Good evening! This week's edition of the In Common newsletter comes from Rory Hamilton, Common Weal’s Communications and Campaigns Co-ordinator and PhD researcher at the University of Glasgow.
What makes a good victim? Who is deserving of aid and compassion?
As the onslaught of genocide, displacement and violence in Gaza continues and the international community does nothing, these questions should be at the forefront of our minds.
Over 220 journalists have been killed in the Gaza Strip by the Israeli Army in the space of two years – the most recorded deaths of journalists in a conflict in history. The National’s own editor, Laura Webster, put it well speaking at a vigil in Glasgow: “We all have a duty to say something and stand in solidarity with our colleagues. You would want the same if it were you. Use your voice, use your platform. There is no impartial reporting on genocide.”
You would want the same if it were you.
I wholeheartedly agree, and yet at the same time I am galled by the way in which we are compelled to talk about Gaza. Palestinians are being, and have been for decades, persecuted for their identity, their skin colour, their religion, and for claiming a right to their own land. However, the lengths to which we must go to justify their demands, to justify their existence and our solidarity are extraordinary.
Unlike in Ukraine where support has been near unconditional, governments across the West legitimise support for the starvation and bombing of the Palestinians. And while it is not an Olympics of the poor, sick and needy, the creation of a specific resettlement scheme for Ukrainian refugees and the lack of one for Palestinians highlights the racialised boundaries of what makes a good victim.
But why this difference? Why are Palestinians deemed undeserving? I would argue that it is because they do not play the role of the "good victim". Instead of accepting “Israel’s right to defend itself,” Palestinians assert a right of return to their homes and to their land, they assert a demand for justice, and for recognition of their statehood, their identity, their borders.
Anthropologist and sociologist Didier Fassin argues: “Those at the receiving end of humanitarian attention know quite well that they are expected to show the humility of the beholden rather than express demands for rights.”
Palestinians defy the accepted norm of willing submission to a category assigned to them and refuse to sit down in the face of bigger powers who wish to exploit their land for a high-tech megacity, who wish to cash-in on the Israeli security-industrial complex that underpins surveillance technology systems the world over.
For the aid-givers, therefore, the Western states and institutions like the EU, this subversion, of the willing victim, the good victim, flies in the face or their demands for gratitude.
When Fassin also talks about a “politics that gives specific value and meaning to human life […] between lives to be saved and lives to be risked,” one can invoke the expendability of Palestinian lives.
The maintenance of ordinary economic relations with the state of Israel by the EU (accounting for 32% of Israel’s total trade), by the UK (on the verge of awarding a 15-year, £2.5bn contract to a subsidiary of one of the two largest Israeli weapons manufacturers, Elbit Systems), and indeed by the Scottish Government (via Scottish Enterprise’s investments in arms manufacturers Raytheon, Thales and Leonardo), indicates that the economic benefits gained from trading and investing in Israel is worth the risk of the lives of Palestinians. The value of economic trade outweighs that of human life. So much for a "peace of markets".
In Gaza, where the IDF’s own data estimates a civilian casualty rate of 83%, in other words, for every one combatant, four civilians are killed, the "value" of a Palestinian life is one of a life to be risked. Palestinians are undeserving of compassion, because they are not willing to play the role of the deserving victim. Because they express demands for their rights to be recognised, or they wont just "shut up and go along with the plan", they have forfeited their right to compassion.
What this shows is that it is crucial we use our voice, our platform to champion their cause, to call out the structures that underpin their exploitation and murder. We must continue to demand a boycott of Israeli goods, divestment from arms manufacturers, and sanctions on Israel’s economic affairs.
We must also defend our right to protest against this because the concept of a "good victim" bleeds through into the way the Government responds to anti-immigration protests and the way it treats small boat arrivals. A defence of protest is also a defence of a just and compassionate morality. Join us on Saturday at the Mound in Edinburgh with Stop the War and others to express our solidarity and our outrage.
