Didier Fassin: Une étrange défaite. Sur le consentement à l’écrasement de Gaza, Paris (Editions La Découverte) 2024, 198 pp. Englische Übersetzung: Moral Abdication. How the World Failed to Stop the Destruction of Gaza, translated by Gregory Elliott, London/New York (Verso Books) 2025, 128 pp.
Didier Fassin says it all. In eight chapters, he talks about the destruction in Gaza, about the approval of it, and about how talking about it is made impossible and words are given new meanings: “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 civilians is the ‚Israel-Hamas war‘. Thinking is suffocated when debates are prevented, lectures banned and exhibitions cancelled, when police enter institutions of higher education and prosecutors are imposed to ensure orthodoxy.” (p. 87)
Precisely because Didier Fassin says everything that everyone can know, everything that is accessible everywhere in the media: about the dead, the hunger, the bombs, the destruction, the blockade, the arms deliveries, the history of violence—the immediate violence of the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, and the violent long history leading up to it, back to the Balfour Declaration of 1917— the justifications, the declarations of intent… he leaves us with a deep sense of the futility of all words. We know what he is reporting here. And it changes nothing.
In fact, there is a lot of talk, and almost always deliberately avoiding what is happening in Gaza, so that the talk erects a kind of sound barrier between Gaza and our knowledge. “The language to describe it seemed somehow dead. Or rather, an attempt was underway to induce its death by imposing a vocabulary and grammar of facts, by prescribing what must be said and condemning what must not be said (…).” (p. 5/6) And yet the reality is obvious, and everyone knows: whether you call it genocide or not, tens of thousands of people have been deliberately killed in Gaza, hundreds of thousands have been displaced and displaced again, and the survivors have suffered severe physical and psychological damage and had their livelihoods destroyed in the long term.
What does this insignificance of knowledge about what is happening before our eyes mean? We are witnesses without testifying. Didier Fassin regards the moral failure of the West, its “consent” to destruction, which lies both in allowing it to happen and in actively supporting it, as a profound historical turning point. And indeed, with the knowing silence about the destruction of Gaza, a point of no return seems to have been reached. Even if the normative order that at least claimed to value every human life has always been hypocritical, the open rejection of its values and principles opens up an even deeper moral abyss. The inequality of the value of human life is not only accepted and no longer metaphysically confined, but has become the new principle of a completely lawless world. But Fassin believes that one day history will be told differently: “A voice will be restored to the Palestinians and with it a language will be reborn. Words will find their true meaning again. (…) 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.” (p. 92).
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