‘Thoughts of Gaza Far from Gaza’: The book shows how to think of Gaza as a world in itself

What is happening in Gaza? On the face of it, a simple question. All of us have seen those images and videos of mass destruction and annihilation, of a people being cynically dismembered, their homes being gleefully annihilated by smiling soldiers waving Israeli flags. We know what is happening in Gaza. Or so we seem to think.

Gaza exists, even if tenuously so, in a permanent state of exception imposed upon it by the exceptional state of Israel. So, what is happening in Gaza? The names for what is happening range from a struggle for revolutionary liberation, an anti-colonial uprising against settler colonialism, a new Nakba or another form of ethnic cleansing, apartheid and genocide. The more we, so far from Gaza, think we know what is happening there, the more puzzled we become, even though what is happening is pretty clear and obvious: the genocidal brutalisation of an entire people. The problem is not that what is happening in Gaza is unnameable because the name cannot saturate reality; it is unnameable because each name oversaturates reality, and there are already too many such names.

Thinking of Gaza

Soumyabrata Choudhury’s book Thoughts of Gaza Far from Gaza refuses to take this unnameability as an injunction to stop thinking. To think...

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