When Nayirah Al-Sabah takes the stand at the United States Congressional Human Rights Caucus in October of 1990, she is really unsheathing the blade of her most potent weapon: she is here to tell her story.
The world holds its breath as it watches a helpless, innocent 15-year old Kuwaiti girl, a survivor of the Iraqi occupation, recounting the senseless atrocities she has been subjected to under Sadam Hussein’s regime. She infamously narrates the experience of volunteering at the Alldar Hospital, where she looks on in horror as Iraqi soldiers take premature babies out of incubators and leave them to die on the cold hospital floor. The violence she has seen is unimaginable, but that is exactly why her first-person account is so important; she makes her pain tangible to her audience, and forces them to empathise with her plight. How do you deny the pleas of a young girl who has Survived?
The strength of Nayirah’s testimony was proportional to the suspense of disbelief it required. Unbelievability is the threshold our propaganda must pass in order to succeed in its purpose—if we seek the utter dehumanisation of our enemy, we must show that they are capable of utterly inhumane acts. Think of poor, traumatised Nayirah; think of those defenseless infants, murdered in cold blood; think of the sociopathic, bloodlusting savages who could be capable of something so heinous. Nayirah’s testimony was disseminated throughout the media, weaponised by the H. W. Bush administration in order to justify their intervention in the Gulf War, and their choruses of indignance are echoed into the public, manufacturing a desire for justice and an acceptance of bloodshed. We understand now that every tax dollar should contribute to the punishment of this soulless evil.
A year after the Gulf War ended, it was revealed that Nayirah’s testimony was a fabrication funded by Hill & Knowlton’s public relations campaign on behalf of the Kuwaiti Government. Humanitarian organisations such as Amnesty International USA would publicly condemn H. W. Bush’s ‘opportunistic manipulation of the international human rights movement’. But it was too late, as it always is, as is every condemnation of fabricated atrocity propaganda that comes well after the damage has been done. This is the power of victimhood as a weapon. You cannot question Nayirah’s testimony as it is presented in front of you. You cannot let cynicism betray your empathy for her pain—a teenager bares her wounds in front of you, and you dare to wonder if her story adds up? We must give a grace period to the victim, and we must treat her testimonial as sacrosanct until it is appropriate to wonder otherwise. All the while, her story gives her defenders the ammunition to act with complete impunity.
In René Girard’s I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, Girard comments on the rise of an ideology he refers to as ‘victimism’. In an era post-globalisation, we have minted a currency out of ‘concern for victims’—we see suffering and cruelty across the world like never before, and our concern for their pain organises into global calls for justice. Of course, this sentiment has been a driving force for positive social change. But equally, and perhaps more effectively, it has become a new frontier to be weaponised for political and economic power. Where imperialists of the past could be transparent about their interests in conquest and domination, we now see these motivations dressed up in humanitarian garb. All interventions now occur for justice, for the safety of our victims and for the redemption of our fallen. If a party succeeds in monopolising this economy of victimhood, then it has captured a public’s unconditional support and earns unfettered license to act in its own interests.
Nariyah and her team of mythical, martyred babies succeeded in a vital social element of modern warfare: she cemented herself as the ‘apex victim’. She sought to present her suffering as more salient and more real than the invisible civilians of some foreign land, and thus she outranked them on the foodchain—she had been through the Worst, and now the Worst must be enacted to redeem her. Every geopolitical conflict since World War II draws from this exact playbook. Every political actor seeks to weaponise a narrative of victimhood in order to justify its violence, and it is always the empire that succeeds in its monopoly. The hegemony controls the stories we consume and distorts our empathy to its favour, until it has completely militarised our support.
On the 7th of October 2023, roughly 1,400 Israelis were murdered in Operation Al-Aqsa Flood. Over 1,000 of these victims are civilians, including children and the elderly; families are crying out for the return of their loved ones who have been taken hostage; images are broadcasted through the media of bloodshed and destruction. Then comes the spin: Hamas has beheaded 40 babies (later deemed unverifiable by the IDF itself); Hamas is heralding the trophy of a woman’s corpse through Gaza (she is later revealed to be alive by her own mother); we see image after image of empty houses and closets covered in the bloodstains of supposed victims (not a body to be seen). The violence is unforgivable, and the cruelty is simply inhumane—Israel has been victimised by a random and senseless act of terrorism, completely at the mercy of the barbarians of Gaza. Action must be taken.
While many Israeli politicians and military commanders are unafraid to clearly state their genocidal intentions for the current campaign in Gaza, there is still a public-facing justification that is disseminated throughout the media. It is the bogeyman of Hamas. The terrorist, jihadist Hamas is behind the casualties in Israel, and they are holding the Palestinian civilians hostage too, using them as human shields by creating strongholds under hospitals and churches and refugee camps. This is the same logic utilised by all of its Western imperialist supporters: Hillary Clinton recently went on record to denounce a ceasefire, because of course, the safety of Palestine can only be achieved through the extermination of Hamas.
There is an age-old adage that every Israeli accusation is really an admission, and I wonder then if its justifications are really an expropriation of Palestinian rationale. If Palestine has been under violent occupation for the past 75 years, and the past two decades have seen brutal blockade and siege at the hands of the IDF, and every Israeli settler is also mandatorily conscripted into military service for the singular purpose of maintaining domination over the Palestinian people: then is it not the state of Israel who is holding the people hostage? Are Hamas’ military efforts not justified by this same logic? Has Israel not written the rules by which Operation Al-Aqsa Flood was performed? What makes the dead Palestinian civilian an inevitable tragedy of war, and the dead settler a senseless tragedy worthy of retaliation?
When I ask this line of questioning, what I am trying to do is demonstrate an anti-victimist politic; politics that are instead guided by principled ethics and fact. Here is what we do know. Israel is an illegitimate settler-colonial state created by the imperialist powers of Europe for the sake of a Jewish ethnostate. Its existence is premised on the apartheid of Indigenous Palestinians, and it must maintain its dominance over this population in order to prosper. When a state is capable of displacing its Indigenous population into an open-air prison and a set of reservations in its colony, and is capable of denying water and food and military resources to these populations at any time, any conflict between these parties cannot be construed as a ‘war’ between ‘states’. Israel is merely sparking and reacting to a series of liberation struggles from a population it controls.
And when Israel seeks the ‘destruction of Hamas’, what it truly seeks is the destruction of Palestine. The tunnels of Hamas run through every body in Gaza, soldier and civilian alike, because it is the Palestinian himself who poses an existential threat to Israel and whose death legitimises its existence. Within this context, and through the nuances of a 75-year history of violence and bloodshed, it is impossible to understand Israel as a victim in any way. When we look at its evil, we understand why Israel must hold the camera lens of victimhood with an iron fist—our global empathy must be manipulated through misinformation and emotional blackmail so that Israel can commit its genocide with full impunity.
October 7 had the profound impact of uniting Western politicians and celebrities alike in displays of public solidarity as they all proclaimed that they ‘Stand With Israel’. It was a level of solidarity that has never been displayed for Palestine in all of the Black Saturdays it has experienced; Amy Schumer does not lament on Twitter for the 172 Palestinians murdered by Israeli forces in 2023 before these events even began. It was in this moment that Israel won the race to apex victim, because its robust propaganda campaign knows the sympathies it must exploit. By contrast, the Palestinian can only enter the battlefield of victimhood if they are frozen in time as children throwing rocks at tanks, or the countless children murdered by the current genocide; if the people dare take up arms and organise for self-determination, they become the terrorist who must be neutralised.
Any loss of civilian life is a tragedy, and I do not seek to understate this harm, but Israel’s stronghold on Western propaganda succeeds when it misrepresents the nature of this conflict: to portray it as a senseless act of terrorism, and not as the clearly-intentioned guerilla warfare that it really is. We cannot become too conscious that armed resistance is a legitimate means to pursue liberation, or that it is even legal under international law for an occupied force to use it. We cannot pay too much attention to the promise to release the Israeli hostages in exchange for the 10,000 Palestinians being held hostage by Israel, many of whom are imprisoned for the crime of pro-Palestinian demonstration. This would muddy the waters too much, and challenges the sword of victimhood that Israel wields so expertly. We need to feel too guilty to question the narrative, and this is why the state of Israel endeavours to hold every television and computer screen captive with its crocodile tears, castigating us for questioning its pain and begging us to endorse its cruelty.
‘Victimhood’ is not an identity. It works best as a framework. It is helpful for us to understand the relationships between victims and perpetrators, to understand how one party becomes victimised by the other, especially in the case of how the oppressed and the oppressor come to be. But when we allow a person to construct an identity from their Victimhood, what we really do is strip them of humanity—they become sanctified, a perfect innocent incapable of harm, and thus their actions become unimpeachable. P.E. Moskowitz writes an excellent article about an analogy between the non-binary roommate who weaponises their trauma to avoid doing the dishes, and the Zionist who justifies the actions of Israel. As an annoying Gen Z 20-something who has grown up in the Internet era, I have seen countless examples of people whose only allegiance is to their own victimhood, and are incapable of accepting their own agency. Now I am acutely aware of how this plays out on a macrocosmic political scale, and I urge us to commit to a philosophy of critical thinking: where our ethics are principled and informed by knowledge and robust moral systems, as opposed to the reflex of immediate sympathy.
The Israeli is as capable of living, loving, laughing as you or me, and still they are not deserving of settling on the homes of an oppressed and displaced population and participating in their active, violent victimisation. The Palestinian is as capable of living, loving, laughing as you or me, and as capable of anger, sadness, violence too; and still, they are no less deserving of a free Palestine. We must not require their perfect victimhood in order to support their liberation.
Absolutely amazing! I enjoy all your articles but this one really blew me away! Thank you for writing about this 🇵🇸❤️
This is brilliant, thank you for writing!