As has happened time and again following the murder of Palestinians, we were distracted with debating whether Israel committed the massacre, rather than focusing on the massacre itself, write Harry Pettit & Dina Zbeidy. [GETTY]
On October 9 2023, Husam Zomlot, the Palestinian Ambassador to the UK described on a BBC news segment that his cousin, alongside her husband, two children, and three other relatives, had been killed in an Israeli airstrike. Kirsty Wark, the presenter, replied: “I’m sorry for your own personal loss. I mean, can I just be clear, though, you cannot condone the killing of civilians in Israel, can you?”
This is just one example amongst many of how Palestinian suffering is ignored and has been normalised. The BBC segment shows how the loss of Palestinian lives is bypassed; the Palestinian is asked to forget about his own personal loss, and condemn the loss of Israelis.
Although this is a particularly shocking incident, this exchange is not unique. It demonstrates a repetitive phenomenon which has plagued Western media and commentary since the onset of the genocide in Gaza. Rage and sadness directed towards maimed and murdered Palestinian life is quickly extinguished by redirecting these emotions towards Israeli pain or suffering, while also delegitimising the person expressing those emotions as unobjective, biased, or one-sided.
For over 15 months, emotions have been aggressively constructed and directed in ways that justify the genocide.
The orchestration of outrage
Feminist scholars Sara Ahmed, Kathleen Stewart, Lauren Berlant, and Eva Illouz have demonstrated how dominant economic, political, and socio-cultural configurations produce what they term ‘emotional cultures’, or ‘affective economies’. These emotional cultures in turn become a critical mechanism through which relations of power are reproduced.
Judith Butler applied this approach to considering the question of whose lives are mourned in times of war. They asked whose lives are grieved, whose lives are considered ungrievable, and whose deaths are treated as legitimate in the service of saving lives which are more grievable.
In the immediate aftermath of October 7, Western media and politicians went into overdrive to create outrage and horror. The attacks were called a ‘holocaust’, a ‘massacre of innocents’; stories of forty babies being beheaded or burnt in ovens, and mass rapes were repeated again and again. There was no waiting for the facts to be checked.
Stories of Israeli deaths were not questioned or told with a note of caution.
Yet, when Palestinians were killed, like the 473 during the Al-Ahli hospital massacre on October 17, there was more caution and calls were made to wait for the facts. As has happened time and again following the murder of Palestinians, we were distracted with debating whether Israel committed the massacre, rather than focusing on the massacre itself. The outrage was dissipated.
Indeed, according to the dominant emotional culture in the West, the events of October 7 can only be accompanied by immense outrage and horror; there is no room for celebration or ambiguity given the decades of Palestinian suffering at the hands of Israelis. Outrage and horror regarding the massacre of Palestinians, on the other hand, are not given time or space. They are relegated to the background and even outright ridiculed.
We were increasingly expected to shift our attention and outrage away from the over 62,600 Palestinians murdered by Israel. Instead, focus has been drawn towards the language and tactics used by people protesting genocide in the West, which are framed as undermining the ‘safety’ of those of Jewish or Israeli backgrounds. We are expected to prioritise these feelings over even the genocide itself.
This framing often involves hyperbole, false accusations, and decontextualisation, just like the reaction to the Maccabi Tel Aviv football hooligan attacks in Amsterdam.
Furthermore, such a tactic only serves to distract from the genocide. As Mohammed El-Kurd so brutally retorted to this emergent phenomenon: “it is mad to be discussing the emotional weight of words when people are being slaughtered…in one world we have people digging with their bare hands to find family members in the rubble, and in another world we have students crying in their privileged high-rises.”
Guess who we are asked to feel more sorry for.
The rational Westerner vs the angry Arab
Part of the process of securing a dominant emotional culture involves delegitimising and criminalising emotions that might challenge it. This has historically been done through presenting oppressed populations (usually women and people of colour), and their emotions, as devoid of logic or rationality.
The outrage of the white European on the other hand flows from logical reasoning and objective argument. These dynamics have infused European relations with the Arab World for centuries.
Lord Cromer, the British colonial administrator in Egypt, showcased this in his 1908 book Modern Egypt, as described in Edward Said’s Orientalism: ‘The European is a close reasoner, his statements of fact are devoid of any ambiguity; he is a natural logician…The mind of the Oriental, on the other hand, like his picturesque streets, is eminently wanting in symmetry…(they are) singularly deficient in the logical faculty’.
Since then, these kinds of representations have plagued European writing, newsreels, photos, and films which visually depict Arabs in ways that “represent mass rage and misery, or irrational (hence hopelessly eccentric) gestures,” explains Said.
This has continued unabated during the genocide. While Palestinian resistance fighters and those who support resistance against Israeli military occupation are seen as lacking any strategy and inherently evil, aggressive, barbaric and devoid of any moral compass, the Israeli oppressors are framed as a moral army that tries to kill in kind, sensible ways while navigating a difficult moral terrain.
Palestinian and Arab commentators are positioned as biased, too one-sided, overly emotional; unless of course they begin by condemning Hamas and participate in the narrative that their people need to be annihilated. They are only given space on Western media if they join in on its emotional culture.
The rage and need for vengeance on the part of Israelis is hardly questioned, whether in interviews with Israeli officials or by politicians or media commentators. Genocidal statements by officials are trivialised and not seriously engaged with.
While Israel seems to have the right to be so angry as to commit genocide, Palestinians seem to have the duty to die in silence. Any show of emotions is framed as irrational, beastly.
Western commentators meanwhile position themselves as neutral, objective, independent mediators or witnesses. We have seen Piers Morgan, for example – who showcased unabashed outrage at the events of October 7, but has repeatedly described the Israeli response ever since as a ‘moral quandary’ – announce that he ‘does not have a horse in this race’. In reality, he is a citizen, and a commentator in a country which is aiding and abetting one side to occupy, ethnically cleanse, and kill the other.
Breaking down a colonial emotional culture
Palestinians and others have been working tirelessly for over a year to show the cracks in the imperialist emotional culture of the West. On the one hand people are beginning to see through it, and to challenge it in more direct ways – as was the case when Amsterdam residents recently challenged the media and political framing of the response to the Maccabi fans.
Additionally, more people are becoming aware of how the label antisemitism is being misused to silence critique on Israel’s genocide against Palestinians. Reports also show that the public support for Israel is at an all-time low.
But at the same time, the repression and control of this emotional culture is getting harsher, and the consequences for going against it are high. People who speak out against institutional complicity, or demand a call for an end to the genocide and justice for Palestinians are losing their jobs or being harassed online, and there is a general rise in anti-Palestinian racism.
Addressing those who share the difficulty of speaking out at workplaces, El-Kurd reminds us to relativise our own emotions, saying: “I’m sorry about your job, I’m sorry about your difficult emotions, but it is nothing compared to a mother losing a child; the fear of speaking out is hard to swallow, but it doesn’t compare to your house being bombed.” Showing this courage can be challenging to us all.
While it is important to keep speaking out, it is also vital to dismantle the processes that silence Palestinian outrage and sadness over Israel’s massacres, as well as those outraged by the complicity of their governments and who want to exercise their democratic right (and duty) of protesting.
Harry Pettit is an Assistant Professor in Economic Geography at Radboud University Nijmegen. He researches new forms of extraction, resistance, and survival that are emerging within late-capitalist systems, with a focus on Egypt and Lebanon. He is author of The Labor of Hope: Meritocracy and Precarity in Egypt, 2024.
Dina Zbeidy is an anthropologist. She currently works as lecturer and researcher at Leiden University of Applied Sciences. Her research fields include development studies, refugees and displacement, nationalism and Zionism, human rights education, and diversity, equity and inclusion practices and policies.
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Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.
