Permission to Narrate

Forty years ago, the issue of judgment in Palestine was raised in a different way by Edward Said in his essay “Permission to Narrate,” published in the aftermath of Israel’s atrocity-drenched 1982 invasion of Lebanon. Meditating famously on how “facts do not at all speak for themselves,” Said’s interest, in reviewing several published works on the offensive, was in part to raise the question of how extensive evidence of atrocity can so completely fail to influence dominant understandings. “What makes it possible,” he asked regarding Palestine, “for us as human beings to face the facts, to manufacture new ones, or to ignore some and focus on others?”

Said found an answer in the pervasive refusal in the West to narrate “from the point of view of a Palestinian.” He explained this as an unwillingness to situate facts within an understanding of how Palestinians encounter Zionism. To portray events in this way now would require accounting for both the historical backdrop of colonial domination, ethnic cleansing, and genocide and the level of individual experience — the simple humanity rarely depicted in Western media or politics. His argument, as Mary Turfah explained last year in an article for Protean magazine, “was that Palestinians should be framed as agents.”

In the halls of Washington and chronicles of Western media, the facts have once again failed to speak for themselves, deliberately obscured somewhere between occurrence and understanding, as the gap between reality and official narrative has grown ever wider. That disconnect has been aided through so many unstated judgments that refuse to grant Palestinians simple human agency: the tacit assessment that massacres reported by those in Gaza cannot be what they seem, the wary appraisal that demands for safety must be threats to Israelis, the suspicious conclusion that Arabs reporting on their own persecution may not be telling the truth. Combined with the eager willingness to repeat even widely discredited Israeli propaganda, the pervasive refusal to judge ongoing atrocities is straightforward repudiation of the very people subjected to appalling brutality.

Viewed in this light, the distance between judgment and narrative begins to collapse, helping to clarify the crucial function played by the refusal of so many to judge their own contributions to US-backed Israeli atrocities. Profound political lies — like the fiction that it is not clear what Israel has done with American support in Gaza — often require what Hannah Arendt, pondering questions similar to Said’s, once called “the making of another reality” to accommodate them. In addition to self-preservation, this is the project in which those so stubbornly reserving judgment have been engaged for so many months. The point has never been to raise questions that will later be answered, but rather to maintain the artifice necessary to keep doing what was already decided upon. Of course, the grotesque construction is pretense, but it is also its own form of narrative.

In Real Time

One of the great horrors of the genocide in Gaza has long been its narration in real time by Palestinians facing the naked brutality of Western imperialism. “It’s like we’re watching Auschwitz on TikTok,” the physician and Holocaust survivor Gabor Maté remarked in October. One of the most consistent Palestinian narrators of this terror in the months leading up to the recent cease-fire has been another doctor, Hussam Abu Safiya, whose dispatches from Gaza provide a clear example of Palestinian humanity spurned through the refusal to judge and act against atrocity.

A pediatrician by training, Dr Abu Safiya is the director of the Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahia. Along with all other nearby hospitals, Kamal Adwan was repeatedly bombed and invaded by US-backed Israeli forces pursuing a publicly declared starvation and ethnic cleansing campaign to make way for the planned construction of Israeli settlements in northern Gaza, a “genocide within a genocide” in the words of Palestine’s United Nations envoy. Although prohibited by the terms of the cease-fire agreement, Israeli leaders continue to openly state their intention to retain control of much of this area.

Compared to an original population of several hundred thousand, there were at one point estimated to be fewer than 50,000 Palestinians living in the decimated enclave. For months, Israel blocked the entry of almost all food, fuel, water, and medicine to the area and reduced vast neighborhoods to rubble. One resident of Beit Lahia, Said Kilani, summarized the situation clearly: “Everything has been destroyed to force people out.”

Starting in October, Dr Abu Safiya began issuing near-daily videos on the situation at Kamal Adwan Hospital, offering a contemporaneous illustration of how the Western refusal to judge mass atrocities functioned as straightforward rejection of Palestinian narratives. The material consequences of that refusal featured prominently in Dr Abu Safiya’s unanswered dispatches from his besieged hospital.

“We have made distress calls to all international organizations, the international community, human rights organizations, and the Red Cross,” he reported in early November, wearing hospital scrubs and a white physician’s coat more than a month into the Israeli siege. “Unfortunately, until this moment, we have not witnessed any breakthrough.” Following a steady stream of unanswered requests for protection and for the delivery of food, water, and medical supplies, he reported much the same in a Christmas Eve dispatch, in which explosions rattle the hospital as he talks: “We are being killed every day. . . . We are now approaching eighty days [of siege], and we are still appealing to the world. . . . It is falling on deaf ears.”

Three days later, as Americans celebrated the holidays, Israeli forces supplied by the United States stormed the hospital for a third time, strip-searching and beating patients and health care workers. Dozens were kidnapped, including Dr Abu Safiya, who was taken to an Israeli prison camp notorious for torture and sexual violence. Kamal Adwan was set afire by the Israel Defense Forces; meanwhile, Israel reassured the world that unstable patients could evacuate to another nearby hospital. According to the World Health Organization, the facility to which Israel directed patients was already “destroyed and nonfunctional.”

More than a year ago, a group of doctors spoke to the world from the parking lot of Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City, warning that the West’s refusal to judge Israeli atrocities would prove a key mechanism enabling their repetition. Speaking in English from behind a podium surrounded by the bodies of the dead, Dr Ghassan Abu-Sittah, a British Palestinian surgeon who was volunteering at the hospital with Médecins Sans Frontières, directly spelled out the connection between public judgment, the maintenance of narrative, and the enablement of atrocity: “Israel has been warning the entire world that it was going to attack Palestinian hospitals, and it did exactly that. . . . If the Israelis get away with it again, then more war crimes will be committed and more hospitals will be targeted.”

Since that press conference, Israel’s systematic destruction of the Gazan medical system has become a defining and instrumental feature of the genocide and a paradigmatic example of how the refusal to judge functions not as neutrality but as endorsement. For over a year, health care workers in Gaza, Lebanon, and the West Bank caring for the sick and wounded under constant Israeli bombardment shared their devastating experiences unsparingly. Their reports were compiled, reviewed, interrogated, corroborated, and presented to the world again and again: mass graves in hospital courtyards; bodies uncovered “with catheters and cannulas still attached”; sniper attacks on nurses, children, doctors, and patients; ambulances bombed; aid workers assassinated; patients and medical staff rounded up in mass arrests.

Israel killed more than one thousand Palestinian health care workers, many in targeted assassinations. Several prominent doctors have been tortured and killed in Israeli prison camps, and many are still detained. In October, a nineteen-year-old engineering student, Shaban al-Dalou, was burned alive in his hospital bed while still attached to an IV pole, recovering from injuries sustained in a prior bombing. In one single week around the start of the new year, at least six starved and displaced infants in northern and central Gaza froze to death in the cold.

To read these testimonies, survey this landscape of destruction, and refuse to accept its reality is not neutrality. It is simple repudiation. “Denial is arguably the opposite of recognition,” the novelist Isabella Hammad said in a lecture on narrative and Palestine just days before the October 7  attacks. “But even denial is based on a kind of knowing. A willful turning from devastating knowledge . . .” That refusal is a form of narrative and action itself, a tendency common enough in the history of genocide that it is a recognized component of the crime with a name of its own: atrocity denial.

The Guilty Reveal Themselves

That the construction of narrative — the elevation of some stories and not others, the repetition of some facts or lies and the deliberate ignorance of others — involves no small degree of judgment poses a problem for those Americans who have sustained the genocide in Gaza: the reality that has unfolded before the world plainly does not comport with their preferred narrative. One of the people most directly implicated in the provision of American weapons to Israel, the former secretary of state Antony Blinken, came close to admitting as much in an end-of-term interview with the New York Times in January, just before the recent cease-fire was announced.

Asked if he worried that he had been presiding over what the world will soon view as a genocide, he drew a rare conclusion: “No, it’s not,” although he offered no explanation for this declaration, which contradicts the assessment of Palestinian civil society, Amnesty International, the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, Human Rights Watch, the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention and Human Security, multiple UN experts, and many dozens of genocide scholars. As for the rest of the world’s judgment, Blinken conceded, “I can’t fully answer. . . . Everyone has to look at the facts and draw their own conclusions from those facts.”

In a lecture nearly sixty years ago, Arendt warned that “behind the unwillingness to judge lurks . . . the doubt that anyone is responsible or could be expected to answer for what he has done.” Alongside indifference, she located the most dangerous mode of moral disengagement in “the widespread tendency to refuse to judge at all,” a failing she identified among those who perpetrated the great crimes of the twentieth century:

Out of the unwillingness or inability to choose one’s examples and one’s company, and out of the unwillingness or inability to relate to others through judgment, arise the real skandala, the real stumbling blocks which human powers can’t remove because they were not caused by human and humanely understandable motives. Therein lies the horror and, at the same time, the banality of evil.

Arendt’s famous construction of “the banality of evil” is often recited as a warning that ordinary people can commit great crimes, but it was also an admonition that mass atrocity is only possible when the failure to think and judge becomes commonplace. As a result, she was able to identify great evil far away from sites of physical violence, in acts committed by “wrongdoers who refuse to think by themselves what they are doing and who also refuse in retrospect to think about it.” It was in the resistance to drawing conclusions and acting accordingly that she found a breakdown in ethical and political life that could not be pardoned.

Today’s circumstances are different, but in those who have provided material support to Israel’s genocide of Palestinians while refusing to judge what their own actions have wrought, there is more than an echo of the great criminals of Arendt’s lifetime. Renouncing the responsibility to adjudicate right from wrong, our policymakers and the supplicants supporting them may hope, like the unthinking killers of centuries past, to make it appear when the fever finally breaks “as if nobody were left to be either punished or forgiven.” Then as now, though, in their desperate efforts to obscure the relationship between their own actions and mass atrocity, the guilty reveal only themselves.