“Gaza situation grows more dire.” That was the headline over a Reuters news story on April 12. “‘Hell on earth’: That’s how the president of the Red Cross described the humanitarian situation in Gaza….”
“Israel was allowed to commit genocide in Gaza…in plain sight,” the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs insists in its review of Moral Abdication, “aided in that most heinous of crimes by major powers….” It’s as The Times explains in its critique of Didier Fassin’s book, “Consent to the obliteration of Gaza has created an enormous gulf in global moral order.” And, the “values and principles,” now relinquished, are “foundational.”
The “acquiescence in the devastation of Gaza and the massacre of its population,” Fassin prophesies, “will leave an indelible trace in the memory of the societies that will be accountable for it.” The author is unbending in his avowel, but it’s as the Washington Report has it, “Fassin’s argument draws on facts assembled from widely available sources.”
Anthropologist, sociologist, and physician, Fassin, who’s authored 20 books, holds the chair Moral Questions and Social Issues in Contemporary Societies at Collège de France and at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University. His achievements are legion.
Moral Abdication: How the World Failed to Stop the Destruction of Gaza
By Didier Fassin
Verso, 2024
