The Dis-Invention of Gaza

[This essay was originally published in the Fall 2024 issue of Arab Studies Journal. For more information on the issue, or to subscribe to ASJ, click here.]

You go through that experience only once, the experience of how futile war can be. You latch on to all the names of the towns, all the news. . . . There are towns whose names evoke a real horror in you because you have learned to link those names with atrocities, but, for the generation that follows yours, those names will mean nothing; forgetting doesn’t take long. Fallujah will be as meaningless to them as Daejeon is to you.[1]

This painful reflection from Teju Cole’s novel Open City appears in one of the final conversations between Julius and his mentor, Professor Saito, in a New York apartment as the Iraq war rages. As the genocide in Gaza enters its second year, I find myself interrogating Saito’s observation that war catalyzes both politicization and amnesia. The professor is making the case that what befalls these localities at the hands of imperial power radicalizes a new generation of young people, often in the “Euro-American heartlands.”[2] Certainly, for those educated in the canon of twentieth-century Western history, the use of place names as shorthand for significant battles is not unusual. Gallipoli, Ypres, Stalingrad, Dresden: each evoke wartime cataclysms. The point Saito makes is more subtle. The enduring association between places of atrocity and the generational scarring that inevitably accompanies them speaks to how those atrocities fuel resistance to state power. This a convincing frame through which to make sense of the anti-Vietnam War movement in the United States, for example, or the anti-Iraq War protests across the United Kingdom in February 2003. 

In my case, as part of a post-Second Gulf War generation, it was the names of towns, cities and camps across the besieged Gaza Strip in Palestine that seared themselves into my consciousness. Over three excruciating weeks between 2008 and 2009, the names Deir al-Balah, Gaza City, Khan Yunis, Jabalia, and so on suddenly became intimately familiar to me. Though I am of both Palestinian and Iraqi heritage, it was the 2008–09 incursion into Gaza (dubbed Operation Cast Lead) that taught me about the military might of empire and the diplomatic impunity that accompanies it. I felt that revelation in a bodily way, and it elicited a deep and enduring political radicalization. 

Yet Gaza takes Saito’s assertion to new heights. The 2024 generation is reading the same news, learning the same names, and observing the same horrors as those of 2008–09, but on a scale unimaginable to my adolescent self. The Israeli assaults in 2012, 2014, 2018, 2021, and now 2023–24 have added Rafah, Shujaiya, Nuseirat, al-Mawasi, Tel al-Hawa, and al-Rimal to our list of place names that evoke horror, as well as specific sites: Al-Shifa Hospital, Al-Omari Mosque, Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital, Rosary Sister’s School, and so on. Add to these a set of hastily made spatial designations—“northern and southern Gaza,” “humanitarian corridors,” “safe zones,” “Gaza floating pier,” and the “Philadelphi Corridor”—and a fully evocative and familiar geography of Israel’s assault on Gaza is realized. 

Senior Israeli politicians and public figures have routinely spoken of their intention to annihilate the Gaza Strip, for example, the deputy Knesset speaker who called for “erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the earth.”[3] But they are realizing genocide—at the time of writing, the UN reports over 44,500 fatalities—through the decimation of various domains of life.[4] Complementing frames enable a clearer picture: domicide (Israel has destroyed or severely damaged over 87 percent of housing units), scholasticide (there are no universities left in Gaza and over 87 percent of school buildings require full reconstruction or major rehabilitation), urbicide (Israel has damaged or destroyed over 55 percent of Gaza, including 80 percent of commercial facilities and 68 percent of the road network), and ecocide (Israel has destroyed over 50 percent of trees in Gaza).[5]

Certainly, there is a conversation to be had about the repetitive, gaslighting nature of these genocidal assaults on Gaza’s landscape and population, as well as the global moral depravity that abets them. But a more urgent and unsettling question to my mind is: what will Rafah mean to children twenty years from now? Under such apocalyptic conditions, can we assume that the names that mobilize the young of today will even refer to a physical place in the future? 

I have found no language strong enough to carry the weight of the horrors of Gaza. These horrors render words, concepts, metaphors, and theories meaningless.[6] But neither do I see this period as out of character for the Zionist settler-colonial project, which has been ravaging Palestine for a century. The 1947–48 Nakba, for all its historical specificity, exists in the present. It is an ongoing and deeply violent structure that continues to shape the reality of Palestinian society in all fragmented parts of Palestine and its diaspora.[7] This is well-trodden ground in the literature. Palestinians have described Israel as a settler-colonial society, and Zionism as a settler-colonial project, for almost a century.[8] Settler colonial theory’s current resurgence is attributed to the late Patrick Wolfe, who frames settler-colonial invasion as “a structure not an event.” This structure seeks to displace, then replace, the indigenous people from the land, which Wolfe terms “the logic of elimination.”[9]

If one were searching for a single word to name Israel’s actions, “elimination” would certainly be a strong candidate, but it does not quite capture the overwriting of Israel’s actions.[10] What Gaza is being subjected to requires new language, research, and scholarship. For want of something better, let us call Israel’s actions a “dis-invention”: a desire not only to destroy, but also to operate as though the place never existed at all, never mind that Rafah dates back to Pharaonic times. If the first step in Palestine’s dis-invention is to annihilate the landscape, to literally reduce it to rubble, then phase two seeks to banish the place name, which J. B. Harley refers to as “toponymic silence.”[11] In Gaza, we are witnessing the former and anticipating the latter. 

During an event in London in March 2024, the poet and playwright Ahmed Masoud read from his novel, Come What May.[12] The short extract narrated two young people’s walk from their campus, to a café, to the beach in Gaza City. The events described were quotidian (though today they appear fantastical) and portrayed a lived-in world of relationships, afternoon coffees, and sea air. In his remarks accompanying the reading, Masoud argued that Israel is rectifying what it failed to achieve in the 1948 Nakba: the concerted and total annihilation of Palestinian space. As he saw it, after the Nakba, Haifa remained Haifa, and Akka remained Akka. The Nakba decimated the people and their way of life, but these cities’ houses, roads, and infrastructure continued, in one form or another. Put differently, a map of Haifa would still feature the same places before and after the Nakba, even if the city’s original inhabitants were expelled. This, of course, was not the case for the 530 Palestinian villages that the Nakba wiped wholesale off the map. Today, Masoud asserted, they are ensuring that Palestinian cities in Gaza are disappeared. “Khan Younis no longer exists,” he said. The Gaza in his novel will come to be regarded as historical fiction. 

The Nakba of 1948, the foundational dis-invention, casts a long and sharply outlined shadow. S. Yizhar, an Israeli soldier and writer, laid bare the relationship between the destruction of a place and its memory in his chilling novella Khirbet Khizeh:

What happened to the place happened to its name: for a time the name tarried, hanging there, lingering in the air until it vanished. Names without places hover for a while like bubbles, stay for a while, then burst. Here it is, a levelled hill; they levelled it well. Humble and lacking any sign of life; they have returned it to before it was.[13]

As Harley argues, this erasure of place names “amounts to acts of cultural genocide.”[14] The map is essential for this process. The Zionist regime buttresses its legitimacy by Hebraizing the landscape. As Israeli historian and former deputy mayor of Jerusalem Meron Benvenisti readily admitted, “the makers of maps and assignors of names were following the footsteps of the builders of cities and villages, planters of trees, pavers of roads and destroyers of Arab communities—and sometimes went before them.”[15]

Traces of this dis-invention persist all over the landscape today. To travel around 1948 lands is to happen upon places that just eighty years ago constituted a civilization and today are levelled: the well crumbling and filled with stagnant water, the pastures overgrown and twisted with cacti, the mosque or school wall collapsed in on itself, on and on. Some people are able to see fragments of these remains, while others remain oblivious, as though they exist in another dimension.[16] In the summer of 2023 in the Eastern Galilee, I would set off in search of one destroyed village, Al-‘Ubaydiyya or Sirin, and discover, quite by chance, others along the way, strung together like beads on a chain. Palestine was wounded but still there, breathing and growing patiently, in plain sight. 

For the displaced Palestinian subject, however, seeing and moving in this way engenders fatigue and “an inexplicable feeling of anxiety,” as Adania Shibli puts it in her novel Minor Detail.[17] The novel’s unnamed protagonist beautifully articulates the ambivalence of the Palestinian body moving in the colonized landscape of a contested homeland:

Wherever I look, all the changes constantly reassert the absence of anything Palestinian: the names of the cities and villages on road signs, billboards written in Hebrew, new buildings, even vast fields abutting the horizon on my left and right . . . little details drift along the length of the road, furtively hinting at presence.[18] 

Could a Palestinian moving through Gaza several decades from now have similar revelations? Could Israel gut and overwrite a besieged geography home to 2.2 million people (the lion’s share of whom are refugees from 1948) in such a fashion? I do not believe so. Here again, the Nakba teaches us. Let us not fall into the trap of understanding the Nakba only through the lens of despair, and instead follow Rana Barakat in assessing the Nakba as also a story of sustained resistance, decolonization, and the possibility of refugee return.[19] Quite apart from anything else, as Raef Zreik reminds us, “there are still six million Palestinians living in their historical homeland . . . . They managed to rescue the name of their homeland—Palestine—from oblivion.”[20]

To return to Saito’s assertion, the question remains: how can we capture the momentum that the ongoing dis-invention of Gaza brings and reject the forgetting? 

The answer lies with the necessity of taking the long view. The indigenous Palestinian landscape was not created “by administrative feat, nor . . . for the purpose of providing the basis for a claim to proprietorship.”[21] It has formed, and will continue to form, organically. It is a continuous, evolutionary process, in which each generation, population, and community adds another layer to the rich tapestry of Palestinian life. In this way, Palestinians will continue to be custodians of the land. Israel’s dis-invention, though brutally violent and, at points, unimaginable, is nevertheless a failed project. When asked about this longer future horizon, the Palestinian poet and aid worker Jehan Bseiso responded simply, “biddha nafas,” it needs breath. “It needs a lot of breath to be able to continue.”[22] We remember the names not as historical artifacts, but as invitations to breathe through this moment so that we can build for the next.