1. Resistance, pathology, madness

Liberationist writings published since October 7 offer a different canvas on which to thread material and psychic reality together. The writings of scholar and writer Abdaljawad Omar are among the most compelling. Omar has insistently refocused our attention on the question of Palestinians’ practices of resistance, while not shying away from their complex psycho-affective undertow. His English-language writings inhabit a variety of registers and include unrestrainedly political-philosophical articles, essays, and journalism; his words can be found in literary and other kinds of magazines, in academic journals, and on news websites.Footnote ¹⁴

In November 2023, Omar made two powerful interventions responding to two widely read articles on Palestine and Israel published in the internationally distributed London Review of Books—one by the magazine’s US editor, writer Adam Shatz, and the other by philosopher Judith Butler.Footnote ¹⁵ In the earlier of Omar’s interventions, he pointed, nearly fifty years on from Said’s foundational work on Orientalism as a “Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient,” to the “expansive intellectual labyrinth” that “haunts Western intellectuals.”Footnote ¹⁶ Omar argued that in this labyrinth, Palestinians are persistently melted down into victims and the multiple political rationalities of resistance disappear. One purpose of this labyrinth is to keep “the Palestinian experience” safely at a distance. There, western intellectuals need never engage with the experiences of Palestinians themselves, nor with the world as Palestinians perceive it. This has many consequences—not the least that it makes it almost impossible to consider the logics of violence.Footnote ¹⁷

Omar regarded Shatz’s “Vengeful pathologies” as an exemplary instance of that labyrinth. Shatz had addressed October 7, as well as offering a reading of how the revolutionary, writer, and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon understood anticolonial violence.Footnote ¹⁸ While acknowledging Palestinians’ rightful rage at Israel’s ever-intensifying repression, Shatz had read Hamas’s actions as sadistic and vengeful—arguing that they transformed the Nova music festival into a “blood-drenched bacchanalia.” Shatz leaned on one passage from Fanon to lend weight to the argument he himself wanted to make about the need for anticolonial fighters to withstand the “temptations of primordial revenge” (for Shatz, the Hamas fighters clearly did not). Shatz, Omar argued, did not allow Fanon’s complex assessment of the necessity of violence within an anticolonial struggle to extend to the Palestinian situation. Fanon’s radical vision was thereby lost—a vision that insists on understanding how anticolonial struggle works to liberate the metropole from itself, as well as the colony from unending oppression. Shatz ended up, instead, only being able to see Palestinian fighters’ actions in October 2023 as helping to usher in a dystopian and nightmarish fascist future, rather than that which holds the potential, however uncertain, to open up different futures.Footnote ¹⁹ That, for Omar, meant closing the temporal horizon back down. Shatz could not but then position himself on the side of those Omar described as “offer[ing] us the monsters so we remain committed to existing structures.”Footnote ²⁰ Omar, in contrast, insisted that Palestinian resistance, which he acknowledged is built on a “highly tangled architecture of emotions and passions,” employs that tangle and whatever “meagre power” it has “to widen the horizon of political possibilities.”Footnote ²¹

Omar’s disagreements with Shatz did not disavow the complex role that violence plays in the psyche and in the fight for liberation. He insisted that Palestinian violence must be understood dialectically in the context of sustained oppression. Such violence does not burst out spontaneous, one-dimensional, gorged on hate and desires for revenge.Footnote ²² The title of Omar’s response—“Hopeful pathologies” in contrast to Shatz’s “Vengeful pathologies”—acknowledges the psychic as well as material deformations effected by colonialism, while offering a different temporal horizon.

Throughout Omar’s writings one finds, simultaneously, an acknowledgment of the closeness that certain practices of resistance can have to what has been described through the language of “pathology,” or to indeed to a kind of “madness” and his refusal to collapse modes of material resistance into psychological and psychologized dramas. In his essay responding to Shatz, he pointed out that Shatz was right to emphasize Fanon’s caution over any “nihilistic celebrations of the psychological utility of violence” within decolonial struggles. In an article where Omar has used philosopher Bataille’s term informe (“the formless”) to address resistance as a kind of “anticoncept,” Omar expressed frustration with how resistance can be reduced to a kind of Fanon-inflected “psychological liberation.” He proposed that resistance ought not to be understood through psychology but as, fundamentally, “an effort to deform the colonial condition.”Footnote ²³ In one interview, Omar averred that resistance is a “complex phenomenon” that does indeed include “psycho-affective elements.” But he insisted that it must always be analyzed through its being “grounded in the concrete.” In addition to once again rejecting explanations of resistance that rely on the categories and depictions of an interiorized psychology, he also demanded that it be treated neither as sacred (where it can so easily be fetishistically admired) nor profane.Footnote ²⁴

It is in Omar’s essay “Crosshairs,” which considers what it is to live life perpetually in the crosshairs of the Israeli sniper, that we find, I suggest, some of his most startling representations of how to approach resistance and the terrain of the psyche together.Footnote ²⁵ Within that essay, Omar placed a short story, in which he provided a crystalline description of the encounter that “[his] friend Ibrahim” had with an Israeli sniper:

Omar narrated how Ibrahim narrated to Omar that moment of awaiting the sniper’s bullet as he advanced with the stone in his hand. It is a moment for Ibrahim that contained no subjective retrospection. This event revisited some of the essay’s earlier passages in which Omar described himself being shot by a sniper: “in that moment, you do not summon a past or display a successive stream of memories, the stuff that makes you recall who you are,” nor is there a “future to speak of.” “You are present,” Omar emphasized, simply “in the consciousness that you appear as a target.” We also find similarities between Omar’s narration of how, subsequent to being shot at by the sniper, he “gradually absorbed the sniper’s vigilant eye into every bone of my precarious body” and Ibrahim’s description of how “we bear an inner sniper inside us.” We see here Omar’s preoccupation with how the colonizer’s acts violently interfere with how the colonized come to experience inner life and in particular relations between past, present, and future.

Omar took up a specific event from his friend’s life to answer the political-philosophical question of whether “there is life in being rendered killable.” As he interpreted Ibrahim’s account, Omar reworked some of its terms. The refiguration of “madness” I regard as crucial. Ibrahim invoked both insanity and madness after having said that he stood “awaiting [his] fate” with the sniper’s bullet. It could be that Ibrahim stated, “You may deem me insane,” because he did not run for cover; because he described having a sniper as an “inner companion”; because he made the startling statement about the “rightful place” of sniper, bullet, and himself; or because he laughed. (It could be because of all of these.) Omar, reflecting on Ibrahim’s account, picked up the term madness and explicitly associated it with resistance. “If one questions whether resistance is a form of madness,” he wrote, “the answer is yes, it is indeed mad to resist the supremacy of math and machine.” Whereas it is not impossible to read “madness” in Ibrahim’s account as having an association with what could be construed as a kind of passivity (he stood “awaiting [his] fate” with the bullet), Omar, in taking up madness, tied it to a strong active verb, “to affirm.” The phrase “to affirm existence” closed Omar’s essay.

“Crosshairs” argued that there are two ways to live in, and submit to, the crosshairs of the sniper. The first is to dodge an anticipated bullet. But that, for Omar, would be to remain within the constraints of a scene which the hunter directs and which the colonizer positions himself as omnipotent. The second is “to stand defiantly, touched with a dash of madness” in an act that submits utterly “to the now.” That was the route that Ibrahim took, and that submission, in its audacious stand against the deathly logics of Israel’s superior technologies of killing, is a kind of madness that was also for Omar a mode of resistance. How so?

Recall how “Crosshairs” has shown that the sniper being there, or always about to be there, has transformed the phenomenological experience of time for the one colonized. For Ibrahim, the sniper accompanied him in his internal world across time. To dodge, to hide at the moment the external sniper reappeared would be to adhere to the temporal deformations inflicted by the sniper. A key term to navigate in Omar’s text, here, is I suggest, his use of submission. The act of submitting oneself to the authority of another (whether that is to God, a ruling power, or another individual) is an act in which one accepts the organizing temporal frameworks of that entity to whose authority one submits. The framework of the sniper-colonizer attempts to force the prey either to run (“I must attempt to live”) or passively to accept his fate (“I am simply the impending kill of the hunter; I am already dead while alive”). “Madness” is a refusal to accept either of those options. “Madness” is to submit not to the authority of another but to manifest an “absolute submission to the now.” I read Omar as recounting how Ibrahim refused what the sniper-hunter wanted as he turned (yet another) Palestinian into prey. In “lacking the will and the desire to move or to hide,” Ibrahim lacked the will and the desire to adhere to the temporal and spatial coordinates of the deadly game the hunter had set. In the absolute devotion to the moment of the now, a now shorn of the familiar subjective acts of looking back and looking forward, Ibrahim, with the stone still gripped, we assume, in his hand, lives life that turns its back on the sniper’s death-drenched world, and the modes of submission that his crosshairs constantly attempt to enforce.

Omar’s use of the word madness lies at a significant distance, then, from uses of madness that tie it to individual pathology, to all that is interiorized, psychologized. Omar’s use of madness far exceeds the medically inflected language of the pathological and instead marks the interruption and refusal of the death-dealing rationality of the colonizer. If Omar in “Crosshairs” showed us how the colonizer deforms the colonized’s experiences of embodied time, then he showed too how “madness,” like the informe that appeared in his essay “Bleeding Forms,” acts to deform the colonizer’s deformations.

2. An ‘inescapable … present tense’

Omar’s second intervention of November 2023, in which he responded to an essay by Judith Butler, addressed the question of mourning.Footnote ²⁶ It cannot be overstated how central certain understandings of mourning have been to the humanities (literary studies, memory studies, philosophy, history) in the west and to their constitution of models of subjectivity and of temporality. Many of those understandings have been indebted, loosely or tightly, to a psychoanalytic model of mourning that, in contradistinction to the apparent stuckness of melancholia, points to the subject’s or community’s ability gradually to come to terms with loss. Scholars and clinicians have offered a multitude of accounts of mourning in the wake of Freud’s foundational 1917 essay “Mourning and Melancholia.” Freud there famously distinguished mourning and melancholia through arguing that whereas the capacity to engage in the painful work of mourning allows a grieving person gradually to detach from the “object” that had been lost, in melancholia, the loss has been withdrawn from conscious awareness and that loss holds the person captive. In Freud’s memorable description, “the shadow of the object fell on the ego”: the person’s unconscious identification with the lost object means that anger over the loss is directed, internally, toward the ego, and the person is thereby kept pathologically tied to the lost object.Footnote ²⁷

In Omar’s intervention, Palestine shifts the foundations on which those understandings of mourning and of melancholia have been built. Omar does not deny that mourning allows the mourner to grieve and come to terms with what is lost, but rather shows how the immanent violence of an ongoing colonial present forcibly excludes the Palestinian from being able to enact the proposed temporal sequences of mourning.

For the purposes of clarifying the stakes of Omar’s intervention, I have chosen to set Omar’s account against the psychoanalytic model of mourning developed by the psychoanalyst Hans Loewald. Loewald construed mourning as a temporal process that can meaningfully navigate and come to terms with loss, and his account provides an exemplary model against which to think through the different temporal architecture offered by Omar. Loewald described the task of mourning, as it occurred through therapeutic work, as the transforming of ghosts into ancestors. The unconscious was here a “crowd of ghosts,” and the work of therapeutic action, understood as a process of mourning, was one in which the “ghosts of the unconscious are laid and led to rest as ancestors whose power is taken over and transformed into the newer intensity of present life.”Footnote ²⁸ When ghosts were laid to rest and relieved of their work of inhabiting the living, the power of ancestors could be taken up into daily life. Loewald’s account, while distinctive in its particulars, is exemplary of many psychoanalytic accounts of achieved mourning: a laying to rest (re)establishes a temporal order in which dead kin take up their appropriate place in marking, generationally, the passing of time. Such a process has commonly been endowed with an ethico-political charge: in its allowing of an appropriate honoring and letting go of lost objects, it facilitates the individual’s own understanding of their own mortality and place in relation to those who have gone before them. It facilitates what we might call an “unsticking” of time that gets frozen when the dead cannot be let go.Footnote ²⁹

Omar’s essay “Can the Palestinian mourn?” recast those accounts of mourning.Footnote ³⁰ Butler’s essay, to which Omar responded, had asked whether, after October 7, we can mourn, without qualification, the lives lost in both Israel and Palestine “without getting bogged down in debates about relativism and equivalence.” Butler offered what they described as a “wider compass of mourning” as serving “a more substantial ideal of equality, one that acknowledges the equal grievability of lives, and giving rise to an outrage that these lives should not have been lost, that the dead deserved more life and equal recognition for their lives.” Butler’s essay extended their longstanding philosophical and political investigations of mourning and of grievability.Footnote ³¹ In 2020, during the early, acute phase of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, they had argued that:

The pandemic resulted in the pushing of grief into private which could not, Butler emphasized, in any way respond to the world’s need to bear witness to the scale of mass death. Butler outlined a kind of geographical plenitude in which mourning could end up tying people together, in new kinds of relations, across space. We see a similar urge for a kind of radical comparability in those who have died, and for how those remaining might grieve across distance, in Butler’s London of Review of Books essay. Indeed, Butler’s statement “the dead deserved more life” (in both Palestine and Israel) doubled their earlier phrase, “the life that should have had a chance to live more” (in relation to the pandemic).

Omar challenged an understanding of mourning in which it is implicitly presented as available for the metabolizing of punctual events comprising loss. He offered instead the “paradoxical contention” that the Palestinian resistance insists on life by fighting—and, indeed, being willing to effect violence—to open a temporal conjuncture in which the dead can be begun to be appropriately mourned. Here, Palestinian militants’ strategic acumen, Omar argues, is bound up with a deep desire to recapture what he terms the very “right to mourn.” In distinction to the temporal trajectory held out by those such as Loewald, Palestinians, on Omar’s account, are denied the very possibility of mourning. They therefore “refuse” to start the process of breaking the ties between themselves and their objects of loss (with some becoming, in the process, “melancholic”).

Loewald’s therapeutic path took the mourner from a chaotic cartography full of restless ghosts to one in which the ancestors come to inhabit an appropriate distance from the living. Omar argued that Palestinian collective life, which the colonizer attempts repeatedly to drown in violence, has lost any possibility of “chronal refuge” whereby mourning is possible. Just as in “Crosshairs,” Omar showed how the colonizer deforms phenomenological time for those living under occupation. On Omar’s account, most Palestinians “clear away from constructions of monuments, museums, and material artifacts of loss”—since such a monument would enact a betrayal by envisaging the loss as “past.”Footnote ³³ But Omar also demonstrated how Palestine redraws melancholy as well as mourning. Drawing on Nouri Gana’s work on Arab melancholy, his essay worked to unwind the usual association between melancholy and stuckness, construing it instead as a kind of defiance that binds generations, and martyrs, across time.Footnote ³⁴ Here, it is the very fact that ancestors cannot be laid to rest that ensures that their power is taken up in the work of the living. And that work pushes forward, through struggle, toward a time that will effect an exit from colonial brutality. Israel’s colonial brutality both stalls mourning and attempts to break Palestinian resistance so that a so-called “healing” might take place on Israel’s terms.Footnote ³⁵ An exit from that colonial condition is the only act that will offer the possibility of repair—including acts of mourning—that would be worthy of the name.

Omar rerouted accounts of mourning, memory, and suffering that have not adequately grappled with the complex temporal violence effected by settler colonialism. We can see the full stakes of this by placing his account alongside another essay by Freud. In one of his five introductory lectures of 1909, Freud offered an account of symptoms, mourning, and melancholy that he routed through the monument.Footnote ³⁶ He was explaining one of his most famous, and striking, formulations: that hysterical patients suffer from “reminiscences,” and that such reminiscences, in the form of symptoms, are markers of traumatic experiences. These symptoms are “mnemic symbols” of traumatic experiences just as, Freud noted, the monuments and memorials that adorn large cities are mnemic symbols. Here, Freud turned to the overpowering grief that King Edward I experienced in the face of the death of his wife, a grief that burst across England over seven hundred years ago. His grief resulted in the construction of three tombs and 12 stones which, on the king’s orders, marked each site in England in which his wife’s body rested on the way to the funeral.Footnote ³⁷ The last cross was located at Charing Cross, in London. It is this cross, a Victorian reconstruction of the original, that features in Freud’s lecture. Freud compared the traumatic experiences of hysterics with the monuments and memorials to be found across large cities:

For Freud, both the symptom and the monument were unwieldly and resistant; both needed to release their grip on the one whom they plague. There are two poles here: the stuck, ghost-ridden hysteric who cries at the monument and is unable to move forward; and the mobile modern subject, able to enjoy his (sic) brilliant and rebuilt city. One is pursued by ghosts, the other apparently confident with his ancestors. Both sit within an imaginary in which the city—the environment through which embodied mind moves—is central in shaping the psyche.

It is instructive to attempt a strained analogy between the Palestinian and the “unpractical Londoners”: both cling to the living pain of traumatic pasts that have been passed down to them; both could be said to be incapable of freeing themselves from those pasts to live in the present. Attempting this analogy helps us clarify where it breaks down. For Omar, the Palestinian cannot but always already hold deep within themself the truth that a monument would mean that the mourning is done. The monument could not, as it could for Freud, before the First World War, act as a metonym for completed mourning. The Palestinian does not weep at the memorial but holds fast to martyrs inside them.Footnote ³⁹ There can be no comparable getting lost in the past instead of turning back to the hurry of the modern day. That is because the city—as Israel’s domicide in Gaza has made brutally clear—is under perpetual attack that threatens total erasure. The colonizer’s fire might always be about to raze all, once again, to the ground.

The force of Freud’s vignette derived from the temporal disjunction—and recognized chronal distance—between the late-modern city dweller and the grieving medieval king (or fire-scarred early modern Londoner). It is that chronal distance that facilitates the reader’s shared surprise that the late modern city dweller might still cry at Charing Cross or at the Monument. But let us look at that metropolitan scene from the viewpoint of the colony. For it is the metropole’s ongoing, unrelenting actions in the colony that produce the conditions for excessive and melancholic inconsolability that are forced upon the colonized as their everyday. In the colony, we find no temporal gap across time analogous to the gap marking the distance between London’s rebuilding after the fire of the seventeenth century and the busy metropolis of the nineteenth-century fin-de-siècle. Under conditions of settler colonialism, there is no possibility of “get[ing] free of the past.” And there is no escaping to the future—“We [Palestinians] are,” writes El-Kurd, “besieged in an inescapable, eternal present tense.”Footnote ⁴⁰ This means that there is no temporal disjunction that allows the grief of the past to recede: both past and present are drenched in loss. And the present is drenched in loss-to-come.

There is more. The mobility of Freud’s metropolitan Londoner—his ability to “go about his business in the hurry that modern working conditions demand”—is founded on his disavowing those who have been killed, are continuing to be killed, in the colony. His psychic mobility is not punctured by any grieving for those who are dying – being killed – elsewhere. His material mobility rests on “going about his business” enabled by the metropole’s extraction from the colonies. The monuments that Freud depicted were not monuments to those killed in the colony by the metropole; the Londoners Freud depicted were not stalled by their grief for those killed in other places by the metropole. To return to the terms that Loewald used, those killed appear in the metropole neither as ghosts nor as ancestors.Footnote ⁴¹

The early twentieth-century London scene tightens further when we remember that 1909, the year in which Freud described his “unpractical Londoners” during his only trip to the United States, is the same year that the Zionist imaginary names as birth date of Tel Aviv, a city it describes as having “no past.”Footnote ⁴² But as Kaleem Hawa reminded us in his essay on visiting Tel Aviv, “Tel Aviv did not just emerge from the sand that year, it pulverised Jaffa, dispossessing Palestinians across the district through processes that spanned the periods before, during, and after the Palestinian Nakba.”Footnote ⁴³

In 1909, Freud imagined a hypothetical scene in a busy imperial metropolis to ground his foundational accounts of the vicissitudes of trauma, unquiet memory, and mnemic symbols. In that city, monuments establish and pin down normative psychic coordinates deemed able to separate the past from the present. In that same year, the metropole is at work in the colony initiating acts that will bring severe and long-lasting material and psychic devastation. Such trouble will not only not be acknowledged by the metropole but wiped clean through the brutality of a colonial chronology that continues to dispossess when it celebrates its own foundational acts of violence. Over a century later, the unforgotten histories persist and resistance against the Zionist erasure of Jaffa continues amid the ongoing, monumentalizing logics of old and new metropoles.

Here, “Can the Palestinian mourn?” needs, I suggest, to be read alongside Omar’s discussions of ruins.Footnote ⁴⁴ Omar has conceived of the ruin differently from many cultural and historical accounts of the ruin that prioritize decay and the fragment.Footnote ⁴⁵ While Omar has made clear that Israel’s boundless violence in Gaza has yielded a “panorama of ruins,” he has insisted on linking this panorama to the power of the Palestinian resistance to “deform the colonial condition.”Footnote ⁴⁶ The ruin ought not be read—and thereby reduced—as a symbol of destruction. It needs, rather, to be recognized as a “structure of refusal.”Footnote ⁴⁷ For Palestinians to return to ruins, and to live within ruins that for others might manifest simply as panorama, or debris, is an act—psychic as well as material—of defiance. The ruin in this sense is not that which can be separated out as a fragment of catastrophe. It is that which holds within it the capacity that different forms of Palestinian resistance have to “effect things.” Ruin as dwelling place makes clear, in fact, as Omar stated in an interview, that “history is not just a pile of ruins.”Footnote ⁴⁸

Omar, in insisting that the ruin is not “a relic to be mourned from a safe distance,” once again draws a different topography through which to approach Palestinian psychic and social life as well as urban form.Footnote ⁴⁹ In pointing to Palestinians’ ongoing psychic and material attachment to the ruin as an act not only of survival but of ongoing resistance to the colonial violence of erasure and dispossession, he unsettles any conviction one might hold regarding what is finished versus what is yet undone, whether in the realms of the socio-material or the psychic world. And Omar has refused to allow the reader to place themselves at a safe distance where the ruin can be misrecognized as simply a fragment of destruction. This echoes his lambasting of those intellectuals lost in the “labyrinth.” For the labyrinth is also a place of “safety” in which the Palestinian experience “remains comfortably distant, a spectacle to be consumed.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Only from that imagined place of safety can a supposed act of mourning that which is (mis)construed as representing the past take place. For that misconstrued “past”—that “panorama of ruins”—is in fact a living scene of an ongoing, stricken, pulsating present. Omar has shown us how mourning can be invoked and pursued as a consolatory salve by those who are able, at least in their imaginary, to exit a scene (in which they are implicated). That imaginary exit might allow them to see annihilatory violence—Israel’s creation of a blotted landscape of ruins—but forecloses recognition of ongoing resistance to attempted erasure.

Omar’s writings ask us to reenvisage both loss, and responses to loss. Many of the models of loss that circulate inside and outside the academy do not adequately contend with the kinds of material, psychic, durational devastation inflicted through colonial brutality, nor with how the particular characteristics of Zionist brutality inflect how its victims respond both materially and psychically.Footnote ⁵¹ Omar asks us to consider how resistance, including violent resistance, to unfathomable, durational violence works to try to open a scene for mourning rather than being locked in an imaginary in which that violent resistance is repeatedly discussed solely as the precipitator of others’ grief. Calling, as Butler did, for a “wider compass of mourning” that might acknowledge “the equal grievability of lives,” could not but manifest some kind of disavowal, since such a call could not adequately grapple with the structural logics of imperialism that foreclose the possibility of equal grievability.

3. Opening another future

Palestinian resistance is directed at opening another future.Footnote ⁵² (Vengeance, in contrast, keeps actors bound in constrained temporal relations: circuits of response and counter-response.) Liberationist writings published since October 7 are full of calls to split history open. El-Kurd has explained his own compulsion to write during genocide through his needing to “infiltrate a space” that is, while dominated by professions of solidarity, barely worthy of the word, given the western academy’s “overwhelming rejection of Palestinian armed resistance.”Footnote ⁵³ His choice of the verb “infiltrate” challenged the common assumption that writing is done to effect dialogue; instead, writing acts as a kind of interstitial movement to break apart calcified forms.Footnote ⁵⁴ El-Kurd has also told us that his “irrever[ence] at the podium” is one means he uses to refuse the constraints on “a scrutinized people whose psychic and affective allowances are shrinking endlessly.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Psychic terrain is an overdetermined locus when identifying how the ongoing work of Palestinian liberation redraws the world.

Resistance breaks apart desiccated forms and arrangements, including imperial and Zionist models of mind. But many lost in the intellectual labyrinth are unable to recognize Palestinian forms of psychic life that depart from models of mind that still roll through institutional halls. Rather than simply condemning how many Palestinians Israel and its allies have killed, many of us need to grasp how Palestinian resistance has been upending the world. Sheathing Palestinians in destruction and death obliterates how Palestinians continue to be central in making the rhythms of history, and risks our becoming seduced by the empire’s mammoth power to destroy.Footnote ⁵⁶ Hawa has described how liberal imperialism repeatedly “fashions its static victims to pulverize with hollow concern”: it offers “no recognition of Palestinian resistance as the engine of historical motion.”Footnote ⁵⁷

In February 2025, the Israeli military dropped yet more fliers into Gaza. Some contained the sentences:

Those fliers enact the genocidal temporality of Zionist empire. Buttressing the explicit wish to destroy all the people of Gaza are the hammered statements that the future will not mourn dead Palestinians, and the future will contain Israel’s death-dealing military “until the end of time.” This is an annihilatory project that refuses the colonized psychic as well as physiological life.

It is that project that the Palestinian people, every day, continue to resist. Resistance works toward exiting the chronal organization of Zionism and of empire so as to live, remember, mourn, and dream free of the phenomenological and temporal contortions inflicted by the colonizer. Failing to acknowledge that ongoing resistance to immanent and durational violence can lead to a misrecognition of that struggle—for example, by calling upon a frozen account of the Shoah to utter the phrase “Never Again.” For that call, a kind of apotropaic memorialization, even when revised through a capacious universality (“Never Again for Anyone”) gets time and sequence wrong. By assuming that Israel’s genocidal violence started at some point only after October 7, 2023, the call obliterates the ongoing, durational brutality of colonialism.Footnote ⁵⁹

Gaza and Palestine cannot be confined within the humanism of international human rights and ought not to be interpreted as a symptom of some greater failure (whether of neoliberalism or of the domain of international law).Footnote ⁶⁰ They name, rather, the struggle against imperialism. Keeping the categories of the human and of humanism that underpin the cadaver of the United Nations and the threadbare discourse of human rights also keeps the bombs going. The writings of Omar, among others, make clear that how we imagine and narrate the terrain of the psyche helps cracks history open—or indeed locks it back down. Nadia Bou Ali has urged us to abandon the west’s tired universality to see how the “the people of Gaza beckon forth a humanism that has to be constructed.”Footnote ⁶¹ In continuing to find ways to live, Bou has written, they look back at the “grin of ugly enjoyment,” the enjoyment of annihilation, to say, “I have a reason to live that you do not know.” To read Omar’s and others’ liberationist writings since October 7 is to read texts that categorically refuse the psychological categories, temporal deformations, and modes of submission that Zionist empire attempts to impose.