How the Sociopolitical Concept of Necropolitics Can Help Us Understand Politicians' Approach to Palestine
By stacy lee kong
Image: Shutterstock
Content warning: this newsletter contains graphic descriptions of death, violence and torture. Links may contain graphic images.
A note on language: As I’ve mentioned in every newsletter I’ve written about Gaza since Oct. 7, it’s super important that we take care with our language when discussing Israel and Palestine, because the way we talk about this situation has real consequences for real people. So to be clear, when I critique the Israeli government and military, I am not critiquing all Israelis, much less all Jewish people. I also think it’s important to push back on attempts to characterize critique of Israel and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) as antisemitic. Furthermore, it is disingenuous and actually dangerous to conflate Zionism with Judaism, as this list of prominent Jewish writers has argued. Lastly, when I use the words colonization, genocide, apartheid, occupation and ethnic cleansing to describe Israel’s actions, that’s based on the analysis of organizations like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, the International Federation for Human Rights, the United Nations, the Center for Constitutional Rights, Jewish Voice for Peace as well as academics who study genocide and South Africa’s application to the International Court of Justice to bring genocide charges against Israel. It is also based on the language Israeli officials and public figures have used themselves, 500+ instances of which have already been collected by Law for Palestine.
Over the weekend, the Israeli army withdrew from Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City after a two-week siege, leaving the hospital in literal ruins—and, horrifyingly, littered with bodies and body parts. When CNN published Reuters’ footage of the complex on Monday, the news outlet included the caveat that some of the video was “too graphic” to show. But we have reports that shed light on what happened over the course of 14 days: “I witnessed hundreds of bodies outside the hospital, their [sic] wasn’t one full body all the bodies were either pieces or heavily mutilated,” says journalist Hossam Shabat. “The bodies were in horrific conditions; many had their hands and legs tied behind their backs and were flattened by a bulldozer. Many of the bodies were burned and left to be crushed to pieces. Several bodies were decomposed and partly eaten by stray dogs. Most of the bodies were unrecognizable; families could only identify them by their clothes.”
If you were on X/Twitter at all that day, you likely saw some of it. I certainly did, despite trying not to: what looks like a man’s head and shoulders, covered in dust and ash, the rest of his body just… gone. Parts of bodies in confusing configurations and uncanny scale (likely because they had been crushed by bulldozers). Adults and children who had been burned beyond identification, and almost beyond being recognizably human. That is a commonality, actually—these bodies have been so horribly desecrated that they don’t read as human at first glance. You could almost fool yourself into believing you’re looking at special effects, uncanny and disturbing, but fake. Just silicon and camera tricks, carefully designed to inspire horror. But they are human, and their bodies really have been disrespected in appalling ways. (And yes, this impulse feels particularly fraught considering Israeli hasbara, the country’s propaganda strategy, has often tried to argue that Palestinian injuries and deaths are fake. Remember Muhammad Hani Al-Zahar, the five-month-old baby who was killed in an Israeli strike in December? Zionists claimed a photo of his mother holding his dead body actually showed a doll.)
This is not the first time that we’ve seen horrific photos and videos of Palestinians’ bodies after an IDF attack, of course. In February, images started circulating of seven-year-old Sidra Hassouna’s lifeless corpse dangling from a wall for two days after an IDF attack on the southern Gaza city of Rafah, where she and her family had been forcibly displaced. I still can’t get the image of the father carrying his children’s dismembered bodies in plastic bags out of my head. And it’s not always the result of a direct military attack; I can also immediately visualize the dozens of children who have starved to death because Israel has refused to allow aid to enter Gaza.
For a long time (and yes, I knew this was naïve even as I was thinking it), I hoped there was a line. That eventually, some photo or video would be ‘bad enough’ to force Western politicians and media to admit what so many of us have known for so long: that Israel is committing genocide, that innocent Palestinians are being tortured and maimed, that it has to stop. Well, it turns out that line exists—and it is so totally unsurprising where it lies.
On Monday, the IDF struck a convoy of aid workers from chef José Andrés’ humanitarian organization, World Central Kitchen (WCK), killing seven people, most of them white and Western. Immediately, photos began circulating of their dead bodies, carefully positioned in body bags, foreign passports prominently displayed on their chests. In the days since, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has apologized for the trio of airstrikes that killed them, while U.S. President Joe Biden, who has bankrolled much of this genocide, has finally, belatedly called for an “immediate ceasefire.” (Of course, his administration is currently pushing Congress to approve an $18-billion arms deal that would see Israel purchase up to 50 American F-15 fighter jets, so I’m curious who he’s calling on, exactly?) And according to U.K. paper The Independent, “it may seem wrong that, after more than 30,000 Palestinians in Gaza have perished, it took the deaths of just seven international aid workers to stir Western governments into a sense of outrage, but that is the reality… The moment has come to do whatever it takes to force Israel to end its war.”
As I noted on Instagram, it does not seem wrong to place a greater importance on these aid workers’ lives over the 33,037 Palestinians who have been killed by Israel since Oct. 7; it is wrong. So, let’s actually delve into this. Because while you could very easily explain the disparity in public and political reaction in terms of anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian racism (which would still be accurate), I recently learned about another concept that definitely applies: necropolitics.
You probably already understand what necropolitics means, even if you’ve never heard the term
First, a definition: while ‘necropolitics’ immediately makes me think of Immortan Joe from Mad Max: Fury Road, it is actually a sociopolitical theory developed by Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe. As he wrote in a 2003 article published in the journal Public Culture, “the ultimate expression of sovereignty resides, to a large degree, in the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die. Hence, to kill or to allow to live constitute the limits of sovereignty, its fundamental attributes. To exercise sovereignty is to exercise control over mortality and to define life as the deployment and manifestation of power.”
Or, as academic and writer Namrata Verghese put it in Teen Vogue in 2021, “necropolitics is a framework that illuminates how governments assign differential value to human life. The closer you are to dominant power, the more your life is worth. In the United States, if you’re a straight, white, able-bodied, cisgender, wealthy, Christian man, this is great news for you. But the further away you are from those axes of privilege, the less your life is worth under the logics of necropolitics—and the more precarious your existence becomes.”
I’m still doing my reading, so I’m definitely not an expert here. But it has been interested to realize that I’ve been understanding the world through a necropolitical framework for a long time; I just didn’t know that’s what it was called. In fact, it’s exactly this dynamic that I was thinking of when I wrote about why I do my best not to watch videos of police brutality, even though I acknowledge they have a purpose, and how it felt to watch Jordan Neely die on a New York City subway, and why it’s fucked up that TMZ published photos of the rapper Takeoff’s body after he was fatally shot in 2022. In each of those cases—and in the context of Palestine, too—the way media represents a marginalized person’s death not only speaks to that person’s perceived value in a white supremacist patriarchal society; it also illuminates the policy decisions that led to those deaths. Or maybe, to make a sharper point, these media representations offer strong evidence for the argument that the primary form of governance in the West is necropolitical. I mean, whether it’s gun control or police brutality or decimating social services or sending billions of dollars in military aid to a nation that is carrying out genocide and ethnic cleansing against a population that’s already totally under its control, it all comes back to our political leaders exerting their power to decide who lives and who dies.
The Takeoff newsletter is especially relevant to this conversation, because it references a 2018 New York Times article by author Sarah Sentilles that I think is worth re-reading now. In it, Sentilles references a university class she used to teach on photography and war, and recalls explaining to her students that, while American news media is inundated with images of “dead Iraqis, dead Afghans, dead Syrians [shown] blown up and bloodied, buried in rubble, partly covered by sheets, on the floor, on the ground, on a stretcher, in a pile… we almost never saw images of dead American soldiers.”
This incongruence matters, she says: “My students understood that there was a relationship between the visible images from other countries and the suppressed images from our country. Hiding some dead bodies affects how other dead bodies are viewed.”
Whose bodies matter, and whose do not?
Sentilles’ students couldn’t agree on exactly what that relationship was, or whether showing images of the war dead was ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ and I think those questions are just as complicated here. We in the West really only see what’s happening in Palestine because Palestinian people are showing us, and I’m uncomfortable with the idea that oppressed people documenting their own genocide could ever be considered ‘disrespectful.’ At the same time, though, it does feel very clear that a) there is a marked difference not just in how these different categories of people are actually treated, but also in how their dead bodies are portrayed and b) the fact that some of those bodies are portrayed in their degradation while others are shown in a more ‘respectful’ way can tell us something important about who our society thinks is valuable, and who it considers disposable and subhuman.
“The closer you are to dominant power, the more your life is worth,” right?
There was another very clear example of this via The New Yorker this week. If you haven’t been reading staff writer Isaac Chotiner’s probing, meticulous interviews, you have to start, ideally with this one, featuring Aaron David Miller, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment and a former State Department official with almost three decades’ of experience in U.S. foreign policy, especially in the Middle East. I found his responses frustratingly opaque for most of the interview—until the end, when Chotiner asks him about the emotion in his voice when he talks about Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel, and whether he thinks American policymakers feel that same emotion for Palestinians.
Miller’s response? “I think it’s fair to say, yes, that America and Americans have a pro-Israeli sensibility… When Biden gave the speech on October 10th, you watched the tears well up in his eyes. He talked about the black hole of loss. He’s conflated the tragedies in his own personal life with what Israelis felt on that day.”
Putting aside the fact that I could write an entire newsletter on Miller’s assumption of who Americans are, demographically, politically, etc., when Chotiner presses him on who Biden identifies with, he goes even further: “Oh, if you’re asking me: Do I think that Joe Biden has the same depth of feeling and empathy for the Palestinians of Gaza as he does for the Israelis? No, he doesn’t, nor does he convey it. I don’t think there’s any doubt about that.”
… Oh.
What tf are we supposed to do with this information???
Now, this is wildly racist, obviously. But… it also raises some scary questions. I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about what it means that while a ceasefire is extremely politically popular and has been for months, elected officials in the West don’t seem to want one, and therefore refuse to listen or act in accordance with their constituents’ wishes. In December, progressive U.S. think tank Data for Progress released polling data that showed “61% of likely voters, including a majority of Democrats (76%) and Independents (57%) and a plurality of Republicans (49%), support the U.S. calling for a permanent ceasefire and a de-escalation of violence in Gaza.” (Other, more recent polling put that number even higher, for the record.) However, only about 11% of America’s lawmakers, or 64 out of 535 members of Congress, have expressed the same opinion. This despite the fact that polling suggests Americans are more likely to vote for politicians who support a ceasefire!
Similarly, among Canadians, support for a ceasefire has been strong (between 65% and 71%, depending on the poll) since November, and while our federal government did vote for the non-binding UN resolution calling for “an immediate humanitarian ceasefire” in December, it’s still selling tens of millions of dollars worth of arms to Israel. (That much-lauded embargo? Doesn’t apply to existing permits. And btw, Canada approved $28.5 million in new military export permits to Israel between October and December 2023.)
These feel like very clear examples that our governments do not feel beholden to us, which I thought was the fundamental contract of democracy???? That lack of accountability is bad enough, but when you add on the framework of necropolitics, the implications become much worse. I don’t think this is new, of course. But it’s an election year in the U.S. and we’ll likely soon have a federal election in Canada, too, and realizing that many prospective voters are on the ‘wrong’ side of our leaders’ necropolitical approach is jarring. Because we might live in the heart of empire, but many of us are quite distant from the dominant power. And if that is prompting you to ask yourself what we should actually expect from our political leaders and systems in the coming months and years… same.
📆 Mark Your Calendars: Friday Talks, S2: Not Bad For Some Immigrants Drops Next Week! 📆
I’ll be releasing the first episode of season 2 of Friday Talks on Tuesday, April 9, and I’m super excited for you to watch! This season is all about ‘the immigrant experience’—and how there’s not actually one we can point to, because each of our experiences is complicated, nuanced and unique. I’ll be chatting with guests including former MuchMusic VJ Hannah Sung, journalist Pacinthe Mattar, writer and media personality Bee Quammie and filmmaker v.t. nayani about the specific ways diasporic communities move through the world, navigate our identities and relate to our families (or don’t). Subscribe to Friday Things on YouTube so you don’t miss an episode!
And Did You Hear About…
This beautiful essay on memory, the ‘brain-computer metaphor’ and grief.
The New Yorker’s fascinating profile of an OG tradwife.
My new fave Instagram account.
This disturbing Wired feature about the rampant sexual harassment experienced by women scientists who work in Antarctica.
Tayo Bero’s thoughtful take on Diddy, Russell Simmons and the long-overdue reckoning around sexual violence in hip hop.
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