Notions, Notations Toward the Abolition of the Planetary Regime of Nakba

Can we create an anti-denialist space and language to adequately confront the ongoing genocide in Palestine? This edition of the Conference of Butterflies asks contributors to share words, notions, practices which nourish or obstruct our movements from perceiving and abolishing all the forces, forms, institutions maintaining the planetary regime of ongoing Nakba.

Schedule

• 10:30 -12:00
• (Lunch 12:00 – 13:00)
• 13:00 – 14:30
• (Break 14:30 – 14:45)
• 14:45 – 16:15
• (Break 16:15 – 16:30)
• 16:30 – 18:00 (End)

Please join us for as much of the day as you can.

Most contributors will be in person at Tramway. Isabella Hammad, Zoé Samudzi, Amirah Silmi and Adrian Zakar will join virtually.

Overview

We begin the first full day of Episode 12 with the Conference of Butterflies by directly confronting the ongoing genocide in Palestine and building up our capacity to perceive, thus resist the multiplicity of forces, forms, interests, institutions committed to futuring, perpetrating, denying it.

Our friends in the Anti-Denialist Museum of Palestine assert that the political impasses we confront today are structured not only by the power accumulated by colonial, imperial, capitalist forces, but also by the cultural, epistemic, linguistic limits which such forces have and continue to institutionalize.

If, as they explored in the previous Assembly at Episode 11, genocidal violence depends upon forms of denial, then how are epistemic, aesthetic, cultural regimes today implicated in reproducing an ecology of thinking, perceiving, even struggle which by design or by habit perpetuate the conditions for its futuring?

“To arrest, apprehend, abolish all that stands for the ongoing Nakba is to reclaim our ability to determine which words, notions can help us perceive what Gaza asks of us? Which words, notions even horizons act as material obstacles?”

How to reorient our struggles beyond the imposed terms, temporalities of denialist “war” and genocidal “peace”?

If the terminological is the poetic dimension of thought, then in the spirit of Attar’s birds and Darwish’s butterflies, this reclaiming of ‘conference’ brings together many of the contributors to this episode to construct a lexicon of terms, words, notions, associated practices which can orient or obstruct our struggles to abolish the planetary regime committed to ongoing Nakba.

Context

Supporting text from the Anti-Denialist Museum of Palestine:

Notions, Notations Toward the Abolition of the Planetary Regime of Nakba

What does Gaza ask of us? How might we respond to Gaza beyond the dates, imposed temporalities and the language of a genocidal “peace” and denialist “war”?

The obliterative campaign under which Gazans have suffered over the past three years, not only forms a continuity with other episodes of destruction over the passing decades, but also, has resulted in a century and a half of violence imposed on Palestinian land and life.

Historically, the term Nakba (Arabic: “catastrophe”) has come to denote the forced expulsion, ethnic “cleansing,” foundational to the imposition of a Zionist state atop historic Palestine. Yet, for many who have been thinking; struggling for a Free Palestine, discussions around the term Nakba have attempted to think its broader temporal, geographical expanse; broadening our understanding of it beyond an event toward a structure, a particular form of mass crime, as an array of strategies of colonization including accumulation by dispossession, theft and destruction of land, of archives in many forms, of material and intangible heritage, collective punishment, incarceration, captive labor, torture in a larger context of an ongoing, program of erasure, effacement, extermination.

The acceleration, intensification and visibilization of this process, arriving to “textbook” genocide in Gaza demands resistance at many levels. Clearly, there is an urgent necessity to stop this obliterative process materially. But as we see, at an institutional level, there is an effort to impose, in the name of ‘ceasefire’ and ‘peace,’ the same future,  in the same forms of the programmed denial and obliteration which Nakba names. Thus, there is an urgent need to re-examine our notions, terms, perceptions and language which can both attend to urgencies of programmed death and colonization, yet also avoid the traps that a denialist, one could say, genocidal culture has been engineered to normalize, to unsee.

The Al-Aqsa Flood has exposed how the attempted obliteration of Palestinian life has been an intrinsic part not only of Zionism but also of a collusion of other forces, parties, states, corporations, institutions including the formation of discursive, legal, juridical, cultural frameworks and forms invested in, rehabilitating logics of supremacy, futured by, committed to perpetrating/denying the Nakba.

This denial of the Nakba has not always taken the form of simple negation. Rather we want to also consider the deployment of practices, ranging from infrastructured oblivion, ignorance, innocence, disinterest, disavowal, isolation, segregation, bordering, disciplining, whiteboxing, one could say constructivist and positivist forms of denial. In this context, we could consider how even the Nakba’s objects and victims could be denied perception of one another and the scope of what they have been subjected to. The urgency of our struggles weighs on how even our forms of solidarity and advocacy can participate in practices of unseeing, epistemically sequestering, silo-ing, delimiting terminologically, temporally, geographically, perceptually  this program of annihilation of the Nakba and all it has attempted to future on a planetary scale – implicating not only Palestinians, the peoples of the region but clearly, as we understand today, communities in every part of our shared planet, assymetrically affecting Fanon’s invoked damned, condemned of the earth.

In this sense, far from an event or even a structured obliteration intrinsic to the imagined Zionist settler-colonial state, the Nakba has been and remains central to the imposition of colonial-settler futurity on a planterary scale.

If in order to resist something, one needs to understand what they are confronting, then can we begin to flesh out the popular slogan of Palestine is Everywhere and give an account of how Palestine is the Destruction of Earth or even the New Universal by understanding how the Nakba has been at the heart of the reordering, reimposition of “the world” and the means of reconstructing, buttressing of what Palestinian writer, thinker Samera Esmeir has called the “colonial international” or in the words of decolonial thinkers such as Anibal Quijano, refashioning the “colonial matrix of power.”

If Palestine inhabits a singular place in this imperial/colonial map, rendered undeniable through the complicit and culpable responses of nearly all Western institutions (including those modeled on their principles, doctrines, rights, values they have purported to uphold): we must assert that it is by no means isolated. If Palestine is Everywhere then we want to invite friends to help us understand all the component parts of how that became so. It is in this way that “the gazafication and genocide by attrition” in Artsakh and Occupied Palestine, as the genocide scholar Elyse Semerdjian has theorized, become more legible as historically materially conditioned processes which are not merely similar but deeply connected. We could say the same of the so-called wars and civil wars, leading to the devastation and destruction of Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Yemen, Syria, Egypt, Algeria, Libya, Somalia, Ethiopia, Sudan, Congo which are not only results of inter-imperial meddling and aggression but manifestations and theaters of this planetary regime.

In this process of re-constellating our entangled destinies toward the abolition of this regime of Nakba, we can retrace and reclaim with historian Adrien Zakar how even the word Nakba before it came to constitute in Arabic its singular place in naming a death sentence or interminable incarceration upon Palestinian life, had been part of a social practice of ideating trans and inter-communal catastrophe in its plural form as Nakabat (“catastrophes”).**

**Used to denote serial massacres perpetrated by Ottoman authorities against Christian communities (nominally, depending on their denominations, under the protectorate of various Western Powers, obviously, less interested in their well being and more in securing their colonial, imperial ambitions) in the last decades of the Empire leading ultimately to the expulsion, flight, if not outright extermination of many Christian communities of the region, including the genocide of the Armenians, Assyrians, Greeks.

Thus, if we assert and resituate, with friends, the Nakba as a Planetary Regime (as we have attempted in Episode 11)— it is in the exigencies of understanding how the Nakba (as Unavowable Holocaust – please include link) was used as a building block to render inconsequential, exonerate all the other imperial, colonial perpetrators of genocidal crimes in order to continue such crimes of annihilation, including what we live and witness today at its apex in Gaza.

It is in this way that we can say that the Nakba has been at the heart of a reorganized regimentation, legalization of obliterative violence, production as destruction, accumulation as dispossession, the education, acculturation and cultivation of counter-insurgent and counter-revolutionary forces (martial as well as discursive) of an endless, all encompassing war, by many names including “peace”, “development,” “structural adjustment,” on colonized, gendered, racialized peoples, including horizons of  subsistence, communisms, anarchisms, feminisms, anti-colonialisms, other temporalities, histories, cultures, knowledges, practices, cosmologies, worlds, in short against anything other than the triumphant progressive unitary time of modernity/coloniality and its privileged economies of debt, indentured labor, stolen time (i.e., coerced participation or death) of racial-patriarchal capitalism.

If what the Arabic speakers of the region called Nakabat, in its plural significance, names a critical conjuncture of competing imperial powers asserting political dominion over Asia and Africa and its resources including oil (Germans, Ottomans, Russians, French, British, …); then, the agreements of Sykes-Picot and the Declaration of Balfour in 1916 and 17, arriving to its singular form, by 1948, to the Palestinian Nakba did not in any way signal a break from its geographic expanse and scale. On the contrary, it became an integral part of the old-new world order which meant different things for different peoples, its legibility and meaning disordered across what decolonial thinkers such as our friend Walter Mignolo have theorized as the “colonial difference.”

For most colonized, racialized peoples, it would be another episode in the long reign of hypocrisies and productions of inhumanities by imperial, colonial forces. In Europe—under the banner of a clean break of “after” Auschwitz and “post”-war— Nakba guaranteed a future for colonial capitalism by generalizing a denialist account of fascism and through a sleight of hand, making Palestinians do the time for Europe’s crimes. Propping up the Zionist regime in Palestine proved integral to this continuity-posing-as-a-reordering of time and space after 1945, invoking, through “Year Zero,” a tempus nullius as corollary to terra nullius.

What these notes invite is a collective rethinking of this entire legacy, because if we are to resist its hold un us collectively, Gaza’s call must include a re-membering together how Palestine is not simply another episode or iteration of colonial brutality, but it constitutes something of an epicenter, lynch-pin, or critical node accounting for how the long durée of colonial racial brutality has continued with impunity, inconsequentiality insisting on its spatial-temporal logic of irreversibility and no exit, no outside, no return.

Nakba has formed something like the dark matter—invisible but integral—that constitutes the violent fabric of our social order, from cultural, political institutions to legal, aesthetic regimes. Our task is not simply to reveal or expose the centrality of the Nakba but to actively destitute and divest from its epistemic, financial, psychic, libidinal and bodily investments, impositions.

Historically, the collective  articulation of forms of life based in a militant practice of resensibilization have been termed by Palestinians “the culture of resistance” (thaqafat al-muqawama). As artists, writers, thinkers and activists, we try to deepen our understanding of the specific role, function that culture has played in facilitating the ongoing perpetration and denial of Nakba; our Conference is a contribution to that effort as also an affirmation of our reclaiming of different worlds through different words.

To think the singular/plurality of the Nakba is to begin to understand its planetary grip —to do so together and with Palestine—that is the convocation of this iteration of the Conference of Butterflies.

We gather this Conference—in the spirit of Attar’s birds and Darwish’s butterflies—alongside many friends and comrades and invite you to help us open our collective capacities to interrogate and reimagine the terms of our transcommunal movement to abolish and delink from all the forms, cultures, knowledges, practices, infrastructures and institutions shaped and committed to future Nakba.

As our comrade, the Palestinian thinker, practitioner of vernacular knowledges Munir Fasheh has suggested, any communal practice of learning, thinking, resisting, sustaining and weaving a life together must reflect on the words that nourish our visions, practices of an otherwise and those which lock us into the prescribed and obliterative futurity of ongoing, planetary Nakba and its knowledge-settlements.

In putting Fasheh’s suggestion into play, for this iteration of our conference, we will assemble to share some of the notions, words, practices which can enhance our perceptions and transcommunal movements toward the abolition of all that stands for ongoing Nakba and those notions, forms and practices which diminish, hold us captive, instruct, channel, obstruct us away from those insurgent paths and emancipatory movements.

Further reading: Anti-Denialist Coalition text on Denialist War and Genocidal Peace