Didier Fassin is an anthropologist, sociologist, and medical doctor. He is also a professor at the College de France and the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton University. Previously, Fassin was vice president of Médecins Sans Frontières. Last year, he published a short book on the war in Gaza, titled Une Étrange Défaite: Sur le Consentement à L’Ecrasement de Gaza (La Découverte, 2024), which has been translated into English under the title Moral Abdication: How the World Failed to Stop the Destruction of Gaza (Verso Books, 2024). In it, he analyzed the way that many countries, especially in the West, effectively consented to the Israeli military campaign in Gaza, despite its great destructiveness and the large number of victims among the civilian population. Diwan interviewed Fassin in June to discuss his book, and the broader implications of the Gaza war, particularly how it has affected the ties between Western nations and the countries of the Global South.
Michael Young: You recently published a book, in French, titled Une Étrange Défaite: Sur le Consentement à L’Ecrasement de Gaza, which has been translated into English under the title Moral Abdication: How the World Failed to Stop the Destruction of Gaza. The French title has the key word “consent” in it, in this case meaning the consent in Gaza’s crushing. When you use the term “consent” what specifically do you mean? Consent by whom?
Didier Fassin: We can distinguish between two modes of consent. Consent can be passive: remaining silent and refusing to oppose crimes being committed. In the first year of the attack on Gaza, several members of the United Nations Security Council declined to call for a ceasefire in the territory, while most higher educational institutions failed to condemn the destruction of Palestinian universities and the assassination of their professors.
Consent can also be active: contributing to the perpetration of crimes. For example, after October 7, 2023, many European heads of state traveled to Israel to affirm their support for its reprisals against Gaza, and several countries—including the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, and France—sent weaponry to the Israeli armed forces.
Most Western states thus acquiesced, passively or actively, to Gaza’s destruction. This was not surprising as they had never denounced, let alone sanctioned, the violations by Israel of multiple UN resolutions. I am sometimes asked how to define Western countries. An empirical delimitation could be those who had not recognized the state of Palestine until 2023. But Western countries were not the only ones to consent to Gaza’s obliteration. There were others, such as countries in Eastern Europe, for example Hungary; in South Asia, such as India; and in Latin America, such as Argentina. Even various Arab countries were more interested in trading with Israel than resolving the question of Palestine.
MY: In the polarized international climate today, in which criticism of Israeli actions has often been met with accusations of antisemitism, what motivated you to write the book? How easy was it for you to publish it? And what has the reaction been to it?
DF: I wrote the book to leave a trace of what happened in the first six months of the war on Gaza, as I understood that historical revisionism was already at work with the erasure of what had been the attitude of Western governments, intellectual elites, and mainstream media. I thought that this was the most serious moral and political failure since World War II, as these governments, elites, and media outlets were justifying, with some even supporting, the annihilation of the culture, memory, and future of this small territory whose population was being decimated. I knew the risks of doing so since I had experienced the repression targeting those who denounced the criminal activity of Israel, evoked the history of Palestine, or even called for a ceasefire. I came under attack after publishing an article on November 1, 2023, alerting people to the risk of a genocide in Gaza, which had led to accusations of antisemitism, and even of secretly seeking the extermination of the Jews. But I believed it was the responsibility of academics like me to correct an image of the war that had been distorted in the news and in official statements.
MY: Some observers have regarded the ongoing slaughter in Gaza as representing a foundational moment, perhaps even a rift, in the West’s relationship with the rest of the world, particularly what is called the Global South. Do you agree, and do you believe Gaza will have lasting repercussions internationally?
DF: Definitely. The double standards in the policies of Western countries have long been established and recognized, whether in terms of human rights, international justice, or diplomatic negotiations, especially in the Middle East, but also in Africa and elsewhere. However, consenting to what an increasing number of UN agencies and rapporteurs, nongovernmental organizations, Israeli Jewish experts of the Shoah have called a genocide is of a different scale. The rift between the Global North and the Global South is deep. Western governments have lost all legitimacy and any ability to give lessons to the rest of the world. They have shown that might makes right and that la raison du plus fort is the only thing that counts.
MY: You make the point that there is a paradox at play over Gaza, namely that what you call the moral abdication of states toward the killing there has been justified in moral terms. Can you explain what you mean?
DF: Language has been damaged and values have been reversed. The mass murder of civilians, including the highest number of children in any recent conflict, has been presented as a legitimate riposte to the Hamas attack of October 7, even when it violates international humanitarian law and probably the Genocide Convention. The Israeli army is said to be the most moral army in the world, despite the cruelty of its soldiers, their use of human shields, their destruction of schools and hospitals, and their generalized practice of torture. The assassination of poets, journalists, and humanitarians has been described as the elimination of terrorists. Civilians arrested and incarcerated without charge have been referred to as prisoners instead of as hostages, to serve as bargaining chips. Western governments and many intellectuals have repeated that Israel’s existence is threatened, which justifies its war, when this conflict actually advances to an unprecedented degree its colonial project to impose its sovereignty over Palestine from the river to the sea, as promised in the 1977 Likud platform. There is a Hebrew name for this alteration of language and values. It is called hasbara, or propaganda to present a moral image of Israel to the world. However, many observers believe it more likely that this image will be tainted for a long time.
MY: You are a medical doctor and public health specialist, so what is your assessment of the true casualty toll in Gaza—bearing in mind that you write in your book that efforts to underestimate the Palestinian death toll have involved “taking their lives, while denying them their deaths.”
DF: We know from previous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, studied by the Watson Institute at Brown University, that the number of indirect deaths caused by malnutrition, infections, maiming, deteriorating conditions of hygiene, destroyed health facilities, and the denial of access to water and electricity, is approximately four times higher than direct deaths caused by bombing and gunfire. There are currently an estimated 56,000 people who have been killed in Gaza, mostly civilians. Considering the extreme situation described by humanitarian workers, with the famine and devastation of the health system, the actual number could exceed 250,000 deaths—more than 10 percent of the total population.
Yet, the death of Palestinians is denied in three ways. First, suspicion is systematically expressed about the statistics provided by the Health Ministry of Gaza, even though its figures were found to be reliable in previous conflicts. Second, the Israeli armed forces have claimed that the mass killing of civilians corresponds to collateral damage that it tries to avoid, even though the testimony of soldiers and investigations by independent journalists have revealed a deliberate intention to decimate the population, for example through the dropping of one-ton bombs on areas where people have sought refuge. Third, deaths are effectively concealed by the fact that the dead cannot be properly buried according to traditional rituals. Instead, they are thrown by the Israeli military into informal mass graves, their remains have often been reduced to fragments, their bodies are not given to their families, and cemeteries are desecrated.
MY: You cite Israeli historian Raz Segal to the effect that what is going on in Gaza is a “textbook case of genocide.” Do you agree with him?
DF: The case brought by South Africa before the International Court of Justice establishes two facts that correspond to the definition of a genocide. On the one hand, acts were committed on a huge scale to decimate the population of Gaza, seriously harm many people, starve everyone, and prevent births among Palestinians. This represent four of the five criteria of a genocide. On the other hand, the intent to destroy a large part of the territory’s population, including children, was explicitly stated numerous times by the highest Israeli political and military authorities. There is therefore little doubt that the conditions for the recognition of a genocide are met.
Will the International Court of Justice go from declaring its plausibility to affirming its reality? Many legal scholars think it likely that it will indeed do so. However, extraordinary pressures have been exerted on its judges, and we know that threats have also been directed by Israeli officials against the prosecutors of the International Criminal Court who were investigating crimes committed by their country. The United States, in turn, imposed various sanctions on them after the court issued arrest warrants for Israeli leaders. So, in this context of intimidation, recognition of the genocide perpetrated in Gaza will be an important litmus test for the independence of international justice.
MY: In the aftermath of the Shoah, is it easy to be perceived as a victim of Israel?
DF: Invocation of the Shoah has served to justify the support of Western countries, especially Germany, for the destruction of Gaza. This is highly problematic. First, most Israelis today are not descendants of victims of the genocide of European Jews, and Israeli governments themselves have long refused to instrumentalize references to this tragedy. Many Jews reject the weaponization of their memory.
Second, the perceived culpability of countries that had participated in the Shoah has always hidden other more serious reasons for their sympathy for Israel, namely that it is viewed as an outpost of the West in a hostile Middle East.
Third, the persecution of Jews by Europeans over the centuries cannot be absolved by the mass murder of Palestinians, who had no responsibility for such persecution.
Fourth, even if it is painful to admit this, having been the victim of a heinous crime does not guard against perpetrating heinous crimes oneself. We have today a paradoxical, and shocking, situation in which grandchildren of Germans who participated in, or consented to, the destruction of the Jews 80 years ago are denouncing Jews critical of Israel as being antisemitic, even when these Jews are themselves the grandchildren of victims of the Shoah.
