[Authors' note: We are publishing this roundtable from the opening program of the Sharjah Architecture Triennial on structural and corporeal violence in Gaza to mark the second anniversary of the start of the Great March of Return protests. In light of recent reports of COVID-19 in Gaza, the issues of maiming and containment are ever more urgent. COVID-19 will exacerbate the conditions of the blockade that already characterize life in Gaza: the titration of medicine, equipment, and patient visas; the shortage of medical personnel; the density of a growing population confined to finite space; inadequate access to basic utilities such as electricity and uncontaminated water; and a decimated medical infrastructure, already overburdened by the preponderance of injuries since the beginning of the Great March.]
In 2014, the United Nations projected that Gaza would be uninhabitable by the year 2020; the year is upon us, so what does this calculation mean? Since the Great March of Return began on 30 March 2018, more than eight thousand protestors have been shot by IDF snipers and sustained lower limb injuries, usually requiring multiple surgeries and in many cases, amputation. Using visual materials, experimental video art, modeling, and sound, architect Francesco Sebregondi and queer theorist Jasbir K. Puar project Gaza beyond the spectacular of humanitarian visual economies to show biopolitical practices of maiming and containment in banal, quotidian life. Their joint exhibition situates maiming in its multi-scalar temporal, generational, and spatial forms, complicating the exceptionalism of Gaza, and illuminating the elasticity and porosity of the blockade, its uneven and ever-changing titration of flows, designed not only to restrict goods and people but also to control the act and idea of movement itself. What escapes the blockade, however, is no less than multiple horizons of unyielding resistance and the future lives of return.
Puar and Sebregondi were joined by surgeon Ghassan Abu-Sittah, MSF-Lebanon executive director, poet, and author Jehan Bseiso, and media studies professor Helga Tawil Souri to discuss the on-the-ground situation in Gaza.
Francesco Sebregondi:
Thank you all for joining us on this warm Sunday morning to this panel, titled “Biospheres of War.” I would like to thank the whole team of the Sharjah Architecture Triennial for this wonderful gathering that brings us together here. So, Jasbir and I are the co-authors of this new project that was developed specifically for the context of the Sharjah Architecture Triennial titled “Future Lives of Return.” We can see it as an in-depth examination of the ongoing Great March of Return protests in Gaza. As many of you will know, since the 30 March 2018, thousands of Palestinians in Gaza are gathering on different points, along a thick militarized fence that separates Israel from the Gaza strip. They are protesting their indefinite confinement within the regime of the Gaza blockade, which has been going on since 2007, so for already twelve years. They are also protesting and calling for the end of seventy-one-year-long occupation of Palestine, and they are claiming their rights to return to the land they belong to. And, as of today, the response from the Israeli military has been to shoot over 8,000 unarmed protesters with live ammunition, 1,200 of whom, at least, will be crippled for life. Our project tries to interrogate what is at stake in these protests. It tries to look at what is happening but also how it is happening, where it is happening. It tries to unpack both the structure of power that is deployed at the level of the blockade itself, understood as a system of containment of a population that is considered unworthy, as well as the shifts in the modalities of power that are displayed in the brutal repression of these protests, themselves a response to the blockade. But, perhaps even more importantly, what the project tries to question is the people of Gaza’s unyielding capacity to resist. We are trying to address Gaza no longer as a merely humanitarian emergency, that would require our distant attention; but also, essentially, as a reserve of political imagination; as a place from which to think and to oppose any discourse claiming that an extremely advanced technological apparatus of power may be able to completely cancel a form of resistance and to annihilate a liberation struggle that has been going on for, again, seventy-one years. Jasbir will say a little bit about how we have analyzed and studied the modalities of power that we are describing, and opposing somehow, in this project, as well as the reason why we have invited these incredible guests specifically, with a view to enrich the discussion and discourses that we are trying to open up through this project. Thank you.
Jasbir Puar:
I want to start by thanking the curatorial team, and everyone that supported us and made this project possible. It has been a really incredible experience, to translate some of the research that I have been doing on deliberate maiming into an installation experience. My background is in race, gender, sexuality, and disability studies; I work very specifically on questions of embodiment and embodied practices. That has been my interest in terms of thinking through, in particular, Israeli state violence but, more generally, the question of US empire. I am an Americanist, and so, the relationship of the United States to Israel is crucial to thinking about how empire works from the vantage of American studies. Since 2014, I had been noting that a lot of discussions around the violence of Gaza was always organized around the question of civilian deaths, and this way of disarticulating, in this notion of collateral damage, disarticulating death from disability. What is the productivity of that disarticulation? What kinds of goals does it serve? So, I started thinking really about the tactic of deliberate maiming. It is a tactic that has become very visible in recent Great March of Return protests, but it is actually a tactic that we can trace earlier, to the first intifada if not before. We can trace it to the West Bank; we can trace it to other geopolitical locations, Kashmir for example). That was one of the goals of the project, to de-exceptionalize Gaza in relation to these practices and think more generally about how the violence of the nation state is not just organized through letting-live or making-die but also perpetual injuring and the productivity of perpetual injuring. We can see what is happening in Gaza now as a kind of acceleration of a tactic, but we can also start thinking about how the tactic of deliberate maiming has actually been submerged in a narrative about living and dying as the primary modulation that nation state violence is embedded in. I am just going to quickly say: The goals for the project for us were, first of all, to move what is happening in Gaza out of a humanitarian crisis frame and return to the question of a liberation movement, which is really important because the language coming out of Gaza right now is really organized through humanitarian aid and human rights discourse, that translates everything into a kind of economic project as opposed to a political one, I think. The second, again just to reiterate de-exceptionalizing Gaza historically, geopolitically—both geopolitically in terms of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, the Golan Heights, but also, in terms of other locations, in terms of settler colonialism more generally. To paraphrase Patrick Wolfe’s formulation of settler colonialism, the settler-colonial state is invested in genocide through annihilation or assimilation, and one of the things that I have been really interested in is thinking about debilitation and perpetual injuring as another facet of genocide. The third thing is when I started looking very specifically at Gaza in 2014, that is when the year of 2020 came up; so, six years, it seems like a long time—I guess not really a long time—but it was not proximate the way it is now. As time has gone on, what does it mean that 2020 is upon us and Gaza is apparently unliveable, what are the thresholds of liveability that are not consistent or universal but actually constantly shifting. The blockade itself is an elastic formation that is expanding and shifting and allowing things to move in and out—not so much about a finite relationship to movement, but the constant modulation of movement itself and controlling the notion of what movement is and what it constitutes. And then the last thing I will say, I think a biopolitical fantasy around maiming is really that resistance can be stripped, that it can be annihilated, and that there is point at which it cannot reorganize itself. That was the other thing that we really wanted to focus on, which was exposing the fantasy as such. So, we organized this panel in relation to people who work very specifically on Gaza, who work in the field in Gaza, to expand on some of these questions, and to illuminate some of the on-the-ground realities that we couldn’t necessarily get to in more depth, so we are really excited to have all of three of you here to continue this conversation.
Ghassan Abu Sitta:
Thank you very much for this invitation. I always feel like a little bit of an imposter in these things. The journey for me that has taken thirty years in terms of working with war wounds, particularly in Palestine, that started during the first intifada, but then expanded into the region in Iraq and Syria, has left me with a few points that I would like to share. The first is the idea that wars are not temporal events. Wars create an ecology, a biosphere in which people permanently will live, even after the political component of the war ends. This biosphere contains within it the destruction of social relationships, the destruction of the built environment that was created to protect people and creates channels of injury and re-injury that will enslave or imprison people within this biosphere for generations to come. We can see is South Iraq as an example. South Iraq, the Basra area and the areas that are demonstrating at the moment, really have not had a war for a long time, but the destruction, and the intensity of the destruction by the first American war and the second American invasion and the years of blockade create that ecology. The most interesting, or the most obscene in its ingenuity of this ecology is Gaza, because you have created a hermetically sealed space in which you are able to titrate people’s lives, and really the aim is to keep them in that zone between an incomplete life and the absence of total death. And you do that titration in the siege by allowing the different components of life to come in or denying them. So, it literally is like a chemical equation: when you are titrating life, you are bringing in more hours of electricity or withdrawing hours of electricity, you are bringing in the infrastructure for sewage and water treatment or you are withdrawing it, you are allowing food. We know that from the Wikileaks papers, the Israelis were talking about putting people in Gaza on a very strict diet, so there is actually a calorie control and formula that the Israelis employ when they allow food, medication, and medical personnel. And then the components of death: when you control the number of cancer patients you give permits to leave Gaza, and you allow it to vary between twenty percent and forty percent rejection rate. And then during the negotiations on de-escalation with Hamas, you throw in the offer of a cancer hospital in Gaza. Then you realize that actually what you are doing is really titrating this condition. Then you have these waves, that Sharon called “mowing the lawn.” These waves of war on Gaza, the aim of them is to really even out the bumps in the system so that when there is, you’re able to kind of inflict more in terms of death than you are able to control through the siege. Which brings us to the Marches of the Return. So, the Marches of Return injured 0.01 percent of Gaza’s population within a year, which is a huge number when you think about a place of two million. The second phenomena was the intimacy of sniper fire. You do not have a process in which injury, or maiming, or mutilation, is a byproduct of the ordinance; with snippers, you are able to decide exactly where the bullet will go and, therefore, even down to which limb you want to choose. The decision to create this body of disabled young men—seven-thousand so far, that we know clinically—you are consigning to a two to three year period to up to nine to ten surgeries, that will leave them eventually with a degree of disability—then leaves you with the idea of why would you want to do this. If you step back to the origins of the Zionist movement, what differentiates Zionist colonialism from, let us say, Apartheid colonialism in South Africa, is that, in South Africa, you needed Black labor as part of the natural resource of the country. Zionist capital does not need Palestinian labor, and, therefore, you need to use the body of the colonized in a different way, you need to harvest the body in a different way. And you harvest the body in Gaza differently by creating disability so that, economically, you benefit from being the only conduit of international aid but, politically, you are able to transform a national liberation question, an anti-colonialism question, into a question of humanitarian aid. So, Gaza is no longer about the refugees, and 1948, and the ethnic cleansing of 1948, and the denial of Palestinian rights. Gaza is about how many doctors have you allowed in, how many doctors have you not allowed in, how many hours of electricity will you let in. So, you are able to harvest the bodies, not in the way other colonialists have harvested the body for labor, but harvest the body for political capital. To step back and then to look at the wound. And these wounds then become part of the struggle between the colonized and the colonizer. The wound, particularly because it is in its most vicious form when it is shot by the snipper, then becomes the biological manifestation of the hegemony of the colonizer over the body of the colonized. It is the permanent narrative of the relationship between the colonized and the colonizer. But at the same time, the colonized, the wounded almost reaffirmed their ownership of the wound by giving it a narrative that is a narrative of resistance. And so, rather than what the Israelis intended it to be—which is what the Israelis call in Arabic كي الوعي, which is the branding, branding in the way you brand cattle, of consciousness—the struggle of the colonized and the wounded becomes to own the narrative of this wound as a form of generating a consciousness of resistance by saying: “This is my biological manifestation of the struggle against the colonized, of the struggle against the siege.” This is in no way belittling the physical pain and the clinical suffering and the real suffering, but it is about the struggle around the wound as a space in which consciousness becomes a battleground that is being played out in the wound between the colonized and the colonizer. Thank you.
Jehan Bseiso:
Thank you for the invitation. It is really a pleasure to be here. I am one of those creatures that Adrian referred to in his opening remarks who is not used to being at an architectural conference. I basically inhabit two kinds of places: either medical, emergency, humanitarian platforms or literary festivals, where my two personalities as a writer, but also aid worker, diverge. Architecture in its expanded sense is needed and is necessary; we are at a conference called “The Rights of Future Generations.” Where Gaza is concerned, if the last ten years are any indication, then the very idea of a future, like our patients’ legs in Gaza, is amputated. And that is exactly why we need to keep talking about it, and not only providing medical care. I would like to refer to Gloria Anzaldúa, the Chilean writer and theorist, she says: “To survive the Borderlands, you must live sin fronteras, be a crossroads.” So, for Gaza, despite its isolation, and containment, and siege, for it to really survive it needs to continue to be a crossroads, even if it is a crossroads of the macabre, a crossroads of surveillance, a crossroads of violence, a crossroads of pain, it needs to continue to be a crossroads, because it can also be a crossroads of solidarity and resistance. I represent a very practical organization today. MSF/Doctors Without Borders has been on the ground in Gaza since 2000. We treat hundreds of people, and since the March of Return started in March 2018, we have treated half of those wounded by Israeli gunfire and live ammunition, most of them in the lower limbs. Our surgeons talk about bones turning into dust: complex, very, very serious injuries that Dr Ghassan knows very well, where already infection is a problem but, in Gaza, infections resistant to antibiotics are rearing their ugly head as well. We were talking yesterday about what we can learn from Gaza. Unfortunately, some of the lessons that we, as a medical humanitarian organization, are learning from Gaza are very painful lessons: about how you can treat people with incredibly critical injuries in a very low resource setting, about how you can keep pumping people with antibiotics, but they cannot heal, which says a lot about the body and, again, links with Jasbir’s work on maiming. What does recovery look like in Gaza today: when we cannot even get wounds to close, when our patients suffer recurring infections and when sometimes we treat entire families for gunshots? It is really difficult, and it has created a new “normal.” In March 2019, one year after the March of Return protests started, our teams were ready to prepare for what we call mass casualty preparedness: so hundreds of people come into the corridors and for us to triage and to be able to provide the care for those who need it most. Fortunately, in March, I can say only four people were killed and sixty-four were injured, on the anniversary of the March of Return. The fact that our teams report being relieved that four people were killed and only sixty-four injured by live ammunition is horrendous, and unacceptable. Right now, what we can say is that Gaza needs to continue to be a living present, through not only the provision of medical care, but also by breaking the silence and breaking the oblivion. If architecture can be seen as an archive, participate as an archive, then so can medical witnessing and data. And this is a little bit uncomfortable, and it is definitely new. Medical data becomes a narrative tool; medical data becomes a witnessing tool. It can no longer be just numbers; it can no longer be just people and injured and nameless patients; it needs to be stories. Even for an independent medical humanitarian organization like Doctors without Borders. I will also end by saying: in Gaza, we also face the limitations of humanitarian action. My colleagues have described the impossibility of looking at this as just a humanitarian crisis, one where the prison doors open to let in some assistance and re-close again. In 2012, our teams left Libya, because we publicly declare that we refuse to patch up victims between torture sessions. What do we do in Gaza today? Do we leave Gaza? I would say no, because we are really providing urgent medical care that is needed. But our complicity in a system by working in the prison is something that is very much on our minds and in our debates as an organization.
Helga Tawil Souri:
As far as I know, the only place on Earth where people are actually pushed down to a humanitarian level is Gaza. If you think about it, humanitarianism for all of its faults, for all of its misleading, for all of its horrors itself, is usually is supposed to pull people up. In Gaza, humanitarianism pushes people down. In Gaza, people have been pushed down to this humanitarian level, whether we are thinking about it infrastructurally, whether we are thinking about it psychologically, biologically, in all kinds of ways. And so, the maimed body, if you will, is a very real thing but it is also representative of a different kind of maiming, of what we talk about when we talk about Gaza. I have spent the better part of fifteen years thinking and writing about Gaza and Palestine, and all I can tell you is that Gaza is absolutely not gentle on the soul, to think about. It is a beautiful place. Gaza is like sparkling eyes, the smell of fresh strawberries, the smell of fresh fish, also the smell of shit flowing down the streets; the contradictions are just astounding. But if you could try to capture every word, every thought, every process that Gaza inhabits, I think you need a new vocabulary. At least for me, it has become impossible to tell the story of Gaza. So, I very much appreciate these different sorts of attempts—which certainly the project of Francesco and Jasbir tries to do—to think of a new vocabulary to explain something that is really unexplainable. I mean, how else can you grasp that, by 2020, a place is inhabitable. First of all, it is already inhabitable, and so, okay, thank you very much United Nations for telling us that it is going to be inhabitable by 2020, but what the fuck are we supposed to do about that? Sorry. It is very angering. And this is maybe the thing, is that I do not think that one can necessarily speak of a place like Gaza without actually getting angry. There is always this kind of response: “What are we going to do?” and “How can we help?” and so on, and that is a wonderful thing. But I think there also needs to be room for a kind of expression of the absolute. Again, I feel like I just do not have the words anymore to kind of explain Gaza.
I was supposed to actually introduce what I do. I generally work on infrastructure, and specifically work on telecom infrastructure, which sounds incredibly boring, but if you think about it, it is one of these things where we are supposed to be wireless, and we move around the world, and we are all free and mobile, and so on, but not in Palestine. In Palestine, things like the fiber optic cables follow the very land territorial limitations that Israel has built around Palestine. So, what does it mean to think about something like a state that has a very limited or, if you want, maimed infrastructure? How can you even think of it? What kind of state are you allowing to produce that cannot even control something like the connection between people technologically, let alone physically or geographically? So, after going on a tangent, but I am going to move it back to you guys.
Francesco Sebregondi:
It is very difficult to add anything to such incredible inputs for us to think about the situation in Gaza. Just to attempt to hinge towards some of the themes that are addressed within this Triennial as a whole—a Triennial of architecture, of urbanism, of the environment: an idea that is driving the project that we have developed for the Triennial is to present or approach Gaza as a kind of extreme, and paradigmatic urban form. One whose project is really that of managing, or dealing with, an undesired population, a population that has been framed as such. This project is carried out through practices of maiming, that maintain a level of vulnerability across a population of two million people—let us be reminded of this, a fast-growing population of two million people—and through practices of containment that are aimed at confining a population within a specific defined territory. Looking at this urban form as a machine, as a functioning assemblage, in fact looking at its architecture, really brings to the fore the fact that some of the most advanced experimentation with regards to both spatial and biopolitical technologies are at work there. I think that this is why Gaza is a place that we simply cannot ignore or forget when thinking about the urban future more generally. That is, at the same time as certain idealized urban futures are being incubated, we have places such as Gaza, where a dark urban future has already materialized, whose aim is to maintain and contain a population outside of the sphere of society. I think, as architects, we just need to address the existence of this project that is most directly materialized in Gaza today.
Jasbir Puar:
I would be interested in talking more about the social life with the wound, I think we are trying to figure out what that economy is, and what that relationship to resistance and embodiment is. As someone who works in disability studies—a field is driven by Euro-American understandings of the exceptional nature of disability—Gaza, and most places in the Global South, complicate that understanding of disability as exceptional. It is actually endemic. And so, how do we square disability rights with the sovereign right to maim, what are the contradictions and continuities between the two? How does the rights project really fail a place like Gaza, along with many places in the Global South? What is that social life of the wound in relationship to disability? Is it completely evacuated? Is it something that is not available or legible for acknowledgement? A social model of disability has to disarticulate maiming from disability, to naturalize impairment, something that is not the right material for a rights project. So, you have contradictions in Gaza as well, you have a Paralympic team that is very successful, you have BBC documentaries about amputated soccer players, all of these recuperative models of disability that human rights frameworks can entertain. And then, you have this other understanding of the wound as a form of resistant anthology. Maybe that is a framing question, or maybe not. But, I just wanted to bring in the global context, a form of humanitarianism that’s organized around the idea that disabled bodies should be bodies that are empowered but only in a very specific way.
Ghassan Abu Sitta:
When you look at this idea that Gaza in a few months' time will become officially under the UN rules uninhabitable, one of the things struck me particularly. On the eve of the movement of the American embassy to Jerusalem, three thousand were wounded in four hours. And being there, on that day, one of the things that shocks you, and I had seen it kind of almost accumulating, is the rate of re-injury. So, which one of the wounds in the particular individual should you be addressing at the moment? I had patients who had been injured in the same limb that they had been injured in 2004 or 2008. Or patients who had been injured in other wars and then have come back as injured. And so, that is within the same body. Then, within the social body, the wounded family and how people start—when the wound becomes a social phenomenon—how people manoeuvre this relationship of the wounded family, of multiple members of the family having wounds. So, one of the things that I do is I provide clinical advice to humanitarian organizations like MSF [Médecins Sans Frontières] on planning projects and I have been working on a project on how we can streamline amputee services in Gaza. Two problems: if you’re a child that loses a limb, the body, the stump continues to grow, and continues to grow disproportionally, so the bones usually outgrow the soft tissues and they need multiple surgeries as they grow up. The statistic that is shocking is, just from 2006—so we are not talking about second and first intifadas—in 2006, during the wars—not the incursions in between or the little air raids in between—during the wars, 1,300 people lost limbs in Gaza, and became amputees that require prosthetics. If you look at the people who needed amputations as secondary amputations—what we call the failure of the reconstructive process, you are looking at closer to 2,000, 2,500. That phenomena, that social phenomena in a very close society means that, as Helga said, you really need to discover not only new language, but as a clinician, new ways of thinking about things. Reconstructive surgery is really a boutique service; I mean you are taught, I have trained in the National Health Service in the United Kingdom, to spend eight hours on a case. But what do you do when you have epidemic numbers of reconstructive cases, where you cannot spend eight hours, because you cannot spend eight hours times seven thousand, each of which will need nine surgeries? You start multiplying the number of hours, that scale of epidemiology that you see in infectious diseases, in diarrhea, in ebola, in other infectious diseases, to see it in an intentional infliction of a physical disablement, and to start reimagining medical care on a scale that nobody else has dealt with, to try to look for data where none exist, except in the First World War. I mean, that is the scale that we are looking for, between 4 pm and 8 pm on the 14 May when they moved the American embassy, three thousand were injured. It literally felt like what you would feel like if you were in the First World War with waves of thousands of patients. Six and seven per ambulance were being brought in at the same time. Gaza pushed the limitations of our understanding, and the limitations of language, and the limitations of scientific knowledge in terms of that kind of infliction of suffering, for no reason other than really—you see, the Israeli designed this project, has always wanted to create politicide, i.e., the annihilation of Palestinians as a political body, and are happy to skirt as close as they need to skirt to genocidal policies to achieve politicide. What is happening in Gaza, this concept of how much you can squeeze people into the smallest plot of land, and the smallest conditions of habitability, is that kind of urge for politicide and the willingness to pursue genocidal policies to achieve politicide.
Jehan Bseiso:
I just would like to make two small comments. Jasbir, you mentioned the Paraplegic Olympics, and little things like that that remind us that the body in Gaza is not disabled that it is also recovering. And you mentioned the importance of situating it within also disability rights and empowerment discourse. I agree completely, but I also want to highlight that that discourse cannot also evacuate the wound, and the disability, from the politics in which it occurred. We see a little bit of a self-critique of the organization which I am part of, where we tell the story of the disability but not the context around it and I think that is very, very important to keep that in mind, and I say it as a reminder also for us.
Jasbir Puar:
I agree with that; I was saying that disability rights completely fails us.
Jehan Bseiso:
Telling the stories of disability is also telling the stories of Gaza and fighting against oblivion, because maiming outlasts media cycles; we see that deaths and killing are more interesting for the media, are more interesting for coverage. But thousands of amputees, hundreds of amputees, nobody is interested in covering their stories anymore, and that is quite concerning.
Helga Tawil Souri:
One of the things that I think about when I listen to my co-panelists or colleagues or friends up here, is: we often think about Gaza as contained or maimed in different ways, and there is always that question of can you really completely imprison, collapse, squeeze, contain—there are so many other words that I could use—people and a population, and to what extent. At the same time, I think it is helpful to zoom out to different scales, whether it is geographic scales or, also temporal scales. What if we think about Gaza, not just from the perspective of a body or a national body even, but what if we were to think about Gaza from an environmental scale? Gaza is also an environmental disaster that is being created and propagated. On purpose—I mean, not that any of what we do is not on purpose. So, there is this sort of movement as well of how we can think about Gaza from a very specific timescale to a much more expansive timescale. And, one of the things that is happening today—and certainly I think Jasbir’s work kind of brings up as well as the work of Ghassan and others—is this question of what kind of future are we actually enabling? It is almost incomprehensible to us to try to figure out: what does it mean to live with a maimed limb? I mean, God forbid, you do not want that to happen to you, but it is not completely inconceivable to imagine what it would be like to live with a phantom limb or any prosthetics. But, what if you move up the next level? What does it mean to live in a maimed family, in which you have multiple wounds of one person, multiple wounds of a family, in which you will then also have the wounds of the building, and of the village, and of the city? And if you move up even more in scale, of a whole nation and in national sense—not national belonging but, at least, a national project of some sort. And, to keep moving, zoom out and to think about: what does that mean for the future? Not just simply on an individual or a family, or on a social or on a national level, but on this much larger global scale. And so, the tension is how do you talk about Gaza in a very specific way. There is a part of me that wants to disagree with Gaza as an example, Gaza as a metaphor, Gaza as a paradigm, and so on. But, at the same time, recognize that it really does function that way. Is that the kind of future that we are creating in different places? Whether it is Chile, or Hong Kong, or Sudan, or wherever else you kind of see these mini Gazas. And, then, what does it mean to think about these at different timescales?
Jasbir Puar:
One of the things that we tried to focus on, about the future in ways that we cannot predict, is this idea of wound as something that rearranges family: what kinds of gender relations are being reorganized and rethought in the context of a predominantly male population being unable to work in the same ways, the re-scripting of domestic space, what happens to women as caretakers, and also this question of the wound that grows. So, young people being wounded and having a wound that grows but understood as having a stunted body in terms of medical thresholds and metrics. What does it mean to be foreclosed from a certain kind of adulthood, which is also a certain gendering; in order to be male or female, you have to be understood as a gendered adult in some sense? So, these are the questions about the rights of future generations and futurity. But I also think these are the spaces that we cannot yet know, that are going to be spaces where resistance cannot be stripped, new ways of living, and living in what is pointed to as the unliveable. It’s something that we have to keep thinking about.
Francesco Sebregondi:
I think we would like to open this panel to questions from the audience, if you have any.
Audience member (1):
Thank you for great panel, and all the contributions. Some years ago in 2007-8, we made a film in Jenin refugee camp where we were thinking about the way that images of Palestine get circulated, and get used in order to confine people with a certain structure of visibility. And, we thought about Glissant’s term, the “right to opacity,” in relation to what we were doing at the time. But, what I wanted to ask you was in relation to your installation here, the choice of images and films that you have put together, in relation to this idea of a conundrum of representing Palestine, or Gaza.
Francesco Sebregondi:
Thank you for this question, which also gives me the opportunity to thank and acknowledge the incredible work of the ActiveStills Collective, a collective of Palestinians, Israeli, and international photographers working across occupied Palestine who have been documenting forms of resistance to the occupation in 2005. The collection of images on the screen behind us are all taken from the Active Stills archive except, perhaps, one. So, in relationship to the images of the conditions in Gaza and the West Bank, I think our choice of images has also been driven by an attempt to expose and exhibit what often does not make it into the frame. We see a lot of images of frontline situation, both in Gaza and in the West Bank, but there is also what is going on in the back, for example, of the protest camps, the kind of spontaneous initiatives by civil societies that are also very much part of these protests and that do not necessarily make it into the headline news. It is also what has been driving the idea of producing a model of these protests, to multiply to perspectives that we could have on this event that, precisely because of the regime of the blockade and the immobility it imposes both ways—impossibility of access, impossibility of getting out—ends up being a media event for most of us. There is a degree to which our understanding of it is literally framed by the images that circulate. So, a lot of this project is also about really pushing and opening the frame of how these protests have been circulating in the media sphere.
Jasbir Puar:
And then, one counter to that, there is one photo in the thirty-two photos we displayed that went viral. It is the photo of Saber al-Ashkar, the protester at the Great March, the double amputee in the wheelchair with the slingshot. That photo won an international photojournalism award; it went viral, I think because of those paradoxes of disability rights. It got picked up because it was the scene of empowerment, and the reason why I wanted to keep that one viral photo in there was to re-contextualize it and say: this is not about disability empowerment; this is about the right to be maimed and the resistance to the occupation in that moment. So, there was also a kind of counter strategy of “de-viraling” the image that had been so heavily circulated but—I will not say for the wrong reasons because of course that circulation then enabled a certain kind of audience to enter into a conversation about what was happening in Gaza—but it did go viral because of the ways that discourses of empowerment are so stagnant and so recalcitrant around the broader political context.
Audience member (2):
Hi and thank you for your really compelling panel. There was a point made early on about the sort of labor politics in this particular region and, specifically, that the Palestinian bodies are not required for labor, and then the discussion of the resulting sort of cultural and social economy of the wound. But, if I am not mistaken, there are international profits being made from, for instance, weapons and various technologies and systems used to inflict this violence, and to inflict these wounds. So, it seemed that is still the labor, and that is still kind of the profit model, on a very, very massive scale internationally. So, I wonder if you would consider tying that into that type of economy as well.
Ghassan Abu Sitta:
So, one of the interesting things about these wars that are launched on Gaza is that they offer also the opportunity and they act as field testing grounds for the Israeli arms industry. So, if you imagine that—actually the first drone war was 2008-2009 war in Gaza and sales of Israeli-made predator drones really rocketed as result of the success of the use of drones during the 2008 war. During the current Marches of Return, what are being tested and marketed are these new drones that fire multiple gas canisters, up to five at the same time, and these are now being taken up and are on sale globally because of the result of the success of these wars. So, the Israelis have always used components of each of these wars to test out and to market new weapons. If you recall, back in 1982 during the Israeli invasion of Beirut, was the first use of aerial-delivered phosphorous bombs, which were then used to great effect in Fallujah by the Americans in 2003 and 2005. So, there is a component of these wars which act as a kind of live fire marketing exercise.
Helga Tawil Souri:
If I could add, I think it is important to highlight to what extent, whether it is Gaza or Palestine in general, is actually a very profitable entity for Israel, certainly militarily and in all kinds of other ways. But, the other thing to think about is how upside down the economies actually are, in a place—not just Gaza, but all over, Israel-Palestine, Palestine-Israel, West Bank, whatever you want to call it. It is important to think about how there is this new elite, a bourgeoisie within Gaza, that is tied to tunnel economy; that has created an entirely new realm of profiteers and rich people, who used to themselves be the periphery, and are now the people economically in charge. So, here is an example of how to think about what sorts of profits are being made in a place like Gaza. Or think about when the settlers were pulled out, in 2005, thousands of Gazans were hired to go destroy things: we are going to actually now employ people to go and destroy and tear down different kinds of buildings. There are all these different ways in which capital continues to be made; not just in an international or global sense—of course, the Microsofts, and the Hewlett-Packards, and the Googles, make a lot of money; of course so do all the Israeli companies like Raphael and other military firms—but also within Palestine itself, you have different kinds of capital elites forming.
Jasbir Puar:
To add to that, I do think of maiming as a way of creating profit from populations that are otherwise thought of being disposable; so, what the “laboring body” is shifts, in that context. And yet, though there this pervasive narrative about Palestinian labor not being necessary—which is the case in Gaza—there a new book out by Andrew Ross, Stone Men, which argues that there are more Palestinians being employed than ever by the Israeli state. So this is another example of the elasticity of the way the occupation works, the porousness and the expansion and contraction that is always strategic; it is never a fixed tactic; it is always about creating a kind of relationality between tactics to manage populations. I think we can take one last question?
Audience member (3):
Thank you for a very sobering panel and a great exhibition. I think it is really interesting the balance between the political, the context, the medical, and the on the ground. We are now in the nitty gritty of how many surgeries it is between this age and that age. If we go back about what was said about wars, was basically outlasts time and it is continuing. And we go back to the panel previously, where we are watching Chile rise up, one of the panelists confided that her friend lost her eye yesterday, and she felt the double guilt of presenting here, while there is up in flames. Some of us are from Beirut, and Beirut is definitely not at that level of violence, but some might say that Lebanon has been in a perpetual state of war. Syria, Egypt, Iraq, Libya, and the list goes on. So, what is that saying about our rights to future generations here, today, seventy years after the success of a Zionist project, if we might say, it is not successful because we are still resisting? At the same time, the topic of Palestine here, today, is about which limb is lost, how do you live with what limb, it has become a discussion about the disabled. Of course, we have not even gone into psychological disabilities, which is on a whole other level. So, I guess my question to you as panelists from different disciplines, is where do we go from here, in our field? I know you are daily in the operating room, deciding to treat this wound or that wound, or that patient or this patient. But, you are there to ensure for the rights of future generations and I wonder about the younger generation that is participating in these marches. One of the most striking things in Lebanon right now is looking at the different ages participating, and the, actually, absence of memory. There is not the trauma of certain wars that maybe older generations have; so the younger ones, there is a certain resilience; there is a certain freedom that is being sought. Are we seeing this is Gaza, amongst all the different ages, given that there are difference cohorts and that the younger one is quite a large one?
Jehan Bseiso:
So, everywhere is burning. Really. And, I think that if there is anything positive, it is that we are connected with empathy, connected with solidarity, through removing layers of exclusion. It is hard not to be pessimistic, but, as I told Francesco yesterday, pessimism is a luxury that we cannot afford, and it is a privilege that we cannot afford. And the fact that everywhere is burning, in different ways, and maybe some places will completely, not only not be inhabitable, will no longer cease to exist as they are today. For me, this is just even more of a reason to rise up in all the different ways and, here, there is a role for medicine that is critical, there is a role for poetry that is critical—I am campaigning for my two main things—but there is a role for every single discipline and person.
Helga Tawil Souri:
I think your question, no matter which discipline one comes from, one might have a different answer. Unlike Jehan, I want to persist in my pessimism, at least my own personal pessimism. Interestingly it is the pessimism that can drive us to recognize that things need to be documented. Certainly, in the world of media or cultural studies that is one thing that we should continue doing: telling those stories, capturing those images, figuring out how do your build archives, how to put together cookbooks. Sometimes, the really mundane things are the things that I think need to be kept, and that need to be documented, in the longer view. If I look one hundred, two hundred, two thousand years from now, how is it that we want Gaza to be remembered— not the sort of disappearance of some civilization like the Mayans. But the kind of tangible, palpable, archivable, mediatic kinds of things that can we put together, to keep for those future generations. I find it difficult to think in twenty, thirty, forty-year terms. It is almost easier to think in two hundred, three hundred, four-hundred-year terms.
Ghassan Abu Sitta:
So, for me, what differentiates colonialism from occupation is that in colonialism, which is a longer-term project, the body of the colonized is the battleground, and the land is secondary to that primary prize, which if you can win, you can ensure the longevity of the colonialist project. And you see that in Chile—and the role of violence in its attempt to permanently alter the body is to also temporarily alter people’s consciousness, people’s awareness of themselves and their surroundings. That struggle that exists in Chile, that exists in Palestine, that exists everywhere, is really a struggle about consciousness and the way hegemonic bodies, whether they are colonialist projects or international financial bodies or capital, are attempts to alter and shape people’s consciousness, their relationship between each other, their ability to show solidarity rather than aversion. Because that consciousness, once achieved, allows people’s solidarity rather than pity and empathy, allows people’s steadfastness which is an active process rather than resilience which is a passive process. Consciousness is why they do to us what they do to us: so, alter our view of what we are, what we can do and who are the people we need to reach out to in order to effectively change the balance of power, which is so, so much in their favor.
Jasbir Puar:
In terms of what we do from here, or what is in the future: we actually went back to a 1956 letter from Ghassan Kanafani, “Letter from Gaza,” where he talks about the amputation of his niece’s leg, and recognition of a new Gaza in relation to the amputation that symbolizes the missing realization of the right to return. There is always ongoing intergenerational cultural meaning, and momentum, and thinking, and consciousness around what is happening. So, this is not necessarily a new threshold; it is something that has been approached before and will be approached again, I think.
Francesco Sebregondi:
Perhaps just to echo something that Jehan was touching upon. We heard, of course, a lot about the pain and suffering that the Palestinian people in Gaza are subjected to. But, let us remind ourselves that, every Friday, people are going back to these protests. There is something about the vitality of this people who, in spite of the increasingly horrendous modalities of repression they must face, return to the border fence every week, that is, at least for me, truly inspiring and empowering actually—rather than something that would call for some kind of compassion towards this suffering body of population. There is a degree to which, for me, looking at Gaza gives a new and stronger meaning to Antonio Gramsci’s famous formula: “Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.” There is something about the way the people of Gaza behave that is just the embodiment of that formula, and I think one way forward is also simply to acknowledge it, and try to take some of that in the way we behave on our everyday life, rather than thinking of what we can do for them. Actually, they are already doing a lot for us… Khalas? OK.