This essay was my contribution to the panel Global and Transnational Approaches to Race and Racism at the Inaugural British Journal of Sociology Conference, 15-16 April 2024 at the London School of Economics. I am grateful to Ghada Majadli and Bettine Josties for their comments on an earlier version of this text.
Let me begin with the asterisk in the title of my essay. “After” indicates futurity, but we are in the midst of destruction. Gaza will not cease to exist, but this genocide has already changed all of us. Israel’s war waged against all Palestinians in Gaza is ongoing. We are collectively witnessing an unspeakable amount of violence, inflicted in the name of protecting a settler colonial state.
Palestinians in besieged Gaza, in the occupied Palestinian territories, within Israel, and in the diaspora experience what it means to be the West’s ultimate Other; “human animals” whose lives are not only disposable and ungrievable, but whose bodies have become the battlefield to fight a war “to save western civilization,” in the words of Israel’s president Isaac Herzog. From a position of post-trauma and willful ignorance, most of Israeli society either chooses to close its eyes to the suffering in Gaza or participates in an active rejection of a ceasefire and support for an ongoing war of extinction. Western countries and allies of Israel, such as my home country of Germany, are committed to their support of Israel at all costs. Even against the ICJ’s recognition of the plausibility of Israel committing genocide, and its ruling that Israel must implement “immediate and effective measures” to protect Palestinians in Gaza, Israel’s security—a term stretched infinitely—is German Staatsräson, the state’s raison d’etre. The US is by far the biggest supplier of weapons to Israel, closely followed by Germany, as well as the United Kingdom. 99% of Israel’s arms have been provided by the US and Germany combined. So when I write that this war has already changed all of us, I am writing from the West—a positionality of structural complicity but also of collective solidarity. To turn the gaze back onto ourselves in the West is my point of departure in this essay.
This is a text about bearing witness to extreme violence. “After five months of military operations, Israel has destroyed Gaza,” writes Francesca Albanese, the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the occupied Palestinian territory. What is the appropriate analytical vocabulary to grapple with an ongoing genocide? How do Israel’s impunity and the West’s complicity in committing war crimes shape our conceptualization of the social? What can social theory offer (if anything), in a situation in which the very concept and sanctity of human rights has been shattered time and again? In what follows, I hope to offer some theoretical and conceptual reflections on these questions.
Witnessing
In her essay on the work of the witness, Sara Aziza, a Palestinian American writer, reflects on our responsibility to bear witness. Like her, I have previously argued that in our representation of dehumanizing realities, we must not reproduce the initial conditions of such violence. There is power in withholding, in refusal, and descriptions of violence often do very little to counter dehumanization. But today we must reconsider our role as witnesses and our analytical tools to approach violence. Palestinians’ “invisibility is not a matter of lacking images, but of a social-political vision in which true witness is precluded,” Aziza writes. A witness, then, is not someone who simply testifies to violence. Following Aziza, our work as witnesses “is to make contact, to be touched, and to bear the marks of this touch.” To change the social-political conditions of witnessing is to understand our own implications in the production of these conditions. This conceptualization of the witness, in Aziza’s words, “turn[s] the gaze back onto the spectator,” turns the gaze back onto us and our emotive responses, here in the UK, in Germany, or in the US.
In her book Invited to Witness, feminist and ethnic studies scholar Jennifer Kelly interrogates the role of the witness in Palestine through the lens of solidarity tourism as an anti-colonial practice. The main feature of witnessing, she argues, is that solidarity tourists are being invited to Palestine, and then they are being invited to go home to do the work there. This approach to witnessing questions the self-importance of “white” or “scholarly” saviors at the local scale, and it urges us to think about anti-colonial work in a transnational sense and on the structural level. This model of solidarity work challenges the same global condition of the invisibility of Palestinians Aziza refers to. Too often, Palestinians are not perceived as reliable narrators or theorists of their own condition. Thus, solidarity tourists must visit and “see it to believe it.”
Today, we don’t have to travel to Palestine to be called into that work, we simply have to look down at our screens or turn on the TV. But, as with the solidarity tourists in Palestine, what we bring to this act of witnessing, which feelings witnessing invokes in our bodies, which categories we think with in order to make sense of what we are witnessing, and what our witnessing can do “back home” throws us back onto ourselves. We are not only witnessing the accounts of violence that reach us from Gaza every day but also how this violence reverberates on a conceptual level of representation. What this genocide forces us to witness is not only unspeakable violence, but also the transnational circulation of existing racial categories as well as their hardening, and the ways in which their global circulation bolsters and legitimizes Israel’s deadly operation in Gaza.
Palestine and the Transnational Circulation of Race
Sociologists like Areej Sabbagh-Khoury demonstrate how Israeli sovereignty is built on the continued racialization of Palestinians. Sabbagh-Khoury shows how early Zionist settlement in Palestine relied on an Orientalist mode of representation, describing indigenous Palestinians as backward and primitive as well as incapable of transforming the land according to notions of modernity and progress. This “civilizational foil” allowed Zionists to “imagine themselves as forming a civilized national self,” a self deeply rooted in European colonial thinking. As Edward W. Said puts it in his foundational essay ”Zionism from the Standpoint of Its Victims” : “From the earliest phases of its modern evolution until it culminated in the creation of Israel, Zionism appealed to a European audience for whom the classification of overseas territories and natives into various uneven classes was canonical and ‘natural.’” Zionist pioneers, in their attempt to escape Nazi Germany and European persecution, established a nation-state for the Jews by reproducing the parameters of European colonial and racial hierarchies and property relationships. From its initiating modern conception onwards, Israel has been defined by its foundational thinkers as racially configured. This allows for continuous Palestinian dispossession and subjugation.
Today, the Israeli state defines itself as the nation-state of the Jewish people and effectively bifurcates “nationality” and “citizenship” based on racialized categories and demographic concerns. The Israeli state continues to enact the same racial technologies of segregation, categorization, and discrimination the Zionist movement relied on. Institutions of Israeli statecraft, such as settler colonial citizenship for Palestinians, the 2018 Nation-State Law, or the ratification of the Family Unification Law are thus instruments not only of settler colonialism but also of race-making. Ashkenazi Israelis occupy the structural position of whiteness, while Arabs—and Palestinians in particular—constitute their racialized Other. This further complicates the positionality of Arab Jews in Israel. Cultural theorist Ella Shohat demonstrates how the integration of non-European Jews points to a rupture in the hegemonic Zionist narrative of state-building. Not unlike Palestinian Arabs, Mizrahi Jews were understood through the lens of modernization, classified as “primitive” or “backward.” But unlike Palestinians, as both Jewish nationals and citizens, they are full members of the settler state.
We are witnessing this hierarchical categorization of the people living between the river and the sea in today’s legitimization of Israel’s war on Gaza. Not only are racialized tropes deployed directly by Israel’s leaders, but they reverberate in the political debates of its allied Western countries. This is particularly obvious in Germany, where our violently racist and genocidal past has been effectively mobilized to structure Holocaust memory in a unidirectional way. The ostensibly successful history of de-Nazification is used to insist on a German responsibility to unconditionally support Israel. Germany and Israel need each other. Germany needs Israel’s moral absolution in order to ignore our still profoundly antisemitic society and constantly growing fascist movement, while Israel needs German weapons and moral legitimization.
The Holocaust, the Nakba, and today’s genocidal war reveal the complex ways in which Germans, Israelis, and Palestinians are connected through trauma, guilt, and memory. In this figuration, a relationship that Sa’ed Atshan and Katharina Galor have termed a “moral triangle,” the Arab Other serves as a shared racialized figure of the abject, of all that we have left behind, but also all that we have never been as “modern” and “civilized” nations. In this figuration, Palestinians become invisible as the victims of the victims of European antisemitism and the German genocide of six million Jews. This transnational circuit of race-making haunts Palestinian liberation. Anthropologist Nadia Abu El-Haj already asked in 2010 how “a Palestinian nationalist narrative of disenfranchisement and suffering [can] be heard by Israeli and US (and European) publics,” and argues that the racist character of the Israeli state becomes unintelligible to Euro-American audiences. In Aziza’s words, if we turn our gaze back onto ourselves as witnesses, we can see how we bear the marks of this history.
Social Theory after* Gaza: Ungender, Unchilding, Infra-Humanity
Different thinkers have explained Palestinian’s invisibility and the intelligibility of their suffering as a result of their dehumanization. This condition can be traced in the transnational circuits of race-making as well as in the connected condition of Palestinians being the absolute Other to the Israeli state. Social theorist Theo Goldberg terms this racially conceived positionality as Palestinian in- or infra-humanity. Referencing his work, legal scholar Nadera Shalhoub Kevorkian writes: “Palestinian bodies, both living and dead, are no-bodies that exist ‘at the limits of the human.’” This transnational status of Palestinian dehumanization justifies any action in the name of Israeli security. In Gaza today, but also in the seventy-five years preceding this war, Palestinians could be maimed, they could be killed, and, even in deaths, their bodies could be withheld at the hands of the Israeli military.
What happens to the social categories we use in describing the effects of such violence—the body, women and children, the home? In his analysis of Marxist readings of slavery, sociologist Moon-Kie Jung suggests that social theory reaches its limits in extreme antisocial situations. Drawing from Black studies scholars such as Hortense Spillers and Saidiya Hartman, he argues that in the antisocial context of slavery, sociological categories such as gender or kinship lose any meaning. Without conflating the history of the transatlantic slave trade and plantation slavery in the US with Israeli settler colonialism and the genocide in Gaza, I am approaching Jung’s suggestion that in the face of extreme violence, we must probe the adequacy of our social categories to help us make sense of how to write social theory after* Gaza.
A theoretical conversation between Black studies and Palestine studies appears in legal scholar Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s extensive oeuvre. Her concept of “unchilding,” which she develops in her most recent book Incarcerated Childhood and the Politics of Unchilding, describes the global circulation of the imaginary of Palestinian children as dangerous entities—potential terrorists—which legitimizes, in turn, the violence and humiliation they and their parents experience at the hands of the Israeli military. To develop the concept of “unchilding,” Shalhoub-Kevorkian draws from Spillers’s notion of ungendering. The Middle Passage, as Spillers writes, threw our customary lexicon, or grammar, into “unrelieved crisis.” In the process of violent and unspeakable commodification, Spillers suggests, Black women’s bodies were erased of their social past, such as their social and gendered identities—their names, where they came from, who their relatives were. This reduction to a pre-social status is what Shalhoub-Kevorkian captures with her conceptualization of unchilding. Gender studies scholar Abeera Khan similarly reminds us that while gender, sexuality, and kinship relations are part of the ideological scaffolding of settler colonization, being a woman, or queer, or a child offers no protection against the Israeli assault on Gaza. In the act of dehumanization, social identities and the protection they offer to those included in such categories cease to exist.
Faced with the material and bodily conditions of this genocidal war, Shalhoub-Kevorkian suggests another term to think with. Grappling with what happens in Gaza, where people have to carry the bodily remains of their loved ones, she suggests that our theoretical tools of power and violence—biopolitics, necropolitics, slow death—falter in the face of such violence. What we are left with is the flesh—that “zero degree of social conceptualization” that comes before the “body,” in Spillers’s terminology. To capture this theoretically, Shalhoub-Kevorkian offers the Arabic term of “Ashla’a,” which translates to pieces, to scattered body parts, to cut bodies; a term that indexes how Israeli destruction has reached a level of refusing humanity materially, on a bodily level.
Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s conversation with Black Studies echoes Jung’s theorization of violence. If the categories we usually operate with as social theorists are thrown into crisis (if the body is reduced to mere flesh, the child who has lost their parents to a target), then Palestinian invisibility is mirrored on the theoretical level. We lack words to capture such violence. Jung proposes to develop a new theoretical vocabulary in what he terms an “underdiscipline of antisociology,” investigating extreme antisocial practices and formations, and their unregistered effects. Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s broad body of work on Palestinian life across Israel and Palestine offers one such theoretical approach of an “antisociology.” “Palestine,” she writes “has become a place where we can interrogate life as such, as the global community (hegemonic West) debates, dismisses, or allows brutal forms of dehumanization to persist.”
Understanding Palestine as a site to trace the global conditions of European colonialism, racial hierarchy, and Indigenous dispossession is an ongoing intellectual project. And while I recognize the risk of folding these very distinct histories and modes of oppression into each other, thereby dismissing the uniqueness of anti-Black racism in the United States, I also believe that a careful comparative analysis of the shared conditions and histories of violence exposes critical insights about colonial modernity. To come back to the figure of the witness in the West, this historical perspective also cautions us against any positionality of innocence or perspectives based on simplistic binaries of “good” or “bad.” As witnesses of violence, we can learn from the past and our entangled histories of racism, fascism, and antisemitism.
“We Cannot Cross Until We Carry Each Other”
In this essay, I have thus attempted to make sense of our positionality and responsibility in witnessing Gaza from the West, specifically as social theorists. Many might ask, why theory? I don’t have a good answer. Theory is one strategy of many, and it is one of the strategies I am committed to. I approach thinking with Palestine from a position of “feminist debt.” This proposition, formulated by political theorist Sumi Madhok, highlights the generative epistemological and methodological interventions that a critical and reflexive politics of location enables; a politics that considers the relational and historical dimensions of race-making. Feminist debt, Madhok writes, is a “debt that cannot be repaid.” Instead, it calls for acknowledging our responsibility to produce theories that open up new ways of thinking and contribute to reshaping the conditions of “thinkability” outside of hegemonic frames of reference. My attempt to think through some of the theoretical vocabularies we can draw from in Black Studies, Palestine Studies, and social theory is one way of “paying that debt.” To give a form—one of many—to what we are currently witnessing.
Theory is never a solo endeavor. Perhaps this is also what characterizes the underdiscipline of antisociology. Our commitment to thinking with each other, to recover the social in antisocial circumstances: we rely on each other despite and because of the fact that our histories are intertwined. In the past six months, I kept coming back to Arielle Angel’s text “We Cannot Cross Until We Carry Each Other,” published on October 12, 2023 in Jewish Currents. I come back to this text to remind myself of a collective way forward, a way forward that takes settler colonial rule and race-making as our shared analytical-historical starting point, but without freezing in that position. Angel writes that we need to imagine a different movement for liberation, “where people stay to pick up the pieces, rearranging themselves not just as Jews or Palestinians [or any other identity category] but as antifascists and workers and artists.” To me, this echoed a question Black studies scholar Sophia Azeb posed a few years back, writing about Palestinian futurity in The Funambulist: “who will we be when we are free?”
