Jasbir Puar on the Pager Attacks and the Right to Maim
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On September 12, 2024, during a Twitter live broadcast, a doctor named Layth Hanbali calmly cited a shocking fact: Israel’s war on Gaza has led to around 11,000 Palestinian children losing limbs. “This is the largest cohort of pediatric amputees in the history of warfare,” he said. “On a clinical level, it's critical to try and understand the health implications of such a calamity.”
This new calamity is part of an old practice: mass maiming as a deliberate strategy of state violence. For almost two years, beginning in 2018, the people of Gaza walked every Friday to the border fence with Israel, demanding an end to Israel’s blockade of Gaza, and the right to return to their homes, in a series of nonviolent demonstrations called the Great March of Return. During this time, Israel’s military specialized in shooting protesters in the legs, knees, and ankles. “At first we told them to shoot at the leg,” said one officer quoted in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz. “We saw that you could be killed like that, so we told them to shoot below the knee. Afterward, we made the order more precise and instructed them to shoot at the ankle.”
After last week’s pager and two-way radio attacks, as people in Lebanon wondered whether it was safe to even call their loved ones, pro-Israel social media accounts erupted with a celebration of maiming: grisly jokes and memes gloated over severed limbs, exploding phones, and supposedly neutered men. To put the pager attacks in the context of Israel’s ongoing practice of maiming, The Public Source reached out to Jasbir K. Puar, a professor of Global Race Studies at the University of British Columbia and author of the award-winning book “The Right To Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability.”
We wanted to hear her thoughts on the pager and radio attacks, in which thousands of people lost hands and eyes in a split second. How might these attacks complicate the typical framing of liberal humanitarianism, which presents such attacks as more “humane” than outright killing? How does this new spectacle of horror fit into Israel’s “humane” image, which has long been central to its justification for the right to maim?
Below is her response, edited lightly for length and clarity.
Jasbir K. Puar:
These detonated explosions of hand-held devices maim on several levels: bodily, as events of mass impairment that will likely lead to hundreds of permanent disabilities, some of them preventable with proper medical care, which may not be available (please note I use the term disability loosely, as it invokes a liberal rights apparatus that Palestinians — and now, perhaps, the Lebanese — cannot avail themselves of); infrastructurally, as medical facilities are pushed beyond capacity, overwhelmed with injured patients needing emergency care at exactly the same moment, an impossible scene of treatment; psychically, as people in Lebanon walk in fear and terror of the next event, and a global audience ponders how else and where else such tactics might be used; and communally, as a short-circuiting of communication through social media and messaging platforms render people cut off from local and diasporic connections, isolated in their terror.
The simultaneity of the explosions, yet dispersal of the injuries, seems significant in a spatio-temporal sense: a kind of distributed, spatially diffuse massacre.
The simultaneity of the explosions, yet dispersal of the injuries, seems significant in a spatio-temporal sense: a kind of distributed, spatially diffuse massacre.
I always understood the "right to maim" as broadly relevant to any context where "not-killing" is proffered as a "humane" alternative to contain and control bodies — in effect authorizing less harm vis-à-vis killing, but a greater, ever-expanding scope of violence. We see this with the logic of non-lethal weapons, which are narrated as instruments that avoid mass killing — but in fact therefore allow greater usage of these weapons to harm, to debilitate, to maim. During the George Floyd protests we saw a proliferation of "crowd control weapons" (CCWs) used to attack protesters, with police forces shooting rubber bullets into protestors’ eyes (in France, the U.S., Chile, and many other locations; there is also long-standing practice of security forces shooting pellets at the eyes of people in Kashmir). The right to maim is by no means tethered to Israel, even as Israel might be an exemplar of its praxis.
The right to maim is functioning as South African Advocate Tembeka Ngcukaitobi explained, in the testimony he delivered at the International Court of Justice hearings in January, where he stated that Israel will maim “what it cannot destroy.”
I agree that the framework of liberal humanitarianism is not needed as cover for Israel's heinous acts of violence in this instance, nor in the genocide on Gaza. Instead, I think the right to maim is functioning as South African Advocate Tembeka Ngcukaitobi explained, in the testimony he delivered at the International Court of Justice hearings in January, where he stated that Israel will maim “what it cannot destroy.” In prior iterations the “cannot” was about the restraint of force or the appearance of disproportionate force. But now the “cannot,” both in Gaza and Lebanon, appear to be about logistical constraints; and in that sense, it might be perhaps only a marker of time (“we cannot yet”). The recent horrific attacks on southern Lebanon and in Beirut, killing hundreds of people, indicate that the right to maim and the right to kill are no longer in a supplementary relation — one modulating or covering for the other — but rather, both are explicitly enacted as strategies of violent decimation.
In instances past, maiming was a tactic to minimize death — placating global actors, while nevertheless creating huge harm through mass impairment. The tactic was explicit at times (during the first intifada) and covert at other times (the number of injured in Israel’s 2014 Gaza War, for example, was rarely noted, as there was so much grief about the number of dead). In this case I think the nature of the spectacle — which involves, as you note, the fetishization of dismembered body parts — is crucial, because it is tutoring international audiences in the value hierarchy between Israeli and Palestinian and Lebanese bodies. It appears akin to the mass injuries sustained during the 2018–2020 Great March of Return, during which western mainstream media routinely printed images of rows of Palestinian men with amputated legs, in wheelchairs, and bandaged and on crutches. Through this spectacle, the amputated limb had become a signature injury, a carceral assemblage of the “humanitarian” use of maiming, the media focus on disaster capitalism, and the tactical attempt to contain resistance. Signature injuries are, to some extent, biopolitically preordained: a particular injury becomes what a certain body is known for, what it is expected to receive and assimilate, even before it happens to the body.
The nature of the spectacle — the fetishization of dismembered body parts — is tutoring international audiences in the value hierarchy between Israeli and Lebanese and Palestinian bodies"
I feel that what is being normalized is the mass impairment, through the most horrifying dismemberment of body parts, of Palestinian and now Lebanese bodies, as the value of these bodies, as what these bodies deserve and are destined for. In that sense, the humanitarian rationale is no longer needed — only the collective witnessing, tutoring, absorption, and sanctioning of a global audience that is only too happy to have their racist anti-Arab, anti-Palestinian world views confirmed. It is as if to say: if these bodies are to remain alive, they must only be alive as mutilated.
Jasbir K. Puar is Distinguished Professor of Arts at the Social Justice Institute at the University of British Columbia. She is the author of two award-winning books: The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (2017), and Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (2007).