What is happening in Gaza? On the face of it, a simple question. All of us have seen those images and videos of mass destruction and annihilation, of a people being cynically dismembered, their homes being gleefully annihilated by smiling soldiers waving Israeli flags. We know what is happening in Gaza. Or so we seem to think.
Gaza exists, even if tenuously so, in a permanent state of exception imposed upon it by the exceptional state of Israel. So, what is happening in Gaza? The names for what is happening range from a struggle for revolutionary liberation, an anti-colonial uprising against settler colonialism, a new Nakba or another form of ethnic cleansing, apartheid and genocide. The more we, so far from Gaza, think we know what is happening there, the more puzzled we become, even though what is happening is pretty clear and obvious: the genocidal brutalisation of an entire people. The problem is not that what is happening in Gaza is unnameable because the name cannot saturate reality; it is unnameable because each name oversaturates reality, and there are already too many such names.
Thinking of Gaza
Soumyabrata Choudhury’s book Thoughts of Gaza Far from Gaza refuses to take this unnameability as an injunction to stop thinking. To think of Gaza is to not just find a name for the events that are happening there, but to answer what kind of event it is. Events have a typology of their own. To think of Gaza, then, is to think of the event that is happening there, in its specificity. These are the four grids within which Choudhury classifies events: they can either be scenarios, situations, states or worlds.
The scenario is the most widespread form within which everyone, from the Israeli state to Western media, is encouraged to think of Gaza. To think of it as a scenario is to bracket it off from its historical context; to think of October 7 as an unthinkable, unimaginable eruption, one which has no context behind it and which must be dealt with as a scenario (for which of course multiple plans of action already exist). “This book”, as Choudhury clearly states, “refuses to enter the black hole of such scenario thinking”. One finds such scenario thinking in even well-intentioned media reports about Gaza, which use forensic technology and intensive investigation to find an objective truth of a scenario: what kinds of bombs were dropped, were they targeting militant or civilian infrastructure, how many people were killed and so on. To think of Gaza as a scenario, or a collection of multiple scenarios, means bracketing it outside its historical situation, which is exactly what the Israeli state would want.
Facing the failure of thinking of Gaza as a scenario, one can, of course, think of the events in Gaza as belonging to a historical situation. Embedded in a historical reality (however contested it may be), this is perhaps the way to think of Gaza. Yet to do so is to overlook the way the historical reality of Zionism is itself overladen with the mystical force of an exceptional experience (the Holocaust). To think of Gaza as a situation must necessarily exclude the exceptional experience (or at least minimize the real effects of its exceptional force), which once again blocks us from thinking of the event in itself.
Can the event of Gaza be thought of as a state of affairs, a state of war, for example? That too seems impossible for Choudhury because of two reasons. Firstly, for the Israeli state, it is not a war of humans against humans, but a process of extermination of what the defence minister called “human animals”. Secondly, to think of it as a state of affairs is to render it permanent and stagnant (what Choudhury calls, in his insightful chapter on the media coverage of Gaza, as a stagnant genocide). In short, to think of it as a state of affairs is to normalise it. This Choudhury, in an act of “non-specialist, public disobedience” refuses to do, because that is what is expected of us, to think of death and destruction in Gaza as part of a “normal” process of history, which has always and will always be one of war.
The only option left, then, is to think of the events in Gaza as the coming into existence of a world. Strangely enough, Choudhury remarks that this view is perhaps the only one unequivocally held by both the Israelis and the Palestinians:
“It is not the individual bodies of Hamas members that must be targeted but the world that is Palestine, of which Hamas is a problematic but real part…the reason for targeting a church or a hospital is not actually the one given by the Israeli military, that Hamas commanders are using civilians as human shields in these places, but the real one that irrespective of whether there are Hamas militants in those places, churches, schools or hospitals are also worlds. Each of these places is part of the real of Palestinian politics; the real of Israel’s war must literally strike against the real of a politics of the world.”
The eruption of a world
What is happening in Gaza is the eruption of a world. But what is a world, if it is neither a scenario, nor a situation nor a state? A remarkable example of a world is provided by Choudhury at the very end of his book. A few Israelis assembled in Tel Aviv protesting the war in Gaza and supporting the Palestinian demand for self-determination. They were too small in number to stay in one place, and therefore to avoid harassment from both police and other Israelis, they kept moving around with their placards. Asked by a reporter what they hoped to achieve, they simply replied, “We want you to know that we exist”. This, Choudhury calls the “trace of a little ‘world’ appearing in Israel, which today is nearly all state and no world”. A world is thus an eruption, a trace or sign of an unconditional existence. This is the secret presupposition tying together both the Israeli assault and the Palestinian resistance: that Palestine is a world, and not a scenario, a situation or a state of affairs.
“A people like any other people” – this was the manifesto of The Journal of Palestine Studies founded by Palestinian writer Elias Sanbar. This manifesto is, Choudhury writes, “a manifesto of singularity and not at all of normalisation…it is a declaration of a desire to be indiscernibly exceptional people among peoples with the larger universal idea that all peoples enjoy the possibility of being such indiscernible exceptions to each other”. To be a world would be to have an uncompromising desire to be “universal without an available historical name”. Which is to say, to be a world is to desire universality; but since this universality does not yet have a name, it requires revolutionary social change. This would mean that the world of Palestine, of which Israel too is a part, demands “fundamental alterations to these societies and synthesise the alterations themselves within a transformed horizon for a new society which can only be called a political horizon”. A world thus erupts like a scenario, is historically embedded like a situation, and demands universality like a state of affairs. Yet it is neither of the three, but something absolutely different, despite efforts from all sides to reduce it to one or the other.
To think of Gaza, far from Gaza, requires not just courage but caution. This book displays not just exemplary courage, but painstaking caution in trying to think of Gaza as a world rather than as a scenario, situation or state. Books are not bombs; they are far more dangerous because they trace the creation of new worlds rather than destroy them. In that sense, this book is a dangerous book, one that asks us not just to think but to respond to the emergence of a new world of politics that resounds in the name of Gaza.
Thoughts of Gaza Far from Gaza, Soumyabrata Choudhury, Navayana.
