Bleeding Forms: Beyond the Intifada

Abstract

This essay considers the war in Gaza from the perspective of resistance as an anticoncept. It draws inspiration from the notion of the informe (formless) as described by Georges Bataille to understand how resistance acts as a formless operation that deforms the colonial structure. It argues that resistance overflows the condition it seeks to dismantle and bring down in the world. The essay explores the difference between Bataille's account of the operation of the formless and Frantz Fanon's understanding of the tabula rasa, highlighting how resistance can break down, deform, and distort following this capacity to deform historically. However, the Palestinian resistance did not achieve the radical break, or what Frantz Fanon describes as the minimum demand of the colonized, the clean slate from which a genuine decolonization can ensue. The essay explores how the Palestinian resistance initiated on October 7 a meticulously orchestrated offensive maneuver that surpassed the spontaneous uprisings of previous intifadas. It was a calculated decision to deform the existing order. The essay points to the novel development in Palestinian resistance where the decision to instigate this process of decomposition has become wedded to a decider and a locus, while highlighting some of the pitfalls of this development. It argues that the current moment is marked by a decomposition of the colonial order without decolonization.

In the landscape of Gaza today, a panorama of ruins emerges. It is an image made of the stuff of horror, where the remnants of homes once bustling with life now stand in silence, forced to yield to the power of Israeli bombs, which turn built structures into collapsed heaps. Intimate possessions jut out from the rubble like the ribs of decaying corpses. The very soil of Gaza cradles the concrete of its shattered buildings, while underground tunnels are exposed like a labyrinth of moving roots. As the military machine observes with apparent pleasure its power to kill, maim, and destroy, employing sophisticated information-gathering systems, algorithms, and artificial intelligence, it inflicts wholesale destruction.¹ As one Israeli official military spokesperson proclaims, “Right now we're focused on what causes maximum damage.”² In Gaza today, one encounters the ruins of civic space and the stark disfigurement of the city. This disfigurement brings the city's concrete structures down into the world. In Gaza, the stench of decayed bodies buried under the rubble relentlessly torments the living. Life appears as but a fleeting illusion of respite from drowning, a mere gasp, a single breath before drowning in the dark vastness of the sea, a breath taken only for one to be dragged back into the unknown. The only question that survivors ask for an instant is: Will this be my last breath?

In Gaza, a grotesque tableau unfolds. Graves are ruthlessly excavated and corpses defiled.³ Universities are reduced to rubble, hospitals are turned into mass grave sites, and the injured are questioned by the military with hostile contempt: “Why haven't you died yet?” The human body is subjected to humiliation, stripped bare for all to see, especially if this body is a Palestinian man's, and especially if this man is from Gaza.⁴ This is but a glimpse into the horrors that Gaza faces. This litany speaks of the operation underway to deform, destroy, degrade, and defile, or, in other words, to level Gaza and bring it down in the world.

The challenge of giving meaning to the current war in Gaza or of framing and understanding its implications amid the chaos and the raw, unadulterated eruptions of violence is a hallmark of the war. This challenge is particularly evident in attempts to conceptualize resistance beyond its status as a symptom of the colonial condition, an ailment, a desire for revenge, or a form of psychological liberation as espoused by Fanon, where violence is valued for its ability to force a dialectic of “recognition” to emerge. The war in Gaza gives rise to a struggle to comprehend and articulate its significance within a context that defies existing interpretations, echoing Georges Bataille's work on the informe (formless), where meaning, form, and structure are relentlessly called into question and are all ultimately degraded. Though initiated by a nonsovereign decision by the Palestinian resistance in the Gaza Strip on October 7, the war's progression toward the excessive destruction of Gaza has shattered the veneer of “peace” that masked the other enduring war. This other war is the decades-long colonial condition itself, an expansive, pointillist war that allows for the accumulation of land and resources by settlers through a slow, though documented, process that remains veiled—a war that pervades daily life in Palestine. Here, through a nonsovereign decision, resistance emerges as an effort to deform the colonial condition, a task that is also “formless” and that seeks to bring the colonial condition down in the world, initiating a process of decomposition. At this zero point, it becomes possible to envision new beginnings and connections, to construct new associations, and to transcend and do away with the binary world that colonialism creates. This nonsovereign decision is bottom-up and comes from a position of vulnerability, and it appears as a necessity and the culmination of a historical process but also as a choice that pits the necessity to act against the possibility of inaction. Yet this decision to flood the gates of Gaza also corners the settler state into pursuing the complete eradication of the colonized in a last-ditch effort to salvage a decomposing colonialism or to preserve the settler's insistence on not seeing the “other” as another human being, keeping the colonized perpetually damned.⁵ It forces settlers to employ the weapons they possess and to suspend the old rules, replacing them with the settlers’ ability to wield more violence.

The Informe and the Tabula Rasa

Nearly a century has passed since Georges Bataille sought to construct a dictionary that aimed not to elevate or build but to degrade, not to clarify but to obscure, and not to endow things with meaning but to deform them. This dictionary would underscore the power of the “formless,” an anticoncept aligned with Bataille's view of the universe. In contrast to the quest for establishing and systematizing meanings that is usually associated with a dictionary, Bataille pursued a different aim with his critical dictionary, working to diminish things in the world, to bring them down, to degrade them, and, through this degradation, to unveil other possibilities, allowing readers to associate the universe with “spittle” or a “crushed spider.”⁶ The organizing principle of this dictionary was the informe.

This term, the “formless,” brimming with the potency of disorder, rebels against the assignment of meaning within the domain of the traditional dictionary. Bataille appropriates the dictionary and its form only to undermine it. As he states in his critical dictionary, “A dictionary begins when it no longer gives the meaning of the words but their tasks.” ⁷ He highlights the energies of irruption that are already contained within the word. The formless is an operation that degrades, emphasizing the distance separating the tasks of words from their meanings while showcasing how signifiers and signifieds can collapse onto each other and bleed in and through this encounter. In this sense, a creative operation is at play, one that declassifies by forcing things to level zero, but this is also an operation that defies or resists conceptualization or stabilization. As Benjamin Noys points out, the formless is always “in-form”; rather than a concept that can stand alone, a concept that can be encapsulated within a frame, the formless resists appropriation.⁸ In fact, Noys claims that the formless flows out of form, bringing about the very “derangement of form.”⁹ It is indeed crucial to understand the formless as an operation or a flowing that subverts meaning. It is not surprising, then, that the term the Palestinian resistance used for its offensive operation was “flooding” or “Al-Aqsa Flood.”

In this context, there is an affinity, or a close relationship, between the operations of anticolonial resistance and the concept of the formless. Both entail an effort to subvert and destabilize established structures and meanings, and both defy any attempt at classification that seeks to impose a stable structure or definitive meaning on the world, especially the colonial form itself. Viewed in this light, anticolonial resistance can also be considered “in-form,” suggesting that it is inherently interwoven with the very structures and forms of colonialism it seeks to challenge but also signifying that it possesses the capacity to deform the colonial order. The task of resistance lies in its capacity to erode and deform these established structures and forms. It emerges from within these structures and overflows to unsettle their fixed arrangements.

In the colonial condition, resistance is also an attempt to erase colonial relations, replacing them with new intersubjective relations. Frantz Fanon posits this metamorphosis, emphasizing the transience of the tabula rasa, a blank state or level zero, where decolonization achieves the decomposition of the old and simultaneously remains at the cusp of a new beginning, of a new creation of intersubjective relations that moves beyond the dialectic of master and slave, Black and white, colonizer and colonized.¹⁰ Decolonization is therefore attained only through a radical break that presumes erasure and construction that passes through the tabula rasa; it is premised on an ability to undergo erasure. Fanon characterizes the tabula rasa as the minimum demand of the colonized, which the colonized will from the “bottom up,” or from the low to the high. He writes: “But we have precisely chosen to speak of that kind of tabula rasa which characterizes at the outset all decolonisation. Its unusual importance is that it constitutes, from the first day, the minimum demands of the colonized. To tell the truth, the proof of success lies in a whole social structure being changed from the bottom up.”¹¹

Bataille's formless destabilizes high “civilizational” categories, showing a process of decomposition that degrades and mutates existing hierarchies and norms, a movement from high to low, an overflowing that leaves forms formless and institutes disorder. This operation is not merely destructive but revelatory, exposing the arbitrary distinctions between high and low by returning elements to their bases. Fanon, on the other hand, while also engaging deeply with the marginalized and abject as agents of revolutionary change, envisions decolonization as leading to a necessary and radical creation of a new societal order. For Fanon, decolonization requires not just the dismantling of colonial structures but the construction of a new society; from the tabula rasa, the oppressed can redefine their existence and futures free of racialized colonial binaries. This process involves a movement from low to high, a revolt that proceeds from the bottom up. Thus, while both thinkers valorize the revolutionary potential of the excluded and the abject—the damned or wretched, in Fanon's terms—their visions diverge in the aftermath of revolution. Bataille's decomposition leaves things in a state of relentless questioning, undermining structures without necessarily positing a clear horizon. By contrast, Fanon's blank slate is imbued with the hope and necessity of constructing a decolonized society, where colonial legacies and hierarchies vanish, and novel intersubjective relations are constructed.

The kinship between the decision on October 7 to conduct an offensive military action on Israeli garrisons and settlements in the Gaza envelope and Bataille's concept of the formless should be apparent. At its core, anticolonial resistance tries to effect a process of decomposition in the colonial form. This decomposition impacts cultural, aesthetic, ethical, political, and legal categories, engendering more expansive factual descriptions and, at the same time, difficulty in encapsulating or expressing in language the intensity of destabilization. This is a decomposition that affects not only the immediate structures, discourses, and ideologies of the settler state but also the very way the world appears to the settler—shattered, in flux, unstable, and degraded. This process of decomposition also unleashes base drives, where genocidal discourses and the insistence on not seeing the other as another human being become the primary means of recuperating or resisting this decomposition and immediately give way to a discourse of animality and an attempted eradication of Palestinian presence. In fact, the very way Israel attempts the total destruction of Gaza, and the Palestinians of Gaza, its way of rolling out the second Nakba as many of its pundits proclaimed, is in fact a way to reaffirm colonial binaries by externalizing the flow of decomposition and debasement onto the already debased and excluded population of Gaza.¹² The intensified humiliation, degradation, and debasement of Gaza and the Palestinians help expand the frame of the settler-colonial form. By widening the frame through the acceleration and intensification of its violence, the settler-colonial state attempts to contain the process of decomposition and to restabilize the binary of high and low under the conditions of colonialism.

The words with which the Gaza war is described are also telling. Most descriptions align with Bataille's fascination with the abject, the excluded, the heterogeneous.¹³ They center the horrific nature of the conflict, the ruins it leaves behind, the sacrifices involved, and the overwhelming encounters with mass death that it entails. This Bataillean sensibility is reflected in the frequent use of terms that end in -cide in the current war in Gaza, such as genocide, sociocide, urbicide, scholasticide, and democide. The suffix -cide comes from the Latin caedere, meaning to cut down or kill. It is therefore not surprising that some of the early consequences of the current violent eruption included an inability to think beyond descriptions of killing, a disavowal of politics, a reluctance to allow for the emergence of a dialectic of recognition between the colonized and the colonizer, and a foreclosure of the possibility of realizing the minimum demand for a transient state, where the colonized might create a new, if confusing, beginning.

In this context, the ceasefire movement within Palestinian activism emerged as a demand to disrupt the attempt by the colonial state to expand the colonial frame, to contain the decomposition and deformation. The settler state seeks through the excess of its violent transgressions—Dresden-like bombing, the mass killing of civilians, the destruction of entire neighborhoods, villages, and cities—to level things to the ground. But this is a leveling that delays the arrival of the tabula rasa or renders it unattainable. This process remains locked in the attempt to contain the overflow and to stabilize existing norms, forms, and structures. The degradation and annihilation of Gaza emerge as the only strategies for salvaging a dying colonialism, maneuvers by which to reaffirm that the other does not exist. The current moment, then, offers decomposition without the possibility of a tabula rasa.

Beyond an Intifada

As I have already noted, resistance as anticoncept resists conceptualization and flows from the very structures that it ultimately seeks to decompose, degrade, and destabilize, to bring down in the world, in Bataille's phrase.¹⁴ However, resistance is also a historical category, a set of actors, a constellation of wills, and an organizing assemblage that takes shape through its interplay of various relations and forces, including affects, tactics, technologies, techniques, and strategies. Therefore, it is only a formless operation insofar as it flows from the regime of forms that the colonial condition establishes, and only in its immediate effect as an operation that attempts to decompose and deform the established syntaxes, forms, structures, institutions, and categories that this colonial regime seeks to stabilize.

The Palestinian resistance, in particular since the advent of Israel's occupation of the remaining unoccupied parts of Palestine in 1967, is marked by this flowing out from existing colonial forms. But the resistance's current mode of articulation in Gaza is distinct. It consists of a decision wedded to a particular actor, organizational arrangement, event, and place, all the while sustaining itself as an anticoncept that enacts the process of degrading and decomposing, of bringing things down in the world. This development moves beyond the paradigm of the intifada of the recent past, where a political event had a strategic effect but lacked a singular strategic actor.

The intifadas between 1987 and 2006 were spontaneous eruptions of the damned, collective actions that the Palestinian masses ignited through a mix of disruptive acts employing a wide array of tactics and based on an affective burst or overflow. In the First Intifada (1987–93), these strategies relied on noncooperation and the power of summoning, where organizational actors played a role in tuning into the rhythm of the struggle and its discourse, calling upon the masses to participate through specific actions such as strikes, demonstrations, building cooperatives, and communes.¹⁵ If one were to insist on speaking of a decision in relation to the First Intifada, one would have to describe it as a collective one, spontaneous in its eruption and its unpredictability. Hence, also, its diffuse responsibility.¹⁶ The First Intifada managed to deform the existing colonial form of direct control and propelled an Israeli strategy of indirect control based on spatial separateness. This separateness was based on a division of control between the nascent Palestinian Authority (PA) and Israel, where areas heavily populated by Palestinians came to be under the security and civil control of the PA, and Israel would come to control the rest of the West Bank, mostly illegal settlements and empty lands. It also culminated in the 1993 Oslo Accords when Israel insisted on sustaining its inability to see the other by refusing to recognize the Palestinians, instead opting for a semblance of recognition that enabled it to contain the irruptive power of the intifada and the operation of its formlessness.¹⁷ Similar characteristics marked the Second Intifada (2000–2005). It, too, was an eruption that lacked a clear deciding actor (notwithstanding the argument voiced by many that the late Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat made the decision to instigate it). The Second Intifada, while spontaneous, did, however, exhibit a turn toward offensive action. The shift to the offensive was the result of the spatial separateness that defined the Oslo years, whereby the Israeli army withdrew from the center of the cities to their edges or checkpoints. As a result, noncooperation strategies became ineffective and were gradually replaced by violent offensive actions. The intensity of Israeli violence produced forms of Palestinian offensive actions—shooting attacks, the human bomb, and infiltration of illegal settlements—that experimented with the ability to reach and hit a target, replacing the old noncooperation tactics. Nevertheless, the Second Intifada's capacity to deform the colonial structure was exhausted by two parallel processes. There was first the severing of the Gaza Strip from the West Bank through what Israel called its “unilateral withdrawal” from Gaza and the strip's subsequent blockading. Second was the arrest and assassination of the members of the major organized networks of resistance in the West Bank.

If the two intifadas were ignited as affective outbursts of subversive rhythms without being prompted by a clear decision,¹⁸ the offensive of October 7 was not the product of a spontaneous collective outburst but can be traced back to a singular, albeit nonsovereign, decision. This was no Schmittian decision to suspend the law or institute a state of exception in an effort to preserve the order against an external threat. Quite on the contrary, stemming from a position of vulnerability and weakness, this nonsovereign decision aimed to deform the current order, not to preserve it, and to instigate a process of decomposition.

A nonsovereign decision is necessarily paradoxical. Such a decision is already predetermined by forces that exceed the decider. In Gaza, this decision arose out of necessity; it was akin to a predetermined force compelling action to disrupt the status quo. Consider the background. The world was shifting focus away from Palestine toward the Arab regimes strengthening their normalization agreements with Israel. There was also the upcoming Saudi normalization deal with Israel. In addition, in the wake of the Arab Spring, marked by civil wars and upheavals, attention within the Arab world had shifted away from Palestine, and the capacity of Arab collectives to resist the normalization efforts of their regimes and to organize resistance against their governing elites had diminished. There was also the continuous expansion of illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank and the struggle over Al-Haram Sharif (Al-Aqsa Mosque) in Jerusalem. And then, there was the perpetual predicament of Gaza: an endless state of siege, recurring operations meant to “mow the lawn,” and no clear resolution in sight. This nonsovereign decision was intended to resolve Gaza's dilemma, to liberate it from the economic chokehold of a perpetual siege. It arrived after other forms of struggle—including marches on Gaza fences, legal international mechanisms, and attempts by the Palestine Liberation Organization to achieve a two-state solution—were exhausted. Israel's own vulgar fascism was also on the rise; extreme settlers held the keys to the highest offices of the government.

This intricate web of causative factors—a map of apparent inevitabilities—reveals the dual condition of Palestinian existence. First, Palestinians have been persisting within a harrowing horizon of annihilation; living under an overarching regime that attempts to make them into mere objects of exclusion, regulation, and eventual effacement; and surviving a slow war of annihilation. Second, however, there is an emergent potential within this very form; resistance germinates amid the prevailing slow desolation and manages to overflow the colonial order. Hence, the nonsovereign decision is rendered both inevitable and necessary. It emerges from the historical struggle to forge synchronicity between a decision and a decider. The decision could have been otherwise (a decision not to act), despite the map of inevitabilities and the necessity of taking this particular decision. This is a bottom-up decision, made from a position of vulnerability and guided by a program of “disorder” and destabilization.¹⁹ The choice to act, or to initiate a preplanned inundation that disrupts the status quo, is thus both a result of necessity and a “leap of faith” that exceeds rational deliberation. It reflects Fanon's articulation of decolonization, but in this instance condensed into a singular decision, made in a specific locus and at a particular historical moment. Fanon goes on to argue that decolonization is the result of two opposing forces and the culmination of a historical process.²⁰ However, the decision in the Palestinian case is a marker of impasse, a state of paralysis where one is incapable of moving through a condition, or a set of norms or ideas. The impasse in this context results from the choice between accepting a meager presence within a horizon of annihilation and erasure or attempting a deformation that could result in a tabula rasa.

What Is an Intifada?

I have been suggesting that what is differential about the current war in Gaza is that it can be traced back to a nonsovereign decision, to an operation that from the outset intended to surprise, shock, and deform the existing order, to bring things down in the world, in a world that is not ours, to use a phrase Ghassan Kanafani coined not long ago.²¹ It also marks a movement beyond the intifada, or beyond the spontaneity of the early uprisings in the West Bank and Gaza.

It is therefore telling that the word intifada has remained conspicuously absent from the Palestinian lexicon since October 7, although it was hotly debated within institutions of higher education and even in Congress in the United States.²² Palestinians, some argue, have failed to muster an “uprising” that resonates with their own historical experience of two great intifadas. To be sure, the October 7 offensive was in part devised by the militants of the First and the Second Intifadas, as a result of the evolution of the intifadas into a guerrilla army and the exchange of know-how and training within a larger network of resistances in the region.²³ The offensive was the culmination of the work of a confined guerrilla movement within a dense and confined strip of land, a movement that redrew this space by recognizing its subterranean potential. It lent the Palestinians the capacity to take the colonial master by surprise, not out of spontaneity but as the culmination of a historical moment that had begun in the refugee camp of Jabaliya almost thirty-six years earlier, the same refugee camp that has been largely destroyed during the current war.

The absence of an intifada in this context is indicative of the political conjecture within Palestine, oscillating like a pendulum between the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, striving to silence the capacity to resist, and the transformation of this capacity into a guerrilla army in the Gaza Strip. It is indeed paradoxical that Palestinians are incapacitated in the West Bank, where the specter of an imminent intifada is perpetually invoked as a possibility that remains deferred.

Numerous articles in Arabic discuss the possibility of a coming intifada, whether before October 7 or as a result of it. Moreover, Israeli security officials with “deep” knowledge of the West Bank and Jerusalem recurrently warn of this very possibility.²⁴ These articles and discussions reveal the desire for an alternate horizon that interrupts the catastrophe and refuses the negation of the Palestinians, or such discussions could be read as a marker of the colonial apparatus's—the Israeli security establishment's—neurotic fear of another spontaneous, surprising outbreak, another instance of the disruptive political rhythm embodied in the intifada. But what is most pertinent to this political moment is the fact that while the West Bank is busy wondering, questioning, and raising the specter of the intifada to come, Gaza exceeds the intifada, moving toward another articulation of the capacity to resist and to deform the existing order.

The term intifada itself, from the verb intafada, has natural, even biological origins, describing a nonintentional and reflexive movement of the body, a mechanical oscillation within a supposed equilibrium, a vibration, a shaking, a tremor, or even a throb—sometimes resulting from an external influence or manifesting as a counterforce to an external source of instigation. In this sense, an intifada is a physiological reaction to an external provocation, a response provoked by the presence of the colonial apparatus and its diminution of Palestinian space and time. Nonetheless, it also possesses a rhythmic quality, implying the intensification of a specific rhythm and movement, including the ability to oscillate, as well as suggesting that this oscillation includes a process of intensification and one of relaxation. Thus, an intifada is both physiological and pathological. It indexes both a pathology inherent in the way power is structured and extends in space and time within a settler-colonial framework and also a distinct form of response that exhibits physiological characteristics.

Abdalwahab Al-Masiri, an Egyptian intellectual, reflects on the term intifada, noting its etymological roots connected to the act of shaking off dust from clothing—suggesting a cleansing or purifying action. Thus, an intifada metaphorically represents the act of discarding the old in order to create something new. Al-Masiri also conceptualizes the intifada as an epistemic framework, a kind of recoiling or regressive movement that aims to reestablish Palestine through a “de-modernization” effort. In this framework, the intifada is not just a physical uprising but an epistemic shift with a recursive nature, where liberation is understood as a movement backward. Al-Masiri celebrates the intifada as a complete social uprising, chaotic yet coordinated, demonstrating a pragmatism in sustaining the struggle and articulating a critique of power. He was, however, primarily theorizing the First and Second Intifadas and did not anticipate their evolution into the strategy that binds the decision to a decider.²⁵ While intifadas were pivotal in the resistance movements within the occupied territories, the notion of an intifada today seems to oscillate between nostalgic remembrance and the anticipation of future uprisings that are always deferred.

Alongside the absence of the word intifada in general Palestinian discourse and on the streets of Jerusalem or the West Bank are other linguistic omissions, such as “revolution” or the broader term “Palestinian National Movement.” The absence of these words and phrases points to a tragic conclusion and a melancholic stance that casts a liberated Palestine as spectral, unattainable, or even a burden. It suggests movement toward a future horizon that retains Palestine but only as a shattered form of loss. This is evident in the inaction and discourse of the Palestinian Authority. Rather than deforming the colonial order and its own formation, the PA manages to deform Palestine and the Palestinians.

Thus the current, concealed fissure that divides Palestinians separates a politics of cooperation with settler colonialism and a politics of defiance. The absence of Fatah and the larger, more secular nationalist movement from the decision to resist existing political structures is also the result of the emergence of a Palestinian comprador class (ruling class). This class operates by co-opting the vocabulary of liberation and revolution, employing it tactically to maintain the Palestinians’ subservient status, acting as a mediator on the periphery of imperial and colonial order.²⁶ Hence the Palestinian Authority and its representatives make statements that either absolve themselves from the act of “shaking off” or attempt to maintain their political stasis by pointing out the futility of resistance. They also declare their readiness to assume the governing body of a promising new economic space in the Gaza Strip as part of the American plan for the “day after.”²⁷ In this sense, the PA accumulates not intifadas but ruins and betrayals, marking the triumph of pragmatic survival even at the expense of self-effacement. This form of psychoaffective accumulation is sustained by and conjoined with the horror that Israel's military machine inflicts, the material ruins of homes, the bombs dropping from the sky, the arrests, the maimings, and thing killings. Paradoxically, it is this form of stasis—the investment in the decision not to decide, not to act—that is creating the flows of resistance in the West Bank. This resistance manifests through “lone wolf attacks” or armed insurrections in the North of the West Bank. The emergence of this resistance in the West Bank is also a call to return to the capacity to deform the existing order. It is thus as if too much stability and too much investment in sustaining the order created the very flows that attempt to deform it.

The current mode of resistance in the Gaza Strip has its pitfalls. Unlike the earlier intifadas, where the responsibility for the decision was diffuse, the nonsovereign decision to act enables a counterinsurgent discourse to appear, a claim to separate resistance from the rest of the population, but it also empowers the comprador class in the West Bank to argue that Hamas should be held accountable for its decision to act.²⁸ This is reinforced by the very locus from which the decision is taken, a locus that makes it difficult for the multitude of Palestinians, choked in different geographies, divided by the colonial order, to fully participate in the decision. Each geography—the diaspora, Gaza, the West Bank, Jerusalem, and the Israel within which Palestinians live—is its own complex sociopolitical context. It is indeed the tragedy of Gaza that at this particular moment carries the burden alone. But this also raises the question among Gazans: Why only us, and why not everyone else?

Conclusion

Many political analysts ask what the Palestinian resistance wants. The question attempts to point to the absence of a clear strategic goal that is generally described by these analysts as a version of a one- or two-state solution, among other solutions proposed. By centering the formless as a way to understand the effects and task of resistance, a different subversive image arises. We begin to see resistance overflowing the very order it seeks to undermine, instigating a process of decomposition in the colonial order, and bringing things down in the world, while resisting any stable meaning or form. Yet, despite the recurrent historical efforts—whether through intifadas or through the recent Al-Aqsa Flood—a complete tabula rasa, a blank state from which a genuinely decolonized society can emerge, remains elusive. This absence underscores the complex challenge of transcending the operations of resistance to achieve a foundational restructuring of social relations, free from the impositions of colonial relations and their legacies.

The ability of the colonial form to contain or rearrange itself in an effort to salvage colonialism and sustain its refusal to acknowledge the other is also part and parcel of Israel's ability to contain this process of destabilization and decomposition. Historically, the Palestinian intifada spurred an Israeli move toward spatial separation, indirect control, the intensification of violence, and the introduction of myriad technologies of control. The nonsovereign decision that led to October 7 deformed the strategy of siege, walls, surveillance, and deterrence and spurred a move toward annihilation, an attempt to widen the colonial frame through an excessive degradation that transgresses old forms. This is the only means to stabilize the colonial order and its division between colonized and colonizer. In fact, rather than relying on the strategy that is usually associated with war as an extension of politics, Israel seeks to contain the effects of the overflow of the formless.

Notes

Works Cited