Moral Abdication

Reviews / Votes

"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