Genocide in Gaza. The Manufacturing of Western Consent

Alain Gresh 

History did not begin on October 7, 2023. In this focus, Orient XXI looks back on a year of genocidal war in Gaza. In his latest book Une étrange défaite, Didier Fassin, professor at the Collège de France, has the merit of dismantling, piece by piece, the responsibility of political, intellectual and media leaders who shape public opinion to the point of making the unacceptable acceptable.

This image represents an abstract artistic composition with human silhouettes. The figures, drawn in black, are dynamically arranged on a vibrant red background. Their poses evoke movement and interaction, while the contrast between the dark silhouettes and the bright background creates a strong visual impression. The geometric shapes in the background add an extra dimension to the work, reinforcing its expressive and emotional character.

Mamdouh Kashlan (1929-2022), Children of Napalm, 1972, oil on canvas

The question comes back, nagging, with each crisis in the Middle East, with each “escalation” against the Palestinians, with each killing in Gaza. Yes, of course, but… Sudan? Congo? Afghanistan? Beyond the constant understatement of the number of Palestinian deaths (thanks to this magical precision: "according to the Hamas Ministry of Health"), the questioning - falsely naive - erases a fundamental distinction between the war against Gaza and the other conflicts mentioned... A distinction highlighted by Didier Fassin in his latest book:

None of these wars and none of these massacres has been the subject of such unwavering support from Western governments and such systematic condemnation from those who denounce them, even though the scale of the devastation and the desire to erase them are incomparable.

In a hard-hitting essay, A Strange Defeat, a reference to the famous testimony of Marc Bloch, written in the aftermath of the collapse of France in 1940 and which attempts to understand the political reasons, the professor at the Collège de France returns to the "moral defeat" of Western leaders in the face of the crushing of Gaza, which has all the characteristics of a genocide. Even if it will take a few years for the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to legally stamp it as such. Should we, in the meantime, wash our hands of the blood flowing in Palestine?

However, we just have to take the Israeli leaders at their word. Irish lawyer Blinne Ní Ghrálaigh, who defended South Africa’s application before the ICJ in January 2024, was able to find the right words. Gaza represents “the first genocide in history during which the victims broadcast their own destruction in real time in the desperate — and for the moment vain — hope that the world can do something.” As noted in the ICJ ruling and Israeli historian Raz Segal, who speaks of “a textbook case in genocide”:

Speeches, even from the highest echelons of power, have shown that the Israeli military intervention in Gaza was aimed at much more than the disappearance of Hamas (…): it was the entire territory and its residents that were the target. The list of quotes documented by South Africa is impressive: the prime minister asking soldiers to “remember what Amalek did to you,” in reference to the biblical enemy whose sacred text Israel was to “kill men and women, infants and newborns” without distinction; the president stating about the Palestinians that “the entire nation is responsible” and must be “fought until its back is broken”; the defense minister indicating that there would be no more “electricity, food, water, or gasoline,” because this is a war “against human animals” and we must “act accordingly.”

The fallacies of the media and intellectual narrative

One by one, Fassin deconstructs the fallacies of the Israeli and Western narrative, the most pernicious of which would be that the story begins on October 7, 2023: buried the blockade of Gaza; erased the expansion of colonization and assassinations in the West Bank; forgotten the Judaization of Jerusalem and the provocations against the Al-Aqsa mosque; ignored the thousands of prisoners in Israeli jails. As for “the most moral army in the world,” it would only “retaliate” to what was, in the words of President Emmanuel Macron, “the greatest anti-Semitic massacre of our century.”1 Which led to minimizing or hiding the images that came from Gaza and the West Bank—the latest example, that of Israeli soldiers swinging three Palestinians from rooftops in Qabatiy (West Bank) in September 2024, thus recalling the practices of members of the Islamic State organization (ISO)2.

This is how, with the active help of the mainstream media, Western leaders forged “consent” to genocide, consent that, writes Fassin:

has two distinct dimensions. The first is passive. It is the fact of not opposing a project. We therefore allow it to be accomplished. The second is active. It is the fact of approving this project. We then provide our support for its realization. In the case of the war in Gaza, the two dimensions are combined.

Of course, the responsibilities are different, depending on the country and within each of them. In the Western world, it is the United States that bears the primary guilt, but the European countries, by providing weapons, like Germany and France, or by proclaiming "Israel's right to defend itself", have politically and diplomatically covered Israel.

Discrediting any critical voice

What is also striking, notes the author, is the desire to discredit any critical voice, including by force of the police or the courts, under the accusation of "apology for terrorism". Adding the accusation of anti-Semitism to complete the demonstration. Since the beginning of the second Intifada in 2000, a few intellectuals had been accused, or even prosecuted for anti-Semitism, whether Edgar Morin or the resistance fighter Stéphane Hessel. But the witch hunt reached an unprecedented level after October 7, 2023, with the nominal denunciation of journalists - without the profession being moved by it - academics and ordinary people. If many of these attacks come from agencies more or less financed by Israel, they are orchestrated by the State and relayed by "good citizens" anxious to denounce those who do not think straight.

Didier Fassin himself was thus accused, in a column by some university colleagues3 of adopting a “reading grid that constantly tells us that a Jewish life is worth much less than any other” — if we had to open accounts, we could recall that since October 7, approximately 2,000 Israelis and more than 41,000 Palestinians have been killed, a ratio of 1 to 20, clearly to the detriment of “Palestinian life”. Fassin would also “relativize” the Shoah, would follow in the footsteps of Roger Garaudy4 who sank into Holocaust denial at the end of his life. The author would be an anti-Semite, anathema that allows us to close the debate before even opening it.

For its detractors, it would be unacceptable to proclaim the colonial nature of the Zionist movement, which was nevertheless highlighted nearly sixty years ago by Maxime Rodinson, and which would deserve, even if it is contested, at least an in-depth discussion. It is true that the debate at the university has become perilous since a hundred professors called on the political power, in October 2020, to monitor those suspected of “Islamo-leftism” or “wokism” — an attack on academic freedoms that no one had dared to demand since the end of the Algerian war5.

Recently, the names of 11,000 Palestinian children killed in Gaza were published, including 700 infants under one year old. Marc Bloch was already thinking about the very young victims of wars:

There is one of those pictures that I feel I will never get used to: that of the terror on the faces of children fleeing the fall of bombs, in a village that is being flown over. I pray to heaven that I never see that vision again, in reality, and as little as possible in my dreams. It is atrocious that wars cannot spare childhood, not only because it is the future but especially because its tender weakness and irresponsibility address such a confident appeal to our protection. The Christian legend6 would probably not have been so severe to Herod, if it had only had to reproach him for the death of the Precursor. The inexpiable crime was the Massacre of the Innocents.7

Eighty years later, this "massacre of the Innocents" continues. And many of those who, in French universities or elsewhere, claim to be part of Marc Bloch's legacy accept it without qualms.