Moral Abdication :How the World Failed to Stop the Destruction of Gaza - The Verso Palestine Pamphlets

4.51 ( 353 Ratings by Goodreads)
Moral Abdication

Moral Abdication :How the World Failed to Stop the Destruction of Gaza - The Verso Palestine Pamphlets

4.51 (353 Ratings by Goodreads)
paperback | English
Published: 7 January, 2025
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Description

Consent to the obliteration of Gaza has created an enormous gulf in the global moral order. History will record how Western governments and large sections of their elites have supported the war waged by Israel against Palestinians after Hamas's attack on 7 October 2023 and silenced voices calling for a ceasefire, a just peace and a respect of international law. Not only buildings have been devastated and civilians massacred, but also language and thought have been damaged. Providing an archive of the first six months of the war nourished by multiple sources, the book examines how the past of occupation and oppression of Palestine has been negated, how a vocabulary and a grammar of facts have been imposed, how accusations of antisemitism have produced censorship and self-censorship, how mainstream media have been restrained and biased. It addresses the acceptance of the unequal worth of lives and the differential treatment of deaths. It questions the invocation of the existential threat for Israel and the debt contracted because of the Holocaust. It analyses how the geopolitical and economic stakes in the Middle East and the growing rejection of Muslims and Arabs have contributed to the abdication of values and principles claimed as foundational.
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More Details

Type Book
ISBN13 9781804299678
ISBN10 1804299677
Number Of Pages 128
Item Weight 150 g
Publisher / Reseller Verso Books
Format paperback
Edition Paperback original
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Media Reviews

"One of the outcomes of the ongoing genocide in Gaza has been a total collapse of any semblance of moral authority on the part of the West...Didier Fassin’s book surveys this moral abdication, focusing on how many western states and institutions have actively consented to the destruction of Gaza, particularly by obstructing and criminalising Palestinian solidarity. By foregrounding students and other activists who have defended the basic rights of Palestinians, the book also seeks to 'attest to the existence of a refusal, shared by many, of consent to the obliteration of Gaza'."
Irish Times

"[A] powerful book...How is it possible, Fassin asks, that with rare exceptions, 'for political leaders and intellectual personalities of the principal Western countries…the lives of Palestinian civilians are worth several hundred times less than the lives of Israeli civilians'? How do we explain why 'demonstrations and meetings demanding a just peace are banned'? Why is it that 'without independent confirmation, most of the mainstream Western media quasi-automatically reproduce the version of events relayed by the camp of the occupiers, while incessantly casting doubt on that recounted by the occupied'? Why do 'so many of those who could have spoken, not to say stood up in opposition, avert their eyes from the annihilation of a territory, its history, its monuments, its hospitals, its schools, its housing, its infrastructure, its roads, and its inhabitants—in many cases, even encouraging its continuation'?"
—Omer Bartov, The New York Review of Books

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Author's Bio

Didier Fassin is Professor at the Collège de France, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. Anthropologist, sociologist and physician, he conducted research in Senegal, Congo, South Africa, Ecuador, and France, focusing on moral and political issues. Recipient of the Gold Medal in anthropology and the Nomis Distinguished Scientist Award, he is a member of the American Philosophical Society and a former Vice-President of Médecins sans frontières. He authored 23 books, translated in 9 languages, including Humanitarian Reason. A Moral History of the Present and Enforcing Order. An Ethnography of Public Policing, and edited 27 collective volumes.

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