by HOSSAM EL-HAMALAWY
The Columbia professor’s new book argues that Gaza is the measure by which any moral framework must be judged
Hamid Dabashi’sAfter Savagery: Gaza, Genocide, and the Illusion of Western Civilization is a book that does not nudge; it wallops.
Written in the long shadow of Gaza’s devastation, it refuses euphemism, demolishes the polite fictions that anaesthetise Western consciences, and insists on a simple thesis: Gaza is the ethical ground zero of our time.
What we call “the West” has been revealed, not as a civilisational high point, but as a system of domination that dresses barbarism in moral drag.
Read it if you’re ready to stop pretending. Read it if you want language equal to the horror, and a map for thinking, and acting, beyond it.
Published by Haymarket Books, it opens not with hedging but with the unvarnished vocabulary of genocide.
Dabashi peppers the book with quotes from Conrad to Ayelet Shaked, showing how the injunction to “exterminate all the brutes” is not a relic of empire but a living operating system, retooled for a besieged strip of land that has become the world’s moral mirror.
The result is a searing, scandalously explicit indictment and a celebratory defence of Palestinian life and culture as a generative, life-making force.
Gaza as the new categorical imperative
Dabashi’s most provocative move is philosophical: he rewrites Kant from the rubble. The book argues that Gaza has overturned the “metaphysics of morals” and exposed a metaphysics of barbarism at the heart of the West.
If a universal law permits mass death so long as it is rationalised by security, then the universal law is rotten.
Gaza, he insists, is the test: either we orient our ethics from there, or our ethics are counterfeit.
If a universal law permits mass death so long as it is rationalised by security, then the universal law is rotten
This isn’t ivory-tower wordplay; it’s a demand for a total reframing of moral philosophy in the wake of livestreamed atrocity.
The chapter-length meditations hammer the point: from official language that brands Palestinians “human animals”, to policy choices that starve and bomb civilians with impunity, the book refuses to let philosophy float above the blood.
A categorical imperative, Dabashi says, now lives or dies under the dust of collapsed apartment blocks. That’s not melodrama; that’s accountability.
Israel is not merely backed by “the West”, it is “the West”.
The book’s core political claim is blunt: Israel is the condensed, weaponised expression of western imperial history, a garrison state projecting imperial interests, not a normal country gone astray.
From witness to martyr
This is more than the familiar settler-colonial framing; it’s an argument that Gaza exposes the DNA of the West’s self-exculpating myth, linking Indigenous erasure in the Americas, the transatlantic slave trade, and European fascism to the ongoing Palestinian catastrophe.
Dabashi leans on Cesaire’s cold insight: the West only truly recognised “the crime” when the methods of empire were used on Europe itself. That recognition never translated into universal empathy; Gaza proves it.
The author is not asking to swap one victimhood for another. He marks the Holocaust’s specificity while rejecting the move that isolates it from the larger architecture of European genocidal practice.
In this telling, Zionism is not a prophylactic against antisemitism but a colonial project that keeps the region and Jews living within a militarised enclave that is permanently unsafe.
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