Moral Defeat

Following the rout of the French army in 1940, Marc Bloch wrote Strange Defeat, an uncompromising analysis of what had led to it. That defeat was military; today’s is moral. It calls for an examination that must be carried out as lucidly as the French historian’s, even if the context and issues are very different and even if the ethical divisions go much deeper.

An examination, then, of what led to a situation where, for political leaders and intellectual personalities in the principal Western countries — with rare exceptions such as Spain — the statistical reality that the lives of Palestinian civilians are worth several hundred times less than the lives of Israeli civilians, and the claim that the death of the former is less worthy of being honored than that of the latter, have become acceptable.

A situation where demanding an immediate cease-fire in order to stop the massacre of children after more than twelve thousand of them have already been killed and so many others burned, amputated, and traumatized is denounced as an act of antisemitism, and where demonstrations and meetings demanding a just peace are banned and people who refer to the history of the region are sanctioned.

A situation where, without independent confirmation, most of the mainstream Western media quasi-automatically reproduces the version of events relayed by the camp of the occupiers, while incessantly casting doubt on that recounted by the occupied; and where state bodies, scientific institutions, and university authorities impose silence on voices calling for the laws of war and international humanitarian law to be applied, while allowing free rein to those who flout them.

A situation where criticism of a government composed of far-right ministers giving speeches that dehumanize a people whose very existence it denies is equated with incitement to hatred; where so many of those who could have spoken, not to say stood up in opposition, avert their eyes from the annihilation of a territory, its history, its monuments, its hospitals, its schools, its housing, its infrastructure, its roads, and its inhabitants — in many cases, even encouraging its continuation.

Such an inversion of the values proclaimed by Western societies, such a political dereliction, such an intellectual collapse demands examination. The notion of consent probably requires some clarification. There are two distinct dimensions to it. The first is passive: not opposing a project, whose realization is thereby facilitated. The second is active: approving that project, whose realization is thus supported.

Passive and Active Consent

In the case of the war on Gaza, the two dimensions are combined. When the United Nations Security Council declines to impose a cease-fire because of a veto by one of its members, or when the governing body of a higher education institution rejects the possibility of a vote condemning the destruction of universities and the murder of their professors, they passively consent in the first instance to the continuation of the massacre of the Palestinian population and the devastation of its territory and, in the second, to the continuation of the crushing of the Palestinian education system and academic world.

On the other hand, when heads of state line up in Jerusalem to affirm Israel’s unconditional right to defend itself, or when their governments send it massive quantities of weaponry, bombs, and planes, they actively consent to no limits being imposed on retaliatory action and to additional resources being supplied to execute it — even when, in order to justify the killing of civilians, Israeli leaders and military figures publicly state that there are no innocents in Gaza. Remarkably, following the recognition by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) that there was a real risk of a genocide which had to be prevented, a shift occurred in some of the support from active to passive consent, but without any interruption in the dispatch of matériel.

Throughout the war, however, a number of Western states have done more than consent. They have prevented those who defended the right of Palestinians to live in dignity, or simply to live, from expressing their views, accusing them of inciting hatred and apologizing for terrorism, arresting them on university campuses or barring them from entering European territory.

The paradox is that this moral abdication by states has been justified in the name of morality. European countries, it was said, had a historical responsibility toward Jews and must guarantee their security. The October 7 attack was a monstrous act threatening the very existence of Israel. Thus, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) riposte became not only inevitable but also legitimate.

As for the death of Palestinian civilians, obviously that was regrettable, but it was to be regarded as collateral damage that the Israeli army was doing its best to avoid. The destruction of Gaza and part of its population was essentially a lesser evil for the sake of eliminating a greater one — namely, the destruction of the Jewish state on which Hamas was intent. In these circumstances, to speak of crimes being committed by the Israelis attested to the most suspect form of racism: antisemitism.

This was especially true if genocide was invoked to refer to the massacre of the Palestinian population, for it was intolerable that the descendants of a people who had been the victim of the greatest genocide should be accused of perpetrating one. Good conscience was thus on the side of those supporting the collective punishment of the Palestinians. In short, not only were values inverted, but the very foundation they rested on became unstable.

Language Dies

“From time to time, language dies,” writes the Palestinian poet Fady Joudah. “It is dying now. Who is alive to speak it?” In the numerous exchanges I have had over these last months with people who do, or do not, share my view of what consent to the obliteration of Gaza means, two things have emerged: not only has the space for speech been restricted by the threats that hang over it, but there are no words to express what is taking place.

All were conscious that, stunned and powerless, we were witnessing a major event in contemporary history whose moral consequences, political fallout, and intellectual implications would be considerable. But 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 the facts, by prescribing what must be said and condemning what must not be said, on pain of being singled out for public disgrace, ostracized from polite society, relieved of one’s responsibilities, removed from one’s institution, deprived of an income, stripped of a prize, excluded from a conference, subjected to a police inquiry, or even summoned to appear before a court.

This policing of language, which was also a policing of thought, was fueled by denunciation by colleagues, professors, citizens, and community organizations that demanded sanctions for the offenders. Restoring freedom of speech, demanding a debate about words, and defending a language that might make the world more intelligible had therefore become a necessity.

This necessity became all the more imperative when, following the ICJ’s ruling that the commission of a genocide in Gaza was “plausible,” history began to be rewritten. The most embarrassing traces of encouragement of war crimes in the name of the “right to self-defense” were erased. Those who had supported the bombardment of Gaza and its blockade began to declare the Israeli government accountable for the so-called humanitarian crisis it had caused.

Having censured the voices calling for a cessation of hostilities, they suddenly declared themselves in favor of it. Having been bellicose, they evinced compassion. Having practiced censorship, they minimized it. They distanced themselves from Israeli government communications.

In the midst of this revisionism, it was necessary to collect evidence to contribute, modestly, to building an archive of something that will leave a deep wound in a century already marked by wars and massacres. These wars and massacres are indeed invoked by some to relativize the singularity of the obliteration of Gaza.

They legitimately point to Congo and the Kivu, Sudan and Darfur, Ethiopia and Tigray, Turkey and the Kurds, Russia and the Ukrainians, Myanmar and the Rohingya, China and the Uighurs, and more. Each of these situations is tragic. Some have involved a greater number of victims than in Gaza. But none of these wars and none of these massacres have elicited such unwavering support from Western governments and so systematic a condemnation of any who denounce them, while the scale of the devastation and the intent to erase are beyond compare.

“Sometimes it is better to be lost for words,” wrote the British philosopher Brian Klug, two months after October 7. “Perhaps we should hold our tongue until we find words that approximate to reality — the brutal human reality of suffering, grief, loss, and despair. . . . There are times when we need to stop talking in order to start thinking — thinking politically.”

To this prudent injunction, the Saudi-born anthropologist Talal Asad replied, “Yes. But perhaps in the present situation in which deliberate cruelty is being done and shamelessly denied, what is necessary is not only thinking but also speaking and acting morally.” And yet, he added, “How one can do that is more difficult than it might appear.” This difficulty makes it only more crucial to try. If not now, when?