President Donald Trump meets with Faith Leaders from across the country to pray in the Oval Office, Wednesday March 19, 2025. (Official White House Photo by Molly Riley)
One of the most troubling features of Trump-era politics is not simply nationalism, authoritarian style, or contempt for institutions. It is the extent to which large parts of the administration and its surrounding ecosystem have normalised a form of religious absolutism, especially in its Christian Zionist variant, as a legitimate basis for public policy. This is most clearly visible in relation to Israel–Palestine, where biblical claims, apocalyptic imagination, and civilisational rhetoric increasingly bleed into state language, lobbying, and diplomacy.
This is not a story about religion in politics in the broad sense. American politics has always been saturated with religion. Nor is it a story about American Christians as such, many of whom reject Christian Zionism and oppose the sacralisation of war and occupation. It is, rather, a story about a specific ideological formation: the convergence of Trumpism, evangelical power, militarised Christianity, and an unqualified pro-Israel agenda that increasingly treats territorial expansion and permanent domination as morally righteous, even divinely sanctioned.
Consider Pete Hegseth, now serving as U.S. defense secretary. His tattoos include both “Deus Vult” (the medieval crusader slogan meaning “God wills it”) and the Jerusalem Cross, a symbol with a long Christian history that has also been adopted by some far-right groups as an emblem of struggle for “Western civilisation.” Symbolism matters, especially when it aligns with a broader worldview. Hegseth’s public commentary has long deployed crusade-inflected language and cast politics in civilisational terms. In a political environment already inclined to frame conflict as existential and redemptive, such imagery is not merely ornamental. It signals a moral universe in which force can be imagined as a sacred duty.
Then there is Paula White-Cain, Trump’s longtime spiritual adviser, now serving as senior adviser to the White House Faith Office, created in February 2025. White is not a marginal pastor offering private counsel; she is an institutional actor at the centre of the administration’s religious outreach. Her prominence illustrates how charismatic evangelical leadership has been folded directly into executive power. Whatever internal diversity exists within evangelicalism, White’s role provides formal access and symbolic legitimacy to a religious-political bloc that has made unwavering support for Israel central to its moral vocabulary.
That bloc has organisational muscle. Christians United for Israel (CUFI) describes itself as the largest pro-Israel organisation in the United States, with more than 10 million members. It presents its mission in explicitly activist terms: to educate and mobilise Christians “with one voice in defence of Israel and the Jewish people.” CUFI is not merely a constituency group; it is a mass infrastructure for translating prophetic belief into lobbying pressure. When biblical narratives are converted into organised political leverage at this scale, they shape the range of what elected officials can say and do.
The American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is different, but no less important. It is a major pro-Israel lobbying organisation that plays a key role in shaping the U.S.–Israel relationship. Its worldview is more conventionally strategic than theological. Yet in practice, the agendas of groups like AIPAC often converge with those of Christian Zionist networks, producing an American political field in which the costs of backing Israeli occupation, settlement expansion, or maximalist territorial claims are drastically reduced. Theology and lobbying are not identical, but they are politically complementary.
The administration’s own institutional architecture reinforces this trend. In February 2025, Trump signed an executive order creating the Task Force to Eradicate Anti-Christian Bias, led by Attorney General Pam Bondi. On paper, the initiative is framed as protecting Christians from discrimination. In practice, such moves risk deepening a politics of Christian grievance and exceptionalism, presenting the state as the guardian of a supposedly besieged majority faith at the very moment when Christian nationalist language is becoming more entrenched in public power.
The rhetoric becomes even clearer in the case of Elise Stefanik. During her January 2025 confirmation hearing for the UN post, Stefanik endorsed the claim that Israel has a “biblical right” to the West Bank. The significance lies not only in the remark itself, but in what it reveals: a willingness to displace international law, diplomacy, and Palestinian political rights with a sacred title deed. Although her nomination was later withdrawn, the statement remains politically telling.
Mike Huckabee, now U.S. ambassador to Israel, has long embodied this same logic. He is widely described as a staunch evangelical supporter of Israel and a longstanding defender of Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank. His politics are not simply “pro-Israel”; they are rooted in a theological reading of land, sovereignty, and history that aligns closely with Christian Zionism. That worldview narrows the space for any policy grounded in equality, international law, or genuine Palestinian self-determination.
This alignment is clearly reinforced by the relationship with Israeli political leadership. While Benjamin Netanyahu has strategically engaged with evangelical audiences and Christian Zionist networks, he is not alone. Extremist figures such as Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir have drawn explicitly on religious justifications in articulating territorial claims and in dehumanising Palestinians. This does not imply a simple ideological overlap with American Christian Zionism, but it highlights a growing convergence in which theological narratives and state interests intersect, mutually reinforcing a political environment where extremist ideologies and military policies acquire both strategic and symbolic legitimacy.
Crucially, this ideological framework does not stop at Israel–Palestine. It extends into broader geopolitical imaginaries, including the war in Iran, where segments of the same evangelical ecosystem interpret conflict through apocalyptic and civilisational lenses. In such narratives, geopolitical confrontation is not merely strategic but part of a larger, divinely ordered struggle. The effect is to further erode the space for diplomacy, recasting war as destiny rather than as a contingent and avoidable political choice.
At the centre of this configuration stands Donald Trump himself. Trump is not a conventional religious actor, nor does he consistently articulate a coherent theological worldview. His relationship to religion has been largely instrumental and politically attuned rather than doctrinal. It is precisely this pragmatism that has enabled a particularly effective alignment with Christian Zionist constituencies. Trump’s approach to Israel has combined strategic calculation with symbolic gestures that carry deep theological resonance for evangelical supporters. Decisions such as the relocation of the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, the recognition of Israeli sovereignty over contested territories, and the consistent avoidance of pressure on settlement expansion have not been framed in explicitly religious terms by Trump himself. However, they have been readily interpreted within a Christian Zionist framework as affirmations of biblical promise and prophetic fulfilment, in line with the “Greater Israel” vision. Trump’s significance lies less in personal belief than in political calculation: he has translated a set of religiously inflected expectations into concrete policy shifts, while maintaining enough ambiguity to keep these commitments legible as both strategic choices and moral imperatives.
Taken together, these figures and institutions reveal a deeper pattern. Christian Zionism is not a decorative feature of Trumpism; it is one of the moral languages through which power justifies itself. It sanctifies hierarchy, recasts occupation as covenant, and turns war into destiny. Its extension beyond Israel–Palestine into wider conflict theatres underscores the risks of allowing theological absolutism to shape statecraft.
Its danger lies precisely in this fusion of transcendence and politics. Once territorial claims are rendered biblical, and military force is wrapped in sacred symbolism, political argument becomes harder, compromise becomes sinful, and domination begins to masquerade as faith. The ritual of “laying on of hands” in the Oval Office on 5 March 2026—during which prominent evangelical figures gathered around Donald Trump, placing their hands on his shoulders and arms while praying over him—epitomises this convergence. It is not merely a display of personal devotion, but a performative enactment of political theology: a moment in which spiritual authority and executive power collapse into one another, reinforcing the idea that political leadership itself is divinely sanctioned and that state action can be endowed with sacred legitimacy.
Antonio De Lauri is a Research Professor and Research Director at the Christian Michelsen Institute. He is the President of the International Humanitarian Studies Association, and the Editor-in-Chief of Public Anthropologist.
Cite as: De Lauri, A. 2025. “The Trump Administration: Theology into Statecraft” Focaalblog March 27. https://www.focaalblog.com/2026/03/27/antonio-de-lauri-the-trump-administration-theology-into-statecraft/
Image 1: Bombing scene in Tehran, 2 March 2026. Anonymous photographer. Shared via the Telegram channel Vahid Online.
No, dear Rira, my letter must be short, must be simple, with no talk of ambiguity or mirrors. I will write to you again: We are all well— but do not believe me.
(Ali Salehi, Iranian poet)
The Sense of an Ending — April 26, 2025
Thick black smoke is rising over the port of Bandar Abbas, where Iran’s largest port is located. A massive explosion has just torn through the area. Authorities urge people to stay indoors, warning of airborne toxins possibly spreading across the city.
We’re watching a local TV station livestream the explosion site. Ambulances move back and forth, firefighters enter and leave the frame, and there is a constant stream of water aimed at the large black billows rising into the sky. “War must be really scary. I’ve thought about it often, for a long time. But yesterday, I realised war is truly terrifying,” Javid tells me. Although we were born during the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s, we have no clear recollection of the bombings and explosions.
Despite the shock of yesterday, friends call, describing an eerie stillness in the city. The blast was so powerful it shook windows; many initially thought it was an earthquake—a frequent occurrence in this part of Iran. Speculation runs rampant: some fear sabotage by Israel, recalling the devastating 2020 Beirut blast; others blame incompetence by the corrupt regime. The only shared certainty in this divided society is the overwhelming reality of the explosion itself and how devastatingly powerful it was.
I had landed in Bandar Abbas just hours earlier, flying from Tehran. The plane was old, part of Iran’s aging air fleet, historically hampered by years of Western sanctions. Its engines rattled and the seats were worn out, but it got us here. Like much of Iran’s infrastructure, it was fragile, underfunded, yet stubbornly functional. Whatever that means.
Julian Barnes’ book title The Sense of an Ending keeps coming to mind. The explosion feels like a prelude to war, echoing the trajectory of Beirut: first the port explosion in 2020, then full-scale conflict.
Yet my sense of looming catastrophe doesn’t fully align with the general mood of those around me. My family continues to rely heavily on the healthcare system. My mother visits the hospital twice a week for kidney dialysis. Another relative is undergoing cancer treatment. They return home relieved, even cheerful, knowing most of their medical expenses are still covered by public insurance. People persist in their routines, driving their children from school to the gym to music lessons. They adapt. They press on. Rent consumes an entire salary. I keep asking nearly everyone I meet how they make ends meet. Hardly anyone knows precisely how daily life holds together. Nothing quite works, yet everything somehow remains in place. Politically, the atmosphere feels similarly precarious.
In many respects, Iran seems to be experiencing a rare period of calm. For now, a delicate peace holds between the state and society. In Tehran, women without hijabs walk openly through the streets. At night, new cafés buzz with conversation, laughter, and young people lingering into the late hours. A cautious optimism lingers in the air.
Iran and the U.S, the archenemies for over four decades, appear closer than ever to resolving their hostilities. Iran might agree to curb its nuclear ambitions, while the U.S. is expected not only to lift sanctions but also to commit billions of dollars in investment. Such steps would strongly reassure Iran that the U.S. won’t abruptly withdraw again, as it did in 2018 when the Trump administration unilaterally abandoned the JCPOA—the nuclear agreement meticulously negotiated during President Obama’s administration.
The Blown Up Table — June 13, 2025
Except it wasn’t.
Israel launched an unprovoked assault on Iran. In the first few minutes, several high-ranking military commanders and nuclear scientists were assassinated. At that moment, Iran and the U.S. were gearing up for the sixth round of indirect negotiations, with Oman serving as intermediary. Looking back, it is easy to believe the growing reports that the U.S.-initiated talks were a cover for Israel’s surprise attack.
The assault began exactly on the sixty-first day of the two-month deadline Trump had set earlier in a letter to Iran’s Supreme Leader. On June 20, days after Iran’s renewed discussions with the European powers—Germany, the UK, and France—the U.S. joined the Israeli offensive. The U.S. bombed three main nuclear facilities. Other targets included security command centers and the so-called “centers of oppression”—among them Basij bases, where I had conducted fieldwork since 2015. These sites range from military compounds to humble bureaucratic offices dispersed throughout neighborhoods. They form a sprawling network under the Revolutionary Guards’ control. For years, these bases played a crucial role in surveilling ordinary citizens, especially during unrest. Now, they are under bombardment, just like military bases, the notorious Evin prison, and state TV headquarters.
They claim it is a liberatory act—aiming to set the Iranian people free. How strangely familiar this rhetoric sounds. The Iraqi invasion déjà vu.
Politics of Rightful Killing — June 21, 2025
An old woman in her seventies darts across a shopping store in Berlin, shouting to her companion in Farsi: “Look, good news. Israel has continued the bombing of Iran.” She is referring to events that unfolded just hours after the announcement of a ceasefire between Israel and Iran, brokered by the U.S. and Qatar. News circulating on social media reports that the Israeli government instructed a fleet of jets to bomb targets in Iran, allegedly in response to a missile launched from Iran into Israel shortly after the ceasefire began.
A sense of disgust washes over me. Nausea, as Sartre describes it.
In a second episode that day, a friend calls and asks for advice on how to respond to a voice message she has just received. The internet has finally come back after the ceasefire. The message explains that the sender had to rush back to Iran—despite the closure of the airspace—for the funeral of his brother. “He passed away,” the voice says, referring to one of the recent attacks. My friend tells me she has no idea how to respond to the message from her colleague. “Was her brother a member of the security forces in Iran?” she asks. She explains that her colleague had once hinted at her family’s involvement and alignment with the Iranian regime. “Now,” she continues, “I wonder how to respond. If her brother was part of the regime, wouldn’t he have been involved in the mass oppression and killing of protesters just a couple of years ago?”
I suggest she let it go—for now. People from all walks of life were killed in the attacks. I tell her to focus on the simple fact that her colleague has lost a brother. Just offer condolences.
She agrees, reluctantly, and ends the conversation with a quiet question: “In the absence of the regime, how would people treat those who aligned with it?”
Resentment runs deep, and revenge seems to be the only instinct left in our repertoire. Some call it the politics of rightful killing.
Snapback- 28 August 2025
All U.N. sanctions have been reimposed, one of the harshest sanctions regimes laid against any country. Iran has already been under Western-imposed sanctions for decades. It is not yet clear what the effect is going to be.
Lottery — January 12, 2026
It is Monday evening. My phone finally rang. It is my sister’s voice. It has been more than four days of complete blackout. No internet in Iran, no chance to call family back home from abroad. Videos of dead bodies under black covers in the central morgue of Kahriyak in Tehran have been trickling in since Saturday. Those of us abroad with internet have been searching for loved ones in the videos. Someone has smuggled the video out, and then shared it on a Telegram channel. Hundreds of dead bodies have been laid out in the yards of the morgue, and many more are lined up in the compound. I have paused and replayed the videos many times, checking to see if there is a familiar face.
In this total communication darkness, there are reports from Persian-speaking TV channels giving mounting numbers of the murdered. They were all killed with live ammunition on the 8th and 9th of January. Shortly after the beginning of massive protests on the streets of Iran and the internet shutdown, the security forces, the Basij, and members of the Revolutionary Guards Corps, in a coordinated act, opened fire.
There were Mossad agents among the protesters. This is what the Iranian state claims. No one knows. The number of dead keeps piling up, by thousands. From the morning of January 12, we know that phones are being restored, and some people on social media say that their families were able to call them from Iran. No word from Tehran yet—does this mean that we have lost a loved one? “It is a lottery,” a friend in Berlin tells me on the phone, waiting impatiently for a call from inside Iran. “When you receive the call, you will ask, ‘Is everyone safe?’ You may hear yes or no. Even if you hear a yes, you are sure that many will hear a no.”
Stockpile — February 27, 2026
“We are going to be fine,” my brother tells me. “They will reach an agreement at the last minute. Badr bin Hamad Al Busaidi is in Washington to offer what the U.S. wants.”
“We have stockpiled food for a few weeks,” my brother tells me. “But we have already eaten half of it,” my sister says in the background. “It’s been two months since Trump has wanted to make his decision.”
It is not clear if Iran is refusing to hand in its highly enriched uranium to the US, or according to Badr bin Hamad Al Busaidi, the Omani foreign minister and mediator, Iran has accepted ‘zero stockpile.’
Having a Blast? — February 28, 2026
They blew up the negotiating table again. The supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, is dead.
I have to confess that for over thirty years, every Newruz, the Iranian new year that happens on 20 March, when all family members rush to come together and make a wish during the countdown, I too always rushed, my mind bubbling, not knowing what I had to wish for. In that moment of chaos, I always wished that this year Khamenei would be dead.
Until the year 1404. This year, I joked to my German friends who are visiting us: “This year I’m not going to wish for his death. For thirty years it was not granted. I won’t do it this year, and maybe that will make my wish come true.”
In the evening of 28 February, it is Netanyahu first, and then Trump, who confirm Khamenei’s death. After several hours, Iranian outlets confirm it too. I have a whirlwind of emotions. There are videos of some Iranians having a blast on the streets. There are other videos of a school ruined by several blasts by the US-Israeli strikes. There are 21 days left until Newruz.
We are only 24 hours into the U.S.-Israel war against Iran. I am not sure when the war will end. The consequences are deeply uncertain and potentially chaotic. Violent chaos may very well be the only true objective Trump and Netanyahu have for this country.
Ahmad Moradi is a Senior Research Fellow at the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin. He has conducted ethnographic research with the paramilitary organization of the Basij, as well as with Afghan refugees in Iran who fought in the Syrian civil war and were wounded there. His broader research interests include revolutionary politics and the politics of care in contexts of protracted conflict and displacement in the Middle East.
Cite as: Moradi, A. 2026. “Iran, Year 1404: Chronicles of Planned Chaos” Focaalblog March 5. https://www.focaalblog.com/2026/03/05/ahmad-moradi-iran-year-1404-chronicles-of-planned-chaos/
Image 1: A police truck fires “skunk” water at protesters during a demonstration against recent home demolitions in Palestinian communities, Ar’ara, northern Israel, January 21, 2017. Photo by Keren Manor
As we write this, in January 2026, there is, theoretically speaking, a ceasefire in place in Gaza. Unfortunately, this does not mean that the war, the genocide, the violence, and horrors have come to a stop as Israel is breaching the ceasefire on a daily basis. Violence and death are still omnipresent in Gaza and the largely overlooked Occupied Westbank. And so are the sights, smells, and sounds that we associate with death: they are everywhere, albeit experienced differently depending on one’s identity, locality, and positionality. These sounds, smells and sights remind us of the multitude of ways in which war and destruction enter daily lives. War habitually comes in the form of deadly violence, destruction, and famine, and makes itself present through ‘daily’ experiences, such as the sounds of the air raid sirens, the smell of death, and the sight of weaponry in the public sphere.
The senses, of course, cannot be separated from broader issues of embodiment. As several scholars working on the senses and embodiment have demonstrated, senses mediate lived reality and help us to understand it, through our bodies, in a political sense (e.g. Howes 1991; Pink 2015). As such, senses are a means of inquiry that help us understand the realities around us and how we feel this bodily. A focus on the senses can tell us something about what smells, sounds or sights make us feel comfortable and secure, which ones alarm us, frighten us, and how such experiences fluctuate over time and/or in different contexts for divergent groups of people. As such, sensory experiences serve as important mediators in violent conflicts.
In this piece we are interested in the ways war and its violence travel from battlefield spaces to civilian spaces. While it is more common to analyse the ways in which the two are blurred, meaning how the war itself invades civil spaces, we will focus on the ways that war, both purposefully and incidentally, enters Palestinian and Israeli spaces through the senses and what political message the senses convey to different actors in divergent contexts. We include several wars, such as the genocidal war in Gaza, but also the other wars Israel has waged and is still waging with other neighbours, such as Lebanon and Iran, and the ongoing violent occupation and increasing annexation of the Westbank. While we will not be able to delve into the relations between these separate fronts, or their own specificities, we will discuss war and violence are mediated through the senses and how sensorial experiences are individually and collectively interpreted.
We focus on two distinct ways in which the senses are attacked and/or affected in war in Israel/Palestine. First, we recognize the intentional use of sensorial attacks where the senses are purposefully weaponized by Israel and its military through the development and use of technologies that attack sight, sound, taste, and smell. Secondly, we will discuss the sensorial ‘byproducts’ of war’s violence and a society’s militarized characteristics. Although often done unintentionally, this also serves to normalize the war and its violence by bringing it into ‘civilian’ spaces. Here smell and sounds also become sources of conflict and security and they start to play a role in the making of the (enemy) other.
During times of emergency, the way we perceive and digest sensorial input is intensified and feelings of (in)security and fear are (re)constructed by, for example, the sounds of sirens warnings that rockets are on their way, but also through the sight of the huge number of weapons that have been flooded into the Israeli civil space in the last two years. For some, feelings of security increase with this sight of weapons, while for many others it is the opposite.
Intentional sensorial warfare
The direct attack on the senses during war is a practice that goes back many years. Think about the use of tear gas by Britain in WWI to help disperse crowds (Feigenbaum 2017), or the use of sound bombs in Brazil’s favela’s, employed by the military police in their ‘pacification’ efforts (Vieira de Oliviera 2019).
Over the last few decades, Israel has put itself on the map as a major player in the sale of defensive security products and knowledge, and as a specialist in technologies of ‘crowd control’, also known as ‘anti-riot’ weaponry, non-lethal, or even less-than-lethal weapons. The Israeli government, as well as several private companies developing such products sell these globally to clients interested in pacifying both external and internal ‘enemies’, such as protesting citizens (Grassiani 2022). Many of such technologies purposely attack the senses; the eyes, the nose, the ears and have been originally developed to disperse crowds in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, such as protests against the occupation and its violent repression. One notorious example of such an Israeli invention is a substance called Skunk, which has a terrible smell that sticks to anything that it encounters. Not only is it sprayed on people themselves, but it is also used as a form of communal punishment as it is sprayed on houses, leaving the stink lingering for a very long time (Joronen and Ghantous 2024). Another example is how Israeli soldiers release diesel fumes from their tanks—originally intended for battlefield camouflage—onto Palestinian civilians.
An additional technology designed by the Israeli military to disperse people is the ‘Scream’, an acoustic weapon also known as the ‘Shofar’, after the religious horn used during Jewish Holidays. It produces a very high-pitched sound that causes dizziness and feelings of nausea and was used by the Israeli military against Palestinian protestors for the first time in 2011.
More recently, during the genocide in Gaza, human rights organizations also reported the use of supersonic boom by Israeli Air Force fighter jets as a mean of deterrence and terrorizing, as well as the use of quadcopters by the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF). These drones fly very close to windows of houses and tents and broadcast horrific sounds of crying babies, attacking dogs, and constant ambulance sirens. These sounds were purposefully broadcasted as a form of psychological warfare, to terrorize people, and to draw them out of their dwellings (Euromed 2025). In an article in the Guardian, two Gazans relate about the ‘sonic hell’ that is the night in Gaza with the ‘high-pitched whirring that Palestinians call “Zanzana”’ of the drones and the loud explosions (Ahmed and Gonzalez Paz 2024). During the day people receive calls from the Israeli military where a computer voice tells them to evacuate. “You’ve got no option to actually talk to a human being, to ask questions, to negotiate’” says Zaharna in the article (Ahmed and Gonzalez Paz 2024).
Importantly, these technologies have all been designed and intended as an attack on the senses; they are intentional weapons developed and used by the Israeli state and its proxy violent actors.
Sensorial byproducts of war and militarization
In addition to intentional attacks, there are also many more mundane, yet very violent ways senses are targeted in civilian spaces. Those most affected in the case of Israel/Palestine are the Palestinians in both Gaza and the Westbank. Regarding Gaza, it is very difficult to speak about any ‘normal’ civilian space, as almost all infrastructures have been destroyed or damaged. There, Gazan civilians narrate extensively about the smell of death around them, as many bodies of the dead have yet to be found under the rubble. As mentioned above, attacks by sound have been deliberately used as a weapon, but the continuous sounds of the artillery attacks and drones around them similarly have a devastating effect on the civilian population. As Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian (2017) has demonstrated, the Israeli occupation of Palestine is also an ‘occupation of the senses’. She refers to the different mechanisms in which the senses are controlled by the Israeli occupation, such as through camera’s, checkpoints and other forms of surveillance and how these ‘sensory technologies …manage bodies, language, time and space’ (2017: 1279).
It is important to note that Israeli citizens are also affected by the ongoing war, although we do want to stress that this cannot at all be compared to what is experienced by residents in West bank and Gaza. Israeli civilians are affected by the ongoing war, which permeates both public spaces and private homes, not in the least through the government’s propaganda machine and society’s militarized character. Daily siren warnings signal incoming rockets, and the IDF issues additional alerts directly to citizens’ mobile phones through the Tzeva Adom (Red Colour) system. The sounds and sights of war—especially within Israel—dominate the national atmosphere, with television networks transformed into 24/7 news channels focused solely on war coverage.
Image 2: Stickers commemorating fallen soldiers on walls of McDonalds at gas station in South of Israel. Photo by Erella Grassiani
In the streets of Tel Aviv, the presence of conflict is inescapable: stickers commemorating fallen soldiers cover walls and signs, posters of Israeli hostages held in Gaza hang on public buildings, shops, and balconies, and yellow flags symbolizing the campaign to free the hostages flutter from nearly every other passing car. The status of war is also evident through the different sounds of ambulances after the Israeli emergency service changed these after the October 7 attack. This change has been made to prevent public confusion and panic, as the traditional ambulance siren was sometimes mistaken for rocket or air-raid alerts, which led people to believe there was an immediate security threat. To address this, emergency services began using alternative siren tones that are more similar to European or international ambulance sounds and clearly distinguishable from military warning alarms. At the same time, however, these exceptional urban sounds have also intensified the sense of emergency among residents.
It is important to realize that there is a high proximity of Palestinian/Israeli spaces that oftentimes completely overlap, and as such, it is difficult to distinguish between them. For example, Palestinian villages and towns that are located within Israel will have similar sensorial experiences as their Jewish neighbours (for example hearing warning sirens or war helicopters flying by), while at the same time they can have a completely different interpretation of these sounds and sights. For one community such sounds might be reassuring, for others they are threatening. Simultaneously, within Israel’s internationally acknowledged borders, some communities are also excluded from the warning sounds from the state that they are part of. This became painfully clear in April 2024, when the only person hurt by the Iranian attacks on Israel was a Bedouin girl, living in an unrecognized village without an alarm system or a proper shelter. In this case, the sound of silence during war time may be interpreted as very alarming and even terrifying.
With such instances, we are not speaking of the deliberate weaponization of the senses, as we do in Palestinian spaces, but rather of the effect on the senses as a byproduct of the militarization of Israeli public space and the normalization of war—its transformation into an ordinary aspect of daily life. This produces a highly selective perception of war, one centred almost entirely on the Israeli (Jewish) experience. In this experience, Gaza appears distant, portrayed as another world rather than a place merely seventy kilometres away, and for some even less. Israeli news coverage rarely addresses the personal suffering or death of individuals in Gaza, and Gazans are shown up close only in sanitized contexts—on the beach, for instance—when the image can be deemed free of visible violence. Although Israeli soldiers sometimes share photos from the fighting in Gaza on social media, and testimonies are increasingly surfacing that expose extreme violence, such images and stories seldom reach the broader public. Moreover, when Israeli activists attempt to circulate pictures of Palestinian child victims, such as on university campuses, they are frequently censured or punished.
Interestingly, the very sounds that evoke fear and terror among Palestinians often carry reassuring or even uplifting meanings for Israelis. The noises of Israeli aircraft and the Iron Dome anti-missile system are perceived as sounds of protection, embodying both national defence and technological superiority. Even the artillery fire directed toward Gaza—audible to Israelis living near the border and at times even in Tel Aviv—is frequently interpreted as a sign of justified retaliation and military strength. Many Israelis describe having developed an ability to discern between sounds that signal real danger and those that do not.
Concluding remarks
Conflict and war cannot be fully understood through geopolitical or military strategy alone; they must also be grasped as a deeply embodied and sensory reality. By centering the senses, we illustrate how war and violence migrate from the battlefield into the most intimate of civilian spaces, mediating how individuals and communities interpret their lived reality. We draw from the concept of the ‘occupation of the senses,’ by demonstrating that state power is exercised not merely through the management of land and borders, but also through the governance of bodies and sensory perception. Following Judith Butler (2009: 51), we conclude that the sensory regime in Israel/Palestine functions to differentiate ‘the cries we can hear from those we cannot,’ effectively pre-determining whose lives are deemed worthy of grief and defence. The sensory experiences discussed—from the ‘sonic hell’ in Gaza to the ‘uplifting’ sounds of artillery in Israel—serve as somatic evidence of this political chasm. Ultimately, by attending to the smell of fear and the sound of relief, we gain a more nuanced understanding of how war inhabits the body, ensuring that the violence of the conflict is felt—and remembered—long after the sirens fall silent.
Moving forward, we encourage further analysis of the long-term somatic effects of these sensory assaults on both populations. Future research might explore how the ‘olfactory duration’ of substances like Skunk water or the sounds of drones shapes the psychological landscape of survivors long after the physical violence ceases. By the same token, it is essential to analyse how those living under a sensory regime develop modes of ‘sensory resistance’ or alternative environmental interpretations to maintain agency and community. As militaries continue to deploy ‘less-than-lethal’ technologies, there is a pressing need to study how these sensory weapons are being adapted for use against protesters and marginalized groups globally, transforming the human body into an additional domain of war.
Erella Grassiani is Associate Professor at the Department of Anthropology, University of Amsterdam. Her work focuses on the Israeli military, the Israeli security industry and non-state violent groups. She is currently working on a new project on aroboreal nationalism.
Nir Gazit is a senior lecturer at the Department of Behavioral Sciences at the Ruppin Academic Center. His research interests include civil–military relations, political violence, and vigilantism.
Feigenbaum, Anna. 2017. Tear Gas: From the Battlefields of World War I to the Streets of Today. London: Verso Books.
Grassiani, Erella. 2022. “The Shifting Face of the Enemy: ‘Less than Lethal’ Weaponry and the Criminalised Protestor”. Journal of Illicit Economies and Development, 4 (3): 323–36.
Howes, David. 1991. “Sensorial anthropology.” In: Howes, David (ed.) The varieties of sensory experience: A sourcebook in the anthropology of the senses ( 167-191). Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Joronen, M., & Ghantous, W. (2024). “Weathering violence: Atmospheric materialities and olfactory durations of ‘skunk water’ in Palestine”. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 7(3): 1122-1141.
Shalhoub-Kevorkian, N. 2017. “The Occupation of the senses: the prosthetic and aesthetic of state terror”. British Journal of Criminology 57: 1279-1300.
Vieira de Oliveira, Pedro J. S. 2019. “Weaponizing Quietness: Sound Bombs and the Racialization of Noise.” Design and Culture 11 (2): 193–211.
Cite as: Grassiani, E and Gazit, N. 2026. “The Smell of Fear, The Sound of Relief: Sensing War in Israel/Palestine” Focaalblog February 17. https://www.focaalblog.com/2026/02/18/erella-grassiani-and-nir-gazit-the-smell-of-fear-the-sound-of-relief-sensing-war-in-israel-palestine/
Image 1: Encampment at the University of Amsterdam on the 6thof May, photo by Luisa Steur
In the morning of the 6th of May, inspired by the swelling global wave of student solidarity encampments for Palestine, a group of students set up tents on a field of the University of Amsterdam Faculty of Social and Behavioral Sciences. The aim was to push university management to meet the students’ long-standing demands to disclose, divest and cut ties to Israeli institutions and thereby end the university’s complicity in genocide. At 6 pm that evening, staff was called upon to stand in solidarity and I went together with many colleagues. The atmosphere was euphoric as we had eagerly awaited a moment of collective political action to confront the ongoing bombing and starving of Gaza. Together, university management, police and the mayor of Amsterdam however decided to set the inglorious global record of being the quickest to shut down the encampment: at 3 am that night a bulldozer cleared the barricades and police violently evicted the camp.
Shocked at the police violence, a gathering was called the next day at 4 pm, in which many more students and staff showed up, in solidarity with Palestine and with our students who had suffered police violence. The gathering was full of energy and at the end of the planned speeches it turned into a demonstration of thousands marching to the inner-city campus of the university where a group of students occupied its famous “Oudemanhuispoort”. This time, the university management decided to let the encampment be for the night and set up a series of negotiations on the students’ demands.
Image 2: Clearing of the occupation of Oudemanhuispoort, photo by Luisa Steur
And yet, the next day, when these negotiations had only just started, a massive police force was again unleashed on the student protestors, this time with two bulldozers clearing the occupation. From a short distance, behind the police cordon, students and staff who had rushed to the spot chanted “you are not alone” to show their solidarity and others tried to block the police vans carrying off student activists. That Saturday, the demonstration to commemorate the 76th anniversary of the Nakba in Amsterdam attracted as many as 10.000 protestors from all walks of life.
The Monday after – the 13th of May – a walk-out was called at the campus where it all started, and many students and staff again showed up. Standing on the bridge in front of the main entrance and surrounded by students holding up poster-size images of the covers of academic books on Palestine, an impressive line-up of speakers addressed the crowd. But none received as much applause – and elicited so many tears – as Jacob Engelberg. We are honored to reproduce his speech, as he gave it, here on Focaalblog:
“Hello friends. I join you today as a Jewish anti-Zionist member of staff here at the UvA [University of Amsterdam]; I name myself as both Jewish and anti-Zionist, as dominant discourses circulating—from the Israeli state to the Dutch media to our own CvB [Executive Board]—tend to imply that we do not exist. I assure you, we are many.
I have been working with colleagues in negotiations with our CvB to demand moral action from our university in the face of Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza. I have been deeply inspired by the passion and the moral clarity shown by our students in their call for the university to disclose, boycott, and divest. These urgent calls have been met, however, with repression, intimidation, defamation, and violence, as the CvB refuses to negotiate in good faith, spreads lies about its own students, and then recruits the police to violently repress dissent. We will not stand for the erosion of democratic freedoms at the institution in which we teach and learn. Indeed, teaching and learning cannot take place without the democratic freedoms we hold dear.
I stand here today not only as an academic, but as a Jewish member of our university community. Much has been said about how Jewish people are feeling on campus, but always in a way that erases the presence of Jewish students and staff, including Israeli students and staff, within our Palestine solidarity work. Instead, our community is presented as monolithically Zionist, and critique of the state of Israel is rewritten as antisemitism. In Dutch media and politics, we have heard the lie that the student movement at the UvA is antisemitic. This is a characterisation unrecognisable to those, like myself, who visited the encampment and joined students in their various forms of protest. These lies efface the Jewish students and staff whose efforts in these actions have been steadfast, and who were among those brutalised by the police. The notion that these forms of violence are necessary to secure our safety is a risible distortion of the notion of safety.
I am, of course, well aware that there are many within my community aligned with Zionism, who consider it intrinsic to their Jewish identities, and who see denouncements of Israel’s actions as a threat to their very being. To the Jewish students and staff who feel afraid at the sight of Palestine solidarity protest: I believe your fear. I implore you, however, to reflect on the roots of that fear. My wager is that, like me, you were taught by figures in our communal institutions to equate anti-Zionism with antisemitism. I expect you might have a visceral response to seeing the Palestinian flag, to hearing the phrase “From the River to the Sea,” or even at the very mention of the word Palestine. I want you to know that these responses are the cumulative effects of years of distorted narratives about Palestine solidarity, the history of the Zionist project, and the meaning of a free Palestine. I call on you to think critically about the presuppositions we have been taught to make, to listen to the voices we have been told to ignore. The university, at its best, should be a place where you can do this work of critical reflection.
The state of Israel’s impunity depends upon the support of a terrified diaspora, whose approval is garnered through distortions of real fears of Jewish unsafety, against which Israel then positions itself as the antidote. It uses the trauma of intergenerational experiences of antisemitism, and particularly the trauma of the Shoah, to justify its actions. Let us be clear that a Jewish ethnostate that subjugates, displaces, and murders Palestinians in our name does not make anyone safe. Crucially, Israel’s cynical deployment of Jewish fear turns our attention away from where antisemitism is burgeoning in our societies: in the far-right nationalist parties gaining momentum globally; in the transnational conspiracy theories circulating centuries-old lies about our people; in the rise of neofascism that has already taken the lives of our community members as they pray in shul. Zionism turns our eyes away from where antisemitism needs to be most forcefully resisted, encouraging us, instead, to turn on our Palestinian, Arab, or Muslim siblings. We must refuse this cynical ploy.
It was in my years as an undergraduate that I first began to question the Zionist doctrines with which I had been raised. I felt many fears, among them the fear that were I to critique Zionism, I would find myself bereft of community, bereft of ethnicity, bereft of identity, bereft of culture. What I discovered, however, was a rich tradition of Jewish anti-Zionism with a legacy that stretches from the Bundist movement in Imperial Russia to the very student protests we see globally today. Jewish anti-Zionists have built and will continue to nourish Jewish communities that stand, without reservation, in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle.
I am grateful for the invitation to speak today and I stand beside you in the struggle for a liberated Palestine in which all can live freely under conditions of radical equality from the river to the sea. Thank you.”
Jacob Engelberg is Assistant Professor of Film, Media, and Culture at the University of Amsterdam Department of Media Studies and the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis. His research considers the relations between sexuality and the cinema. He has completed research into pornographic film, articulations of Jewishness in transnational cinemas, and the cinema of Ingmar Bergman.
Luisa Steur is Assistant Professor at the Department of Anthropology, Universty of Amsterdam, and Managing and Lead Editor of Focaal—Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology. Her research interests lie in the field of political anthropology and the anthropology of labor with a regional focus on Kerala (India) and Cuba.
Cite as: Engelberg, Jacob 2024. “The Palestine solidarity encampments in Amsterdam: “We must refuse this cynical ploy”” Focaalblog 17 May. https://www.focaalblog.com/2024/05/17/jacob-engelberg-the-palestine-solidarity-encampments-in-amsterdam-we-must-refuse-this-cynical-ploy-introduced-by-luisa-steur/
Israel’s wall and de facto border with southeast Lebanon. Writing reads: “All resistance for the sake of Jerusalem.” Photo taken by author in summer 2023 near Adaysseh, Lebanon.
“I cannot listen to the sound of the warplanes anymore, it sounds like they are flying over our roofs,” as a resident of a south Lebanese border village described the situation in South Lebanon on October 8. She, her family, and her extended family evacuated their villages of Mais el Jabal and Blida shortly afterwards. Since October 7, Hezbollah and Israel have been steadily increasing hostilities on Lebanon’s southern border, fueling fears among its inhabitants and raising the prospect of a full-on war between the two, which would be devastating for the region. It is imperative that the history of Israel’s bombardments, occupation, invasions of Lebanon, and the repeated forced displacement of its residents, is put at the forefront of our understanding of why the Lebanese front remains an active battleground.
The politics of displacement in South Lebanon
Not long after Hamas’ October 7 attacks, Israel deployed military vehicles northward, and reinforced the militarization of their northern border. War planes were constantly flying over South Lebanon and flare bombs were fired over the villages during the first few nights already. Hezbollah officially entered the battle on October 8, by targeting three Israeli military positions in the occupied Shebaa farms. Israel responded to this incident, and the violence has been increasing ever since. Since the beginning of the war on Gaza and as of January 19, Israel has launched at least 3,600 strikes on South Lebanon. In comparison, there have so far been about 920 strikes launched from Lebanon, mainly by Hezbollah. Most of Israel’s attacks have been focused on the area about 5-10 kilometers from the Israeli border; as a result more than 88,000 residents of this area have vacated their homes in the largest escalation of hostilities between Israel and Lebanon since the end of the 2006 war. As events unfolded, Israel moved its inhabitants of the northern border into shelters in other areas of the country.
Since the beginning of the hostilities between Hezbollah and Israel on October 8, nearly 200 people have been killed in South Lebanon by Israeli strikes. At least 40 of those killed are civilians and one Lebanese army soldier—the others, at least 144, are mostly Hezbollah members or fighters. Israel has targeted villages and towns throughout the south Lebanese border area. Israel has targeted Hezbollah, Lebanon’s most powerful armed political movement, but their attacks have also struck a wide range of civilians and state infrastructure. Over 34 attacks have been recorded against the Lebanese army, killing one soldier. Israel has attacked and killed civilians, explicitly and repeatedlytargetedjournalists, and struck houses and residential areas, public roads, mosques, churches, schools as well as a hospital, and healthcenters.
It is often the most vulnerable segments of the population that are forced to stay behind. The elderly, poor, and disabled are those who are physically unable to flee their homes, and therefore become victims of Israeli shelling and bombs. This is a tragedy all-too-well demonstrated in Aitarun, a village in the southeastern tip of Lebanon, where three young children and their grandmother were killed by an Israeli airstrike as they were evacuating. Their mother survived with critical injuries. Human Rights Watch called this attack an “apparent war crime.” On December 20, a civilian whose car broke down in the Marjayoun district was killed by an Israeli sniper, and a 70-year-old civilian was killed by an Israeli strike.
The economic and human tolls of the war
While aid organizations and individuals are providing some immediate relief, especially for those in shelters, the overall public awareness of the difficulties of the displaced is slim. The Lebanese government’s emergency plan is inadequate to say the least; it has not helped with evacuating or finding housing for its displaced. It has made some temporary shelters available for only a little over a thousand IDPs. The proportion of IDPs in collective shelters—mostly sections of still operating schools, or unfinished buildings—accounts for only 2 percent. The majority of the displaced are staying with close and extended relatives throughout Lebanon while others are renting a place independently, among other options. The needs of the displaced are less visible to the public. The ones who are renting housing are exposed to exorbitant rents without any oversight. If help is available, it is not advertised properly to people eligible to access it. This situation affects more than just Lebanese citizens: Syrians, both residents and refugees, many of whom have already been forcibly displaced multiple times and have fewer relatives in Lebanon that could host or support them.
The financial, physical, and psychological hardship on the displaced in the midst of Lebanon’s most severe economic crisis cannot be overstated. A great proportion of the southern Lebanese inhabitants are farmers and day laborers. They depend on their land for sustenance. Many find themselves traveling back and forth to the south, amidst heightened danger, especially for work. Some farmers who hold livestock have to stay or visit their property on an almost daily basis to care for their animals, despite ongoing attacks. The current conflict hit in the midst of the olive harvest season, on which many depend for at least part of their livelihoods. Villagers’ careful preparation of their muneh (preserved goods) is what traditionally gets them through the winter. This year, many villagers missed out on harvesting, preserving, and pressing their olives during this time, as well as preparing other kinds of preserves. Israel’s indiscriminate use of white phosphorus bombs in the fields throughout South Lebanonis further taking a vast environmental toll that will likely take years to recover from. Furthermore, December and January mark the season in which tobacco farmers sell their dried and packed up tobacco.
In addition to the war’s economic impact on South Lebanon, 52 schools had to close in the area, many since October 8. Seventeen of these are public schools whose closure impacts more than 6,000 children. An emergency plan by the caretaker Lebanese government to allow public school students to attend schools in their area of displacement, has only accommodated about 1,000 children.
The social impact of the war and displacement
This is not the first time South Lebanon had to face such scenarios, and its plight has still been misunderstood and downplayed by parts of the Lebanese public. The Israel Defense Forces has established a heavy military presence along the Lebanese border, and given the decades-long history of wars, invasions, occupations, and covert military action, the threat of another conflict had always loomed for people living in the area. Even in more “peaceful” times, including before October 7, the Israeli air force had conducted near daily incursions into Lebanese airspace, illegal under international law, sometimes deep into Lebanese territory. A report found that between 2006 and 2021, the Israeli military violated Lebanese airspace over 22,000 times. It used Lebanese airspace to strike Syria, such as on Christmas eve 2020 when fighter jets flew at low altitude over Beirut terrifying residents still reeling from the Beirut port explosion. Israel’s regular military exercises, sometimes conducted during key political moments, such as right before the Lebanese elections in 2009, are another form of intimidation and harassment.
The frequent and loud sound of cluster bombs being demined by the Lebanese army and the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) further adds to the sound of the threat across the border. Israel dropped an estimated 4 million cluster munitions on Lebanon during the 2006 war, 90 percent of them in just the last three days of the conflict. It is estimated that one fourth of those bombs did not explode. Many farmers risk their lives working in fields contaminated with unexploded bombs.
Decades of continuous displacement
This current war and resulting displacement is yet another episode of wars the inhabitants of the border areas on the Lebanese side have been exposed to since Israel’s creation in 1948, known as “Nakba” or “catastrophe” in the Arab world. During Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948, several Lebanese border villages were occupied alongside Palestinian villages and their residents displaced. Thirteen of these villages were returned with the signing of the Lebanese Israeli armistice agreement in 1949. Houses and historic and cultural sites were destroyed during this period and people had to rebuild their homes for the first of many times. For example, in Blida, one of the border villages under attack today, parts of the Ottoman mosque and several houses of people were destroyed in 1948. Residents in this border area have also lost large parts of their agricultural farmlands at the time. After 1948, a period of emigration to Beirut began, as the southern border villages lost their vital economic, social, and kinship ties to Palestine, disrupting social, economic, and trade relationships.
A gradual displacement of border inhabitants also occurred from the late 1960s onward. From 1967, the presence of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and Lebanese groups fighting against Israel in South Lebanon began to grow. Israel responded to this mobilization by stepping up its attacks on Lebanese territory. Going beyond military targets, Israel attacked public infrastructure, including the Beirut airport, as well as civilian homes and fields, making livelihoods difficult in the south.
This most significantly culminated in Israel invading South Lebanon in 1978, in an attempt to destroy the PLO and its supporters. The consequences of this war were yet another major displacement of about 200,000 of southern Lebanese residents. In this campaign, Israel killed 1,000 to 2,000 Lebanese and Palestinians and leveled several towns and Palestinian refugee camps. Israel occupied South Lebanon from 1978 until 2000, during which many inhabitants of this border area lived through daily insecurity and indignity.
Between 1982-1985, the Israeli army occupied about half of the country reaching up to Beirut, laying siege to the capital in the summer of 1982. Israel is estimated to have killed more than 19,000 people that year alone. After this siege, many southern families living in Beirut returned to their villages, since the brunt of Israeli force was focused on the capital.
There were several additional Israeli military operations during the occupation of South Lebanon, such as Israel’s “Operation Accountability,” known in Lebanon as the 1993 Seven Day War. In this conflict, Israel killed about 120 Lebanese civilians and injured nearly 500 in what Human Rights Watch referred it as “a ferocious Israeli assault on population centers in southern Lebanon […] which also temporarily displaced some 300,000 Lebanese villagers and Palestinian refugees.” Operation “Grapes of Wrath” in 1996, known by the Lebanese as the “April Aggression,” displaced up to half a million residents in the south, and killed about 150 civilians, through the targeting of hospitals and UN shelters like during the Qana massacre on April 18.
Israel finally withdrew from most of South Lebanon in 2000, after attacks by local resistance groups, eventually led by Hezbollah, made its continued presence in Lebanon untenable. For much of the following six years, a fleeting period of stability reigned, in stark contrast to what preceded it.
During the 33-day 2006 war, residents of the southern border area as well as those in Beirut’s southern suburbs, were displaced—about one million in total. About 1,200 Lebanese, mostly civilians, and 160 Israelis, mostly soldiers, were killed. Israel severely damaged Lebanese infrastructure across the country and destroyed many homes in the targeted areas. Israel’s aim in the 2006 war was to substantially weaken or destroy Hezbollah, in which it was decisively unsuccessful. The war ended with the implementation of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1701, which foresees the full respect of the Blue line, a temporary boundary demarcation in the absence of a peace agreement between Lebanon and Israel. It also calls for the Lebanese government to deploy its troops along the Lebanese border to replace Hezbollah’s presence, which was left to the government that is highly divided on the matter.
War and displacement in 2023
Since the 2006 war, there had been mutual deterrence between Hezbollah and Israel. Unlike previous wars where it felt unrestrained to strike with impunity, in the current war, Israel is calculating its strikes more carefully. Hezbollah’s stated rationale is to impose a cost on Israel for its assault on Gaza, and to keep part of Israel’s military forces tied down in the north. There is a tit for tat response for Israeli attacks by Hezbollah. Over the past few weeks, however, the attacks from both sides have become more intense, with Israel seemingly leading the scope of the attacks to which Hezbollah responds. So far however, Hezbollah, has reiterated that it is not interested in an escalation into a full scale war, but is prepared for such an event.
The current genocidal war on Gaza, sets an alarming precedent for what Israel’s military operations can get away with without being held accountable and for the nature of armed conflict in future. The current war between Lebanon and Israel seems to be only a teaser of what could potentially happen in the region if the war on Gaza continues. Several Israeli ministers have continuously threatened to turn Lebanon into Gaza. As this war of attrition continues, South Lebanon has been enduring daily strikes at an increased pace, with Israel striking villages further north, going deeper into the territory and targeting new places and villages by the day. Before long, it may reach the point of no return.
A longer version of this text was first published by the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy and it is republished here with the permission of the author and publisher.
Susann Kassem is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, the University of Oxford. Her current research project explores the formation of political subjectivities during the multiple reorganizations of everyday life and forced migrations under the shifting borders and systems of rule in south Lebanese frontier villages.
Cite as: Kassem, Susann. 2024. “Israel’s Looming Threat: Death, War and Displacement in Lebanon” Focaalblog 22 February. https://www.focaalblog.com/2024/02/22/susann-kassem-israels-looming-threat-death-war-and-displacement-in-lebanon/
CC: Dr. Ursula Rao, Dr. Biao Xiang, Dr. Marie-Claire Foblets
MPI for Social Anthropology, Halle
Dear colleagues,
We write as Israeli Jewish scholars, working in Israel and worldwide, in support of Prof. Ghassan Hage and in protest of the accusations against him. Prof. Hage is an outstanding contributor to the field of anthropology, who has made a professional impact on us all. His critical analysis of ethno-nationalism – be it Australian, Israeli, or Palestinian – and his vision of an alter-politics for Israel/Palestine both invoke an alternative to nationalist political structures and the possibility of egalitarian co-living between Jews, Christians, Muslims and others.
The significance of this moral and intellectual vision to anthropologists in Israel was reflected in Prof. Hage’s invitation to deliver a keynote address to the Israeli Anthropological Association (IAA) in 2016. Though he refused the invitation, the published correspondence between Prof. Hage and Prof. Nir Avieli, then President of the IAA, demonstrates his sensitivity to the complexity of the political situation in our country. His stance is political and critical, but it is not antisemitic. Accusing Prof. Hage of antisemitism is malicious and betrays a lack of good faith.
As Jews, some of us descendants of victims of the Nazi Holocaust, and some who research the Holocaust and racist violence more generally, we take this opportunity to voice our concern over the conflation between criticism of Israel and antisemitism, which is putting Jewish life in the diaspora, and Germany in particular, at risk.
It is well-known that Prof. Hage is a proponent of the boycott of Israeli academic institutions as part of the BDS movement. While many of us disagree with the methods of this movement, we acknowledge that its guidelines do not mandate discrimination against individual Jews or Israelis, and can affirm that Prof. Hage does not practice such discrimination. Several Israeli Jewish scholars have had the privilege of consulting and debating with him, and have always been welcomed with respect, kindness, and a professional response.
In the harsh time our world is going through, a time of polarization, deep mistrust, nationalist radicalization, and the persecution of dissenting voices, we urge you not to succumb to the brutal silencing of critical voices, and to uphold the academic value of unbiased evaluation and fair dealing.
Best regards,
Alma Itzhaky, Leibniz Zentrum für Literatur und Kulturforschung
Alma Miriam Katz, University of Oxford
Amalia Sa’ar, University of Haifa
Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin Ben-Gurion, University of the Negev
Amos Goldberg, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Anat Matar, Tel Aviv University
Anat Rimon Or, Beit Berl College
Avital Barak, Nova University
Barak Kalir, University of Amsterdam
Dafna Hirsch, Open University of Israel
Daphna Westerman, Goldsmiths University of London
Eilat Maoz, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Eli Osheroff, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Erella Grassiani, University of Amsterdam
Gadi Algazi, Tel Aviv University
Gaia Dan, Anti-occupation Bloc, Haifa Guy Shalev University of Haifa
Hadas Weiss, Humboldt University of Berlin
Hedva Eyal
Hilla Dayan, NYU Remarque Center Visiting Fellow
Inna Leykin, Open University of Israel
Itamar Haritan, Cornell University
Itamar Shachar, Hasselt University
Keren Assaf, University of New Mexico
Livnat Konopny Decleve, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Matan Kaminer, Queen Mary University of London
Micah Leshem, University of Haifa
Mieka Polanco, Jefferson Consulting
Naor Ben-Yehoyada, Columbia University
Neve Gordon, Queen Mary University of London
Nira Yuval-Davis, University of East London
Nitzan Lebovic, Lehigh University
Nitzan Shoshan, El Colegio de Mexico
Niza Yanay, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
Nomi Erteschik-Shir, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
Ophira Gamliel, University of Glasgow
Pnina Motzafi Haller, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
Professor Amalia Sa’ar, University of Haifa
Professor Avner Ben-Amos, Tel Aviv University
Rafi Grosglik, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
Regev Nathansohn, Sapir College
Ronnen Ben-Arie, Technion, Open University of Israel
Shifra Kisch, Utrecht University
Sigel Ronen
Smadar Sharon, Tel Aviv University
Tal Dor, Nantes Université
Tamar Barkay, Tel Hai College
Tamar Schneider, Open University of Israel
Udi Raz, Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies
Uri Gordon, CES
Uri Hadar, Tel Aviv University
Yael Assor, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Yael Berda, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Yali Hashash, Isha L’isha Feminist Research Center
The unfolding genocide in Palestine today is a continuation of Israel’s 75-year-old occupation and ethnic cleansing. This article provides a perspective on the ongoing tragedy from the vantage point of the Golan Heights – often referred to as Israel’s ‘forgotten occupation.’ How are the stateless Syrians experiencing this war? And why do ‘ethnic cleansing’ and ‘genocide’ reverberate as strongly here as in the rest of Palestine and Israel? By threading the current genocide to the story of occupation and ethnic cleansing in the Golan Heights, this article discusses the underlying settler-colonial assumptions about religious purity and war that have fuelled imperialist projects in occupied Syria and Palestine, and in the wider region.[1]
Fear and messages on WhatsApp
On Sunday, 8th of October, my friend Kamel[2] wrote on WhatsApp: ‘the kids are worried so much… I bought food and water for them… we are preparing ourselves for a big war in the area…’ With his wife and three young children, Kamel’s family have been staying inside for the past month, working and going to school on Zoom.
We became friends in Damascus in 2009. Kamel had just finished his degree in English Literature at Damascus University, while I was doing fieldwork for my PhD. We’ve kept in touch and I’ve visited him and his family in the Golan Heights. Last time this May, I promised Salam, his wife, that I’ll bring my own young children to Majdal Shams, the biggest of the occupied villages in the Golan, next time I visit in February 2024. Our kids are of similar ages, our families in similar stages. If we lived closer, we’d have playdates and family dinners.
Image 1: The border fence between occupied Majdal Shams and Syria, Druze flag [Photo taken by the author, 2015]
People, Kamel tells me, are really afraid to go outside their houses. Out of fear of arrests and, even more, out of fear of pogroms against Arabs, most dare not leave their villages to travel into Israel. For friends from the Golan Heights that live and work in Israel and in the West Bank, the situation is sheer terror. ‘We are afraid to go to work, we are afraid to speak Arabic in public,’ Kamel adds. People have been arrested by Israeli police for writing pro-Palestinian posts on social media. Throughout Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories people get arrested and held without charges, university students and workers, Arab and Jewish Israelis. Sara, one of the stateless Syrians in the Golan Heights, has stopped going to work in the Israeli eco-project that she was working with before the war on Gaza: ‘Israeli society has become, overnight, so extreme, so racist,’ she tells me.
Others, especially from the older generation, are not surprised by the state of Israel’s genocidal attack on Palestinians. ‘The tree of occupation never bears good fruit,’ Salman tells me on the phone. The ‘tree of occupation’ is the 75 years of occupation, killing, dispossession, and apartheid that Palestinians have endured in the hands of the state of Israel. This is the ‘root cause’ of violence.
Salman is one of the community’s leaders and revolutionaries, also a former political prisoner in Israel. He is a friend and a co-author, whose field research and hospitality have shaped my own field visits in the Golan over the past years. We speak on the phone often, he is worried about the ‘total siege on Gaza,’ and emphasises that Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant ordered a ‘complete siege on Gaza’ saying that they are fighting ‘human animals.’ In his speech, and throughout the past month, Palestinians have constantly been dehumanised in the Israeli press. ‘They don’t show any pictures from Gaza, nothing!’ Salman exclaims.’ In a state of war, Israeli public media focus on Hamas’ massacre and Israel’s ‘right of self-defence,’ egging on the ‘flattening of Gaza.’ Like many others, Salman is afraid because Netanyahu, Gallant and others sense that their time is up, and they want to cause as much destruction as possible. From academics to the UN, the word genocide is used to describe the collective punishment of Palestinians unleashed by Israel.
Back to Kamel, we send each other video messages and funny things that the kids do. I keep thinking: how do you keep young kids busy amidst a war? In what stories do you translate your fears? Do you speak to them about the killing of so many children? How do you contextualise the sound of rockets across the border, and the constant humming of drones over your head? Do you tell them that the Israeli soldiers in their streets use them as human shields when they fire from the military bases within the Golan, to Syria and Lebanon? Can you make the rockets that get intercepted by the Iron Dome seem like fireworks or early Christmas lights?
As human beings and anthropologists, how can we make sense of this brutality? We watch live the purposeful and vengeful collective punishment of the Palestinian people, the indiscriminate bombing of refugee camps, hospitals, schools, residential buildings, mosques and churches. We (mis)measure again the different value of being a human, where Palestinian children are cast ‘outside of humanity’ (Fernandez 2023). We bear witness to state terrorism and murder (De Lauri 2023), to starvation and siege, to war crimes, and to the genocide of a people by the machinery of one of the most highly armed nuclear states in the world. These techniques of extermination are a continuation of Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinians that started with the al-Nakba, furthered through the wars of 1967 and 1973, and has continued unabated until today (Pappé 2007).
Although I don’t have answers to the above questions, this piece is a way to make sense of the pain, war, and defiant hope that come out of years of ethnographic fieldwork, and of the most recent genocidal war and the reign of fear. For, although the Israeli occupation in the Golan has been the least violent in comparison to the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), we can see that from ethnic cleansing to the religious engineering of a compliant minority, the sectarianism of the occupation is part of a larger arsenal, one of the means towards the same ends.
The weaponization of religious difference, or, how the Israeli occupation in the Golan was from the start ethnic cleansing and religious engineering
“If you live, live free. If you die, die standing like a tree.” These lines are carved onto the tombstone of Hayel Abu Zeid (1968-2005), who died, the epitaph continues, ‘for the resistance and hope.’ Hayel is one of the martyrs and revolutionaries from the Israeli occupied Syrian Golan Heights who dedicated their lives to the cause of liberation from Israeli occupation. Next to his tomb is a commemorative plaque for Amir Abu Jobal, a boy of 5 years who was killed by an Israeli mine near his home. In the cemetery in Majdal Shams, the largest remaining occupied village, there are many other tombstones commemorating resistance, heroism, and the unjust loss of life as a result of war and occupation.
Occupation, ethnic cleansing and resistance have deep roots among the indigenous stateless Syrian people. From the very start of Israel’s invasion during the Arab-Israeli war of 1967, ethnic cleansing was an important strategy of war and occupation. 95% of the Syrian indigenous population was forcibly displaced and only five villages, out of 340 villages and farms, remained. These villages were predominantly Druze (the villages are Majdal Shams, Mas’ada, Buq’atha and Ein Qiniya. The village of Sahita was later destroyed by Israel, Ghajar is an Alawi village). Israeli army officials believed that the Druze, a religious community with historical links to Isma’ili Islam, would inflict a ‘stab in the back’ to Arabism. The sectarian logic of the Israeli occupation from the start, thus, was clear: displace the indigenous population, render them prostrate, or engineer them so that they cannot unite with Palestinian resistance and no longer pose a threat. Sectarianism is the more insidious continuation of ethnic cleansing outside of war.
Image 2: Much of the occupied territory is designated by Israel as military zones [Photo taken by the author, 2015]
The belief that the ‘Druze’ would be compliant peons in maintaining a state founded upon religious and ethnic difference was not unfounded. Israel had already by 1949 achieved an alliance with the religious Druze elites in the regions of Carmel and Galilee, in what became Northern Israel (Firro 1999). This alliance with the state of Israel isolated the Druze community in Israel from their co-religionists in Syria and Lebanon. In exchange for becoming political representatives of a new religious ethnicity (not unlike the created roles of tribal chiefs in other colonial settings), the sectarianisation of political identity in the greater context of Israeli ethnocracy (Yiftachel 2006) was moulded, and the ‘Israeli Druze,’ thus, created. The creation of the ‘Israeli Druze identity’ became henceforth an ongoing project between local Druze elites and the Israeli state, a project of producing ‘ethnic difference’ in the process of ‘inventing religious traditions’ (Firro 2005).
And so, the ‘Israeli Druze’ were the first Arabs ‘to be trusted’ to serve in the Israeli Defence Forces, and until recently, they were the only Arabs to be conscripted to do so (Kanaaneh 2008). Their so-called loyalty to the state of Israel turned ‘Druze identity’ into a laboratory for the manufacturing of sectarian difference, as the Israeli state and military worked hand-in-hand with local elites to produce and fund new ‘Druze traditions,’ as well as a comprehensive and specifically ‘Druze’ educational curriculum to educate the new generations. While this project was successful in funding the architecture of religious politics, it has not done much to address the chronic poverty and impoverishment of this region. Indeed, the Druze in Israel continue to be second-class citizens living under a settler colonial apartheid state. As such, all state policies are essentially discriminatory on the basis of religion, as shown during the 2018 Druze protests against the Jewish Nation-State Law.
The Druze in the occupied villages of the Golan Heights are Syrians and different from their ‘Israeli Druze’ counterparts described above. As the tombs in the cemetery proclaim, the heroes and martyrs of this mountain community have fought Israeli occupation, sacrificing their lives to either Israeli bullets or inside Israeli jails. Although individuals can be killed, memories of such resistance, here as in Palestine (see Swedenburg 2003), are not easy to kill.
What is being Golani? The complexity of citizenship, belonging and resistance
‘Israel wants us to be Druze,’ explained Fahed, the president of a local autonomous organisation, during an interview in May 2023, ‘Israeli Druze.’ Here, being ‘Israeli Druze’ means being compliant to Israeli authority. For deeply pious shaykhly families in the Golan, being somehow connected, or dependent upon the worldly authority of an occupying power is a religious anathema, and the most religious among them, have abided by strict regimes of independence and autonomy (see Kastrinou et al 2020).
Nevertheless, Israeli propaganda posits that the Druze of the Golan do not take Israeli citizenship because they are afraid of repercussions from the Syrian regime, should the Golan return to Syria. Yet none of my interlocutors has ever mentioned this reason. Instead, during the height of the Syrian war in 2015 I heard that ‘We will still be Syrians, even if Syria ceases to exist!’ Like inside Syria, the stateless Syrians in the Golan Heights underwent a similar process of anti- and pro-regime protests, while more recently from this August, some have been protesting in solidarity to the Druze protests ongoing in the Syrian province of Sweida.
Image 3: Barbed wire at a UN post on the border [Photo taken by the author, 2015]
On the basis of estimates from local representatives and academics, between 10 and 25% of the stateless population has accepted Israeli citizenship. The vast majority of Syrians in the Golan Heights remain stateless. Getting Israeli citizenship is a contentious subject for a community that is known for its resistance to Israeli occupation (Mason et al. 2022). When I asked Nidaa, a member of the women’s committee in the Golan, whether she’d still want to be part of Syria while there is a war, she adamantly said: ‘I’m part of the Syrian body, I’ll go through what the people go through.’ Yet, taking Israeli citizenship has increased after the Syrian war, but it happens for complex, and sometimes contradictory reasons – out of losing hope at the aftermath of the Syrian revolution (Al-Khalili 2023), or to be able to work within the Israeli job market and advance one’s career, rather than because people ‘feel Israeli.’ Rabiah, a young man in his late 20s, for example, took Israeli citizenship so that he would not lose his land after living outside the country for three years – ‘I did it so that Israel does not confiscate my land,’ he told me.
In the 1980s and 90s it was the norm that people who took Israeli citizenship suffered social ‘death.’ Branded as being ‘traitors’ and ‘collaborators,’ they were excommunicated from social and religious affairs. Jawad’s father was one of the first people in Majdal Shams to publicly declare his support for Israel and also one of the first to get Israeli citizenship. He lost most of his business and social capital in doing so. Jawad mentioned bitterly that, when his father died, the local religious shaykhs refused to carry out the mortuary prayers and rituals; the family had to bring in Israeli Druze shaykhs from the Galilee. Yet, when I asked him where he feels his identity lies, to my surprise he replied that he feels ‘Syrian’ even though he has Israeli citizenship. And, like most people who have acquired Israeli citizenship from the Golan Heights, Jawad was exempt from serving in the IDF: ‘I don’t like the army,’ he says. ‘I’m a pacifist.’
Underpinning the process of ethnically cleansing the Golan and the sectarianisation of political identities that Israel undertook lies a simple colonial logic, namely that religious groups are, basically, homogeneous. This logic assumes that there is one homogenous Druze community running through the occupied Golan Heights and the Druze villages in Northern Israel. This assumption is simplistic, filled with colonial connotations (i.e. same religion = same everything else), and simply not correct. We can see this assumption supported by Israeli policy and propaganda which has historically tried to imprint a sectarian logic and ‘Druzification’ on the occupied Syrians in the Golan Heights. The same colonial logic underpinned USA’s ‘tribal’ policies during the invasion of Iraq (González 2009).
It is the same logic, extended, that we see used by Israel to explain the large-scale genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. In the words of Israeli President, Isaac Herzog, “it is an entire nation out there that is responsible,” The Israeli ex-defence minister Avigdor Liberman said that “there are no innocents in Gaza.” Indeed, this is the logic that was used from the very start of the Zionist project, with ethnic cleansing ongoing since its inception (Pape 2007). The murder in Gaza is blatantly obvious whilst the occupation of the Golan is, in comparison, less bloody. But the underlying assumption of homogeneity within religious and ethnic groups is the same. The settler colonial state, then, either engineers homogeneity or works to expel or exterminate it.
Image 4: Inside a civil building in the deserted town of Quneitra, now used as an Israeli military training ground [Photo taken by the author, 2015]
But “religion is precisely the recognition of man in a roundabout way,” wrote Marx whilst exploring how capitalist states, in general, pretend but essentially fail to keep their secular, emancipatory promises. And creating a homogenous, religiously pure social entity is a risky, unstable business.
The French had already tried it. During their colonial mandate, they divided Syria into territorial chunks on the basis of the colonial assumption of obedience in exchange for religious homogeneity. It was at the end of the Ottoman Empire and the establishment of Western colonialism and imperialism in the Middle East that what Ussama Makdisi (2005) calls the ‘culture of sectarianism’ was born, as a thoroughly new and modern phenomenon. And, as it was born it was also resisted: the Syrian revolt against the French colonial rule was started in the Druze province by a Druze, Sultan Basha Al-Atrash, one of the greatest Syrian national heroes. The French collectively punished the Druze for their disobedience by burning down the village of Majdal Shams and collectively punishing its inhabitants. Indeed, it was this memory that was cited as a deterrent for villagers in leaving their village during the 1967 invasion (Kastrinou et al 2020). No one wants to be uprooted twice. The Israeli plan to move more than a million Palestinians from North Gaza to the south, along with the possibility of a further displacement in Egypt’s Sinai, could be a history repeated thrice: as tragedy, farce and genocide.
As with French colonialism and USA imperialism, the Israeli operation to ethnically cleanse the Golan Heights and to homogenise Druze identity in exchange for obedience, did not go to plan. When Israel decided to unilaterally and illegally annex the Golan Heights in 1981, the occupied people responded by going on a six-month strike. In their vast majority, the Syrian people of the four occupied villages, some 25,000 people, are stateless because they have not accepted Israeli citizenship. Their status is legally the same as that of Palestinians in East Jerusalem (see al-Marsad 2011, and Delforno 2019): they are ‘permanent residents’ in Israel and as such they do not serve in the IDF. Legally stateless, they don’t have passports but laissez-passer documents where their nationality is ‘undefined’. They have trouble travelling inside and outside of Israel, trouble getting jobs, accessing basic services, and they are constantly under the threat of the military occupation that steals their land (the ongoing conflict with the wind turbines is a point in green colonialism), and creates a host of other problems.
This experience of colonial taxonomical imposition, violence and ethnic cleansing resonates from French colonialism in Syria to Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank today.
Sowing resistance, sowing hope
A different heritage, that of resistance, is knitted into the town’s urban landscape, the most emblematic of which is Hassan Khater’s statue ‘The March’ (1987), which depicts Sultan Basha al-Atrash, the Druze leader of the Syrian revolt against the French in 1925, surrounded by contemporary figures such as a man of letters, next to a traditionally dressed man, a mother holding her dying son – a new martyr of the resistance. On the back of the statue there are three kids, the future, holding books and wheat. Instead of religious homogeneity, the threading theme is resistance to outside occupiers. The French missed that, and so did the Israelis.
Image 5: ‘The March’, statue by Hassan Khater (1987) at the central square of Majdal Shams [Photo taken by the author, 2023]
History teaches that colonial assumptions of religious purity lead to imperialist projects of ethnic cleansing and genocide, like the televised genocide in Gaza and the occupation of the Golan Heights. Look closer, though, in the continuities of everyday practices and the threads of another history become visible: the history of ordinary resistance, what the Palestinians have exemplified and gifted to struggles far and wide: ‘sumud’ – steadfastness. In combating the ‘bad fruit’ of occupation, the occupied people of the Golan Heights, and the occupied Palestinians, continue to sow resistance and hope, what the poet Mahmoud Darwish described in his poem ‘A state of siege’:
Here, where the hills slope before the sunset and the chasm of time
near gardens whose shades have been cast aside
we do what prisoners do
we do what the jobless do
we sow hope
Maria Kastrinou is Lecturer in Social Anthropology at Brunel University London. Her research interrogates the politics of sectarianism, statelessness and resistance through the lives and stories of her ethnographic interlocutors from Syria and the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. Author of Power, Sect and State in Syria (I.B. Tauris 2016), she is currently working on the project ‘Lives across divides: Ethnographic stories from the Golan Heights.’
Endnotes
[1] Acknowledgement: Many thanks to colleagues and friends in the Golan Heights who despite the war read through and made suggestions; to colleagues at Brunel University, especially Isak Niehaus, Gareth Dale and Mark Neocleous; to Vera Sajrawi, and to Steven Emery. Kastrinou’s current research about the Golan Heights is supported by the Druze Heritage Foundation, London.
[2] All names are pseudonyms and some details have been altered in order to ensure my interlocutors’ anonymity.
References
Al-Khalili, Charlotte, 2023. Waiting for the Revolution to End: Syrian displacement, time and subjectivity. London: UCL Press.
Al-Marsad, 2011. ‘Suggested issues for Consideration Regarding Israel’s third Periodic Report to the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR) To Be Held On November 14-December 2, 2011.’ NGO Report. (https://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/cescr/docs/ngos/Al-Marsad_ISRAEL_CESCR47.doc) Accessed: Nov. 13, 2023.
Firro, Kais. 1999. The Druzes in the Jewish state: A brief history. Vol. 64. Brill.
Firro, Kais M. 2005. “Druze maqāmāt (shrines) in Israel: From ancient to newly-invented tradition.” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 32, no. 2: 217-239.
González, Roberto J. 2009. “On “tribes” and bribes: “Iraq tribal study,” al-Anbar’s awakening, and social science.” Focaal 2009, no. 53: 105-116.
Kanaaneh, Rhoda Ann. 2008. Surrounded: Palestinian soldiers in the Israeli military. Stanford University Press.
Kastrinou, A. Maria A., Salman Fakher El-Deen, and Steven B. Emery. 2020. “The stateless (ad) vantage? Resistance, land and rootedness in the Israeli-occupied Syrian Golan Heights.” Territory, Politics, Governance 9, no. 5: 636-655.
Makdisi, Ussama. The culture of sectarianism: community, history, and violence in nineteenth-century Ottoman Lebanon. Univ of California Press, 2000.
Mason, Michael, Munir Fakher Eldin, and Muna Dajani, eds. The Untold Story of the Golan Heights:: Occupation, Colonization and Jawlani Resistance. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022.
Pappé, Ilan. 2007. The ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Simon and Schuster.
Swedenburg, Ted. 2003. Memories of revolt: The 1936–1939 rebellion and the Palestinian national past. University of Arkansas Press.
Watenpaugh, Keith David. 2022. “Kill the Armenian/Indian; Save the Turk/Man: Carceral Humanitarianism, the Transfer of Children and a Comparative History of Indigenous Genocide.” Journal of the Society for Armenian Studies 29, no. 1: 35-67.
Yiftachel, Oren. 2006. Ethnocracy: Land and identity politics in Israel/Palestine. University of Pennsylvania Press.
Cite as: Kastrinou, Maria 2023 “Looking at ethnic cleansing in Palestine from the occupied Syrian Golan” Focaalblog 16 November. https://www.focaalblog.com/2023/11/16/maria-kastrinou-looking-at-ethnic-cleansing-in-palestine-from-the-occupied-syrian-golan/
The algorithm swiftly gets it –yes, I am sucked in by news about Gaza- and collapses my social media platforms’ feeds into a monothematic thread that mirrors my recently (re)ignited preoccupation with the genocide of the Palestinian people. A Middle Eastern, female illustrator’s art work I started following on Tuesday shows up at the top of the screen. Her drawing of Wadie Al Fayoume – white eyeballs, embraced in an arch of red flowers, the same gesture and the same happy birthday hat he wears in the pictures that have circulated online after his killing – precedes the onset of my scrolling through the tawdry spectacle of death with an uncanny allusion to what it might have looked like to be alive.
Image 1: A mural artwork in a town in West Bank features a person wearing a keffiyeh and holding a Palestinian flag. The words ‘Resist to Exist’ can be read in English. Photo by Júlia Fernandez, August 2017.
After him, startled faces of terrified children, blood-dripping foreheads, cheeks covered in trails of tears and dust unfurl a grotesque witnessing of suffering; I am not immune to their affective power. ‘You Muslims must die’, the news says Wadie Al Fayoume’s murderer said before stabbing him to death in his house in Chicago. The pungent rawness of blurry video footages from Gazan hospitals revolts me, as they become, like Wadie, animated traces of lives that might soon be, if they are not yet, lost.
The narrative and visual dimensions of social media portraits of ‘what is going on in Gaza’ invert the effacing of the traces of the living that numbers on the news do, but they do so through a grammar of compassion for ‘all souls lost’ – the recognition of those as (former) living beings, and thus, Judit Butler would argue, the assertion of their grievability – with which a staggering surge of posts unreflectively registers a moral inflection toward neutrality. What I find more disturbing is not the invocation of a denial of what is in fact the very real differential distribution of grievability that is at work in such sites of violence, but how the ‘both-sides’ -or ‘no sides’- rhetoric, articulated by people who bestow themselves with the title of ambassadors of a common humanity, is oblivious to the fact that Palestinian children are not really apprehended as living until they are dead.
When the suffering of some is rendered accessible only when it can be equalized to that of others, the presumably uncomplicated language of a universal value of lives carries in fact the implicit recognition, by virtue of its omission, of what the battlefield makes evident: not all lives are counted as livable. Representations of common suffering elicit in fact interrogations of what counts as humanity, for they mobilise the term as if it were an empty signifier, sliding into ethically unfixed questions of what –and when this what– is a livable and grievable life, and what -and when- it is not. In positing a fantasy of equivalences, they omit the fact that in denying them the social conditions that enable the persistence, sustainment and thriving of life, Israel deprives Palestinians of life even before they are killed, inevitably tapping from a moral economy of suffering in which Palestinian deathis historically normalized and socially reified.
In a sort of collective aphasia (Stoler, 2011), accounts of suffering and pain are measured against each other through a grammar of false equality between what the colonizer’s absolute right to kill differentiates in terms of valuable and non-valuable lives. The long-standing pervasiveness of colonialism, dispossession and killing power becomes muffled; its monopolization of an unlimited right to self-defense denied in historically illiterate proposals of peacebuilding rooted in Solomonic repartitions of the territory and allocations of quasi sovereignties. Framings of the violence that often accompany such accounts as a ‘war’, or a ‘conflict’, often uncritically registering the tensions at stake through the performative solidarity of posting two flags together, raise unsettling questions about how the equation of the suffering of ones to the suffering of others – or the recognition of their shared humanity – seems so often to acquire meaning alongside a conceptual erasure of the long-standing power imbalances between the sides. To talk of suffering in order to speak about domination, Didier Fassin argues, is to do morals and politics with new words (2008: 532); but what kind of morals and politics are done by the omission of colonial domination that the articulation of frameworks of universal suffering seem to convey?
At the forefront of many calls for action, reflections on grief and loss, and denunciations of the ongoing violence ‘in and around’ the Gaza Strip are children whose suffering bodies, like those of Wadi or the children in hospitals in Gaza, seem to convey a sort of humanitarian discourse of ‘antipolitical moralism’ (Ticktin, 2011: 64). Children occupy, of course, a key place in dominant imaginations of the human and of the ‘world community’ (Malkii 2011), and they do so, in the case that concerns us here, by condensing very particular forms of violence into a moral problematization.
‘It is not a political view but a human response’ declares a dance school in London in their Instagram stories, now gone, imbuing the devastation felt for ‘the loss of innocent lives, especially children’, with a sort of affective affordance that attempts to justify a denial of the politics that are layered in the attribution of differential value to the lives of ones and the lives of the others. A pretension of depoliticisation that invokes in fact a very particular politics, one that reproduces the effacing of the precise context in which violence takes place. In those posts, the continued allegiance to the alleviation of suffering and the condemnation of violence emerges through a language of crisis and urgency that reproduces a particular genealogy of violence and reparation in abstract terms: victims are dispossessed of perpetrators; suffering bodies imagined outside of history and politics; they require help only out of a moral obligation (see Ticktin, 2011).
‘Let these poor innocent children be’ a Bristol based printmaker writes as a concluding demand, posting from the same city where I am. To be what? I wonder; what were Palestinian children being targeted by Israel’s last offensive? What kind of lives, if lives at all, were they living?
The idea of a morally legitimate suffering body collapses again in the figure of children in the words of Arab Israeli politician and journalist Aida Touma-Sliman: ‘a child is a child’; for which she is reprimanded by Knesset member Meirav Ben-Ari with invocations of a lack of symmetry that goes in fact the other way around. Toulam-Sliman is right, but she is also not; a child might be a child within the frames of humanitarian values, but in the rationality of occupation, a Palestinian child is not the same child.
Image 2: Two young girls in a pro-Palestine protest hold banners that read ‘Bombing kids is not self defense’ and what appears as ‘To stand with Palestine is to stand with humanity’. Photo from Dania Shaeeb in Unsplash
In a public endorsement of the ongoing collective punishment against the Palestinian population, Meirav Ben-Ari declares that ‘the children of Gaza have brought this upon themselves’. In this rhetorical unravelling of a selective production and undoing of victims, Hamas’ attacks prove Gazan children’s culpability for their own victimization. Participants of war, children are a ‘category mistake’, Malkki (2010) would say, used in this case to deny the pretension of our shared humanity. Children are, in the colonizer’s rhetoric, perpetrators; they are Hamas’ human shields. They are, as Butler has argued, no children at all, ‘but rather bits of armament, military instruments and materiel’ (2016). The grammar of compassion with which the morally legitimate bodyof the child – and the fantasy of the equal grievability of its life in comparison to Israeli lives – is upheld fails to acknowledge that in the occupied territories, Palestinian children are not really alive as such. They are nothing but a threat against which an absolute power defends the lives of some and destroys the lives of others as it formulates itself. They are like rocks and steel, darkness in human form, a haunting specter of the pervasive threat of terrorism in its developing potentiality.
As highly politically charged sites, Palestinian children embody indeed the racial politics of reproduction that underpin Israel’s colonial settlement project. Perhaps because in the colonizer’s war on demographics Palestinian reproduction stands in the way of the continued success of colonization (Kanaaneh, 2002; Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2015), Palestinian children are produced through the inscription of colonial power in their mothers’ bodies not as made of flesh and bones, but as traces of an unruly destructive power.
On October the 17th, the Israeli Prime Minister posts on Twitter: ‘this is a struggle between the children of light and the children of darkness, between humanity and the law of the jungle’. In the now deleted post, a divide operates through a narrative of impossible dichotomies between light and darkness, between humanity and savageness, mirroring the ubiquitous distortion of Palestinian people that articulates the same discourses that reproduce the frames of recognition in which their lives are considered nothing else but a threat to the survival of others. Perhaps in his post Benjamin Netanyahu uses Niebuhr’s novel’s title to refer to such an existential battle, yet the mention of children reinforces its emergence as a powerful signifier that seams together, even if in complicated ways, universalist understandings of humanity and the precise denials of it.
In what terms can this ‘poetics of our common humanity’ (Malkki, 2011) that permeates social media feeds not lose sight of the context in which such disturbing category mistakes – the, literally, ‘children’ of darkness – are produced? In what ways can such calls for compassion – which reify the moral authority with which children, presumably holders of an innocent, unadulterated, presociality (Malkki, 2011; see also Butler, 2016), are often indexed – be attentive to the everyday forms of criminal brutality that deny their mere existence as humans?
That there is no justification for the targeting of children, or any civilian of any age, is unquestionable. Yet, the way such claims for equidistance seem so often to compress the history of racialized and settler colonial domination into a ‘war against humanity’, obscure the frames in which Palestinian children’s lives are lives that are not only constrained and cut short, but that are ontologically already lost, placed ‘outside of humanity’, ‘dark matter’.
Júlia Fernandez is a PhD candidate in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. She specializes in reproduction, care and forced migration. She has conducted research in the West Bank before, focusing on gender and political resistance.
References
Butler, J. (2016): Frames of war: When is life grievable? Verso, London.
Fassin, D. (2008): The Humanitarian Politics of Testimony: Subjectification through Trauma in the Israeli: Palestinian Conflict. Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 23, No. 3, pp. 531-558
Kanaaneh, R. (2002): Birthing the nation: Strategies of Palestinian women in Israel. University of California Press.
Malkki, L. (2010): ‘Children, Humanity, and the Infantilization of Peace’, in Ticktin and Feldman (eds): In the name of humanity: the government of threat and care. Durham, Duke University Press.
Stoler, A. (2011): Colonial Aphasia: Race and Disabled Histories in France. Public Culture, Vol. 23, No. 1, pp. 121-156
Ticktin, M. (2011): Casualties of Care: Immigration and the Politics of Humanitaranism in France. Berkeley, University California Press.
Cite as: Fernandez, Júlia 2023 “Outside of Humanity: Palestinian Children and the Value of Life” Focaalblog 31 October. https://www.focaalblog.com/2023/10/31/julia-fernandez-outside-of-humanity-palestinian-children-and-the-value-of-life/
