Described in a blurb as bringing “pathbreaking work on the liberal state, sexuality, and biopolitics to bear on our understanding of disability,” Jasbir Puar’s Right to Maim (the blurb continues) “outlines how Israel brings Palestinians into biopolitical being by designating them available for injury.” The book—to be published this month by Duke University Press—argues that, by making efforts not to kill Palestinian civilians while combating terror, Israel has hit upon a new and creative way to exercise its control over them. Liel Leibovitz writes:

A passionate advocate of BDS who had previously accused Israel of harvesting the organs of Palestinians and who threatened to sue anyone who published her talk at Vassar earlier this year, Puar, [a professor at Rutgers University], is to say the least a controversial figure. But books, even ones written by academics, deserve to be taken on their own merit. And, on its own merit, Puar’s book is an intellectual and moral hoax. . . .

Why would Israel spare the lives of its foes? If it is indeed, as Puar repeatedly argues, a colonialist project, wouldn’t it seek to emulate its predecessors and either destroy the indigenous people it was dispossessing, enslave them as cheap labor, or urge them to assimilate? Security and demographic considerations negate options two and three, which makes it very hard to understand, on Puar’s own terms, why and how Israel benefits from shooting to maim instead of to kill. . . .

“Perhaps differing from earlier colonial and occupation regimes where deprivation was distributed in order to maim yet keep labor alive,” Puar [answers], “there is less need for Palestinian labor, for Palestinian production. Rather, profit is derived from the dismemberment of reproduction, a function of capitalism without labor. . . . This inhuman biopolitics flourishes through and beside human populations—economic life growing without human life.” . . .

You can stand up for logic and argue that this sentence is utter twaddle, using jargon to obfuscate its own admission of ideational bankruptcy. You can stand up for the facts, and argue that a book concerned with wounded Palestinians should at least make some sort of effort to observe Hamas’s well-documented policy of using civilians as human shields. . . . But you’d be missing the point. A book like Puar’s is pure dogma; it believes what it believes, damn nuance, context, or facts.

Early Friday morning, Israel attacked military installations near the Iranian cities of Isfahan and nearby Natanz, the latter being one of the hubs of the country’s nuclear program. Jerusalem is not taking credit for the attack, and none of the details are too certain, but it seems that the attack involved multiple drones, likely launched from within Iran, as well as one or more missiles fired from Syrian or Iraqi airspace. Strikes on Syrian radar systems shortly beforehand probably helped make the attack possible, and there were reportedly strikes on Iraq as well.

Iran itself is downplaying the attack, but the S-300 air-defense batteries in Isfahan appear to have been destroyed or damaged. This is a sophisticated Russian-made system positioned to protect the Natanz nuclear installation. In other words, Israel has demonstrated that Iran’s best technology can’t protect the country’s skies from the IDF. As Yossi Kuperwasser puts it, the attack, combined with the response to the assault on April 13,

clarified to the Iranians that whereas we [Israelis] are not as vulnerable as they thought, they are more vulnerable than they thought. They have difficulty hitting us, but we have no difficulty hitting them.

Nobody knows exactly how the operation was carried out. . . . It is good that a question mark hovers over . . . what exactly Israel did. Let’s keep them wondering. It is good for deniability and good for keeping the enemy uncertain.

The fact that we chose targets that were in the vicinity of a major nuclear facility but were linked to the Iranian missile and air forces was a good message. It communicated that we can reach other targets as well but, as we don’t want escalation, we chose targets nearby that were involved in the attack against Israel. I think it sends the message that if we want to, we can send a stronger message. Israel is not seeking escalation at the moment.