Liron Mor over at the Critical Inquiry blog:
This is the time of inqisām. A time of severance, of breaking apart, of the utter destruction of Gaza, the dissolution of its inhabitants, its communities, and its infrastructures, of lives and everything that sustains them, of the very habitability of the land.
But this word, inqisām, names much more. Meaning “severance” or “being partitioned” in Arabic, it helps designate and illuminate several political, conceptual, social, and psychological aspects of Israel’s war on Gaza and on Palestinians more broadly, both before and after October 2023. It is, first and foremost, the proper name for an Israeli mode of segregation, which separates not only colonizers from colonized but also, and more importantly, the colonized from one another. It indexes technologies of distancing that produce Israeli blindness and apathy to Palestinian subjectivity. It accurately manifests the current stage of what is known as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a stage defined by the temporally cyclical and spatially binary logic of blood feuds and revenge, with its tendency to decontextualize and its recurrent moral rebooting of history. Finally, it helps demonstrate that what is going on at present does not constitute a break with the previous Israeli paradigm of “conflict management,” which many declared to have been shattered. Instead, this severance is simply its continuation by other means. Since “conflict management” has long involved periodic large-scale operations of mass killing and infrastructural devastation—a violence whose seasonal nature is captured by the term Israeli politicians have given it, mowing the lawn—what sets apart the current violence in Gaza is primarily its unprecedented scale.
More here.
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