Gaza Is No Exception
“How terrible it would have been…to have lived without even attempting to lay claim to one’s portion of the earth; to have lived and died as one had been born, unnecessary and unaccommodated.”
V.S. Naipaul, A House for Mr. Biswas
GAZA must be the watchword of our generation’s socio-political moment. Indeed, reading Rep. Tom Tiffany’s “Guaranteeing Aggressors Zero Admission” Act, which if passed would proscribe the Biden administration from granting visas to noncitizens with Palestinian Authority passports, one can’t help but notice its astonishing modularity. From the sterile technocratic formatting to Tiffany’s substitution of “aggressor” with the more rhetorically sound “alien” in the fine print, GAZA sits comfortably alongside some of the most iconic documents of 21st century statecraft. Be it a Dominican court ruling that defined 200,000 Dominicans of Haitian descent out of existence by declaring them to have been “in transit” and thus bereft of citizenship; a 2019 manual by the Indian government instructing states to build concentration camps to imprison every undocumented migrant they manage to capture; or a memorandum of understanding between the British and Rwandan governments affirming the right of the former to deport asylum seekers to the latter, the message is clear: foreigners need not apply.
Of course, Gaza is more than just a cruel acronym. It’s a place, and one that millions of people get to call home—or at least used to, until the current bloodletting. As of the time of writing, the latter has attained levels far surpassing even the original Palestinian catastrophe, or Nakba, with 100,000 of a population of 2 million having either been killed, wounded, or reported missing. Alongside them, some 18x more have been uprooted from their homes by a combination of Israeli airstrikes, mass destruction of the built environment, and methodical blockages of humanitarian aid: a twisted game of demographic pinball designed to corral most Gazans into a tiny sliver of their homeland and turn the rest over to a fresh generation of settlers. Despite the claimed military necessity of this postmodern lebensraum, the IDF remains no closer to wiping out Hamas than it was four months ago, as exemplified by a recent incident in which one Palestinian militant managed to single-handedly liquidate nearly two dozen Israeli soldiers by prematurely detonating the very fuses they had intended on using to flatten a Gazan suburb. On the contrary, those wishing to divine the State of Israel’s true war aims would do well to observe the demographic dimensions of the current crisis: since October 7, miscarriages in the Gaza Strip have more than quadrupled.
Figure 1: A sample of the destruction Israel has visited on Gaza.
Yet as the crusaders rain hellfire on Palestine’s last bastion of resistance, it’s important that we not lose sight of Rep. Tiffany’s double entendre. For well before Gaza was converted into the killing field it is now, it was a cage, one whose plight was in many ways paradigmatic of the lot of surplus populations the world over. Indeed, Israeli elder statesmen seem to have already cracked this formula, hence why so many of them proudly furnish the strip’s incarceration as a model for autocracies around the globe to follow (or at least used to until Hamas put paid to this mythology last October). Consider the Israel Aerospace Industries’ Heron TP or “Eitan” drone. First deployed to literally shred Palestinians alive during the IDF’s 2008-9 massacre in Gaza, Eitan has since been repackaged for sale to a wide variety of clientele, including the governments of India (34), France (24), Brazil (14), and Australia (10)—each driven, one supposes, by its own attempts to manage unwanted populations. Likewise, Israel’s extensive record of spying on Palestinians was recently noted by Customs and Border Protection (CBP), which has colluded with the Israeli defense contractor Elbit Systems to hunt down migrants along the US-Mexico border. Elbit, which openly flaunts that its products have been “field-proven” on Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, has already erected more than 60 surveillance towers in far-flung areas across the Sonoran desert, with its most recent designs having landed on the Tohono O’odham Indian reservation. The latter, whose territory has been held under continuous US military occupation since the early aughts, provides a stark parallel to Gaza’s own encagement, with one resident telling reporters, “I don’t feel safe with them taking over my community, especially if you look at what’s going on in Palestine—they’re bringing the same thing right over here to this land.”
Both these and numerous other cases emblematize what Australian-German journalist Anthony Loewenstein calls the “Palestine laboratory,” in which Palestinians have effectively been turned into guinea pigs for the capitalist world-system’s ever-evolving attempts to keep “aggressors” out and investors in. This sanguinary World’s Fair finds a natural locus in Gaza, some 50% of whose population had been out of a job well before October 7 (putting aside the handful who were formerly paid peanuts to labor on any of Israel’s many southern desert colonies, or “kibbutzim”). Being always-already cast as surplus, Gazans thus joined the swelling ranks of (ex)-proletarians around the world whose fates have been trapped between the twin poles of indefinite enclosure and preemptive annihilation. Perhaps the analogue closest to home is the decades-long warehousing of Black America, whose own banishment from the realm of production all but guaranteed its perpetual captivity behind bars. And lest it be forgotten, no part of this (literally) globe-spanning assemblage exists which can’t be spun as a necessary form of “self-defense,” whether against the congenitally savage Islamic beast or his counterpart in the militarized inner-city.
On the other hand, Gaza’s profound entanglement with the struggles of the world’s exploited majority has led to a blossoming of solidarities unbound by geography or culture. When the city of Ferguson erupted in protest after the police lynching of Michael Brown, for example, Palestinians (who themselves had been dealing with the IDF’s worst round of carnage at the time) mobilized to share tips on how to weather the effects of tear gas, one of many shared instruments in Israel and America’s repressive toolkit. In return, a delegation of black activists, artists, musicians, and journalists staged a flash mob in the Palestinian city of Nazareth calling for an end to the Israeli occupation, with one participant proclaiming, “We came here to Palestine to stand in love and revolutionary struggle with our brothers and sisters.” In a similar fashion, Palestinian Christians and Armenians have exchanged messages of solidarity as both groups face the prospect of eviction from their respective homelands. And the pairings don’t end there: Palestine and Namibia; Palestine and Kashmir; Palestine and Chile. Wherever the logic of carcerality asserts itself, Gaza reminds us that its victims will never pass away into oblivion without a fight.
Figure 2: A Canadian girl holds a sign reading: “None of us will be free until Palestine is.”
I will close this discussion with a brief note on historical memory. In the immediate aftermath of Hamas’ strike on the Zionist entity, Palestine advocates the world over scrambled to remind foreign observers that “history did not begin on October 7.” Though a welcome intervention insofar as it brought into relief Israel’s century-spanning history of running roughshod over the rights of Palestinians, this call perhaps risks clouding Zionist violence in the very region of Palestine which made the former so (in)famous last October. In particular, Bedouin Palestinians residing in the Naqab (or “Negev”) desert to Gaza’s east have been subject to a decades-long campaign of ethnic cleansing by the State of Israel designed to cram them into unlivable pockets of their homeland and prime the rest for Jewish settlement (sound familiar?). Those among them who have thus far managed to evade this process occupy what the Israeli government calls “illegal villages,” which are both denied tax-funded services like electricity, healthcare, and piped water and at constant risk of demolition by state authorities. Yet what makes the condition of these Palestinians so notable is that, unlike their counterparts in Gaza and the West Bank, they are (de jure) recognized as full-fledged citizens of Israel and thus in possession of the same rights which (de facto) accrue to their Jewish countrymen.
By contrast (or in addition), the very word “bedouin” is sometimes used by Anglophones as a catch-all term for anyone who goes the way of the nomad. Though it’s rarely stated out loud, these uses often carry a stigma that contrasts implicitly with the valor of sedentarity (an honorific which is itself tied up with numerous others, e.g. “citizen,” “male,” “white,” etc). The history of colonial terror is rife with such dualisms, and the Bedouins of the Naqab embody perhaps their most perfect manifestation: endowed with all the amenities of a rights-bearing subject on paper, yet cast off as human refuse all the same. They, along with the beaten souls of Gaza, the West Bank, and the world writ large, will largely set the tone for the rest of the 21st century. And we here in the West would do well to ensure that their efforts find success; our collective liberation demands it.
by NEO CHATTERJEE
If you are willing and able to financially support the people of Gaza during their most urgent hour of need yet, consider donating to any of the following organizations:
Palestine Children’s Relief Fund
Palestine Red Crescent Society
United Nations Relief and Works Agency
On the other hand, Israel’s war machine is only as powerful as we allow it to be. With that said, you might also consider boycotting all or most of the companies chronicled in this article to ensure that as few of your dollars as possible are being used to support genocide.
Finally, I have compiled below a list of charities servicing people whose respective plights (in one way or another) mirror Gaza’s own:
Save the Children, International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, International Rescue Committee, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (International)
Tigray Disaster Relief Fund (Tigray region of northern Ethiopia)
Eastern Congo Initiative (DRC)
UNICEF - Somalia Appeal (Horn of Africa)
GlobalGiving - Afghan Refugees Support Program in Pakistan (Afghan refugees in Pakistan)
Sunflower of Peace (Ukraine)
Western Sahara Support Group (Western Sahara)
Border Angels (US-Mexico border)
SOS MEDITERRANEE (Refugees stranded at the Mediterranean Sea)