In an Israeli documentary titled Precious Life, a little boy in Gaza with a deadly autoimmune disease is offered a chance at treatment in a Tel Aviv hospital by an Israeli pediatrician, an Israeli journalist who raises funds for the operation, and an anonymous donor who agrees to provide the money. All that remains is to find an organ match for the transplant. While everyone is anxiously waiting, the journalist engages the child's mother in conversation. He tells her that he is troubled by the idea of Palestinian martyrdom, because all “life is precious.” The mother replies that she accepts the idea of martyrdom, because death is normal for her people. “No,” she tells him, “life isn't precious.” The journalist asks about the boy they are trying to save: Would she let him become a martyr? The mother says she would. The journalist is baffled and disturbed, but leaves the conversation there. Then Israel invades Gaza. The invasion delays the operation, which nearly costs the child his life, although he is eventually saved. Many other Palestinians are not as lucky. While in Gaza, the documentary's director finds himself in conversation with a surgeon, who asks him why he is making a film about the saving of one life while Israel is taking the lives of hundreds. We learn that three of the surgeon's daughters have just been killed in the bombing of their home.
Anthropologist Didier Fassin uses these scenes in his new book, Life: A Critical User's Manual, to argue against the confident tendency among many in the Global North to treat an individual life as sacred while refusing to address the social structures that cause many lives to be treated as anything but. His targets are readers in places like Israel and the United States whose lives, despite the fearmongering on the right in both countries, are not particularly endangered; his hope is to get them to understand the political imperatives that determine the lives—as well as the deaths—of so many others both in the Global North and elsewhere, places where life's flagrant riskiness and the inequality of its value must unfortunately be taken for granted. By making this argument, Fassin redirects his readers away from humanitarianism's self-congratulatory ethic of rescue and toward a structural politics that aims at the transformation of collective life.
Trained as a medical doctor as well as an anthropologist, Fassin is especially sensitive to cases in which the saving of an individual life is presented as the definitive humanitarian gesture. In Palestine, to adopt a medical model of rescue and think in such terms is, in Fassin's view, to be distracted from the larger and more pressing issue of justice for Palestine, however that justice might be defined. Distracting people from these longer-term questions of social change, he speculates, may even be what the medical model of rescue is intended to do.
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