Remember to forget October 7

This morning, the Israeli army entered al-Bireh, in the heart of Ramallah in the occupied West Bank. Not because it needed to, but because it had to. Shots fired. Young men rounded up, herded into the school building called al-Mughtaribin — “the exiles.” How language conspires with history: exile gathers them even in naming. 

The reason the army was there had far less to do with “security” objectives than it did with the date.

October 7. Swollen with the repetition of massacres, but this time refusing to fall neatly into the ritual of the “routine,” the date compelled the army to act — not from strategy, but from the need to make us forget that day.

And perhaps ironically, they needed to remind us to erase it from memory.

The morning’s operation was meant to shock, but it ended up folding itself into the long archive of mornings already witnessed. Everything about it was ritualistic — the boots, the radios, the rifles tilted just so. It fails to shock precisely because it is constantly shocking.

To mention October 7 before a fragile assembly of uniformed men, their bodies stiff with authority and fatigue, is to tempt their compulsion to humiliate, maim, and kill. The date itself becomes a trigger, the word too heavy for their weapons not to answer.

The joke today is simple: if you are stopped at a checkpoint and the uniformed men ask for the date with that characteristic boredom that carries a silent threat, answer creatively. Give the date from the Islamic calendar. Offer the date from the Jewish calendar. Invent another year entirely. Anything but that day. You must expel it from your utterance. 

This is the logic of a society so powerful that a single number can trigger its humiliation. They have the law, the armored vehicles, the patronage of imperial powers, and yet they are unable to muster the modesty to listen to a word. Their transgressions against our bodies, our lives, our futures — they are all enacted precisely where language becomes forbidden, where a date can be treated as contraband.

Two years on, the date itself triggers violence and forces their compulsion. It has become a joke, one that reveals how darkness can unexpectedly twist into laughter. 

At first sight, the joke — “don’t say October 7, give them any other date” — appears as a tactic of survival, a small strategy of deception in the face of arbitrary violence. Yet, as with all jokes, the truth lies not in its surface but in its structure.

What does it mean to “remember to forget?” To discipline oneself never to utter the date? The effort to expel October 7 from speech makes it unforgettable. 

To forget it properly, you would have to stop guarding your tongue. You would have to stop constructing elaborate detours — Islamic calendar, Jewish calendar, invented numbers — but the fact that you cannot simply let it go proves that the date is lodged in the unconscious.

Ironically, obscenely, the Israeli insistence makes forgetting impossible. Through every operation, every checkpoint, every ritual of domination, they become the guardians of the date. It is they who rehearse it endlessly, paradoxically ensuring its presence.

They have destroyed Gaza, bulldozed its buildings, killed its possibility for life — and yet they cannot kill the date. Material devastation is absolute, and still the number persists. The more complete the destruction, the more spectral the date becomes, like a residue that resists extermination.

And as we learn to forget, staging the rituals of contrition, we — those pressed beneath their boots — become unwilling archivists, custodians of what must not be spoken. In silence, memory calcifies. In avoidance, preservation. The refusal to utter October 7 becomes its most rigorous citation.

Genocide and resistance in a world not ours

I am not sure how historians will look back on this date. Perhaps as the beginning of the spiral into monstrosity and the hyper-forms of techno-fascism that feed on rubble and displaced flesh.

Or perhaps as the first cracks in an imperial juggernaut and its outpost, the sign of the end of their imagined permanence. 

And perhaps as our end — our bodies scattered, dispersed, maimed beyond recognition.

And maybe as something else: the endurance of the unbearable, the persistence of what was meant to be erased, the resurrection of a people who refuse to vanish. I am not sure. 

That uncertainty is itself the symptom of the interval. To be sure is to argue for inevitabilities. But here nothing is settled. The questions remain open, as does the genocide. The open wounds of Palestine do not close; they spiral.

Two years on, we have learned new lessons.

“Peoples” — yes, this highly abstract word — can nevertheless be guided toward truth. Not by blueprints or decrees, but through the unbearable clarity of lived catastrophe, through the ruins that leave no room for euphemism.

Intellectuals, politicians, journalists: they prove far more resistant. They can see what they see, they can know what they know, but they are schooled in the arts of evasion. Denial, disavowal, the careful management of recognition — these are their crafts. They do not simply fail to speak; they cultivate silence.

Two years on, we have also learned something else: that our lives do not matter. They can be staged as props, bombed out of existence, left to rot without witness. If there was ever faith that humanity was progressing — and here I mean Europe’s own cherished self-portrait — then that faith is killed daily, with every strike, every denial, every silence.

We have also learned that our enemy is fragile, sensitive to the core. At once powerful beyond recognition and yet perpetually trembling, unsure of its own permanence. Its strength is measured not in stability but in its expertise in demolition and the art of turning life into ruin.

This violence, carried out without hesitation or remorse, is less an expression of certainty than of anxiety. It is the performance of an untenable Zionist fantasy of total domination, one that must be defended endlessly because it cannot stand on its own. 

We have also learned — or perhaps relearned — that this world is not ours. Its expansiveness, its joy, its love, all appear differently when we confront them. For us, the world has little room. Its spaces are constructed to sound contemporary, to look modern, to perform openness. And yet beneath the veneer, the old architecture persists: exploitation, racialization, exclusion. And further beneath that, there lingers a colonial nostalgia for the uninterrupted and unrepentant killing of the other. It is this nostalgia that modernity never relinquished, only disguised.

We too have cracked under the pressure. We have come to understand that neither resistance nor surrender will necessarily lead to salvation. All resistance offers is a chance that life might continue, even if only in fragments. Surrender, by contrast, erases what remains — it annihilates not only the body but the very claim to existence. Between these two paths, there is no promise, only the unbearable weight of choice, and the knowledge that both are haunted by loss.

We have also learned something, and this is perhaps the most important lesson: they are defeatable. 

Not only in some imagined future, but yesterday, today, and tomorrow — always. You can see it if you look closely enough. I saw it this morning in their eyes, in the way they carried themselves as they made an arrest. 

The movements of their bodies betrayed it: the stiffness, the over-gripping of their weapons, the rehearsed violence that covers over fear. Beneath the spectacle of power lies fragility, an unease that cannot be concealed. For all their weapons, their machines, their claims to permanence, they remain vulnerable, and it is this vulnerability that reveals the truth: they are defeatable.

In the end, October 7 inhabits us less as a date than as a structure: the interruption that refuses to disappear. To live through it is to learn that history itself is unsettled — that genocide remains open, that resistance remains without guarantee.

The same world that expels us, that insists we have no place within its modernity, cannot suppress the residue of what we carry — the insistence of life, the unbearable endurance that turns even silence into archive.

That is why the memory of October 7 returns, again and again, as both catastrophe and possibility. It is the wound that spirals, and the horizon glimpsed through the wound. It is the compulsion of empire, and the whispered truth of its defeatability. To forget it is impossible. To speak it is dangerous. But to live with it is to insist that even in the ruins, another world presses against the present — one that has not yet been extinguished and refuses to vanish.

Today, the joke is to remember to forget October 7.

Abdaljawad Omar
Abdaljawad Omar is a writer and Assistant Professor at Birzeit University, Palestine. Follow him on X @HHamayel2