Gaza Between Colonial Trauma and Genocide

In the hours following the attack of Palestinian fighters in the south of Israel, Western observers, bewildered, speculated about why Hamas and the young Palestinians of Gaza, born and bred under siege and bombs, have launched an attack of this magnitude, and right now. Others expressed their surprise at the surprise. The Israeli government responded by declaring “total war”, promising the pulverization of Gaza and demanding the inhabitants to leave the strip, knowing that there is no escape. Mobilising even the Holocaust and comparing the fighters to the Nazis, the Israeli government engaged in an operation that they claim is aimed at the destruction of Hamas. In fact, as I am writing, Gaza is being razed to the ground with an unbearable number of Palestinian deaths which gets larger by the hour, with people fleeing under Israeli bombs, water, electricity and fuel being cut, hospitals – receiving one patient a minute – on the brink of catastrophe, and humanitarian convoys prevented from entering the strip. An ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Gaza is taking place with many legal observers claiming this level of violence amounts to a genocide. But what has happened – shocking and terrible in terms of the number of victims – including children and the elderly – creates not only a new political scenario, but above all it also imposes a new frame of meaning. Especially since the Oslo accords onwards, the emotional and interpretative filter applying to the “conflict” has been the asymmetrical valuing of one life over the other which in turn rested on an expectation of acquiescence and acceptance of the Palestinians’ subalternity as a colonised people. This framing has been shattered.