In the end of 2023, the Gaza Strip became an emergency for humanity. In early 2024, Gaza was called by a United Nations official the ‘worst humanitarian crisis I have seen in 50 years’. The world has watched as the Israeli government, speaking about self-defence, has continued a ferocious military attack on the enclave, leading to the death and maiming of thousands upon thousands of civilians, destroying the infrastructure necessary for life to exist, displacing 85% of the population (1.9m people) by December 2023. The people of Gaza have been subjected to starvation, unspeakable torture (for this is what the forced collapse of healthcare facilities means), military terror, the threat of expulsion from their land, while South Africa raised, at the International Court of Justice, the case of Gaza being subjected to genocide by its occupiers. By February 2024, nearly 30,000 people have been killed in Gaza, a number to which should be added those remaining dead under their flattened homes. Gaza appears to be hostage to what Third Text has been opposing since its inception – that is, colonialism and imperialism and all that sustains it: technologies of the image, cultural narratives, institutional politics, geopolitical stakes and socio-economic processes conducive to the perpetuation of colonialism and imperialism have all been subjected to critical questioning and analysis in its pages. But never in the history of the journal, which was founded in the 1980s, has there been such a violent reaffirmation of colonialist and imperialist contempt for the right to life, peace, and the self-determination of a people as through the devastating attack on Gaza. The forum Thinking Gaza: Critical Interventions is intended as an opposition to such contempt – an opposition which lies at the heart of anticolonial, decolonial and postcolonial thought and its address to history and the contemporary world.
Such thought is not inert and it does not amount to the proverbial ivory tower of aloof scholarly pursuits. Anticolonial, decolonial and postcolonial thought, addressing culture and society, is integrally connected to the struggles of the oppressed. It emanates from such struggles and returns to them, and has no other reason for existence. Such thought will not ignore the crimes perpetrated against the Palestinian people in Gaza, the history of which did not start on 7 October 2023, when Hamas went through the fences enclosing Gaza, leading to the deaths of 1,139 Israelis (including children) and foreign nationals, mostly civilians, and capturing about 240 as hostages. At the same time, the number of Palestinians (including minors) held in Israeli jails has risen to 8,000, according to credible reports, with ‘numbers held without charge at historic heights’. These numbers, these fences, this tragedy are part of the history of colonialism, as are the Occupied Territories of Palestine – a description created in 1967 as part of a longer violent project of displacement and erasure enacted in the twentieth century. As this war is not between two nation-states, as this war is executed in a land that the state of Israel controls (since 2007, with a blockade so strict that Gaza has been described as an ‘open-air prison’ by Human Rights Watch), questions arise. Is there implicitly a Palestinian nation-state with Gaza in it, despite the fact that the right of forming such a nation-state is denied to the Palestinian people? Or is self-defence exercised as the defence of an occupier against the people of an occupied land? Given that two mothers have been killed in Gaza every hour by the relentless bombardment (UN Women, ‘Gender Alert: The Gendered Impact of the Crisis in Gaza’, 19 January 2024), the question is unavoidable: are the thousands of women and children killed to date, 70 per cent of all the murdered Palestinians in Gaza, seen as the actual enemies? What is the biopolitical meaning of this? It is an open question whether contemporary global society, itself occupied by power blocs of geopolitics and biopolitics that are often necropolitics, has the institutional means to end the occupation. What is certain is that these power blocs have the means to disregard, intimidate and even punitively suppress the voices of those who speak against injustice. Gaza has revealed the scale and scope of the suppression of speech that is exercised when speaking, precisely, with those that are violently othered. In the face of all this, resignation is not an option. Deliberating from a non-bombed desk about ‘two sides’, as if two equal opponents are each having a point, is not an option. Calling attention to the children of Gaza losing their loved ones, their limbs, their eyesight, their will to live, their right to peace and their right to existence is the only option, if the struggle against colonialism and imperialism, which is also the struggle for peace and for life, is to remain meaningful in our century.
February 2024