How do Palestinians rethink the cosmologies of time within which they organise their struggle—and the clock counting down on Israel’s endgame.

Overview

In his recent book The Time Beneath the Concrete, Nasser Abourahme centers time as not merely the medium but, indeed, the object of the Palestinian struggle. Quite often, eliding the temporalities of resistance has gone hand in hand with eliding the anticolonial nature of resistance as such. Through concepts such as “parallel time” and “organized spontaneity,” Palestinian thinkers such as Walid Daqqa and Basel Al-Araj have tried to capture something of the chronic contours of both Zionism’s eliminationist drive and the tenacious endurances of Palestinian sumūd.

In this conversation, Palestinian writers and critical theorists Nasser Abourahme and Peter Makhlouf will explore the often-occluded temporal grammars central to perceiving both Palestinians’ collective forms of life and the temporary-permanent Nakba that has been waged against them.

Context

Israeli settler colonialism has long been said to be an anachronism: arriving late to a chapter of world history well in the throes of a decolonization to which Palestinians, in turn, have proved latecomers. Yet there seems to be an even more primordial apportionment of time key to the Zionist project: a division of history into a before and after that underwrites the project of state foundation. “After Auschwitz,” “postwar,” “Oct. 7th,” and “1948” are but some of the temporal markers that have come to be wielded as tools in the service of state legitimacy. Event and structure wage a dialectical struggle in historic Palestine. And in a land—and, acutely, in a Gaza—where reconstruction and development are tools of colonial governance, “the future” itself—how it can be imagined, determined, or itself colonized—has been subject to a ferocious weaponization. While Zionism has never emerged from its foundational impasse—we are decades into 1948, writes Khaled Furani—Palestinian resistance has never allowed the colonial disciplining of duration and history to dictate its temporality. The paradoxical inscription of the longue-durée in today’s Gazan moment demands a rethinking of the cosmologies of time within which Palestinians organize their struggle—and the clock counting down on Israel’s endgame.

Content Notes: Discussion will cover ongoing conflicts, genocide and state violence.