CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Afkar-e-taza! From Imperial OverKill to Decolonial OverLife: the Ground Zero of Palestinian and Iranian Resistance and a Feminism that Embraces Life

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

“Is that you again? Didn’t I kill you? I said…you killed me…and I forgot, like you, to die.” – Mahmoud Darwish, “In Jerusalem”

“Is that you again? Didn’t I kill you?

I said…you killed me…and I forgot, like you, to die.”

– Mahmoud Darwish, “In Jerusalem”

My esteemed colleague, the beautiful human being named Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, a Palestinian Armenian scholar from Jerusalem, reviled and chased out of her tenured full professor position at Hebrew University for daring to call the genocide of Gazans by its proper name, and who has been a Visiting Professor this past year at Princeton with me in the Gender and Sexuality Program, elaborates on this verse of her compatriot, the late poet Mahmoud Darwish, through her chilling concept of Overkill[1].  Like the related term “Necropolitics” as adumbrated by African scholar Achille Mbembe, “Overkill” signals the murderous policies enacted on the bodies of SOME citizens (deemed unworthy, abject)–by neoliberal capitalist states in the contemporary world order, of which the entity of Israel is a prime example. Overkill, she explains, is a colonial necro-economy. As a colonial technology, overkill operates through the systematic evisceration of the colonized socio-political body—attacking its cohesion, interdependence, and capacity for regeneration. It subjects populations to continuous and routinized death, rendering human life, family, and community continuity no longer sacred but instrumentalized in the service of power. In her analysis and theorization of the ongoing genocidal Nakba in Gaza, Shalhoub-Kevorkian thus calls attention to “the centrality of death and overkill apparent in the ashlaa’ [body parts] of decomposed babies in incubators”  bringing into our view “the ordinary terror inhabiting the most vulnerable bodies – newborns and children – and most vulnerable spaces: homes, schools, and hospitals” (540).

Her analysis exposes the racist, white supremacist, necropolitical ideology of the Israeli state that “reduces children and newborn bodies into decomposing, dismembered objects to support the larger project of demarcating the ontological boundary between the human and the non-human, the should-be-shredded, decomposed, and killed to disappear.” In other words, some bodies—seen as sub or rather, non-human—like those of brown Arab Palestinians—are ripe for killing—again, and again and again: this is overkill. Contrasted to the Israeli babies whose birth is celebrated by their soldier-fathers even as they are simultaneously killing and maiming Palestinian ones, shows that this racist ideology claims only the colonizer’s bodies as human, worthy of being saved, preserved, and celebrated.  Yet, the brutal inscription of Israeli state power on Palestinian flesh, as Shalhoub-Kevorkian explains, links these dead and “dying bodies to the settler colonial state” permanently, eternally, for historians to excavate forever in perpetuity[2]. In an ever-more searing gesture of anamnesia, when parents of dead babies and children look for the scattered remains of the flesh of their flesh, a finger, a hand, a severed foot—this lamlameh, this process of in-gathering, of community resolve in the face of unimaginable grief and loss, this collecting of ashlaa’, tethers flesh and body, delivering the supreme blow of resistance: the gestus of re-membering  dis-membered parts,  that (re) connects Palestinian “individual and collective lives … establish [ing] a  renewed peoplehood.” Thus, Palestinians refuse to be reduced to body parts, their wholeness fragmented, they refuse to succumb to the erasure the oppressor so desperately tries to ensure with all the military might at its disposal, supplied by the arch-imperialist nation of the USA, whose watchdog in the (so-called) Middle East Israel has always been. Instead, Israeli OverKill results in Palestinian OverLife— life beyond life, a hauntology that the settler colonial state can neither resolve nor whose consequences, escape, is condemned to live in its spectral present, haunted by lost futures and pasts that refuse to die. As Darwish had written in 2005, addressing the Israeli Overkill machine, “you killed me…and I forgot, like you, to die.” Overkill is the paradoxical condition of Overlife:  Operation Enduring Resistance.

Which brings us to an understanding—demanding admiration– of........

© CounterPunch