Moral Abdication: How the World Failed to Stop the Destruction of Gaza

Moral Abdication: How the World Failed to Stop the Destruction of Gaza

Moral Abdication: How the World Failed to Stop the Destruction of GazaIda AudehMiddle East Books and MorePosted On March 21, 2025




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Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, May 2025, pp. 84-87
Middle East Books Review
Moral Abdication: How the World Failed to Stop the Destruction of Gaza

By Didier Fassin, translated by Gregory Elliott, Verso, 2025, paperback, 128 pp. MEB $14.95
The Destruction of Palestine Is the Destruction of the Earth

By Andreas Malm, Verso, 2025, paperback, 144 pp. MEB $14.95
Reviewed by Ida Audeh

FROM THE OUTSET of its response to October 7, Israel’s genocidal intent in Gaza was never in doubt; it killed Palestinians on an industrial scale over a 15-month period and made the environment inhospitable to human life. The world gave it a wide berth to accomplish these goals.

Why did Western countries see it fit to adopt Israel’s genocidal agenda as their own, and at what cost to humankind does the abdication of responsibility for genocide come?

Two recent books published by Verso address these questions, exploring Israel’s role in the global imperial order and the moral and political corollaries of the bloodletting the world has watched unfold for more than 15 months, with a resumption looming in the background.

Andreas Malm’s The Destruction of Palestine Is the Destruction of the Earth consists of three essays, the first and longest of which is an exploration of the convergence point between two processes, the political and the environmental, for which Gaza stands as a microcosm. Malm describes the Gaza genocide as a “technogenocide” perpetrated by a technologically advanced state and possibly “the first advanced late capitalist genocide.”

Malm begins in 1840, a year with significance both to the history of Palestine and to the climate disaster facing us now. Great Britain had developed steamboats, and it had a surplus of cotton that needed new markets. It approached Muḥammad Ali, pasha of Egypt, whose realm extended to the Levant, but the latter wasn’t interested because Egypt had its own cotton industry. To help the pasha see things differently, the British positioned their steamships facing Beirut and began shelling. They did this down the coast, conquering Akka in three days, continuing to Jaffa and Gaza and Alexandria. Their strategy was to inflict maximum civilian casualties and to destroy the built environment so that the British could set the terms of future relations. Muḥammad Ali caved, and Egypt imported British cotton, which destroyed its own cotton industry. The deindustrialization of Egypt that resulted from this encounter “placed the region as a whole in subordination to the advanced capitalist countries of the West…a power relation with very durable results.”

The year 1840 was also when a British statesman and politician, Lord Palmerston, floated the idea that Palestine be colonized by Jews, who would “place themselves virtually under our protection, they would come back in considerable numbers, and bring with them much wealth.” The proposal was consistent with what Malm refers to as the “mania” for the Zionist project—a full 77 years before the 1917 Balfour Declaration. A Jewish entity in Palestine would be tethered to the metropole and facilitate capitalist development without challenge. Malm states elegantly: “When the Zionist movement was eventually assembled, it was a wagon that could be placed on ready-made tracks.” Malm argues that after 1917, and with the British Mandate in place, Palestine was in the process of transforming into a center for capitalism. The Nakba brought into being a state that would solidify that transformation, and after 1967 the focus was on defending that state.

Fossil fuel production received renewed attention in the 2020s, with the discovery of natural gas resources off the coast of Gaza. Amid Gaza’s recent destruction, extraction and exploration continued unhindered. The multinational interest in exploiting this resource irrespective of the harm done to the environment helps explain Western support for the slaughter of the population that might have resisted foreign control. Capitalist countries recognize no restrictions on their appetite to extract fossil fuels, and they are indifferent to climate catastrophes—hurricanes, heat waves, floods, more frequent and more intense fires caused by this lucrative, albeit life-destroying, activity. And so in a very literal sense, the destruction of Gaza and its population is part of an extractive process that will destroy the planet.

The second essay in Malm’s book is a brilliant defense of the Palestinian resistance from naysayers who reject it for not being a secular-led movement and from those who fault it for the violence it unleashed. He argues gently but persuasively that such critiques do not hold up when examined through a historical lens.

In a short essay that concludes the book, Malm addresses the role of the Israel lobby in the Middle East policy of the United States: Does the U.S. government act to fulfill its own interests or does the Israel lobby sway the U.S. government to act in ways that serve Israeli (but not necessarily U.S.) interests? He argues that Israel is part of a Western capitalist empire, created as a base in a resource-rich geography to provide Western countries with unhindered access to oil and gas; as such, there is no need to lobby the U.S. government to further Israel’s interests. One is left to conclude that the lobby helps keep in check members of Congress and the general public who aren’t on board with U.S. global hegemony.

How the destruction of Gaza was brought about is the subject of Didier Fassin’s Moral Abdication: How the World Failed to Stop the Destruction of Gaza. Consider the facts: Not only was Israel’s genocidal intent well-advertised, but the killing was livestreamed by the victims to people around the globe. The killing was actively aided by the United States, Germany and other NATO countries; the killers’ excuses for its genocide were accepted by the media as plausible; calls by protesters to end the slaughter were denounced as anti-Semitic; and Western countries showed an astonishing willingness to trash the civil rights of their own citizens to make the world less hostile to a foreign country. As Fassin put it, “such an inversion of the values proclaimed by Western societies, such a political dereliction, such an intellectual collapse, demand examination.”

Fassin’s argument draws on facts assembled from widely available sources. He begins by reviewing the events of October 7, in the process shredding the official narrative. He examines the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza and the brazenness with which it was brought about, which stunned seasoned international aid workers by its speed and comprehensiveness.

Mainstream media downplayed the killing, casting doubts about official casualty figures. At the New York Times (and other organizations as well), Fassin informs us, journalists were told not to use words like “massacre,” “carnage” or “ethnic cleansing,” and to avoid referring to “refugee camps” or “occupied territories.” Attempts are made to minimize Palestinian casualty counts by framing them as Hamas-provided numbers, when in fact it is obvious that the figures are undercounts, when so many dead are buried under rubble that hasn’t been removed. Reports of mass Israeli casualties on October 7 never add the obvious qualifier: it is unclear how many of the several hundred Israeli non-military deceased were killed by Palestinian militants and how many were killed by the Israeli army as it executed a “mass Hannibal.”

One of the more shocking details of state complicity in Israel’s genocide has to be the suspension of democratic practices to criminalize criticism of Israel, trampling on First Amendment rights and shredding long-established civil liberties in the process. That citizens everywhere disregarded the repressive arm of their own governments to express their revulsion, knowing they could face significantly adverse consequences, must be attributed to their realization at a visceral level that Gaza could be the testing ground for what was in store for any population that opposes state power.

That Israel was allowed to commit genocide in Gaza for more than a year in plain sight, that it was aided in that most heinous of crimes by major powers, provides a precedent for what is considered tolerable. As Malm and Fassin demonstrate so succinctly and powerfully, that spells disaster for any population living in a geography with resources to be exploited by transnational capitalism.

Ida Audeh is senior editor of the Washington Report.