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Bassem Youssef’s Darkest Act
Kareem Shaheen, New Lines Magazine
last updated:
Oct 19,2023
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This essay was published first by New Lines Magazine on October 18, 2023.اضافة اعلان
“Let’s
for a minute imagine a world without Hamas. And let’s name this world ‘the West
Bank.’”
The
Egyptian satirist Bassem Youssef gave an interview on
“Piers Morgan Uncensored,” shortly after news emerged of the explosion at
Al-Ahli Al-Arabi Baptist Hospital in Gaza, in which possibly hundreds of
Palestinians, including many women and children, were killed. The horror of
this moment is self-evident, the conflagration in its aftermath yet to be
determined.
Hamas
blamed an Israeli airstrike for the hospital attack. Israel blamed a failed
rocket launch by Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) militants that fell back and
landed in the hospital and blew up. Open source intelligence experts who have
proven their reliability before while investigating crimes in Syria, Ukraine
and Afghanistan are hard at work unpacking the evidence in the light of day. As
of the morning after, they had not yet made a definitive determination on who
was responsible for the attack but appeared to be leaning toward the theory
that a smaller payload, rather than an airstrike, was to blame.
As
world leaders, and others whose words matter less, were figuring out the verbal
gymnastics necessary to issue condemnations that studiously avoid blame and
don’t appear to hew too far in the direction of expressing sympathy for the
Palestinians, and as competing narratives over just who had killed yet more
Palestinians emerged on social media, Youssef was doing what he and other
satirists do best — deploy the darkest humor amid this collective suicide of
human empathy.
“Let’s
for a minute imagine a world without Hamas. What will this world look like?
Let’s give this world a name, and let’s name this world ‘the West Bank,’” he
told Morgan. In the terror group’s absence, subjugation of Palestinians
remained the modus operandi. “Hamas has no control over the West Bank, and
since the beginning of the year only through August, 37 Palestinian kids were
killed. No music festival, no paragliding, no Hamas.”
Contrary
to the public pronouncements, the horror that unfolded in the hospital in Gaza
was neither unimaginable nor unthinkable.
There
was, in fact, little left to the imagination as photographs and videos emerged
from the scene showing piles of dead bodies, and doctors there held a press
conference literally in the middle of charred and bloodied corpses, including
those of children.
It was
also hardly unthinkable because hospitals have been attacked routinely in the
past decade in multiple conflicts, including Afghanistan, Ukraine and Gaza
itself but also in Syria, where the frequency of the attacks there has
essentially made bombing hospitals a routine part of war. Since 2011, the NGO
Physicians for Human Rights recorded over 600 separate attacks on healthcare
facilities in the country, the vast majority of them carried out by either the
Syrian government or its Russian allies (both of whom strongly condemned the
attack in Gaza).
I had
the misfortune of visiting a bombed Syrian hospital in 2017 (after years of
covering those bombings from afar) and there is a uniqueness to the evil of it.
This particular bombing came in the aftermath of the chemical attack on Khan
Sheikhun in April of that year and appeared primarily aimed at killing
survivors who had been taken to the nearby hospital. There was a storage
facility in the courtyard that had been flattened — one of the first responders
told me it was used to store the corpses of those who had died in the initial
chemical attack, so in a sense they died twice. But the plight of the dead was
nothing compared with that of the wounded survivors, who were lying down, still
frothing at the mouth from the chemical attack, while the place they had hoped
would provide refuge and succor was pounded from the air.
Then,
as now, the shameful nature of the crime prompted competing narratives and
handwringing about what we knew. But often with these cases of collective human
psychosis, the outcome was all the same for the families of the dead.
Youssef’s
satirical masterpiece on the Piers Morgan show is brilliant precisely because
it captures the absurdity of these moments of psychosis, while rooting it in the
actual experiences of the innocent people suffering in the aftermath of Hamas’
bloodthirsty attack and Israel’s rampaging fury, as they have in years past.
Some of the legendary comedic routines of the television age are rooted in this
unpeeling of these moments of collective hysteria or illogic. Take George
Carlin’s famous set on the seven dirty words that you weren’t allowed to say on
television, and the gradual parsing of the individual words and why they were
so uniquely bad as to be banned from the airwaves. Its genius lies in
demystifying and zooming in on their individual subtleties, such that the
arbitrariness of what we choose to be outraged by is laid bare.
Youssef’s
interview belongs in the annals of those performances, although in one way it is
also a piece of quintessentially Arab satire, dark humor being a tool to deal
with the wars and preoccupations of recent Middle Eastern history.
At the
beginning of the show, Youssef, whose wife is Palestinian, noted that her
family had fled their home in Gaza after it was bombed (he showed a photo of
its bombed-out facade later on in the segment).
After
joking about her “loser” cousin who had “failed all the interviews to be a
human shield” and who denied that Hamas was forcing Gazans to remain in their
homes — despite the claims of American voices from thousands of miles away — he
said: “We are used to that. It’s just very repetitive. We are used to them
being bombed every time and moving from one place to the other. Those
Palestinians are very dramatic, like aah, Israel is killing us. But they never
die; they always come back. They’re a very difficult people to kill. I know
because I’m married to one.”
The
experience of witnessing a tragedy unfold in the Middle East, specifically in a
conflict like Israel-Palestine, is maddening. This is made worse by the fact
that it does in fact mimic the experience of Bill Murray in “Groundhog Day,”
where the same debates, the same dehumanization, the same outsize and
disproportionate suffering meted out to Palestinian civilians, the same malaise
and impotence across the Arab world, the same debates by armchair experts and
keyboard warriors and the same gradual erosion of civilizational norms are
repeated ad nauseam. It is also one of the few public events or conflicts in
which the traditional David and Goliath script is reversed, and sympathy for
the embattled underdog (specifically Palestinian civilians, not Hamas) is a
harder sell and requires some finessing.
Youssef
alludes to this when he likens the relationship between the United States and
Israel to that of an abusive partner who convinces you that you are at fault in
the wake of abuse.
“Israel
wants you to believe that they are the victim,” he said. “You look at Israel as
Superman, but they’re really Homelander. They are shooting fish in a barrel and
they’re annoyed with the splashes.”
This
last point is bolstered by the chart he brandished during the interview that
showed side-by-side comparisons of Israeli and Palestinian casualties, with the
latter obviously dwarfing the former, in the conflicts and violent flare-ups
over the past couple of decades.
“The
question is what is a proportionate response because it’s been different from
one year to another,” he said, holding up the chart. “This is the deaths of
Israelis to Palestinians, and it changes from year to year; it’s fluctuating
like crypto.”
“So my
question is today, what is the going rate today for human lives?” he asked,
noting that, during the 2014 assault on Gaza, there were roughly 27
Palestinians killed for every Israeli. “That is a very good exchange rate.”
“I
can’t remember what happened in 2014, and there was no music festival,” he
added. “It has to be something. It’s their fault.”
The
example is a powerful illustration of the broader point he makes about the
value, or lack thereof, of Palestinian lives, and is particularly powerful
because it makes one uncomfortable contemplating the question in stark and
crass terms. The Onion weighed in on the issue in a Q&A on
Israel-Palestine, in which the answer to the question of how many people had
died so far was that it depends on whether you want to count Palestinians. One
of the most memorable breaking news headlines by the Arab satirical website
AlHudood, which emulates the Onion’s macabre and dry humor, is one about the
Syrian war, which blared: “Syrian man dies of natural causes.” It’s powerful
because it makes you laugh and you immediately feel like you are going to hell
for laughing.
But
Youssef also truncates one of the familiar talking points so beloved by Western
pundits and media analysts, which is the question of proportionality.
Morgan
presses Youssef multiple times during the interview on the question of
proportionality and what Israel’s response ought to be to the civilian
massacres. The question is beside the point, Youssef notes, because Israel will
kill as many “sons of bitches” as it wants to, since it can, and because the
conflict has never been proportionate or equal. But the broader issue is that
the disproportionate response is illogical because it has never yielded results
before and is unlikely to do so this time either.
“If we
agree that for the 14,000 casualties, I mean who’s counting, does that mean
that every single one of those civilians was standing obscuring a military
target behind them? Because that’s a lot of weapons. I mean, Hamas is packing,”
he said.
Youssef
reserves some of the most colorful language in the interview in describing
Hamas. When asked about the terror group’s goals and their crimes, as a prelude
to the expected condemnation, he declares, using a common Arab swear word: “Why
do you keep asking me about Hamas? I fucking hate them. Fuck Hamas. ‘Kossom’
Hamas.”
At one
point, Youssef asks what the goal of Israel’s campaign is and whether part of
the aim is to scare the population of Gaza into overthrowing Hamas. When Morgan
says that is likely one of the reasons, Youssef points out that such campaigns
meant to instill fear in the populace with the aim of enacting political change
are identical to the modus operandi of terrorist groups like the Islamic State
group.
“These
are years of disproportionate responses by Israel,” he added. “Did it solve the
problem? Did it work before? What will be the surprise this time? What will be
the twist? What will be different?”
Yet for
all these moments of deja vu, and for all the outrages constantly promoted on
the toxic platforms of social media, it never gets easier to witness the latest
snapshot of collective international psychosis. This applies of course to the
constant stream of images of death and destruction. Everything is and will be
televised or TikToked. This includes the burned bodies of Israeli civilians and
an inconsolable family grieving the death of their little girl as Hamas invades
a kibbutz. It includes the videos of Gazan fathers and mothers in hysterics
while carrying the body of their dead infant after an Israeli airstrike or
young children playing in the courtyard of the hospital that was attacked 24
hours later.
But it
also applies to the extraordinary dehumanization of ordinary people, which has
become routine and is perhaps the most disturbing and grueling aspect of the
conflict every time it happens, besides the actual violence.
During
the interview, Youssef discusses Morgan’s opposition to the Iraq war and argues
that claims such as Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction were marketed to the
public with the aim of dehumanizing Iraqis and instilling the idea that their
deaths were a necessary price to pay for peace.
It is
maddening to witness a repeat of that narrative because you know for a fact
that when the Israeli defense minister uses a term like “human animals” to
refer to Hamas, even as he orders a full crippling siege of all of Gaza, or
when antisemitic hate speech and abuse of Jews spreads like wildfire, you know
that it is a prelude to crimes of immense gravity, like the collective starving
and bombing of a civilian population, hate crimes against Jews or the murder of
a Palestinian child by the landlord because he is Arab.
You
know that it is a path we should not go down.
“Long
before the Holocaust, before Jewish people were thrown in the gas chambers,
Nazi propaganda called them rats,” Youssef said. “Now as a human being I will
never accept that another human being is thrown into a gas chamber. But a rat?
Kill 10. Kill a thousand, or 3,500. They are sons of bitches, human animals who
live in open sewage and decapitate babies.”
Kareem Shaheen is Middle East and Newsletters Editor at New Lines
magazine Published with permission from New Lines Magazine