Frames the issues in terms that question how we regard our own humanity

• Affiliation: MEDACT, Doctors for the NHS, Keep Our NHS Public
• Country: UK

I salute Dr Arawi’s courage and well-cited and well-written piece and to the Journal for their courage in publishing it amid all the fearmongering taking place against any portal that dares to challenge the genocide taking place under the plain sight of the whole world.

• Affiliation: University of Dublin
• Country: Ireland

This essay raises a highly significant question: is it morally and legally (under international law) permissible to bomb hospitals and ambulance vehicles when one has reason to believe that enemy combatants may be in or underneath them (e.g., in tunnels)?
Do we judge that belligerents should have such discretion?
Or do we judge that they must pursue their war aims differently, i.e. while respecting the sanctity of designated health care facilities?

• Affiliation: Yale University
• Country: United States

Professor Arawi correctly points out that Israel’s current intentional targeting of Gaza’s healthcare system is an escalation when measured even by the yardstick of brutality we have come to expect from Israel towards the Palestinians living under colonial occupation for over half a century now. It is this escalation among others that has also resulted in a different response from the world’s population, a population that as a whole has not been historically supportive of the cause of Palestinian liberation. We have even seen some governments and their officials come out in defense of Palestinians facing the current onslaught, even a few European government officials. Arawi identifies the current moment as “a Nietzschean moment in history”, when the mask of the so-called democratic regimes has come off all the way, “unreservedly reject[ing]” human rights as “slave moralities hostile to life, espoused by the ‘weak’ and thus need[ing] to be replaced by those that are based on the will to power” (Arawi, 2024). Indeed, it is at this moment that the ruling classes of those countries who still dominate the world economy (or at least still believe to be dominating it) do their utmost to show that it is Netanyahu who best embodies the values of the West when he says “The weak crumble, are slaughtered and are erased from history while the strong, for good or for ill, survive.” (Netanyahu, 2018). Of course, to anybody paying attention to the history of colonial conquest and genocide over the past half a millennium, it is no surprise that these are the underlying values.

I want to bring attention to a different kind of replacement of values, not the colonizers’ rejection of the façade of human values by an openly Nietzschean will to power (a will that has always been behind the façade), but rather to the decolonizing replacement: “la décolonisation est très simplement le remplacement d’une « espèce » d’hommes par une autre « espèce » d’hommes. Sans transition, il y a substitution totale, complète, absolue.” (Fanon, 2002, 39) However, this replacement is of a different register altogether. The colonized dreams “non pas de devenir un colon, mais de se substituer au colon”. (idem. 54) This absolute replacement, of not replacing, but going beyond, is well exemplified in the discourse surrounding the interpretation of the call to free Palestine “from the river to the sea”. Is this a simple substitution of Israel’s genocidal “there will only be Israeli sovereignty from the river to the sea” or is it a Fanonian refusal of colonial mastery? Of course, for the racist colonizers, “from the river to the sea” is nothing but a rebranding (to the local geography) of Anglo-American violent colonial dispossession slogan “From sea to shining sea”. It calls for an eradication of “the Palestinian” from the entirety of the territory. Therefore, it is unsurprising that the colonizers view the opposing call to free Palestine “from the river to the sea” as also a call for genocide. However, if understood decolonially, it is simply a call for refusing to place humans in a hierarchy – of “not need[ing] Other in order to understand Self” (Tamale, 2020, 38) – in the whole space between the river and the sea (and ideally beyond, as well). It is a call for equality for all its (human) inhabitants, which by definition excludes the possibility of calling for a genocide against any group, unless, of course, not all humans are acknowledged as worthy of the zone of (human) being.

As An Yountae so helpfully summarizes: “Fanonian theodicy rejects the Manichaean good-and-evil paradigm, the life-and-death cycle in which the triumph of good over evil involves sacrifice and exclusion or the replacement of one world by another”. (An, 217)

An, Y. (2021). On violence and redemption: Fanon and colonial theodicy. In An, Y., & Craig, E. (Eds.). Beyond man: race, coloniality, and philosophy of religion. Duke University Press. (204-225)
Arawi, T. (2024) War on healthcare services in Gaza. Indian Journal of Medical Ethics, [S.l.], v. 0, n. 0, p. , jan. 2024. ISSN 0975-5691. Avaialble at: . Date accessed: 06 Feb. 2024.
Fanon, F. (2002). Les Damnés de la terre. Paris: La Découverte.
Netanyahu, B. [@IsraeliPM] (2018) Twitter, 29 Aug. 2018, https://twitter.com/IsraeliPM/status/1034849460344573952
Tamale, S. (2020). Decolonization and Afro-feminism. Daraja Press.

And JFC at the pro-genocide comments. If you come here to say that “a number of troubling representations in the text should have been challenged” [I could just hear your pedantic annoying male voice], then challenge them or shut up.

• Affiliation: Universite de Montreal
• Country: Haudenosaunee Confederacy (temporarily occupied by Europeans)