Fate and Necropolitics in Gaza

It is hard to stomach images of the catastrophic ethnic cleansing Israel is committing against Palestinians in Gaza. Thousands are dead, including thousands of children. Half of the residential buildings are uninhabitable or rubble. Public facilities are destroyed. There are tanks on the street. All basic necessities are gone or on the verge. Ghoulishly, Netanyahu has announced that this is only the beginning.

Necropolitics is the term Achille Mbembe gives for the ways in which states deploy power to determine how people live and who must die. Whole populations and categories of people are thrust into conditions of precarious or even doomed existence, on the precipice of disaster from the legacies of colonialism, neoliberalism, climate change, disinvestment, policing, structural violence, and war. The predictable police murders and early deaths of Black and Indigenous Americans, the mass casualties of some pseudo-natural disaster Over There, the everyday violence of sweatshop labor in the Global South, the entire nations doomed to be climate victims and refugees in the coming century... these are not accidental distributions of death, but rather are governed.

One of the most chilling aspects of necropolitics is the way in which feelings of necessity and inevitability are engineered in relation to this distribution of death. Our perception of time is altered, becoming a vehicle to cart us into that charnel house future. When Israel announces that its “right to defend itself” – and its position of domination over a colonized population – is so paramount, so eternal, that entire cities have to be leveled, what can Palestinians do but die? When Israel informs families ahead of time that it will be destroying their community in the near future, how can it be anything but the Palestinians’ fault for continuing to live where Israel must bomb? How can the claims of mere mortal Palestinians ever compete with the immortality demands of the Israeli state? No, the Palestinians must be the problem, and must be cut to fit the Procrustean bed of Zionism.

A final aspect of the necropolitics we see in this genocide is rather a bit of necromancy, and while it is commonplace historically, it is something that we don’t approach with enough skepticism and unease. The dead cannot speak, but are constantly invoked, reanimated, and pressed into service. This can be done for liberatory ends or to cultivate empowering histories to guide the struggles of groups fighting oppression (see the #sayhername tactic that has memorialized Black women killed by police in the U.S. for a local example). It should properly horrify us, however, when the dead are conscripted to facilitate greater violence and more death. How long will the 1,400 Israelis killed by Hamas be marched to help kill a far larger number of Palestinians? What is the ethics of this when many of those Israelis who were killed were critics and opponents of Israeli occupation and apartheid?

When drowning in voices that try to tell us what fate must be, and at whose expense, we must listen closely for the voices of those who would be damned. One such voice I have turned to is the poet Mahmoud Darwish, and his reflection on his experience living under Israeli occupation, which begins:

Here on the slopes of hills, facing the dusk and the cannon of time

Close to the gardens of broken shadows,

We do what prisoners do,

And what the jobless do:

We cultivate hope.

by James Petrocelli