The politics of appeal and the asymmetrical valuing of lives

Nov 3, 2024
Palestine flag during a protest with many people in the city streets.

On October 11, I attended a vigil for Palestinians in Federation Square, Melbourne. The event did not attract politicians’ censure as it was sufficiently distanced in time from Jewish vigils on 7 October.

In the week before 7 October, Labor and Coalition politicians criticised organisers of events to memorialise the slaughter of more than 42,000 Palestinians. These gatekeepers of appropriate mourning declared that it was “inappropriate” to hold Palestinian events on the date of the Hamas attacks or on the preceding weekend. There were constant reminders that 7 October marked one year since the largest loss of Jewish life (more than 1,200) on any single day since the Holocaust. By conflating 7 October with the Holocaust, Jewish trauma was turned into a weapon of war, redirecting the grief of the Holocaust onto a people who had nothing to do with it. Remembrance of a twentieth-century genocide was used to block remembrance of a contemporary one.

Federal and state politicians from both major parties attended Jewish vigils; as far as I am aware, none attended events commemorating Palestinian deaths. “In the interests of moral clarity”, Peter Dutton reminded those at a vigil in Sydney of Israel’s right to defend itself and its people from existential threats. The differential distribution of political grieving was on full display.

As Judith Butler has written, “The question of whose lives are worth grieving is an integral part of whose lives are worth valuing.” One set of losses are more horrifying than another. The differential characterisation of Jewish and Palestinian deaths had been preordained by Israeli leaders, members of the Knesset and top echelons of the military. If “there are no uninvolved people”, and Palestinians are “human animals” who “need to be exterminated”, then Israeli Jews, the descendants of those slaughtered in the Holocaust, are the only grievable people.

The Pew Research Centre conducted face-to-face interviews with 1,001 Israelis in March and early April 2024. The survey found that a mere 4% of Israeli Jews thought that Israel’s military assault on Gaza had gone too far. At the time of the interviews, over 31,000 Palestinians had been killed, the majority of whom were civilians; 1.7 million had been internally displaced; and 2.2 million were facing crisis or worse levels of food insecurity.

Perhaps in an attempt to counter the asymmetrical valuing of lives, the vigil in Federation Square was a memorialisation of the children killed by Israel in the past year. If grievability is a presupposition for the life that matters, then in the public imagination, children are more deserving of our grief than adults. The images and names of deceased Palestinian children were displayed successively on the square’s screen, some with siblings or other family members who had also been killed. We were invited to select a strip of paper from containers passed around the crowd. Each slip recorded a child’s name in Arabic and English, their age and date of birth. We read out the names in turn, a chorus of voices ringing out across the square, registering the huge loss of young lives, some barely begun. A rebuke to the indifference of our politicians who deemed the children not grievable by failing to do anything to stop the slaughter.

I keep my slip of paper on my desk as a permanent reminder of the genocide: Muhammad Mahmoud Saleem Alghufari, aged 3, born on 24 March, 2020.

But the question needs to be asked: why should we resort to “humanising” Palestinians to demonstrate they are worthy of our grief? As Palestinian poet and journalist Mohammed El-Kurd writes in an Afterword to his poetry book “Rifqa”, despite the massive disparity in the death toll of Israelis and Palestinians, the world grieves Israeli loss without qualifiers. There’s no need to highlight their age (children or the elderly), their gender (women), or their humane professions (doctors, nurses, aid workers). By way of contrast, “A Palestinian man cannot just die. For him to be mourned, he must be in a wheelchair or developmentally delayed, a medical professional, or noticeably elderly at the very least. Even then, there are questions about the validity of his victimhood.”

If the premise is that “there are no uninvolved people”, Palestinians must prove their innocence. Those Palestinians who manage to survive the slaughter in Gaza and make their way to Australia must prove they are deserving. For some such as Dutton, this is impossible; he declared that no Palestinian should be granted a visa to come to Australia. By way of invidious comparison, nearly 4,900 Ukrainians were issued humanitarian visas within weeks of Russia’s invasion, while all but a handful of Palestinians were still waiting for humanitarian visas a year after 7 October.

It wasn’t until October 2024 that Tony Burke, Minister for Immigration and Multicultural Affairs, granted temporary humanitarian visas to 12 Palestinian families after he met with them in person. Burke made a point of stressing that the families were deserving of Australia’s beneficence, “… I’ll tell you, there’s [sic] been some extraordinary people I’ve met … Some people with skills like accountants …”.

How is it that Palestinians have to prove their humanity, their exceptional qualities, when they are being killed in droves, starved and ethnically cleansed by a genocidal apartheid state? El-Kurd refuses what he terms “the politics of appeal”, rejecting “the responsibility to give humans eyes for [Palestinians’] humanity” by conforming to norms of Western respectability and civility.

Born on the fiftieth anniversary of the Nakba, El-Kurd’s very name is “a bomb in a white room, / a walking suspicion / in an airport, / choiceless politics.” His poem “Born on Nakba Day” parses the protests outside the hospital where his mother labours: tanks imprinted with US flags, tear gas, rubber-coated bullets and a few people shot dead. “The liberation chants outside the hospital room / told my mother / to push.”

Our message to Palestinians: if you want to rouse us from indifference to the ongoing Nakba, don’t be angry, defiant, impolite or ungrateful. Don’t display the full spectrum of human characteristics or emotions. Don’t say or do anything to “disrupt social cohesion”.

Demonstrate that you are “extraordinary” and you just might be deemed worthy of our empathy.

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