Hierarchies of Grievability: How Does the Response to World Central Kitchen Attack Teach Us Whose Death Matters in the Charity Sector? By Sham Murad.

Sham Murad is a Baghdad-born Master in Law graduate with a Bachelor’s degree in International Relations and Development. They teach English to refugee children in their local centre and believe in humanity over everything. They’re Passionate about Arsenal, reading, boxing and cooking.

On the 1st of April 2024, an aid convoy of three cars from The World Central Kitchen (WCK)  in Gaza was targeted by IDF Strikes. The Attack killed seven aid workers. Following reports of the attack, the IDF accepted responsibility, calling it an unintentional “mistake”. In April 2024, Sham Murad focused on the media and public response to this attack, shared her live reaction to this tragedy and asked who is worthy of our grief.

The past six months have revealed some of modern history's worst examples of human suffering.  The images that have come out of Gaza in the past six months include graphic content of mass graves, siblings burying one another, and children asking if their limbs will grow back, all coupled with images of Gaza covered in the rubble of homes and dreams which have now been destroyed. Despite Gaza being under occupation for two decades and the past six months of onslaught, it is only following the death of World Central Kitchen workers that much of the Western press has begun to question the mass death we have witnessed in Gaza.

Aid Workers as Saviours

Whilst it is indisputable that the work done by aid workers, often at the frontlines of service delivery during crises, is admirable, we must move past this conception of aid workers as saviours whose sacrifices are acts of unique benevolence. The lives of aid workers are viewed as sacrosanct, and their deaths are uniquely violent. When we create such framings, we forget how this, in and of itself, serves as a mechanism through which the lives of those suffering are normalised and their victimhood is ignored. Whilst we can and should mourn the death of those who are innocently slain in the service of aid provision, we must challenge attempts to excuse the violence experienced by those suffering under the violence of Imperialism and centre their humanity.

The NGO sector has played into this narrative, too, with celebrations like International Charity Day often serving as a means for charities to market themselves as arbiters of benevolence and goodness. However, when it comes to calls for exploring and exposing the darker sides of the NGO and Charity industrial complex, such as naming historical ties to colonialism or even addressing how many have historically and/or are currently funded by organisations responsible for causing devastation, there is a deafening silence.

In the case of the strikes against World Central Kitchen (WCK), many organisations who had been silent about the previous 6 months of devastation in Gaza named their outrage and renewed pressured governments to protect the lives of aid workers. A hierarchy of worthiness remains even when classifying aid workers and their value. Over 200 aid workers have been killed in Gaza since October 7th, most of them Palestinian, yet we have not seen the mainstream press or charity organisations galvanising for their cause in the way we have witnessed the response to the seven slain WCK workers. If we are to analyse the rationale, then the racialisation of aid workers cannot be ignored, especially since, in this particular case, six of the seven WCK workers were non-Palestinian. 

Whose Death is Grievable?

Judith Butler has developed a framework of “grievability” that helps us analyse this contradiction. She states:

“The question that preoccupies me in the light of recent global violence is: Who counts as human? Whose lives count as lives? And, finally, What makes for a grievable life?”

Grievability is established through ‘norms’ and ‘frames’. Butler argues that these ‘frames’, which saturate our daily lives through various forms of media, play a significant role in constructing the human that is deemed grievable versus the non-grievable. Through this analysis, we can see how the language used to describe Palestinian civilians over the last 6 months, in comparison to the language used to describe the 7 WCK aid workers, illuminates the underlying biases and perceptions of worthiness. That is, to be Palestinian is to be rendered so outside the category of worthiness that 30,000 deaths are not enough to be grievable when placed in contrast to the lives of seven aid workers. 

Butler writes:

“We have to consider how the norm governing who will be a grievable human is circumscribed and produced in these acts of permissible and celebrated public grieving, how they sometimes operate in tandem with a prohibition on the public grieving of others, lives, and how this differential allocation of grief serves the derealizing aims of military violence.”

Butler writes these public acts of mourning are:

“How a life becomes or fails to become, a public grievable life, an icon for national self-recognition, how a life becomes noteworthy.”

The Value of Palestinian Life

This construction of worthiness and grievability has always been the imperative of colonialism and imperialism; it tells us who is human and deserving of our grief whilst dehumanising others who it constructs as threats to its limited conception of humanity. The question of Palestine, whilst an essential and necessary condition through which we can evidence dehumanisation, is but one example of this rendering.

As Judith Butler asks, “What is the value of Palestinian lives? To ask the question is already rather terrible. Why does such a question have to be asked? And when we ask it, are we also asking for whom Palestinian lives have value? Could the answer to the question be, no, they do not have value?”

Suppose we passively accept the media's framing. In that case, we comply with the construction of  Palestinians as the other, which in turn serves as a necessary precursor to justify the violence against them. When the question of value is posed in this way, whilst alarming, it exposes how we tacitly endorse violence. And the examples of the violence we have witnessed committed against them are some of the worst we have seen in modern history. We must resist the attempts to manufacture our consent in the devaluation of Palestinian lives; we must tackle the consistent dehumanisation of those suffering under imperialism and fight against this narrative that seeks to create hierarchies of value. What Butler is attempting to do here is to force us to confront our complicity.

In the face of this, Palestinians continue to exemplify what it means to hold on to humanity so beautifully that it transcends the narrow construction of value offered by the Western World. Palestinian existence reminds us that we are capable of more than is provided to us by the barbarism imperialism and settler colonialism seeks to normalise.  Whilst many of us in the West remain incapacitated in the face of Imperialism and settler colonialism, distracted by the blood-soaked comforts and our incessant consumerism, we should ask ourselves, are we worthy? What is our value?