Introduction
The only rebuttal necessary to Professor Anton Fagan’s rejoinder to my article is to exhort him to re-read it; but this time for meaning and understanding; for evidence and facts; and for law and logic; all of which he missed (or deliberately ignored) because he is more invested in barbs than a real debate.
I do admit that my 15 000-word response to his stream-of-consciousness musings was overlong, too detailed, and too well referenced, and may have stretched his ability to focus or follow the logical thread.
While I employ a plain clear style, and don’t engage in semantical gymnastics, my article’s robustness is sustained by the fact that Fagan’s response fails to dislodge a single one of my arguments. All he does is repeat his initial assertions and elides all the evidence provided in my rebuttal, since it devastatingly debunks his narrative.
But I do empathize with Fagan. In my younger days I got through all three volumes of Marx’s Das Kapital, much of Lenin’s selected works, Isaac Deutscher’s three volumes of Trotsky’s biography, Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, and Foucault and Derrida. I even read Marx’s very quotable, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. In between I read a couple of medical textbooks. Alas, these days I have to serialize even a simple ninety-minute Netflix movie. In hindsight I should have provided Fagan with an executive summary, or illustrations.
Fagan’s attack on Caitlin le Roith
I do not wish to speak for Caitlin le Roith, as she has elegantly demonstrated her capacity to teach her previous lecturer law, ethics, and evidence. It gives me great pride in UCT graduates, which allays Gramsci’s pessimism in that ‘the old is dying and the new is already born’.
Differentiating violence
However, it is indubitable that Israel’s violence and that of the Palestinian resistance is qualitatively, legally, and morally different. Israel’s violence represents colonial violence by a belligerent illegal occupation force, enforcing a regime of apartheid. Palestinian violence is based on resistance to that colonial and apartheid regime. The references, and legal basis for this assertion is covered in my article, and don’t bear repeating. One of Fagan’s fundamental errors, elementary for any lawyer, is his failure to invoke a legal foundation for Israel’s violence (jus ad bellum), particularly in the context of an illegal and belligerent occupation. Fagan simply assumes Israel’s (legal) right to violence against Palestinians, and then supports such brutal violence. To quote from my article: “(Israel’s) utilitarian logic is always accepted, as if the morality is embedded in this logic”.
Anyone with even a passing knowledge of the history of Palestine will know that this is not Israel’s first genocidal campaign against Palestinians – there have been far too many in Gaza (‘mowing the lawn’ as Israel calls it), some in greater Palestine in 1948, 1956, 1976, and in the intervening periods Palestinians are subjected to daily violence, discrimination, and dispossession. Fagan would do well to read some historical texts on Palestine - Tom Segev, Ilan Pappe, Avi Shlaim, Shlomo Sand and Rashid Khalidi are highly recommended. These texts will provide ample evidence that Israel’s very foundation is based on terrorism and genocide.
To be sure, Palestinian violent resistance, absent any peaceful avenue for freedom and justice, is legitimate and rightfully asserted in international law. Israel as an occupation force has no right to claim either self-defence, or the invocation of aggression against it (UNGA Resolution 3314). To put it simply for Fagan, you cannot claim self-defence (or aggression) in defending your illegality. Of course, this does not release resistance movements (non-state actors) from the Additional Protocol II of the Geneva Convention, which was specifically designed to protect civilians in such conflicts, but a greater obligation always rests with the occupying force. But it seems neither international law, nor human rights is Fagan’s forte.
But Fagan, ignoring all the evidence before him makes up facts as he proceeds to confirm his predilection: Hamas deliberately targeted civilians, Israel didn’t; Hamas committed war-crimes, Israel didn’t; Hamas committed genocide, Israel hasn’t; Israel’s claims are always believable, Palestinians’ never; Israel has a right to violence, Palestinians do not. Palestinians use human shields, Israel has no control of its violence. The Israeli Defence Force is to be believed; Palestinians are dishonest. No amount of evidence, even that provided by independent observers, will move Fagan from a pre-conceived ideological position, which as I state in my article is his starting point, which he then proceeds to justify. It is the logic of apartheid judges, or those of Israeli military courts in the Occupied Territories with a conviction rate of over ninety-nine percent.
Anti-Semitism
Fagan then proceeds to demonstrate ‘pervasive’ anti-Semitism in South Africa, for reasons he knows best. But his arrogance clangs when he preaches anti-Semitism to a Jewish woman, claiming that he has ‘experienced’ more anti-Semitism than she has. Just in case he accuses me of misquoting him, this is what he says:
“I certainly hope that Ms Le Roith has experienced less anti-Semitism than I have”. (my emphasis).
Not only ‘encountered’, but ‘experienced’! By that logic, he’s probably experienced more gender discrimination than she has. Or being nurtured within the bosom of the Afrikaner Broederbond, it wouldn’t be surprising if he claims to have ‘experienced’ more racism than Black people in South Africa. And I have no doubt that he has experienced more Islamophobia than I have. If Fagan is moved to speak because of this seemingly pervasive anti-Semitism he has encountered or experienced, one can only speculate about his silence on racism in South Africa, and its consequences, and which remains the oldest and most pervasive bigotry.
It perhaps hasn’t occurred to Fagan that the reason he has encountered or experienced more anti-Semitism (and probably racism, sexism and Islamophobia) than the rest of us is indicative of the company he keeps, or the ecosystem he inhabits, rather than a general societal trend in South Africa. In other words, his cohort is a biased sample.
Fagan proceeds to provide ‘evidence’ from what he considers a definitive study on anti-Semitism in South Africa, to demonstrate pervasive anti-Semitism. He concludes with great authority that “close to one in two South African view Jews in an unfavorable light” – to be exact, 44% according to the study.
Since Fagan fails to provide a reference, as a diligent student I attempted to locate this study. It transpires that this study was conducted by the US-based Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which self-describes as a Jewish organisation, but functions as a pro-Israel lobby group (see here). My next instinct as an inquisitive and scientific mind, and the incongruence of this finding with my experience, was to explore its methodology and definitions. A simple Google search revealed, to my utter surprise, that the South African Jewish Board of Deputies (SAJBD), no less a culprit in manufacturing claims of anti-Semitism, damns this study (reference). Highlights of the SAJBD response is provided below:
“With regard to the above survey (ADL study), however, we are strongly of the view that many of the findings concerning South Africa are at best highly questionable and sometimes clearly wrong. The findings are replete with contradictions, anomalies and inconsistencies, all of which ultimately greatly misrepresent the nature of South African society in general and the position regarding its Jewish citizens in particular.
..from a strictly academic, methodological point of view, the manner in which the survey was framed and conducted appears to have been gravely flawed…
According to the survey South Africa has, after Poland, the highest level of negative perceptions of Jews out of all the countries surveyed, with nearly one in two South Africans apparently viewing Jews in an unfavourable light. This is simply not true. South Africa has consistently recorded amongst the lowest rate of antisemitism in terms of actual attacks on Jews in the world. Moreover, local attitudinal surveys reveal that the great majority of South Africans either have no knowledge at all about Jews or hold no particular opinion of them one way or another. It is hence highly implausible that, as the survey results suggest, 44% of South Africans agree with the view that Jews were responsible for the repression of Eastern Europe under Communism during the 20th Century, or that Jews “want to weaken our national culture by supporting more immigrants coming to our country”. Such beliefs primarily resonate amongst right-wing white supremacists, who in South Africa constitute a tiny fringe group even within the white minority community.”
The last sentence perhaps references Fagan’s circle of friends, but the study certainly doesn’t represent attitudes of millions of South Africans, as Fagan claims. This academic sloppiness is typical of the learned professor’s approach to evidence and research.
Le Roith’s evidence
Then in a bizarre, puerile dig at Le Roith, Fagan writes:
In a revealing slip, Ms Le Roith takes herself to have established that the IDF committed acts ‘of genocide’ in Gaza in advance of answering the question whether those acts had been committed ‘with the intent of bringing about the destruction of the Palestinians of Gaza’.
Aside from the fact that both of Fagan’s articles are replete with such assertions, it is not unusual to state a conclusion (arrived at after first considering the evidence) and then presenting the evidence in a logical written form. This is exactly what Le Roith does. That is very different to arriving at a conclusion without considering evidence (as Fagan does).
This is what Le Roith’s writes in her introduction, and then methodically and systematically presents the evidence, and legal argument, for Israel’s genocide, referencing the criteria encompassed in the Genocide Convention:
By 17 November, when the statement was released, the violence that Israel was perpetrating against Palestinian civilians was of a genocidal nature. In fact, as early as 13 October, Raz Segal, an Israeli historian of genocide, had already gone so far as to refer to what was happening in Gaza as a “textbook case of genocide”. Segal was not alone in this assessment, as it was also shared by Craig Mokhiber, who, in his letter of resignation from his position as Director of the New York Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights dated 28 October, wrote of Gaza that “[t]his is a text-book case of genocide”.
The claim of genocide might raise a few eyebrows or be seen as provocative, but it shouldn’t, as even a (necessarily preliminary, given the forum) legal analysis will show (for a more comprehensive, though by now slightly dated, legal analysis see this emergency briefing paper by the Centre for Constitutional Rights).
I would assume South Africa’s 83-page submission to the ICJ, where the case for genocide is laid out in great, devastating detail, may be a bit too lengthy to hold Fagan’s attention.
[It is instructive that the statement by members of the UCT Law Faculty was issued on the 17th November, where Israel’s genocidal attack on Gaza was into its sixth week, with already devastating humanitarian consequences.]
Fagan’s inequality of concern
One may justifiability ask, why is Fagan more exercised at the deaths of about 700 Israeli civilians, but not 11 000 Palestinian children? It would be reasonable to assume that perhaps it belies a belief that Palestinian lives are disposable; black lives don’t matter!
Would it be reasonable to conclude that his inequality of concern is a mark of conscious, unconscious, subconscious, or subliminal racism? Or is he just crudely racist? Would it be justified to conclude that reactions to Palestinian deaths in certain sectors of South African society is indicative of pervasive racism in that sector? Perhaps it is an illustration that Fagan’s denial of unconscious bias is wrong?
Or is it an absence of space for Palestinians (and other colonized people) in his moral (or amoral/immoral) imagination. In fact, his justification of Palestinian deaths is so extreme, that it borders on a celebration of such deaths. The grotesque irony is that while he accuses his colleagues of diminishing Jewish (actually Israeli) lives, his actual dehumanization of Palestinians is terrifying.
Fagan’s imagination, prefigured through racist categorization which only saw liberation movements through the lens of terrorism, and despite the evidence, asserts Hamas only targeted civilians and thus guilty of war crimes. On the other hand, Palestinians were mere collateral damage of Israel’s reprisal against Hamas. Black bodies are disposable, and colonialism’s violence is only reactive, and excusable:
Whereas Hamas’s violence in Israel constituted a war crime because it satisfied the condition that it directly targeted civilians, the IDF’s violence in Gaza could have constituted a war crime only if it satisfied the condition that the (anticipated) harm it would cause to civilians and civilian objects was excessive, given its (anticipated) military benefits.
That at least one third of all deaths of the October attack were Israeli military personnel demonstrates the fallacy in Fagan’s argument. Hamas claims that it attempted to take only Israeli military personnel hostage. Such hostages were rich currency to trade for Palestinians, many of them minors, held without charge in Israeli jails, and without an option of a fair trial. In other words, to trade hostages for hostages. After October 7th Israeli detained thousands more Palestinians without charge.
The larger question is why does Fagan fail to consider the Hamas operation as a military operation, and not just a terrorist attack deliberately targeting civilians (many of whom were killed by Israel’s own military)? If Fagan wants to employ a military logic, there needs to be consistency. After all, Hamas is fighting against one of the longest occupations in history. Malcolm X captures this moral inversion, and Fagan’s perversion succinctly when he said, “If you're not careful, (they) will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.”
Hamas released a statement on 21 January in relation to the 7th October attacks, which according to Al Jazeera (see here) , was a reaction to Israeli provocation, continued occupation, dispossession and settlements, failure to commit to a peace settlement, and Israel’s murder of over 11 000 in the period January 2000 to September 2023, and injury to over 156 000 people:
The Palestinian group Hamas has said there were “faults” in the October 7 attack it led on southern Israel, but claimed its fighters only targeted Israeli soldiers and people carrying weapons…
The report said Hamas planned to target Israeli military sites and to capture soldiers, which could be used to pressure the Israeli authorities to release thousands of Palestinians held in Israeli prisons…
If there was any case of targeting civilians; it happened accidentally and in the course of the confrontation with the occupation forces,” read the report.
It added that “maybe some faults happened” during the attack “due to the rapid collapse of the Israeli security and military system, and the chaos caused along the areas near Gaza.
(see here for full Hamas statement).
Even if one considers the Hamas statement as propaganda, why would Fagan believe one and not the other? Fagan seems less concerned with the act, but rather who committed it.
While one may argue that some of the acts of 7th October fall within the definition of war crimes, it would be difficult to sustain a position, even with the wildest expansion of the definitions in the Genocide Convention, that it constitutes genocide. Fagan, while asserting that it constitutes genocide, merely parrots the Israeli narrative, failing to argue his case as any half-decent lawyer would.
Evidence of Israel’s civilian targets
Furthermore, Fagan’s unequal logic fails to acknowledge the now overwhelming evidence that Israel deliberately targeted civilians and civilian infrastructure, referred to as “power targets”, as detailed in my article and many others. Since publication of my article more evidence has emerged:
Just a few days ago, Israel bombed and destroyed the private Israa University in Gaza, with 315 mines, which the IDF had occupied for 70 days prior as a control and detention centre (see here). There was no military objective, no presence of tunnels, or Hamas fighters.
Israel has destroyed all of Gaza’s universities and murdered of 94 University professors, 59 PhDs, and hundreds of other academics. (see here; or here, and here).
Israel has specifically targeted the scientific and literary elite in Gaza (see here).
What of Israelis destruction of UNESCO Heritage sites, one of the world’s oldest churches (see here; and here) and stealing Gaza’s historical artifacts. The bombed Israa University contained a museum with over 3000 rare artifacts.
All of Gaza’s mosques and churches are completely destroyed or seriously damaged.
CNN has uncovered the gruesome desecration of at least 16 cemeteries in by Israel in Gaza (see here; and here) and exhumation of bodies, in an act of grotesque barbarism. The irony is that even under Hamas, the cemetery housing the Great War veterans was immaculately kept, including graves of the South African battalion and Jewish graves with prominent displays of the star of David.
This pattern of Israeli conduct is what Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term genocide, described as cultural genocide, or ‘culturicide’, which is a central component in Lemkin’s formulation of genocide. He enumerated eight ‘fields’ or targets in the ‘techniques of genocide’ - political, social, cultural, economic, biological, physical, religious, and moral. When one examines Israel’s behaviour in Gaza and elsewhere, one goes tick, tick, tick.
Lemkin, who was one of the architects of the Genocide Convention, did not see genocide as necessarily meaning the immediate destruction of a nation; rather it was also a coordinated plan of different actions aimed at destroying the essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating such groups, through forcing disintegration of their institutions, or forced displacement.
Dr Ghassan Abu Sitta, a British-Palestinian surgeon, who worked in Gaza during the war, describes Israel’s systematic attack on Gaza’s health system as the primary target, not part of collateral damage. He saw this as a critical strategy of Israel’s campaign of ethnic cleansing and genocide against Palestinians. He argues that the attack on the Baptist Hospital was a test balloon to gauge international reaction. The muted response opened the way for Israel’s destruction of the entire health system in Gaza, to a point where Israel doesn’t even bother justifying its attacks on hospitals and doctors anymore, attacks which have rendered most of Gazan hospitals non-functional. Israel has systematically attacked medical professionals (Israeli snipers murdering doctors at will) and destroyed the only two medical schools in Gaza “with the aim of eliminating an entire generation of doctors.” The Israeli objective, according to Abu Sitta, is that “even if you rebuilt hospitals, you wouldn’t be able to rebuild the health sector.”
What of the wanton murder of journalists, aid workers, those standing in food queues, those seeking refuge in churches (which even the Pope labelled as terrorism), or those moving to Israeli designated safe zones? What of those civilians killed execution style in full view of their families by the IDF (see here) which unequivocally constitutes war crimes? Or the destruction of all the bakeries in Gaza?
Yousef Munayyer and Shree Paradkar (see here; and here) add to the genocide lexicon and to Lemkin’s ‘techniques of genocide’:
Genocide is an incomplete descriptor of what Israel is doing in Gaza. We are seeing entirely new crimes that also need to be noted. Scholasticide- the elimination of the education system, Medicide- elimination of hospitals & doctors, and Journocide- mass killing of journalists.
I simply wonder how Fagan justifies this, not as isolated cases, but recurring patterns in a genocidal plan. Fagan’s morally corrupt views, fails to explain the deaths of nearly 370 Palestinians in the West Bank in the last three months, including 98 children.
Fagan and criticisms of my article
Before I address Fagan’s three criticism of my article, let me list a dozen key elements of my article, the details of which need not be repeated, save to state that Fagan fails to response substantively to any of them:
Anti-Palestinian racism informing narratives of the current war on Gaza.
The statement of Law Faculty members and Fagan’s canard of anti-Semitism.
Who speaks for UCT.
Some contextual points on history and Israel’s apartheid, colonialism, and Jewish responses to October 7th
International law covering the current conflict.
Blaming the victim and Fagan’s justification for genocide
Evidence of Israel’s war crimes in deliberately targeting civilians.
Violence against Palestinians in the West Bank (absent Hamas).
Reversing the logic Fagan uses in his defence of Israel and applying it to Palestinian resistance.
Critiquing Fagan’s approach to ‘evidence’ and interrogating his ‘evidence’.
The facts around 7th October events, and Fagan and Israel’s propaganda debunked.
Fagan’s linguistic trickery, Conclusion and Coda
Anti-Semitism again
Fagan denies that he labelled his colleagues, either through expression, allusion, or implication, as anti-Semites. My first question, as a lay person, is why then pose the question, and create an allusion or implication of anti-Semitism? This is what Fagan argues, in his own words:
I suppose it is also possible for people who are not consciously anti-Semitic (and who reject anti-Semitism) to be unconsciously or subliminally anti-Semitic.
Some have argued that anti-Semitism is more or less hard-wired into the other two Abrahamic religions. So, if subliminal anti-Semitism is a real possibility, then my Christian and Muslim colleagues may be particularly prone to it.
Although Fagan attempts to walk this back in his Coda after some pushback from his colleagues, his invocation that ‘anti-Semitism is more or less hard-wired into the other two Abrahamic religions’ is a categorical statement, that remains in his article. Fagan could have edited his article to exclude this egregious statement, and if he is particularly convinced of his colleagues’ integrity, a simple categorical denial of any anti-Semitism on their part would have sufficed: “I do not believe that my colleagues are anti-Semitic in any way”.
In his rejoinder he makes further claims:
That Jews, whether in or outside Israel, are being criticized because they are Jewish is therefore an ever-present possibility. There is no a priori reason to assume that this possibility does not obtain at UCT.
There are two further issues I want to raise in response. The first is that Fagan’s claim is false: nowhere in the conflict are Jews being ‘criticized because they are Jewish’. In fact, major opposition to Israel’s genocide comes from within Jewish ranks, significantly in the US. Zionists (both Jewish and non-Jewish) may be criticized because they may support the current war-crimes/genocide in Gaza. There’s no exception that should shield people from criticism just because they are Jews (but not only because they are Jews).
The second is Fagan’s fixation with anti-Semitism, which in the context of Israel being a nation-state, is misplaced? Why would criticism of Israel be deemed anti-Semitic? He ventures down this rabbit hole with no logic or explanation. As an analogy would criticizing the ANC or the South African government constitute racism; or criticizing Saudi Arabia’s brutal dictatorship be considered Islamophobic?
His simplistic and lazy analysis has implications he perhaps has not considered. If by his logic, any criticism of Israel is seen an attack on every Jew in the world, then by extension should every Jew in the world be held accountable for Israel’s actions? Through his misplaced logic, Fagan himself creates a basis for anti-Semitism. The problem lies not with those who legitimately criticize Israel’s actions, but rather those who tether their identity to an ethno-nationalist apartheid state. Many Jews around the world legitimately and rationally consider themselves citizens of their own nation states and homelands – lands where they reside.
Considering that Fagan himself denies any experience of anti-Semitism at UCT, his premise of its pervasiveness in society (except in his self-selected ecosystem) is fatally flawed, and that condemnation of Israel’s genocidal actions bears no relationship to anti-Semitism, his introduction of anti-Semitism is simply a diversion, a red herring, a canard.
Fagan’s denial of advocating for war-crimes and genocide
The second issue he has with my rejoinder is that Fagan denies he advocates for genocide or war-crimes, when he in effect does. Simply denying it and then proceeding to justify it, is his trick. I don’t wish to repeat my rebuttal of Fagan, as readers can reference my article directly, where I deal with this in much detail.
However, it is instructive to identify Fagan’s reference point, and the source of his legal knowledge:
… a friend who is a graduate, but not member, of the Faculty and is an expert on the law of armed conflict (or international humanitarian law) pointed out that my piece does not make it clear enough that the test for proportionality (the second condition identified in my piece) is anticipated military benefit from an attack as against anticipated incidental harm to civilians or civilian objects: i.e., it is not an effects-based test, but rather based on what the commander making the decision to attack knew at the time.
Straying outside his area of expertise, Fagan ignores the extraordinary body of literature, and case law on this matter, and assuming he’s on Who Wants to be a Millionaire choses to ‘call a friend’.
Having consulted professors in human rights law, international humanitarian law, and military law, I can say with great conviction that jus in bello, international humanitarian law, and human rights law, is meant primarily to protect non-combatants, not military objectives as claimed by Fagan.
“International humanitarian law is inspired by considerations of humanity and the mitigation of human suffering. It comprises a set of rules, which is established by treaty or custom and that seeks to protect persons and property/objects that are or may be affected by armed conflict, and it limits the rights of parties to a conflict to use methods and means of warfare of their choice”.
This contradicts Fagan’s logic, that the legitimacy of an action is determined by the military commander, with ‘military benefit’ of primary consideration, and humanitarian considerations a secondary one. To use a bad analogy to explain a poorer grasp of law, “if there is a criminal surrounded by innocent people, would the capture or murder of that criminal be of greater importance than the rights of bystanders?”
In Fagan’s warped logic, a commander will determine whether harm to civilians is acceptable. By this logic the Russian commander waging war in Ukraine is given the option to decide which military action is justified and at what human cost. Or the Nazi commanders in World War II, or apartheid military commanders in the wars against the South African liberation movement? It would be permissible according to Fagan’s logic for a military commander, in response to the Ellis Park or Magoo’s Bar bombings, to destroy Soweto in order to destroy the ANC or kill one or more of its members. Or if the British military decided to wipe out the Catholic section of Belfast because of an IRA terror attack?
Aside from the overwhelming evidence of Israel specifically targeting civilians and being fully aware of the civilian costs of their bombings, what does Fagan say about withholding food, water, fuel and medical care as weapons of war; or the displacement of 2 million people and destruction of 70% of homes in Gaza? His argument presents this this as acceptable collateral damage to destroy Hamas, which he sees as a legitimate objective. Fagan defends the dropping of 2000lb bombs in densely populated civilian spaces, use of banned chemical weapons, and destruction of civilian infrastructure.
So yes, Fagan does support war-crimes and crimes of genocide.
UCT’s Public Health Professor, Leslie London in an article in a Business Day article, counters the (false) Israeli and Fagan’s narrative which claims the high Palestinian death toll as a function of the latter using human shields, or hospitals as military zones. London writes:
“Gordon and Perugini have meticulously detailed in a peer-reviewed academic paper how IDF propaganda has constructed this claim (human shields) over past decades to justify the extraordinarily high civilian death toll in waging war against urban populations. By characterising everyone as a human shield, regardless of whether they are actually serving as shields, the protections applicable to civilians during times of war are dispensed with. They all become potentially “killable subjects”. The claim is made during the war, but never justified with evidence. As the adage goes, if you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes true. …
As Gordon and Perugini predicted in 2016, claims that medical facilities were being used for military purposes as human shields are deployed to legitimize their destruction. Once destroyed, no proof is provided.”
If Fagan dares challenge himself with academic rigor, and not merely rely on IDF propaganda, the reference to the paper (2016) is provided, as well as the abstract. That this paper was published more than 7 years ago, attests to the consistency of Israeli propaganda:
Abstract: “In this paper, we use Israel/Palestine as a case study to examine the politics of human shielding, while focusing on the epistemic and political operations through which the deployment of the legal category of human shield legitimizes the use of lethal force. After offering a concise genealogy of human shields in international law, we examine the way Israel used the concept in the 2014 Gaza war by analyzing a series of infographics spread by the IDF on social media. Exposing the connection between the re-signification of space and the constitution of a civilian as a shield, we maintain that the infographics are part of a broader apparatus of discrimination deployed by Israel to frame its violence post hoc in order to claim that this violence was utilized in accordance with international law. We conclude by arguing that the relatively recent appearance of human shields highlights the manifestation of a contemporary political antinomy: human shields have to continue to be considered protected civilians, but since they are considered an integral part of the hostilities they are transformed into killable subjects.”
But here is a test of Fagan’s logic, which I raised in my article: based on his claim of rights for the Israeli military, what concomitant rights accrue to Palestinian resistant fighters? If Hamas is a target to be destroyed, what concomitant right would Palestinians have? Would a similar logic apply to justify collateral death and damage to Israeli civilians, infrastructure, universities, hospitals, and synagogues? It is trite that the logic of military law or humanitarian law should apply equally, in fact should such a logic be employed it must balance more in favor of Palestinians by virtue of an inherent right of resistance, and in light of being forced into an asymmetrical war.
Deconstructing Fagan
Finally, Fagan may use semantic trickery and employ as many or different punctuation marks as satisfies him. Ultimately of importance is the narrative that dominates his articles, which requires unmasking. Reading Derrida taught me not to underestimate the power of the question mark as the “the meaning of a sign is never revealed in the sign”. Fagan has enacted what I predicted in my article - creating a shield of plausible deniability. But if his questions were searching and balanced, one would see a logic, and here “a sign only means something by virtue of its difference from something else”. That something else is his silence on the Palestinian narrative or suffering.
Deconstruction allows us to break something down, like Fagan’s arguments, to better understand its meanings. It dismantles language to discover what is really being said beneath the surface. But it also permits us not only to examine what the text says, but what it is silent on. Ideology after all resides at the margins of discourse.
Derrida guided us not to trust words, not to even trust questions, not to trust signs, but to never doubt patterns. Fagan demonstrates that pattern in his discourse – one of coloniality, racism and dehumanization.
I am glad that Fagan is either offended or threatened by my ‘overweening confidence’. If what he expected was deference, my years at UCT have nourished the cynic in me, in understanding that beneath the veneer of civility in academic spaces, there lies a brutality. My intention is always to challenge the Foucauldian characterization of “the close association between power and knowledge”, or those who invoke a certain power by claiming custodianship of certain knowledge. Except that Fagan claims power without the requisite knowledge. Fagan is far too accustomed to societal hierarchies and claiming a perch for himself atop this hierarchy. It is this kind of hubris which enables him to claim that he has a greater right to speak for UCT than Council or its elected members.Fagan displays the last kicks of those who claimed UCT as their personal fiefdoms.
In Fagan’s drunken hubris he misses the irony of his attack on UCT Council who he accuses of “sitting at a distant remove from the action and relying on internet sources algorithmically curated to reinforce their preconceived ideas about the conflict between Israel and Hamas”. But such blindness seems to be his hallmark.
But my mission in life is guided by JK Galbraith’s sage motto:
“In all life one should comfort the afflicted, but verily, also, one should afflict the comfortable, and especially when they are comfortably, contentedly, even happily wrong.”
Versions of denial
Let me conclude this riposte to benefit Fagan, lest it becomes overlong, by describing how Israeli apologists, like Fagan operate. In his article Versions of Denial, published in the London Review of Books, Conor Gearty, reminisces about his association with sociology professor, Stan Cohen, who abandoned his Zionism in 1980 when he moved to Israel to work at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Gearty writes:
When I first met him, he had just published States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering (2000), which shows that denial can masquerade as reason and reasonableness, making the unconscionable appear civilised, measured, even humane…
Cohen was highly critical of the way liberal culture had accommodated Israel’s actions.
He discussed three versions of denial: literal denial (it never happened); interpretative denial (it’s not what you think it is) and implicatory denial (we have to do it/it’s terrible, but it’s not our fault).
It’s much harder for the Israeli authorities to pull off literal denial than it was before the existence of social media, though it lingers on in their dismissal of the dangers facing the population of Gaza …
Instead, and in a move not anticipated by Cohen but which the sociologist in him might have admired, Israel and its supporters have flipped the need for denial to the other side: instead of Israel attempting to show that the atrocities it is committing in Gaza are not in fact taking place, the Palestinians and their supporters find themselves having to prove to the world that things that did not happen actually did not happen – or not in the way Israel says they did. Disproving fabrications is an exhausting business, usefully so from Israel’s point of view. Refutation takes time and often comes too late to undermine what have become entrenched truths.
To add, Palestinians have to constantly prove that what is happening to them, is actually happening; visible in plain sight, but still denied. Thus, their voices must be amplified to rise above Israel’s propaganda and hubris.
Conclusion
In my article I support an international, independent, unbiased investigation of war crimes, and claims made by both sides. Surprisingly, Hamas seems keener to comply than Israel. Israel has, unsurprisingly, forbidden its doctors from speaking to a UN group investigating October 7th atrocities (see here).
Even, as Barry Trachtenberg, expert in Holocaust Studies and Genocide, speaking at the CCR case against Biden for his support for genocide, testified that: “genocides destroy their own evidence”.
One can only wonder why and what Israel wants to hide? Perhaps Israel fears that its propaganda, which Fagan swallows wholesale, will be unearthed? Or perhaps Fagan believes that the UN is a branch of Hamas?
(Disclaimer: Shuaib Manjra is a member of the University of Cape Town Council. This article reflects his personal opinion and not that of UCT or its Council).
Addendum: The ICJ ruling on South Africa’s application, which was issued after publication of this article, is instructive. Craig Murray's summary is insightful; or this commentary by Raz Segal, an associate professor of Holocaust and genocide studies and endowed professor in the study of modern genocide.