The Principle of Return
The repressed ruptures of Zionist time
Adam HajYahia
This essay is part of our rolling online issue about Palestine, born out of both the unfolding genocide in Gaza, in the aftermath of October 7th, and ongoing contentions with international emanations of the so-called “Palestine Question.” Essays will engage the colonial politics of Zionism, Palestinian resistance, perennial questions about loss and diaspora, identitarian entanglements with Islamophobia and antisemitism, and more. As contemporary interlocutors of psychoanalytic traditions, we are inheritors of the field’s ambivalence toward Israel and the politics of Zionism, inaugurated by Freud himself. But as a magazine preoccupied with the unruly mesh of psychoanalytic, psychosocial, and historical-material analysis, we are decidedly unambivalent about our steadfast solidarity with Palestine and the diasporic geographies of Palestinians beyond Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories. This series shares a name with the Palestinian chorus calling for freedom: “From the River to the Sea.”—The Editors
The Future of Return
One must decipher the Zionist time regime to understand the logics of Palestinian resistance and what it has put forth (or brought backward). Since the Nakba, Palestinians have been caught in an ongoing present catastrophe that cannibalizes itself, reproducing a static temporality of enduring violence. This is an ongoing present that both obfuscates the past and colonizes the future. Claiming its dominance in the here and now, Zionism has abused Jewish biblical time—a fantastical past time—to assume the God-given right over Palestinian land and exercise continual domination over Palestinian labor. In doing so, the Palestinian past-present—predicated on testimony, oral history, and intergenerational memory—is subject to ongoing processes of sublation with Zionism’s phantasmal interpretation of a biblical clock. “The colonist makes history,” Frantz Fanon wrote, “his life is an epic, an odyssey.”[1] The Nakba, as a lived reality, is accordingly reproduced so long as this time-regime reigns, asserting an extraction of time over Palestinian psychic and material life.
A temporal architecture produced by Zionism—one that is maintained as long as this regime of time persists—the Nakba’s overbearing preeminence cannot be contained between particular days in 1948 or between “then” and “now.” The catastrophe bleeds into any imagination of a Palestinian past, and as long as the Nakba is present, all temporalities will be read, interpreted, and imagined in relation to it. If we take remembering in the present to be an active construction of the past, history cannot be constructed without relationality to the Nakba. This begs us to recognize the Nakba as structuring settler-colonial violence and thus refusing singular definition. That violence is a machine fueled by extracted time and powered by the engine of History. As Rabea Eghbariah articulately put it:
“In its most abstract form, the Nakba is a structure that serves to erase the group dynamic: the attempt to incapacitate the Palestinians from exercising their political will as a group. It is the continuous collusion of states and systems to exclude the Palestinians from materializing their right to self-determination. In its most material form, the Nakba is each Palestinian killed or injured, each Palestinian imprisoned or otherwise subjugated, and each Palestinian dispossessed or exiled.”[2]
In addition to its most “abstract” and “material” forms, and the Nakba’s encompassing genocidal violence and ethnic cleansing, maiming, subjugation, exile, and social-political fragmentation, it is also an insistence on the mass reproduction of annihilatory fascist technologies operating vampirically to feed off Palestinian time, which it extracts, steals, and re-invests. Zionism does not use Palestinian time, but exchanges its value.
This diagnosis of Zionist violence is not limited by historical confines, as the past under settler-colonialism is both anti-historical as well as infrastructural in its erection of a singular settler-colonial future. Meaning, with every single killing and act of maiming, Palestinian lives are terminated and shortened. When entire family lineages are erased, it means putting an end to an ancestral presence rendered obsolete. When lifeworlds and entire generations are incarcerated, captured time is allocated to another scheme–its exchange value is changed–by moving from one colonial temporality to a colonial-carceral one, living, or dying in a “parallel time.”[3] When new military and surveillance technologies are trialed, or as Israel classifies them, “battle-tested” or “field-proven,” their verified use value is exported and exchanged under the mark of their predicted efficiency tomorrow.[4]
With every speculative investment in fabricated televised lies, we lose minutes, hours, days, and lifetimes, seeking to negate fallacies—reproducing a debt frozen in a dialectical deficit. We pay Israel our time as long as its time regime reigns, and we are indebted to it and by it beyond this present moment into a future to which access is concealed. This is why Palestinian militant resistance must be appraised as this paragon's temporal, ontological, and non-dialectical rupture. Not the riddance of debt through payment, but its abolishment altogether.
Formulating fascism as a multi-temporal historical process against conventional formulations that postulate it as a moment of exception, Alberto Toscano writes about fascism as a “return”:
“The intensely superstructural, at times even fantastical, character of our present's fascistic traits would seem to warrant expanding one's focus beyond capital's strategies to shore up its social domination under conditions of crisis. [...] Fascist movements capture, divert, and regiment surplus social energies - unrealized wishes for a better life, memories of precapitalist lifeways, and unproductive and excessive desire.”[5]
Zionism, as such, cannibalizes these desires: excessive desires, desires of a “better life” by and for European Jewry in pre- and post-war temporalities, alongside desires of performing domination. It functions through the return of the biblical, archaic, or mythic—Israel is founded as the rightful present return of the biblical kingdom of Bnei Yisrael. It is a fascistic return that Zionism rides, a vehicle for the mass mobilization of psychic and libidinal dreams of European Jewry that swallows other non-European Jewish desires, that only gets heightened through the futuristic historicization of postwar Europe. Zionism’s temporal structure—or form—is innately fascistic and not only so in its current state, but throughout many of its myriad historical interpretations and manifestations. The genocide we witness today in Gaza is not a state of exception but one that requires to be read and understood as embedded within the fascistic historical structure of Zionism that always sought the termination and repression of Palestinians through various technological, necropolitical, and psychosocial arrangements. Palestinians were never meant to survive, let alone return or even have the psychic breadth to think of militant resistance to reclaim their lives and lands.
Palestinian return, however, functions through the expression of what is presently repressed: there are no archaic or mythic desires or pasts, but a materially extracted, exported, demonized, marginalized, incarcerated, contained, and maimed real presence under domination with a desire for it to be undone. The return is from the present to a different present. It is a negative return that is repressed by a fascistic return. It is an uncaptured and unregimented surplus desire that does have a material structure to support it and a colonial past-present from which it springs. It is indeed revealing how Zionism abstracts and then manipulates supposedly emancipatory political terminologies such as “Jewish indigeneity” to Palestine or the “Jewish right of return,” which grants Israeli citizenship to anyone who has Jewish ancestry, anywhere at any given moment, in the place of Palestinians who are reproduced as those in a state of displacement in Palestine. Like other forms of fascism, Zionism persuades both the liberals and the conservatives; it is both feminine and masculine[6]; republican and democratic; its settlements are both socialist (kibbutz) and capitalist (start-up nation). It instrumentalizes all forms of discourse, no matter how contradictory or oppositional they might be, to serve one singular purpose: Jewish supremacy in Palestine, settler colonization, and military capital.
“Palestinian return is not an act of reversal, but a redeeming principle that pursues the abolition of the conditions that render exile the only remaining possibility.”
Where, then, do we begin? From which point do we narrate? To begin in 1948 is a political choice, not a historical one.[7] Since the declaration of the inception of the Zionist time regime, the Palestinian refugees internally displaced within Palestine, and those expelled to the outside, have been demanding a return to their homes and lands. Oftentimes in English, it is articulated through the framework of “The Palestinian Right of Return.” However, the Arabic phrase is wearier when using a rights-based framework, and instead, it proposes other compelling ways of approaching return. In standard Arabic, it is referenced as haqq al-’awdah (حق العودة). Haqq is Arabic for right, but it also means justice, “that which is right or just,” or for our purposes, “the justice of return.” Haqq also means “truth” or “reality” - what is true, the Real, against what is fictional or mythical. Appealingly, in colloquial Palestinian Arabic, haqq also means “price” or “cost.” The cost of return. This notion of return neither seeks nor promises the absolute permanent return of all those dispossessed, exiled, and banished, but the open-ended possibility of returning for those who choose to do so. It is the haqq, or justice principle, to choose how to live instead of being incapacitated and forced solely to subsist or survive.
This indeterminate notion of a return evades purity and rejects totality: it involves those who want to return to their ancestral lands and occupied homes; to re-establish their presence; reunite with their families, and live amongst their communities, as well as the others who no longer wish to establish their lives in Palestine, for they have roots and desires invested elsewhere. And yet, they still yearn to have the keys (beyond metaphor) to their motherland. These two groups are not at odds: they both have a future-oriented desire, a productive and generative one. Not a negative desire for something they lack, but an affirmative desire for open-endedness and possibility. This is why Palestinian return is not an act of reversal as such—the relapse to a time prior to exile and dispossession—but a redeeming principle that pursues the abolition of the conditions that render exile the only remaining possibility. It is the redemption of the past in the present and the future, not its abandonment, forgetting, or re-insertion. In other words, return produces possibility and fractures the apparatus that polices our imagination and our life. It is the opening to the future as endless uncaptured time, and the abolition of what we owe; the reparation of what we are owed, our “debts”, the cost of return. It is for this reason that we must see the 7th of October as the superfluous rupture of Zionist time and the re-insertion of Palestinian political subjectivity. On that day, as on many other days within the Palestinian revolutionary tradition, the militarized and besieging walls—in their material and psychic manifestations—could no longer contain the people of Gaza and their desires to return, to break free.
We must not mistake Palestinian return as something that will occur in the future. Rather, it occurs and has been occurring throughout this present moment to enable a future—a future that escapes the economic speculation of racial capitalism into an indeterminate future that isn’t yet molded, one that could be retrieved, that could be emancipated from colonial financialization. With every shattered fence in Gaza, bombarded checkpoint in Jerusalem, clandestine escape from Tulkarm, surreptitious break out of the Gilboa prison, stealthy act of smuggling out of Jenin, and annual activations of Iqrith or Bir’im—physical, literal returns to places of dispossession despite military, legal and carceral prohibitions—we have been returning time and again, accumulating negative spells of time, no matter how short or fleeting they are, as returned beings. Some returns are spectacular revolutionary moments, others are conspicuous and modest in imagination, but they all bring us closer to liberation, feeding into one another. These moments accumulate in the negative, because we count them in reverse, we count them down.[8] Not from the point they begin, but towards the instance of their conclusion, awaiting their expiration time. We count them by the number of breaths we take until we are yet again captured, until we are detained, or shot, martyred, as if awaiting our renewed exile. “Death over indignity.”[9] We count them as beings whose freedom is future-oriented, as Palestinians who materially imagine a life in Palestine that is otherwise, and who remember the past not with depoliticized sentimentality, but as fuel for the imagination of the day of return. And so we are simply out of sync. These stockpiled moments await our cue to reappear eventually at the moment when a collective return is performed—when their sum is powerful enough to demolish the time limit, between fantasy and concrete fulfillment. It is then, when collective return is performed, that we no longer need to count because time will be on our side. Then, soon, we will live in a time that is ours.
Return of the Repressed
In Arabic, al-’awda (fem. verbal noun) is the colloquial reference for return: The Return. ‘Awda is always spoken with a definite article al- that precedes it. It is not any return but The Return, the only return, the return that needs no prefixes or suffixes to specify its reference. Assuredly, there is simply one return: the return to Palestine. In its verbal form, ‘aada, it means [he] returned; came back; went back. ‘Awdah or ‘awdon also means to begin anew; to begin after an end; to go to the beginning.
If return is an act done retroactively toward a beginning, somewhere, sometime—a zero or a negative value, yet always forward-facing—there must always be an excess. With every act of return, there is a surplus, for each time is different. Each time, something either spills or escapes capture. It is fundamentally repetitive but never identical, always subjective. This is why surplus, that excess we spoke of, is at the crux of Palestinian return. In a strictly military sense, surplus is the Palestinian rockets fired back at Israel’s settlements, made out of the unexploded Israeli munition that reaches Gaza. It is also the recycled material waste of exploded airstrikes repurposed to build low-tech guerilla weaponry. In a psychic sense, it is the repetition of the appearance of the unconscious after decades of subjugation. The psychic refusal of repression, the inability to be contained or besieged, the cathartic, superfluous flood of desire to be free.
The quandary many leftist psychoanalysts and so-called materialists find themselves in when they embark on their surgical attempts to diagnose October 7th is their inability to fathom the psychic opening that day has enabled. They often confront a challenge in recognizing the generative or productive affect produced by anticolonial counterviolence for collective psychic formation in the midst of a moment of revolutionary disruption. Revolutionary counterviolence is not a necessary evil or an inevitable inconvenience: it is formative. In the case of Palestine, this does not exclusively apply to the Palestinians in Gaza but to the very aporia of being Palestinian. As Abdaljawad Omar writes, “Is it not curious, one might ask, that the very sympathy shown to Palestinians appears directly proportional to their perceived inability to confront the uniform machinery of settler colonialism?”[10] What underlies many such “non-violent” surgical ventures, whether conscious or not, is an attempt to put decolonization to the test: how can decolonization manifest itself without disrespecting the colonial enterprise, they ask, while they implore hermetically sealed structures of sustained colonial terror, which inevitably reduce all decolonizing efforts to nothing less than abolition and rupture of the structures’ non-penetrability.
How can a people whose modern life is defined by dispossession, dehumanization, death, destruction, starvation, besiegement, mass incarceration, mutilation, and maiming, whose oppression is supported by the world’s cruelest military powers, imagine a material beyond? How can the same people who have been besieged for seventeen years by one of the world’s most technologically advanced and sophisticated necropolitical apparatuses actively break free using low-tech machinery made out of garbage? Dig a hole out of prison with a spoon? Through a sustained practice of resistance, how can a zealous commitment to liberation refuse to become but rhetorical anaphora?
“The psychic refusal of repression, the inability to be contained or besieged, the cathartic, superfluous flood of desire to be free.”
Since October 7th, these questions are being answered daily through images, no matter how life closes down on the people of Gaza. Through Al-Aqsa Flood, the repression of time collapsed into a transformative event with a future in sight. It materialized an imago of what liberation looks like, and how it can be achieved. The image of a bulldozer tearing down the Israeli fence containing Gaza is an image that shatters the psychic impasse—one inflicted by absolute besiegement—and restores our orientation towards the horizon concealed behind the wall. This image has long been the subject of our dreams. “What if I walked right through the wall?” She asked her mother. “I jumped so high I landed on the other side and visited my aunt,” he recollected. “I was driving to work, and I just kept driving until I found myself back in Majdal.”[11] It is indeed a parallel reality within which Palestinians live. An image in which a group of Gazans transgressed the fence that had contained their lives and dreams, in their flip flops, without a checkpoint in sight, while they simply walked into the lands from which they were expelled. It is a psychic image. It is a double, dialectical image: the event takes place while the Israeli settler-colonial apparatus remains the order of the day, and it does not occur after its abolition. The event of return does not take place after the fact, in a ‘post’-temporality where the Zionist regime no longer exists. Instead, the act springs from within the time of its reign, cracking its walls and fracturing its frame. The two images contain two opposing forces, two antagonistic temporalities, and two states of consciousness. Slipping out and spilling into the colonial matrix, this excess is what fuels return.
Many other images persist, though not always of a technological quality; images that are not fixed in a frame. Amongst the most important images is that of the recuperation of land as a sight and site of struggle instead of a reserve for containment. It is the deadly image of the command of a battlefield where the colonizing army is at last face-to-face with the population it colonizes, forcing the perpetrator out of their command room. The battle is no longer solely mediated through Zionist bombs of annihilation, only returned as surplus rockets. The colonized summons the colonizer, demanding him to witness his own wrath of colonization and the fury of anticolonial resistance. The colonized summoned the colonizer to see him face-to-face, without the mediation of surveillance cameras and lethal drones. The return of the repressed in Israeli consciousness is to be faced both visually and psychically with what your entire existence and material presence in Palestine eradicates and represses.
Otherwise repressed, Palestinians return through a besieging wall—which conveniently prohibits the colonizer from ever seeing the refugees she herself has displaced. Their return turns the allegedly peaceful, segregated settlement into a site of confrontation with what the colonizer is now forced to see. The repressed returns in this instance of the fracture, when the violently enforced architecture of repression, also designed to keep the Zionist psyche contented, crumbles. The repressed returns through Palestinian radical expenditure of (liberatory) psychic and physical matter that rearranges the machinations of repression.
Fanon had a close understanding of how, unconsciously, the colonized repeatedly imagines the moment of their freedom. Such psychic returns are not coincidental, nor do they burst out of nothing. They are the stimulus of the labor of dreaming. These dreams and desires are stored in our muscles like hidden building blocks—a stenography of sorts that formulates itself through the very conditions of the repressive reality. “The dreams of the colonial subject are muscular dreams, dreams of action, dreams of aggressive vitality. I dream I am jumping [above the wall], swimming [near the shores of Akka], running [in the streets of Jaffa], and climbing [the trees of Birzeit]. I dream I burst out laughing, I am leaping across a river and chased by a pack of cars that never catches up with me. During colonization the colonized subject frees himself night after night between nine in the evening and six in the morning.”[12] This labor of dreams, these psychic transactions in the unconscious, are not merely reflective of the colonial reality within which the colonized are captured. They are not only the theater that represents the bullets and batons marked on the skin of the colonized, printed on our psychic tissue. No, they are the schemes and imaginations of the struggle that awaits. They are unlike other repressed matter in the unconscious but simply “Not-Yet-Conscious.”[13]
“This labor of dreams, these psychic transactions in the unconscious, are not merely reflective of the colonial reality within which the colonized are captured”
The return of the repressed is the spillage of our psychic matter in the hours before “nine in the evening” and after “six in the morning.” It’s what we actively pursue with a kind of militant hope we are bound with because Our continued existence has been depending on it. While Zionism’s ideal arrangement consists of keeping our repression exiled and dormant, or, as Haytham el-Wardany describes it, in a “coma.” Palestinians have been choosing to sleep and dream, rendering every moment of revolutionary “failure” a time of militant wishes.[14] In his attempts to define the state of a political “coma,” particularly in the wake of the Arab Spring, el-Wardany asks, “If revolution is awakening—a long-awaited aberration that follows a deep mass lethargy—then is not sleep a return to dispossession? A synonym for failure? The failure to reshape reality? The inability to alter the circumstances of life? Defeat in the battle to redefine the self?”[15]
Theorizing sleep as a generative realm that concedes revolutionary failure, el-Wardany defines sleep not as the result of failure, nor its cause, but “the moment of defeat’s acceptance.” Palestinians have been subjugated, maimed, and subject to a structure that is in its very essence exilic, repressing and banishing our psychic matter to be buried deep in our unconscious. Zionism works to further push Palestinians into accepting failure—not only in our sleep, between nine in the evening and six in the morning, where we admit it to ourselves, but also between six in the morning and nine in the evening. Yet a psychic embedment plagues the wakeful hours, as we daydream of the moment of liberation, searching for it in the now. Palestinian militants remind us consistently to beware of the psychological war that Israel wages, the “war of the soul.”[16] However, Israel’s failure—that it fails to admit—is that the state of political coma it has been subjecting us to cannot be forced totally onto us: the repressed have been returning time and again despite all colonial machinations and machinery.
This is why we must locate Al-Aqsa Flood within a revolutionary tradition of Palestinian resistance and a psychic paragon of colonized subjectivity.
“History does not wait for the sleepers to wake; it is written by the wakeful alone. What, from those hours of sleep, is worth the history books taking notice of and setting down? Surplus hours of no benefit or purpose; and yet these hours do not wither and fade away like pointless superfluity but grow in number, night after night, to become a strange assemblage.”[17]
The Labor of Return
Some of the besieged Gazans who returned on the 7th of October already knew the land on the other side of the fence in spite of their decades-long uprooting. They knew how to navigate the industrialized wilderness and the boxy settlements they crossed. Knowing, however, does not mean familiarity, nor does it mean disalienation. The land has been made alien to them, and they alien to it. The land has changed, and they were made strangers. It is through their labor and debt, however, that they claim the future.
Writing about the experience of “black worldlessness,” particularly in the context of post-apartheid Southern Africa, Panashe Chigumadzi describes the reality of Black people’s presence in their native land as akin to being “a pariah in the land of your birth.”[18] Speaking from a materialist position, Chigumadzi pivots towards the Black majority’s labor exploitation in a land almost fully propertied by the South African white minority, describing it as “the spiritually and psychically disorienting paradox of exile at home” — living with a “double consciousness.” This schismatic double consciousness is a result of existing as a supposedly emancipated postcolonial subject in a capitalist nation-state structure, where one remains shackled by the chains of the market. “Exile at home,” which is one way to describe the state of the subjects of settler colonialism, then ceases to be an exclusively geopolitical category. This state is a psychic-materialist one. Although the contexts differ ontologically, this racialized experience of capitalist alienation reverberates across colonized societies. It is the experience of Palestinians in their lands.
The people of Gaza’s knowledge of the land behind the fence comes not from their memories but from the repetition of their labor. They know these lands because, after waiting for months and sometimes years to obtain work permits, they are allowed to cross the besieging walls to work these lands. Again, Palestinian time and labor are paid as a debt: we wait for permits to work the lands from which we are exiled; we wait on checkpoints to cross from one reserve to another. Our extracted and exploited time becomes the infrastructure of material labor with which the colonial enterprise is structured.[19] Those laborers move through militarized Israeli checkpoints to become the farmers of Israeli agricultural plantations, and the workers who build the settlements atop the ruins of their ancestral villages. They know these lands because they work them; they are alienated from these lands because they work them. Their hands change the soil and turn soil and subsoil with ruins of memories into sanitized a-historical structures. It is with their hands that these lands are shaped, and it is with their hands that they know, and with their eyes that they see. What a cruel thing it is for one to be made to be the force that makes one’s relation to land alien.
“What a cruel thing it is for one to be made to be the force that makes one’s relation to land alien.”
Palestinians displaced in Palestine are constituent parts of the settler-colonial regime that alienates them from their lands and stretches their labor across colonial time, but Gazans who “cross” work in particularly dire circumstances. They are surveilled, militarily administered, and overtly exploited, and they endure this to be able to offer their families under siege a better life paid for with nearly unpaid labor. How can one call this act of crossing a return if it is allowed by the same regime that exiles? Gazans’ authorized work access will always be adversarial to the principle of return, bound up with the sole condition of alienation. This is why return can never be exclusively understood through geographical terms, forcing us to implore its psychic and materialist cost. Yet, it is this knowing, manifested through extracted labor and exchanged debt, that maintains material access to the future. If they had not known the lands; if they did not see what was beyond the wall, how else would they have returned?
The Image of Return
“Go, Mahdi, Go,
Oh, people, these are our occupied lands.
Our lands, oh people, these are our lands.
Our occupied lands, oh people,
these are our occupied lands.
Oh people, our occupied lands.
We have returned to our lands, oh, people.
Our occupied lands, oh, people.
Our occupied lands, oh, people.
We have returned, oh people, after eighty years.
We have returned to our occupied lands.
Our occupied lands.
Our lands,
Our lands,
Our lands, oh people.
Beer el Sabe’, oh god, Beer el Sabe’
Beer el Sabe’, our homeland
Beer el Sabe’, our homeland
Beer el Sabe’ oh my homeland,
it is within you where the falcon sang.
We returned to our occupied lands.”[20]
—A Gazan man returned, October 7, 2023.
Like religious rites, these words were uttered on the 7th of October. They stimulate an instinctive association with the poetic, but they were the intuitive words of a Gazan man at the moment of his entry out of Gaza: at his moment of return. “Go, Mahdi, Go,” the Gazan man calls to another ahead of him. Is Mahdi the one who paved the way? Is he just ahead? It could be that he was only faster —resist your urge to assign messianic meaning to the name Mahdi.[21] The Gazan man’s words reach us through his mobile phone. He pants, his voice cracks, muffled, he cries, reiterating: “These are our occupied lands, these are our occupied lands.” Around him, a flock of Gazans appeared to be scattering, seizing the moment to roam without limits, while others kneeled to kiss the soil that birthed them. The Gazan man walked through the alien, emptied wilderness that was once the land upon which his ancestral village and those of many others stood. “We returned after eighty years, Beer el Sabe’” he whimpered, referring to the historically largest Palestinian city in the Naqab desert surrounding Gaza, captured and occupied in 1948, which he witnessed from a distance. “Beer el Sabe’ oh my homeland, it is within you where the falcon sang,” the Palestinian man pronounced, articulating a renewed assertion of political subjectivity. The falcon sang, and we heard the call.
“Why is it always our suffering that makes our images beautiful, but never our desire for freedom on which we act? “
This is an image of return. It is a difficult image, but nonetheless a beautiful one. How can one find beauty in an image produced, manufactured, and contextualized within brutality? If violence is what materially defines our lives, don’t we deserve to have beauty in our realities saturated by it? Amid images transfused and reproduced within the grays of concrete debris of bombarded homes and incarcerating walls, the browns of exploded sewage pipes, and yellows and muted whites of pillaged lands, is the only red we are able to capture one of blood, and the neons of phosphorous mechanical rain? How can an image of return be beautiful when it goes against all that is sublime, against sublimation in principle, when it is an image made in excess, like the waste it contains? Surplus images, pixelated, poor, impoverished, and limited in color—images of return transmit signals that surpass canonical regulations of beauty. An image that can never be framed because whatever it contains spills, escapes definition, and lends itself to be captured by those who uphold the conditions of its grotesqueness. In poor attempts to embarrass us for finding beauty in this liberatory moment, English and Hebrew captions read “Terrorists Break In”, while Arabic voices scream, We have been set free! Tainting our cheers and pushing us aside, their rhetorical violence produces yet another racial spectacle.
An orphaned boy standing atop the ruination of all that birthed him sings to the sea; two girls who had just buried their siblings kiss their maimed kittens; fathers who never got to see the day their kids return from school utter poetry at the sight of death; and mothers, before they bury their own, attend to those left without family. These are all images of quotidian life under colonization that Palestine has been forcing us to reckon with since the inception of the Zionist time regime. These images escape canonical and moral definitions altogether because they capture all that is absurd and unfathomable about the tenacity of Palestinians in the face of their oppressor. But this same tenacity shouldn’t remain comfortable in the eyes of our non-witnessing spectators. Why is it always our suffering that makes our images beautiful, but never our desire for freedom on which we act? Are images of a generation of young men, who were never allowed the sky above their heads—when they are finally flying, claiming it as theirs—not images of the unimaginable? Or that of a bulldozer imported to demolish Palestinian homes finally repurposed to break out of cages? Colonized legibility will always remain a regime of oppression. Some phrases and words resist all attempts at translation, and a lineage of images will never be seen for what it is. When Palestinians try to engage with those who insist on determining our fate, Gaza is described as an “open-air prison.” Yet when we speak between ourselves, Gaza is colloquially referred to as al-ard al-moharrarah, the freed land, the liberated land (الارض المحررة). Wonderful are the images of those who went under to become one with the land. Here they are, repurposing surplus colonial architecture to become architects of freedom, rendering Zionist occupation tunnels into anticolonial guerilla subsoils.[22] Tender are the images of farmers stepping with their bare feet and those of workers riding their motorcycles back into the lands that oppress them. These are all the images of return. They possess a different matter of the unfathomable, the paradoxical, and the impossible.
[1] Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth”. Pages 14
[2] Eghbariah, Rabea. “The ‘Harvard Law Review’ Refused to Run This Piece about Genocide in Gaza.” The Nation, 22 Nov. 2023, www.thenation.com/article/archive/harvard-law-review-gaza-israel-genocide/.
[3] Walid Daqqa, Parallel Time, 2006. From a letter that he wrote in Arabic that was smuggled out of prison at the beginning of his twentieth year of incarceration.
[4] Russek, Sam. “Israel Arms the World’s Autocrats-with Weapons Tested on Palestinians.” The New Republic, 28 Nov. 2023, newrepublic.com/article/177074/israel-arms-worlds-autocratswith-weapons-tested-palestinians.
[5] Toscano, Alberto. Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis. United Kingdom, Verso, 2023. P. 4.
[6] See Massad, Joseph. The Persistence of the Palestinian Question: Essays on Zionism and the Palestinians. United Kingdom, Taylor & Francis, 2006. He discussed libidinal and sexed investments in relation to Euro-feminized Jewish diasporic unconscious and Zionist production of a phallocentric Jewish nation.
[7] Ghassan Kanafani marked the 1936 revolts in Palestine as the political beginning of the Palestinian national liberation movement against the British colonial government and Zionist settlement (see: Thawrat 36-39 fi Filastin [The 1936-39 Revolts in Palestine]). Alternatively, feminist anticolonial Palestinian activist and organizer Tarab Abdul Hadi, traced the national Palestinian decolonial women’s movement back to the 1929 Revolts in Palestine. Edward Said also wrote about the difference between “origin” and “beginning”, with the former relating to myth, religion and the divine, while the latter emerges as a secular and human notion (see: Said, Edward W.. Beginnings: Intention and Method. United Kingdom, Granta Books, 2012.) More contemporary Palestine historians trace the beginning of Zionist project and the struggle against it back to the Balfour Declaration in 1917. (Thank you Laura and Ghalya.)
[8] Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, May amnesia never kiss us on the mouth, 2021.
[9] الموت ولا المذلّة
[10] Abdaljawad, Omar. “Hopeful Pathologies in the War for Palestine: A Reply to Adam Shatz.” Mondoweiss, 14 Nov. 2023, mondoweiss.net/2023/11/hopeful-pathologies-in-the-war-for-palestine-a-reply-to-adam-shatz/.
[11] These are not real quotes, but they are derived from countless conversations with Palestinians who dream of return, or dream through return. The Dream (1987 film) by Mohammad Malas is a project that materializes a visual rendering of many such dreamers.
[12] Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth. Page 15. All that is in brackets was added and does not appear in the original text.
[13] Bloch, Ernst, et al. The principle of hope. Vol. 3. Cambridge, MA: Mit Press, 1986. Page 201-202.
[14] Haytham el-Wardany, The Book of Sleep (Transl. Robin Moger, Seagull Books, 2020), first published in Arabic as Kitab Al Nawm (Al Karma Publishers, Cairo, 2017).
[15] Ibid
[16] الحرب النفسيّة.
[17] Ibid
[18] Chigumadzi, Panashe. “The Cry of Black Worldlessness.” Africa Is a Country, 10 Dec. 2021, africasacountry.com/2021/10/the-cry-of-black-worldlessness.
[19] Ferreira Da Silva, Denise. Unpayable Debt. Germany, MIT Press, 2022.
[20] The video was published on Al-Quds Al-Bawsala’s (القدس البوصلة) Instagram and Telegram accounts, October 7, 2023. https://www.instagram.com/reel/CyGfsZnIiDa/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link
[21] Al Mahdi (The Guided).
[22] During Israel’s military occupation and settlement within Gaza that lasted until 2005, the IDF built tunnels below residential neighborhoods to spy on, and neutralize Palestinian resistance fighters. These same tunnels were abandoned when Israel was pushed out of Gaza, and re-activated and expanded by Palestinians.