Gaza is showing the rest of Palestine the truth of struggle

On the perplexing day of October 7, something fairly unconceivable transpired. Palestinian fighters, despite being cornered in an enclave with seemingly scarce resources, managed not only to breach Israel’s formidable defenses but also to seize an extensive chunk of territory. The subsequent events are, predictably, shrouded in controversy. While Israel asserts that these Palestinian fighters engaged in widespread massacres, such portrayals are now under the relentless gaze of skepticism. Once the smoke of war dissipates, the haunting specter will loom over Israel’s political and military echelons: How could Israel’s expansive intelligence and detection apparatus falter so incredibly? And further, what of their ostensive keenness to speedily reclaim the Gaza envelope? This haste suggests a glaring oversight: the seeming disregard for the safe return of Israeli hostages in the settlements within the envelope surrounding Gaza, which may have been instrumental in the mass Israeli death toll.

War, with its tumultuous facade, represents a moment suspended in the ether of time, challenging and disorienting our temporal relationships. War ushers in an acute state of “in-betweenness,” where all former norms, rules, structures, and even emotions are thrown into contention. Daily life, even in areas beyond the immediate vicinity of the war in Gaza, fractures, causing old antagonisms to readily dissipate. For a moment, everything seems within reach. While the past persists, it assumes a backstage role as the “in-betweenness” shifts focus toward the future. The first question invariably mirrors the second: what will happen to us?

At this very point, war announces itself not only as a breaking of the symbolic order but also as a powerful example of how powerless we are with language — how we can’t contain the suffocating experience of time in the prison-house of language. It is a hysteric disorientation that produces questions more than answers; it forces us to encounter the terms of its occurrence as moving parts in flux and produces a moment where everything seems possible — both the nightmare and the dream.

West Bank: Society of the post-political

Amidst this pervasive disorientation, the West Bank stands as a silent observer. It bears witness to the dual forces: on the one hand, the stubborn spirit of resistance, and on the other, the harrowing spectacle of relentless aerial assaults raining down upon a densely populated civilian enclave. This agony of dislocation not only cripples Palestinians in the West Bank into a paralytic state but also burdens them with the survivor’s guilt — at least for the present. Amid this emotional turmoil, the frantic cries echo the age-old quandary posed by Lenin: “What is to be done?”

The response to such a question at such a time cannot help but remain elusive. As thought conserves itself in a traditional veil, thinking is made implausible, if not impossible. However, the somber specter of death in Gaza propels anger that remains terrified of revealing itself and, at least for the moment, remains interiorized in intimate spaces — homes, among friends, and in placing the normalcy of daily life on hold. But traces of this anger nevertheless manifest on our faces, which are otherwise inscribed with disorientation and uncertainty.

There are those — whispering in hushed tones — who find a secret solace in the Palestinian Authority’s stewardship of the West Bank. Haunted by the possibility of another Nakba, to which Israel repeatedly gestures in actions and words, some Palestinians in the West Bank secretly accede to the Palestinian Authority’s inevitable collaboration with and submission to Israel as a way to ensure the preservation of our bare existence. The PA’s silence, they think, might ensure survival. 

Others, however, view the PA’s silence and collaboration as the ultimate act of treachery, a nod to complicity in the face of an overpowering settler-colonial otherness. On the one hand, Palestinians condemn the PA by exteriorizing their anger and unleashing it against it. On the other hand, some also secretly cheer on this complicit strategy of “survival.” Perhaps that is the real power of the PA and its current leadership — not to be loved nor to be politically legitimate, but to provide many Palestinians in the West Bank with an exteriorized space to condemn their political inoperability and lack of will. Understood as such, the PA is an authoritarian regime whose function is to provide a target for a collective form of revulsion.

The question of “what is to be done?” remains only that — a question. For most Palestinians in the West Bank, the question functions rhetorically to point to the inevitable closure or to the impossibility of an answer. Significantly, this question, repeated time and again, signals an inability to be in the present, to wrestle with the here and now. And this inability, in turn, is reinforced by losing oneself in the “breaking news.”

And here lies the difference between the West Bank and Gaza. The West Bank lives in this majestic abode of tragic uncertainty, while Gaza breaks through the spatial settler colonial order and suffers from the unleashing of what one Israeli general called the floodgates of “hell.” In the West Bank, the truth of the struggle is frozen in the past, making for a largely post-political society that has “cleansed” itself of the dream of Palestine, from its possibility and futurity. In Gaza, the truth of struggle appears in the ability to crack open the space of the colonizer and grasp an opportune moment to maneuver itself outside the gates of the largest open-air prison.

Gaza’s ‘strategic witticism’

Michel de Certeau, drawing upon Carl von Clausewitz, defines “tactics” as the “art of the weak.” Tactics stand in contrast to “strategy,” which is the domain of corporations, nation-states, and the increasingly advanced war machinery of modern state armies. While strategy is characterized by cool-headed and rational calculations, aligning means with ends, de Certeau also views it as the means by which these powerful entities organize and dictate spatial arrangements. For him, strategy is the way these actors aim to streamline, dominate, and transform space into an orderly canvas. Israel’s systems of control, including its walls, early detection systems, airpower, intelligence, and military — all of which surround and choke Gaza — is the strategic frame that Gaza was able to break through.

De Certeau also draws a parallel between tactics and Freud’s elucidation of wit — a mechanism that serves to fissure and fragment pre-inscribed discourses. A witty remark is contingent on the discourse that precedes it; it can only appear as a crack in this pre-inscribed discourse. In this sense, tactics weaponize time, making use of the opportune moment to crack a joke or play with words. Isn’t that precisely what happened on October 7, as the weak found a method to trick, deceive, surprise, and break the crevices of a pre-ordained spatial arrangement in Gaza? Or to break open the strategic arrangement? 

Yet, what De Certeau perhaps overlooks is the latent potential of the “weak” to not only intervene tactically but to strategically challenge the preordained spatial order of the powerful, and in Palestine’s case, the preordained logic of elimination at the heart of settler colonialism. His emphasis on the quotidian, on the everyday, predisposed him to ascribe to the marginalized merely “tactics” that nudge, twist, and subtly subvert preordained spatial configurations.

Gaza, then, is unshakably and strategically witty. It exposes Israeli fragility for the world to see. Gaza’s strategic witticism does not only challenge Israeli militaristic rhetoric or its economic edifice, erected predominantly through the exportation of military and security technologies of control and dispossession. It does not only tarnish Israel’s intelligence reputation, nor does it end “Mr. Security’s” political career. Gaza also makes explicit the latent emergent discourse that teeters on the precipice of genocide, unapologetically brazen in its display, as discourses of elimination become normalized by the empire and its “representatives.” This is evident in the discourse of Israeli officials. In the words of one of them, “Gaza opened the gates of hell,” and in the words of its Minister of Defense, Palestinians are “human animals.” Israel’s dovish president insists that there is no difference between civilians and fighters because they can all become “witty.”

A profound irony bears witness to the latent strength of the weak: their capacity to fracture walls, liberate themselves from confinement, and sow seeds of disruption and tumult. To usher in both the possibility to dream, to imagine a radically different world, and the ability to usher in the unbearable truth of settler-colonialism, the nightmare of elimination. But it also reveals Israel’s collective unconscious and its yearning for thousands of other massacres, including those at Tantura, Deir Yassin, Ailaboun, and the hundreds of villages it wiped out.

The mood of the nightmare weaves its fabric and builds its diffused content and images from the dark tapestry of our intimate fears and ambiguities. In contrast to daylight, the apparent dissolution of reality dominates this mood, making us unable to delineate differences. Shadows, horrors, and sounds all become distorted. Even familiar people and places become confusing. The nightmare, suspended in the space between the conscious and unconscious, is loaded and burdened with heavy dread. Time seems to stretch, condense, and contract, making moments of terror feel eternal. The nightmare is a realm that traverses the known and unknown, the horrific and the uncanny. In Gaza, this nightmare is real. It flies over Gaza with sophisticated drones and the most advanced fighter jets. It chooses where to drop the next load and which family to erase from the civil registry.

Palestine lost, Palestine reborn

In the West Bank, this nightmare exists on the level of the imaginary, situated in the innermost depths of Palestinians caught within a political domain dominated by a ruling class that has operationalized inoperability. The mood of the nightmare here is collective; it does not emanate from the weaponized sky. A nightmare that induces a paralytic state: everything is changing, yet nothing can be done.

In the West Bank, people yearn for the war’s conclusion, not out of a thirst for victory alone, but for the end of the spillage of blood. The war’s prolongation exasperates the pangs of collective survival guilt. This desire to break free from guilt stretches thinking to its limits, yet fails to open the space for the witticism of political thought and action. It fails at discharging and transcending the collective fall into the abyss of a tragic truth buried in the past.

In recent years, the West Bank has adopted new tactics and established self-defense zones in areas such as Tulkarem, Jenin, and Nablus. From October 7 to October 22, it lost over 90 of its own sons and daughters. In Nur Shams refugee camp, there was a significant clash with Israeli special forces, leaving 14 Palestinians dead. Israel has even used its fighter jets to hit a mosque in Jenin, redrawing the unspoken rules of engagement with these self-defense zones. The amplified resistance in the West Bank throughout the past couple of years helped Gaza design its moment of shock and awe.

Yet the crisis within the Palestinian national movement in the West Bank persists. This movement is unable to cultivate new figures and leadership. This is not a crisis of strategy alone, as the general critique of Palestinian leadership usually contends, i.e., the lack of vision and the lack of a roadmap. But it also highlights the disconnect and parallelism between the post-political or post-Palestine middle class, centered on consumerism and individualism, and a revolutionary working class raising the stakes through tactical ingenuity. A middle class that is based largely on the large public Palestinian sector and civil society is materially invested in the maintenance of this post-political space, a space where Palestine is frozen in a tragic past. Its general melancholic attitude towards Palestine, as a lost object, propels a form of disagreeable silence, one that is not truly capable of energizing or mobilizing itself to face the deeply complex challenges Palestinians face. The West Bank remains caught between the in-betweenness of new resistance and the inoperability of the middle and upper classes to create new avenues for political engagement and discourse — to fight its political fight.

The silence that papers over the strata of professionals, public servants, merchants, educators, doctors, nurses, and engineers is symptomatic of the ability of the current PA leadership to demobilize a large swath of the Palestinian population. On the one hand, we witness a radical political phenomenon invested in creating new potencies and potentialities embedded in working-class dense urbanities. On the other hand, we are also confronted with a largely silent and fearful middle class that is stuck between two desires: political salvation and liberation, and skepticism and the fearfulness of resistance itself. They shy away from the ability of resistance to conjure the dreadfulness of uncertainty, insecurity, and the wreckage of failed expectations.

Gaza lives in the present, is contemporaneous with itself, and yearns for the end of war precisely because it’s a war that it already won when it successfully humbled the god complex at the heart of settler-colonial pathology. It won when it brought the empire hurrying to the region to affirm and reaffirm, again and again, that it would allow Israel to regain its godliness. It won when it made the Israeli lobby feel trivial when they told the world that Palestine did not matter to regional and international developments. It won when it gave Palestinian prisoners a way out of prison. A small besieged city has made the region jittery and on the edge of an all-out war, and it has driven Israel to its moment of madness. Palestine is now alive everywhere.

Israel is banking on this moment of international and diplomatic support to upend the rules radically everywhere. Rules of combat, rules of opening fire, rules of residency in Jerusalem, and rules of carrying weapons among settlers. It is employing this moment to upend the rules of killing and devastation in Gaza. The sovereign is redrawing the field of exceptions while attempting to kill Palestine everywhere.

Yesterday, a distant voice on the phone reached me from Haifa. It wasn’t just the words but the reticence between them — the haunting resonance of a dread that takes shape in the very act of speaking. She was hesitant, almost fragmented, as she reflected upon a time — a parenthesis between 1948 and 1967 — when being a Palestinian with Israeli citizenship meant existing under the shadow of an intricate military machinery, a machinery that later stretched its tentacles to the West Bank and Gaza.

Now, once more, that darkness looms. Israel has decided to arrest words before they find form, terminate the employment of those whose hearts pulse with Gaza, and eradicate the futures of young university students. There’s a paradox in this attempt to erase solidarity, to silence outspokenness. In attempting to silence the streets, Israel inadvertently confesses to its own insecurity; its military might, it turns out, is fearful of words. Ironically, the growing organized crime within the Palestinian community within the part of Palestine conquered in 1948 also freezes at this moment. But perhaps more ironic is that the political leadership of Palestinians in Israel has condemned Gaza and then retreated to the barracks of a “wait and see” posture.

The machinery of settler-colonialism perpetually refines its calculus — differentiating, dividing, and placing in neat categories. With a chilling audacity, it strikes with impunity, whether in Gaza, the West Bank, Jerusalem, or within Israel’s boundaries. It transforms silence into a weapon. Yet the voices of many of our friends in Gaza bear the slogan of profound resonance in these times: “Heaven is closer than Sinai.” These words will not be limited to Gaza, for heaven is also closer than Amman, Damascus, and Beirut.

Eclipsing the nightmare

Gaza speaks with a voice resonating with the tenor of myths but is profoundly grounded in reality. The tangible essence of its call is precisely why the empire, ever attentive, resorts to the defensive and obscures the truth with narratives steeped in cultural rhetoric that perpetuates the divisive discourse of “us versus them.” The empire attempts to turn Gaza into a territory of the profane. But Gaza’s transgression and rejection of its slow death are anything but profane. In fact, Gaza’s strategic witticism lays us all bare, showing the profanity of a world Ghassan Kanafani called a “world not ours.”

War is a blending of contrasts; it is both the dream and the nightmare, a tense fusion that interrupts our power to transform words into tangible forms. As Israel crafts its response in monstrous ways, we’re reminded that these very monsters often serve to validate pre-existing norms, affects, feelings, and frameworks. Israel longs for the days before the tumult of October 7. Gaza’s astute transgressions aim not just to challenge but to push the boundaries of thought and action. Such circumstances compel us back to the uninhibited curiosity of a child, who, with every pointed finger and raised query, seeks understanding but remains relentless. Gaza has shown us the fissures, offering a clearer view of the present moment, all while staying true to its own present. Through these fissures, the dream just might find a way to eclipse the nightmare.

I would like to thank Professor Samera Esmeir for her comments and edits and for taking the time to read this piece. I’m also grateful to Professor Amira Silmi, who graciously read it and provided me with crucial feedback.