Ussama Makdisi
Jewish Currents / January 17, 2025
Revisiting Edward Said’s ethical humanism in the context of the Gaza genocide.
In the 15 months since October 7th, 2023, I have been turning over Edward Said’s assertion that Palestinians are the “victims of the victims.” The renowned literary theorist pithily summarized this “complex irony” in the 1992 edition of his landmark book The Question of Palestine. He wrote that “the classic victims of years of anti-Semitic persecution and the Holocaust have in their new nation become the victimizers of another people.” As he told the novelist Salman Rushdie in 1986, “Any kind of criticism of Israel is treated as an umbrella for anti-semitism … Particularly in the United States, if you say anything at all, as an Arab from a Moslem culture, you are seen to be joining classical European or Western anti-semitism.” Still, Said had distinguished himself as one of the first intellectuals to traverse the profound chasm that marked out antagonistic discourses of historical trauma shaped by the Nakba and the Holocaust respectively; he persisted in his conviction that a compassionate understanding of the modern Jewish experience of antisemitic persecution in Europe was bound up with an affirmative recognition of Palestinian history and national rights. For Said, empathizing with “the disastrous problem of anti-Semitism,” as he called it in The Question of Palestine (originally published in 1979), offered some way out of the morass of competing victimhood. This intertwining of empathy reflected his conviction that the fate and futures of Palestinians and Israelis were inevitably tied together by the question of Palestine.
Today, after 76 years of meticulous cruelty that touches every aspect of Palestinian life throughout historic Palestine, as Israel carries out a genocidal campaign in Gaza that, at the time of writing, has killed an estimated 64,260 Palestinians and wounded tens of thousands of others, I am unsettled by the question: Does the “victims of the victims” still make sense as an ethical-historical formulation? Said died two decades before the Gaza genocide, and, like so many of us, could not have imagined the full horror of its livestreamed depravity; “It’s like we are watching Auschwitz on TikTok,” as Holocaust survivor Gabor Maté put it. Further, Said could not have anticipated the full extent to which Western institutions, leaders, and major public figures would so bellicosely support such atrocities. Neither the proliferation of images and videos of the genocide, nor the arrest warrants for Israeli leaders for their programs of extermination and mass starvation issued by the International Criminal Court (the obviousness of the brutality having finally, belatedly, reached some threshold legible to this body), nor post-Apartheid South Africa’s accusation at the International Court of Justice that the Israeli state is carrying out a genocide has budged the ostentatious philo-Zionism of most Western governments. Instead, they have totally ignored Palestinian humanity in the name of mourning and defending Israeli Jewish victims of violence. Contrary to the empathy that Said called for, the liberal West has categorically refused to view Palestinians as victims of any moral or historical significance.
But as Palestinians are ruthlessly slaughtered in the name of Israel’s security, are Israelis really victims in a collective national sense? Is there not an essential distinction to be made between being Jewish and being Israeli, and thus between a long history of Jewish victimhood at the hands of antisemitic persecutors in the Christian West and the more recent Israeli suffering in the context of the anti-colonial violence that their own colonization of Palestine has provoked? Does it make sense to think of the racist Israeli politician Itamar Ben-Gvir, who leads an anti-Arab party called Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power), as a victim? In what sense are Israeli soldiers victims in 2025? In what sense are they victims when they are armed to the teeth, provided with billions of dollars of US weapons and apparently unlimited US diplomatic cover to defy international outrage at the Gaza genocide? In what sense are they victims when they gleefully disseminate photographs of themselves in the landscape of Gaza that they have ruined—photographs that show them smiling as they dress in the stolen lingerie of stateless and yet-again-dispossessed Palestinian women whose lives they have destroyed, homes they have demolished, and children they have slaughtered? In what sense are they victims as they broadcast videos of themselves laughing as they destroy Palestinian universities and libraries? In what sense are the Israeli Jewish settlers victims when they assemble to prevent food from reaching children who are being starved to death?
What about the Israelis who watched the 2014 bombardment of Gaza, seated nonchalantly as if observing a theatrical spectacle and not a human catastrophe? What about those who, in 2006, during Israel’s bombardment of Lebanon, stood by as their children autographed artillery shells? Or those who participated in or covered up the Tantura massacre during the Nakba of 1948? At some point, it is absurd to continue thinking of these Israelis as victims, except in the sense that they may genuinely believe they are fighting to vanquish the “barbarian” monsters of their minds. Surely that is not what Edward Said was referring to when he described Palestinians as the “victims of the victims.”
Indeed, while Said sought to chart a route by which Israeli Jews and Palestinians might acknowledge each other’s collective trauma, he was clear that what he was after was not a facile equivalence that obfuscated the extraordinary power the former exercises over the latter and concealed the epistemic, political, economic, social, and human damage that has resulted from this ongoing domination. Whereas the Jews in Europe were the victims of Western antisemitism that culminated in the Holocaust, Palestinians remain the victims of Israeli Jewish Zionists and their supporters, enablers, and allies in the West, including Christian Zionists. Whereas Palestinians had no hand in the Nazi anti-Jewish racism critical to the characterization of modern antisemitism, Israeli Jews have played the key role in the dehumanization of Palestinians and the obliteration of Palestinian society, history, and life from 1948 to the present. There are huge differences in chronology, positionality, and in the relationships between agency, cause, and effect.
Even as his “victims of the victims” formulation holds in a single frame the brutalization suffered by both populations, Said is careful to underscore that it also crucially names the particular difficulty faced by Palestinians, who, he writes in The Question of Palestine, “have had the extraordinarily bad luck to have … the most morally complex of all opponents, Jews, with a long history of victimization and terror behind them. The absolute wrong of settler-colonialism is very much diluted and perhaps even dissipated when it is a fervently believed-in Jewish survival that uses settler-colonialism to straighten out its own destiny.” Israeli leaders routinely invoke the history of the Holocaust and the Jewish experience of antisemitism as a cudgel with which to beat their critics, to deflect attention away from the horror of their dehumanization of Palestinians, and to justify the extreme violence of colonial Zionism. Israel continuously violates international law by expropriating Palestinian land and instituting what the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem calls a “regime of Jewish supremacy and apartheid from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea.” But when we reject the myth of timeless bottom-line victimhood, Said points out, a much clearer picture comes into view: “The victims in Africa and Palestine are wounded and scarred in much the same sort of ways.”
While Said’s famous line remains a trenchant critique, identifying this obfuscation of the arrangements of power, its attempt to chart a path forward by way of mutual compassion seems to belong to another era. Perhaps it is time to pair Said’s ethical humanism with that of the great Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. In his poem “Murdered and Unknown,” Darwish writes, in Fady Joudah’s translation:
“I am the victim.” “No, I alone am
the victim.’ They didn’t tell the author: “No
victim kills another. There is in
the story a victim and a killer.”
Darwish crystallizes what Said only gestured toward: However much they were victims in the past, and however much they carry with them the stamp of this past, Israeli Jews have, through their own actions, been transformed into a new kind of subject. With crucial exceptions like historian Ilan Pappé, who reminds us that the secular affiliation to power is a choice made and unmade, Israeli Jews are now in the position of being oppressors. They are in the ongoing act of making victims of Palestinians. Both Israeli Jews and Palestinians are obviously human, both deserve equality and freedom, and the two are bound together. But, at present, only one is the oppressor; the other is the oppressed. If we can’t maintain this basic, obvious ethical distinction between oppressor and oppressed, colonizer and colonized, then history becomes an idol of anachronism rather than a tool to break the narcissism of perpetual victimhood. As Said wrote in The Question of Palestine, “There can be no way of satisfactorily conducting a life whose main concern is to prevent the past from recurring. For Zionism, the Palestinians have now become the equivalent of a past experience reincarnated in the form of a present threat. The result is that the Palestinians’ future as a people is mortgaged to that fear, which is a disaster for them and for Jews.” Darwish distils this formulation, instructing us to look directly at which people are actually suffering at whose hand and why. Together, Said and Darwish remind us that we do not have to be prisoners of the past—otherwise we are all victims, and in the name of our own victimhood we can and will do to others the terrible things that were once done to us.
Ussama Makdisi is a professor of history at UC Berkeley and is the author of Age of Coexistence: The Ecumenical Frame and the Making of the Modern Arab World (2019); he is co-host of the podcast Makdisi Street
