“Gaza is far from its relatives and close to its enemies, because whenever Gaza explodes, it becomes an island and it never stops exploding. It scratched the enemy’s face, broke his dreams and stopped his satisfaction with time.
“Because in Gaza time is something different.” – Mahmoud Darwish, “Silence for Gaza”
1.
It’s been a year now. A year of declaring, forcefully, repeatedly, that the history of Israel and Palestine didn’t start on October 7th, that Palestinians deserve to live dignified and free, that rejecting Zionism is not antisemitic. That what is happening is indeed genocide.
A year of warning that this was bound to spin out into a wider regional conflict. As it now has. Lebanon. Yemen. Syria. Volleys of missiles between Israel and Iran, the possibility of all-out war creeping closer.
Until recently, Israel’s bombardment of Gaza seemed to be backfiring for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. After an initial boost in support, the failure to find an end to the engagement and to bring the hostages home had once again cratered his popularity. Demonstrations in Tel Aviv calling for a ceasefire had grown in size. Now the invasion of Lebanon and his bellicosity towards Iran has buoyed him once again. You could be forgiven for thinking this is a country where political fortunes are built on demolished homes and dead bodies. That is clearly what Netanyahu is doing, and damn the costs.
Israel has long struggled to balance image and reality. On paper, it is a beacon of cosmopolitanism and enlightenment in the midst of a region in chaos. Sweden on the east Mediterranean. Sweden was never so thoroughly militarized though.
You might argue, as Israel always has, that this is a necessary move, surrounded as it is by enemies on all sides. A state – any state – that is founded on mass displacement is likely to make enemies. Of course, Jews have as much right as gentiles to live wherever they wish. It is when the migrant becomes the settler, who would have a state dedicated to them alone, that problems arise – including those of the geopolitical variety. By its nature, everything in this society must be mobilized toward two ends: the valorization of the settler, and, inextricably enmeshed with the former, subjugation of the colonized.
Given this, it is no surprise that sadism has been socialized through Israeli civil society. Not unlike the feel of American life in the wake of 9/11. A month after October 7th, Israeli hip-hop duo Ness and Stilla released their song “Harbu Darbu.” If the song’s lyrics praised the IDF and denounced Hamas, that would be one thing. “Harbu Darbu” goes much further, though. Mostly rapped and sung in Hebrew, it repeats the phrase “every dog’s day will come” in Arabic. It sneeringly warns the people of Gaza that bombs will “rain on you like debt,” and calls for the violent death of Bella Hadid, Dua Lipa, and Mia Khalifa, artists or celebrities who expressed solidarity with Palestinians. The song shot to number one on the Israeli music charts.
2.
Genocide’s hallmarks have to do with far more than who or how many are killed. These are, of course, the core components of the act. But its implications, arguably one of its biggest horrors, is what echoes beyond the killing, the holes and gashes that remain in daily life long after. The full definition of genocide, therefore, is more akin to an erasure, a robbery of past and future. This naturally includes the obliteration of culture and art, the rubbing out of history.
Gaza City, one of the oldest urban settlements in the Levant, has been leveled. Not a single school or university remains. Archeological digs that uncovered thousand-year-old churches and amphitheatres have been destroyed. Music shops, concert halls, museums, dozens of public monuments: these are all gone.
Beirut, where Israeli strikes have now stretched, is a city with over 5,000 years of history. It has been a center of intellectual life through a dozen empires. It is also no stranger to apocalyptic destruction. Plenty remember the civil war, and the role Israel played in bolstering far-right Christian death squads during. Much of its antiquity has already been catastrophically buried in rubble, despite all valiant efforts at preservation. Israel’s wanton incursions serve to further cut off the Lebanese – and indeed the world – from their most vibrant cultural histories.
If, as Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish writes, “time is something different” in Gaza, then it has at least partially to do with the number of artists, writers, and scholars whose lives are snuffed in moments like these. Artists keep us tethered to history. Whether it is encapsulated in physical structure or more ethereal expressions, they interpret and shape the contours of what it is to be alive at a specific point. The fewer artists there are, the more porous time becomes. In the past year, Israeli bombs have killed renowned photographers and visual artists, award-winning children’s theatre directors, professors of Shakespeare and comparative literature, oral historians, world-touring dancers, musicians, novelists, poets. This is on top of the many dead doctors, nurses, journalists, aid workers, and countless others.
And on the other side of all this? We have learned two things about Israel’s vision of the future in recent months. The first is that Benjamin Netanyahu loves maps, particularly those with Palestine erased from them. The second is that he sees the entire Middle East remade in the image of late-late capitalism. Not just luxury beach houses along Gaza’s coast and American-style suburbs dropped into Hebron, but a land bridge of logistics and fiber optics spanning from India through the Arabian Peninsula and into Egypt, with Israel at the center.
That the “blessing” of this cleavage is found in Hindutva India, the repressive dictatorship of Egypt’s Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, and the authoritarian monarchy of Saudi Arabia, is something Netanyahu does not attempt to parse. But Israel is invested (economically and ideologically) in the push of empire, and therefore its key supporters in south and central Asia. Herzl said as much in his initial schematics for what the state would look like, 50 years before its founding: “an outpost of Europe against Asia, the vanguard of civilization against barbarism.”
It is as true for enemies as it is for friends. Opposite from Netanyahu’s “blessings” are the familiar villains of Yemen, Syria, and of course Iran. He even revived Bush-era terminology by calling them an “axis of evil.” “There is no place in Iran that the long arm of Israel cannot reach,” Netanyahu told the United Nations. While most of the rest of the world are terrified of this war spinning out and engulfing the region, Israel fanatically welcomes and embraces the possibility.
3.
Between 1947 and 1962, the United States detonated more than 100 atomic weapons on the Pacific Proving Grounds in the Marshall Islands. The hubris of Cold War America was always clear: these islands were sparsely inhabited, and there was little risk of casualty. The Castle Bravo incident of 1954, which exposed hundreds of native Micronesians to radioactive fallout – along with the crew of a Japanese fishing vessel – reflects the deadly folly. Which is to say nothing about the high cancer rates in the surrounding islands that continue to this day.
This fits with another of Darwish’s implied warnings, which is that an island can only “never stop exploding” for so long before its consequences spread. If Israel had its way, Gaza would remain an island, just like the Americans hoped the Marshall Islands would. But the logic of empire ensures that this isolation does not hold.
Netanyahu has said that things will continue to escalate until every Israeli along the border can return to their home. But what kind of home will they be returning to? Can it be anything other than a wasteland pockmarked with highly securitized safe havens, increasingly suspicious of the outside world?
Writing about this often feels like shouting into the wind, if only because these themes show up so often in recent events. The rise of exterminism, whole swathes of the planet written off as sacrifice zones. Landscapes wrecked and wasted, punctuated by a few imperial Fiddler’s Greens arrogating themselves outside of time. Setting aside governments, do we really want to live in a world where the rich and fecund regions of Persia and the Levant are completely leveled? There is a reason that empty, devastated landscapes feel so foreboding. What should be there but isn’t leaves traces.
How these traces are regarded is an open question. We all know that history is bound to repeat itself as farce. What does this do to the perspective of those living through that farce, to our ability to understand the past as tragedy? A look at the reactions this past spring to The Zone of Interest provides a possible, dismal answer.
Hindsight will likely prove The Zone of Interest to be one of the greatest films of the early 21st century, but the statements of its director have made it an awkward watch for many of Israel’s most steadfast supporters. Jonathan Glazer’s acceptance speech at the Academy Awards – spoken when accepting the Oscar for Best International Film – opposed the bombardment and invasion of Gaza. It provoked an outpouring of denunciation from many in Hollywood.
It also prompted a flurry of critical commentary, faulting the film for focusing on the mundane life of the oppressor, for having the temerity to be analogous. Wesleyan professor Peter Rutland, who elsewhere takes umbrage with the notion of settler colonialism writ large, also deems it a problem that the filmmakers find parallels to other instances of bigotry, colonialism and genocide.
“[I]n a 45-minute discussion of the film by the cast and crew at the Cannes Film Festival in May, the question of Jews never came up,” wrote Rutland. “Instead, producer James Wilson talked about how white racism and colonialism were driven by beliefs ‘that were very similar to the ideas that were propagated by National Socialism in the 1930s.’ An audience member saw connections to the ‘Don’t say gay’ law in Florida.”
Those parallels are there, much as Rutland may disagree. It is, after all, well-known that the Nazis were virulent colonial racists, that the designs of the final solution took inspiration from America’s treatment of indigenous people. That queer people were rounded up and targeted by the Third Reich, with many of them perishing in Auschwitz. To deny that these lineages echo today, to insist that the Holocaust was unlike any other genocide, that it was so exceptional as to be unknowable, is to rob it of its meaning, and thus, to make it possible again.
4.
So here we are. In his long essay Gaza Faces History, Marxist philosopher Enzo Traverso writes that, until recently, Holocaust commemoration
served as a paradigm for the remembrance of other genocides and crimes against humanity — from the extermination of Armenians, to military dictatorships in Latin America, to the Holodomor famine in Ukraine, to Bosnia, and to the Tutsi genocide in Rwanda. If this sacred and institutionalized memory serves only to support Israel and attack the defenders of the Palestinian cause on the pretext of anti-Semitism, our moral, political and epistemological bearings will become unmoored, with devastating consequences. Certain postulates that make up our moral and political conscience — the distinction between good and evil, oppressor and oppressed, perpetrator and victim — will be undermined. Our conception of democracy, which is not limited to a system of laws but also founded on our culture, memory, and historical heritage, will be weakened.
This would not be the only factor distorting our sense of historical perspective. Like every other contemporary atrocity, Israel’s war has been gamified, be it through drones or weaponized pagers or AI-guided missiles. Israeli scholar Itamar Mann describes watching The Zone of Interest with several students, one of them a reserve soldier displaced from the country’s north. She admitted to being shaken by the thermal imaging scenes interspersed through the film, which render characters a dreamlike hot white.
“She shared that the thermal imaging sequences made her think about her own role watching areas of combat in Gaza through thermal imaging equipment,” writes Mann. “As she explained, in the military control room she serves at, soldiers watch as dead bodies cool off and turn from light to dark.”
For many in this stage of late-late capitalism, war is a video game. If you really want to, you can tell yourself that the white spots on the screen are just graphics, that the flight of the weaponized drone you’re piloting is a simulation. Only when the video game is juxtaposed with the reality do we start to get uncomfortable, and those in charge are determined to stop it from coming about. Hence the grander project of historical separation, of creating the principle of difference ontological in nature. The reduction of the Other to a graphic on a screen is made easier. The cycle repeats.
One has to marvel at the way in which cruelty isn’t just banalized but made aesthetic here. In this context, is it any wonder that the new far-right continues to find traction? Once, we might have been moved by footage of drowned migrants, of families crying out for each other from the rubble. But when everything is footage, the ability to cast and deflect blame, to dissolve the basic units of solidarity, to prey on fear, to appeal to our most tribal impulses and build impermeable boundaries – between inside and outside, between self and other – is accelerated. The impetus that creates songs like “Harbu Darbu” becomes a contagion.
That Netanyahu’s fierce grip on power is part and parcel of the rising far-right is hardly a novel observation. It bears repeating though, particularly as it sits uncomfortably with his liberal supporters. To decry the rise of Trump, Orban, and others while boosting the fortunes of Netanyahu and his religious fundamentalist allies creates a quandary that can only be ignored for so long.
It was liberals who called the cops on American pro-Palestine encampments, who stood aside while right-wing vigilantes violently descended on protesters. A social democratic government banned such demonstrations entirely in Germany, even arresting people who fly the Palestinian flag. This hasn’t stemmed the rise of the far-right and anti-immigrant Alternative fur Deutschland.
Nor has French President Macron’s steadfast opposition to Palestine solidarity – along with all things Left – managed to keep Marine Le Pen’s Ressamblament National at bay. If anything, Macron’s barely veiled disdain for democracy has simply allowed the RN to inch closer to power. It is a move anyone could have seen coming, though few likely welcomed it like Benjamin Netanyahu.
5.
At the time of writing, the possibility of Israeli strikes on Iranian oil infrastructure has caused crude prices to spike. Someone is gaining from this, the chaos of attempting to redraw the map of the Middle East. Though like all things oil-related, it can only be a short-term gain. Particularly with the climate disintegrating like it is.
The problem is that maps and the land they describe can never fully match up. Cartographers will always be behind the curve of reality, if only by a little bit. Their creations fail, by their nature, to take into account the full, crashing undulations of people and events. The size of this dot compared to that is determined by population or geopolitical standings. But these are never static.
In Netanyahu’s case, his precious maps will never match reality because they fail to take into account the sheer scale of destruction they necessitate. A retaliation by Israel against Iran can only invite more retaliation, more escalation. Corridors of blessing and cursed axes become so entangled that they can’t be told apart. The land never stops exploding.
Palestinians have lived with the consequences of this for more than 75 years. So, in often different but sometimes similar ways, have the people of Lebanon, of Syria, and Iran, often going back further. Ask anyone uprooted by the Lebanese or Syrian civil wars. Or any number of Iranian communists who helped bring down the Shah, only to flee the Ayatollah.
Even Israel’s attempts to give life to a myth seem to be playing out differently. Secular Jews, both fearing escalating war and alienated by the government’s lunge in the direction of fanatical religious communalism, are leaving Israel. “A land without a people for a people without a land” was never true, and the future is as likely to prove it as the past. The irredentist fantasies of Likud, of Netanyahu, of Itamar Ben Gvir and Yoav Gallant, do not amount to history. The only power they can assert is the devastating “shock and awe” variety.
Just as maps can never match the landscape, myth can’t push aside memory. Fantasy cannot replace history. A destroyed history creates room for nothing but more emptiness. No matter how many monuments or condominiums are constructed on top of it, no matter how many hastily printed textbooks tell us otherwise, there will always be someone to tell us about the wreckage, always a testimony to the absence built up around us. Always, until there isn’t.