In Gaza, the production of unequal humanity
How has the Gaza war illustrated as well as intensified the production of a humanity in which some lives are more valuable than others?
On December 10, 2023, the world marked the 75th anniversary of the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). This remarkable document expresses our collective agreement that all human beings are equal in dignity and rights: That all lives matter, equally. In a cruel irony, the anniversary fell during the war in Gaza, which is becoming the most glaring example in our times of the fact that all lives do not matter equally. How has the war illustrated as well as intensified the production of a humanity in which some lives are more valuable than others?
One of the early refrains after Hamas’s attacks on October 7, 2023 was that it was the “bloodiest” or the “deadliest” day for Israel since the Holocaust. In terms of civilian deaths in a single day, this is, of course, correct. And the attacks were indeed brutal and extensive. But this framing gave a historical angle to what the Israelis experienced, one that comes charged with strong emotions as well as fundamental commitment on the part of the West to the security of Jews and the Israeli State. This was not a problem in itself. But the attacks took place against a backdrop of decades of Israeli occupation, repression, siege and killings of a much larger number of Palestinian civilians while Israeli citizens had enjoyed much higher levels of security. It is an awful comparison to make because all civilian lives should enjoy the same levels of security. But it casts into sharp relief the asymmetry in values assigned within the Judeo-Christian/western world to the lives of two sets of civilians. The strength of outrage found within Israel and the West after the attacks of October 7 was far greater than anything expressed in response to the previous deaths and destruction of Palestinian lives.
And the pattern has held as Israel has executed its war on Gaza. The figure of over 20,000 or nearly one per cent of Gaza’s pre-war civilian population killed, about 70% of them women and children, does not capture the unprecedented destruction and suffering Israel has inflicted. Nearly two million lives have been displaced to the edge of extreme precarity. Hospitals have been destroyed or severely degraded. Medics have been killed. Several journalists and aid and rescue workers belonging to international organisations, including the United Nations (UN), have also died.
Israel has exercised a military monopoly on external aid, regulating it at the border crossings, which has produced, according to a UN-backed report, “catastrophic hunger and suffering” for over half a million people and raised the spectre of famine in six months. CNN has reported a US intelligence assessment that nearly half of the munitions dropped over Gaza by Israel are “dumb bombs”, which potentially kill more civilians because they aren’t precision-guided. Bear in mind that Israel has cutting-edge sophistication in military power and that it has besieged Gaza from land, sea, and air. Another awful comparison: This is Israel’s response to about 1,200 dead and 240 taken hostage.
The West has enabled this production of differential humanity. Discomfort of western governments became public after over 10,000 civilians were killed. “Far too many”, said US secretary of state Antony Blinken in New Delhi on November 10, 2023. Other governments have since followed. But these expressions of concern have had negligible impact on Israel’s use of its firepower. The US has tremendous leverage over Israel, and the former’s strategic interests in West Asia are at odds with Israeli actions. And yet, it has supplied military aid to Israel while blocking or diluting the Security Council’s attempts to produce a ceasefire. In this moment of churn in international politics, western, and particularly American actions have degraded its legitimacy in the non-West. The next time it uses the notion of a rules-based international order in the context of the non-West, it could be laughed at in the same fashion as Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov was at the Raisina Dialogue in Delhi in March this year.
All this does not exonerate those Arab States who have played historical roles in Palestinian displacement and dispossession. And their strategic inaction in response to Israel gives the lie to the notion of an Arab humanity. Tragically, but also thankfully, it clarifies that the Islamic ummah is little more than a notional global community of Muslims. Like their peers, Muslim and Islamic States prioritise their national interests rather than serving any transnational political community of Muslims.
And we absolutely must not lose sight of Hamas’s nihilistic criminality, which brought this catastrophe upon the Palestinians. Its actions did not come from a vacuum, and it is morally untenable for an outsider to preach non-violence to a population living under occupation and siege. But one can still pose the following question to Hamas and other militant Islamists. When was the last time your use of self-destructive violence did not produce mass-scale killings of your own people? The strand of Islamism that glorifies death more than life in the name of martyrdom will produce suffering for innocent believers unless it is itself extinguished. And this task belongs entirely to the Muslim communities.
Atul Mishra teaches international relations and Shiv Nadar Institution of Eminence (SNIoE). The views expressed are personal
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