In February 2024, I was invited by Lisa Stuckey and Alexander Damianisch to contribute a short entry to their publication Uncertain Curiosity in Artistic Research, Philosophy, Media and Cultural Studies: Transforming Understanding—Understanding Transformation about concepts developed by Ariella Aïsha Azoulay. I accepted the invitation and informed the editors I would write about potential history and the imperial shutter in relationship to Gaza. Within a few days of submitting the essay I received notice from the publisher that my piece would no longer be included.
We watched on our phone screens in December 2023 as a young Palestinian boy in Gaza addressed us after just having witnessed his mother and sisters martyred before him by American bombs dropped by Israel onto the Palestinian refugee population it created and cordoned into the two-mile strip of besieged coastal lands of Gaza on the eastern Mediterranean. He looks beyond the recording camera lens, gestures towards us holding his thumb and index finger in an enclosed circle that swallows up the frame momentarily, and declares in Arabic, translated into English on the screen: “May God protect you, Gaza! It is this small, but the whole world can’t defeat it!” (fig. 1). In a litany of castigations against Israel, its accomplices, and the traitorous Arab leaders who have left Gaza to die, his sentiments, expressed through this gesture and condemnation, demonstrate the obstinate liberatory potential of Gaza, in a moment of incomprehensible brutality. In one hand, in between enclosed fingers, he holds all of the grief of Gaza, and Palestine’s potential history, out for the world to witness.
Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s onto-epistemological concept of potential history is potentialized in this gesture of the undefeatable Gaza, in this message delivered from the gallows of an extermination camp in the throes of resistance and extermination to a world that continues to watch as a genocide unfolds in excruciating detail, livestreamed on our phone screens. As journalists and civilians report the truth of their slaughter from the ground, under the incessant bombardment of Israeli military annihilation, the conceptual framework of potential history is played out to its discursive limits and beyond. A potential history of Palestine is offered to us through this encounter between the anti-imperial, indefatigable, revolutionary spirit of Gaza embodied by the Palestinian youth and the abject, genocidal violence of the imperial world order and its operationalized shutter which seeks to close over Gaza, but which Gaza bursts open.
According to Azoulay, potential history is a recalibration of the linear temporal time scale of progress, which has functioned to sever the violence of a manufactured past from the present racial and colonial realities that shape the conditions of a world deemed modern at the expense of many. The capacious term thwarts the normalization of the violent path to modernity that was paved through racial chattel slavery, genocides of Indigenous peoples, land theft, ecocide, and the sedimentation of cis heteropatriarchal governance. The current segregation of past, present and future, Azoulay argues, has relegated the multifold and manifest colonial atrocities committed as part of the process of modernization to a temporally foreclosed moment, to be studied but never disrupted. Potential history offers an alternative ethico-political modality through which those crimes, consigned to an enclosed temporal past, are not only repostulated as present and ongoing, but as reversible.
As a concept, potential history calls for intellectual intervention and the pursuit of imaginative possibilities of a world otherwise, beyond the violent commons we have inherited, differentially. As theory and praxis, potential history requires daily rehearsals. Potential history necessitates the exercising of our decolonial muscles so that we may enact the social, political, ethical, and ontological undoing of sedimented temporal, spatial, and political paradigms forged under colonial and racial regimes of subjugation.
If potential history is the conceptual untethering of these schemas devised under empire, whose disciplinary bounds have been further cultivated and sedimented in the annals of the academy (the museum, the archive, and other normative spaces of imperial knowledge production), then the imperial shutter is the operationalizing of this violence. Azoulay argues that “the shutter is a synecdoche for the operation of the imperial enterprise altogether, on which the invention of photography, as well as other technological media, was modeled” (19). In other words, the shutter, as an imperial technology, is the antithesis of a potentializing history. The imperial shutter is not delimited to the camera, but is materially operative on lands, bodies, and temporalities. It is the modus operandi under which cultural and state actors normalize and institutionalize an imperial world order built over our ruins. According to Azoulay, “potential history is a commitment to keep alive a collective disobedience to the imperial shutter not now, but all the way back to 1492, when violence was imposed as law and its accumulative voracity made history its tool to erase and belittle existing diverse worlds, now relegated to the past and standing in the way of imperial progress” (239-240). She continues: “Potential history allows Palestine to be and to have always been possible” (239-240).
Israeli state craft is both hegemonic and inconsistent. Zionism’s stories about itself have evolved from its early days of proudly declaring its colonial intentions during Zionism’s nascence, to the perversions of the so-called peace process, to the now gleeful embrace of genocidal exterminatory rhetoric echoed by politicians and citizen-settlers in Israel and the US alike. What this moment of unfettered violence demonstrates, in the aftermath of multiple farcical ceasefires, is that Zionism as a political ideology and as the ordering logic of the Israeli settler state has always structurally sought to eliminate Palestine and the Palestinians from the world, from our lands, and from history.
In an ongoing attempt to uproot the Indigenous population, Israel also seeks to eliminate Palestine and the Palestinians from the future. Zionism, despite the brutality of its efforts in carrying out the elimination of the native through to its teleological ends, has not succeeded in this project because Palestinians continue to potentialize Palestine every day, from everywhere. Gaza, the most liminal site/sight of this potential Palestine, also holds the most potent possibilities for our collective liberation because it is a place where resistance prevails and the colonial conditions of the Israeli state have struggled the hardest to take hold. Gaza has changed the world, and with this potentiality comes the unbearable burden of the last frontier. In Mahmoud Darwish’s words in “Silence for the Sake of Gaza” from 1978:
It is not the most elegant or the biggest, but it equals the history of an entire homeland, because it is more ugly, impoverished, miserable, and vicious in the eyes of enemies. Because it is the most capable, among us, of disturbing the enemy’s mood and his comfort. Because it is his nightmare.
As Jehad Abusalim asserts, reflecting on this moment of political conjuncture, “an explosion between the river and the sea was inevitable — a question of when, not if.” Gaza reminds us that the most urgent Palestinian political thought has historically emerged from captive sites: from Gaza as prison and camp remains a place where potential history prevails through a rejection of the violent conditions imposed over the land and its people, and through a refusal to capitulate for anything less than total liberation. As Azoulay suggests in an article condemning the enablers of the Gaza genocide, “though we see the way the tanks trampled the face of the earth, we also see the soil refusing to surrender and forget.”
In the face of unyielding grief and unbearable conditions of life, Gaza, to borrow the words of Rafeef Ziadah, continues to teach life. Gaza teaches us in snippets of video clips, in images of indescribable atrocities, in sacrifices we cannot allow them to bear alone, and in the memorialization of hundreds of thousands of maimed and murdered martyrs named and unnamed, that Palestinians are bursting open the foreclosures of the imperial shutter. Gaza teaches us what the political workings of potential history look like in practice. Under the most severe circumstances imaginable, under conditions of impossibility, environmental devastation, infrastructural destruction, institutional complicity, and a media circus of propaganda that has operated to obscure what is happening in Gaza from view, still, Gaza rips open the imperial shutter, shattering its carceral frames. This is how Palestine is potentialized, and this is how Palestine prevails.
In Gaza, decolonization and genocide are occurring in tandem, sending rippling currents of both horror and revolutionary optimism throughout the world as communities, activist groups, students, and labor unions organize and rise up in the name of Palestinian liberation and liberation writ large. Over five hundred days into a livestreamed genocide, Gaza has exposed in agonizing detail the unbearable reality of Israeli occupation and has brought us closer to a popular understanding of the roots of Zionism and its deep structural entanglements with racial settler colonial capitalism and white supremacy. Palestinian revolutionary pedagogical practices, the “teaching of life,” in Ziadah’s words, have also transformed our understandings of the duty and potential of international solidarity with the Palestinian liberation struggle. In the process, and in the center of these practices of unlearning, Gaza has taught the world that resistance also looks like love. Indigenous Palestinian love for the land, for life, and for liberation is so profound that no weapon of war, no matter how brutal, and no regime, no matter how cruel, can break it.
This love has not only survived between generations but has expanded and multiplied across oceans, borders, checkpoints, languages, peoples, and the millions of degrees of fragmentation and separation between Palestinians and their lands. That separation has been unable to sever the attachments we have with Palestine, its soil, its Indigenous people, its waters, its jasmine. Mohammed El-Kurd tells us, even amidst the despair, kindergartens began to spring up in the North of Gaza in the spring of 2024, and the scent of jasmine permeated the air, following the teachers who gathered their young students amidst the rubble of their destroyed homes and schools. He ruminates on this sign of life and concludes, “there is jasmine because seeds do not need permission, or a ceasefire, to germinate.” In Devin G. Atallah and Hisham Awartani’s words, “our enduring Palestinian beauty is not only in between our loss and our rage, our pain and our despair, but our enduring beauty is an enactment of decolonial love, intergenerationally flourishing beyond the vice grip of collective anguish and genocidal horror” (8).
As we witness Palestinian bodies reduced by bombs into disembowelled flesh, into dust, into pieces, and as we witness parents holding the mangled bodies of their children to the camera screen, we also witness the explosion of the imperial shutter. In response, Nadera Shalhoub Kevorkian introduces into our critical lexicon the concept of ashlaa, an Arabic term that describes the torn and strewn flesh of Palestinian bodies, and the reparative labor of our kin in Gaza who collect the pieces of their loved ones and gather them back together. The profane and the sacred coalesce in this labor of ashlaa’ that the people of Gaza perform as they re-member their loved ones disfigured by the genocidal war machine that has rained down on Gaza for decades. Ashlaa’ makes it clear that the imperial shutter not only severs time. It cuts into the flesh and tears limbs from bodies. As Israel commits massacre after massacre, and atrocity after atrocity, generation after generation, with impunity and as those massacres continue to follow Palestinians in the camps and in the diaspora wherever we go, evidenced in the bullet that was discharged and lodged into Hisham Awartani’s spine while he has studying abroad in the US in November 2023, still Palestinians continue to potentialize Palestine through an unbreakable commitment to liberation and return.
During this moment of escalated genocide in Gaza, during a time of expediated extermination, in the midst of the ongoing Nakba, within the folds of a structure of Indigenous elimination carried out by the Zionist settler-colonial state project and its imperial collaborators, Gaza is once again teaching us the meaning of Palestinian potential history. Not only do the people of Gaza intervene in the smooth operation of the imperial shutter, they potentialize the abolition of this imperial technology altogether. In Loubna Qutami’s reflections on the (non)place of Palestinian pedagogy in ethnic studies, she suggests that “Black abolitionist, indigenous decolonization and Palestinian thought together invite us to explode from within that which is naturalized as the normal order, and to recreate an otherwise world commensurate with our shared values, aspirations, and freedoms” (318-19). To abolish the imperial shutter would mean undoing the naturalization of the current global, racial, capitalist, cis heteropatriarchal order of differential rights which has relegated some as deserving of life, and the rest, the wretched of the earth, as beyond and below the scope, out of the frame, of imperial humanity.
The potential history of Palestine, which Gaza has thrust through the shattered imperial shutter, shows us a path beyond these imperial categorizations. Last week, on April 16, an Israeli airstrike killed beloved Gazan photojournalist Fatima Hassouna, with the complicity of our tax dollars and our complacency, and despite our many efforts, as a result of our inability to stop the death machine from churning. In the new tradition of self-eulogy thrust on the poets and luminaries of Gaza, Hassouna wrote before her killing: “If I must die, I want a resonant death. I want to be neither a newsflash, nor a number within a group. I want a death heard by the whole world, an impact imprinted forever, and everlasting photos that won’t be buried by time or place.” Through the potentializing of history, through the pinched fingers of a boy in Gaza who locates the potentiality of Palestine and the world in his palm, through Fatima Hassouna’s lens and her impact, Palestine continues to exist and unravel the imperial temporalities, spatial enclosures, and political schemas that have sought to eradicate the possibility of our otherwise worlds.
Palestinians resist the foreclosures of the imperial shutter imposed on our lands and bodies across a fragmented diaspora, and Gaza in particular continues to erupt and intervene in the world order that has sought our extermination and wishes for it to pass quietly. Gaza invites others, as adjacent witnesses and engaged intellectuals, to participate in the labor of abolishing the structural logic of imperialism. In the words of the martyred Palestinian revolutionary, Ghassan Kanafani: “Imperialism has laid its body over the world, the head in Eastern Asia, the heart in the Middle East, its arteries reaching Africa and Latin America. Wherever you strike it, you damage it, and you serve the world revolution.” In other words, through the explosion of the imperial shutter, Gaza delivers its jasmine to the world, through the disruption of the imperial shutter.
