Gaza Beyond Metaphor: On Hamid Dabashi’s Civilizational Ethics

Persian edition

Hamid Dabashi’s After Savagery: Gaza, Genocide, and the Illusion of Western Civilization is written at one of the darkest hours of modern history: days when cameras fixate on Gaza as, before the eyes of the world, thousands of children and families are buried alive under rubble. In such a moment, writing about civilization, barbarism, memory, and the West is more than an intellectual exercise — it is a declaration about who has the right to speak, who is permitted to live, and who is condemned to be forgotten.

The book seeks to overturn the logic of Western civilization from within — the logic of progress, modernity, law, freedom, and enlightenment. Yet this inversion, if it remains only a moral reversal — if we merely declare that the West is barbarism without tracing where, how, and through which material coordinates that barbarism is produced — then the inversion turns into a moral metaphor rather than an analysis.

The book is written in the key of anger — and that anger gives it vitality. It stands against the dead calm of academic neutrality, becoming an urgent text, one written from the burning ground of the present. Yet that same urgency sometimes smooths over contradictions and erases distinctions under homogenizing labels: the West, civilization, whiteness, Europe.

What follows, then, is a critical reading of Dabashi’s book — sympathetic to its intent, but also entangled with its assumptions. The present essay acknowledges that even when we set out to critique “the West,” we are often forced to do so in the language and under the epistemic authority of the very system we oppose. If that epistemic asymmetry goes unnamed, critique shrinks into a moral courtroom: the judge, the vocabulary, and the procedures remain intact — only the accused changes.

This essay attempts to drag analysis from the level of moral vocabulary to the level of material mechanisms: what is produced, where, and by what kind of labor power; what is legitimized; and which forms of knowledge even become audible.

The Genealogy of Violence as Civilization

One of Dabashi’s most significant contributions is his framing of the Israeli project as an organic component of Western colonial history. At a pivotal point, he writes: “Israel is not the West’s outpost in the Middle East; Israel is the West.” (p. xxi)

The claim that “Israel is the West” is illuminating insofar as it rejects the apologetic notion of Israel as an aberration or deviation from Western norms. Yet if the argument stops there, it turns “the West” from a shifting historical arrangement into an ahistorical essence.

Here I propose reading “the West” not as an entity, but as a configuration — a specific alignment of military, media, and financial capital articulated across multiple states and cities, from arms contractors and war-risk insurers to settlement finance and the border industry.

Seen this way, the equation “Israel = West” becomes not a civilizational axiom but a verifiable statement about networks, contracts, and budgets.

This perspective reveals one of the book’s analytical foundations: the refusal to accept the West’s claim that Israel’s colonial violence is merely a mistake, a policy misstep, or a foreign-affairs misunderstanding.

Dabashi insists, correctly, that Israel is the logical continuation of a history in which names such as Rome, Britain, France, Germany, Belgium, and the United States are inseparable from conquest, occupation, racial classification, and the suspension of law in their colonies.

Elsewhere he writes: “Zionism is not a Jewish movement; it is a European ideology born of antisemitism and realized through colonialism.” (p. 156)

Dabashi rightly highlights the paradoxical relationship between Europe’s antisemitism and the Zionist project. This is crucial: Zionism was as much a response to Jewish suffering as it was an extension of Europe’s colonial gaze toward the Orient. The fusion of these two crises — the “Jewish question” and the colonial question — is the very juncture Dabashi examines most powerfully.

He presents violence as the foundation of civilization itself: “Every European colonial project was a rehearsal for Gaza; and what happens in Gaza is not a deviation from the Western tradition but its most faithful performance.” (p. 150)

From this vantage point, Dabashi succeeds in toppling two myths at once: the myth of a civilized West and the myth of a democratic Israel. In their place he constructs a historical tableau where labor camps, legal violence, settlement expansion, and the suppression of freedom are not exceptions but norms.

Morally too, the book’s stance is clear: one cannot simultaneously speak of democracy, law, and human rights while calling the genocide in Gaza self-defense.

Dabashi, with a fierce and uncompromising tone, exposes the hypocrisies of the international order and calls upon readers to take a stand rather than lose themselves in ideological relativism.

Yet precisely where the book’s language is most radical and cutting, its fissures begin to show.  When grand definitions detach from the messy antagonisms of history, they risk congealing into yet another moral narrative — one that explains who is evil, and makes evil essential, instead of showing how evil is produced and how power operates.

When Concepts Collapse: The Question of “the West”

Throughout Dabashi’s book, the concept of the West is employed as though we were dealing with a single organism — a unified historical will, a monolithic civilization. For Dabashi, the West possesses a genocidal instinct, and Israel is not merely its representative but its purest incarnation: “Israel exists nowhere outside the West... The genocidal instinct is European.” (p. xvii)

But here the first essential question arises: What, exactly, is the West? Is it a set of institutions? A ruling class? States? Ideologies? Or is it a civilizational essence? The book offers no clear answer. Instead, it moves through sweeping formulations that turn the West into a spectral totality — a ghostly abstraction that, precisely when it should point its finger at concrete structures, replaces them with metaphors.

The result is a perilous slippage: the real machinery that produces, distributes, and normalizes violence disappears, replaced by a single icon — “white civilization.” But who constructs this civilization? Who fights within it? What contradictions tear through its interior?

At the very moment when millions take to the streets of London, New York, Toronto, Madrid, Athens, and Berlin to cry out Ceasefire now! and Free Palestine!, can we still describe these places and their movements as part of a unified Western moral order complicit in genocide?

If political power in these countries were ever to shift — from the trillion-dollar conglomerates, arms lobbies, and banks to anti-war coalitions, labor unions, and anti-racist or anti-fascist movements — what content would the concept West still hold?

Here lies the book’s central flaw: its analysis does not explain power; it assigns essence. Instead of asking which institutions, with what budgets and through what processes, generate this violence, it asks: to which civilization does this violence belong?

In this move, the material apparatus of power — arms corporations like Lockheed Martin and Elbit Systems; think tanks with military pedigrees such as RAND and the Atlantic Council; lobbying networks like AIPAC and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD); border-control regimes, prisons, digital-surveillance systems, and media outlets that turn “neutrality” into public-opinion engineering — all of these vanish, replaced by abstractions such as the Western conscience, white intellectuals, or the project of Enlightenment.

Violence thus ceases to appear as the outcome of institutional design and class interest, and instead becomes the moral symptom of a vague collective corruption.

At times, the book collapses the boundaries between religion, race, state, and class — as if everything were the reflection of a spirit of white civilization.

This is where Dabashi’s critique descends into political moralism. In the absence of a material analysis, colonialism is reduced to a religious conflict or a civilizational anomaly — as though the West were condemned to perpetual barbarism simply because it cannot accept “the Other.”

In reality, the situation is the opposite: what we are witnessing today is not a metaphysical failure of Western conscience but the institutional engineering of violence. If these institutions are not confronted directly, we all risk being trapped in the very civilizational game that global power wants us to play — West vs. East, white vs. non-white, Jew vs. Muslim, reason vs. emotion.

Dabashi’s analysis, though it begins within the history of colonialism, ultimately leads not to a critique of power but to its poetics: the crafting of an abstract enemy rather than the identification of real agents. By relying on moral-civilizational categories and invoking a theology of liberation, the book seeks to construct a collective horizon — but one that floats above the material ground of politics.

Here we must speak of “Orientalism in Reverse.” This is the point at which a writer appears to critique the West but in fact reproduces the same Orientalist geometry, only with inverted signs. The West becomes a unified demon; the East, an innocent without agency. The result is the erasure of contracts, budgets, and local collaborators in the cycles of war, the war industry, and siege economies.

On one side of this inversion stand elites who, to gain legitimacy in the Atlantic cultural marketplace, turn colonial violence into the moral currency of civilization; on the other, ruling blocs that use anti-Western cultural posturing to mask privatization and domestic repression. In both cases, what disappears from view is the political economy of war.

Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor

In the past decade, decolonization has become the moral banner of the age. From universities to media platforms, every global movement or crisis is reinterpreted under its slogan.

But as Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang warned in their essay “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” true decolonization means returning confiscated land, breaking monopolies over water and energy, abolishing regimes of cheap and coerced labor, and dismantling the policing and border systems that enforce this order. Once these material dimensions are stripped away, what remains is little more than the ethics of guilt and repentance. Without them, the burial of moral authority becomes an act of conscience-cleansing, not of politics.

Dabashi’s book is trapped in this very duality. He seeks to dismantle the West, but not as a system of production and domination — rather, as a mentality, a historical psyche. Consequently, his critique of colonialism remains confined to the level of discourse and memory. In his view, colonialism is a cultural problem to be cured by rewriting narratives, not a material relation between accumulation, ownership, and labor. Yet genuine decolonization cannot occur in that register alone. Decolonization is either economic and social — or it is not decolonization at all.

What is at stake is not merely the substitution of vocabularies or symbols, but the breaking of the disciplinary cycle of fear — the machinery that governs bodies through prisons, sieges, deprivation, and collective punishment. In many arenas, self-organized collective defense has been a moment of psychosocial recovery — not because violence is romantic, but because against the disciplinary violence of structure, it becomes the only practical means to shatter the cage of fear and open a path toward liberatory organization.

This is fundamentally different from state or proxy militarism: the former expands people’s organized agency, giving rise to councils, unions, and public services; the latter devours agency altogether, turning war into a model of accumulation.

In the book, Western violence is reduced to a civilizational instinct. But capitalism has no instincts; it has only logic — the logic of profit. China, India, Russia, Brazil, Turkey, and others were, during the very genocide in Gaza, among Israel’s largest trading partners.

If the United States and NATO sustained Israel’s military machine, these same countries sustained its economy.

War, occupation, borders, racism, and political religion are all instruments for maintaining profit rates and controlling surplus populations. Gaza is not merely the outcome of cultural barbarism but the inevitable by-product of capital’s reproduction under crisis.

The same logic persists today in Sudan and the Congo. In Sudan, war over gold, oil, and Red Sea transit routes plays the same role as siege and occupation do in Palestine: securing military-capitalist control over labor and land. In the Congo, the struggle for cobalt and lithium — raw materials essential to the digital and electric-vehicle industries (and, tellingly, consumed most heavily by China) — reproduces the same pattern of managing surplus populations that in Gaza is enforced by missiles and walls.

The principal strength of Dabashi’s work — his rewriting of the genealogy of colonial violence and its linkage to the present — should indeed be preserved and even emphasized. But that same strength collapses when tied to the essence of the West or a supposed civilizational instinct.

A material analysis of colonialism must speak in the language of class, institutions, law, profit, and supply chains — a language structurally at odds with the horizons of identity, nation, or civilization.

Once critique touches the logic of profit, there is no longer room for nation or the grandeur of civilization as units of emancipation. Such cultural discourses, at best, mark fleeting moments of resistance; at worst, they become the ideological alibi of classes that wish to play the role of “native intellectuals” without dismantling the structures — especially the economic ones — that sustain their privilege.

In the book’s closing turn, Dabashi, disillusioned, retreats into mysticism — invoking Rumi and the hadith, “God is nearer to you than your jugular vein.” At the very moment when the question should be who has starved the children of Gaza, who has commodified their hunger and turned their suffering into the currency of the war economy, Dabashi instead asks: “Where is God?” and answers: “In Gaza, in the suffering body, in eternal love, in inner liberation.” (p. 174)

But liberation theology, unless anchored in the material and legal conditions of liberation, turns into a beautiful metaphor — not a tool of emancipation.

If we are to understand colonialism materially, we must also ask: On what foundation do these books and their epistemic systems operate? What capital circulates through them?
Which academic, migrant, or precarious local labor pays the cost of producing such critique? These questions, inevitably, expose the position of the critic: they speak not from outside capital, but from within it.

That is why the moral discourse of decolonization cannot transcend the critique of itself — for to do so would mean confronting the very class legitimacy and privilege of the speaker.

What Must Collapse?

When we read Dabashi’s assertion that “the West must collapse within itself,” we must ask: what is this self?

If this self names the transnational web of coercive, accumulative, and epistemic institutions — from Washington to Brussels, and from Beijing and Tehran to Tel Aviv and Cairo — then the task is not to destroy a myth of civilization but to dismantle the mechanisms that sustain it.

Analysis, then, must operate at this level of concreteness: the abolition of war-makers’ impunity; the breaking of the profit chains of siege and occupation; the restitution of land and resources; the dismantling of cheap-labor and border regimes that reproduce the global order; and the rollback of the financial-security oligarchies that translate violence into stability.

At this level, critique passes from the poetics of power to the accounting of power.

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