After Savagery: Gaza, Genocide and the Illusion of Western Civilisation

Drawing upon philosophy and literature, Hamid Dabashi exposes the roots of Western colonial savagery and its entire manifestation in Israel as a Western colonial project currently engaged in exterminating Palestinians through genocide.

The genocide in Gaza is not happening in a vacuum. After Savagery: Gaza, Genocide and the Illusion of Western Civilisation (Haymarket Books, 2025) illustrates a rethinking of the Jewish Holocaust as part of “the larger frame of European genocidal reference” and thus linking to other colonial erasures across the globe. “Witnessing this savagery in Gaza,” Dabashi writes, “we can clearly link the Jewish Holocaust to the Palestinian genocide, and see genocidal Zionism as the logical colonial extension of European fascism.”

Dabashi’s writing holds back nothing. It stands in stark contrast to the Western news reports on Gaza and brings the atrocities of colonialism to the fore. “Israel is not a country, it is not a homeland, it is not a rooted culture. Israel is a settler colony, a moral depravity created by the West, enabled and empowered by the West … Since its very inception, Israel is the summation of the West, materialised and put on a pedestal,” Dabashi writes. With that summation embodied in Israel, Palestine now is the measure of all colonial violence inflicted upon people worldwide. While not the first to experience colonial erasure and violence, Dabashi writes, “the history of the world has been summarised in Palestine.”

Dabashi goes on to discuss the implications of Palestine and being Palestinian in a world that is now rethinking its positioning after Israel exposed the foundations of Western colonial atrocities which it embodies. How can the slogan “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” be interpreted? What about the chant that “we are all Palestinians?” What are the implications of the multitudes of Palestinian narratives as a result of the diaspora? Where is home and how is home configurated? What is the essence of Palestine and how the world mangle that essence into refugee camps which are now the epitome of Palestinian identity and resistance?

And yet, Dabashi asks, where do Palestinians fit in world politics, world literature, world art? Is the concept of the world too narrow to include Palestinians, given that it is entirely beholden to the Western view of what the world is?

Delving deeper, Dabahsi asks if Palestinian literature qualifies as national literature, “when the very formation of the Palestinian nation has been violently interrupted by the very imperial and colonial projects that initially theorised the very idea of ‘World Literature’”. Is there truly room for Palestine in the global arts scene when its erasure was planned through colonialism and is still ongoing?

The book turns its attention to showing how Israel and the West are interchangeable and introduces the concept of the garrison state, discussed later in the book. Israel’s brutality in Gaza, the author notes, is “the symptom of the delusional malaise called ‘the West’”. Dabashi notes that the Palestinian genocide will need to be recollected with as much attention as the Jewish Holocaust. “The two atrocities are interrelated as the two sides of the same coin of European genocidal practices,” Dabashi writes.

As the book progresses, it is easy to decipher Dabashi’s historical links, in contrast to the severing which the West imposes with its manufactured narratives on Palestine. The extension of colonial violence is seen in Palestine, and one can also trace back to other colonial genocidal practices in Africa, Latin America and Asia.

Weaving the works of several Western authors and philosophers into his book, Dabashi exposes the missing parts of the narratives, the obfuscation and, at times, the Zionist leanings of philosophical and political thought. Non-Europeans, Dabashi explains, “simply do not exist in the European philosophical imagination, from Kant to Hegel to Levinas and the rest of their pedigree.” Literature, the arts and philosophy, therefore, become exclusively European and this is exposed also in studies and citations, which focus only on Western thinkers. This prompts the author to question whether non-European people can claim philosophy, as a result of exclusion and exclusivity. Other works on settler-colonialism, Dabashi notes, do not “single out Israel, geographically or historically.”

The garrison state, which Dabashi mentions earlier in the book, is expounded upon in a way that centres the previous discussions. The genocide in Gaza, Dabashi explains exposes two realities: “Israel is a heavily militarised garrison state, and Palestine is a constellation of refugee camps at the mercy of Israeli systemic violence since the Nakba.” The garrison state is presented as intertwined with the Palestinian experience of life whether in or outside of refugee camps. In theorising the garrison state, Dabashi points out that earlier literature before 1970 excludes the colonial link, and further explains how the moral legitimacy required by the state “is no longer operative, for now garrison states wield absolute and brutal power over many populations.”

Dabashi’s profound reflections are intertwined with updates from Israel’s genocide in Gaza, spelling both urgency in ending the obliteration of Palestinians, and the necessity of understanding what Israel and Zionism mean, what they reflect and embody, which is the entire Western spectrum of colonial brutality. “The US and Europe (the West) were not just aiding and abetting Israel during this genocide. Israel led the West in perpetrating this genocide,” Dabashi writes. And yet, Dabashi concludes, Israel’s genocide in Gaza has altered perception and scrutiny, as it is the entire trajectory of European colonial violence that has now been exposed.

https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20250730-after-savagery-gaza-genocide-and-the-illusion-of-western-civilisation/