ON LIFE AND DEATH IN PALESTINE
September 21, 2022
Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian is the Lawrence D. Biele Chair in Law at the Faculty of Law-Institute of Criminology and the School of Social Work and Public Welfare at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is also the Global Chair in Law at Queen Mary University of London. Her research focuses on trauma, state crimes and criminology, surveillance, gender violence, law, and society. She studies the crime of femicide and other forms of gender-based violence, violence against children in conflict areas, crimes of abuse of power in settler-colonial contexts, surveillance, securitization, and social control. Her published books include: Militarization and Violence against Women in Conflict Zones in the Middle East: A Palestinian Case-Study (2010); Security Theology, Surveillance and the Politics of Fear (2015); Incarcerated Childhood and the Politics of Unchilding (2019); and the edited books Understanding Campus-Community Partnerships in Conflict Zones (2019), When Politics Are Sacralized (2021), and The Cunning of Gender Violence (2023). Incarcerated Childhood won the 2020 Association of Middle East Children and Youth Studies Book Award and was short-listed for the Palestine Book Awards. As a resident of the Old City of Jerusalem, Professor Shalhoub-Kevorkian is a prominent local activist. She engages in direct actions and critical dialogue to end the inscription of power over Palestinian children’s lives, spaces of death, and women’s birthing bodies and lives.
ILAN PAPPÉ: We will discuss aspects of violence experienced by women and children in Palestine, and I know how difficult it is to talk about these issues. Nevertheless, like you, I feel it is crucial not to overlook these aspects of life under occupation and colonization in Palestine.
My first question, therefore, is whether you can tell us about the choices that you made as a scholar, when you decided to look at some of the most brutal, ugliest sides of state brutality and crimes. Not an easy choice for an object of inquiry. Where does it meet your other focus on gender and gender-based violence? Is it your biography from an early part of your life or more recent? Or is it something else altogether?
NADERA SHALHOUB-KEVORKIAN: Let me start by saying that my main concern, as a scholar-activist, was related to how my research disrupts violence, in particular settler-colonial violence, and especially as a feminist researcher. How can I examine, expose, and unpack settler-colonial structures? How can I talk about the systems that are predicated on recurring patterns of domination and violence that invade and destroy bodies, communities, land, and psychic knowledges of otherized groups, whether Black, Brown, Indigenous, or Palestinian? My theorization and research methodologies are born from the bodies and flesh, the wounding, the relationship and abilities of those living, loving, dying, and being killed by the Israeli system.
To position myself right from the beginning, I’m speaking to you from the Old City of Jerusalem—where daily military occupation, ethnic cleansing, apartheid, dispossession, and kill-ability is confronted with Palestinians’ livability, togetherness, joy, love, and growing solidarity here and around the world. I’m speaking to you from inside the Old City of Jerusalem, yet out of place while being in our place, in our homeland. We are exilic subjects, exiled at home, and it’s almost like a waiting game, with the Zionists waiting for us to die, to leave, to disappear, to evaporate. We are not really out of place, but witnessing the unending refusal of the Palestinians to accept uprooting as the only mode of maintaining the settler state.
My research is a decolonial process that is historically situated but present-focused and futuristic. It’s untethered from my being here, living here—from Haifa where I was born to the Old City of Jerusalem. It’s witnessing, it’s looking at what happened to my people, my places, and the various movements that are changing things. It is based on those who seldom have the right to narrate, when such narrations are anti-oppressive. As in the case of schoolgirls who are speaking against sexual harassment by the Israeli military and the security police, or the voices of birthing mothers resisting demographic dispossession. And the voices of those who build their continuity and power amidst the housing demolitions.
Research and the landscape of knowledges and activism is one of the many interconnected sides of anticoloniality and decoloniality. And decoloniality in my academic production, feminist activism, and writing tries to eliminate the manifestation of settler-colonial violence that persists via the occupation of land, the occupation of mind, the occupation of families, psyche, and even of the senses.
My research is not a reaction to settler colonialism, or an attempt to recover a settler-colonial past. It’s an ongoing orientation toward knowing and being, influenced by many amazing critical scholars from the [Global] South, including Edward Said’s analysis in “Permission to Narrate,” where he taught us that facts do not stand on their own. They require narratives and authorization. Unfortunately, the Palestinian narrative is not authorized, which means that Palestinians are constantly trying to gain the permission to narrate.
So my work is looking at those issues and unpacking violence, while thinking, “How can a ‘terrorist,’ let alone a woman academic ‘terrorist,’ narrate academically and convincingly without being authorized?” It’s a mode of de-linking from hegemonic coloniality with an attempt to imagine a future—not “another” future. Because what I see here in the space around me is really the life of an orphan. All I see in my place, in my time, in the geography, and in my research is very gloomy.
I study Palestine and the manifestation of the colonial project, with its psychosocial and gendered manifestations. My writing and activism emphasize the way in which settler-colonial violence, theft, securitized surveillance, and military occupation of land and life results in ontological and epistemic violence. It results in psychological harm, and here I refer to the amazing work of comrades in South Africa. In my work as a sociolegal scholar and mental health criminologist, I learned that by legitimizing borders and boundaries of disciplines, I risk continuing that colonial violence, knowledge, and being. Colonialism, as Fanon taught us all, is about division of the world into compartments without borders patrolled and policed by structural violence. Decolonial research requires digging deep into the white-stream academic institutions as hubs of epistemic violence and centers for knowledge production. And instead centering the perspective of women, of men, of children, of community—centering the voices of the living and the dead.
ILAN PAPPÉ: Let’s unpack some of what you are disrupting in your work. As you said, one of the important things is gendered violence and violence against women in the Israeli policy. I think we were all made aware of it, even in a nonscholarly way, in the wake of the Israeli assassination of the Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh.
Your work details how women in Palestine suffer from more than one source of violence. We will talk about at least of two of them: Israeli oppression and Palestinian patriarchy, and the connection between them. Let us focus first on the impact of Israeli policy. Is there a particular Israeli violence directed against the women, which is different from or similar to other targeted groups? How common is this violence in what you call “conflict zones”?
My feeling is that somehow Israel created the impression that gender-based violence is not a feature of violence that is relevant to the Zionist movement or the Jewish state, either in the past or in the present. How true is this self-image that quite a lot of people in the world accept?
NADERA SHALHOUB-KEVORKIAN: It’s worth emphasizing that feminist scholarship on Palestine has often traced different effects of colonial power, especially its invasion of the intimate, its silencing, its disciplining, and its surveillance of the colonized. To me, Shireen Abu Akleh’s assassination is state criminality. Most studies on gender-based violence do not look at state crime or state criminality and its gender. State settler-colonial violence, her assassination and Israel’s lies around it—the violence of the state that followed—is all about necropolitical violence that usually those in power do not talk about.
I just completed a special volume titled The Cunning of Gender Violence: Geopolitics and Feminism with my dear friends Professor Lila Abu-Lughod from Columbia University and Professor Rema Hammami from Birzeit. In the book we explore the dynamic political and institutional circuits that GBVAW (Gender-Based Violence and Violence against Women) inhabits, the way it traverses, consolidates, and animates. My contribution to the volume exposes the way that gendered violence is central to state-making and sustaining state power. Other studies, for example Nadje Al-Ali in Iraq, describe how gender is used by states and who also claim to “save” women. Lila Abu-Lughod writes about whether Muslim women “need saving” in her work, and Rema Hammami discusses how humanitarian intervention dramatizes violence against women to invade the state and to invade the otherized, as they are used by the state.
My argument is that state violence can even work through humanitarian registers of saving, of sympathy. Addressing this apparatus of GBV (Gender-Based Violence) and violence against women from a state crime perspective allows me to detect the ways in which state violence works through gender. And it allows feminists to engage with the violence of state institutions and the law, to draw from Indigenous conceptualizations of justice, to examine everyday life and politics, and to go beyond the state and its local and global capitalist economy. When we explain the cunning of gender violence, we say that it can be integral to the working of state power, whether wielded in its biopolitical governance—such as Israel’s demographic, citizenship, and family reunification laws—or subtending authoritarian or necropolitical projects of exclusion, expulsion, and slow deportation.
In the case of Shireen Abu Akleh, the violent event began when an Israeli sniper fired directly at her in Jenin Camp. But later that day, her family gathered in Jerusalem, here in Beit Hanina. They were terrified by the news, but the Israeli military and the Israeli police entered their home, not to give respect to the deceased but to dictate the funeral procession. The Israeli police threatened Shireen’s family with severe consequences if a Palestinian flag were to appear. And Shireen’s family members were sitting in shock. The next day at the doors of the French Hospital in Jerusalem, Palestinians gathered from different places, from the Naqab, Nazareth, al-Lydd—and the same happened.
So Shireen’s body and the body of Fatima Hajiji, who came from Tulkarm to Jerusalem and was shot and killed in Bab al-Amoud [Damascus Gate], are used and abused as women’s bodies. And they become a tool of oppression and serve the settler-colonial project, in which the Zionist power is sustained through pain, through dispossession, through the flesh. Israel’s necropolitics and the state’s ability to wield biopower in the subjugation of death over human bodies and populations for the purpose of preserving state sovereignty and its authority is fascinating. And it was clearly apparent in Shireen Abu Akleh’s case.
I recall walking around the Old City so many times that day, as if telling the streets not to worry, that I’m there. I kept seeing students and people gathering by the Melkite Catholic cemetery and church—a church that I was married in. It was hard to see her body being brought to a church where I left as a bride, and then she left as a dead body. It was really a painful scene. The fact that Israel did not honor dead bodies was so clear that a psychic and collective process of uplifting happened among us, creating songs and chanting. One of the very important ones was “Raise your voice. Raise your voice. It’s better to die than to be undignified and stepped on.”1
But in that moment of devastation, in that moment where Palestinians tried psychologically to expand the home space and mourn Shireen Abu Akleh, in that space of heartbreak, of rage, of shock, of grief, Palestinian dead bodies were not regarded as human. And this is where you see that the gendered aspect is so immersed and interlocked in different aspects of settler-colonial violence. But again, at the same time, Palestinians refused to become exilic subjects at home. They insisted on engaging in practices to repair and to mourn her—despite the Zionist threat, despite the actual harm, despite the million checkpoints. So from one side you have Palestinians chanting “Raise your hand, raise your voice. If you don’t chant, you will end up dying,”2 which is again speaking to necropolitics and the economy of life and death among Palestinians. You see the system trying to asphyxiate and silence us.
This is the gendered nature of settler colonialism and its racialized regime, which I understand as a product of the politico-social and psycho-economic system—when policing, governance, and tear gas are pouring into our homes, our offices, our schools. This is what I study. I study and live in a settler reality, so my studies name the settler-colonial reality and its gendered effects. And I have really learned from many feminists around the world. Although I look at Palestine, you see this violence against women in different conflict zones—sometimes counted, sometimes documented, but sometimes totally invisible. So I have learned from different legal scholars like Ratna Kapur, Leti Volpp, Patricia Williams, and Sherene Razack. Also Françoise Vergès, mental health workers like my colleague Stephanie Wahab, or philosophers such as Achille Mbembe, Ann Laura Stoler, and Judith Butler. My work tries to engage with scholars from the South and the North, but at the same time it is situated—and my first teachers are my people here in Palestine.
ILAN PAPPÉ: An additional mental dimension of the Israeli settler-colonial project is surveillance, which you see daily in Jerusalem and through your research. Some of your major works focus on this issue, which aligns with what you were just saying about a comprehensive Israeli wish to control not only the living but also the dead, and not just the bodies but also psyches.
Those of us who visit Jerusalem are aware of the CCTV control of every corner in the Old City. But it seems that in your research, you see this technology as a small part of a wider phenomenon [of policing] and settler-colonial violence—Jewish marches, graffiti, and festivals are no less important in imposing what you call the “occupation of the senses” on local Palestinians. It becomes an attempt by the colonizer to police every aspect of human action and feelings. And I feel that people abroad are not always aware of how systematic this occupation or colonization of the senses by Israel is. You can see it in the compact reality and environment of the Old City in Jerusalem. Can you expand about this “occupation of the senses” as a field of inquiry in your work? Can you tell us about its manifestation in Jerusalem?
NADERA SHALHOUB-KEVORKIAN: It was a major struggle to write this article, because even scholars who are close to me challenged the concept of “the occupation of the senses” and “aesthetic violence.” No one understood that every time I saw the Flag Parade, the music festival, or the Light Festival, it was so heavy on my heart. And every time I tried to explain that these events are about deleting, erasing the Palestinians and rewriting history—the history is only of one people. I felt that the politics of viscerality played a major role in my work on the occupation of the senses.
By occupation of the senses, I refer to the technologies that are managing the language, the sight, the sound, the time, the light. Come here and listen to the darkness, look at the light and the space in the colony! It is the administration of who acts, who speaks, who gives birth and how. Who walks, who moves, who drives where and how. What kind of language, music, smells, marches, colors, cultures, and scenes are promoted or inscribed over spaces. It goes back to the analysis of settler colonialism. Settler colonialism is a structure not an event, as Patrick Wolfe told me. It is built on the logic of elimination, and it is about the eviction of the native and the indigenization of the settler.
My inquiry is concerned with the ways in which the settler colony uses sensory stimuli in a confrontational manner with the aim of invading the experience of the colonized, producing exclusivity and hegemony on the basis of one culture, one religion, one national and security claim. When analyzing the occupation of the senses, I consider aesthetics and symbolic violence against the Palestinians in occupied East Jerusalem with the focus on visual displays of power, such as the state-sponsored Jerusalem Light Festival or the “price tag” where they spray slogans on walls. I discuss the marches and the parades, and I look at the way that visuals intersect with other stimuli—what we smell is skunk water and what we see is Jewish history, Jewish parades, the Israeli flag, and the Star of David on settler houses in Silwan. The occupation of the senses produces a more complete regime of colonial control over Palestinian sensory experience and over Jews who are visiting.
I deal with the biopolitical and necropolitical manifestations. I discuss demographics and birth in the colonial context, and I argue that the dynamic of occupation extends to the experiences of pregnant and birthing mothers, penetrating their senses but also their wombs. And I conduct fieldwork with children who have been shot in the eyes, or blinded by live fire—I consider the maiming of children’s sight by Israeli soldiers as contributing to the occupation of the senses.
At my dentist in Isawiya, I met a five-year-old boy who was shot in the eye. He was telling me about the pain, that he left the bus and was running because he was very hungry. He was running to his mother because he thought that she had prepared food, but suddenly he was shot in the eye. For an hour he described how his eye still hurts him. They operated under his cheek and now he suffers from severe headaches, wears eyeglasses, and so on. By the end of listening to him for one hour I said, “So, what should we do now?” He looked at me and said, “I won’t get hungry anymore.”3
When you listen to a child who was shot in the eye and he thought that maybe it happened because he was very hungry and rushed to his house, it makes you think about the occupation of the senses. In my writing, I also look at dead bodies—Israel’s withholding of Palestinian dead bodies and the way it is a necro-penological element. Again, you need to remember that I’m a criminologist. I look at penal law and withholding dead bodies such as that of Hassan Manasra. Hassan Manasra was fifteen years old, and I recall the discussions in his house for seven months, trying to free his dead body from an Israeli refrigerator. His mother kept telling me that she feels him, that her hands are frozen because he is frozen. She hears him calling to her all night long, “Please release me from this freezer.” Or the case of Mohammed Abu Khdeir. When I look at the necro-penology, the biopolitics, and the occupation of the senses that invade the visceral, I conclude by proposing that criminologists and criminological approaches should take sensory violence into consideration. If I would call for an abolition, I would call for the abolition of violence against the senses here.
ILAN PAPPÉ: And you actually go beyond that. In a recent edited book titled When Politics Are Sacralized, you describe these surveillance policies and this comprehensive control of Palestinian life and dead bodies as part of the settlers’ “security theology.” A theology that has strong racist and misogynist undertones, as you explored in your 2015 book Security Theology, Surveillance and the Politics of Fear. Why did you use the term “theology” to name these policies of security, surveillance, and fear? Can you say more about the gendered aspects of both the motivation and the impacts of the security theology?
NADER A SHALHOUB-KEVORKIAN: In my book in 2015, I looked at security as a theology, where the theology also refers to the Biblical theology. Because when you talk to people in Hebron or in Jerusalem, their reaction was, “Well, God gave us the land.” That is the theology from one side, and you also have the security that is religiously framed in Israel. In the book I drew from everyday aspects of Palestinian victimization, survival, life, and death. And I move from the local to the global because the book talks about the political economy of fear. I introduce and analyze the politics of fear and the security theology within the Israeli settler-colonial logic of elimination. And I examine violent acts committed against Palestinians in the name of “security necessities,” considering how such “necessities” demand surveillance. The cameras, the control, the police, the military, the surveillance that we see and the surveillance that we don’t see.
The surveillance of certain racialized bodies maintains and reproduces the Israeli political economy of fear, which is built on the fear of losing their right—because “God gave them the land.” By opening the analytical horizon to the voices of those who keep existing, I explore how Israeli theologies and ideologies of fear, of security, and Biblical claims can obscure violence and power dynamics while perpetuating existing power structures that aim at the liquidation of all truths. This is what I see if I use Fanon’s work, which is embedded in colonized people’s existence under a specific structure of oppression—here namely Israeli settler colonialism.
In order to read and understand such untruths as well as daily efforts to liquidate them, I rely on feminist analysis that invokes the intimate politics of everydayness and remains connected to political constraints. The politics of everydayness enables a feminist reading of the settler-colonial regime—its sovereignty and its mode of working. And it directs our awareness to the mundane, routine, intimate, private sites where power is both reproduced and contested. Think about a sniper’s rifle. In my book I have a chapter called “Israel in My Bedroom,” where I highlight the case of a woman in Sheikh Jarrah who says that the sniper “keeps on trying with his dot”—the red dot from his sniper’s rifle continually invades her bedroom.
This attention to the mundane, to routine activities, reiterates the feminist notion that the personal is political. And it alludes to the way in which the everyday is a space for oppression and domination, but also for subversion and creativity. I see this clearly in Palestine. The branding as “security risk ” justifies numerous interventions into the most intimate rhythm of the everyday—to delay or deny passage to pregnant women in labor at checkpoints, to deny medical assistance, to hinder family reunification, to demolish homes, to deny dead bodies the right to a dignified burial. It invades every single aspect.
The book really argues that in order to maintain a productive global and local industry and political economy that produces and reproduces fear, Israel’s security was transformed into a religion. Into a theology. This theology has been combined with the Zionist Biblical claim of Jewish birth right and “the promised land” to create a new settler-colonial theology in Israel. The Biblical claims of Jews’ chosen-ness and return serves Israel’s narrative as a legitimate and sovereign state. They also work to cast Israeli violence against Palestinians as a security necessity. So the discursive collapse of Biblical and security claims work to exonerate racist structures, to mask state violence through the Biblical security prism and naturalize the dispossession of Palestinians.
To develop this analysis further, I worked on a major project with my colleague Nadim Rouhana and we published a book titled When Politics Are Sacralized. In the book we draw comparisons, for example, with India, Sri Lanka, and Northern Ireland. You can see sacralized politics being used in different ways. Through case studies, including Zionism, we could talk about the effect of this theology. Think about one person who needs to first face security and then the claim that “well, it’s God.” How can this be challenged? You see the power of Palestinians in refusing, refuting, and defying.
Another example is the watch towers, like those in Bab al-Amoud. Israel was bragging, “Here we have the watch towers, the cameras. We check. We can hear. Even if fifty people speak together, we can divide the voices and hear exactly what they said.” I sit on the stairs of Bab al-Amoud to watch kids walking to school and when I ask them about the towers they call them “the killing boxes.” This is resistance, just naming those so-called watch towers as killing boxes. Those are boxes where soldiers sit with their rifles and the aim is to kill and not to protect, not to secure, not even to listen to what God has told them.
ILAN PAPPÉ: Moving away from the diagnosis to the prognosis, let’s talk about agency. You are a local activist—there is no rest for such activism if the habitat you live in is your space of activism, when daily, if not hourly, things happen that demand your attention as an activist. I have two related questions in this respect.
First, would you mind sharing with us your own experience of living in the Old City? When we last met, you were kind enough to share with me the walk you take from the Jaffa Gate to your home— not an ordinary journey by any means, although it is less than a mile long. Each walk, which is a mundane action, is probably also a walk of activism, defiance, and agency. Many of our students and the people with us tonight are interested in how to fuse activism with scholarship—your activism and inquiry are corresponding. Do you worry about accusations that your work lacks scholarly “objectivity” or professionalism? Or do you see such a fusion as an asset and part of the struggle for decolonization in Palestine?
Second, we would like you to say more about how you view the present modes of resistance against all these aspects that are hidden or less hidden, but are comprehensive and brutal. How do you see this mode of resistance, in Palestine in general and more specifically in Jerusalem? What are its prospects in the future? From what you tell us, this sounds like an unbearable existence—and surely there is a limit to how much people are willing to tolerate. Yet this has been happening for quite a while.
I am interested in agency here—your own and your observations of resistance.
NADERA SHALHOUB-KEVORKIAN: Let me start with my walk in the Old City. I live here, I shop here, my kids went to school here. And what I see is so much power. So much power. I see it in produce sellers, I see it in children, I see it in their acts. My activism is inseparable from my academic work and my observations. Let me give you an example, because we mentioned Shireen Abu Akleh. For a long time, I was looking at settler violence in different places in the Old City. Settler violence is greater in some spaces because they are there with their own security people, including those who are hidden.
I work a lot with Silwan and one thing I notice is children’s play—al-ghumayda or “hide-and-seek.” Playing hide-and-seek says, “This is my place. I know every corner.” You don’t see Jewish settler kids playing hide-and-seek in the middle of the street in our neighborhood or in Haret al-Sa’diyya, Aqabat el-Battikh, or Silwan. Hide-and-seek itself gave me so many ideas about what happens between the Zionist game and the refusal and defiance of these children.
Following the assassination of Shireen Abu Akleh, I went to Haret al-Sa’diyya and there was a little girl, seven or eight years old, and a large group of soldiers. The soldiers were talking and suddenly she started calling her friend in a loud voice, “Fattoum! Fattoum! Come play hide-and-seek!” And she looked at the soldiers, telling them in a loud voice, “If you killed Shireen Abu Akleh, do you think I’m not going to play hide-and-seek?” This is what she said. “If you fill the graveyards with our bones, do you think we’re not going to play hide-and-seek?” And she kept on calling Fattoum.
Listen, just hearing her voice. This is a voice of clear defiance, of resistance, of refusal of power. I look at those things that maybe many people would pass and wouldn’t notice—her voice and her call for Fattoum. But her call for Fattoum! Lara and Stephen Sheehi’s book Psychoanalysis under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine takes us beyond what we hear. It takes us to new spaces of analysis. It looks at what goes on in the psyche, in the nafs, as they say in their book. My work is a fusion between the analytical and the emotional, for I am concerned with affective dimensions and what happens to kids when they play hide-and-seek—when they’re calling Fattoum while saying, “Yes, we know that you kill us, but we will continue playing.” I am concerned with the affective states exhibited by racialized subjects and produced through political processes of racialization. I looked at Mohammed Abu Khdeir’s burning. I looked at Ahmad Manasra, who was arrested when he was thirteen years old. We started a major campaign for his release, but he is still in solitary confinement. This is a Zionist settler-colonial regime. It is similar to what happens in other contexts, but what happens here is beyond imagination.
My work looks at structural racism, the collective witnessing of lynching—of Eyad al-Hallaq, two minutes from my house—slow death, and the killing of children. We are attempting the work of mental health with Palestine-Global Mental Health Network. We are working with Palestine Solidarity Campaign, Cafe Palestine, Black Lives Matter, and Standing Rock. We are working with our comrades in South Africa, trying to understand but also respect children’s walk to school, children’s language—how they speak life when the system speaks death and unchilding. To me, hide-and-seek exposes what the cameras, the arrests, and the tapping does not.