to conceal more mundane issues of international policy. A geostrategic issue, because Israel is seen as the Western world’s outpost in the Middle East. An economic issue, with the creation of a large regional market and support for the international military-industrial apparatus. And an ideological issue, dominated by the rise of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racism against a backdrop of growing and often violent Islamist movements.
How have the thought and language police been deployed to prevent the reality of what is happening in Gaza from being told?
On the one hand, an official version of the facts was established very early on by governments: for example, the French President referred to 7 October as the ‘greatest anti-Semitic massacre of the century’ and invoked Israel’s ‘right to defend itself’ , even proposing to send soldiers to Gaza as part of a ‘coalition’ similar to the one that had fought the Islamic State; this was the only language acceptable in the public arena. Any other expression was condemned: to say that the Hamas attack was directed not against Jews as such, but against oppressors who had asphyxiated the population of Gaza and mutilated tens of thousands of its inhabitants during peaceful demonstrations was unacceptable; to use the word ‘resistance’ could lead to an accusation of apology for terrorism; to evoke the ‘colonial’ character of Israeli policy gave rise to stigmatisation and denunciation.
Conferences were cancelled, demonstrations banned, ecumenical cultural events prevented, and academics disinvited from positions they had been offered. Under these conditions, many have chosen to remain silent so as not to expose themselves to these risks – more than eight out of ten, according to an international survey of a thousand researchers working on the Middle East.
In what way do you think the ‘Israel-Hamas war’ formula that has dominated the post-October 7 period is ‘doubly misleading’?
Firstly, it erases the history that preceded the Hamas attacks, which is that of a conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, the former having progressively dispossessed the latter of their land, their property and their rights. A history that began at least forty years before the birth of Hamas.
Secondly, it obscures the speeches made by Israeli political and military leaders, who announced from the outset that there were no innocents, that ‘the entire population [was] responsible’, in the words of the Israeli President, that the Gaza Strip had to be ‘wiped off the face of the earth’, in the words of the Deputy Speaker of the Knesset, and that the only choice left to its inhabitants was ‘to stay and die of starvation or to leave’, as one senior officer put it. There was no ‘Israel-Hamas war’, but a war against the Palestinians, which began well before 7 October and became total after that date.
If the annihilation of Gaza was largely minimised and tolerated, weren’t comparable processes of denial of the reality of 7 October also visible?
7 October was a considerable trauma for Israelis and for a large part of the Jewish diaspora around the world. In terms of the number of victims, the atrocities committed, the end of the belief in the military omnipotence of the IDF and the revelation of the incompetence of the government of the Israeli state. It gave rise to demonstrations of support throughout the world, particularly in Western countries, whose leaders hastened to Israel to assure its government of their unconditional backing. In the year that followed, the mainstream media spent more time talking about the daily life of Israeli society in the aftermath of that tragic day than reporting on the consequences of the war waged over the following twelve months in the Palestinian enclave and the unprecedented brutalisation carried out by the Israeli army.
So, it cannot be said that there has been denial. Firstly, in connection with the understandable emotion and shock caused by the attack in Israel, some people felt that the public never showed enough compassion for the victims or condemned the acts perpetrated, with the mere fact of not labelling them as terrorists being suspect. Then there was examination of the actual facts, which made it possible to challenge the official communications of the Israeli government and the reality of the violence committed. This search for the truth by independent journalists was interpreted by some as a denial, whereas on the contrary, if we want to avoid conspiracy theories, it is essential to tell the truth. Finally, there was an interpretation of the attacks in terms of resistance to decades of Israeli oppression and brutalisation, in line with the assailants’ claims. This explanation was denounced as a justification of the crimes committed against civilians whereas understanding the sense that agents give to their actions does not mean approving them.
The real denial was that of the violence and violations of their rights suffered by the Palestinians for decades amid deafening international silence, to the point where ‘the Palestine question’ had disappeared from all agendas.
Have the processes been similar in the United States and France, in your opinion as someone who lives between the two countries?
Freedom of expression is better protected in the United States than in France, there have been more student protests and Palestinian voices have been better heard, but the polarisation has probably been more visible and the repression of movements defending Palestinian rights more violent, particularly on university campuses. The influence of Zionist organisations can be seen in the pressure exerted on the authorities in both countries, but in the case of the United States this is compounded by the funding of both major private universities and election campaigns. For example, the very powerful AIPAC, a lobby in support of Israeli policy, has spent considerable sums to prevent the election of Democratic candidates who have declared themselves in favour of a ceasefire.
As for the mainstream media, in both contexts their reporting has been dominated by the Israeli perspective, particularly in the audiovisual field, with the important difference that in France the public television and radio channels have been subject to pressure from the political authorities, whereas in the United States there are virtually only private media outlets.
Has the academic world been particularly affected, and if so why, when it is supposed to be the very forum for reflective discussion? Is there still a role for the social sciences?
I think so, and that’s what my work is all about. However, the debate has become difficult, because instead of an exchange of scientific arguments we all too often see attacks made in an attempt to discredit opponents, in particular by denouncing all critical thought as anti-Semitic. I’ve experienced this myself, but others have been much more severely affected, in France and elsewhere.
Students have been punished, reported to the authorities, detained, taken to court and even expelled from their institutions. Professors have been dismissed. University presidents have had to resign. Some have spoken of a form of McCarthyism, and it’s true that institutional denunciations and summonses for police questioning are reminiscent of that time.
However, in the lectures I have given and the public discussions I have taken part in, I have often been struck by the attention paid to analysing the situation, combined with a genuine concern to defend law and justice. I sensed, both among students and academics and among citizens, a desire to break free from the shackles of the language and thought police and a demand for reflection on what has happened over the past year, which I think is essential.
You point out that organisations that have committed attacks and acts of terror, whether in a colonial context or not, such as the ANC, FLN, IRA or FARC, now participate peacefully in the political life of their countries. Does this mean that Hamas is closer to the logic of the Shining Path or al-Qaeda, who have always refused to accept a fundamental transformation of their means of combat?
Actually, to stay with the Middle East context, I’m referring above all to the Irgun, the armed wing of the Zionist right under the British mandate, and the Palestine Liberation Organisation, the armed resistance movement against Israeli oppression. Both committed spectacular attacks, killing many civilians. Both were declared terrorists by Western countries. And yet their respective leaders, Menachem Begin and Yasser Arafat, became Prime Minister of the Hebrew State and Chairman of the Palestinian Authority respectively. What’s more, both signed peace agreements and were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize a few years apart. Yet both were demonised in their time. But I’m not suggesting this could be the evolution of Hamas, which I’m not trying to defend, since I myself mention the Shining Path and al-Qaeda as counterexamples. I’m simply trying to reflect on the lability of the terrorist label.
In this respect, it is interesting to note that, while terror first designated a state policy under the French Revolution, it is now associated solely with non-state organisations, and that today, while states are combating the violence of these groups, counterterrorism claims many more victims around the world than terrorism. The operation by the Israeli services to blow up thousands of electronic devices in Lebanon was designed to generate terror among the population but is not described as terrorism.
You write that ‘the argument on which the spectre of a threat to Israel’s very existence is based was the desire expressed by Hamas in its 1988 charter, with its conspiratorial and anti-Semitic overtones, to claim the whole of historic Palestine for Muslims’. And then you point out that a revised version of the Hamas charter exists, which, ‘without clearly recognising the state of Israel as Fatah had done, indicates the movement’s position in favour of a “political solution” to the conflict, consisting of the creation of two states, with the Palestinians occupying the territories defined by the 1967 borders’. Doesn’t 7 October show that this revision of the Charter is obsolete, or even that it was one of the decoys deployed by Yahya Sinwar to blind Israel by displaying a façade of normalisation?
Hamas is not without internal contradictions. And the attack of 7 October 2023 was clearly not the result of a desire to reconquer Palestine, but to challenge Israeli oppression. It is the consequence of the way in which the colonisation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem has continued, the way in which peaceful demonstrations against the blockade in Gaza were brutally repressed, coming just after the Israeli Prime Minister had presented the United Nations with a map of the Middle East in which the Palestinian territories had disappeared and an Israeli government minister had stepped up his provocations outside the Al-Aqsa mosque. As an Israeli sociologist has written, if the Palestinians try to negotiate they are ignored, and if they rebel they are crushed.
But it is above all important to remember that, while the Israelis constantly invoke the 1988 Hamas charter to remind us of the ostensible plan to recover the whole of historic Palestine and therefore the existential threat to Israel, the 1977 Likud platform, eleven years earlier, had already asserted Israel’s sovereignty over Palestine from Jordan to the sea, something that the government has repeatedly referred to since 7 October, and that if there is an existential threat this affects only the Palestinians, whose territory is constantly shrinking as a result of colonisation and destruction.
In the current catastrophe, people are clinging to the South African example as practically the only one that makes it possible to envisage a way out of the deep-seated hatred between an indigenous people and an occupying people. What were the conditions for negotiation between Blacks and whites in South Africa, and is there really a parallel with the situation in historic Palestine?
The parallel with South Africa is interesting for many reasons. We often forget the close diplomatic and military links that existed between the apartheid regime and the Israeli government, including the repression of Black opponents. Also it was South Africa that lodged the application with the International Court of Justice to establish the existence of genocide committed by the Hebrew state in Gaza.
However, there are three essential differences between the two situations. Firstly, in South African society there was a large movement involving citizens of all origins, trade unions and churches, all of whom were opposed to white supremacism and its programme of domination of racialised populations. There is nothing like this in Israel, and opinion polls show that the majority of Israelis remain attached to the right-wing and far-right parties and their policy of violent occupation of the Palestinian territories.
Secondly, there was widespread international disavowal of the South African regime, reflected in a boycott of arms sales, disinvestment by foreign companies, and sanctions in the economic, political, sporting and cultural spheres. Today, Western countries and some Arab countries support the Israeli government and reject any demand for retaliatory measures to promote peace agreements.
Third and finally, there was a peace-loving leader, Nelson Mandela, and a pragmatic head of government, Frederik de Klerk. There is no peace partner in Israel today, and on the Palestinian side those whom the international community considered to be possible negotiators have been eliminated, either by assassination, in the case of Ismael Haniyeh, or by life imprisonment, in the case of Marwan Barghouti.
Unfortunately, the three conditions that made possible a peaceful democratic transition in South Africa are not met for a just and lasting peace solution in Israel and Palestine. But if there is a responsibility to be underlined, it is that of the Western countries, starting with the United States, which had the opportunity a year ago to prevent the crushing of Gaza and the regional extension of the conflict, but did not show the will to do so, supporting instead the deadly Israeli military operations.
Translated by David Fernbach