“Affirmations of Life” Confront Israel’s “Right to Kill”

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On Tuesday, September 17, at 3:30 p.m., as children were arriving home from school, the state of Israel sent messages to thousands of pagers, allegedly belonging to members of Hezbollah, across Lebanon. As thousands of hands fished pagers out of pockets and held them up to their faces — and, in one case, as a ten-year-old girl ran to bring the pager to her father — the devices exploded. The detonations killed 12 people, including two children, and left 2,800 others with injuries, many of them grave. The next day, handheld radios across Lebanon detonated simultaneously at around 5:00 p.m., during the funerals for those killed the previous day. The second round killed 20 and wounded over 450.

Over the next few days, doctors performed thousands of surgeries. As of today, some of the wounded were still waiting for their turn in hospital queues. Others were transferred to hospitals in Damascus and Tehran.

An overwhelming majority of the injured had mangled hands, said Ghassan Abu Sitta, the renowned British-Palestinian plastic and reconstructive surgeon, who flew to Lebanon immediately after the Tuesday massacre. A significant number of them needed amputations. 

Many also sustained eye injuries that led to loss of vision. “It’s a nightmare,” said ophthalmologist Elias Warrak, who in one night extracted more eyes than in his entire career. “The majority of the injured have eye injuries.”

Roughly 400 people lost their eyes. Today, many others with ocular damage still risk the same fate, as they wait to be seen by an ophthalmologist, amid a critical shortage in specialized medical teams. Ultimately, the pager massacres left thousands with some form of damage to the eyes that will need specialized care for years. Most of the patients were young men.

Looking at the high number of injuries, as opposed to relatively lower death tolls, one might get the misleading impression that the injured are going to quickly recover — that the Zionist architects of these attacks opted, benevolently, for a less-than-lethal form of violence. But to understand the politics of maiming, it is crucial to recognize — and therefore undermine — the Zionist strategy of counterinsurgency. This strategy aims to maim as a longer-term means of stifling resistance to settler colonialism. How can we better understand the production of thousands of disabled, colonized bodies, in lieu of dead ones, as a tactic of Zionist counterinsurgency?

The massacres Israel is currently carrying out are mainly designed to kill. But the pager and walkie-talkie detonations had different aims: Israel deliberately wanted to maim thousands of people in Lebanon, in a split second, instead of simply killing them. 

In her book "The Right to Maim" (2017), professor and author Jasbir Puar theorizes what she calls “the right to maim,” in the context of Zionist settler colonialism in Palestine, as “a perversion of the ‘right to kill’ claimed by states in warfare.”

Israeli soldiers implement a policy of “shooting to cripple,” writes Puar, shooting Palestinians in the limbs to debilitate and render them disabled, instead of killing them.

On the surface, writes Puar, this praxis of “letting live” appears to be “a preservation of life” — more humane, in a “liberal fantasy” of humanitarianism, and less violent than killing proper. But instead, we should understand shooting to cripple and maim as a tactical objective of settler colonialism —  a mechanism to contain the resistance, into the future, and prevent the next intifada by maiming as many young abled bodies as possible. According to Puar, “neither living nor dying is the aim.” The ‘right to maim’ is a deliberate and calculated strategy to slowly kill and debilitate a population.

How can we better understand the production of thousands of disabled, colonized bodies, in lieu of dead ones, as a tactic of Zionist counterinsurgency?

The Zionist counterinsurgency strategy, then, supplements “the right to kill” with “the right to maim,” which has been tested in Gaza with the aim to transform it into a camp of death and debilitation. For Zionists, “debilitated bodies are [economically] more valuable than dead ones.” Because illness and mass impairment require human and infrastructural resources that are “economically burdensome,” Zionists use maiming to “preemptively debilitate” the capacity to resist.

On September 17 and 18, thousands of people were maimed in the span of seconds. “The catastrophic thing,” said Abu Sitta, “is that almost all of them will end up with some residual disability, some permanent disability." The thousands of injuries sustained in these massacres will not only require short-term hospitalization, but also medium- to long-term rehabilitation. A significant number of the injured now have life-altering disabilities. They will have to undergo 5 to 12 surgeries in the next few years — and a lifetime of repeated rehabilitation and reconstruction procedures in order to restore as much function as possible to their limbs. Surgical care of this magnitude will create a massive burden on physicians and the Lebanese healthcare system.

Maiming as a tactic produces thousands of debilitated and non-laboring bodies, most of them breadwinners for their families. It is also meant to strike at the heart of the resistance in Lebanon to undermine its capabilities — while stretching governmental and institutional resources thin during an ongoing crisis. In this sense, the tactic of impairment in Lebanon weaponized in the Tuesday and Wednesday massacres may have been more profitable to the Zionist enemy than the tactic of killing.

It is worth remembering that the impairment of Lebanese and non-Lebanese bodies in Lebanon (especially Syrian bodies), like the mass impairment of Palestinians, is financially rewarding — not only for the Zionist entity, but also for the systems of reconstruction and rehabilitation that Puar calls the “corporate economies of humanitarianism.”

But as the Zionist state and its supporters employ maiming and killing as their primary tactics, people in Lebanon have risen up more than ever in defiance of these tactics. Palestinian nurses in Lebanon are offering free healthcare to people injured in the two massacres. Palestinians and Lebanese are donating blood. Some were so affected by the brutality of the attack that they were ready to donate one of their eyes or kidneys to the wounded; one person wrote on Facebook that he was looking to donate “to console those who have lost their eyes, to fulfill some of what is owed to those who sacrificed for us.” A campaign of people offering their organs swept social media and inundated the head of the Association for Organ Donations with calls to fill out organ donation forms.

This praxis of resistance to the right to maim has a long history in Lebanon and Palestine. Medical corps and the larger civilian infrastructure of care have always resisted Zionist settler-colonial strategies to restrict the reproduction of life — for example, the civil branch of the armed resistance in Lebanon in 2006, and their counterparts in Gaza and occupied Palestine. By inaugurating what gender and postcolonial studies scholar Layal Ftouni calls “a practice of life-making,” and healing their injured, they are united in their collective determination to enact the “affirmation of life” “under conditions of death, destruction, and debilitation,” in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for decolonization.

The right to maim may be painful on different levels, not least psychologically. But it is a failed tactic that will never succeed in breaking the fortitude of the resistance and its everlasting capacity to reproduce life and futurity itself.

Nisrine Chaer is a researcher and organizer based in Beirut.