Translated from Arabic by Ziad Dallal

“Darkness was creeping in, filling the distance between the sky and the earth on one of those late summer nights whose darkness mixes with the heavy and humid fog until both are indistinguishable from each other. The sun disappeared without setting; the sky became a sea, and the sea a sky. The eye could no longer distinguish between the surface of the sea and the air above it. The heavy fog stifled sight and breath, as if we returned to the origin of creation; as if this steam was from that old water that existed when His first breath created the sky.” Emile Habibi, Saraya, The Ogre’s Daughter, A Myth

Our time is characterized by hyper-visuality and the extraordinary capability to make everything visibly accessible. What is private contains within it a kernel of the public, or so it seems to those viewing it. But reactions to the current visible catastrophe do not dig deeper than the surface of speech and meaning, thereby avoiding the political reality that not only produced this catastrophe, but also does not want to stop it.

This reading re-arranges some of the scenes produced by the Israeli forces and juxtaposes them alongside the intentional and unintentional recovery of meaning in order to answer the following questions: Why did the angry Arab youth feel that this catastrophe is their catastrophe? What becomes of forbidden mourning? Where does the vacuum of authority lead [Arab] society? How will the language of those who live through a catastrophe recover the meanings of the event?

Their catastrophe: Why did they feel they were there?

The social media algorithms enclose the Palestinian cause and represent this “political catastrophe” as a bastard calamity removed from its political context. Engagements within this algorithmic world mostly uncover the well-known duplicity of the international community. But as this echo chamber grows larger and larger, it quickly becomes apparent that the deafening echoes are an act of silencing that nullifies the logic of accessibility trumpeted by these platforms.

Initially, everyone following the content coming out of Gaza was stupefied at the horrors they viewed. Many horrors have occurred throughout history, but the flood of images with such force and repetition transformed the catastrophe in the eyes of the viewer into a personal crisis of feeling, characterized most strongly by a feeling of powerlessness. Under the slogan, “do not look away,” the viewer did not pay attention to how these stupefying feelings violate the Palestinian body or to the transformative distillation of the stories of life and resistance under occupation into a single story in which the Palestinian emerges either as resolutely steadfast (ṣāmid) when the viewer wants him to be so, or as a victim when the viewer’s feelings slip to powerlessness.

The commodification of the Palestinian into content introduces a problematic that originates with the very act of producing this content. Here, the Palestinian is made to be consumed while simultaneously having a short shelf-life. He is made to replace himself with a virtual self. In their impotence and in their desire to stop the catastrophe, or at least to not be complicit in its normalization, the viewers feel a necessity to reproduce and share these images. In this way, they believe that this crime does not risk becoming one of many victimless crimes that occur in the dark of night without any witnesses.

But the visual presence of the catastrophe on media platforms quickly becomes inversely related to the ability to act. The spread of the visual catastrophe in the manner that it did meant that any political action fell short of stopping it. Thus, Gaza’s catastrophe is a political catastrophe of the first order, besides being a humanitarian or collective catastrophe. This political catastrophe is the result of other catastrophes that preceded it and foreshadowed it in every Arab country where protests were outlawed and/or in which the illusory support for the Palestinian cause was cashed out for national agendas.

Under this umbra of general impotency, the Palestinian is always either more or less Palestinian. He is a Palestinian in himself, but he is also the others who view him without his permission. In this sense, the non-Palestinian Arabs produce an imagined Palestinian that accords with their powerlessness. Intentionally or not, this content creation returns the Palestinian cause to a time when tyrannical regimes used the phrase “Palestine is the Compass” in order to bypass any internal grievances. Instead of Palestine becoming the cardinal direction of the compass and instead of Arab countries providing the elements for political and revolutionary steadfastness (sumūḍ), Palestine is transmuted into the compass itself, thereby culling any real political life whose purpose is to provide Palestinians with the necessary elements for steadfastness, sumūḍ, and struggle.

Apropos of the imagined Palestinian, the Arab spectators’ feeling of powerlessness is mirrored by the celebration of a contradictory steadfastness (sumūḍ). When the Palestinian declares that he is steadfast (ṣāmid), he is also demanding of others what is necessary to remain steadfast (sumūḍ). As for the Arabs, when they celebrate the steadfastness (sumūḍ) of the Palestinian, they merely normalize their own powerlessness by avoiding any political demands that hold the Arab regimes accountable and that push them towards stopping the catastrophe.

Herein lies the affective symmetry with the Palestinian in Gaza. In the minds of the angry Arab youth who witnessed the 2011 revolutions and their aftermath, the catastrophe in Gaza induces a horrifying and intrusive thought: “Our defeat has not ended, our decade-long pacification did not stop the entropic deterioration of things towards their final destination.” This thought divides the youth of the “Arab Spring” into two groups: a group that is horrified by its own defeat in 2013, and, despite this, continues to avoid positioning the Palestinian event in the context of an Arab political reality that cannot and does not want to stop the on-going catastrophe; and another group that has transformed its defeat into a lens through which to read all events, including the reality of Palestine under occupation, and going so far as to render the two-state solution unto Palestinians. In either case, the Palestinian remains an imagined figure onto whom the defeats of others are projected instead of being a Palestinian first, whether under occupation or in exile.

There There: How can mourning be incomplete?

It is both paradoxical and predictable for this catastrophe to begin with the escape [al-khurūj] we viewed on October 7, 2023. Sometimes, the impossible is what is most expected. For what else can emerge from an open-air prison besides escape? And what else can be expected from a prison break other than punishment? Given the obviousness of these thoughts, it remains astonishing that return here is coupled with escape [al-khurūj], as leaving during the Nakba was with escape [al-khurūj].

This escape [al-khurūj] was captured by Israel and repurposed inside the prison of its own design. Israel would go on to drive out [tukhrij] Palestinians from their homes under duress and bombardment, then drive them out [tukhrijuhum] of the north towards the south. As for those who perish under its bombs, Israel will forbid their retrieval [ikhrājihi] and burial, for it considers burial to be akin to return. Israel will continue disinterring old cemeteries and new mass graves and will carry on its campaign of preventing any kind of return, even if in the form of a grave.

In an act of pure destruction whose sole purpose is to erase the memories of people and their places, the Israeli force exhumes graves, razes cities, and erases landmarks. Graves are an accurate representation of those who lived on and tilled the earth. And yet this brutish force ignores what such repetitive loss might produce. When people stand upon the ruins of their homes and re-experience their loss, their mourning is arrested. This failed mourning rebirths their memory anew as a revolutionary public history that resists fading. The memory remains of that which ought not to be.

In an early video, a surviving girl appears from the rubble and questions whether life has any meaning if everyone besides her has died. Where would she remain, in what life, and why did they not take her with them? She was asking, who will remember whom, and who will mourn whom? What becomes of the meaning of loss when most of your family and friends are killed? And what is the meaning of loss when life itself becomes the exception?

In the moment of horror, mourning manifests in the mixture of the wailing and the quivering voice and in the body’s unintentional spasms. A whole world of tremendous anger presents itself, strengthened by the thought, “Even our right to mourn is taken away from us.”

Mourning and grief demand knowledge of the other person, which allows the mourner to remember the traces of the dead. This has occurred many times with the martyrs of Gaza, as when students mourned the teacher, the mentor, and the author Refaat Alareer by blessing his memory. To remember in this way is also to reclaim the meaning of being a teacher, a student, and an author who struggles against the authoritarianism that enfolds them. To remember in this way is to provide opportunities and encourage others to produce meaning.

The horrendous scenes of the war on Gaza return society to a time we thought had been forever altered by the changes wrought by urban life. But what is clear to the eye is that Gaza’s intimate community bonds persist despite the siege, its transformation into an open-air prison, and the persistent killing therein. These intimate bonds are lacking in other places where people were displaced, and were made to turn on each other under competitive groupthink logic, or were ruled solely with the logic of daily relief.

To entrench the legend of their impunity and to re-assert their power, authoritarian regimes torture their victims secretly. Such secrecy also produces a sense of doubt around the torture, allowing these regimes to maintain their role in today’s political world, a role they do not wish to lose. The Israeli occupation, on the other hand, is obsessed with torturing their victims in plain sight for the world to see. Who can forget the iron fist policy of breaking bones during the first intifada more than 45 years ago?

The Israeli army carelessly and broadly broadcasts scenes of torture of those it has publicly categorized as human animals. Israeli Hasbara then proceeds to justify what cannot be justified. The actions of the Israeli army are figured as a defense of human civilization against brutes that have dared to transgress upon it. Other excuses and justifications abound to explain this “defensive” act of eliminating the brutes and exhuming their graves.

The Israeli occupation perpetuates a mourning that cannot and (will never) be fulfilled by bringing the Jewish Holocaust to bear on the present: its perpetrators are blackmailed into supporting another genocide in a restoration of colonial politics that transcends its own catastrophic logic and continues to produce the Palestinian catastrophe.

For Arabs outside of Gaza, mourning takes the form of lamenting the tragic discovery that the system of human rights can be bent according to the will of the political world in which they live. They lament the tragic discovery that their defeat will catch up with them again despite their decade-long retreat into the darkness. The problem with this lamentation is that it continues to escape from one primitive framework of rights towards an even more primitive political vision, without considering how this vision, which adopts the conspiratorial and polarizing logic of ‘us and them,’ has wreaked havoc in Arab countries and contributed to the history of the collapse of these postcolonial [Arab] states.

If the colonial “them” is a central part of the public scene, then this approach fails to recognize that “them” only makes sense in the binary pairing of “us and them,” and yet this “us” itself is illusory. The Arab of today remains a central political component of this colonial game that produced the Palestinian catastrophe and did not provide Palestinians with the necessary components of steadfastness (sumūḍ). The problem with this mourning is that it imagines an illusory Arab and is not invested in creating another Arab amidst the collapse of the countries of the Levant and North Africa.

The Hospitals: Mothers, Fathers, and Brothers

Of the many facets that the catastrophe in Gaza is redefining is the medical profession itself. Like the communal bonds that are recreated anew, the medical profession retrieves its original meaning: magic, affection, perseverance, habit, wit, skill, and cunning wisdom. These traits may seem essential for treatment and care, but our world has swallowed them whole. Under the pressure of the siege first, and the power of brute force second, Gaza’s doctors found themselves having to return to the elementary axioms of their profession, thereby reclaiming its pioneering position within the community.

Before most of them were destroyed, Gaza’s hospitals emerged as loci to treat bodies, repair lives, and heal feelings. The flood of videos and testimonies from the hospitals and from the doctors themselves provides many examples of this: the doctor who learned of his son’s death while on duty; the nurse who unexpectedly saw the corpse of one of her relatives; the kid who reassures his brother that everything will be okay; the doctor who tells children not to be afraid; the hospital yards that are transformed into graveyards; the patients who continue their lives with severed limbs.

This nefarious excess has made hospitals the first destination for Gazans. The videos from the hospitals create an overwhelming feeling that transcends the usual non-choice between the continuation of life and the acceptance of death. Under urgent and pressing conditions like wars, especially ones characterized by such brutal Israeli violence, people need to divulge their feelings; they need to compare these feelings with others in order to feel “some semblance of safety” amidst the ongoing genocide. The famous video of the kid who confesses his fear as soon as a nurse holds him is an unwitting example of what it means to confess your fear in a moment of safety, even if you’re unsure of it. Here, the opportunity centers around the existence of an Other whose existence can help you safely come out of your shell.

The doctors and paramedics of Gaza continue to help the wounded and those recovered from under the rubble to come out of their shell shock. “Are we going to the cemetery,” a little girl asks, and a doctor responds, “why would we? You’re as charming as the moon.” This is yet another example of the filial role that doctors play. With the death of people or their infirmity, their momentary descent into madness, and their inability to play the role of guardian and protector to their kids, siblings, and parents, it is doctors, nurses, and paramedics who take on the roles of fathers, mothers, and brothers.

Perhaps this necessary role is what has riled the ire of the occupation towards these centers of healing and sanctuary. From the get-go, the brutish Israeli forces wanted to leave the Gazans without any destination, so they did not hesitate in targeting hospitals, even after their histrionic denial of targeting the Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital. The recent history of Gaza teaches us that this is not the first time that Israel has taken Gaza’s hospitals out of service.

Michel Nawfal and Ghassan Abu-Sitta’s book, “The Narrative of the Palestinian Wound” (2020), speaks in detail about how Israel disrupted and disabled the medical sector in the 2014 war when it continuously targeted ambulances and destroyed the Amal Hospital, a hospital dedicated to treating chronic neurological diseases and cases of complete paralysis that require constant care. More generally, the book reminds us of the role of the state in controlling biopolitics, the power to give and take life. The book considers the Palestinian wound to be a biological archive of the struggle against the occupation and rejects the occupation’s attempts to control Palestinian biopolitical life. The book also addresses in parallel the relationship between Palestinian politicians (since the PLO) to this wound.

If control of the Palestinian political body was codified by the Oslo Agreement and sustained with the subsequent geopolitical disintegration of the political project of the Palestinian resistance in its various forms, then the war today is yet another attempt to control Palestinian bodily and political life.

Nawfal and Abu-Sitta’s book explains how contrary to other colonial projects, the Israeli colonial project is unconcerned with preserving the Palestinian body, for it is easily replaceable when needed. In fact, the book makes the claim that the effectiveness of Israel’s aggression is determined by its ability to subjugate Palestinians and re-form their consciousness in a way that ensures the longevity of the Israeli project. For this to happen, violence must wear a ritualistic cloak (via the use of technology for tactics of target identification; roof-knocking; in addition to the squares of death in the current war) and appear divine in its control by cementing the relationship between the victim and the executioner (phone calls; leaflets dropping from the sky). Violence here is excessive in both its cruelty and its intimacy (public torture); it is indiscriminate and accurate at once, exceeding any martial or security logic (violence for violence’s sake).

The living Palestinian body is the supplement of the political Palestinian body. Its targeting after the disintegration of the political body aims to undermine the living body’s political value to such a degree that it becomes impossible to reproduce any other political form. Thus, the bombing of Gaza’s buildings, streets, universities, hospitals, and the rampant torture—all these excessive acts of violence are not random, but are surgical strikes on all the components of Palestinian life. This violence also hopes to pit Palestinians, and Gazans in particular, against each other, as part of the Israeli colonial project, which, like others of its kind, is a long-term project.

From this standpoint, any talk of “randomness” and all attempts to come up with “justifications for the crimes of the occupation” relieves Israel from the responsibility for the genocide. This rhetoric implies that Israel reached this level of random bombardment only recently and that this wasn’t its exterminationist logic for the past 75 years. In other words, such theorization, despite its apparent objectivity and exactness, does not care to explain the necessity of reproducing the resistant Palestinian body politic and is equally not attentive to the origins of the occupier’s colonial project and its continued attempts at subjugating the Palestinians’ biological and political body.

The Eventuality of the khurāfah and The Perpetuation of the Catastrophe until…

The dusty and bloody young man, surviving the horror, carrying the corpse of his son, his brother, or his young relative, walking steadily but with no destination; did he ever think that he entered a different world and that he was on his way to heal the child and resurrect him anew?

This question occurred to me the first and only time I saw the video on my phone. The scene looked to me as if it was coming to us from a mythical tale that happened (or did not happen) a long time ago. This made me think that myths [khurāfāt] are considered myths only after a certain temporal distance that allows us to redesignate the limits of human concepts that distinguish between the permitted and the forbidden, the normal and the exceptional, the civilized and the barbaric.

In some towns, both inside and outside of Palestine, al-khurraf is general chatter, especially the chatter that lacks coherence and is meant to fill the emptiness of silence. We can consider the khurāfah a catastrophe that exceeds the bounds of normality and which ushers in new norms for the time that succeeds it. However, to experience the catastrophe in the moment, imminently, is a reminder that norms can be adjusted based on the political reality in which they exist. Thus, after spreading by way of chattering mouths, the khurāfah opens up a void in human history, which continues to expand with more chatter [khurraf] and perpetual mourning.

The khurāfah, the unimaginable catastrophe, always centers around a foreboding evil that is unthinkable and impossible. This evil produces an affective response that refuses to comprehend the eventuality of the event. Despite the enormous difficulty, this affective response cannot but be expressed through speech and language. Even silent awe furthers this refusal of the catastrophic event and is part of the transformation of the khurāfah into a khurāfiyyah, a myth: an endless parole that blurs truth and fiction, like the khurāfiyyah of Emile Habibi, which introduced this essay with a part that refers to the story of creation and its naturalistic representation by land, sky, and sea.

In the introduction to his khurāfiyyah, Saraya The Ogre’s Daughter, published in 1992, Habibi explains why he uses the term khurāfiyyah [myth] to characterize his work. He points out that the word was always used to “describe anything that amazes” and that to use the word khurāfiyyah often necessitates a constant oscillation between defining the word further and resisting its previous definitions. As for its origin, the word al-kharaf signifies both the harvesting of crops and the corruption of the mind. In some Palestinian vernaculars, the person who loses their mind is described as imkharfan.

In the body and margins of Habibi’s khurāfiyyah we find anecdotes that remind us of the Israeli narrative, “a land without a people for a people without a land.” The more one reads, the more it appears that the novel haunts the Israeli body politic, which continues to spread in a paranoiac fear regarding the presence and reality of “other” people on this land. Of these anecdotes that abound within the Israeli state (a state which Habibi describes as “that which does not stop spreading”) is the 1983 panic of a new wave of “infiltration” committed by “old infiltrators” who appear to its residents as “ghosts raging in alleys and backstreets.” These are whispers and rumors that had circulated previously during the second Nakba (in 1967). The expansion of the Israeli state then does not prevent ghosts from infiltrating it or fearful ideas from occupying it. On October 7, these ghosts appeared clearly, concretely, and tangibly to the naked eye, in contrast to the very idea of ghosts. How, then, can the Israeli story (of a land without a people) uphold its fearful story of ghosts when the very idea of ghosts collapses? The state transforms these ghosts into animals that transgressed their limits and escaped their cages, signaling a danger for human civilization.

This demented [kharaf] Israeli thought also refers us back to the relationship between the idea of forgetfulness and the Palestinian catastrophe. In general, the human being is shaped by forgetfulness; it forgets and is forgotten. But the human being that inherits a catastrophe, like the Palestinian, forgets only in order to remember. When Palestinians are forgotten and then recalled to memory, this remembrance and recollection reach the same conclusion: they were heroes in an unjust world. This is not enough, but at least it reminds us that some witnessed [shahada] the fraudulence of this world and dedicated their lives to sharing this recognition with their people.

The temporary forgetting of catastrophe is at the root of all attempts to prevent the khurāfah, the unimaginable catastrophe, from happening again. Only through its forgetting does it translate from the logic of its actual eventfulness to its mythical narrative logic. Across subsequent generations, the mythical narrative logic tries to redraw the limits of the impossible and what ought not to be by resisting its (concrete) repetition and instead narrating it in the form of public chatter [al-khurrāf]. Historically, this characteristic of filling the void of forgetfulness with chatter [al-khurrāf] is often found in the heritage of those who have survived genocides.

And thus, as the genocide continues, the inheritors of this catastrophe clean the bodies of their loved ones from the blood and the dust; they wash them in their thoughts and memories; they tell their stories for the duration of their lives (if they come to pass), and in this way, the khurāfah will continue its spread until a political body harnesses it again and refills the void left in history.