September 13, 2025
Menachem Klein
It was precisely on his home turf, just before the end of his tenure, when one of Israel's most severe diplomatic defeats occurred.
Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) leader Yasser Arafat was invited to speak at the General Assembly, which was supposed to convene in New York.
Arafat was then 20 years older than Netanyahu, more recognised than him on the international stage, and not necessarily in a positive way.
The First Intifada that began spontaneously 10 months earlier marked the PLO leader as the national leader of the Palestinians and a symbol of the Palestinian people's fate.
Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and its failed attempt to eliminate Arafat, the PLO and the national claim for a Palestinian state west of the Jordan River amplified Arafat's symbolic status in the eyes of his public.
The excessive force with which Israel tried to suppress the popular uprising opened the doors of the UN General Assembly to Arafat.
His invitation came after 12 years in which Arafat sought a path through which the PLO could integrate into talks on a political settlement without abandoning its principles.
Israel and the US had long sought to block these efforts, and did so again in 1988. Ronald Reagan's Republican administration refused to grant Arafat a visa, so a special session of the General Assembly was convened in Geneva.
Netanyahu is currently 76 years old, prime minister, sick and reviled as a war criminal with an international arrest warrant hanging over his head.
The State of Palestine
From day one in public service, Netanyahu's life mission was cut and clear: to prevent everything that Arafat wanted to achieve. Until two years ago, he succeeded in doing so.
As prime minister, he established a regime of Jewish supremacy over the entire territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, deepened the Palestinian division, and was on the verge of including Saudi Arabia in the Abraham Accords.
The 7 October Hamas-led attack buried his project. On the initiative of Saudi Arabia and France, key western nations are about to recognise Palestine. In fact, most countries have already recognised it.
It is difficult to credit the current Palestinian achievements to Mahmoud Abbas. The Palestinian Authority president is nearly 90 years old, infirm and works only a small number of hours per day.
Abbas heads a corrupt establishment lacking public legitimacy, which under him has become an operator on behalf of a Jewish supremacy regime.
The "State of Palestine" logo and honour guard that receives Abbas in the Muqata (the Palestinian Authority headquarter in Ramallah) becomes ridiculous when the Israeli military operates undisturbed a few streets away and, together with violent settlers, carries out pogroms against residents.
To Netanyahu's great frustration, it is precisely this failed establishment that is about to gain state recognition from key western nations.
This move does not recognise the reality of a state in the making, as was the case with the Jewish Yishuv during the British Mandate period and the Palestinian Authority during its first stage. This is a recognition of the necessity to replace it with a different reality.
However, international recognition has an additional layer.
Arafat's opportunity
As in 1988, the excessive force - genocide if we define it correctly - that Israel carries out against the Palestinian people with weapons, assistance and political backing from western countries is pushing forward that international recognition.
This is comparable to the guilt of nations after the Holocaust that motivated them in 1947 to support Israel's establishment at the expense of the native Palestinian majority. Accompanying this is the guilt about European colonialism in general and its Zionist chapter in particular.
As in 1988, the cooperation between the Trump administration and Netanyahu's government has prompted the United States to ban Abbas's entry to speak at the upcoming UN General Assembly.
French President Emmanuel Macron and the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman, plan to chair an event during the Assembly where western leaders will join them in recognising Palestine.
In an attempt to drain the expected recognition of its significance, the United States decided to comprehensively ban the entry of any person holding a State of Palestine passport.
Let's return to 1988. In a rare moment of wisdom, the PLO concluded that the popular uprising created a political opportunity that its armed struggle had failed to produce.
In other words, it was not the force Israel imposed on the PLO that led to change but rather the PLO's success in surviving Israel's 1982 attack and being accepted by the Intifada rebels as their leader.
Its status among the Palestinian public, in general public opinion and in western political establishments brought the PLO closer to achieving independence for occupied Palestine and it was ready to declare this.
A fait accompli
On 15 November 1988, within the framework of the Palestinian Declaration of Independence, the PLO recognised the UN Partition Resolution of 1947, which it had vehemently rejected in the Palestinian Charter of 1964 and 1968.
The PLO explicitly stated that the State of Palestine would dwell peacefully alongside the Jewish state.
Thus, the PLO effectively accepted Security Council Resolution 242 from 1967, which serves as the cornerstone for all political plans for an Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement.
This was a significant development in the PLO's path, which Israel consistently ignores. Arafat emphasised these principles in his speech before the special session of the UN General Assembly in Geneva on 13 December.
In November and December that year, Netanyahu became an MP and was on his way to the position of deputy foreign minister under his patron Moshe Arens. Another diplomatic defeat occurred under their noses.
Immediately after Arafat's speech at the General Assembly, the Swedish foreign minister and three Jewish peace activists who were counted on the "extreme left" - Rita Hauser, Stanley Sheinbaum and Drora Kass - opened contacts with US Secretary of State George Shultz.
They asked what, in his opinion, was missing from Arafat's General Assembly speech. Arafat included the text that Shultz dictated word for word in a news conference he held in Geneva. In essence, Arafat said that the PLO recognises Israel's existence, condemns terrorism and accepts Resolution 242.
In Washington, a twilight period prevailed. The Reagan administration was on its way to the history books, and president-elect Bill Clinton was preparing to enter office in January.
Contrary to unwritten rules, the outgoing administration presented the new administration with a fait accompli. The United States recognised the PLO and opened an official dialogue with it.
This was a severe blow to Israel's political rejectionism under Likud leadership.
The zealots of Masada
With his back against the wall of the 7 October failure and facing a tsunami of western recognition of the State of Palestine, Netanyahu is fighting to save his life mission: preventing the establishment of a Palestinian state through Jewish supremacy force.
Netanyahu cannot bear the harsh truth: his greatest political achievement was thwarted by Hamas, whose attack harmed Israel as no Palestinian organisation had ever done.
Hamas did not gain politically from the unprecedented blow to Israel but succeeded in blocking its normalisation with Saudi Arabia.
Netanyahu thinks that "total victory" will eliminate Hamas and its achievement. As total victory becomes more distant, Netanyahu pursues it with more war crimes and unleashing more force.
The attack in Qatar, threats to act against Hamas leaders even in Turkey, and his desire to push Gaza Strip residents to Egypt at the cost of destroying the peace agreement are part of his desperate policy.
Netanyahu is not alone in the battle against the Palestinian state. Israel's Jewish society stands behind him, despite the fact that most of it would like to see him retire from political life.
Internationally, only the Trump administration stands beside him. Together, they are uprooting the relations built between the United States and Palestinians since 1988. They are aware of their limited ability to block or delay the recognition of Palestine.
Therefore, their main effort is directed at changing the reality on the ground to create no demographic and geographic basis on which the State of Palestine can be established.
Netanyahu brought about the total destruction of and devastation in the Gaza Strip, and on a smaller scale (for now?) in the occupied West Bank, where he plans to add de jure annexation as a response to western recognition of Palestine. In other words, to hollow out international recognition.
From his entry into Israel's foreign service, Netanyahu worked to translate Israel's military power into political capital to prevent the establishment of Palestine. When he almost touched his goal, his path was blocked.
In response, the desperate Netanyahu now relies on sheer force alone. He and Israeli society refuse to acknowledge that the 7 October attack came from the place where Israeli force had been applied for years in the most brutal and cruel manner.
Israel refuses to recognise that Hamas's attack proved that exclusive reliance on force and imposing Jewish supremacy have turned Israel into a genocidal society, and a society whose historical model it adopts is that of the zealots of Masada.
September 12, 2025
Hossam el-Hamalawy
Written in the long shadow of Gaza’s devastation, it refuses euphemism, demolishes the polite fictions that anaesthetise Western consciences, and insists on a simple thesis: Gaza is the ethical ground zero of our time.
What we call “the West” has been revealed, not as a civilisational high point, but as a system of domination that dresses barbarism in moral drag.
Read it if you’re ready to stop pretending. Read it if you want language equal to the horror, and a map for thinking, and acting, beyond it.
Published by Haymarket Books, it opens not with hedging but with the unvarnished vocabulary of genocide.
Dabashi peppers the book with quotes from Conrad to Ayelet Shaked, showing how the injunction to “exterminate all the brutes” is not a relic of empire but a living operating system, retooled for a besieged strip of land that has become the world’s moral mirror.
The result is a searing, scandalously explicit indictment and a celebratory defence of Palestinian life and culture as a generative, life-making force.
Gaza as the new categorical imperative
Dabashi’s most provocative move is philosophical: he rewrites Kant from the rubble. The book argues that Gaza has overturned the “metaphysics of morals” and exposed a metaphysics of barbarism at the heart of the West.
If a universal law permits mass death so long as it is rationalised by security, then the universal law is rotten.
Gaza, he insists, is the test: either we orient our ethics from there, or our ethics are counterfeit.
This isn’t ivory-tower wordplay; it’s a demand for a total reframing of moral philosophy in the wake of livestreamed atrocity.
The chapter-length meditations hammer the point: from official language that brands Palestinians “human animals”, to policy choices that starve and bomb civilians with impunity, the book refuses to let philosophy float above the blood.
A categorical imperative, Dabashi says, now lives or dies under the dust of collapsed apartment blocks. That’s not melodrama; that’s accountability.
Israel is not merely backed by “the West”, it is “the West”.
The book’s core political claim is blunt: Israel is the condensed, weaponised expression of western imperial history, a garrison state projecting imperial interests, not a normal country gone astray.
From witness to martyr
This is more than the familiar settler-colonial framing; it’s an argument that Gaza exposes the DNA of the West’s self-exculpating myth, linking Indigenous erasure in the Americas, the transatlantic slave trade, and European fascism to the ongoing Palestinian catastrophe.
Dabashi leans on Cesaire’s cold insight: the West only truly recognised “the crime” when the methods of empire were used on Europe itself. That recognition never translated into universal empathy; Gaza proves it.
The author is not asking to swap one victimhood for another. He marks the Holocaust’s specificity while rejecting the move that isolates it from the larger architecture of European genocidal practice.
In this telling, Zionism is not a prophylactic against antisemitism but a colonial project that keeps the region and Jews living within a militarised enclave that is permanently unsafe.
Safety cannot be engineered on stolen land policed by permanent war. That’s not “security”; that’s a factory of insecurity, subsidised and protected by Western power.
One of the book’s quiet masterstrokes is linguistic. Dabashi interrogates the concept of “witness” through European philosophy (testis, superstes) and then pivots to Arabic and Persian: shahid (witness) and shaheed (martyr).
In our languages, he notes, witnesses and martyrs sit side by side, morally fused. That proximity matters.
It dignifies the act of testimony and honours the dead as more than statistics.
It also rebukes a discourse that treats Palestinian life as a data problem. Pair this with his evocation of Naji al-Ali’s Handala, and you feel the book’s moral scale: witness is not an academic construct; it’s a life risk.
Modern Western philosophy has placed narrow limits on what can be “testified” or “witnessed”.
Dabashi presents a contemporary challenge to this assertion: what does it mean to read Gaza when the archive is livestreamed but still declared “untestifiable” by those in power?
The book’s answer: you read against the grain. You witness, and you make a moral stand where your witnessing puts you.
‘Processed news’ and liberal damage control
If you’ve gagged on the euphemisms of prestige outlets, this book names your nausea. Dabashi accuses mainstream media of producing processed news, like processed food.
Such outlets, he says, provide additives, preservatives, artificial colouring, manufactured to stabilise a political diet rather than nourish understanding.
This isn’t a lazy screed against “the media”; It’s a precise indictment of rhetorical regimes that normalise the abnormal, minimise the criminal, and launder the obscene under the banner of “balance”.
He calls out the New York Times and BBC as archetypes of this liberal-imperial house style, then teaches a tactic: read them forward, backwards, and against themselves until the seams of ideology show.
A similar ferocity greets high philosophy. Dabashi’s earlier critique of Jurgen Habermas’s Zionism reappears here as an index of a broader bankruptcy: a canon that chokes on Palestinian life while waxing nobly about universalism.
The effect is cumulative and devastating: the words that rule our world are designed to keep some deaths unintelligible.
As an alternative, the book offers the antidote - new words rooted in Gaza’s reality.
Palestine as an epistemic challenge
This is where the book begins to sing. Dabashi is not content to catalogue abuses; he wants to change the axis on which knowledge spins.
“World literature”, “world cinema”, “world religion” - he dismantles the cosy universals that pretend to include everything while functionally excluding Palestine.
How do you induct a nation into “postcolonial” frameworks when its colonisation is ongoing?
How do you slot Palestinian art into “world” categories whose gatekeepers insist the “world” is what the West already knows? You don’t. You move the gate.
He proposes a different vocabulary, Nakba (catastrophe), Intifada (uprising), Sumud (steadfastness), as the conceptual scaffolding for a decolonial knowledge project that begins in Palestine and builds out.
This isn’t provincialism; it’s a demand that the “world” expand to fit reality rather than compress reality to fit the “world”.
The point is not inclusion into existing categories but transformation of the categories themselves.
The art that keeps the future lit
One of the book’s most moving threads is its tour through culture: poetry after genocide, cinema after catastrophe, the stories and symbols that refuse erasure.
Dabashi focuses on Ghassan Kanafani, revolutionary, writer, assassinated at 36, and on Anni Kanafani, his Danish comrade, whose life’s work with Palestinian children continues in Beirut’s camps.
Then he brings in Italian filmmaker Mario Rizzi and his film The Little Lantern, which stages Kanafani’s story with children in Burj el-Barajnah, crafting a pedagogy of hope amid the labyrinth of exile.
These aren’t detours; they are the book’s marrow. Culture is not decoration. It’s survival.
Dabashi explains how Rizzi alters Kanafani’s tale in a striking way. The old man with a lantern is replaced by a woman crowning the queen - shifting the story’s focus from an individual symbol of light to a communal ceremony rooted in collective experience.
The image is unforgettable: if you cannot house a single lantern, how will you hold the sun? Gaza won’t wait for abstract sunshine; it gathers small lights, ten thousand small lights, until the room glows. That is how people build a future under blockade.
The garrison and the camp
Another aspect of the book is a confrontation: the garrison state versus the camp. Israel, as a garrison, is the last outpost of a dying imperial order; Palestine, as a camp, is the site where new forms of life and solidarity are being forged.
Camps are meant to immiserate and contain. Yet they also incubate culture, mutual aid and political clarity.
Dabashi doesn’t romanticise deprivation; he recasts the camp as a generator of worldliness that isn’t predicated on domination.
Think of this as a counter-cartography: the map that matters now is not borders on paper, but circuits of care and resistance that route around sovereignty’s cruelty.
From here, the book pushes outward: Palestine beyond borders, diaspora, students and workers, synagogues refusing Zionism, refugee networks, coalitions across movements.
The point is practical: the struggle is not quarantined; neither is complicity.
If western governments bankroll the machinery that kills Palestinians, then western publics must disrupt that machinery economically, culturally and electorally.
Dabashi doesn’t hand out a checklist, but his argument all but writes one: boycott, organise, disobey the death-dealing normal.
An insurgent prose for an emergency
Let’s talk about writing. Dabashi’s prose is incandescent. He stacks clauses to a drumbeat, stitches quotations into a prosecutorial brief, and refuses to domesticate his anger.
Some will call the style polemical. Good. Polemic is what you use when neutral diction is part of the crime scene.
He is not trying to make “both sides” feel seen; he is trying to make the dead visible and the living responsible.
The book will irritate readers clinging to elite decorum or academic hedging. It will thrill and steady readers who have been gaslit by years of “context” that never quite manages to include Palestinian lives.
For an average reader who’s been told that Gaza is too complicated, After Savagery is a relief.
It is not simplistic; it is clarifying. It arms you with frames that travel: read the news critically; translate “security” claims into real-world harms; watch for the “humanitarian crisis” label that surgically removes politics; test every universal against Gaza. If it fails there, it fails everywhere.
This book also gives you a language of joyful defiance. The Kanafani thread is not nostalgia; it’s instruction. The lantern is a method. Culture is a method. Sumud is a method. You don’t wait for elites to license your humanity. You practise it, publicly, until it becomes ungovernable.
After Savagery ends not in despair but in a forward tilt: the old metaphysics are collapsing; help the new one be born.
The argument you’ll carry away when you finish, three convictions stick: Gaza is the measure. Any politics or philosophy that can’t look Gaza in the eye is not worth your time.
The West’s moral exceptionalism has expired. What’s left is the hard work of rebuilding universality from the camp outward, universality as solidarity, not domination.
Palestine is not a cause on your list; it is a lens.
Through it, everything sharpens: climate justice, policing, borders, surveillance, labour. The same empire, the same alibi. Choose your side.
This is a book of witness and a book of strategy disguised as philosophy. It will be shelved under Middle East Studies; it belongs on your desk, annotated, next to your news feed. Dabashi does not ask you to admire his argument. He asks you to risk something for it.
In a season of euphemisms, After Savagery tells the truth with its gloves off and its lantern on.
"After Savagery: Gaza, Genocide, and the Illusion of Western Civilization", by Hamid Dabashi, will be released on 30 September 2025 and is currently available for pre-order from Haymarket Books.
Menachem Klein
From
his start in politics, he aimed to use Israel's military might to derail
Palestinian statehood, only to be stopped just short of his goal
Benjamin Netanyahu was 39 years
old when preparations were being made for the United Nations General Assembly
in September 1989, an energetic diplomatic star who served as Israel's
ambassador to the UN.
It was precisely on his home turf, just before the end of his tenure, when one of Israel's most severe diplomatic defeats occurred.
Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) leader Yasser Arafat was invited to speak at the General Assembly, which was supposed to convene in New York.
Arafat was then 20 years older than Netanyahu, more recognised than him on the international stage, and not necessarily in a positive way.
The First Intifada that began spontaneously 10 months earlier marked the PLO leader as the national leader of the Palestinians and a symbol of the Palestinian people's fate.
Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and its failed attempt to eliminate Arafat, the PLO and the national claim for a Palestinian state west of the Jordan River amplified Arafat's symbolic status in the eyes of his public.
The excessive force with which Israel tried to suppress the popular uprising opened the doors of the UN General Assembly to Arafat.
His invitation came after 12 years in which Arafat sought a path through which the PLO could integrate into talks on a political settlement without abandoning its principles.
Israel and the US had long sought to block these efforts, and did so again in 1988. Ronald Reagan's Republican administration refused to grant Arafat a visa, so a special session of the General Assembly was convened in Geneva.
Netanyahu is currently 76 years old, prime minister, sick and reviled as a war criminal with an international arrest warrant hanging over his head.
The State of Palestine
From day one in public service, Netanyahu's life mission was cut and clear: to prevent everything that Arafat wanted to achieve. Until two years ago, he succeeded in doing so.
As prime minister, he established a regime of Jewish supremacy over the entire territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, deepened the Palestinian division, and was on the verge of including Saudi Arabia in the Abraham Accords.
The 7 October Hamas-led attack buried his project. On the initiative of Saudi Arabia and France, key western nations are about to recognise Palestine. In fact, most countries have already recognised it.
It is difficult to credit the current Palestinian achievements to Mahmoud Abbas. The Palestinian Authority president is nearly 90 years old, infirm and works only a small number of hours per day.
Abbas heads a corrupt establishment lacking public legitimacy, which under him has become an operator on behalf of a Jewish supremacy regime.
The "State of Palestine" logo and honour guard that receives Abbas in the Muqata (the Palestinian Authority headquarter in Ramallah) becomes ridiculous when the Israeli military operates undisturbed a few streets away and, together with violent settlers, carries out pogroms against residents.
To Netanyahu's great frustration, it is precisely this failed establishment that is about to gain state recognition from key western nations.
This move does not recognise the reality of a state in the making, as was the case with the Jewish Yishuv during the British Mandate period and the Palestinian Authority during its first stage. This is a recognition of the necessity to replace it with a different reality.
However, international recognition has an additional layer.
Arafat's opportunity
As in 1988, the excessive force - genocide if we define it correctly - that Israel carries out against the Palestinian people with weapons, assistance and political backing from western countries is pushing forward that international recognition.
This is comparable to the guilt of nations after the Holocaust that motivated them in 1947 to support Israel's establishment at the expense of the native Palestinian majority. Accompanying this is the guilt about European colonialism in general and its Zionist chapter in particular.
As in 1988, the cooperation between the Trump administration and Netanyahu's government has prompted the United States to ban Abbas's entry to speak at the upcoming UN General Assembly.
French President Emmanuel Macron and the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman, plan to chair an event during the Assembly where western leaders will join them in recognising Palestine.
In an attempt to drain the expected recognition of its significance, the United States decided to comprehensively ban the entry of any person holding a State of Palestine passport.
Let's return to 1988. In a rare moment of wisdom, the PLO concluded that the popular uprising created a political opportunity that its armed struggle had failed to produce.
In other words, it was not the force Israel imposed on the PLO that led to change but rather the PLO's success in surviving Israel's 1982 attack and being accepted by the Intifada rebels as their leader.
Its status among the Palestinian public, in general public opinion and in western political establishments brought the PLO closer to achieving independence for occupied Palestine and it was ready to declare this.
A fait accompli
On 15 November 1988, within the framework of the Palestinian Declaration of Independence, the PLO recognised the UN Partition Resolution of 1947, which it had vehemently rejected in the Palestinian Charter of 1964 and 1968.
The PLO explicitly stated that the State of Palestine would dwell peacefully alongside the Jewish state.
Thus, the PLO effectively accepted Security Council Resolution 242 from 1967, which serves as the cornerstone for all political plans for an Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement.
This was a significant development in the PLO's path, which Israel consistently ignores. Arafat emphasised these principles in his speech before the special session of the UN General Assembly in Geneva on 13 December.
In November and December that year, Netanyahu became an MP and was on his way to the position of deputy foreign minister under his patron Moshe Arens. Another diplomatic defeat occurred under their noses.
Immediately after Arafat's speech at the General Assembly, the Swedish foreign minister and three Jewish peace activists who were counted on the "extreme left" - Rita Hauser, Stanley Sheinbaum and Drora Kass - opened contacts with US Secretary of State George Shultz.
They asked what, in his opinion, was missing from Arafat's General Assembly speech. Arafat included the text that Shultz dictated word for word in a news conference he held in Geneva. In essence, Arafat said that the PLO recognises Israel's existence, condemns terrorism and accepts Resolution 242.
In Washington, a twilight period prevailed. The Reagan administration was on its way to the history books, and president-elect Bill Clinton was preparing to enter office in January.
Contrary to unwritten rules, the outgoing administration presented the new administration with a fait accompli. The United States recognised the PLO and opened an official dialogue with it.
This was a severe blow to Israel's political rejectionism under Likud leadership.
The zealots of Masada
With his back against the wall of the 7 October failure and facing a tsunami of western recognition of the State of Palestine, Netanyahu is fighting to save his life mission: preventing the establishment of a Palestinian state through Jewish supremacy force.
Netanyahu cannot bear the harsh truth: his greatest political achievement was thwarted by Hamas, whose attack harmed Israel as no Palestinian organisation had ever done.
Hamas did not gain politically from the unprecedented blow to Israel but succeeded in blocking its normalisation with Saudi Arabia.
Netanyahu thinks that "total victory" will eliminate Hamas and its achievement. As total victory becomes more distant, Netanyahu pursues it with more war crimes and unleashing more force.
The attack in Qatar, threats to act against Hamas leaders even in Turkey, and his desire to push Gaza Strip residents to Egypt at the cost of destroying the peace agreement are part of his desperate policy.
Netanyahu is not alone in the battle against the Palestinian state. Israel's Jewish society stands behind him, despite the fact that most of it would like to see him retire from political life.
Internationally, only the Trump administration stands beside him. Together, they are uprooting the relations built between the United States and Palestinians since 1988. They are aware of their limited ability to block or delay the recognition of Palestine.
Therefore, their main effort is directed at changing the reality on the ground to create no demographic and geographic basis on which the State of Palestine can be established.
Netanyahu brought about the total destruction of and devastation in the Gaza Strip, and on a smaller scale (for now?) in the occupied West Bank, where he plans to add de jure annexation as a response to western recognition of Palestine. In other words, to hollow out international recognition.
From his entry into Israel's foreign service, Netanyahu worked to translate Israel's military power into political capital to prevent the establishment of Palestine. When he almost touched his goal, his path was blocked.
In response, the desperate Netanyahu now relies on sheer force alone. He and Israeli society refuse to acknowledge that the 7 October attack came from the place where Israeli force had been applied for years in the most brutal and cruel manner.
Israel refuses to recognise that Hamas's attack proved that exclusive reliance on force and imposing Jewish supremacy have turned Israel into a genocidal society, and a society whose historical model it adopts is that of the zealots of Masada.
September 12, 2025
Hossam el-Hamalawy
The
Columbia professor's new book argues that Gaza is the measure by which any
moral framework must be judged
Hamid Dabashi’s After Savagery:
Gaza, Genocide, and the Illusion of Western Civilization is a book that does
not nudge; it wallops.Written in the long shadow of Gaza’s devastation, it refuses euphemism, demolishes the polite fictions that anaesthetise Western consciences, and insists on a simple thesis: Gaza is the ethical ground zero of our time.
What we call “the West” has been revealed, not as a civilisational high point, but as a system of domination that dresses barbarism in moral drag.
Read it if you’re ready to stop pretending. Read it if you want language equal to the horror, and a map for thinking, and acting, beyond it.
Published by Haymarket Books, it opens not with hedging but with the unvarnished vocabulary of genocide.
Dabashi peppers the book with quotes from Conrad to Ayelet Shaked, showing how the injunction to “exterminate all the brutes” is not a relic of empire but a living operating system, retooled for a besieged strip of land that has become the world’s moral mirror.
The result is a searing, scandalously explicit indictment and a celebratory defence of Palestinian life and culture as a generative, life-making force.
Gaza as the new categorical imperative
Dabashi’s most provocative move is philosophical: he rewrites Kant from the rubble. The book argues that Gaza has overturned the “metaphysics of morals” and exposed a metaphysics of barbarism at the heart of the West.
If a universal law permits mass death so long as it is rationalised by security, then the universal law is rotten.
Gaza, he insists, is the test: either we orient our ethics from there, or our ethics are counterfeit.
This isn’t ivory-tower wordplay; it’s a demand for a total reframing of moral philosophy in the wake of livestreamed atrocity.
The chapter-length meditations hammer the point: from official language that brands Palestinians “human animals”, to policy choices that starve and bomb civilians with impunity, the book refuses to let philosophy float above the blood.
A categorical imperative, Dabashi says, now lives or dies under the dust of collapsed apartment blocks. That’s not melodrama; that’s accountability.
Israel is not merely backed by “the West”, it is “the West”.
The book’s core political claim is blunt: Israel is the condensed, weaponised expression of western imperial history, a garrison state projecting imperial interests, not a normal country gone astray.
From witness to martyr
This is more than the familiar settler-colonial framing; it’s an argument that Gaza exposes the DNA of the West’s self-exculpating myth, linking Indigenous erasure in the Americas, the transatlantic slave trade, and European fascism to the ongoing Palestinian catastrophe.
Dabashi leans on Cesaire’s cold insight: the West only truly recognised “the crime” when the methods of empire were used on Europe itself. That recognition never translated into universal empathy; Gaza proves it.
The author is not asking to swap one victimhood for another. He marks the Holocaust’s specificity while rejecting the move that isolates it from the larger architecture of European genocidal practice.
In this telling, Zionism is not a prophylactic against antisemitism but a colonial project that keeps the region and Jews living within a militarised enclave that is permanently unsafe.
Safety cannot be engineered on stolen land policed by permanent war. That’s not “security”; that’s a factory of insecurity, subsidised and protected by Western power.
One of the book’s quiet masterstrokes is linguistic. Dabashi interrogates the concept of “witness” through European philosophy (testis, superstes) and then pivots to Arabic and Persian: shahid (witness) and shaheed (martyr).
In our languages, he notes, witnesses and martyrs sit side by side, morally fused. That proximity matters.
It dignifies the act of testimony and honours the dead as more than statistics.
It also rebukes a discourse that treats Palestinian life as a data problem. Pair this with his evocation of Naji al-Ali’s Handala, and you feel the book’s moral scale: witness is not an academic construct; it’s a life risk.
Modern Western philosophy has placed narrow limits on what can be “testified” or “witnessed”.
Dabashi presents a contemporary challenge to this assertion: what does it mean to read Gaza when the archive is livestreamed but still declared “untestifiable” by those in power?
The book’s answer: you read against the grain. You witness, and you make a moral stand where your witnessing puts you.
‘Processed news’ and liberal damage control
If you’ve gagged on the euphemisms of prestige outlets, this book names your nausea. Dabashi accuses mainstream media of producing processed news, like processed food.
Such outlets, he says, provide additives, preservatives, artificial colouring, manufactured to stabilise a political diet rather than nourish understanding.
This isn’t a lazy screed against “the media”; It’s a precise indictment of rhetorical regimes that normalise the abnormal, minimise the criminal, and launder the obscene under the banner of “balance”.
He calls out the New York Times and BBC as archetypes of this liberal-imperial house style, then teaches a tactic: read them forward, backwards, and against themselves until the seams of ideology show.
A similar ferocity greets high philosophy. Dabashi’s earlier critique of Jurgen Habermas’s Zionism reappears here as an index of a broader bankruptcy: a canon that chokes on Palestinian life while waxing nobly about universalism.
The effect is cumulative and devastating: the words that rule our world are designed to keep some deaths unintelligible.
As an alternative, the book offers the antidote - new words rooted in Gaza’s reality.
Palestine as an epistemic challenge
This is where the book begins to sing. Dabashi is not content to catalogue abuses; he wants to change the axis on which knowledge spins.
“World literature”, “world cinema”, “world religion” - he dismantles the cosy universals that pretend to include everything while functionally excluding Palestine.
How do you induct a nation into “postcolonial” frameworks when its colonisation is ongoing?
How do you slot Palestinian art into “world” categories whose gatekeepers insist the “world” is what the West already knows? You don’t. You move the gate.
He proposes a different vocabulary, Nakba (catastrophe), Intifada (uprising), Sumud (steadfastness), as the conceptual scaffolding for a decolonial knowledge project that begins in Palestine and builds out.
This isn’t provincialism; it’s a demand that the “world” expand to fit reality rather than compress reality to fit the “world”.
The point is not inclusion into existing categories but transformation of the categories themselves.
The art that keeps the future lit
One of the book’s most moving threads is its tour through culture: poetry after genocide, cinema after catastrophe, the stories and symbols that refuse erasure.
Dabashi focuses on Ghassan Kanafani, revolutionary, writer, assassinated at 36, and on Anni Kanafani, his Danish comrade, whose life’s work with Palestinian children continues in Beirut’s camps.
Then he brings in Italian filmmaker Mario Rizzi and his film The Little Lantern, which stages Kanafani’s story with children in Burj el-Barajnah, crafting a pedagogy of hope amid the labyrinth of exile.
These aren’t detours; they are the book’s marrow. Culture is not decoration. It’s survival.
Dabashi explains how Rizzi alters Kanafani’s tale in a striking way. The old man with a lantern is replaced by a woman crowning the queen - shifting the story’s focus from an individual symbol of light to a communal ceremony rooted in collective experience.
The image is unforgettable: if you cannot house a single lantern, how will you hold the sun? Gaza won’t wait for abstract sunshine; it gathers small lights, ten thousand small lights, until the room glows. That is how people build a future under blockade.
The garrison and the camp
Another aspect of the book is a confrontation: the garrison state versus the camp. Israel, as a garrison, is the last outpost of a dying imperial order; Palestine, as a camp, is the site where new forms of life and solidarity are being forged.
Camps are meant to immiserate and contain. Yet they also incubate culture, mutual aid and political clarity.
Dabashi doesn’t romanticise deprivation; he recasts the camp as a generator of worldliness that isn’t predicated on domination.
Think of this as a counter-cartography: the map that matters now is not borders on paper, but circuits of care and resistance that route around sovereignty’s cruelty.
From here, the book pushes outward: Palestine beyond borders, diaspora, students and workers, synagogues refusing Zionism, refugee networks, coalitions across movements.
The point is practical: the struggle is not quarantined; neither is complicity.
If western governments bankroll the machinery that kills Palestinians, then western publics must disrupt that machinery economically, culturally and electorally.
Dabashi doesn’t hand out a checklist, but his argument all but writes one: boycott, organise, disobey the death-dealing normal.
An insurgent prose for an emergency
Let’s talk about writing. Dabashi’s prose is incandescent. He stacks clauses to a drumbeat, stitches quotations into a prosecutorial brief, and refuses to domesticate his anger.
Some will call the style polemical. Good. Polemic is what you use when neutral diction is part of the crime scene.
He is not trying to make “both sides” feel seen; he is trying to make the dead visible and the living responsible.
The book will irritate readers clinging to elite decorum or academic hedging. It will thrill and steady readers who have been gaslit by years of “context” that never quite manages to include Palestinian lives.
For an average reader who’s been told that Gaza is too complicated, After Savagery is a relief.
It is not simplistic; it is clarifying. It arms you with frames that travel: read the news critically; translate “security” claims into real-world harms; watch for the “humanitarian crisis” label that surgically removes politics; test every universal against Gaza. If it fails there, it fails everywhere.
This book also gives you a language of joyful defiance. The Kanafani thread is not nostalgia; it’s instruction. The lantern is a method. Culture is a method. Sumud is a method. You don’t wait for elites to license your humanity. You practise it, publicly, until it becomes ungovernable.
After Savagery ends not in despair but in a forward tilt: the old metaphysics are collapsing; help the new one be born.
The argument you’ll carry away when you finish, three convictions stick: Gaza is the measure. Any politics or philosophy that can’t look Gaza in the eye is not worth your time.
The West’s moral exceptionalism has expired. What’s left is the hard work of rebuilding universality from the camp outward, universality as solidarity, not domination.
Palestine is not a cause on your list; it is a lens.
Through it, everything sharpens: climate justice, policing, borders, surveillance, labour. The same empire, the same alibi. Choose your side.
This is a book of witness and a book of strategy disguised as philosophy. It will be shelved under Middle East Studies; it belongs on your desk, annotated, next to your news feed. Dabashi does not ask you to admire his argument. He asks you to risk something for it.
In a season of euphemisms, After Savagery tells the truth with its gloves off and its lantern on.
"After Savagery: Gaza, Genocide, and the Illusion of Western Civilization", by Hamid Dabashi, will be released on 30 September 2025 and is currently available for pre-order from Haymarket Books.
No comments:
Post a Comment