In a recent article, ‘Compassionate Genocide’, the philosopher Michael Marder coined the striking and useful titular oxymoron to characterise the situation in Gaza.
The meaning of this characterisation seems clear enough at first glance: The US claims to provide humanitarian aid to the people of Gaza in the spirit of international law and common humanity even as the Israeli military indiscriminately kills people there – children, men, women whose individual identities are almost entirely lost in this general massacre, lost in ‘genocide’ – with a nearly uninterrupted American supply of weapons from when the war began, after October 7, 2023.
Marder’s meaning is a little more complex. He intends ‘compassionate genocide’ to convey a structural logic of the situation which implicates the so-called subjective feeling of compassion in the genocidal act of war that Israel is committing under the aegis of the ‘right to self-defence’. This right has been exercised with no apparent limit and legitimated by that very system of states called the West which speaks the loudest in the name of international law and humanitarian norms as custodian of a civilised and democratic world order. Marder identifies this as the logic of a ‘neoliberal’ order that is nothing but an abstraction for global doublespeak and capitalist normalisation of myriad types of global inequality and injustice. To illustrate his diagnosis of ‘compassionate genocide’, Marder refers to a recent incident in Western Gaza (March 8) when aid that was airdropped from an American plane landed on some residents, killing them. This ‘killing by aid’ is a brutal scenario of the duplicitous logic and intrinsic irony of the situation in which justification of war and humanitarian discourse seem to go hand in hand with untroubled equanimity.
In this article, I want to provide a supplementary note to Michael Marder’s pertinent diagnostic logic by offering a related but somewhat different interpretation of the March 8 incident.
Parachutes drop supplies and smokes rise to the sky following explosions in the northern Gaza Strip as seen from southern Israel, Friday, March 8, 2024. #APPhotos @Leo_Correa #israel #gaza #war #humanitarian #aid pic.twitter.com/eA0GkNrXpp
— Leo Correa (@Leo_Correa) March 8, 2024
When the aid packages were dropped from the sky by a US airplane, apparently serving the cause of humanitarian assistance, these were literally lowered into the ‘atmosphere’. Marder makes a valid point that it is less important that Israel is not letting trucks carrying aid pass through the normal land route into Gaza and that airdropping aid is a highly inefficient way of giving assistance, because in both cases the fundamental co-implication of the discourse of war and humanitarian discourse within neoliberalism remains intact. But I want to suggest that in one respect, the mode of airdropping aid does illustrate a key feature of the nature of not only humanitarian assistance but of war itself. In a simple schematisation one can picture the action of reaching aid through the normal land route as a properly targeted and individualised form of assistance since it is meant to reach the identified and determined individuals, families, areas, etc. who are in dire need. When lowered into the ‘atmosphere’, the aid is thrown into a kind of indeterminate pool of possibilities, governed only by randomness and dispersion, about who actually access it and even more pointedly whether the aid will enter the ‘world’ of humans at all and be serviceable for that world (for instance, some of the aid is actually lost to the sea). Here, ‘atmosphere’ signifies a common-sense notion of the general environment whose form and presentation are relatively indeterminate with bodies, whether human or non-human, comprising that environment, still relatively entwined and swarming without sufficient individualisation or recognisability. The perverse and tragic result of aid packages that end up killing their supposed beneficiaries is already incipient in this general fuzziness of the atmosphere or environment, with little control over the result of which state or governmental action will produce what effect among the people who are the ‘targets’ of these actions, whether the overall state of the environment/ atmosphere will be ameliorated or degraded by these actions.
The German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk in a short text called Terror from the Air, written in 2002 (translated into English in 2009), proposes that in the 20th century, the mode of warfare has shifted into a new zone, which has significant implications not just for the nature of wars but also for the very status of warring parties (state and nonstate actors in current vocabulary) and the type of experience which war induces for its protagonists and victims (military personnel, post-military terrorists, mercenaries, civilians…).
According to Sloterdijk, in the new paradigm of war it is the atmosphere that is the primary site and target of warfare. The main aim of such warfare is not anymore to simply capture and kill the enemy body but to affect and degrade the enemy atmosphere in such a way that the experience of this ‘environmental degradation’ is felt as a human subjective emotion, and it also objectively targets those parameters which, though not human, affect human bodies and their living experiences. Sloterdijk refers to the first known accounts of gas and chemical warfare during World War I as an illustration of this mode of targeting the enemy’s atmosphere rather than its ‘bodies’—a mode of producing long-standing, nearly endless effects in the environment of bodies, which are passed down through generations.
From the instance Sloterdijk starts with, which is an incident in 1916 when Germans exploded chlorine gas in the surroundings of a French cavalry battalion to degrade and incapacitate it rather than simply eliminate it, to the endless effects of the Hiroshima–Nagasaki bombings in 1945, the persistent worsening of atmosphere beyond immediate targeting and destruction of bodies characterises the counterintuitive paradigm of modern warfare. We can now conceive of a procedure of endless worsening beyond the worst individual act that can be committed in a war – the worst act of genocide for instance, where the bodies of determined and identified individuals is targeted with respect to their ethnic, religious, linguistic or any other parameter of social belonging.
Irrespective of the fact that international law from the 20th century onwards has increasingly prohibited chemical and gas warfare, the essential paradigmatic logic of a war which enters the immediately imperceptible regions of the atmosphere and yet retroactively disorients human perception to the point of a kind of environmental madness, fundamentally characterises not just wars fought by state military but also neoliberal economic regimes, resulting in enormous suffering for populations across the globe, who otherwise might or might not be actually confronted with the experience of a physical war. To this extent, global migration in modern capitalism is indeed an experience of endless indeterminate ‘worsening’ of atmosphere even if this atmosphere has not immediately received the perceptible actions and signs of a physical war.
One can then concur with Marder when he speaks of Gaza as a point of extreme acceleration of global experiences that otherwise have a slow, tortuous and imperceptible duration. So, in Gaza, the pre-October 7 seize to the post-October 7 genocide, to the further projected Day After, when Gaza will have become a new site of economic and environmental reconstruction, are all today scenarios condensed into the unbearable and accelerated experience of something that is having to be borne by real people. It is in this sense that ‘compassionate genocide’ becomes a strange and counterintuitive opening to a post-genocidal and infinite ‘compassionate worsening’ of Gaza.
How does this logic apply to the IDF’s actions in Gaza?
After all, the Israeli state claims that it is explicitly targeting Hamas members in their specific individual culpability for the intolerable thing they did on October 7, 2023. To this end, the IDF is also supposed to be mobilising the most sophisticated instruments not just of warfare but also of intelligence including AI, to locate and target these ‘terrorists’, these ‘criminal’ individuals, who must be absolutely and without exception wiped out. However, we also hear the Israeli political establishment, led by prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, say programmatically that the aim is to destroy Hamas’s military and governing capacity. To achieve this aim, in the last nine months the IDF has killed thousands and thousands…and thousands of people in Gaza, as they ‘appeared’, whether at homes, camps, mosques, schools or hospitals. Israel justifies these mass killings in two ways: First, in the relatively conventional terms that civilian deaths are necessary collateral damage for reaching actual individualised targets, that is Hamas members; but the second justification is trickier.
According to the state of Israel, Hamas is enmeshed in the Gazan population and so it is not even possible to quantitatively calculate the expected collateral damage which can be accounted for to achieve the stated aim of the war. The only way left is to directly assault the ‘atmosphere’ of Gaza, which is nothing but a fuzzy, indeterminate and inseparable world of bodies – whether these bodies be human, Hamas, civilian and everything in between, or they be socio-environmental, from hospitals, schools and churches to natural elements such as the water that is increasingly unfit for consumption, the air that is ignited by bombs and the earth that is nothing but a ‘dump’ (Marder’s word) of warfare, again with the possibility of being ignited any moment with dormant bombs lying in wait to explode at their own sweet time.
Using the second justification, the Israeli army and establishment are carrying out the ultimate test of modern warfare ‘whether in times of war or peace’: How far can you brazenly commit the most violent and remorseless attack on human bodies to protect the security and legitimacy of the modern state system and global order, which speaks both in the voice of unrestricted ‘legal’ state violence and humanitarian discourse of compassion and legality? And at the same time, to what extent can you ‘worsen’ the environment or atmosphere of which people are a part, to accomplish the apparent aim of an ideal wiping out of monstrous, evil, terrorist bodies such as those of Hamas members, since these bodies evidently cannot quite be identified and individualised within this atmosphere? In effect, instead of being able to carry out the ‘ideal genocide’ of Hamas (if Hamas itself is an identity, a community, a genos), is it acceptable to commit a real genocide on a people of which contradictorily it is claimed that Hamas is an inseparable part? One tragic and glaring manifestation of this contradictory claim by Israel is that in this indiscriminate and grievous assault on the atmosphere of Gaza, one of the possible targets is the Israeli hostage herself who, one hopes, still lives somewhere within the tremulous space of this atmosphere.
Yet, if we go back to what Netanyahu says when he declares that it is the military and governing capacity of Hamas that must be destroyed, and we take this literally and also extend the meaning of ‘capacity’ from the specific question of an organisation like Hamas to the more universal or generic capacity of the Palestinian people, then isn’t it possible to also think of a recomposed and emancipated figure of this atmosphere under endless degradation and worsening, as a figure of world? The mosque, the hospital, the school, as traces and fragments of a world in which, even as they are destroyed, people appear? Or is it that, because they never cease to appear, they are endlessly destroyed?
Soumyabrata Choudhury teaches at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi. He is the author of Theatre, Number, Event: Three Studies on the Relationship between Sovereignty, Power and Truth (2013), Ambedkar and Other Immortals: An Untouchable Research Programme (2018) and Now It’s Come to Distances: Notes on Coronavirus and Shaheen Bagh, Association and Isolation(2020). His latest book Thoughts of Gaza Far from Gaza was published by Navayana this month.
This article first appeared on Philosophical Salon. Read the original here.
The author’s photograph is by Reyazul Haque.
