Verso Books

Didier Fassin | Moral Abdication: How the World Failed to Stop the Destruction of Gaza | Verso Books | 128 pages | 9.99 GBP

As an anthropologist, Didier Fassin has long been attentive to what is often called the “ethical turn” in anthropology. In line with Luc Boltanski’s Moral and Political Sociology, this turn marks a shift—especially since the 2000s—toward studying moral life not only through norms and structures but also as lived ethical experience: how people reason morally, navigate dilemmas, and articulate values in everyday contexts. Yet Fassin takes this further. His anthropology consistently tracks the entanglement of ethics with power and institutions. In works such as Humanitarian Reason (2012) and Enforcing Order (2013) he explores how moral vocabularies—compassion, dignity, humanitarianism—operate in fields like policing and immigration, and how ostensibly “good” actions are compromised by the structures that deliver them. His approach therefore blends ethical critique (moral responsibility) with political analysis (structural injustice), exposing how moral claims can mask power relations and making his approach both ethical and political.

In Moral Abdication (2024), Fassin applies this same lens: examining not only what has been done to Gaza, but also how Western moral discourse allowed it to happen. He frames global passivity as a collective abdication of moral responsibility. The book is not only about politics; it is about the failure of a human duty that anthropology’s ethical turn insists upon.

Fassin assembles a quasi-archive, documenting the first six months post-October 7, 2023, especially how dissenting voices—students, activists, some intellectuals—have faced repression. His intent is to preserve evidence of resistance against the silencing of Palestinian suffering. Importantly, Fassin foregrounds Palestinian scholars (Abdaljawad Omar, Tareq Baconi), writers, and poets (notably Refaat Alareer), giving voice where Western discourse erases.

Passive and Active Consent 
Fassin distinguishes between passive consent (failing to oppose, thereby facilitating) and active consent (supporting and legitimating). His searing critique targets Western governments, intellectuals, and media for their passive consent (e.g. the UN Security Council’s paralysis) or active consent/complicity (justifying Israel’s actions, even selling arms to it). This, he argues, represents a profound collapse of moral responsibility.

The Policing of Language
One of the book’s most powerful sections concerns language. Fassin shows how language has been systematically manipulated and how calls to halt civilian suffering get branded “antisemitic” : “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” are banned terms, military operations are sanitized as “ripostes,” in so called ‘Israel–Hamas war’ and the very mention of “Palestine” is discouraged. Censorship or self-censorship has become normalized in public discourse. He documents how The New York Times, for example, instructed its journalists not to use ‘genocide’ and ‘ethnic cleansing’ “Palestine,” “refugee camps,” or “occupied territories,” and to avoid unduly ‘emotive’ words such as “slaughter” or “massacre”.

For Fassin, this is not mere semantics. It is the policing of thought, amplified by denunciations and criminalization of students, professors, and citizens: “Restoring freedom of speech, demanding a debate about words, defending a language … might make the world more intelligible." (p.6). This also means reclaiming history: whether the October 7 attack is seen as an antisemitic pogrom or as resistance depends on whether history is allowed into interpretation. Fassin cites George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.’ We are thus asked to analyze events and social phenomena without sociologizing them or historizing them. He also recalls the words of a former French president Nicolas Sarkozy regarding terrorism, ‘when you start by seeking to explicate the inexplicable, you are preparing to excuse the inexcusable.’ (p. 19)

For Fassin, even speaking of a ‘humanitarian crisis’ is to avoid naming things for what they are, by designating the effects without stating the cause; and to justify a demand for humanitarian corridors and pauses, while permitting the continued bombardment of civilians in apparent respect for international law. Now many Western political leaders simply request from Israel to allow food to enter the Gaza Strip. What Fassin analyses is not new phenomenon: the Israeli philosopher Adi Ophir had previously denounced the politics of catastrophization as a way of halting critical reflection on a conflict, in the name of the urgency of intervention, while simultaneously collaborating with those who had actually caused the conflict (namely, the Israeli occupying forces).

Islamophobia as a Structuring Factor
Fassin identifies Islamophobia as a central factor in Western consent. It is ideological, rooted in colonial and post-9/11 histories: Muslims are cast as dangerous, Arabs as threats to European identity, while sympathy accrues to Israel’s government (Israel being “the enemy of our enemy”) . He rightly notes the expression ‘“Muslims are the new Jews” circulating in contemporary literature in the social sciences, positing that Europe’s historical antisemitism has today been displaced onto Muslims.

Extending the Argument: Symbolic Liberalism
While endorsing Fassin’s diagnosis of moral abdication, I propose extending it through what I call the crisis of liberal democracy and the rise of “symbolic liberalism. In my book Against Symbolic Liberalism: A Plea for Dialogical Sociology (Hanafi 2025a), I argue that in an era of deepening polarization, knowledge economy producers (including social scientists) often reproduce the very injustices they seek to challenge, taking entrenched positions while dismissing dialogue that can produce some alternative perspectives. They espouse classical liberal principles, yet act in politically illiberal ways. I critique how symbolic liberalism inflates the universality of rights while simultaneously narrowing the space for dialogue. 

I fully join Fassin in highlighting some contributing factors to this moral abdication such as Islamophobia, the memory of the Holocaust oscillating between sincerity and certain sorts of instrumentalization, and the Euro-American colonial legacy. In my recent article (Hanafi 2025b) I added other two factors: first, the surge of Symbolic Liberal Zionism as a distortion of what was historically liberal Zionism and, second, the idea that Israel is a secular state that can do no wrong.  

In my view, Zionism is primarily a nationalist doctrine that can be colonial, chauvinistic, exclusionary, or emancipatory – much like any other form of nationalism. However, I believe the major transformation of this ideology occurred within two contexts: first, how liberals came to violate liberalism itself and turned it into a symbolic liberalism and second, how religious forces radicalized it. While many want only to focus to latter (e.g. Illouz 2022), I argue that the problem are above all with the liberal Zionists. Mohamad Fadel (Forthcoming) defines it aptly as “a recognition that Palestinians are victims of something, but that their victimhood demands only a humane response, not a legal response in line with general liberal principles of justice”. This form of Zionism fails to take Palestinian equality seriously, and this failure manifests, according to Fadel, in three key dimensions:

(1) Many banners in these demonstrations clearly spelled out that this is a call for a democratic and secular state for all its residents.

1.Historical: Symbolic Liberal Zionism often ignores Palestine's history prior to the founding of the State of Israel. For instance, Eva Illouz (2024) in a recent interview criticized the slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”, arguing that this is the first time a nation [the Israelis] is called to be eliminated (1). She conveniently overlooked that Israel had already effectively eliminated the Palestinian nation long before.

2. Legal: Symbolic Liberal Zionists disregard the legal norms that existed in Palestine before and after the establishment of the State of Israel. Areej Sabbagh-Khoury (2023) gives the example of the leftist Zionist settlement movement, Hashomer Hatzair, which, by using specific new legal norms, transformed large portions of Palestine into sovereign Jewish territory. The Absentees' Property Law provided a legal mechanism for the state to expropriate the property of Palestinian individuals and businesses. This law treated Palestinians as subjects without rights, and the conflict between Zionists and non-Jewish Palestinians is often framed as one that takes place in a terra nullius (land belonging to no one). In this view, the historical fact of Jewish marginalization is seen as sufficient to exonerate the Zionist project from accusations of colonialism. Of course, this also ignores the fact that the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and the Golan Heights are internationally recognized as occupied territories.

3. Political: Since the founding of Israel, liberal Zionists have pushed for a system of Jewish ethnic dominance over Palestine and non-Jewish Arab Palestinians. They present their political aims as rational, focused on the security of the Jewish people, but “they are not reasonable because their proposals do not seek a common basis for reciprocal cooperation with non-Jewish Palestinians on the basis of mutual recognition of equal standing” (Fadel Forthcoming). Ultimately, Symbolic Liberal Zionism rests on the belief that what is good for Jews as a people is more important than the conventional liberal ideal of reciprocal freedom. More generally, John Rawls (1993)  refers to such an arrangement as a “modus vivendi” which is inherently unstable. For Rawlsian political liberalism, the transition from the rational to the reasonable is crucial, and this shift is violated by Symbolic Liberal Zionism (Fadel Forthcoming). This strand of liberal Zionism is governed not by classical civilian liberal elites but often with heavy intervention of military and security establishments which both disregard the national justice for the colonized and also shape how Israeli society negotiates competing conceptions of the good.

Another factor that, in my view, helps explain this moral abdication is the widespread perception in the West of Israel as a secular state that can do no wrong. However, if we look at one indicator alone – the expansion of illegal settlement in the Occupied Palestinian Territories – one will quickly realize that the Israeli leaders – both secularists and religious actors, both leftists and rightists – have engaged in this land theft (Hanafi 2013). I recall a public talk by the late French sociologist Alain Touraine at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS) in Paris in 1993, where he evoked the Israeli “miracle” of absorbing 100,000 Russian Jews in a short period of time. When I contested this “miracle” with the fact that most of these Russians were settled illegally in Occupied Palestine, he replied: “Mister Hanafi, those migrants will change the equation: grown up in the Soviet Union, they are secular, so they will support the peace process.”

Demonstrating perverse naivete, he did not realize that these illegal settlers would establish some of the most colonial far-right political parties in the Israeli regime – such as Yisrael Beiteinu (Israel Our Home) – and have allied themselves with the religious settlers' movement in the West Bank. After the time of this anecdote, we met many times and from time to time he asked me about the Arab-Israeli conflict I reminded him what he said, but each time I only received either a laugh or a big smile from him.

Finally let me push further the terrific Fassin analysis of moral abdication in arguing that it is not simply indifference vis a vis the other or those whose life unworthy, but it is about disarming any deliberation in the public sphere by criminalizing Palestinian solidarity. This criminalization has started before the War on Gaza by conflating since the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) adopted its working definition of antisemitism in 2005, there have been attempts to equate anti-Zionism with antisemitism and even to redefine Zionism not as a national doctrine but as an ethnicity. According to this redefinition, Zionists are seen as a nationality, akin to Arabs, Mexicans or French, and any criticism of this “nationality” is labeled as racist. This is over-judicialization of our life which makes the possibility of moral argumentation in the public sphere impossible. The IHRA definition of antisemitism is part of the legislation of many western countries in order to move the critics from public debate to courtrooms, foreclosing moral argument in the public sphere. 

Conclusion
Fassin’s (complex) moral clarity is both urgent and prescient. Already in November 2023, he warned of “the specter of genocide in Gaza” (Fassin 2023). This genocide has been confirmed not only by UN agencies and international human rights groups, but also by two Israeli human rights organizations, B'Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights Israel admitted in two reports that Israel is committing a genocide even the Israeli historian Raz Segal describe what is going on in Gaza is a “textbook case of genocide.” 

Through the lens of human rights and equality-of-lives, Fassin situates the Gaza crisis within a broader collapse of moral authority in the West—an argument echoed recently by other scholars. This book is one of the major books who see the world after Gaza is different from that before it. let me highlight the book of Andreas Malm’s (2025) The Destruction of Palestine Is the Destruction of the Earth which unfold of the convergence point between two processes, the political and the environmental, for which Gaza stands as a microcosm. This “technogenocide”, as labeled by Malm, perpetrated by a technologically advanced state is the first advanced late capitalist genocide. 

Fassin isn’t just influenced by the ethical turn; he’s one of its key intellectual voices, though always with a political edge that distinguishes him from more purely virtue-ethics-oriented anthropologists.  In confronting Western silence, Moral Abdication constitutes both a breakthrough in anthropology and an urgent intervention in global public debate.

The smear campaigns in reaction of this book remind me a conversation I had with Ghassan Hage about his fieldwork in Lebanon during the civil war in 1978. One of his interviewees, a member of a right-wing militia, claimed that the Palestinians in Lebanon aimed to take over the country and establish an alternative homeland for themselves. When Hage asked whether he had any evidence for this, the man fell into a glowering silence before angrily reproaching both the question and the questioner as politically heinous: “I will go to get my revolver from the car.” Today, I feel that the level of discussion about the Israeli war on Gaza has reached this same standard of “evidence.” In a similar vein, while giving a talk in Oslo about the war on Gaza, I encountered an audience member who repeatedly insisted that antisemitism is on the rise in Europe, attributing this to demonstrators calling for a ceasefire in Gaza and a political solution to the Israeli occupation. I could not stop him before asking whether it would have been considered normal during the Battle of Algiers in the 1950s or the German genocide in Namibia in the early 1900s to claim that Algerians were anti-French and Namibians were anti-German—or worse, that Algerians and Namibians were anti-Christian. 

The level of discussion among some detractors of Fassin’s work—who argue about a supposed rise of antisemitism among Palestinians—remains at this same poor standard of debate. Critics, such as a review in Le Monde, have accused Fassin of misrepresenting sources. But such objections pale beside the force of his indictment: that the West has failed not only politically but morally, and that this abdication may shape the global order to come.

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References 
Fadel, Mohammad. Forthcoming. “Beyond Liberal Zionism: International Law, Political Liberalism and the Possibility of a Just Zionism.” Transnational Law and Contemporary Problems.
Fassin, Didier. 2012. Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present. University of California Press.
Fassin, Didier. 2013. Enforcing Order: An Ethnography of Urban Policing. Polity.
Fassin, Didier. 2023. “Le Spectre d’un Génocide à Gaza.” AOC, November 1. https://aoc.media/opinion/2023/10/31/le-spectre-dun-genocide-a-gaza/.
Fassin, Didier. 2024. Moral Abdication: How the World Failed to Stop the Destruction of Gaza. Translated by Gregory Elliott. Verso.
Hanafi, Sari. 2013. “Explaining Spacio-Cide in the Palestinian Territory: Colonization, Separation, and State of Exception.” Current Sociology 61 (2): 190–205.
Hanafi, Sari. 2025a. Against Symbolic Liberalism: A Plea for Dialogical Sociology. Liverpool University Press.
Hanafi, Sari. 2025b. “Societal Polarization, Academic Freedom, and the Promise of Dialogical Sociology.” Dialogues in Sociology 1 (2).
Illouz, Eva. 2022. Les Émotions contre la démocratie. Premier Parallèle.
Illouz, Eva. 2024. “Antisemitismus an Den Universitäten: Euer Hass Auf Juden.” Süddeutsche Zeitung (Germany), May 17. https://tinyurl.com/vetf26bv.
Malm, Andreas. 2025. The Destruction of Palestine Is the Destruction of the Earth. Verso.
Rawls, John. 1993. Political Liberalism. Columbia University Press.
Sabbagh-Khoury, Areej. 2023. Colonizing Palestine: The Zionist Left and the Making of the Palestinian Nakba. 1st edition. Stanford University Press.