There Will Be No Morality after Gaza

I

Catastrophes are like cancer. Those who survive live with the condition for the remainder of their lives. They live with the memory, with rebuilding, dreading recurrence, bearing the loss even as they remake life anew.

Memory of a happier life before the event, or indeed of a life at all, serves as an index of sorts for one that could be, if not the same or even better but for one at all.

Erasing an event may be undertaken either in the process of its making or by rewriting the longer history underpinning it. Erasure, in turn, has served as an instrument for eliminating the presence of a people. It has sought to remake facts on the ground as if the natural order of how things have always been and will be understood in perpetuity. Landscape and landmarks along with their longstanding inhabitants abstracted as a “population” are eliminated in fits and starts. The language of representation and articulation is scrubbed of conventional meaning, if not of any significance at all. The material culture, across millennia so central to the appeal of a place, is rubbled daily. All this, by design, seeks to wipe away any evidence for anchoring historical memory and so reparative possibility for what once was.

As with cancer, however, the indelible mark on survivors’ memory is not so readily obliterated. And not just for the disappeared. Perpetrators bear with their prevailing the more or less repressed internalizations of the horrors enacted no matter the self-rationalizing righteousness proclaimed.

II

In the summer of 2023, throngs of families thickly dotted the long stretch of beaches lining Gaza City. Residents were making the most of the balmy weather, evading the inescapability of everyday confinement along the pacific Mediterranean. Highrise apartment buildings dotting the skyline shielded the pleasures of family picnics from the barriers closing off Gaza from the rest of the world, securing it as a prison camp.

This modicum of life’s imagined semi-normalcy was shattered when Hamas tore across that boundary fence, and by its operatives’ ensuing rampage through southern Israel’s everyday life. The fateful events of October 7 took something like 1150 lives and dragged about 250 hostages back with the marauders into Gaza (including some Americans and Thai guest workers). For all of Israel’s extraordinary intelligence capacity—knowing every detail and movement of pretty much every Gazan resident, not to mention of the 300-kilometer maze of Hamas tunnels crisscrossing the territory—the attacks took Israel completely by surprise.

The following day, October 8, began the fifteen-month pulverizing of Gaza by the Israeli Defense Forces. October 7 seemed to uncork the cauldron of fury at the lives lost and fiery embarrassment for the security failure. The Palestinian lives not ended in the incessant bombardment that followed have been altogether upended as a consequence. Israel’s neighbors, from the West Bank to Syria, Lebanon, and Iran a bit further afield, have felt the rumblings of Israel’s wrath too.

When a month-long ceasefire was enacted in January 2025, in the reach for a longer cessation, the stretch of beachfront along which picnickers were reveling fifteen months previously was again thronged with masses. But now they were straggling back to a devastated Gaza City. They carried in bare hands and on bent backs their only remaining belongings. There was no skyline to speak of. Gaza City had been all but completely flattened. Residents returned to find a million-strong city a pile of rubble, those who could or would not leave almost all buried beneath. The official count of the dead today has breached 70,000, a number as we will see is already outdated by the time of publication and again when any reader views this. Another three-to-four times that number are unaccounted for. These numbers far exceed Hamas membership. Children above all have lost their lives, limbs, and long-term futures to a militarized enclosure into which they had no choice being born and which altogether has restricted them from fleeing. Gaza’s residents have been abandoned to rocks. It is a place where life has been reduced to the Hobbesian characterization: poor, nasty, brutish, made all too short.

Israel, as Andreas Malm makes clear, has pulverized Gaza (Malm 2024). Since October 8, 2023, it has engaged with increasing brutality in destroying people and property, individuals and institutions including all hospitals, schools, mosques and churches as well as aid organizations. There is next-to-nothing left of social infrastructure. Criticisms of the destructive behavior by the IDF, locally and globally, seem only to be followed by heightened brutality.

Weeks after the first phase of the ceasefire ended in February 2025, Israel unilaterally resumed carpet-bombing Gaza with the view to forcing Hamas to release all the remaining hostages. Israeli relatives and released hostages had warned that the bombing would more likely result in the remaining hostages being killed than released. At least 500 Gazans were snuffed out in the first two days of almost indiscriminate renewed bombing, approximately 1100 in the first week, more than 40 percent of them children. The killing has continued with impunity since.

A Hamas political leader in Qatar conceded nearly eighteen months later that had he knowledge of the devastation to follow he would not have supported the October 7 attacks. Notwithstanding Israel’s renewed blanketing attacks in the wake of the ceasefire, however, Hamas made clear it was unmoved by Israel’s prisoner dilemma tactics. With no agreement to end the war, giving up all hostages would cede to Israel any limit on obliterating Gaza and all in it, as the most extreme members within Israel’s cabinet have been urging all along.

Perhaps Israel’s point now is to tighten its grip on the throats of Hamas and its supporters, whatever the larger human cost. Small but vocal Palestinian protest crowds have started to gather in parts of Gaza, calling for Hamas to step aside and leave the struggling residents in peace. Israeli officials have snatched up the sentiment, emphasizing that IDF bombing would ease only once Hamas surrenders. In any case, Israeli officials have repeatedly called for emptying Gaza of Palestinians, considering them all Hamas(-like) terrorists no matter how young or frail. They have been supported by President Trump’s reiterations. It is as if repetition fogs the reality before the world’s eyes.

III

In Moral Abdication: How the World Failed to Stop the Destruction of Gaza (2024), Didier Fassin has composed a measured record of the destructive drive in the region today. Any reader could not help but reflect on our collective implication in the extremes perpetrated as we all watch if not see these events unfold in real time. With his admirably characteristic attention to detail, Fassin outlines the fraught history almost inevitably culminating in this spectacle of death. He chronicles the extent of the destructive and all-too avoidable horrors that have unfolded with and since October 7, and the obscene rationalizations circulating to legitimate the extremes at work. Central to Fassin’s argument is both the failure of the representational language and, relatedly, the abject abandonment of moral judgment regarding the horrors transpiring before us. Moral Abdication, then, provides a necessary if time-bound reference to keep close at hand.

For all the quiet power of Fassin’s analysis, of the importance of collecting in one place the detailed record of the horrors unfolding, nevertheless, this important little book offers a less appealing lesson. It bares the limits of the undertaking in its very exercise. And it is on these limits I wish to concentrate in conversation with Didier Fassin’s compelling chronicle. For it offers us a warning about the world we now inhabit.

Fassin spells out the Israeli government’s undertaking to denude condemnatory and even descriptive terms of their previously conventional meanings. Its efforts are sustained by unqualified support among states and powerful interests most notably in the US and Europe. Genocide is re-signified as self-defense; killing innocents as unavoidable collateral damage caused by Hamas’s practice of hiding beneath human shields. Hamas’s rampage is deemed terrorism while Israel’s significantly more systematic and sustained killing both in design and numbers is predictably framed as securing against existential threat. Any critic protesting Israel’s actions is characterized as supporting Hamas even if explicitly condemning the organization. Palestinians are repeatedly dismissed as having no peoplehood, Palestine supposedly no historical existence, culture, or history despite all the evidence to the contrary. Only one country in the Middle East is named a “true democracy” (see the Heritage Foundation’s Project Esther, 2025) even though it maintains this status by precluding almost half the population of the territory under Israel’s control from rights, ranging from residential areas to voting. The IDF is branded “the most moral army in the world” even as it bestializes its targets, tortures captives, purposely kills journalists, assassinates medical staff and chefs keeping people alive, and destroys hospital life support systems enabling even new-born survival.

By seeking dramatically to soften if not erase the signifying force of ordinary language in reportage, Israel and its supporters are undertaking to evaporate the extremities of its daily actions. The Israeli regime, consecutive US administrations, and nearly all European governments have been reinforcing each other in this semiotic resignification. Distinctions are collapsed, terms stripped of their conventional meanings, evidence eclipsed by mere denial. The “logic” at work can be discerned from a seemingly unrelated example. Curtis Yarvin, a right-wing influencer of J.D. Vance, Elon Musk, and others, and through them on President Trump and his administration more broadly, equates the “terrorism” of Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik and freedom fighter Nelson Mandela. Breivik killed 77 in a day-long rampage, most of whom were children, while Mandela stressed targeting only military and key social infrastructure, not people, in a decades-long liberation struggle. Mandela himself murdered no one (Marchese 2025).

This collapse of distinction has been advanced by both the US and Israeli states to erase almost all limit on their respective state actions. More medical staff have been killed by Israel in Gaza than in any other war, overwhelmingly with American munitions, more children and journalists respectively than in all other contemporaneous wars combined.1 This is less moral abdication than moral obliteration, critical value blown up with each human being.

The issue of concern is not simply one of morality, however, as pressing as moral abdication is here. To act morally is already to presume both perpetrators and victims are human, and equally so. The prior question at issue, then, is ontic. Ontologically, the driving question is not just one of bare-life humanity, but of what kind(s) of human we all are. What sort of human being(s) are we being made up as, in Ian Hacking’s (2006) sense?

In killing or seeking completely to eliminate the other, it cannot simply be reduced to security issues. There is the drive to kill so as no longer having to. But the drive involves also no longer having to suffer its memory, to feel guilty in the moment or historically for the death-making. Ontological erasure in this context involves ridding the social landscape of the people targeted, of a people. It involves also erasing all historical trace of Palestinians, and sometimes too of those identified as their supporters, of historical memory too. Fassin seems, at least by implication, to recognize this without spelling it out in full when he comments that “the two logics—dehumanization and denial of responsibility—account for the brutality of the response in Gaza” (17).

The point of moral abandonment entailed by rewriting history in its making thus seems eclipsed by the title of the book and the framing it entails. The underlying erasure is ontological. The Heritage Foundation has supplemented its widely reported, domestic Project 2025 driving much of Donald Trump’s current presidential agenda with Project Esther. The latter was composed with very little Jewish input. Heritage’s better-known Project 2025, after all, has been lauded as a “Christian nationalist blueprint” (Casey 2024). More generally, the biblical story of Esther is invoked as a metaphor by Christian Nationalists for warfare against liberal or progressive ideas, interests, and initiatives. Project Esther (2025) shares the dangerously accusatory view that any critic of Israel is a rhetorical or material supporter of Hamas terrorism. Any such critic, individual or organization, is supposedly part of “the Hamas Support Network.” This is a completely fabricated “organization” that would include even vocal critics of Hamas if also castigating Israel. Herzl (1960), it is clear, would have embraced the likes of Project Esther: “The anti-Semites will become our most dependable friends, the anti-Semitic countries our allies. . . . We want to let respectable antisemites participate in our project” (83–84, 143; my emphasis).

Trump himself recently dismissed minority Senate leader Chuck Schumer as “not Jewish anymore.” He has now become, Trump quickly added, “a Palestinian.” This, the charge made clear, means all but literally that he is a non-being. In the dismissals, “antisemite” (like “Palestinian”) is effectively being made a synonym for non-entity, for having no standing, ontologically and not just morally. The term “Jew,” it seems, has become perversely the name for power, Zionism synecdoche for salvation. MAGA men sound closer to a literal reading of Marx’s “German Ideology” than they’d be comfortable realizing.

Fassin offers a rigorously careful empirical and qualitative account of the devastation exercised by Israel in response to the attacks of October 7. Having such a record is crucially important, as much legally as historically. However, as systematic and rigorous a record as Fassin’s is, it reveals something pressing about chronicling history in its making. No matter the time of reporting during unfolding events—of the number of dead, injured, the missing, the devastation and destruction of lives and infrastructure—by the time such reports are made public and viewed they are already (out)dated. The numbers almost instantaneously outdo themselves. It is as if the in-time record simultaneously registers the scale of the horror at hand while rendering it incomprehensible. Its very incomprehensibility serves to annul for those not immediately impacted the register being recorded in real time. Outrage gives way to stupor.

I do not mean to suggest the record is pointless. Rather, the focus here should concern the pressing question before us now. A genocide in which we are all implicated is in process. The “we” here of course includes all of us in states directly enabling the horror, through funding, weaponizing, supporting events without any modicum of limit, or turning our backs on the horrors before us. If ignorance of a law is inexcusable, refusal to attend to systematic slaughter transpiring before us collectively implicates us all in its possibility. What better way might there be, in a society requiring ever-enlarged spectacularization for any attention, to sustain incomparable concern? What will it take of us all to address its sources, indeed, to end if not reverse its effects and impacts?

IV

Israel and its supporters, as Fassin elaborates, summarily dismiss any characterization of its actions regarding Gaza since October 2023 as “genocide.” The “inception” date itself seems too narrow, as it precludes the history of Gaza’s incarceration in more readily disposing a population to eliminable possibility. And yet, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) has ruled that the genocide case brought against Israel by South African legal representatives is prima facie plausible. The Court has allowed the case to proceed, if ever too slowly, in the face of Israel’s harshly voiced objections. The case before the ICJ concerns whether Israel’s actions in Gaza can be characterized in the terms spelled out in Article II of the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948) established in the wake of the Shoah.

Article II of the Convention defines genocide as “any . . . acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such” (my emphases). This could involve “killing” group members or “causing them serious bodily or mental harm.” It could include “deliberately inflicting . . . conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part” or establishing conditions “intended to prevent births within the group.” The only open question regarding whether Israel’s actions in Gaza since October 2023 meet these criteria concerns intent. The subtitle of Fassin’s book makes evident where he stands and what any honest assessment should conclude on this question: Israel, with American support, is engaged, as the book’s subtitle puts it, in “the [d]estruction of Gaza” (my emphasis).

Fassin draws on the documents of evidence brought to the ICJ by the South African lawyers detailing clear evidence of “intent to destroy” Palestinians, “in whole or in part”: Erasure of almost all social infrastructure; rendering the territory virtually unlivable through the deprivation of food, water, almost all access to healthcare; and dramatic restriction on delivery of humanitarian aid. Israel’s defense minister, like Prime Minister Netanyahu and more recently President Trump, declared all Palestinians to be “human animals” and that the war against them would include withholding “electricity, water, food, and fuel,” in violation of the Geneva Convention’s rules of warfare. The vice-chair of Israel’s Knesset or Parliament pronounced that “we all have one common goal—erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the earth.” A senior Israeli military official insisted that Gaza had to be made “a place that is, temporarily or permanently, impossible to live in” (Fassin, 28, 32–3).

In the month of renewed bombing after Israel ended the ceasefire in March 2025, Netanyahu also reimposed an almost complete blockade on Gaza. No food, water, or medical supplies have been allowed to enter, the desalination plant has been bombed, in all reducing Gaza’s two million residents (and the remaining Israeli hostages) to the brink of starvation. Paramedic personnel have been assassinated while seeking to treat those injured by Israeli bombing.

In March 2025, an ambulance bearing two paramedics trying to reach casualties failed to return. Five vehicles, including an ambulance, a fire engine, Red Crescent medical personnel, rescue workers, and a UN medical representative were dispatched in the dark of night to determine what became of them. They too failed to return. A week after they had disappeared, a mass grave of 15 was discovered in desert sand. All had been executed individually by Israeli ground forces, one with hands still bound behind his back, despite their uniforms and vehicles identifying them as emergency medical personnel. Their vehicles had been crushed by a bulldozer and half-buried too. Without providing evidence, Israel declared nine of the group to be Hamas operatives, failing at the very least to provide any process for proving otherwise or to account for why the others had been executed. Israeli troops claimed that the vehicles were approaching them without headlights or their emergency red lights flashing (Yee and Fassihi 2025). A video found by Red Crescent on a cellphone of one of the dead taken in the process of his execution belied these claims.

From the outset of his second presidency, Donald Trump has echoed the judgment that Gaza is not fit for living. He has insisted consequently that all Gazans relocate to other countries. Without consulting the territory’s residents or Palestinians at all, the Trump administration has approached numerous governments in the Middle East and Africa to take in some or all of Gaza’s residents. Trump’s vision is to remake the territory under American ownership as “the Gaza Riviera.” The implication is hardly obscured from view: The remake as a gentrified resort would residentially gate out all Gazans.

Gaza is the living example today of the production of bare life and social death. The inescapable conclusion from the death, intentional starvation, and almost complete destruction of civil life and society is the elimination of its people by erasing all means for their survival. Palestine is being disappeared. And Palestinians along with the Palestinian map. This too is the point of Israel’s renewal of incessant carpet and targeted bombing to foreclose any possibility of a second stage of the ceasefire. If none of this meets both the letter and spirit of the Genocide Convention, it is hard to imagine what else does. Perhaps this is partly the point too: if nothing qualifies, Israel’s actions don’t either.

Defenders of Israel’s actions invoke strategies to fend off their characterization as genocidal. One is simply to wave them aside, usually belligerently, as inapplicable. In securing itself against existential threat, the implication seems to be, existential annihilation of those perceived as the threat is warranted. This was effectively the implication in Israel’s response to the charges before the ICJ, with little if any supporting evidence or plausible counter-argument. Israel might convince the Court that genocide should not be the operative term naming events in Gaza. But that would be the “ungenociding” of genocide rather than its disproof: evasion of guilt by changing the charging terms.

Fassin rightfully makes clear, nevertheless, that the extremity and horror of what the Israeli government and military have unleashed on the Palestinian people and their infrastructure—significantly more extreme than apartheid South Africa, as he says (46–9), and as bad as that regime was—cannot be so readily discounted. It may indeed deserve its own name. Rabea Eghbariah (2024) has persuasively made the case for “Nakba.”

The other is the “how dare you” strategy amounting to weaponizing the charge of antisemitism. Here, as Fassin discusses, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA 2016) definition has been advanced as the key determinant of what counts as antisemitic. The IHRA definition has been adopted by 40 states, including the US State Department, and a host of other institutions, among them universities, as their basis for opposing, to the point of illegalizing, antisemitism. The IHRA definition’s principal author, Kenneth Stern, director of the Center for the Study of Hate at Brown University, has repeatedly emphasized that the “working definition” was never intended as a state or legal principle. Rather it was meant as an account to be used by especially European researchers to monitor expressions of antisemitism across the many countries on the continent. Stern (2019) has been clear: The definition should not be used to prohibit or restrict non-contemptuous criticism of Israel, or of Zionism, notwithstanding his own disagreements with such criticisms (cf. Fassin, 46 ff.).

On its face, the definition seems largely uncontroversial, centering “hatred of Jews.” If one substituted “hatred of Muslims” or “Islam” it could easily serve as a comparable definition of Islamophobia. But “hatred” reduces more complex considerations to attitudinal criteria, sliding by discriminatory stereotyping or material dimensions. An individual or institution may refuse to hire or admit group members, however misguided, not because of hatred but for supposed security concerns, including group crime rate attributions,2 or too frequent religiously prompted absences. “Positive discrimination” might privilege group members at the expense of non-members. Theodor Herzl, a key founding figure of Zionism, famously offered the Sultan of Turkey free accounting service (“financial regulation”) by Jews in exchange for Palestine as the site for “the Jewish state.”3 Herzl was trading on the time-worn stereotype that Jews are good money-managers, the world’s Shylock in less flattering terms. Donald Trump has reportedly mimicked these terms: “Black guys counting my money! I hate it. The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day” (Cooper 2019). Individualizing meritocrats resorting to crass stereotypes can obviously wax antisemitic, and racist, too.

The IHRA controversy, however, has come to turn less on the definition as such and more readily on the sorts of examples of antisemitism meant to illustrate it. States and organizations adopting the IHRA account largely slide by the formal definition, taking up instead the examples as if inevitably instances of antisemitic expression no matter the circumstance and without exception. The examples effectively serve as definitional substitute. Yet a careful reading of the IHRA document calls for a more nuanced, less definitive analysis of what “might” or “may” or “could” amount to antisemitic expression, depending on “overall context” in specific circumstances. The provisional considerations of “overall context” have opened IHRA applicability to an expansive range of instances, loosened parameters currently in play, while also rendering any specific determination prone to more or less robust contestation. The overwhelming effect has been expression suppression. Mere accusation has foreclosed analysis, made guilt-producing.

One example the IHRA account offers is especially telling here. What would count as antisemitism is “the targeting of the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity” unless “criticism of Israel [is] similar to that leveled against any other country.” If the conditional is satisfied, such criticism “cannot be regarded as antisemitic.” Accordingly, critics of Israel on record reasonably objecting to all states defining themselves on reductively ethno-racial or ethno-national grounds would not qualify as antisemitic. A critic questioning the Israeli government’s self-characterization in law and policy as a “Jewish state” materially and legally privileging Jews while restricting all who are not would not be questioning only Jewish self-determination or sovereignty. Grounding such criticism on a general theory that any such state ends up invariably precluding those not meeting the (usually shifting) criteria of ethno-belonging is not reductively anti-Jewish. States ethno-religiously or ethno-racially self-defined almost inevitably turn repressive to sustain their ethno-purity. Once embracing secularity, they usually scale back some on state violence against those of different ethnic or religious background even as the state might retain vestiges of its historical culture.

Historical instances bearing out such an analysis are telling. They include at the very least Christian nationalist states such as Calvinistic South Africa under apartheid, recourse to “German blood” as restrictive grounds for German citizenship until the late 1980s, assertively Catholic states across their long history, Muslim reductive countries such as Iran or Saudi Arabia, the current stress on Hindu nationalism in India, or even Buddhist dominance in Sri Lanka’s and Myanmar’s state formations. Israel has proved little different, and US recourse to Christian nationalism today is proving the point. And yet the weaponized political charges of antisemitism have overwhelmingly ignored, if not resisted, more fine-grained analysis of this kind. The current Trump administration’s commitment to rooting out antisemitism from college campuses—seeking to deport non-citizen campus critics of Israel—proceeds by reductively collapsing ethnicity with a political state. Stern himself has insisted that the IHRA definition should not deem antisemitic most criticisms of Zionism as a political ideology, as Israel’s supporters too often charge. The claim to exceptionality, then, does not create the fact of it, nor a shield from the reach of justice.

V

The Israeli state has worked to erode, to the point of eliminating, the conditions of possibility for Palestinian social being. Gaza is being systematically reduced to a state of unlivability. Netanyahu’s policies are meant to drive Gazans to die for lack of food, shelter, and medical care or to force them to “self-deport,” to choose “voluntarily” to flee to other states. This amounts to disappearance in the form of death or dispersal. The Prime Minister’s denials are simply guilt-evasion by another name. The pressure has been ramped up too on Palestinians in East Jerusalem and throughout the West Bank. Palestinian landholdings in the West Bank have been steadily eroded through settlements, agricultural destruction, and incessant violence. In Old City Jerusalem, Palestinian residents have had their homes confiscated, their neighborhoods polluted with foul-smelling water, residents physically attacked. Mohammed El-Kurd describes how his family had half their Jerusalem home taken over by a Brooklyn Jew. When confronted, the Brooklynite responded that had he not expropriated half another Jewish Israeli would take the whole home (El-Kurd 2025). Israeli law stands idly by when not legally approving the self-entitlement. The registers of erasure it takes to live atop or aside of one whose home one has literally squatted with state encouragement is stunning in its self-denial.

Disappearing the enemy, however, is not costless. Israeli anxiety ranks among the highest rates worldwide, not least among their youth. Disappearance never means complete erasure. When they can and if still alive, the targeted often go underground. They become invisible. In departing those spaces and places in which they can be seen, and so monitored, they are able more readily to regroup to resist another day. Their invisibility, real or imagined, in turn heightens dread and anxiety among those doing the repressing. The Battle of Algiers offers one telling historical warning.

States founded on war often seem more disposed than others to resort to waging them. In its founding Israel went to war against those resisting the moment. Hamas, founded in the 1980s as a result in large part of Israeli connivance, steadily grew in its autocratic authority after its Gaza election in 2006. Warring states, perhaps by definition, are founded on a warring state of mind even in moments when claiming to be at peace. A state negotiating a ceasefire with a non-negotiable principle that it can keep bombing as it deems fit during the ceasefire is both altering the meaning of ceasefire and appearing committed to perpetual war.

All colonizing involves irretrievable and irreplaceable loss. Asking what of value colonization has ever contributed to indigenous life of the colonized, Aimee Cesaire (1951/2000, 34) responds categorically: Nothing! Netanyahu’s Israel is proving the point, literally. His operators have repeatedly resorted to the Trumpian mode of perpetual distraction. The distractions are multiple. One is from the history and perpetuation of colonizing in the establishment and extension of Israel itself (compare Herzl 1896 to Said 1979). There is distraction too in drawing attention from the immediate wrongdoing at hand by immediately overriding it with some other, often even greater one. The ceasefire was ended at the outset of March 2025 with Israel’s renewed bombing in Gaza on the very day Netanyahu was scheduled to appear in an Israeli court on his corruption charges. War-making trumps judicial proceedings, which are placed on hold, again. The result is a blur, the effect is the loss of focus on any one wrong. Stop all food and medical aid, draw attention away by bombing a hospital to kill a Hamas leader the resulting killing of children being treated from which attention is drawn by quickly bombing a refugee camp. The announcement that Israel will limit food supplies in Gaza by reducing per capita nutritional value to the barest daily minimum in turn obfuscates the simultaneous announcement that Israel will enable any Gazan choosing to leave to another country, in turn distracting from the ultimate plan to denude Gaza of all Gazans, one way or another.

The larger ethical question has been completely silenced by the endless momentary distractions instrumentalizing Palestinian elimination, whether in the form of extermination or eviction. Both, in the final analysis, are seeking to foreclose national belonging. The paradox of such eliminative pursuit is that it fuels a more robust embrace of the very belonging it aims to end. The long and deep ethical challenge embedded both in state formation as such and more deeply in religious tradition is this:

How to live enduringly with the neighbor in the face of differences ramified by ethno-religious enclosure?

This is the question of our time, and not just in the region. Historically, Israel from its outset sought domination. This became increasingly assertive after 1967, the more so in the wake of the first Intifada and intensifying more dramatically with the intended implosion of the Oslo Accords and the second Intifada that followed. When raised expectations are increasingly dashed, the dominated find themselves with few options. Since October 7, Israel and its supporters have moved to bury the question tout court. A noted orthodox rabbi in the US northeast quickly responded to a piece I published pressing the point of neighborly coexistence (Goldberg 2024). Within an hour of publication, he accused me, across a page-long email screed, of supporting “HAMAS NAZIS” (his capitalization). I expressed surprise in my reply that so learned a man could deny the deep strain in Jewish theological and philosophical traditions regarding the ethics of the neighbor. I received no further response from him.

Perpetual invasion is accompanied by the end(less) game of perennial evasion. As with the most invasive of cancer treatments, rationality is reduced to instrumentalized calculation and rationalization. If consuming dis-ease doesn’t end life, the treatment likely will. Moral deliberation has been squeezed out along with the people of Gaza, exiled when not reduced to rubble. I am not as sure as Fassin that “words will find their true meaning again” (90). History has in fact sometimes proved otherwise. Hence the need for newly expressive terms more readily able to characterize the novel extremity of the work in process.

Gazans are condemned at birth to lifelong confinement. Many tens of thousands have now been executed. The jailers are acting as accusers, prosecutors, judges, and executioners. How, then, to name what we are witnessing? Genocide has been stripped of its conventional meaning and force in the perpetration of war not just on Hamas but on all Palestinians. If genocide has been stripped of its universal applicability here, it calls for new terms. To press the point, in ways likely to make everyone uncomfortable, we can tag what we are witnessing as a national familicide: the killing of relatives historically reduced to black sheep. Those the familiar or family members purport to know best, with whom an intense history is shared, have been excommunicated in order to effect their elimination, to purge them from the nation. Then again, perhaps genocide is always a national familicide.

The question before us all, it follows, concerns the possibility of living together while facing up to the enormity of the pain and repression historically and at hand. Didier Fassin’s little book conjures the melancholic sense of Theodor Adorno’s (in)famous remark that poetry, or art generally, after Auschwitz would be obscene (1949/1955, 34). For us today, however, the point of reference has shifted. Palestinian poetry has been the poignant voice of Gaza’s suffering. Fassin closes his book (91–2) with one penned by Refaat Alereer imagining his own death which followed shortly after as he and family members perished in a targeted bomb attack. After Gaza, it seems, there can be no morality. It has been (word-)bombed into oblivion.

Perhaps in such moments art is all we have to turn to . . .

David Theo Goldberg is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine, with affiliate appointments in Comparative Literature and Criminology, Law and Society. From 2000 to 2022, he served as Director of the systemwide University of California Humanities Research Institute. He has authored and edited over twenty books, most recently The War on Critical Race Theory (2023) and Dread: Facing Futureless Futures (2021).

Notes

• 1. In the case of journalists, since October 8, 2023, more journalists have been killed by the IDF in Gaza than altogether in the US Civil War, both World Wars, the Korean and Vietnam Wars, the two wars in Yugoslavia, and the American war in Afghanistan.

• 2. Such claims have been made by the likes of both Dinesh D’Souza (1995: 259–62) and Christopher Rufo (Douthat 2025).

• 3. “If His Majesty the Sultan were to give us Palestine, we could in return undertake to regulate the whole finances of Turkey. We should there form a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism” (Herzl 1896/1946, 96). Elsewhere, Herzl (1973, 163–4) offered equally negative stereotypes of those Jews he calls “Mauscheln,” those (especially Polish) whose German is strongly Yiddish accented: “A Jew is a human being like any other—no better and no worse . . . Mauschel [the mouse], on the other hand, is a distortion of human character, someone unspeakably low and repugnant.”

Works Cited

• Adorno, Theodor. 1949/1955. “Cultural Criticism and Society,” Prisms. https://web.english.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Adorno_Prisms.pdf.
• Casey, Mary. 2024. “Project 2025. The Blueprint for Christian Nationalist Regime Change,” The Kettering Foundation, August 19. https://kettering.org/project-2025-the-blueprint-for-christian-nationalist-regime-change/.
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