‘After Savagery’ by Hamid Dabashi detonates the West’s moral alibi on Gaza

Hamid Dabashi’s After 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. 

Safety cannot be engineered on stolen land policed by permanent war. That’s not “security”; that’s a factory of insecurity, subsidised and protected by Western power.

One of the book’s quiet masterstrokes is linguistic. Dabashi interrogates the concept of “witness” through European philosophy (testis, superstes) and then pivots to Arabic and Persian: shahid (witness) and shaheed (martyr). 

In our languages, he notes, witnesses and martyrs sit side by side, morally fused. That proximity matters.

It dignifies the act of testimony and honours the dead as more than statistics. 

It also rebukes a discourse that treats Palestinian life as a data problem. Pair this with his evocation of Naji al-Ali’s Handala, and you feel the book’s moral scale: witness is not an academic construct; it’s a life risk.

Modern Western philosophy has placed narrow limits on what can be “testified” or “witnessed”. 

Dabashi presents a contemporary challenge to this assertion: what does it mean to read Gaza when the archive is livestreamed but still declared “untestifiable” by those in power?

The book’s answer: you read against the grain. You witness, and you make a moral stand where your witnessing puts you.

‘Processed news’ and liberal damage control

If you’ve gagged on the euphemisms of prestige outlets, this book names your nausea. Dabashi accuses mainstream media of producing processed news, like processed food.

Such outlets, he says, provide additives, preservatives, artificial colouring, manufactured to stabilise a political diet rather than nourish understanding. 

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This isn’t a lazy screed against “the media”; It’s a precise indictment of rhetorical regimes that normalise the abnormal, minimise the criminal, and launder the obscene under the banner of “balance”.

He calls out the New York Times and BBC as archetypes of this liberal-imperial house style, then teaches a tactic: read them forward, backwards, and against themselves until the seams of ideology show.

A similar ferocity greets high philosophy. Dabashi’s earlier critique of Jurgen Habermas’s Zionism reappears here as an index of a broader bankruptcy: a canon that chokes on Palestinian life while waxing nobly about universalism. 

The effect is cumulative and devastating: the words that rule our world are designed to keep some deaths unintelligible.

As an alternative, the book offers the antidote – new words rooted in Gaza’s reality.

Palestine as an epistemic challenge

This is where the book begins to sing. Dabashi is not content to catalogue abuses; he wants to change the axis on which knowledge spins. 

“World literature”, “world cinema”, “world religion” – he dismantles the cosy universals that pretend to include everything while functionally excluding Palestine.

How do you induct a nation into “postcolonial” frameworks when its colonisation is ongoing? 

How do you slot Palestinian art into “world” categories whose gatekeepers insist the “world” is what the West already knows? You don’t. You move the gate.

The West’s silence as Israel delivers the final Nakba | Ghada Karmi | MEE Opinion pic.twitter.com/JItGPvUerp

— Middle East Eye (@MiddleEastEye) May 28, 2025

He proposes a different vocabulary, Nakba (catastrophe), Intifada (uprising), Sumud (steadfastness), as the conceptual scaffolding for a decolonial knowledge project that begins in Palestine and builds out. 

This isn’t provincialism; it’s a demand that the “world” expand to fit reality rather than compress reality to fit the “world”.

The point is not inclusion into existing categories but transformation of the categories themselves.

The art that keeps the future lit

One of the book’s most moving threads is its tour through culture: poetry after genocide, cinema after catastrophe, the stories and symbols that refuse erasure.

Dabashi focuses on Ghassan Kanafani, revolutionary, writer, assassinated at 36, and on Anni Kanafani, his Danish comrade, whose life’s work with Palestinian children continues in Beirut’s camps. 

Then he brings in Italian filmmaker Mario Rizzi and his film The Little Lantern, which stages Kanafani’s story with children in Burj el-Barajnah, crafting a pedagogy of hope amid the labyrinth of exile. 

These aren’t detours; they are the book’s marrow. Culture is not decoration. It’s survival.

Dabashi explains how Rizzi alters Kanafani’s tale in a striking way. The old man with a lantern is replaced by a woman crowning the queen – shifting the story’s focus from an individual symbol of light to a communal ceremony rooted in collective experience. 

The image is unforgettable: if you cannot house a single lantern, how will you hold the sun? Gaza won’t wait for abstract sunshine; it gathers small lights, ten thousand small lights, until the room glows. That is how people build a future under blockade.

The garrison and the camp

Another aspect of the book is a confrontation: the garrison state versus the camp. Israel, as a garrison, is the last outpost of a dying imperial order; Palestine, as a camp, is the site where new forms of life and solidarity are being forged. 

Camps are meant to immiserate and contain. Yet they also incubate culture, mutual aid and political clarity.

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Dabashi doesn’t romanticise deprivation; he recasts the camp as a generator of worldliness that isn’t predicated on domination. 

Think of this as a counter-cartography: the map that matters now is not borders on paper, but circuits of care and resistance that route around sovereignty’s cruelty.

From here, the book pushes outward: Palestine beyond borders, diaspora, students and workers, synagogues refusing Zionism, refugee networks, coalitions across movements. 

The point is practical: the struggle is not quarantined; neither is complicity. 

If western governments bankroll the machinery that kills Palestinians, then western publics must disrupt that machinery economically, culturally and electorally. 

Dabashi doesn’t hand out a checklist, but his argument all but writes one: boycott, organise, disobey the death-dealing normal.

An insurgent prose for an emergency

Let’s talk about writing. Dabashi’s prose is incandescent. He stacks clauses to a drumbeat, stitches quotations into a prosecutorial brief, and refuses to domesticate his anger. 

Some will call the style polemical. Good. Polemic is what you use when neutral diction is part of the crime scene. 

He is not trying to make “both sides” feel seen; he is trying to make the dead visible and the living responsible. 

The book will irritate readers clinging to elite decorum or academic hedging. It will thrill and steady readers who have been gaslit by years of “context” that never quite manages to include Palestinian lives.

For an average reader who’s been told that Gaza is too complicated, After Savagery is a relief. 

It is not simplistic; it is clarifying. It arms you with frames that travel: read the news critically; translate “security” claims into real-world harms; watch for the “humanitarian crisis” label that surgically removes politics; test every universal against Gaza. If it fails there, it fails everywhere.

You don’t wait for elites to license your humanity. You practise it, publicly, until it becomes ungovernable

This book also gives you a language of joyful defiance. The Kanafani thread is not nostalgia; it’s instruction. The lantern is a method. Culture is a method. Sumud is a method. You don’t wait for elites to license your humanity. You practise it, publicly, until it becomes ungovernable. 

After Savagery ends not in despair but in a forward tilt: the old metaphysics are collapsing; help the new one be born.

The argument you’ll carry away when you finish, three convictions stick: Gaza is the measure. Any politics or philosophy that can’t look Gaza in the eye is not worth your time.

The West’s moral exceptionalism has expired. What’s left is the hard work of rebuilding universality from the camp outward, universality as solidarity, not domination.

Palestine is not a cause on your list; it is a lens. 

Through it, everything sharpens: climate justice, policing, borders, surveillance, labour. The same empire, the same alibi. Choose your side.

This is a book of witness and a book of strategy disguised as philosophy. It will be shelved under Middle East Studies; it belongs on your desk, annotated, next to your news feed. Dabashi does not ask you to admire his argument. He asks you to risk something for it.

In a season of euphemisms, After Savagery tells the truth with its gloves off and its lantern on.

“After Savagery: Gaza, Genocide, and the Illusion of Western Civilization”, by Hamid Dabashi, will be released on 30 September 2025 and is currently available for pre-order from Haymarket Books.