A Rupture in Time | Sarah Aziza

It is October, and for a year the world has ended, and somehow gone cruelly on. It seems almost meaningless to mark this temporal passage—what does the moral indictment of one year of genocide mean that one hundred days of genocide or six months of genocide did not? And yet my family in Gaza has not ceased to count—marking birthdays in their battered shelter in Nuseirat, tallying each day since the last displacement, the hours between bombs. “A year,” my cousin Nabil writes to me, “a year with nothing, no work or hopes or living, nothing but running from death.” It is October, warped and too warm in this era of climate emergency, and nothing can be the same.

In the beginning it felt like this: the earth opened beneath us, but for a moment it seemed as though gravity forgot itself. We waited for the falling to begin. That morning, I stayed indoors, head full of static as Americans walked by, smooth-faced, outside. The grate of surreality, here in the heart of empire; how much it costs us, for this nation to maintain its illusion of impenetrability. What I mean is: of course most of those around me did not taste the death-promise of October 8, even if some of them were gripped by horror at the events—true, fabricated, and obfuscated—that unfolded the day before. One trick of the American mirage is the feeling of time flying while history barely moves.

But in Gaza, time had already fractured. As the sky roared toward the earth, my twenty-six-year-old cousin Haneen fired off fragmented texts:

Gaza under bombardment. We can’t sleep. The sound of bombing is terrorizing, and it spreads. The stench of smoke. I feel I cannot breathe. We endure the night in complete darkness. The sound of children crying. The sound of fear and pain is heard at night. Every moment we die.

Genocide, so wild and ruthless it mutilates even the clock. In the midst of death, an hour might be the measure of a human’s capacity for pain. How much does one minute weigh to the mother of a hemorrhaging child? To the amputee, at what speed does an hour pass on the first day without your limb? Who can ever know the size of Hind Rejab’s final night?

“I expect that this war will not last more than two weeks,” my exhausted cousin wrote a few days in. Surely, Israel’s staggering violence was too extreme to sustain. She was a veteran of much Zionist carnage, and had lived most of her life under siege—but her imagination still arced toward life. “The two sides cannot withstand any longer, or fight a long war.”

She was set to graduate from college in a few months. In her closet hung a cap and gown. “I do not like war. I love peace, tranquility and life. I love that hope inside me, that was pushing me to achieve my treasured dreams.”

“We have already eliminated thousands of terrorists—and this is only the beginning,” proclaimed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the third week. By then, he had rejected early offers of ceasefire and hostage exchange, intent on a full-scale invasion of Gaza.

“Gaza is running out of time,” declared United Nations experts on day twenty-six. Their report decried ongoing Israeli strikes on Jabalia refugee camp as a war crime. At the time, it was still a shock to see dense neighborhood blocks blasted into rubble, craters sinking like punctured lungs. But already, the Zionist state had dropped the equivalent of two nuclear bombs on Gaza, devastating hospitals, camps, utilities, and universities. It had already declared a siege on all life-sustaining resources, including electricity and food. It had ordered more than one million Palestinians out of their homes, killed at least 9,000, and wounded at least 23,000 more.

Beneath its gloss of modernity, the Zionist state—not Palestine—is the anachronism.

In the eleven months since, the unthinkable has become commonplace. We’ve watched children eaten alive by their own starving bodies while hundreds of aid trucks wait, barred by Israeli settlers or soldiers, mere miles away. We’ve seen their desperate families scramble for food only to be mowed down, crushed by tanks, or struck dead by ill-conceived airdrops. On our screens, entire families are obliterated under rubble, while others are reduced to sacks of shredded flesh or literally vaporized. And with at least ten thousand Palestinians taken prisoner by Israel, we’ve seen widespread sexual abuse and torture while Israelis publicly defend rape as an instrument of war.

And one year after a baseless story of beheaded babies made shrieking rounds in the international press, we’ve watched as decapitated infants and dismembered children in Gaza have failed to receive similar attention, let alone outrage. Inside the Strip, the systematic murder of Palestinian writers and journalists, and the decimation of Gaza’s infrastructure, means even our own records are suppressed. While conditions have slowed the official counting of the dead, experts predicted in July that, if the war ended immediately, the combined effects of violence, displacement, deprivation, and disease might still claim over half a million lives.

Like the mass graves which threaten to reduce the dead to a jumble of nameless bones, the carnage may obscure the specificity of grief. But: today in Gaza, someone woke to the third or forty-fifth morning without someone they could never have imagined living without. Today, some father will, like Mohammed Abu al-Qumsan, remember precisely how many days or hours his child was permitted on this earth. Today, someone will work to rebuild a shelter or a garden, and wonder how long, this time, it will last.

A year: a calendar, or weight, or knife. Each body an archive, dense and beautiful as life itself—and more of them crushed, starved, incinerated every day.

You don’t get it back—for the past year, I have lived in the jaws of this thought. There is always something left to fight for, but true loss is not recuperable. So much can never be replaced.

For the perpetrators of the genocide, temporality is something to be mastered, bent. As Netanyahu escalated his campaign against Gaza, he called on Western leaders and media for their endorsement, casting the Israeli project as a fulcrum of history. “We will not realize the promise of a better future unless we, the civilized world, are willing to fight the barbarians,” he declared last October. “We cannot give immunity to the savages.”

This statement was not merely an appeal to Western, Islamophobic anxieties but an invocation of core Zionist ideology. In 1896, Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism wrote of his vision of settlement in Palestine: “We should there form a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism.” More recently, Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak proclaimed the Zionist state a “villa in the jungle,” while Israeli Knesset members have called their desire for Jewish-Arab segregation “natural” and likened Palestinians to sheep and dogs. It is a familiar colonial logic: establishing the legitimacy of the settler through contrast with a denigrated native, one cast as both dangerous and trapped in a timeless, vulgar past.

It is a distinction Israel has sought to manifest with transparent and manic force. For the better part of a century, the state has sabotaged Palestinian “development” with instruments of both bureaucracy and war. Meanwhile, the Zionist state has increasingly taken comfort in its material advantages, mistaking weaponized technocracy for superiority. October 7 shattered this paradigm, as the state-of-the-art nation was briefly overthrown by the crude weapons of the dispossessed. Since then, Israel has attempted to bomb Gaza into barbarity, swearing to reduce the Strip into a “desert island” fit for its “human animals.”

Now, after a year of quagmire in Gaza, Israel is seeking new horizons for performing dominance—as in Lebanon, which it threatened to bomb back “into the Stone Age.” As Netanyahu took the podium at the United Nations on September 27, Israeli attacks had killed over seven hundred Lebanese in the preceding week alone, while displacing half a million more. Having just rejected another ceasefire call, and hours before ordering two-thousand-pound bombs to be dropped on a residential sector of Beirut, the Israeli prime minister stood before the General Assembly and called his Arab opponents “savage murderers [who] seek to destroy our common civilization and return all of us to a dark age.”

For years, and increasingly the past twelve months, we have seen how these primal projections extend into the ranks of the Israeli military—as when soldiers filmed themselves burning food supplies in famine-stricken Northern Gaza, proclaiming, “We turn on the light against this dark place and burn it until there is no trace of this whole place.” Yet none of this rabid cruelty—nor the attempted cultural genocide via the destruction of Palestinian educational infrastructure, heritage sites, libraries, and archives—has succeeded in imprisoning Palestine in an imagined, primitive past. Rather, Israel’s relentless vitriol and violence erupt from an indignation over its own, arrested futurity. Beneath its gloss of modernity, the Zionist state—not Palestine—is the anachronism.

In the Zionist imaginary, the year 1948 should have been the inauguration of perpetual dominion over Palestine. Instead, the Nakba represents not one but two thwarted futures. Even as they managed to ethnically cleanse at least seven hundred thousand Palestinians from their land, the founders of Israel did not achieve their goal of a Jewish-majority state from the river to the sea. The backwards natives had managed, somehow, to hold ground.

Paradoxically, this failure means the Zionist vision remains regressive, defined by the past. Pledged to a crude and unfinished settlement project, its future can only begin with the completion of conquest. Toward this aim, its apologists plunder history, recruiting God into a political eschatology and leveraging the horrors of the Holocaust to justify genocide. Simultaneously, the state routes each new generation into mandatory military service, ensuring the continuity of a society largely forged by combat training, siege mentality, and antagonism toward Arabs. It is an antagonism which can only compound as Palestinian resistance continues to deny Israel the horizon of complete control.

It is toward this receding horizon that Israel has waged every war and “peace process” since 1948, its internal strife over the “Arab problem” largely a matter of degree—should the Nakba be completed politically and incrementally, or violently and swiftly? Any liberal comfort taken in token Arab inclusion, the fantasy of a two-state solution, or the myth of Israeli diplomacy ignores both the material arc of the past decades and the explicit declarations of the Zionist state itself. Last October, a leaked document from the Israeli Intelligence Ministry, dated October 13, 2023, revealed plans to expel Palestinians from Gaza into Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. A few weeks later, Israeli agriculture minister Avi Richter announced, “We are now rolling out the Gaza Nakba . . . Gaza Nakba, 2023.”

“When we decided to leave, we went to our house to say our last farewell,” my cousin wrote to us in December as they prepared to evacuate their home. “Everyone burst into tears. We touched the walls, kissed the beds, and hugged each other. The air.”

Gaza is on the brink. By December, brink became the word of choice, as various international agencies issued alarms about impending collapse—into famine, into disease, into social chaos. “The brink” was where Gaza seemed to stay perched for months, as the West wrung their hands about a “looming,” “catastrophic” invasion of Rafah, the southernmost point in Gaza, where 1.5 million were sheltering. Around the world, protests continued, including a wave of stunning activism on college campuses, but Israel’s backers refused to take meaningful action to curb the disasters in Gaza or, increasingly, in the West Bank. Palestine was abandoned to its many precipices, until “the brink” faded from the news. Israel invaded Rafah, proving again that no red lines exist, as conditions in Gaza crashed over cliff after cliff.

Shortly after my cousins fled south, we received photos of a body wrapped in a white shroud. My great-aunt Zahia had passed away. Days after their long trip, crammed with twenty others on a truck bed in the winter cold, she had succumbed. She was ninety-seven. Her life in Gaza began as a young woman driven from her village during the Nakba. Her sister, Jaziya, had been struck dead as they fled.

الله يرحمها

You don’t get it back.

Israel’s regressive vision is complemented by the United States’ steadfast refusal to reckon with either horizons or history. Rather, whether through jingoistic fables of past greatness or claims of progress to come, American politics is a cycle which serves only the present tense.

Republicans openly disdain challenges to their conception of the status quo, loud in their attacks on environmental regulations or their xenophobic fantasies of reversing demographic shifts. Meanwhile, their so-called opposition has withstood the pressure of popular protest against interventionist wars, racialized oppression, and the ongoing dispossession of Palestinians. Under its auspices, we have seen a spectrum of rhetoric deliver similarly hawkish outcomes: from Obama’s “historic” administration overseeing record deportations and expanded drone wars to a Hollywood-fêted candidate who defends Israel’s genocide.

This lethal lack of imagination underpins American support for an increasingly erratic and violent Israel. If the Zionist fantasy is to complete its halted hegemony in Palestine, the American dream is to suspend the world forever in its post-Cold War moment of unipolar dominance. In the basest of U.S. calculations, the elimination of the Palestinian people would be no loss at all. Rather, Israel’s regional supremacy would be welcomed as a boon to waning American influence in the Middle East.

This desire has recently been on naked display. In the midst of wanton Zionist escalations in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and beyond, Kamala Harris’s running mate Tim Walz declared, “The expansion of Israel and its proxies is an absolute, fundamental necessity for the United States to have the steady leadership there [sic].”

Thus, in the U.S.-Israel alliance two death-drives fuse with wild hubris, flinging fire against the land and wills of millions. Careening, as if racing against time.

“Every day is a repetition,” writes my cousin, “every day brings fear again, repeating our displacement, renewing the occupation’s merciless bombing. My dear cousin, beloved and near to our hearts, تعبنا جداً , our exhaustion is enormous, we are utterly exhausted with this life.” Since December, Israeli violence has driven them from Khan Younis to Az-Zawayda to Deir al-Balah, and back to Nuseirat again; as of this writing, they are trapped between two evacuation zones.

Of course, it would be a mistake to see the spectacle of Gaza’s devastation and miss what it portends. For all Israel’s attempts to consign Gaza to the past, the Strip is much more like a preview, in the words of British-Egyptian activist and political prisoner Alaa Abdel el-Fattah, of “some grim future we haven’t arrived at yet.”

Though our struggle is an existential one, we do not desire to match Zionist depravity.

In the devastation and collective abandonment of the Strip, we might glimpse a coming age when the elite will ghettoize mass populations displaced by environmental collapse and war. In the impotence of international law to halt this genocide, we can forecast a time when tyrants are emboldened to commit ever-more heinous crimes. Likewise, we easily see how the fascistic escalation in policing on Western streets and campuses are creating new, repressive norms. And it is no secret that Palestine is a laboratory for technologies of murder and surveillance which are then exported worldwide.

Gaza’s present might be your future, this argument goes, by those who consider themselves sincere and astute allies of Palestine. This is not incorrect, but it is ethically incomplete. Not simply because it makes solidarity a function of self-interest but also because it reduces Gaza to a mere site of catastrophe.

In reality, through all the world-ending atrocities they have faced, the people of Gaza continue to embody a truer futurity than their progress-obsessed oppressors ever could. While Israel slaughters in the name of a colonial utopia, Palestinian مقاومة, or resistance, is grounded in the visceral conviction of indigeneity. Decades of Zionist brutality have not extinguished the Palestinian resolve to remain, to thrive, on familial earth. It is the force that has sustained generations in both sumud and struggle, from the Great Arab Revolt to the Great March of Return.

While this history may also be read as a series of apparent defeats—from the mass dispossession of the Nakba to the capitulations of Oslo, from the massacres in Jenin to the recapture of the Gilboa escapees—its meaning cannot be captured so simply. Rather, taken together, this lineage underscores how Israel’s very structure is embedded with defeat. “Gaza as a concentration camp of dispossessed refugees that can be killed at will is the unsaid condition of Tel Aviv as the laid-back global city of Bauhaus architecture and nightlife,” writes Nasser Abourahme. “But the structure only works if the regime of violence is unquestionable and unconditional.”

Palestinians in Gaza and elsewhere threaten this structure each time they refuse their subjugation. In each instance, they declare an allegiance to the future, enacting, however fleetingly, “an affirmative desire for open-endedness and possibility,” in the words of Adam HajYahia. He continues: “We must not mistake Palestinian return as something that will occur in the future. Rather, it occurs and has been occurring throughout this present moment to enable a future.”

It is at this juncture—the point of rupture in the regime of captured, colonial time—that supporters of Palestinian liberation must meet. The last year has shown the world what Palestinians have always known: the imperial horizon is nothing less than an enclosure, a cage within which all but a chosen few must submit, or disappear.

Knowing this, we recognize that the people of Gaza will be saved not by humanitarian relief but by an end to structural tyranny. And we must acknowledge the inevitability, and necessity, of indigenous resistance. To deny the latter is to forfeit the full humanity of Palestinians, implying that passivity in the face of holocaust is possible, let alone morally required.

Such solidarity may cause some of us discomfort. It calls us to transgress the entrenched logics of imperial law and order. It asks us to look deeply at the languages of legitimacy—one in which mass, mechanized violence is named “civilized,” while those acting outside hegemony are invariably “terrorists.” It demands we reckon with the real nature of the status quo: how it demands civility of the slaughtered, meeting even peaceful protest with brutal, or lethal, force. It asks us what, within these enforced conditions, it might mean to affirm life.

“Here we are sitting in a room with a cracked ceiling,” wrote Nabil, sending me a photo of the fractured roof of their shelter, flecks of sky exposed. “it resembles our exhausted hearts. The ceiling of our dreams ends when the war ends.” As of September, our extended family had lost over two hundred relatives.

A simple exercise: ask to whom is granted the “right to self-defense,” and to whom belong the majority of the dead.

Of course, Palestinians have never had the capacity to replicate the scale of violence inflicted on them, neither in times of war nor in Israel’s regular crackdowns on civil disobedience. Even so, we bear in mind that oppression does not confer moral exemption. It is not as simple as saying that any act done in the name of anti-colonial struggle is ethically justified, nor that indigenous movements are incapable of excess. Though our struggle is an existential one, we do not desire to match Zionist depravity.

We who know the cause of liberation to be inherently just will not shy away from these fraught lines of inquiry. To quote Aburahme again, we must grapple with these moral dilemmas not out of deference to liberal sensibilities but because “the colonised owe it to themselves, and only to themselves; they owe it to the horizons of futurity and cohabitation their struggle will perform, to the world their children will inherit.” What Zionism is incapable of imagining—a Gaza in which none are hostage, a world freed from supremacy—is the horizon we see, and know we deserve.

Those who seek to support Palestinians in their pursuit of these horizons owe them a radical trust. They must refuse the settlers’ projection of the Palestinian as a genocidal savage who cannot be trusted with liberation, or even her free will. They must believe Palestinians capable of answering, too, the vexing question of future institutional leadership. Above all, they must allow nothing to derail the movement from the fundamental demand: an end to the genocide, and then, our return.

Is it possible? Not inside the recursive, brutal temporality of empire. As I write, the West frets about “escalating tensions” between Israel and Iran, largely ignoring the deliberate provocations of Israel, and Iran’s relative restraint. The doomsday clock stands at ninety seconds to midnight, while the United States gives its blessing to Israeli retaliation, pushing the region ever closer to war. Meanwhile, the Zionist state has intensified its massacres in Gaza and continues to pound Lebanon, reiterating how its zero-sum vision necessitates conflict. The horizon of Zionism will always, only fold back on itself.

But it did not, does not have to be this way. The current reality is unnatural, an imprisonment only sustained by vast arsenals. What is required is rupture. The future groans on the far side of its wall.