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

“Since its very inception, Israel is the summation of the West.... It is not just a settler colony that the West supports, but it is ‘the West’ in its very quintessence,” argues Dabashi (Iran in Revolt), a professor of comparative literature at Columbia, in this piercing study. Making a case that “Palestinians are the simulacrum of the world” and that Israel is “doing to Palestine what the West has done to the world,” Dabashi considers Palestine’s place in global literature and knowledge production while taking sharp stabs at “Eurocentric Critical Theory” and its thinkers, including Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, for what he considers their blindness to and silence on issues outside of the West. Elsewhere, Dabashi considers political art (“Can a Palestinian artist be anything but a political artist?”) and argues that Palestine will be the West’s final reckoning: “The West has had its historical course and died in Gaza.” While Dabashi’s prose style can be academic and jargony, he pulls no punches in his criticisms of the West’s self-mythologizing and of where the Western philosophical canon falls short, and his analytical threads are fascinating to follow. It’s a searing condemnation of the status quo and a poignant intellectual reckoning with an unfolding tragedy. (Sept.)