-Essay-
CAIRO — The war has been far longer than we supporters of the Palestinian cause had predicted. We had built our expectations on the exceptional image of the moment, on this momentary glimpse, when the resistance crossed the border and flew its gliders towards the promised land. But on the ground, the confrontation was violent and bloody on both sides to form another exceptional image, which is the practice of violence.
Perhaps the members of the resistance who crossed (into southern Israel) did not believe that they were inside the land they were denied. They were stunned by the surprise, so the joy was mixed, sometimes, with historical revenge.
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Even now, as supporters of the cause, we learn from our mistakes and from our transgressive dreams, and from the sudden moments of joy that shaped our thoughts and emotions. We are still learning from our one-sided pessimism, and from our non-objective objectivity, as long as we do not yet have a clear method of thinking.
We will continue to learn from our mistakes, as long as there is no connection between our imagination and our objectivity, and between our infinite optimism and our one-sided pessimism. We still think in a short-sighted way. We don’t think in a matter, any matter, as a whole when we discuss one part, any part, of it.
Hunting question
The war continues, and the number of dead rises: all this bloodshed and victims are not enough to minimize the repercussions, or the explosion, of a war which was bound to happen. Nor is this bloodshed enough to justify the opinion that accuses and condemns the resistance and its historical mistake when it launched this attempted suicide. That attempt dragged the Palestinian people into this renewed historical predicament.
The Palestinian issue defies any sense of fairness.
Some argue we are witnessing the defeat of the resistance. They hold the resistance accountable for the death and massacre that has happened this past year, and beyond. I do not agree with this opinion. It does not account for the rules of time.
Perhaps some were waiting, as supporters of the cause, for a sudden victory that sets new conditions, and cancels our distortions and self-contradictions. One of the reasons may be that the Palestinian issue defies any sense of fairness when we look into it. It’s still deadlocked for 70 years, like an unfinished episode of an eternal history.
This desperation pushed us to believing in a miracle. Emotions usually trump objectivity in the analysis of events.
Was the war inevitable?
The specter of an answer lingers in the minds of those who support the resistance, satisfying their conscience: that there is a destiny in this war that no one chose. It was chosen by the historical moment, to hasten the resolution or end of this episode of modern history, at least in our region. And it was inevitable, after the tragic situation that Gaza and the West Bank reached before the war. The liquidation of the cause was occurring in silence.
Throughout the months of the war and its mornings and evenings, I was scrolling through the pages of my Palestinian friends on Facebook to see their reactions to what was happening on the ground: Is there any condemnation for Hamas? Is Hamas the resistance that represents them? Was the situation before the war better? In what ways?
I find myself confused about my pro-resistance opinion — and those who resemble me in it, despite the enormity of the losses. My opinion brings with it a guarantee of sacrifice and death — but also a future where history is completed, and becomes a reality greater than the present time.
I stare at the faces of those evicted from their homes as cameras follow them: the relatives of the dead and the martyrs, the procession accompanying any speeding stretcher filled with blood. I stare at the congregation behind the rows of white shrouds.
Perhaps the tragedy of all of this exceeded our utilitarian relationship with the cause, and our divisions and contradictions around it, but even exceeded the idea of condemnation itself. That’s because the tragedy made them touch the truth, overcome the internal division, and look with innocence, clarity and defiance, directly in the eye of the aggressor, or the conscience of the world waiting behind the cameras, and defend the cause with extraordinary clarity.
A moment of renewal
As the war goes on, we begin to understand anew the reasons behind the cause, and its consequences. Any beginning of an exceptional moment is a call to a new time from memory and from the stock of personal dreams for the sudden and temporary victory of the resistance.
The beginning is the most honest, because it is the exception that gets rid of the calculations. It has no precedent or successor, a frozen moment, devoid of any authority or rule. It is an exceptional, undefeated and historical time. This moment changes the equation of repetitive time that has been monopolized by the colonial regimes.
It was the exceptional time that changed the equation and moved towards deeper confrontations from the two sides. So the dream returned to the Palestinians, and to us as passive supporters of the cause, even if temporarily.
Liquidation of the cause
This exceptional time also awakened the hidden Israeli dream. It brought it to light in front of the whole world. It brought back the past conspiratorial plans of the extermination of the Palestinian people; the liquidation of the cause, and the evacuation of the land.
Everything Israel is doing now was part of its big project, and the moment of October 7th came to expose this highly racist colonial past. The State of Israel is an exceptional form of occupation, deriving its strength from oppression, sacrifice and isolation, and clinging to the past through the reproduction of the religious dream that exercises power in all its forms, demeans and monopolizes the other.
Perhaps these are not the practices of states in the modern sense, but temporary nationalities, wearing the dress of the states as represented in the Jewish state. It faces an opposing historical moment. It stumbles with the stones that it left behind in its exceptional growth and expansion. But it eventually collides with it.
The State of Israel returns to the time of pure racism. It unites with a scattered symbol of racial purity and the peoples chosen by God.
The exception changes the shape of the world, its policies and alliances. So there is constant resistance to it, because it gives the Palestinians the dream of returning to their homeland, and also deprives them of this right according to the other party’s view of them.
Different levels of exceptionalism
It’s exceptionalism versus exceptionalism. But even within the exception there are fundamental differences between a dream of restoring a right and an occupied land, and another dream of annihilating a people from existence.
On Oct. 7, during those fleeting moments, the balance and rules of power were changed even if for a short while as happens in carnival times, where the laws are suspended and the forms of power change according to the Russian thinker Mikhail Bakhtin, or in the sovereignty of the exception concept that prevails in emergency situations as pointed out by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben.
The Palestinians have been living in an exceptional situation for more than 70 years.
Who has the power and sovereignty in those situations? Agamben questions how the citizen is viewed after he has become a victim, without an identity, and no law to protect him, and can be killed in the name of the state of exception itself?
Perhaps the concept of the state of exception/emergency, as Agamben explains, applies to the Palestinian people as a whole since the 1948 Nakba drove them from their homes.
The Palestinians have been living in an exceptional situation outside of the law for more than 70 years. They are left to die in an extended moment in which the law was suspended. Emergency conditions have been imposed on them, from the negation of existence and the practice of all forms of torture and abuse.
