"Zone of interest" as an Ethnography of Indifference

I saw 'Zone of Interest' when it first appeared. Like many, I came out thinking that I have just seen one of the best movies I have been to in a long time. As I watched Rudolph Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz's concentration camp, his wife, Hedwig, and their children, live the life of their dreams in the house of their dreams, while only being separated from the exterminatory furnaces by a mere wall, it was hard not to keep thinking: this is all of us now in the shadow of the mass murders committed in Gaza, living in cultures that have banalised evil. But the thought did come to me that maybe it was just me projecting my Middle Eastern sensitivities and obsessions into the film. When I came out of the theatre and started talking to others it was clear that I was hardly the only one to think this. Later, the director's courageous Oscar acceptance speech, Naomi Klein's incisive reflections on the film's significance, and my colleague Marcelo Svirsky's comments about the politics of the 'never again' in which the film intervenes, all reinforced the view of the film as offering what Foucault would call a history of the present, a view of the past that is also about our everyday lives in the now.

This perspective allows us to capture a rich dimension of the story that would otherwise be missed if we merely read the scenario as an attempt to chronicle the past. But it also encourages discussions of the overall moral and political relevance of the film at the expense of some of its micro elements. Most people I know who have seen the film have also been taken by the incredible attention to the minute details of the everyday life of the household depicted in it. I later understood that this was achieved by the positioning of the cameras such as to create a 'reality TV' effect: 'Big Brother in the Nazi house' as Naomi Klein quotes Glazer saying about his film. I felt throughout the film that the scenes were played out as if informed by an account of someone who has had deep knowledge of how daily life unfolded there. It is this ethnographic dimension of the film that I want to think with here. I hasten to say that this ethnographic dimension does not contradict the generalist politico-moralist dimension. On the contrary, it speaks to it, enriches it and continually reinforces it. Nonetheless, it is a dimension that is often being eclipsed by the focus on the general message and the discussions it is generating.

With this in mind, I decided to go and see the film again and consciously concentrate on its attention to behavioural details. As expected, I found this second viewing very rewarding, and I recommend it to all those who have appreciated what the film has to offer. If nothing else, this viewing highlighted the way the exterminatory devil was present in the details, as it were. I can now say with more confidence: I would be happy to recommend this film to anthropology students as an introduction to an ethnography of necropolitical indifference. Centring on this indifference points not only to a history but also to an ethnography our present. It shows how the film provides us with material that helps us ask enlightening questions: How are indifferent-to-the-death-of-the-other subjects constituted? What is indifference as a social phenomenon? How is indifference enacted in everyday life? What are the factors that make this enactment possible? Seen from this perspective, the film teaches us an importance truth: necropolitical indifference is not a result of racism but rather one of its key defining features.

First, a point about the kind of racism manifested in Nazi antisemitism that helps us understand a crucial dimension of the film - and I can't help but add: something those Zionists who are freely distributing 'antisemitism', mindlessly, all over the place at the moment should pay attention to. That is, if they really cared about antisemitism, and not just about justifying their disastrous murderous politics. 

I must ask the reader to bear with me here before we get back to the film, as this needs to be explained a bit more carefully than the film review genre usually allows for. 

While all racisms share some things in common, they can also differ in fundamental ways. Most importantly for us here, not all the phenomena referred to as 'racism' involve a perception of the racialised other as 'exterminable'. For someone like me who started thinking about 'White racism' in the context of Australian multiculturalism, it took me some time to fully understand the degree to which colonial racism towards Indigenous Australians was of an entirely different kind to racism towards Italian or Vietnamese or Lebanese immigrants. The latter was not just less virulent than the racism towards Indigenous people, it was a different kind of racism altogether. I would say anti-Indigenous racism was viler. And part of its vileness was precisely its articulation to intimations of 'exterminability': for racists, the indigenous others were as exterminable as cockroaches and as disgusting to be in the proximity of. While it shows up in odd individual cases, this kind of seriously vile racism was not directed in any significant structural way towards European and Mediterranean immigrants. It showed its face at the height of racism against 'Asians' in the nineteenth century, and in more recent times towards Muslims.  

This difference between forms of racism was not only important in Australia. As further reading and research helped me understand, despite some important similarities, there was a fundamental difference between the racism that manifests itself in slavery and colonialism, and the racism towards immigrants that comes from an unease in the face of cultural difference or in competition over jobs. To be sure, sometimes the two overlap. But it is the difference that is important to highlight here because Nazi anti-semitism was more in the vile tradition of slavery and colonialism rather than anti-immigrant racism. This is where I found the film to be exceptionally insightful. It gives us a clear sense of how, for all its (rightful) association with extermination, Nazi anti-semitism was always like slavery and colonialism, a mix of extermination, disgust, exploitation and appropriation. Throughout the film, the furnaces of Auschwitz, the sound of guns being fired and the sounds of victims shouting as they face their death are shown to be continuously accompanied by practices of exploitation of Jewish forced labour (including sexual exploitation), and by the appropriation and cross class distribution of Jewish property. Given the colonial genealogy of this cocktail of practices, it is not surprising that the racism that animated it also had strong resemblances to the racism that animated slavery and colonialism.

It is common knowledge in anthropology that 'belonging to the human race' and believing in a categorical biological and moral difference between humans and non-humans is a distinctly modern phenomenon. There are pre-modern tribal cultures where the humans of the tribe feel a sense of together-ness with the animals and plants that surround them far more than with the 'humans' of another tribe. In the modern era where it becomes taken for granted that 'humanity' and 'the human race' are one, such a lack of belief in the one-ness of humankind comes across as fundamentally discordant and incompatible. Many racisms solve this incompatibility by creating gradations of human-ness. Nazi anti-semitism, however, replicates certain elements of the tribal culture refers to above. While those in themselves are not racist, they become so in a modernity positing the unity of 'humanity' (see Note). It posits a human (Aryan) one-ness with nature, often referred to as eco-fascism, in opposition to a oneness with other humans (the Jews). This is powerfully and systematically portrayed in the film. The attachment that Höss and his family exhibit towards the natural environment stands out in its opposition to the lack of care for the Jews surrounding them, those that are being exterminated 'next door' as it were and those working as forced labourers in their homely space. The most intense 'love scene' in the movie is Höss saying goodbye to his horse. And there is a macabre moment where Höss is admonishing the killers and executioners of the Jews in the death camp for mistreating the camp’s flowers. 

This essentialist and radical banishment of the figure of the Jew from the sphere of sympathy and care is in Lacanian terms both the symptom and the condition of possibility of the culture of indifference that appears to protect the family's homely jouissance from the continuous processes of dehumanisation and extermination to which the Jews are subjected. It colours and shapes the practices of necropolitical indifference that make up most of the movie.

To call these 'practices' of indifference is to highlight their nature as a form of labour; something that involves a conscious or unconscious working-on-the-self to achieve. This is important because not all types of indifference require of us to work on ourselves. In the dictionary indifference is defined as 'having no particular interest or sympathy, being unconcerned.' One does not need to work on oneself to have no particular interest or sympathy towards, or be unconcerned with, something. To be sure, to be indifferent to x is not the same as to be oblivious to the existence of x. The indifferent subject is always aware of what it is they are being indifferent to. But being indifferent is not the same when we are being indifferent to something we have casually encountered and that has no particular significance to us, and being unconcerned with something that is an integral part of our affective space. It is in the latter case that indifference requires a form of work on the self. This is crucial to understand the racist necropolitical specificity of indifference. Racism is a relation with people that brings them into our space of being. Even extreme racist dehumanisation brings some people into the space of our being as dehumanised. We do not casually encounter the people we racialise. They are a structural part of our lives. Hating and despising x is a relation that brings x into our affective sphere even if it is to hate it and despise it. How to be indifferent to something or someone we despise is not an easy matter. On the face of it, one cannot say at the same time: I hate and despise chocolate and I am indifferent to chocolate. Yet this is precisely what racist indifference aims to achieve. It is what makes the labour of antisemitic indifference to the extermination of the Jews far more demanding than meets the eye.

Throughout the movie, Höss' family is exposed to manifestations of the macabre processes of extermination happening right next to them: the gunshots, the screams, the smoke, the light from the furnaces, the wall itself. All these are metonymies of the exterminatory process that is unfolding. That is, they are a small part of the process that they signify it in its totality. It can be said that while metaphors use one order of reality to re-present another order of reality, metonymies consist of an order of reality presenting itself through one of its fragments. As such, saying that the above-listed manifestations are not metaphors of the concentration camp but metonymies of it is to say something that is on one had somewhat evident ,but on the other, something whose importance is overlooked:  the manifestations listed above are not representations of the exterminatory process but the exterminatory process itself presenting itself through these manifestations. They are continual intrusions of the un-homely space of the camp and what happens in it into the homely reality of the family's lifeworld. 

I am dwelling on this point because it is significant to our understanding of the type of indifference we are dealing with here: one is not indifferent towards a metaphor of extermination the same way one is indifferent towards a metonymy of it - in the way, today, we find it harder to be indifferent to a raw video of the death and destruction of Gaza posted on social media than to a sanitised written account published by a mainstream newspaper in the West. There is a particularly important scene in the movie where Rudolph Höss and his children are enjoying fishing and swimming in the river up to the point where he realises that the ashes and remains of the incinerated bodies are thrown in the river and coming towards them. Höss rushes to remove his children from the river and they all subject themselves or are subjected to a long bath where all traces of the ashes of the dead are thoroughly scrubbed off their bodies. The indifferent subject knows that they are face to face with an unbearable reality whose presence and impact in their lives needs to be minimised. One can guess that, after that first encounter, Höss will make sure to regulate when the ashes of the dead are thrown into the river so as to avoid swimming there during such times. This is the labour of indifference. 

In a number of commentaries on the film, what I am calling a labour of indifference is referred to as 'disassociation'. There is no doubt that physical and emotional disassociation are part of the labour of indifference but it does not cover all the forms that the latter takes. Indifference can be a form of de-sensitization. This is what is referred to popularly as ‘developing a thick skin’. The Lebanese say about a man who is indifferent and unaffected by his surrounding 'hayda m-tamsah' (this man has become-crocodile). This i in reference to the thickness of the crocodile's skin. The 'thickness of the skin' of the coloniser to the plight of the colonised is acquired historically as part of a colonial habitus. One can think of this as a political dermatology.

Indifference can also be a form of de-intensifiying the presence of something in our surrounding. Unlike with de-sensitisation where we learn to see but not feel, here we learn not to see or hear or smell, etc. As Bourdieu's concept of illusio invites us to see: our relation to reality creates a differential of intensities within that reality that depends on one's interest and desires. Here the technologies of indifference work on the fashioning of one's surrounding reality more so than on fashioning one's self and one's sensitivity and 'skin' as happens in de-sensitization. As noted above in relation to disassociation, one can learn to un-see the metonymic fragment or learn to un-see the connection between the fragment and the whole. In the film, it is not clear whether the Höss family had learnt to un-see the flames of the furnace or had learnt not to associate the flame with the exterminatory process of which it is a part.

At its simplest, indifference can be acquired through strategic avoidance. The subject knows where they will be exposed to the reality they want to shield themselves from and refrain from moving in spaces where they are most likely to encounter it. A more important strategy of avoidance is that of total blockage. In the film, the wall itself is of course the most important technology of blockage, stopping the unbearable reality of what is happening in the camp from flowing onto the space of the home.

I am only separating these types of indifference for analytical clarity since, in real life, and as well depicted in the movie, they come jumbled and fused with one another. This can be seen in the case of the presence of Jewish forced labour in the space of the home. As I have already noted, an important aspect of the film for me is how it makes clear the way extermination and the exploitation (including sexual exploitation) of forced labour go hand in hand. This entanglement is shown to be a feature of the household's everyday life as much as it was a governmental pre-occupation. At one point we see a Nazi commander order Höss to exterminate an obscene number of people, then turn to another commander and tell him something like 'don't worry he won't kill everyone. You’ll get your labourers'. In the way it shows the labourers as if zombified and occupying a space between the dead and the living, the film alerted me to something I hadn't thought of before: in the midst of a genocidal process, those who are spared death to perform labour are nonetheless living metonymies of the exterminatory process itself. The family learns to both unsee this forced labour and unsee its connection to the process of extermination in which it is embedded.

The movie leaves us in no doubt that all these successful techniques of indifference come at a price. It takes its toll on the psyche and the body. The indifferent subject is not constitutionally indifferent to its indifference. Every member of the family without exception exhibits pathological symptoms that the movie director wants us to see as the cost of their existence in this culture of necropolitical indifference. Rudolph Höss who on the face of it is the quintessential Nazi subject. His 'classical' Nazi antisemitism is shown in the business-like way he discusses the efficiency of the technologies of death he is introducing into his concentration camp, and in the paradoxical scene where he is sexually exploiting a camp inmate, instrumentalizing her for his pleasure but at the same time exhibiting his disgust for coming to contact with a Jewish person. Witness the scene where he is endlessly washing and scrubbing himself after his 'bureaucratised' sexual assault. This takes us back to the other scrubbing scene referred to above where the ashes of the dead are being scrubbed after the accidental river encounter. Yet for all his de-sensitisation to the suffering and the death of the Jews, Höss is shown to be suffering from what appears to be something of the order of severe stomach cramps. Hedwig seems to be the prototype of the petit bourgeois Nazi, her antisemitism structured around her envy and resentment towards the middle class Jews for whom, in pre-Nazi time, her mother worked as a cleaner. Determined to enjoy her upward social mobility, she appears as the most resolved of all the family members to not let any unbearable reality ruin the homely space she has managed to climb to. She wants her mother, the ex-maid, to enjoy and be part of her social climbing and success, but is left deprived of her company as the mother, finds living in the vicinity of the camp unbearable. Towards the end of the film Hedwig appears as unable to experience any joy or excitement: drowning in the meaninglessness of her life and the amoral abyss she has dug herself into. The children are also shown to exhibit all kind of pathologies from sleeplessness to behavioural disorder. There is little doubt then that one of the key themes of the movie is that indifference comes at a psychological cost. For if one can take a bath and scrub off the traces of extermination that stick to one’s body, how does one scrub off the traces of the extermination that have stuck to one’s psyche?

In this sense, while the film, as Naomi Klein and Marcelo Svirsky point out, does indeed make us think about the question of active and passive complicity, of the 'where are you and what are you doing while the genocide is unfolding,' it also makes us think about another equally pertinent question. One that is at least pertinent to those of us who live in those countries where indifference to what is happening in Gaza has been hypocritically made into a higher morality (apparently, to struggle against necropolitical indifference, to care enough to want to stop the ongoing slaughter, is to support Hamas). This question goes something like this: what kind of pathologies are we, the inhabitants of these lands, silently developing as we are forced to live through the unbearable nightmare that is Gaza in a space where indifference to it is encouraged and routinised? What somatic disorders will our bodies and psyche begin to exhibit as we consciously or unconsciously work on taming the unbearable into something bearable?

Note:

I have added this sentence. and changed 'one-ness' above with 'togetherness' in response to the following critical comment made by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro.

"I read your post with the interest and admiration I always give to everything you write. That's why I can't help but disagree with the parallel you draw between Nazi racism and the ethnocentrism of extra-modern peoples. In particular, I disagree with the following passage:

Nazi anti-semitism, however, replicates the tribal culture refers to above. It posits a human (Aryan) one-ness with nature, often referred to as eco-fascism, in opposition to a oneness with other humans (the Jews).

One fundamental difference is that the extramodern (or tribal) peoples I know, at least the Amazonian ones, may indeed consider neighboring peoples as not completely "human". But they have no problem adopting (by marriage, kidnapping or any other means) an individual from these other peoples and considering him or her an integral member of their society. This is something that, I suppose, would be unthinkable in the relationship between Nazis and Jews. Moreover, alliances and mergers between peoples who were previously enemies are very common phenomena (and the reverse is equally true). Because "tribal" ethnocentrism or "racism" has nothing biological about it, it doesn't assume that individuals from other peoples are naturally - that is, immutably, essentially - inferior or non human. These peoples' concept of "human" has very little to do with our modern concept (shared, incidentally, by Nazis and non-Nazis alike). Likewise, the "oneness with nature" that the so-called animist cosmologies show is very different from Nazi eco-fascism. It's not about oneness, in fact, but equality or pan-sociality, in the sense that non-human beings are considered people (different people, I should add) — which doesn't necessarily make them friendly (kinspersons, for example), quite the opposite. "

To which I replied:

"I agree with both the point you make about kinship etc… and concerning the differences between the Nazi and the pre modern tribal relation to nature (one-ness is clearly the wrong term for the latter I need to replace it with together-ness). 

At least in part, what your critique highlights is more the point where analogies become a problem.

I think I need to re-write what I have written so as to ensure it is not interpreted as a claim that the Nazis and the pre or as you call them extra modern people share a similar ‘racism’ or that, as you put it I am drawing parallels between them. I think racism is only possible with the rise of the modern belief in ‘humanity’. I simply wanted to use the comparison to convey the radical exclusionary nature of Nazi racism that is more radical than any other racism. Still what makes Nazi anti-semitism racist is not that radical exclusion but that exists in conjunction with that dominant modern belief in ‘humanity’."

References:

Naomi Klein, The Zone of Interest is about the danger of ignoring atrocities - including Gaza, The Guardian, 14 March 2024.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/mar/14/the-zone-of-interest-auschwitz-gaza-genocide

Milan Solly, The Real History Behind 'The Zone of Interest' and Rudolf Höss, Smithsonian Magazine, January 4, 2024

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-real-history-behind-the-zone-of-interest-and-rudolf-hoss-180983531/

Marcelo Svirsky, Perpetrators: Israel under the Zone of Interest, Arena Online, 19 March 2024.

https://arena.org.au/perpetrators-israel-under-the-zone-of-interest/

The Metamorphosis of Daniele the Zionist

When I first met my partner Caroline and learnt that her father was of Italian-Jewish background, and that he migrated to Australia to escape Mussolini’s black shirts, I expected that, when I get to meet him, we will probably end up arguing about Israel. I wasn’t particularly worried. I had a long experience with my own Christian Lebanese anti-Palestinian family of going into intense arguments about Palestine without having to take it as far as severing family ties. As it turned out Caroline’s father had very little attachment to Israel.

 

It was not until we visited Rome, from where the family originated, and met Caroline’s cousins, that I got to encounter family members with a strong investment in Israel. Some had even done a full pilgrimage, gone there, lived on a Kibbutz, and trained with the IDF, before returning to Rome. Those were seriously committed Zionists. Chief among them was Daniele (not his real name). A tall, softly spoken, chain-smoking man with an incredible knowledge of Rome and its art, Daniele was a seductive character. I immediately liked him. I was also primed by Caroline to tolerate his Zionism for, among all of the family members, he had had the most traumatizing experience of Italian fascism in World War Two: when the Mussolini’s Blackshirts climbed up the stairs of their apartment to round up whoever was left of the family, his grandmother hid him under the bed’s mattress and asked him not to leave until she told him to do so. The fascists took his grandmother away and Daniele remained under the mattress for three days. I’ve never felt it to be good productive politics, and certainly not decent human behaviour, to strongly criticise the investments that people make as a result of such experiences.

 

Nonetheless over the fiteen years or so that I knew him (he died in 2016), Daniele’s views about Israel changed considerably. I like to think that maybe it’s because of my influence, but it’s probably more a growing clash between his political and ethical sensibility and the increasingly reactionary and intolerable social and cultural environment that has become pervasive throughout the country. 

 

I remember the first time I met Daniele, he openly and carelessly told me how worried he was about the son of a relative who was an Israeli soldier fighting in Lebanon. It didn’t seem to bother him that I was Lebanese or that I might be worried about any Lebanese people at the receiving end of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. I was already writing about the relation between victimhood and narcissism at the time, and, thought to myself that he would make a good case study. But what he said did initiate the first of many later arguments we had about the ‘who is right and who is wrong’ of the war. While strongly disagreeing with him, it was through these arguments that I got to like him more and more, chain smoking and calmly making his point without a hint of aggression.

 

Around the mid-2000s I began noticing a very distinct change in Daniele’s attitude. He was feeling increasingly alienated from Israeli society as it was evolving and mentioned a couple of friends that he no longer talked to. While he continued to be invested in Israel, he nonetheless found it hard to justify why he was. He adopted a kind of ‘I don’t like what they are doing but we Jews don’t have much choice but to support Israel’. On one occasion, I told him a story related by Edward Said. I can no longer find the reference so I might have changed the story a bit. I think it was about an intellectual who was a reluctant Zionist, but that Said liked and respected, nonetheless. In explaining why he supported Zionism despite not having any affinities with it, this intellectual said something like this: if your son steals all your money and bets it on a horse, you might not like what you son has done and you might not even like the horse, but would you want the horse to lose the race? Daniele really liked that story. He thanked me for it and said it really captured how he felt.

 

In 2014, however, two years before he died, Daniele surprised me. We happened to be visiting him and his wife in Rome, in the midst of what became known as ‘Operation Protective Edge.’ This operation, in many ways, prefigured the 2023 Israeli invasion of Gaza in its exterminatory deadliness, and its indifference to civilian life. Daniele was upset by it. As we were watching the violence unfurl on the news, he got particularly agitated watching a clip of two Israeli soldiers leading away a handcuffed young boy. He sighed heavily, and turned to me and said: ‘I no longer care if this horse wins anymore. It’s like, as they say in English, “flogging a dead horse”.’ I did not dare say anything triumphant as it would have cheapened the moment, and disrespected what he must have experienced saying this.

 

It was an important moment to me. As I noted above, while I always considered the linking of the Holocaust and Israel’s right to exist as an ethno-national entity intellectually untenable, I nonetheless understood the people who have been traumatised by the Holocaust and who experienced the relation between it and Israel as sacrosanct. I always refrained from engaging  with such people critically. That moment when Daniele referred to Israel as a ‘dead horse’ helped me break the aura of sanctity that surrounded the nexus between the Holocaust and Israel. After all what has happened and has been happening, I increasingly see in the people highlighting this nexus as self-serving ideologues whose collapsing of the idea of ‘being at home in the world’ with the idea of ‘defending an ethno-national state’ is both politically and ethically untenable.

 

English Translation of 'The Ghassan Hage Scandal', Written in German by Samuli Schielke (Published in Zenith, 23/02/1957)

A renowned visiting researcher expresses his anger on social media about the Gaza war and its victims. The Max Planck Society throws him out the door and makes accusations of anti-Semitism that, upon closer inspection, are unfounded.

 

The Lebanese-Australian scientist Ghassan Hage, born in Beirut in 1957, is considered a luminary in his field; His 1998 book “White Nation – Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society” is one of the standard works in anthropology and ethnology. His latest book, “The Diasporic Condition,” published in 2021, is a milestone in the anthropology of migration. The German, publicly funded Max Planck Society was proud when it appointed Hage as a visiting scientist at its institute of the same name in Halle in 2023. As an intellectual, Hage regularly speaks out in interviews about the Middle East conflict and has long propagated the idea of a one-state solution for Palestinians and Jews.

 

Since October 7, 2023 and the subsequent outbreak of war in Gaza, he has been writing a lot on social media or on his blog on the Internet. Some of it is characterized by anger and lacks scientific sophistication. On the day of the Hamas attack on Israel - at a time when very few people had a clear picture of the true extent and brutality of the attack - he published a poem entitled "The endless Dead-End that will not end". It's about the cyclical violence in Gaza. In the end, it says that despite all the military superiority, the "resistance of the Palestinians" is endless - they can even "fly over walls." Critics saw this as a glorification of Hamas.

 

Hage likes to advocate provocative viewpoints that are not popular in either the West or the Arab world. On December 30, he wrote on X (formerly Twitter): “I have no doubt that Israel will cease to exist as a Jewish state. It will cease to exist by dissolving back into what it was as Palestine: a multi-religious space [...] with all its ups and downs.’’ With this sentence he speaks against Islamists and Arab nationalists as well as against Israel's Western supporters. According to a report in Welt am Sonntag published on February 5, 2024, the proof was provided: Hage was preaching hatred of Israel, anti-Semitism and trivializing the Holocaust because, for example, he called methods of Israeli warfare in Gaza "similar" to those of the National Socialists: for example, the systematic humiliation of the Palestinians in Gaza. It would be bad if a member of the Max Planck Society had spread hatred of Jews. But is it even true?

 

As someone who has been researching the Arab world for decades, I know the Arab version of anti-Semitism well. It is shaped by the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, but also uses thought patterns, themes and slogans from European and National Socialist Jew-hatred, disguised with religiously based resentment. In short: I know more about it than I would like.

 

Anyone who examines the Hage case and leaves the final word to expert analysis cannot confirm the accusation that Hage is an anti-Semitic and spreads anti-Semitic propaganda. His writings are not anti-Semitic. They do not denigrate Jews or Israelis as people or as a religious or ethnic community; neither are his statements. They are polarizing and polemical. They are directed primarily against Israeli politics and the idea of ethnic nationalism, which he sees as embodied in Israel's political project. Only those who equate criticism of Israel and the occupation with hatred of Jews can see anti-Semitism in this.

 

There is a lot of discussion and writing about this tendency in the media and politics. However, there was no anti-Semitism scandal at the Max Planck Institute. The “termination of the collaboration”, i.e. the dismissal of Hage by the Max Planck Society in response to criticism of his statements, is the actual scandal as it affects the freedom of science and expression of opinion.

 

In its short press release on February 7th about the Hage case, the Max Planck Society accused Hage of having “damaged science” with his statements. Loyalty to the employer is just as important as the legally guaranteed right to freedom of expression. The Society’s president ended the message with the memorable sentence: "Racism, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, discrimination, hatred and agitation have no place in the Max Planck Society." The Max Planck Society did not explain what exactly Hage had committed. On February 23, Hage announced that he would take legal action against his dismissal. So this question is still being discussed in court.

 

For anyone who wants to make their own judgment, I recommend his English essay “Gaza and the Coming Age of the Warrior” from November 2023, published online on Allegra Lab. There, Hage calls the terror against Israeli civilians by its name. He also discusses why many people outside Europe did not want to share the grief for the Israeli victims: this is perceived as exclusive and does not apply equally to the Palestinians who were killed in Gaza by Israel's "punitive expedition" (Hage) - with Europe's blessing and the western world. Of course, the same can be said about many Arab voices who ignored the suffering of Israelis. But wrong twice stays wrong. Hage is someone who feels horror and sadness for the suffering of friends and opponents. That's why we should listen to him when he demands the same from others.

 

Not only sadness, but also anger is permissible and understandable: about the cold-blooded killing of almost 1,200 Jewish Israelis as well as foreign tourists and guest workers. About the no less cold-blooded killing of over 29,000 Palestinians in Gaza by Israel's army. Which of these should scare us more? In war we are partial; we are more affected by the suffering of some people than that of others. That is difficult to change. But a minimum of decency requires that we do not forbid others to express their sadness and anger over the killing of so many people. Especially if we know Ghassan Hage's work: In it he doesn't just stop at anger - he thinks more often about the events and speaks into our conscience.

 

It is arguably legitimate to criticize or be angry with Hage's point of view, just as he criticizes and is angry with others. All of this is clearly within the scope of freedom of expression within the meaning of the Basic Law. And the media and science have to endure it accordingly. Hage supports the idea of the controversial movement “Boycott, Divest, Sanction” (BDS), which wants to force a policy change through a boycott against Israeli institutions. That's why he doesn't travel to Israel himself, but, as he himself explained, he works with Israeli colleagues. A group of Israeli scientists recently confirmed this in a public statement in support of him.

 

Hage has since commented on the allegations on his blog: "If some right-wing journalists who don't like my politics pick out my criticism of Israel from everything I've written and accuse me of anti-Semitism, I expect my "My employer knows about it or at least examined my file and defended me against such accusations." He still stands by his statements: He represents a political ideal "that I have always fought for with regard to Israel and Palestine. It is the ideal of a multi-religious society in which Christians, Muslims and Jews live together in this country.

 

The path towards a plural society also requires pluralistic discussions that give space to viewpoints that are initially irreconcilable. The Max Planck Society's decision is a sad statement about the future of Germany as a science location. For many colleagues at home and abroad, the debate within Germany, in which any discussion about the Middle East conflict can be cut off with accusations of anti-Semitism, is difficult to understand.

 

And why should they come to Germany if they also have to fear becoming the target of a politically motivated campaign? Especially when they are biographically linked to a region that is far removed from German sensitivities and culture of remembrance, but is directly affected by an armed conflict in which Israel plays a central role.

 

I, myself, emigrated to Germany because, in addition to good working conditions, I also found a more critical spirit and diversity here than in my Finnish homeland - a culture that I found to be free, but also small-minded and nationalistic. Today I wonder if I would make the same decision again. The Max Planck Society was given the choice: to continue the tradition of critical discourse and cosmopolitanism - or to wall itself in under pressure from some activists and the media and de facto censor one of its most renowned scientists. They chose the latter.

Reflections at the funeral of my assassinated self

It's Saturday 17 February morning here in Sydney. For those wondering, I did not leave Europe to Australia because of what happened in Germany. The trip was planned long ago. I’ve come back to Australia to welcome into the world my grandson Luca (my first grandchild). 

 

But it’s good to be with family, old friends and colleagues. I am over my jet lag. And I am over the 'stunned this is happening to me' phase of the Max Planck debacle. 

When I insisted on noisily being sacked rather than silently ‘parting ways’ with the institution, I knew that their cheap classification of me as antisemite would only reflect badly on them and on their reputation as a place of serious and unhindered academic research. The classification was a slap in the face of every institution that has ever employed me: Melbourne, Sydney, Western Sydney, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Harvard, Paris, Toulouse, Beirut, and I won’t mention all the many places that have invited me, paid for me and housed me to give talks about my research, all these universities and all the students and academics who wanted to hear me, and believed I had something valuable to say, all were naïve little sods who never noticed what an evil antisemitic creature I am, until the president of the Max Planck Society and his lawyers came to finally reveal me for what I really am. 

 

For those same reasons laid out above, I was confident that most academics will see the classification ‘antisemite’ for the travesty that it is, and will rally behind me. Nonetheless, I wasn’t prepared for the scale of support I have received and am still receiving from around the world. It is all a bit overwhelming. I cannot begin to thank the many organisations, friends, colleagues, ex-students, people I know and have not met, and people I don’t know at all, who have sent me private messages, or made public statements to the Max Planck Society’s President and/or on social media. They have all made a difference. It is practically impossible for me to reply individually to all of them. But let me assure you: I've read all of them. I've read them all, not out of politeness, but, with an immense sense of gratitude, because they all lift my spirits and give me much needed strength. 

 

And I do not forget for one second that this is ultimately not about me at all. It is about a concerted effort by reactionary colonial forces around the world to normalise and legitimise the mass murder of thousands of people in Gaza in the name of defeating Hamas. ‘Defeating Hamas’ is elevated into some kind of higher transnational, and even transcendent, geopolitical reason. What makes this doubly important for us academics is that these forces have accompanied their assault on Gaza with an obscurantist assault against critical academic culture everywhere in the world. Using the state apparatuses when they are under their control, colonising and weaponizing third rate journalistic spaces that thrive on a culture of manufactured lies and innuendos, scaring mediocre managers of academic spaces that don’t know how to strike a balance between the interests of their sources of funding and the interests of the academics they are managing, they aim to eradicate the very conditions of possibility of what makes intellectual places specifically intellectual: the provision of the space, the time and the peace of mind to be able to ‘think hard’ about things. Thus, at this very moment, the struggle to stop the Gaza massacre from continuing to unfold and the struggle to be able to think hard about this massacre have become articulated - even if there is no imaginable symmetry between the suffering that results from the destruction of Gaza and the suffering that comes with the repression of the capacity to think critically about it. 

 

Reading the flow of nice things being said in my defence in the public domain I couldn’t help but joke to my partner and say: ‘it’s like one of those impossible fantasies examined in psychoanalysis, the fantasy of being alive and hovering over your funeral. The assassins are sitting there in satisfied silence, while the mourners dole out the tributes. But at least you get to hear all the nice things that people have to say about you at a time when they are disposed to say nice things about you.’ By the time I cracked the joke, a sense of dread and a more serious fear overcame me: and what if this was, really and truly, my funeral, I found myself thinking. Or at least the funeral of my Max Planck self. That part of myself that has just been subjected to an attempted symbolic murder by the president of the Max Planck Society? After all, not that long ago, if you read this piece carefully, I predicted the possibility of my assassination https://allegralaboratory.net/gaza-and-the-coming-age-of-the-warrior/. But I never thought the assassin will be the chief manager of the institution that employed me.

 

When I took my time to reflect on this fear, it became clear that this was not about the fear of death. I loved my Max Planck self and the people that sustained it, and I am sorry to see it wasted like this. But, luckily for me, and as with all beings, I have many other selves. There was another fear lurking in the background. A fear that I have always harboured: it was the fear that all those statements in my support were really forms of funeral orations. 

 

It was a fear that I have always harboured, one that I indeed touch upon in the linked text above: how can we academics, who, by definition, are part of a non-warring culture, respond to a warring culture that wants to harm us, without undermining our very mode of existence? Does not our discourse reflect, as a matter of fact, our pathetic lack of political power? And even if we had political power, how can our statement and our very analytical concepts be deployed in an aggressive way without them losing at least some of their analytical value? Aren’t we academics destined to only cop it, complain and make a statement without really being able to do much in the face of those who act against us?

 

While, as I said, I was raising questions that I have always raised and reflected upon, there was another part of me that felt unethical to react in such a way to the statements I have received. After all, most of those texts, and the statements that were made public, had in them the necessary fighting spirit demanded by the occasion (except maybe one email which, despite being well meaning and supportive, had ‘Condolences’ in the headline ). They were full of demands for re-instatement, apologies and the like. As I said, they energised me and pumped life into me. Thus, despite my rationalist defeatist inclinations those text demanded from me ethically and politically that I believe in them.

 

This is when the Holy Spirit intervened. It is true that we have witnessed the assassination of my Max Planck self. And it is true that we are in the midst of its funeral. But aren’t all these statements resisting and refusing to believe in this death rather than being resigned to it. Perhaps because Easter is approaching, I found myself digging into my neglected Catholic upbringing and saying to myself: maybe I should believe. Maybe my non-religious self should believe again in the possibility of resurrection! Is this not what these statements point to? Rather than a politics of defeat, a politics of resurrection?

 

The thought of this energised me. It made me more aggressive. I wanted to look at the President of the Max Planck Society, and rather than say ‘how dare you?’, say ‘accept that you have erred. Apologise for directing the words ‘antisemite’ at me, and reverse your decision!’ Do you want to be the president of the readers of a populist newspaper or do you want to be the president of an academic institution? If it is the latter, academics from all over the world are telling you: reverse your decision! If you don’t that is all what you will be: 

Statement Regarding my sacking from the Max Planck Institute of Social Anthropology (February 9 2024)

On Wednesday 31^st of January morning I woke up to an email from the right-wing newspaper Welt am Sonntag. They declared me to be ‘an activist for the BDS boycott movement for years’ which has never been the case. I take my job as an academic too seriously to have time to be an activist.

I was informed that the newspaper’s so-called ‘research team’ that ‘since the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7th, we have noticed that you have been making increasingly drastic statements towards the State of Israel’… It didn’t seem to occur to them that maybe this was because Israel was engaging in an on-going mass murder of Palestinians.

They had selected a few of my social media posts and wanted to know if I could understand if ‘critics classify your statements as antisemitic?’ I did not reply to this email. In my experience, the questions were a prelude to a fascistic ideological assassination job which was going to happen regardless of whether one says or does not say something.

Indeed, the article did happen. In it I was portrayed in conspiratorial terms as the henchman of some kind of BDS group. My job is to infiltrate academia. I had finished doing my job in Australia and was now set on infiltrating Germany. 

But before the article was published, I sent the above email to the Directors of MPI (Max Planck Institute of Social Anthropology in Halle) on the same morning I saw it. I was informed that a similar query was sent not only to them but also to the President of the Max Planck Society in Munich. I was also informed that the President has sent the email to the society’s lawyers. No one in Munich, lawyer or otherwise, contacted me or sought my opinion about the above. The next day, on Thursday morning, the directors of MPI informed me that there was a central decision requiring that MPI sever its relationship with me. The decision was based on the way antisemitism has come to be defined and institutionalised in Germany which has been analysed and critiqued by many.

 

For anyone who knows the German landscape at the moment, there is nothing surprising about this happening to me. Many people other than me have copped a variation on this same treatment. It does not make it less infuriating. 

 

Needless to say, I stand by everything I say in my social media. I have a political ideal that I have always struggled for regarding Israel/Palestine. It is the ideal of a multi-religious society made from Christians, Muslims and Jews living together on that land. My academic writings on that matter, and they are considerable, attests to the way I have always struggled for this ideal. I have criticised both Israelis and Palestinians who work against such a goal. If Israel has copped and continues to cop the biggest criticism it is because its colonial ethno-nationalist project is by far the biggest obstacle towards achieving such aim. This is also true of my social media posts. My declarations of these ideals is there in my social media. My critique of Palestinians who work against such an ideal is there in my social media. And so is my critique of Israel's ethno-nationalism. If some right-wing journalists who dislike my politics decide to pick from all what I have written my critiques of Israel and accuse me of antisemitism, I expect my employer to know or at least to investigate my record and defend me against such accusations. Believing in a multi-religious society and critiquing those who work against it is not antisemitism. I will not accept to be put in a defensive position where I have to justify myself for holding and working for such ideals. 

 

As importantly, I have more than 35 years of writing and teaching behind me, I have taught whole courses and parts of courses on Middle East anthropology throughout the world, to students with all kind of political persuasions: Never, EVER, have I had a student or an employer come to me and tell me that anything about my teaching has offended them or hurt them. On the contrary, the list of those who praise me and my work for making them think harder despite disagreeing with me is very long.

This is why, when the Max Planck President’s Office treated me as a liability that needs to be managed, and proposed that I go silently with a non-disclosure agreement, I refused and asked to be unilaterally sacked. I felt it was important that they produce a document where they state why they have chosen to sack me. (this is yet to be sent to me btw)

 

Two months into the Israeli bombardment of Gaza and its killing of thousands of Palestinians, my colleague Livnat Konopny-Decleve, from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, invited me to participate in an EASA (European Association of Social Anthropology)-organised debate on Violence and Postcolonialism. The thought came to me that if anthropologists have anything specific to add to the scholarly analysis of political violence, it probably had to do with trying to show that political violence is not something that is the same everywhere: there are different cultures of violence. Looking at a photo of naked Palestinian prisoners being led by Israeli soldiers in the ruins of Gaza, I began thinking about the relation between violence and humiliation. As I often do when I am writing, I posted the idea I had on Facebook:

The Israelis like to say that what they are doing in Gaza is like what the allies did in Dresden. But this is not true. The allies never tried to humiliate the people of Dresden. Israeli violence resembles far more Nazi antisemitic violence in this regard in its destructive power and desire to humiliate. It also resembles Nazi violence by its vulgarity.

 

I am taking my time contextualising this Facebook post as it is one of the posts that were deemed by the lawyers of the Max Planck Society to put me in contravention of the law in Germany: it is apparently antisemitic to engage in a comparison between Israel and Nazis. That is what I was told anyway. As far as I understand, this is, in a nutshell, what has put me at odds with Max Planck Society’s lawyers. What to me is a fair, intellectual critique of Israel, for them is ‘antisemitism according to the law in Germany’.

 

This is why, if Max Planck Society’s president limited himself to saying something like the above, I could have lived with it. I might not like the way the critique of Israel is conflated with antisemitism, and I find the German’s pseudo philosemitism self-serving, and at times racist, instrumentalised to racialize the Palestinian and more generally the Arab and Muslim community in Germany. But as a visitor there is a limit to the extent to which I feel entitled to critique this.

 

I cannot describe how saddened I am by this. I felt I was participating in and achieving some great things with some wonderful people at MPI. The fact that this intellectual world I was part of can be destroyed so easily and that the managers of academic institutions run scared and let it happen rather than defend the vitality of the academic space under their management is a real tragedy. 

 

Ghassan Abu-Sittah: The Practice of Surgery as an Anti-Genocidal Struggle

I have known Ghassan Abu-Sittah since his time in Beirut as the Head of Plastic Surgery at the American University of Beirut’s Hospital. When we were first introduced, and given the number of Lebanese women that walked around with a band aid on their nose, I was a victim of a stereotype that made me think that Plastic Surgery could only mean providing ‘nose-jobs’ and the like. I began wondering how it could possibly be that a surgeon from Gaza, who immediately comes across as well-read in radical political theory, and likes to frequent social scientists, spends his time aestheticizing the noses, ears and faces of Lebanese women. Then he started talking about his work and it didn’t take me long to become introduced to the world of limb replacements and reconstructive surgery. I learnt that he spent a lot of time in Gaza operating on people maimed in awful ways by Israeli soldiers and their ‘sophisticated’ weapons and ammunitions. I also learnt that part of his work in Beirut consisted in operating on Iraqi soldiers maimed by the many of Saddam Hussein’s wars and the American invasion of their country. 

We’ve stayed in touch on social media and we always come across each other when we are both in Beirut. He and his wife are both from Gaza and he has always worked in hospitals there amidst the many violent Israelis incursions into the territory over the years. So, it didn’t surprise me that he would immediately announce that he is going to Gaza when the Israelis started their retaliatory pounding of the strip in the aftermath of Hamas’ October 7 attacks. 

As the retaliatory pounding turned into the most savage, premeditatedly indiscriminate and brutal mass murder of civilians in the first quarter of the twenty first century, and as the Israeli bombing targeted the whole social, cultural and medical infrastructure of the strip, the bombing of hospitals became a particular cause of attention and outrage. In this environment, Ghassan and his social media descriptions of working conditions inside the hospitals and the kind of surgery he had to perform, especially as hospitals ran out of anaesthetics, started to widely circulate. He was increasingly being interviewed in the mainstream media and is now preparing to be an eyewitness at the ICC in the Hague.

Recently, we caught up over a cup of coffee at Café Younes in Hamra, Beirut. He had lost a lot of weight. He told me that he was suffering psychologically and physiologically in the aftermath of his Gaza experience. He also feels a sense of guilt for having left and would have liked to go back if it didn’t involve subjecting his family to all the fears and uncertainties that going back to Gaza would involve. Already his wife’s father has disappeared in Gaza more than a week ago, so she’s dealing with enough as it is. Insensitively perhaps given the above, I tried not to let all this come too much in the way of my curiosity. I wanted to hear from him some details of his everyday life as a surgeon working in the midst of destruction and mass murder. So, I was probably unbearably inquisitive, raising way too many issues. But he indulged me, and answered my questions. 

We often argue that thanks to social media, and to some heroic journalism, Gaza’s destruction and the killing of its people have been made available for all of us to witness more than any destructive murderous war before it. While this indeed gave us an unequal proximity to the destruction and the killing, it did not give us proximity to the way this destruction and killing is lived and negotiated by those experiencing it. My questions to Ghassan were particularly directed at getting some insights into the nature of surgery as a practice in such conditions. How do the medical staff perform their tasks under such circumstances, how do they relate to their own bodies being endangered, how do they relate to the horror that surrounded them and how do they relate to each other? I also quizzed him about what kind of solidarity, but also what kind of tensions arose between the staff in such circumstances.

At one point I raised the fact that in the public imagination surgery is often associated with ‘cool hands’. How was it possible to have ‘cool hands’ amidst the falling bombs, crumbling walls, depleted medical resources and malfunctioning technology? I asked. Ghassan said this was all nerve wrecking indeed. And particularly nerve wrecking was the flow of dead and injured people one encounters at every moment; sometimes in incidents happening before one’s very eyes. He kept referring to ‘the freshness of the wounds’ and the kind of interaction with the body of the injured that such ‘freshness’ required. Paradoxically, all this, he said, gave the performance of surgery itself a therapeutic function, so there was never a problem with your hands not serving you. 

As he explained, in the chaotic conditions of mass destruction and mass murder, there is a reversal between what, in a ‘normal’ (ie, peace-time) hospital space, is considered as ‘the space of tension,’ and what is considered as ‘the space of tranquility’. In those normal conditions the world outside the surgery room is the world of calm while the tension is happening in the operating room. This is reversed in Gaza. With the world outside the surgery room being extremely dangerous and tense, the performance of the familiar practices associated with surgery transform the operation for the surgeon into a kind of relaxing ritual: the person they are operating on becomes flesh rather than the daughter of x or the brother of y, and the technicality, predictability and ordered nature of surgery stands in opposition to the chaotic outside.

The above, ordered, a-personal, and ritualistic character of the surgery itself stood out particularly in comparison with the socially far more difficult pre-surgery decisions concerning triage: choosing who to prioritise for surgery among the many injured. This created a continuous ‘Sophie’s Choice’-type reality, Ghassan said. And it was made complicated by situations where medical staff would recognise people personally, he stressed. I initially thought that he was speaking of those difficult moment which many of us had already seen on social media where medical staff recognise close kin among the dead and injured. But this was not what he was referring to.

He said that while triage is usually done on the basis of a purely medical assessment of the viability of the operation: who needs it most urgently, and who is likely to survive it and benefit from it. In Gaza, and because the medical staff sometimes recognised who the injured people actually were, an added criteria was people’s knowledge of how many of someone’s family had already been murdered by the Israelis. Someone would say: we must try and prioritise saving this one, three of his or her siblings have already been killed and s/he is the only one left for his/her mother.

I found this extremely important, because it is a point that transformed the practice of surgery from a relation between a surgeon and the repairing of an individual body into a relation between the surgeon and the repairing of social relations. If the aim of genocidal violence is not only the destruction of individual bodies but the destruction of networks of social relations and their capacity to reproduce themselves, surgical practices, by aiming to save or repair family and communal rather than just individual bodies in the way it is described above acquire an important anti-genocidal dimension. Ghassan said a number of times that the environment created by the Israeli bombing kept bringing Achille Mbembe’s notion of ‘death world’ to his mind. It seems that in Gaza’s crumbling environment, the hospital gives new meaning to the notion of ‘life world’, highlighting it as a form of resistance to the expanding ‘death world’.

There is a particularly special and close relation between health practices and anti-colonialism in Palestine that is not as pronounced in other anti-colonial struggles, Ghassan tells me. Perhaps this is because of the intensely genocidal disposition of Israeli colonialism towards Palestinians. In places like South Africa, Apartheid was structured by the need for a healthy labour force and hospitals performed a useful colonial function in this regard. In Palestine, while the Israelis do make use of Palestinian labour, this usage is neither important nor crucial. There is no vested interest in a healthy Palestinian population, quite the contrary. As such, the exterminatory tendencies of Israeli colonialism can more easily run amuck as it were, especially when they are well-financed and well-armed as we have seen it happening over the years, and as we continue to see it happening in Gaza today. It makes all practices of preserving health anti-colonial by definition. The insistence of Israel on demolishing hospitals acquires a different dimension when seen from this perspective.

This puts us face to face with the other therapeutic dimension of what we do in the hospitals, Ghassan says. I told you about the therapeutic function of the surgical practice as a ritualised, ordered work of relating to the flesh of the injured. It can be seen as a therapy provided by the micro dimension of our practices. The therapy I am now referring positions us on a different scale. It comes from a relation to the macro socio-political dimension of our practices. It comes from the knowledge that what we are doing is part of an anti-colonial liberation struggle. Not in the darkest of moments, when the bombs are falling at their most intense, and when the flow of the dead and injured is at its most severe and when the morale is very low, do we lose sight of the horizon of liberation.

 

We, lovers of Palestine, we are better than you

 We, lovers of Palestine, We are better than you.

 

We do not instrumentalise our holy scripture to rob people of their houses,

We are better than you.

 

We don’t pollute the noble history of victimhood of our ancestors, 

and use it to treat people like shit,

We are better than you.

 

We do not like thieving, exploiting, aggressive, fascistic, violent states,

We are better than you.

 

We who grieve the dead as human beings, not as superior ethno-national subjects, 

we are better than you.

 

We who do not feel pain at the sight of a suffering child according to where the child comes from, 

We are better than you.

 

We who have refused to master indifference in the face of injustice and genocide,

We are better than you.

 

We who do not love ourselves by hating others, 

we are better than you.

 

We who acknowledge that we can be better than we are and work on ourselves to be so,

We are better than you.

 

We who recognise that history is full of injustices that we need to acknowledge, 

and where possible rectify, 

rather than ignore, hide and deny, 

we are better than you.

 

We are

 

We are more loving, we are more caring, 

we are more sensitive, we are more receptive 

and we are more perceptive,

 

There are only two reasons why, we might die suffocating in your self-serving, hating, thieving, blind with narrow and short-sighted self-interest, world.

You are better financed and you are better armed.

 

But we are better than you.