Contribution short abstract:

This paper addresses the analytical tension between two modes of humanitarian narratology in the context of Gaza: the deployment of humanitarian frames to displace politics, and the unsettlement of political discourse through the act of bearing witness.

Contribution long abstract:

My contribution will address an analytical tension within the purportedly antipolitical meanings and functions of what I call “humanitarian narratology.” On the one hand, international actors regularly deploy humanitarian moralism in order to displace questions of political violence and injustice that require structural redress far beyond the humanitarian mandate. In the context of Israel’s war on Gaza, appeals for a humanitarian ceasefire—while crucial to mitigate immediate suffering—have served to redirect mainstream political debate into terms already aligned with the imperatives of Israeli warcraft, obviating political challenges to the moral legitimacy of military occupation. At the same time, humanitarian narratives have also played, since the inception of the modern humanitarian industry, the contradistinct role of bearing witness to political violence, which bears special relevance to conflict zones otherwise curated for an international audience by state propaganda and (official or unofficial) press censorship. Humanitarian aid workers in Gaza, for instance, have offered timely and efficacious refutations of IDF disinformation, and exercise power to shape public opinion precisely by invoking the antipolitical character of humanitarian testimony. In this mode, I argue that humanitarian narratology articulates the conditions of its own self-critique: unsettling the discursive economy of political violence while reinforcing the broader recognition that there are ultimately no humanitarian solutions to humanitarian problems. This duality, I conclude, offers a productive point of departure for public anthropological engagements with the humanitarian frame.