To the poem: place your siege under siege.
Mahmoud Darwish
Among the truths that have become clear in the days following Hamas’s October 7 attack against the Zionist Israeli state is that the globally sanctioned institutions of legality and stately life abhor Palestinian existence and collaborate to bring about the end of Palestinian life. The terms, in the words of Israeli Minister Yoav Gallant are wholly genocidal: “We are fighting,” he explained, “against human animals.”
On October 12 Israel ordered the 1.1 million residents of northern Gaza to evacuate to the south even as all of Gaza is besieged, without water, electricity, or medical supplies, access to which is blocked by Israel in contravention of the Geneva Conventions. And yet after issuing the evacuation order Israel struck convoys of Palestinians in flight as the United Nations insisted that Israel rescind it. “Forcible population transfers,” UN Special Rapporteur Paula Gaviria Betancur stated, “constitute a crime against humanity, and collective punishment is prohibited under international humanitarian law.”
As Israel bombards the 2.4 million inhabitants of the Gaza Strip, intentionally striking schools, ambulances, and residential buildings, and leveling entire neighborhoods, the colors of the Israeli flag and images of it have been projected onto buildings at Brandenburg gate in Berlin, at 10 Downing Street in London, the headquarters of the European Commission in Brussels, the White House in Washington, DC, and elsewhere. Protests in advocacy of Palestinian rights have been banned in France, Austria, and Germany, and the United States has extended its massive military and economic aid to Israel, totaling more than $260 billion since World War II, as it sends the USS Gerald R. Ford Carrier Strike Group to the eastern Mediterranean in support of Israel and in consolation, as President Joseph R. Biden explained, of his “broken heart”: “Our hearts may be broken but our resolve is clear,” the American President said.
Universities work in lock-step with the organized obfuscation of social and historical knowledge in relation to Israel and Palestine. The statement on “Mideast violence” by University of California Board of Regents Chair Richard Lieb and UC President Michael V. Drake decontextualizes the ongoing Israeli attacks and fosters the social logic of white settler normativity in California and in the United States. “Our hearts are heavy in the face of the horrific attack on Israel over the weekend,” the two leaders wrote, echoing the terms of administrators at Harvard University, Cornell University, New York University. No such comments have been offered regarding the widely-publicized Israeli attacks against Palestinian civilians, children, families, and journalists, such as Shireen Abu Akleh, who was targeted and shot on May 11, 2022, as well as schools, hospitals, and universities over the past decades.
White settler institutional support of Israel — such as that of the University of California — points to two historical contexts. The first is the history of the formation of the Israeli settler state, since 1948 and before and after, its expulsion of over 750,000 Palestinians from their lands and homes, its depopulation of over 400 Palestinian villages, and its ongoing attacks against Palestinian individuals, communities, and institutions, including, as the Palestinian poet and translator Fady Joudah has observed, Palestinian memory. All of this is ignored by political and educational leaders in the United States in the interest of the Israeli colonization of Palestine and the subjection of Palestinians to settler obliteration.
The attachment of these institutions and leaders to the Israeli state points to a second context: the racialization of social understanding among white settler individuals, institutions, and collectives, and an identification of individuals, institutions, and collectives with white settler life, self-understanding, and social sense. The affirmation of Israeli acts of genocidal violence as self-defense is not only a grotesque distortion. It points to a social truth: that the social form of the American settler state foments an identification with settler ways of being—with white settler life and social existence—through which individuals, collectives, and institutions understand themselves and in relation to which the world becomes legible for them as a space for life.
This identification suggests a third context: the ongoing attempts to domesticate the struggles for decolonization following World War II in the institution of the modern state and the modern terms for the law. These include the basic terms through which the social is understood, terms such as the “individual,” “right,” “property,” and “whiteness,” which sustain the law and which the law reinforces. It is not only that Palestinians are a non-white, non-European people struggling for liberation and freedom against a settler colonial oppressor—and this is the case—but that their struggle, in whichever form it takes, conjures a panic in white life and settler being, a fantasy, as the anti-colonial militant and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon put it in The Wretched of the Earth, in 1961, of “swarming” and “gesticulating” Black and Brown beings, against whom the settler colonial state sets its police, military, and pedagogical forces.
It is in this context that we must understand the many attacks against Palestinian academics and intellectuals, such as Nadia Abu El Haj, the author of a pathbreaking book on Israeli archaeology and its relation to colonization; the attacks against psychoanalysts, such as Lara Sheehi, who has brilliantly studied the links among settler colonialism and psychoanalysis; the attacks against the Palestinian novelist, essayist, intellectual, and teacher Adania Shibli, whose receipt the LiBeraturpreis at the Frankfurt Book Fair on October 20 has been unjustly delayed; the attacks against the Palestine Writes conference, a gathering of Palestinian writers, activists, intellectuals, and artists held from September 22-24 at the University of Pennsylvania and “dedicated to celebrating and promoting cultural productions of Palestinian writers and artists.” The desire to prevent Palestinians from publicly and collectively celebrating their literary, artistic, poetic, and cultural productions is a social and psychical assertion of and an identification with a mode of being and life: a form of life that one might call “settler life” in all of its whiteness and in all of its attachment to the state and the law, and in its racialized, anti-Black and anti-Indigenous social sense and ongoing counterinsurgent and carceral practice.
These are attacks that draw upon and belong to the histories of orientalist thought as well as anti-Black and anti-Indigenous form. They act to preserve a social order and coherency of world for those who are attached—socially, psychically, and linguistically, and as individuals, collectives, and institutions—to the racialized social and legal institutionality and sense of life installed in post-Second-World-War frames globally. It is this which they refuse to give up as they tell us, as Joseph R. Biden did, that “Our hearts may be broken but our resolve is clear.”
The task, in the face of the ongoing Israeli onslaught in Gaza and the ongoing white settler attachment to it, is to struggle against this social order and this coherency of the world and abolish them and their institutions, modes of relation, and manners of being. Such abolition has already begun — as described, most urgently, in the work of the scholar and activist Ruth Wilson Gilmore — and our task is to join in and accelerate it. It is a task that presents itself at each and every instant. Each institution. Each gathering. Each conversation. Each poem. Each and every time. In this, we affirm the right of the poem—in the words of the great Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish—to place the siege under siege. What the poem teaches us is that each of us must affirm the right of Palestinians to struggle for their liberation and freedom. That we must struggle in solidarity with them and state clearly that this struggle is just. That we must uplift the voices of Palestinian communities, such as, to name one, the Palestinian Feminist Collective. And that we must affirm that collective’s love and what it also teaches us, now, here, today:
“Your relentless will to remain on the land is a source of inspiration, perseverance, and fortitude. Once again, Palestinians from the far north to the far south of our homeland are defying settler colonialism attempts to partition land and people. From the Galilee to Gaza you reveal the geography of Palestine, in the face of military brutality and international impunity.”