Jasbir K. Puar's work, always hugely rewarding, has been particularly challenging in the case of this book, read as the Israeli military (IDF) was gunning down, injuring and maiming unarmed Gazans marching towards Israel's self-proclaimed border during what became known as the Great Return March of May 2018. As I was preparing to write this review, photographs of maimed Palestinian bodies flooded my screens, making Puar's theorization of debility, capacity, and disability crucial and urgent.
Thinking about how and why some bodies are perceived as debilitated or capacitated, in her book The Right to Maim, Puar mobilizes the term “debility” as a disruption of the category of disability and the ability/disability binary. In her formulation the term debility aims not to flatten disability but rather to expose the normal consequences of the violence of life. Debility for Puar is a register of biopolitical population control and is important precisely because the disability rights movement tends to speak of white privilege and disability together, while debilitation explains what she calls “the right to maim,” a right expressive of sovereign power that is not the same as the right to kill: maiming, she insists, is a source of value extraction from populations that would otherwise be disposable (p. xviii).
Linking critical race, transnational, and postcolonial theories with disability studies, Puar points out that disability studies are rarely the subject of an intersectional analysis, the field being epistemologically white, even though “most of the world's disability happens through colonial violence, developmentalism, war, occupation and the disparity of resources” (p. xix). The book makes two main critical arguments: first, the rethinking of disability through, against, and across the disabled/non-disabled binary and the theorization of debility in relation to neoliberal and affective capacitation, debilitation, and what Lauren Berlant calls “slow death”; and second, the positioning of both technology and the “medical industrial complex” as modulating debility and capacity.
While the book encompasses a range of topics including gay suicide and disability and trans justice, what interests me most is the way Puar discusses Israel's complex program of rehabilitation, a biopolitical assemblage of control that instrumentalizes a spectrum of capacities and debilities on the one hand, and the debilitation of Palestinian life and land that enables Israel to claim the right to maim and debilitate Palestinian bodies and environments as a form of biopolitical control. Basing her analysis on the time she spent in occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank in January 2016 observing Israel's permanent war against the Palestinians as the primary producer of debility, Puar's observations become pertinent and acute as Israel tightens the noose around Palestinian flesh, all the time claiming victim status and “self defense.”
Puar discusses Berlant's notion of “slow death,” moving away from the event of trauma or catastrophe, echoing Foucault's formulation of death as “durational.” Displacing military encounters, genocides, and other traumatic events, slow death occurs not within the time scale of the crisis, but in a zone of ongoingness, of getting by, of living on. Slow death, in fact, describes populations marked out for wearing out, a description most apt to Gaza and to Palestine in general, where death is indeed slow, durational, thanatopolitical.
As Gazans—living with just a few hours of electricity per day, undrinkable water and insufficient nutrition, and in danger of being bombed and shot at—acknowledge, slow death implies we might not (only) be haunted by the disability to come, but also disavows the debility that is already here. I am particularly interested in the concept of slow death in relation to Israel's project of rehabilitation through the spatial, affective, and corporeal debilitation of Palestine and the sovereign right to maim wielded by Israel in relation to the right to kill. As a Palestinian activist posted on Twitter during the recent march for return, maiming is a daily occurrence: “They did not kill him, so Israel wants to make sure that he is crippled for life…”
Chapter 3 discusses Israeli “pinkwashing,” the strategy Israeli propaganda cynically uses to promote LGBTQ bodies as representative of Israeli democracy juxtaposed against the allegedly backward homophobia of the Palestinians. Puar links this to the rehabilitation of the Jewish diaspora, arguing that the establishment of the Israeli state rests on rehabilitating both the debilitating Jewish diaspora and the genocide of the Holocaust through the redeeming masculinizing discourses of the “new Jew,” “Muscle Judaism,” and the new Jewish man as the total opposite of the debilitated Palestinian body.
Making the link with disability, Puar argues that instead of fostering a rights discourse that embraces disability as a valuable difference, the Israeli state relies on the spectacle of disability as trauma and victimhood. Thus, although disability is indelibly connected to antioccupation movements (in relation to budgetary priorities, etc.), the emergence of a liberal disability rights movement is possible only if delinked from the occupation. So if the muscular Jew drove the rehabilitation project in the past, the present neoliberal regime reduces support for disabled people as the Israeli welfare state is declining while the costs for the occupation and the settlements continue to soar. Meanwhile, in the West Bank debilitated Palestinian bodies stand in contrast to rehabilitated Jewish bodies protected by the Israeli state. The project of rehabilitation requires the disavowal of the disability of Palestine. The occupation creates intense forms of disability through war, shootings, drones, border skirmishes, missile attacks, and extrajudicial killings. It also produces debility through food, medicine, electricity, and water shortages in Gaza. In other words, Puar asserts that “‘not killing’ Palestinians while rendering them systematically and utterly debilitated is not a humanitarian sparing of death, but rather a biopolitical usage and articulation of the right to maim” (p. 108).
She further discusses Israel's eugenicist pronatalism, reiterating her argument about homonationalism as the use of LGBT rights as a barometer by which civilizational aptitude and capacities for sovereign governance of a population are measured. Thus the particular spatial coordinates of Israeli rule—the triumvirate of settler colonization (1948), occupation (1967), and apartheid (the Oslo accords)—position Palestine and Israel as a singular site with ever flexible internal frontiers.
Chapter 4 deals more specifically with Gaza and Israel's “shoot to cripple” policy as productive, through the profitability of a speculative rehabilitative economy, discussing how the population available for injury is capacitated for settler colonial occupation through its explicit debilitation (p. 128). The use of flechette shells that explode upon impact into thousands of tiny steel darts leaving bodies permanently debilitated has been highlighted during the May 2018 return march massacres, illustrating Israel's right to maim, but also kill with impunity, ignoring international law and censure.
This is an important book for scholars and students rethinking disability and capacity, but also for those studying Israel's racialized permanent war against the Palestinians. Puar points out that debility is the disability to come, and is always also profoundly racialized, a point she returns to again and again and which, I would argue, is relevant to Israel's colonization of Palestine, where the decision of who must live and who is allowed to die denotes the racial segregation between people marked with white (Jewish) supremacy and people marked with nonwhite (Arab) inferiority.
