The predicament of Palestinians: For their lives to matter

A massively complicated military operation is represented by a simple headline. On October 7, Hamas fired rockets at Israeli cities and settlements surrounding the Gaza Strip as tens of the group’s militants tore down the perimeter fence, attacked military units and stormed settlements, killing, capturing and injuring hundreds of Israelis. They were soon followed by other non-combatant Gazans, most of whom are refugees from villages and towns on the other side of the fence, who, upon learning that it was breached, rushed to catch a glimpse of their villages, towns and fields. Attendants of a psychedelic trance music festival, which had continued through the night in nearby rural farmland, were alerted to the outbreak of violence. As they tried to flee through a road that connected two Israeli checkpoints, they encountered different groups of Palestinians. Many non-combatants were killed, and others were taken to Gaza and held hostage.

“Militants killing the attendants of a music festival” soon became the main headline.

To further amplify the contrast, the Israeli propaganda machine circulates a series of lies. Palestinian militias, we are told, butchered infants, raped women and beheaded non-combatants. Mainstream news outlets started recycling these reports, and, contributing to this plethora of lies, President Joe Biden falsely claimed that he saw heartbreaking photos of beheadings. When pressed for evidence, the White House effectively retracted the president’s claims, and the Israeli government conceded its inability to confirm the reports. But the propagation of these lies persists. They constitute the core message of a media campaign sponsored by the Israeli government. The message, which appears in editorials, online advertisements and official statements, is already summed up in three words: “Hamas is ISIS.” The implication is made explicit. Israel will do “whatever it takes” to defend itself, including by destroying Gaza.

Israel never needed an excuse to bombard Gaza or kill Palestinians. Since 2008, it has waged four different wars on the densely-populated strip. It has a longer history of killing Palestinians with impunity. Just last year, the Israeli occupation army shot over 200 non-combatant Palestinians, including children, first-aid providers and journalists. There were no political or legal repercussions for these killings.

What the Israeli government is soliciting from the “international community” through the perpetuation of lies is not an endorsement of its killing. Even the slightest breach of the Israeli-imposed rules suffices to procure such endorsement. As one commentator put it, standing with the colonizers “is a reflex so deep it’s the muscle memory of the West.” Rather, it is soliciting an endorsement for the ethnic cleansing and war crimes it is now so openly committing, in the name of humanity. 

The human animal

The reporting of fatalities is uneven. Reporting on the Palestinian side, the almost exclusive focus of mainstream news outlets is numbers. One week into the eruption of violence, we are told, Israel has used the equivalent of one-quarter of an atomic bomb to destroy over 750 residential buildings and 89 schools, and wipe out entire populations, including at least 47 families. More than a million Palestinians have fled their homes, and because of the siege imposed by Israel, hospitals are expected to have already run out of fuel. All numbers. No faces. No names. No narrative. The lives of Palestinians are so easily rendered statistics. Even when Israeli lives are represented numerically to emphasize the gravity of the catastrophe, numbers are not used to represent lives. They are accompanied by in-depth reporting, video footage and interviews, especially with the attendants of the music festival, which render them relatable and narrate the happiness and liveliness that was disrupted, as well as the suffering, shock, terror, and death that the Palestinian combatants brought to the scene. They are remembered as people, not numbers.

This is not simply the difference between the valued life of the civilian and the detested life of the militant. The overwhelming majority of Gaza’s 2.2 million Palestinians, as it should be remembered, are non-combatants who, alongside the Israeli army and armed settlers, are all erased from representations of the conflict. Rather, it is the difference between the Israeli and the Palestinian. Thanks to popular representations, the former, even when soldiers in the Israeli occupation army, are never aggressors (and are seldom combatants). The latter, however, and irrespective of whether he [and the Palestinian in popular discourses is unanimously, even if sometimes insufficiently, masculine] is a combatant or not, is never truly a civilian. While typically originating from international law, in which the civilian is defined as an individual who is not a member of the armed forces, volunteer corps, or militias, these popular discourses offer more expansive criteria for defining the civilian.

The Palestinian cannot be a civilian not because he is necessarily a combatant, but because he is not civilized. The longstanding and pervasive tradition of Orientalism produces him as primitive, irrational, violent and fanatic. In erasing the non-combatant and propagating the lies of senseless killings, the representation of the current conflict only perpetuates this depiction. The Palestinian, in the words of the Israeli Defense Minister, are “human animals.” 

This representation serves two purposes. First, it justifies Israel’s bombardment and besiegement of Gaza. If Palestinians were civilians, Israel’s policies would constitute a clear breach of Protocol I Additional to the Geneva Conventions, which maintains that the “presence within the civilian population of individuals who do not come within the definition of civilians does not deprive the population of its civilian character.” But because Palestinians are just human animals, they could not be civilians, and, as a result, no one should be seriously inquiring about the measures taken by the Israeli army to avoid the killing of their children. There is no humanitarian crisis because there are no humans.

But being human animals does not merely justify the killing of Palestinians. It mandates it. He, the uncivilized, captured civilians and civilized soldiers, and held them hostage. Israel has the moral obligation to liberate them. The reason is clear: being held captive by Palestinian militants is “worse than death.” These militants, we are told, make no distinction between combatant and non-combatant abductees, who are all kept “in a dark room with Christ knows how many people and terrified every minute,” and have no food or water. These barbarians, in short, are accused (with no evidence) of keeping abductees under exactly the same conditions that Israel admits to imposing on the entire population of Gaza.

This risks collapsing the difference between the civilian and the non-civilian. To maintain the difference, Israeli propaganda again resorts to a different marker, namely intentions. As a rule, we are told, the Israeli army, being civilized, does not target non-combatants, nor do its policies aim at harming them. Whenever they are killed or injured, it is because the army was compelled to do so by an overriding concern, dictated by its status as a civilized military, of attaining victory and minimizing its casualties. The killing of Palestinians is therefore rendered collateral damage. The Palestinian militant, on the other hand, is neither capable nor willing to make this distinction between the civilian and the combatant. Importantly, however, this difference in intentions is not examined, but is rather assumed. It builds on the existing representation of the Oriental as uncivilized.

Second, the invocation of this representation of the Oriental as a human animal offers a ready explanation for his violence, thus obscuring its political and social causes. He is, by his very nature, irrational, intolerant and vindictive, and his violence ought to be unequivocally condemned and combatted, not analyzed. This is a recurrent theme in the Palestinian struggle. As Haggai Ram reminds us in Intoxicating Zion, Zionists used a similar approach in their response to the Arab Revolt of 1936-1939 that was triggered by British support for the Zionist colonial project from Europe to Palestine, economic hardships and the disillusionment with Palestinian leadership. Obscuring these myriad causes, they attributed the revolution to the “violent insanity” caused by hashish intoxication, which strips the consumer of his willpower and transforms him into a tool in the service of anyone who seeks to manipulate him. In the original Orientalist myth, dating back to the 11th century, this manipulator was Hasan-i Sabah, the founder of the Assassins, or Hashasheen order who, the myth goes, supplied his followers with the drug and manipulated them into performing “spectacular acts of violence.” In 20th-century Palestine, the manipulator was the Syrian leader of the revolt, Izzeldin al-Qassam. As such, and by invoking this centuries-old myth, the political causes of revolt were erased, and it was explained as a manifestation of the violent insanity of the hashish consumer, the forefather of the human animal.

Life(lessness) in prison

Israel claims to be in a perpetual state of self-defense. Even its army, operating in occupied territories, is called the “Israeli Defense Forces.” Its wars are always defensive (even if they lead to the occupation and annexation of new territories) and its strikes, bombardments, invasions, and other military operations are always defensive, preemptive, or retaliatory, but never offensive. The Palestinian, on the other hand, is always the aggressor. Reuters’ recollection of the “Timeline of conflict between Israel and Palestinians in Gaza” is a case in point. The timeline begins with Israel’s decision to “unilaterally withdraw” from Gaza in 2005, and follows with a series of wars triggered by Palestinian violence in the form of firing rockets or capturing soldiers.

The narrative is obviously sustained through a certain arrangement of temporal blockages, discussed below. Once these blockages are abolished, Israel’s wars could no longer be understood as defensive. The narrative then begins not with the Israeli “withdrawal” from Gaza, but with the influx of European Jewish settlers, followed by the destruction of life, massive killings of Palestinians and the establishment of a settler colony.

But even without the (otherwise necessary) obliteration of these blockages, the claim that Israeli violence is defensive does not withstand scrutiny. Not only does it erase certain episodes of Israeli bombardments (in the narrative above, for example, the Israeli frenzy resulting from the defeat of its army in Lebanon in the summer of 2006, and its decision to bombard Gaza to restore its reputation and recover from humiliation), but it also rests on a very narrow definition of violence, one that limits it to use of military power. This prospect of brute violence is constantly present in Gaza. While exercised periodically, it is accompanied with another form of violence. Less visible and more pervasive, it takes place through another paradigmatic institution of Israeli occupation: the legal institution.

The aforementioned withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza in 2005 inaugurated this violence. In The Biggest Prison on Earth, Israeli historian Ilan Pappe convincingly argues that, through dismantling Israeli settlements in Gaza and separating Palestinian and Israeli communities, occupation troops were able to impose more restrictions on the movement of the former, effectively transforming Gaza into a high-security prison. In this open prison, Israel created what Achille Mbembe describes as deathworlds, or “forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to living conditions that confer upon them the status of the living dead.”

Israel’s policy rested primarily on the control, and continued calibration, of life-sustaining flows of resources. In the immediate aftermath of Hamas’s electoral victory in 2006, an advisor to Israel’s prime minister proposed an idea to put “the Palestinians on a diet, but not make them die of hunger.” This proposal was soon transformed into policy. In The Least of All Possible Evils, Eyal Weizman outlines this transformation. In 2007, and shortly after Hamas took control of Gaza in a preemptive coup staged to avert a military seizure of government by Fatah, the Israeli government declared its intention to “limit the movement of goods into the Gaza Strip, reduce the supply of fuel and electricity, and limit the movement of persons to and from the strip.” The purpose of this resorting to necropolitics, Israelis claimed, was to put pressure on Gazans by reducing their quality of life and thus force them to take action against Hamas. Human, animal and machine fuel flowing into the strip was on the decline, a precursor to the complete siege now imposed on the human animals.

The question was soon brought to an Israeli high court. Later in 2007, human rights lawyers petitioned to increase provisions, which had already fallen short of what the United Nations and humanitarian organizations deemed necessary: a total of 140 megawatts of electricity, 900 truckloads of supplies per week, including 625 loads of foodstuffs and medical supplies, and 275 loads of “other necessary items,” such as personal and home hygiene needs, house cleaning materials and other such provisions. In response, representatives of the occupation army promised the court that the ongoing reduction of provisions will be done in coordination with experts in security, international law, humanitarianism and electrical engineering, while maintaining contact with “UN agencies, international NGOs and Palestinian health offices, who would help determine whether there were any indications of a humanitarian crisis developing.” Calculations were based on the same methods employed by the American-led sanction regime imposed on Iraq. They sided with the military against the human rights lawyers. It cited the difference between [civilian] Israelis, whose rights ought to be protected, and “the terrorist organizations fighting against it,” who are not civilians, and whose rights, therefore, could be compromised. 

The control and decrease of energy supplies continues to this day. Shortages of machine energy hinder the ability of Palestinians in Gaza to cultivate their land, cause the failure of the medical enterprise and affect the quality of drinkable water in the strip, while shortages of human and animal energy contribute to malnutrition and the resultant diseases. Despite its pervasiveness, this violence is deemed more humane (and definitely more legal) than the retaliatory Palestinian violence manifesting in breaching borders to smuggle water purifiers and vitamins, building tunnels to escape the world’s largest prison, or trying to neutralize the war machine continually erected against them. In the context of the current war, Israel further stepped up this violence: Imposing a complete siege on Gaza that is justified as a military necessity mandated by Israel’s need to defend itself. The consequent death toll and humanitarian crisis is rendered secondary.

Temporal walls

Israeli violence is always deemed understandable, even if reprehensible. The reason, it seems, is that it is embedded in a comprehensible historical narrative: that of defending the Jewish polity against an imminent threat. As the Israeli prime minister told Biden in a televised phone call, “we” have not seen a degree of “savageness” as in the Palestinian attack “since the Holocaust.” The aforementioned representation of the conflict helps invoke this history. In doing so, Israel preempts European critique in two ways: reminding Europe of its crimes against its Jewish communities and weaving a narrative in which Palestinian violence is a continuation of European antisemitism and Israel the legitimate heir of the victims of the Holocaust. The trauma and vulnerability resulting from this invocation also justify the ongoing war crimes. It is, after all, in an existential battle for self-defense, and the scale of its reaction should not be measured against the objective evaluation of Palestinian military power, but against the collective, transgenerational trauma resulting from genocide.

Palestinian violence, on the other hand, is not embedded in a comprehensible historical narrative. The reason is not that Palestinians are without a history. In fact, the ethnic cleansing of 1948, and the forced exodus of 1967, among other atrocities, are well-documented and hardly disputed. But this history has no place in the present. Instead, it belongs to the past. While acknowledging the “ethnic cleansing and the massacre of civilians in the War of Independence,” Henry Siegman insists that this past “does not confer any legitimacy” on the violence integral to the Palestinian struggle for independence.

How are the massacres committed by Israelis(-to-be) against Palestinians, on the land of Palestine, after WWII relegated to the past, while atrocities committed against European Jews in Europe before and during the war allowed a place in the present? A temporal apartheid wall allows this discrimination. It disrupts the natural flow of time that renders all moments equal and equally constitutive of the possibilities of the subsequent moments.

In controlling the flow of time, the temporal wall built by Israel produces parallel temporalities. Foundational moments, including the “War of Independence” and the “Six Day War,” are ruptures that create new realities. They erect new time borders that ought not to be crossed. These borders are continually produced and guarded through nationalist narratives, legal regimes and other “facts on the ground.” They are expanded with every new dispossession, which is immediately followed by the erection of a new temporal wall that relegates it to the past. Behind other borders, not those obscuring the dispossession of Palestinians, however, lies a different history, both biblical and modern. It is this history that flows into the present.

Militarizing this time border perpetuates the image of Palestinian militancy as a reflection of irrational violence. From the Palestinian perspective, Israeli terror could not be relegated to the past. Terrorist groups such as the Haganah, Irgun or Stern, or their heir, the Israeli occupation army, did not just force them out of their homes, towns and villages 75, or 55, or two years ago. Israeli violence has been denying them the right to return to these same towns and villages every day since. But this ongoing violence is erased because the initial act of dispossession is always relegated to the past. Instead of understanding the violence of the Palestinian as an attempt to neutralize the force with which he has to reckon every day, it is more commonly understood as irrational violence that stems from the Oriental’s vindictiveness and inability to forgive.

Temporal walls are also integral to the production of Israeli civilians. Relegating foundational moments to the past absolves members of the aforementioned Israeli terrorist organizations that played a central role in the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948, as well as those who committed war crimes in more recent history, of their crimes. One can massacre thousands of Lebanese civilians as an army officer, for example, and then, once this war is relegated to the past, become a civilian prime minister, not a war criminal. While hundreds, if not thousands, of Israeli officers kill non-combatants and commit crimes against humanity and then cross the border to become protected civilians, Palestinians have no room for redemption.

Palestinian Lives Matter

There is no objective standpoint through which this conflict could be narrated. Each narration has to either accept or reject the Orientalist representations of the Oriental, erect or dismantle the temporal wall, and expand or contract its definition of violence. Once the Orientalist representation is accepted, the Israeli temporal wall perpetuated and the definition of violence reduced to the brute force of arms, the Palestinians loses their humanity.

From the Orientalist’s perspective, no number of facts would suffice to restore the humanity of Palestinians or even complicate the simple image of the ruthless Palestinian terrorist killing the peaceful Israeli civilian. That Hamas leaders, unlike their Israeli counterparts, condemned the killing of civilians and told Al-Jazeera that they instructed militants to “not kill civilians, women, children, or the elderly,” does not seem to matter. Nor does the release of a female captive and her children, the footage confirming focus on military targets, or testimonies coming out on the tongues of released hostages and eyewitnesses suffice to, at the very least, put into question the stereotypical characterization of the fanatic Orientalist. Nothing, from this perspective, could render Palestine human or the Palestinian non-combatant civilian. As long as this perspective is maintained, therefore, Palestinian lives will never matter.