Abstract
Israel's ongoing genocidal war on Gaza has entailed the massive destruction of universities and schools, religious and cultural centers, and other sites critical to the survival and reproduction of Palestinian cultural life. At the same time, the death toll of Palestinian writers and artists, teachers and doctors, journalists and researchers has been exceptionally high. Such a level of destruction and killing continues to be excused by Israel and its supporters as the unfortunate collateral damage of a war against a terrorist organization that conceals itself within civilian spaces. This essay, on the contrary, argues that in light of the longer history of colonialism with which Israel's settler‐colonial enterprise is continuous, the assault on cultural life should be seen as a systematic element of its overall project, the elimination of the Palestinians as a people. What the Kenyan anticolonial intellectual Ngugi Wa Thiong'o once described as colonialism's “cultural bomb” aims, alongside more material weaponry, to break the will to resistance of the colonized. It intends the psychological destruction of the population and the eradication not only of armed resistance but also of those whose intellectual, artistic, or literary work contributes to the maintenance of the sense of cultural continuity and futurity on which both armed and unarmed resistance draws. The instance of Refaat Alareer, a scholar, teacher, and poet murdered by Israel in December 2023, is emblematic of the long history of Israeli assassinations of Palestinian cultural figures but also of the persistence and dissemination of their work that defies destruction.
The biggest weapon wielded and actually unleashed by imperialism against the collective defiance [of the colonized] is the cultural bomb.
— Ngugi Wa Thiong'o, Decolonising the Mind
As this essay goes to press, it is over twelve months since Dr. Refaat Alareer, professor of English at the Islamic University in Gaza, was killed by an Israeli air strike on December 6, 2023, which also killed his brother, sister, and four young nieces when their home in the al-Daraj area of Gaza City was destroyed. Alareer was a teacher, a poet, an activist, and a mentor to numerous Gazan students who in turn became writers, journalists, and poets with his encouragement and support. He was the editor of the 2014 anthology Gaza Writes Back: Short Stories from Young Writers in Gaza, Palestine and a cofounder of We Are Not Numbers, a project launched in Gaza after Israel's 2014 attack, to mentor and support young writers in the besieged territory to tell their stories to the world. A beloved teacher of Shakespeare and of world literature with a PhD on John Donne, his impact on Palestinian nonviolent resistance was incalculable. It seems almost certain that his murder was in fact the targeted assassination by Israel of one of Gaza's most influential cultural activists: only the second floor of the house, the floor on which he and those murdered with him were living, was hit in the strike, at a time when Israel's indiscriminate total demolition of Gazan residences has become routine.1 And his killing was preceded by warnings Israel's agents sent, not to alert but to intimidate, in the days before his killing. Such an extrajudicial execution of those who defy its settler-colonial agenda, even when their resistance is unarmed, as Alareer wryly joked his own would perforce be, has been typical of Israel's practice for decades and has even set the pattern, in flagrant breach of international legal norms, for the practice of other colonial powers, including the United States.2
Israel may have erased Alareer physically, but in all else its assassination of him proved a dismal failure. His teaching and mentorship, his example, his writing and editing, all continue to be commemorated globally and to circulate, like his now famous poem “If I Must Die,” further than ever before.3 His name and his work, and the image of the white kite that he invoked in that poem, appear at demonstrations condemning Israel's genocidal warfare and calling for a ceasefire, while countless of his students have written eulogies and committed to continuing his work in Gaza and beyond. As has so often happened, the death of an anticolonial activist at the hands of a colonial power has succeeded only in producing an iconic figure, a focal point for articulating both the spirit and the practical legacy of the resistance. As he put it so presciently in “If I Must Die,” in his death, his life and work have become a tale, a tale that will long outlive the names and the acts and the hopes of his killers:
At the time I first wrote, a few months after Alareer's murder, the recordable death toll from Israel's genocidal campaign had already exceeded forty thousand; at least 75 percent of Gaza's population, or 1.7 million people, according to the United Nations, had been displaced and forced to seek refuge in the ever-shrinking, supposedly safe zones of Gaza, where none are safe from Israel's unrelenting bombardment and shelling; some 70 percent of Gaza's housing stock had been destroyed and the population, denied access to water, food, medical supplies, shelter, and sanitation by Israel's criminal blockade, faced death by famine or disease if not by bombing. It might therefore seem misplaced to single out for celebration and mourning the life and the death of one individual.5 And yet those who do so are not wrong but are recognizing the insidious colonial intent that Alareer's assassination symbolizes and encapsulates. Among the structures demolished in Israel's relentless assault, in addition to the hospitals that have been systematically and notoriously targeted, have been schools, universities, including the Islamic University where Alareer taught, and cultural centers. At the time, well over one hundred journalists had been killed, often in their homes along with numerous family members, and many of Gaza's writers and teachers had been detained, injured, or killed, including at least 221 teachers by January 2024.6 Before he, too, was murdered, Alareer had already had to witness the deaths of three of his mentees and fellow writers: Huda al-Sousi, Raed Qaddoura, and Mohammed Hamo.7 Israel's genocidal colonial war does not—and does not intend to—spare from annihilation Gaza's cultural life, any more than its civil infrastructure and vast numbers of its civilian population, which is being devastated by bombs or driven out by what Israel cynically termed a “voluntary migration” coerced by those same bombs. The assault on Gaza's cultural life is a no less intrinsic dimension of the settler-colonial project than its military onslaught; it may even be the most significant and programmatic aspect of that onslaught.
In the 1920s, when Zionism's founding generation had yet to pretend that theirs was anything but a settler-colonial project that aimed at the ethnic cleansing of Palestine's actually existing Indigenous population, Zev Jabotinsky, “godfather” of right-wing Israeli politics, developed his thesis of the necessity of an “iron wall,” a thesis that has in practice, if not always by admission, governed Israel's relation to the Palestinians. Jabotinsky acknowledged that “every indigenous people will resist alien settlers as long as they see any hope of ridding themselves of the danger of foreign settlement. This is how the Arabs will behave and go on behaving so long as they possess a gleam of hope that they can prevent ‘Palestine’ from becoming the Land of Israel.”8 His prescription “to erect an iron wall of Jewish military force”9 has frequently been reinvoked since October 7, whether to describe the miltarized fence around Gaza or to reinvigorate his doctrine.10 Jabotinsky frankly recognized that Zionist settlement would have to proceed “under the protection of a force that is not dependent on the local population, behind an iron wall which they will be powerless to break down.”11 Only confronted with such powerlessness would Palestinians come to “consent” to the Zionist project of colonizing their lands. The principal purpose of military force, according to Jabotinsky, was to induce hopelessness: “As long as the Arabs preserve a gleam of hope that they will succeed in getting rid of us, nothing in the world can cause them to relinquish this hope, precisely because they are not a rabble, but a living people. And a living people will be ready to yield on such fateful issues only when they have given up all hope of getting rid of the alien settlers.”12
We should accordingly stress that for Jabotinsky, “who never wavered in his conviction that Jewish military power was the key factor in the struggle for a state,”13 the aim of the iron wall was not principally that of military conquest: after all, British military and police power continued to shelter and collaborate with Zionism's armed colonization till 1947. The iron wall, to which has now been added Israel's apartheid wall, was intended primarily to reduce the “living people” to hopelessness, to undercut resistance with despair and paralysis or immobility. Though increasingly, from 1948 on, Zionist military force would be devoted to conquest and occupation, ethnic cleansing and massacre, martial law and siege, the initial rationale of the Iron Wall remained operative. Israel's use of force aimed at the transformation of Palestinian psychology, at reducing the will to resist that lay in the Palestinian sense of its own cultural life and identity as a people with an enduring claim to inhabit the land on which was grounded their refusal of “foreign settlement,” of displacement, and of dispossession and theft. For Jabotinsky, Palestinian resistance, precisely because it was a normal and predictable response to Zionist colonialism, would have to be annihilated in the first place by the psychological impact of the spectacle of indomitable force.
Thus we have to understand Israel's sustained attacks on Palestinian cultural institutions and activists as a quite typical settler-colonial strategy aimed at the elimination of the spirit of resistance. They are not the incidental outcome of strikes whose intended targets are military forces or installations, as Israel so often pretends. We can understand Israel's settler project and the contradictions it constantly faces as intertwined features of a belated but typical colonial enterprise. Forged initially at the height of Europe's colonial expansion and in time with the transition of the United States from a century of continental settler expansion into an overseas imperial power, Zionism came late to the game and faced the predicament of becoming a settler state even as the anticolonial movements of the 1950s and 1960s arose to cast that once normative mode of domination into disrepute. Notwithstanding its efforts to cast its foundation as the achievement of independence from the very power that, like a good mother country, had protected, collaborated with, and advanced its settler-colonial ambitions, the threadbare fiction of Israel's claims to be a postcolonial entity was not long in unraveling. Ideologically trapped between the demand to present itself as an exemplary Western democracy, endowed with Westphalian sovereign power, and the need to constantly assert its exceptional status as an ethnic majoritarian state and refuge for an oppressed people, Israel has proved unable to disavow for more than a few short decades what was always apparent to Palestinians, its typicality as a settler colony exercising its own form of the apartheid regimes that every such entity is obliged to impose on a native population that it can only wish away.14 Given this belated arrival on the colonial scene, Israel is also obliged to repeat, if in carefully dissembled forms of pseudolegality, claims to self-defense, or reasons of state, the practices and logics of a long-established mode of domination.
Given this, one is obliged to return with an almost uncanny regularity to the foundational and militantly forthright formulations of the anticolonial theorists of the postwar decolonizing era in order both to clarify and to grasp the logic of the practices that Israel takes such pains to disguise both rhetorically and through their dispersion into discrete acts, laws, and administrative measures.15 Those classic texts of anticolonial analysis offer lessons that remain all too pertinent to the present, in which the modes of past colonial violence repeat themselves with the dismaying predictability of a long parsed logic, their ravages only accelerated by technological renovations. This is especially true when it comes to the rationale for Israel's targeting of Palestine's cultural life and institutions. As the great Kenyan writer, anticolonial cultural activist, and theorist of decolonization Ngugi Wa Thiong'o realized:
Imperialism, led by the USA, presents the struggling peoples of the earth and all those calling for peace, democracy and socialism with the ultimatum: accept theft or death.
The oppressed and the exploited of the earth maintain their defiance: liberty from theft. But the biggest weapon wielded and actually daily unleashed by imperialism against that collective defiance is the cultural bomb. The effect of a cultural bomb is to annihilate a people's belief in their names, in their languages, in their environment, in their heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities and ultimately in themselves. It makes them see their past as one wasteland of non-achievement and it makes them want to distance themselves from that wasteland. . . . It even plants serious doubts about the moral rightness of struggle. Possibilities of triumph or victory are seen as remote, ridiculous dreams. The intended results are despair, despondency and a collective death-wish.16
Every colonizing power has sought to destroy Indigenous cultural life in some manner, whether by negating the value and validity of that culture, by seeking to eliminate it through imposed schooling in the colonial language and the destruction of Indigenous forms of education or cultural transmission, or through the assassination of its cultural figures: the pattern persists in every colonial location, from Lord Macaulay's celebrated and entirely uninformed pronouncement in 1835 that “a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia” to South Africa's effort to force Black students to study Afrikaans in segregated schools that led to the Soweto demonstrations in 1976 and the massacre that ensued, only to invigorate the national and global antiapartheid movement.17 As Patrick Wolfe argued, the “elimination of the native” does not only take the form of genocide but also deploys all the tools of assimilation and cultural destruction available. As he affirms, “Settler colonialism is inherently eliminatory” precisely because it is crucial to “access to territory.” And, as any Zionist would agree, “Territoriality is settler colonialism's specific, irreducible element.”18
Among the techniques of elimination that Wolfe argues succeed the initial phase of violent genocide is a whole set of tactics aimed at the cultural and even biological assimilation of the Native population and the erasure of its cultural identity.19 Strikingly, with the exception of the transformation of property title and the renaming of the land and its landmarks, Israel has largely avoided using the assimilative techniques of elimination that Wolfe enumerates. Even the Hebrew-language requirement for advanced education and in Israeli political life fails to eliminate Arabic as the quotidian language of most ’48 Palestinians. This does not mean, however, that Israel is not a settler colony. Rather, its racist will to eliminate the Palestinians from the land of Eretz Israel runs so deep, as if a guilty stain that must be erased, that any effort to assimilate them, biologically or culturally, would be anathema. Accordingly, settler-colonial elimination has taken the form of what Rashid Khalidi has termed a “negationist narrative.”20 From the slogan of Zionists less honest than Jabotinsky, “a land without people for a people without land,” to Golda Meir's famous denial that there was a Palestinian people, echoed lately by Netanyahu's fascist finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, Israel's determination to erase the Palestinian presence has found its discursive expression in what Edward Said called Palestinian “civil extinction,” expressed in “actively destroying as many Arab traces as it could.” 21 Cultural elimination has always proceeded in time with the programmatic physical elimination of Palestinians in the campaigns of massacre and ethnic cleansing that Plan Dalet prescribed in the Nakba of 1947 – 48 and that have occurred periodically ever since. As the great Martinican poet and anticolonial activist Aimé Césaire succinctly put it in his Discourse on Colonialism (1950), colonialism is a “forgetting machine.”22
Within Israel itself, more than sixty discriminatory laws, from the denial of the right of Palestinian refugees to return to the denial of the right for family unification, from the legalization of racial exclusion by communities to the refusal of citizenship to the effectively annexed Palestinian residents of occupied East Jerusalem, are designed to ensure demographic control over Palestinian numbers.23 The tightly woven regime of discrimination that grounds the self-described Jewish state's denial of basic human rights both to its Palestinian minority and to its subject populations in the occupied Palestinian territories constitutes an apartheid system of racially based differential treatment and makes nonsense of its claim to be a democracy. Zionism's efforts to establish control over biological and demographic reproduction of Palestinian life, which found their most absurd expression in the Israeli term for Palestinians who managed to return to their homes after the first phase of the Nakba in 1948, “present absentees,” goes hand in hand with the more openly violent assault on the institutions and practitioners of its cultural reproduction.24 As Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian has put it:
Israel surveils, counts and manages Palestinians to ensure that they do not resist, express their political views, raise the issue of their identity as Palestinians or produce too many children who might change the demographics of the ruling majority. . . . To ensure that Palestinian numbers do not increase, Israel legislates laws and creates additional systems of control that deny the rights of unauthorized individuals to unify their families, return to their home/land in a lawful manner or access their social networks.25
The obsession with demographic control is matched by the drive to annihilate the memory of a distinct Palestinian cultural life. Alongside Israel's military Dahiya Doctrine,26 which, in open violation of international humanitarian law and the Geneva conventions, explicitly calls for the destruction of civilians and civilian infrastructure as a tactic aimed at liquidating support for resistance, runs a long history of appropriation and destruction of archives, from the theft of Palestinian libraries and other cultural artifacts, including crucial legal and historical documents, sequestered in Israeli libraries as Abandoned Property, to the looting of the research center of the Institute for Palestine Studies in Beirut in 1982 and to the targeted bombing of schools, university buildings, and libraries in each Israeli assault on Gaza down to the present war, in which every past record of cultural destruction has been far exceeded. The willful theft or destruction of cultural materials all over historic Palestine, including heritage sites and buildings as well as historic Palestinian villages from which whole populations had been ethnically cleansed prior to their demolition, demonstrates an ongoing and consistent pattern of attempts to erase the cultural continuity of Palestinian life.27 To invoke Césaire again, colonialism means “societies drained of their essence, cultures trampled underfoot, institutions undermined, lands confiscated, religions smashed, magnificent artistic creations destroyed, extraordinary possibilities wiped out.”28 Israel's intent for decades reveals itself as the annihilation of all the possibilities that a Palestinian future would embody.
And yet Palestinian artists and poets continue to resist the annihilation of their history, their intensely creative existence as a culture, their imagination of futures liberated from domination. It would seem that this resistance in the form of inventive persistence enrages the colonizer. The targeting of material culture, literalizing Ngugi's “cultural bomb,” goes along with a no less consistent pattern of assassinations and detentions of cultural figures over decades. We may say their names, or at least a few of them, since their names are legion: Ghassan Kanafani, painter and writer, assassinated by a Mossad car bomb in Beirut in July 1972, along with his niece Lamis; the poet Kamal Nasser, assassinated in his home in West Beirut by Israeli commandos in April 1973; and Abdel Wael Zwaiter, writer and translator assassinated by Mossad in Rome in October 1972—all of whom “were not ‘terrorists,’ but the most prominent voices of a national movement, voices Israel was determined to stifle.”29 In the present Israeli war on Gaza, the assassinations continue with the same logic: in addition to Alareer and his students, Israel has targeted Sufyan Tayeh, a leading researcher in physics and applied mathematics and president of Islamic University, killed along with his family in an Israeli air strike on December 2;30 Ahmed Abu Artema, writer and nonviolent activist, founder of the Great March of Return in 2018, wounded in an Israeli strike that also killed his son Abboud and five other family members; novelist and poet Hiba Abu Nada, killed in an Israeli air strike in October 2023.31 Other writers and poets have been arrested for their temerity: Mosab Abu Toha, poet and founder of the now destroyed Edward Said Library in Gaza,32 detained and beaten by Israeli forces in November 2023; the poet Dareen Tatour, imprisoned or placed under house arrest for several years until her conviction in 2018 on charges of incitement to violence and support for terror organizations—all for disseminating a poem praising Palestinian resistance on social media;33 Mahmoud Darwish, himself a “present absentee,” imprisoned for reciting poetry and traveling between villages without a permit under Israel's martial laws that targeted Palestinians in the 1960s, placed under house arrest when his poem “Identity Card” was turned into a protest song. After repeated arrests at the hands of Israeli authorities, Darwish eventually went into exile and found refuge in Beirut, where he witnessed the plundering of the Palestinian archives in which he had worked during the Israeli assault on the PLO in Lebanon in 1982 and faced expulsion once again.34
As historian Rashid Khalidi writes:
[Israel's] long-standing policy of liquidating Palestinian leaders, inherited from the Zionist movement during the late Mandate period, aimed at eliminating the Palestinian reality, demographically, ideationally, and politically. Assassinations were thus a central element in Israel's ambition to transform the entire country, from the river to the sea, from an Arab to a Jewish one.35
We can add to Khalidi's account the ongoing spectacle of Israel's efforts to achieve Palestine's cultural elimination, including its assassination or punitive detention of its cultural voices. Ngugi, as we saw, offered an explanation for the relentless attack of colonial states on the cultural life of the colonized. Like its militarist counterpart, the iron wall, the targeting of culture and its institutions aims at inducing a sense of hopelessness and despair. And yet, as the history of every anticolonial movement shows, this effort to induce despair and passivity among the colonized is rarely if ever successful for long. The organization and practice of resistance is never separable from the revival of an inventive and innovative cultural movement, one that is innovative precisely because of the constantly evolving situations to which it must respond.
Refaat Alareer knew this history and knew that even in his death he would not be alone. He was one in a long and honored lineage of writers and artists whose cultural resistance, which is also the cultural persistence and ongoing life of Palestinians everywhere, Israel has always tried and failed to eliminate, just as it has sought to negate the existence of Palestinians as a people with the unceded right to self-determination and a generations-long presence on the land that (in Israel's own ugly and historically resonant expression) it relentlessly seeks to Judaize. Nor did he ever underestimate the crucial place of literature in the work of anticolonial resistance: he always rejected the temptation to defend writers who fell victims of settler-colonial violence by minimizing the central importance of their work to Palestinian liberation. Speaking of the Palestinian poet Fadwa Tuqan, he argued against that tendency:
We always fall into this trap of saying, “she was arrested for just writing poetry!” We do this a lot, even us believers in literature. “Why would Israel arrest somebody or put someone under house arrest, she only wrote a poem?”
So, we contradict ourselves sometimes. We believe in the power of literature changing lives as a means of resistance, as a means of fighting back—and then at the end of the day, we say, “She just wrote a poem!” We shouldn't be saying that.36
Alareer recognized that, precisely as the settler-colonial enterprise is determined to eliminate not only the physical but also the cultural life of the colonized, every trace of whose prior existence on the land it seeks to erase, what Ngugi calls “the higher and more creative culture of resolute struggle” becomes not a luxury but an indispensable mode of resistance.37 Palestinian creativity in every sphere—poetry, film, theater, and the visual arts—and its flourishing and innovation in the face of an ever-intensifying Israeli effort to complete its conquest resonates with the lessons of decolonizing struggles everywhere and in every epoch. The Guinean – Cape Verdean anticolonial militant and theorist Amilcar Cabral offered in 1970 an analysis that could be transferred from the Portuguese colonies of West Africa to Palestine now:
History teaches us that, in certain circumstances, it is very easy for the foreigner to impose his domination on a people. But it likewise teaches us that, whatever the material aspects of this domination, it can be maintained only by the permanent and organized repression of the cultural life of the people concerned. . . . In fact, to take up arms to dominate a people is, above all, to take up arms to destroy, or at least to neutralize and to paralyze their cultural life. For as long as part of that people can have a cultural life, foreign domination cannot be sure of its perpetuation.38
Accordingly, “foreign domination, for its own security requires cultural oppression and the attempt at direct or indirect destruction of the essential elements of the culture of the dominated people.”39 The two-thousand-pound bomb dropped on closely inhabited civilian areas finds its counterpart in the cultural bomb whose role is to eliminate the vitality of the colonized's forms of life. As Cabral grasped, precisely to the extent that colonial domination's “denying to the dominated people their own historical process, necessarily denies their cultural process,” their resistance must pass by way of cultural struggle: “national liberation is necessarily an act of culture.”40 It is so because, as Cabral understood, the cultural struggle in effect, though its own creativity and transformative energy, returns their history to the people: it restores to them the knowledge of their past, in all its contradictions and defeats as well as in its continuities and resources; it restores to them their historical agency as shapers of their possibilities and not as victims of what Frantz Fanon perceived as a colonial culture that had become paralyzed or fixed in “immobility.”41
Cultural struggle, as Refaat Alareer taught and practiced it, is not simply a matter of offering more accurate representations of Palestinian life, important as that task may be: if the tale that is his life—like the stories of so many of the writers who, while numerous, are not just numbers—is one to pass on to the future, it is also a tale that shapes the future, that opens its potentialities in yet unrealized ways. In opening future imaginaries, the work of a resistant culture refuses to reproduce the brutal antagonisms and apartheid mentalities of the settler-colonial logic. In his insistence always on recognizing the humanity even of those that sought to kill him and other Palestinians whom he loved, he echoed Darwish, who, in the midst of the Israeli siege of Ramallah in 2002 during the second Intifada, wrote:
While Alareer never failed to condemn the brutality of Israeli siege and its repeated wars on Palestine and noted the hideous irony of their racist logic's continuity with the anti-Semitic brutality of Nazism, that recognition did not culminate in returning violent hatred with hate. On the contrary, as his poem “I Am You” reflected, the Palestinians are, in Edward Said's formulation, caught in the impossible predicament of being the victims of the victims, except that, in the case of the Jewish soldier who now holds the gun, “The victim has evolved, backward, / Into a victimizer”:
The Palestinian culture that Israel is desperate to annihilate continues to haunt it. But in doing so, the Palestinian imaginary is not the ghost of time past but that of the future: a future that is not trapped in the doleful repetition of hatred and annihilation but imagines the possibility of a life in common predicated on the realization of the coexistence of difference in all its multiplicity. That would be the advent of poetic justice as the method and practice of decolonization.
Parts of this essay are revised from “For an Aesthetics of Resistance,” in the Nordic Journal of Aesthetics 67 (2024): 232 – 42.
Notes
For Alareer's joke about the whiteboard Expo marker that was his only weapon, see al-Shorbaji, “Our Stories Matter.” On the ways in which Israel's targeted assassinations—“extralegal, arbitrary, and summary executions, which are prohibited by law”—gradually make new international law and norms as “violations become the norm rather than the exception,” see Erakat, Justice for Some, 178, 185. Chapter 5, “From Occupation to Warfare,” in Noura Erakat's book gives an invaluable account of how, with US collaboration, Israel succeeded in exploiting the context of the “war on terror” to legitimate its war crimes, dangerously “asserting that its unprecedented conditions authorize it to create new law for itself and everyone else” (183). The United States has not been slow to normalize its own targeted assassinations, especially under the Obama and now the Biden administrations.
Any figure one gives for the levels of destruction and fatalities in Israel's genocidal assault on Gaza will inevitably be fluid and unstable, not because of the unreliability of the sources, as is sometimes claimed, but due to the fact that they grow more appalling daily at a rate difficult to keep up with, especially given the interval between writing and publication. But on May 20, 2024, Edem Wosornu, director, Operations and Advocacy Division, United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, gave the figure for displacement of 1.7 million people (United Nations, “Speakers in Security Council”). Architectural Record reports the figure of 70 percent for the destruction of housing (Schulman, “Experts Assess Housing Damage”), while the ever-mounting death toll reported by the Ministry of Health in Gaza is certainly an underestimate, given that many of the dead remain unreachable under the rubble of their homes. Al Jazeera provides a live tracker of statistics from Gaza that is largely reliable and regularly updated (AJLabs, “Israel-Gaza War in Maps and Charts”).
The number of journalists killed remains uncertain, as does any death toll, given the scale of Israel's assault. It is certainly far higher at the time of the ceasefire (January 2025) than at the time of writing. One hundred was the figure given by the government media office in Gaza, December 23, 2023 (Al Jazeera, “Gaza Media Office”). The Committee to Protect Journalists gave the more conservative figure of eighty-two, January 14, 2024 (CPJ, “Journalist Casualties in the Israel-Gaza War”), and Al Jazeera's live tracker reports one hundred killed as of April 5, 2024. In either case, the numbers are the highest recorded for any conflict, and Palestinian journalists have widely charged that they are being deliberately targeted. The UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reported that “according to the Ministry of Education in Gaza, between 7 October 2023 and 2 January 2024, 4,119 students and 221 teachers were killed, while 7,536 students and 703 teachers injured across the Gaza Strip” (OCHA, “Hostilities in the Gaza Strip and Israel”).
Work by all three of these young writers can be found via Electronic Intifada. For work by Huda al-Sousi, see https://electronicintifada.net/people/huda-al-sousi-0; for work by Raed Qaddoura, see https://electronicintifada.net/content/why-has-gazas-sea-turned-black/35671; for work by Mohammed Hamo, see https://electronicintifada.net/content/gaza-photographer-captured-and-tortured-israel/38371.
Cited in Shlaim, Iron Wall, 13.
See, for example, Swaine et al., “How Hamas Exploited Israel's Reliance”; Dromi, “After October 7, Israel Must Finally Build.”
Cited in Shlaim, Iron Wall, 13.
Cited in Shlaim, Iron Wall, 14. The description of Jabotinsky as “godfather of the political trend that has dominated Israel since 1977” (i.e., of the Likud party and its even more right-wing allies from the settler movement) is from Khalidi, Hundred-Years War on Palestine, 12.
On Israel's contradictory oscillation between typicality and exceptionality, see Lloyd, “Settler Colonialism and the State of Exception,” 59 – 80.
Makdisi, Palestine Inside Out, remains an exhaustive study of the legalistic contortions of Israel's mode of maintaining a carefully dissembled apartheid regime, though the passage of the Nationality Law in 2018 has in many respects obviated its efforts to disguise apartheid by way of dispersion of its practices. Mor, “On Severance: Fragments on the Time of Inqisām,” analyzes the segmented nature of Palestinian life under settler rule as a distinctive form of Israeli domination.
Macaulay confesses his ignorance of the literature he is dismissing:
I have no knowledge of either Sanscrit or Arabic. But I have done what I could to form a correct estimate of their value. I have read translations of the most celebrated Arabic and Sanscrit works. I have conversed both here and at home with men distinguished by their proficiency in the Eastern tongues. I am quite ready to take the Oriental learning at the valuation of the Orientalists themselves. I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia. The intrinsic superiority of the Western literature is, indeed, fully admitted by those members of the Committee who support the Oriental plan of education. (Macaulay, “Indian Education,” 722)
A detailed account of the Soweto Uprising and its causes can be found in SAHO, “June 16 Soweto Youth Uprising.”
On Plan Dalet and the elimination of Palestinians it projected, see Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Golda Meir's remarks are also in Khalidi, Hundred-Years War on Palestine, 106. For Smotrich's remarks, see Gold, Tal, and Salman, “Israeli Minister Says.” The United States’ rebuke matches negationism with amnesia, forgetting as it does that the acceptable face of Zionism is no less committed to the negation and elimination of Palestinians than the extreme Right. It is just better schooled in concealing its aims. For civil extinction, see Said, “Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims,” 103.
For documentation of Israel's plethora of discriminatory laws, see Adalah's “Discriminatory Laws” database.
Said offered a scathing account of this designation for the original inhabitants of what was to become the state of Israel as “a legal fiction of Kafkaesque subtlety” (“Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims,” 105).
Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Security Theology, 56. See also Pappe, Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, chap. 12, “Fortress Israel: The ‘Demographic Problem,’ ” 249 – 56. That Shalhoub-Kevorkian, an internationally renowned professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, was herself arrested and subject to interrogation techniques tantamount to torture in April 2024 for the expression of her political views and for affirming the settler-colonial status of Israel is no small confirmation of the generality of the application of Israel's apartheid legal apparatus to all Palestinians, without exception.
On the Dahiya Doctrine, publicly cited by current War Cabinet member Major General Gadi Eizenkot, see Khalidi, “Dahiya Doctrine.”
On the looting of the research center of the Institute for Palestine Studies in Beirut in 1982, see Hijazi, “Israeli Looted Archives of P.L.O.” Among recent examples of such destruction, during the most recent phase of Israel's war on Gaza would be the Omari Mosque (BBC Online, “Images Show Major Damage”) and the Church of Saint Porphyrius (Veltman, “More Than One Hundred Gaza Heritage Sites”), both bombed on the pretext of “pursuing Hamas.”
Work by Abu Artema can be found at https://electronicintifada.net/people/ahmed-abu-artema. Work by Hiba Abu Nada can be found at https://mizna.org/literary/not-just-passing/.
For Darwish's account of these latter events, see his memoir, Memory for Forgetfulness. If I have focused throughout on the writers targeted in Israel's various assaults on Palestinian culture on account of Alareer's own avocation, this is not to dismiss the creativity of Palestinian cultural production in other modes, from music to filmmaking, nor the obstacles all face in the form of occupation and displacement as well as destruction and censorship. But see, for example, on the visual arts, Toukan, Politics of Art; Lloyd, “Redemptive Constellations.”
Alareer, If I Must Die, 107. On Tuqan, see Khalidi, “ ‘This Land, My Sister, Is a Woman.’ ”
Cabral, “National Culture,” 140. It is worth noting in the current context that Cabral's essay was originally delivered as a speech in honor of Dr. Eduardo Mondlane, president of the Mozambican liberation movement, FRELIMO, “who in a cowardly way was assassinated on 3 February 1969, in Dar-es-Salaam by the Portuguese colonialists and their allies” (138). Cabral concludes by remarking that “if Portuguese colonialism and imperialist agents can still with impunity murder a man like Dr. Eduardo Mondlane, it is because something putrid continues to decay in the heart of mankind: imperialist domination. It is because men of good will, defenders of the culture of peoples, have not yet accomplished their duty over the planet” (154). The Israeli assassination of Dr. Refaat Alareer, with impunity, means that we still have that task to accomplish.
