Hamid Dabashi, After Savagery: Gaza, Genocide, and the Illusion of Western Civilization (Haymarket Books, 2025).
Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?
Hamid Dabashi (HD): A genocide of historical proportion is happening in our time. Like millions of others around the globe, for over two years I have woken up with the news of incessant number of Palestinians—men, women, and particularly children—slaughtered by Israel. Instead of paralysis and despair I have collected the most reliable facts and data by world renowned scholars, human rights organizations, healthcare professionals, the UN, the ICJ, and so on, to produce a document, for posterity, of what this genocide means for the fate of our humanity at large. What made me write this book was the unvarnished savagery of the Israeli settler colony barefacedly defying any measure of human decency, international law, the simplest mandates of just being a human being, and for the two longest years slaughtering tens of thousands of Palestinians, destroying their habitat, bombing their homes, hospitals, schools, refugee camps, mosques, churches as if they own this earth and can mass murder an entire nation with total impunity. Where did these genocidal Zionists gather such undaunted vulgarity to think they can do all this and get away with it? These and similar questions made me write this book.
J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?
HD: After Savagery is about the unfolding Palestinian genocide of 2023-2025 as perpetrated by Israel in Gaza and the rest of occupied Palestine and as painstakingly documented by Palestinian journalists, healthcare workers, and other professionals at the heavy cost of their lives. It is about the machinery of death and destruction, as equipped and amassed by the West in their Israeli settler colony, which for generations has targeted Palestinian people. It is about the dispossession of Palestinians for over a century, culminating in the Gaza genocide today. It is about a garrison state planted by European and American commercial and strategic interests in the heart of the Arab and Muslim world to sustain their hegemony and power. It is above all about the pivotal role of Western philosophy to dehumanize the people around the world so that their slaughter does not register with the apparition of any moral conscience they may have claimed. Represented by the senior most European philosopher alive Jürgen Habermas and his solid support for the Israeli killing machine, my book details the racist underpinning of Western philosophy from Greek antiquity to Hegel, Kant, Adorno, and Levinas. The point is to unpack the immoral and unethical foundations of Western philosophy in which non-Europeans are systematically excluded from the very ontological apparatus of their philosophical thoughts.
J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?
HD: A significant part of my scholarship is devoted to the phenomenon of European colonialism around the globe. This particular book is a pivotal point in that trajectory with the immediacy and urgency of a genocide the world has witnessed live-streamed. The most immediate books before this that lay the foundation for its critical perspective are my Europe and Its Shadows: Coloniality after Empire (2019) and, before that, Can Non-Europeans Think? (2015).
J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?
HD: People of conscience around the globe. Although I have written this book in English, translations of it into Arabic, Persian, Korean, Japanese, Turkish, and other languages are already under way. Its audio version has also been featured in Spotify. The book is a call to intellectuals and critical thinkers to begin anew the urgent task of rethinking the very parameters of our moral imagination from the ruined rubble of Gaza. The world and what we are doing in it must be thought anew from that devastated site and the countless Palestinian men, women, and children who are buried there. As evident by millions of human beings protesting around the globe, Zionism and the murderous garrison state it has created in occupied Palestine must be held accountable for this genocide.
J: What other projects are you working on now?
HD: I always work on multiple projects—but I still remain haunted by the horror of the Palestinian genocide that is unfolding in front of us. No human being, no critical thinker, no scholar with a claim to a moral conscience can abandon the site of the Gaza genocide as the sacrosanct premise of our thinking for generations to come.
J: What does it mean to be a scholar in the time of a genocide?
HD: Scholars are human beings too. What does it mean to be a human being in a time of genocide? How did people feel and what did they think during the Armenian genocide, the Jewish Holocaust, the nuclear holocaust in Japan, the transatlantic African slavery, the Native American genocide, the African genocide committed by European colonial powers? The list is unending. Any one of these atrocities causes a moral paralysis in any decent human beings, including scholars who have an added moral responsibility to leave a reliable record for the posterity. The Gaza genocide is the defining event of our generation.
Excerpt from the book (from the Preface)
As I write these words, I have a copy of Sven Lindqvist’s terrifying short volume “Exterminate All the Brutes”: One Man’s Odyssey into the Heart of Darkness and the Origins of European Genocide (1992) on my desk. Lindqvist takes his cue from Joseph Conrad’s classic novel Heart of Darkness (1899) and carries its genocidal implications deep into African and global history. I keep returning to this book, pleading with Lindqvist, as it were, to hold my mind steady as I write—for I am deeply afraid. I am a distant witness to a genocide. I am aghast and horrified by the sheer savagery of Israelis mercilessly slaughtering tens of thousands of Palestinians without batting an eye—bombing children and their parents, their homes, hospitals, schools, university campuses, refugee camps, mosques, churches, even when they rush to collect food from the few trucks that manage to get through the circle of starvation Israelis have formed around Gaza. There have been days and nights I could not utter or write a word, frantically following the news instead, mostly in Arabic, because most of what I read in English, especially in The New York Times and in BBC online news articles, troubles me to my core: the cold-blooded, calculated cruelty of mastering a pernicious prose that seeks to justify this genocide with writing that is inane, tightfisted, derisive, sardonic even.
In Heart of Darkness, Kurtz is a European ivory trader who is driven mad by his lust for power over native Africans. Lindqvist was mesmerized by Kurtz’s words at the end of the novel: “Exterminate all the brutes!” “What did they mean to Conrad and his contemporaries?” Lindqvist asks in his preface to “Exterminate All the Brutes.” “Why did Conrad make them stand out as a summary of all the high-flown rhetoric on Europe’s responsibilities to the people of other continents?” Lindqvist then cites Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) and her assessment that “imperialism necessitated racism.” Toward the end of his preface, Lindqvist engages apologetically with Steven Katz’s The Holocaust in Historical Context (1994), where the author has contempt for anyone who dares to place the Jewish Holocaust in comparative context with any other genocide Europeans have perpetrated outside Europe. Lindqvist appears to defend his own position—that European colonialism “prepared the ground” for the Holocaust—while maintaining that both approaches “seem equally valid and complementary.”
Right now, we have entered a moment of epistemic shift, when the Jewish Holocaust must be brought into the fold of humanity at large. There is another way of thinking about the Jewish Holocaust, a way that marks its unique specificity while also allowing us to bring it into the larger frame of European genocidal reference, thereby connecting it to the erasure of Native people, to the transatlantic slave trade, to the historical colonization of much of the globe. As Aimé Césaire noted decades ago:
Yes, it would be worthwhile to study clinically, in detail, the steps taken by Hitler and Hitlerism and to reveal to the very distinguished, very humanistic, very Christian bourgeois of the twentieth century that without his being aware of it, he has a Hitler inside him, that Hitler inhabits him, that Hitler is his demon, that if he rails against him, he is being inconsistent and that, at bottom, what he cannot forgive Hitler for is not the crime in itself, the crime against man, it is not the humiliation of man as such, it is the crime against the white man, the humiliation of the white man, and the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the “coolies” of India, and the “niggers” of Africa.
In this liberated sense of understanding the Jewish Holocaust, we can connect it to the successive waves of Palestinian genocide by Zionists, a genocide that has been incremental, increasingly vicious, and that has culminated in the devastation of Gaza. Jews have always been the internal Other of Europe, as the Orient has been its external Other. Witnessing this savagery in Gaza, we can clearly link the Jewish Holocaust to the Palestinian genocide and see genocidal Zionism as the logical colonial extension of European fascism.
To Witness
This war is a war that is not only between Israel and Hamas. It’s a war that is intended, really, truly, to save Western civilization, to save the values of Western civilization.
Israeli President Isaac Herzog
(December 12, 2023)
As I begin to write this book in the first week of June 2024, Israel has killed more than 37,000 Palestinians. Every single day since October 7, 2023, the world has awakened to more and more terrorizing updates. By the time I finish and send this book to my publisher, that cold and lifeless number and that vicious fact will have arisen to even colder and more lingering terror. I have written much of this book in the early hours of the morning in New York, with the world around me lost in quiet darkness, the bright apparition of my laptop on the edge of a sofa where I sleep for a few hours before waking up and writing again, trembling with fear.
Soon after the killing of Palestinians resumed with full force in late 2023, I published a short essay on the ethical bankruptcy of a statement coauthored by senior European philosopher Jürgen Habermas, which openly disregarded Palestinian lives in the context of this genocide. Back in 2014, I had written a similar piece reflecting on another major European philosopher, Theodor Adorno (1903–1969), who soon after the Jewish Holocaust had said, “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” I had wondered then about Gaza, and what the systematic, consistent, unrelenting acts of Israeli savagery against Palestinians would mean for “poetry.” In both these pieces, and throughout my work, I have been preoccupied with the following question: Are we non-Europeans, Palestinians or otherwise, even human beings in the enduring philosophical traditions of what calls itself “the West”? And what is the prospect of moral and intellectual agency on the part of people at the receiving end of European philosophy and colonialism at one and the same time?
The cruelty of the Israeli army murdering Palestinians with total impunity granted them by the US, the UK, France, Germany, Canada, and Australia leaves no room for speculation. Palestinians are simply not considered to be human beings, an idea to which Israeli authorities repeatedly refer. “We are fighting human animals,” Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant stated on October 9, 2023, “and we are acting accordingly.”10 Day in and day out as the genocide unfolded, I was haunted by this phrase, and I held the entirety of “Western philosophy” accountable for that unfolding terror.
This book is not about a historical past. This book is about a savagery fully evident and present. The first chapter of the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s classic text, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (1999) is about The Witness. Habitually, Agamben looks at the two Latin words testis and superstes, the former referring to a third perspective observing two parties in a legal affair and the latter as someone who has been through an event. In Arabic and Persian as well as adjacent languages, the word we use for “witness” is Shāhid. The potent example of it is the Palestinian iconic figure of Handala by Naji al-Ali.
Agamben might not take an interest in what the word “witness” in Arabic or Persian or Urdu or Turkish or any language other than Greek and Latin might be. But we ought to take an interest. The word Shāhid is akin to the word Shahīd, the first means “witness,” and the second means “martyr.” So “witness” and “martyr” in our languages are very closely related, one who has been a witness, and one who has died for such a testimonial. It is impossible to exaggerate the moral implications of this proximity in our languages.
Like millions of others around the globe, I am at once overwhelmed by the magnitude of terror that genocidal Zionists are capable of perpetrating on innocent and defenseless people. Neither the political nor the poetic urges, nor the secular or sacred citations that might come to mind can come to terms with what is happening in Palestine. Given the depth of this savagery, the vulgarity, and the cruelty we face, we must expose, I thought to myself, directly, the barbaric roots of what has sold itself as “Western Civilization.”
Israel is not a country, it is not a homeland, it is not a rooted culture. Israel is a settler colony, a moral depravity created by the West, enabled and empowered by the West. Israel is the most wicked evidence of the West. Israel is every atrocity ever committed around the world in Asia, Africa, and Latin America by the West in a nutshell, staged for the whole world to see. Since its very inception, Israel is the summation of the West, materialized and put on a pedestal. This book, therefore, is about making a crucial adjustment in our perception of Israel: It is not just a settler colony that the West supports, but it is “the West” in its very quintessence. It is the highest manifestation of the calamitous ideology of conquest that calls itself “the West,” exposing its murderous roots and occasioning the groundwork for the very metaphysics of barbarism that has sold itself to the world as “Western civilization.” Today, Gaza and the rest of Palestine is where the false premise of Western moral authority is buried. The world is liberated from that false consciousness.