Post-occupation Gaza: Israel’s war on Palestinian futures

Amir, M. (2021). Post-occupation Gaza: Israel’s war on Palestinian futures. Geografiska Annaler: Series B,Human Geography. https://doi.org/10.1080/04353684.2021.1958357

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Post-occupation Gaza: Israel’s war on Palestinianfutures

Merav Amir

To cite this article: Merav Amir (2021): Post-occupation Gaza: Israel’s war on Palestinian futures,Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography, DOI: 10.1080/04353684.2021.1958357

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Post-occupation Gaza: Israel’s war on Palestinian futuresMerav Amir

School of Natural and Built Environment, Geography, Queen’s University Belfast, Belfast, UK

This article is published as part of the Geografiska Annaler: Series B,Human Geography special issue “Palestinian Futures Anticipation,Imagination, Embodiments”, edited by Mikko Joronen, Helga Tawil-Souri, Merav Amir & Mark Griffiths.

ABSTRACTThe 2005 Israeli Disengagement from the Gaza Strip has left this region ina political and legal limbo. No longer strictly and fully complying with thedefinition of an occupied territory, the Strip, which has been under siegefrom 2007, cannot similarly be considered as fully independent. This paperargues that the Israeli control of Gaza is predicated on relegating thiscontrol to the past. Accordingly, it offers ‘post-occupation’ as aconceptual framework for deciphering Israel’s modalities of power overthe Strip, claiming that rather than signifying a clear break from a nowdefunct occupation, post-occupation demarcates the persistence ofIsraeli domination. By rendering Gaza to the status of a post-occupationIsrael can infer that Gaza’s future has already arrived, and relinquish itsresponsibilities towards the Strip and its residents through a fabricationof Palestinian political agency, while holding the Palestinian futurescaptive. The post-occupation condition therefore confounds normativenarrations of time, while disrupting the distinction between past,present and future. This examination of the Disengagement and thesiege as operating in tandem reveals that Israel substituted aburdensome and costly occupation with a more parsimonious spatialcontainment of Gaza, which allowed it to retain its grasp of Palestinianfuturity.

ARTICLE HISTORYReceived 23 November 2020Revised 3 May 2021Accepted 18 July 2021

KEYWORDSIsrael; palestine; the Gazastrip; futures; temporality

The Israeli Disengagement from the Gaza Strip was met with surprise by many. The 2005 withdrawal,in which Israel unilaterally evacuated all of its civilian settlements and military forces from the Strip,was perceived at the time as its yielding of control over parts of the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt)which had been under Israeli military rule since 1967. It therefore seemed to be at odds with the set-tler-colonial endeavour guiding Israeli policies up to that point. Absurd as it may seem in hindsight, atthe time, some even interpreted this step as Israel progressing towards reaching a peace agreementwith the Palestinians (Efrat 2006; Golan 2008; Rynhold and Waxman 2008). Yet, even after the Dis-engagement, Israel has retained its command of the terrestrial, maritime and aerial boundaries ofGaza, strictly managing the flow of people and goods in and out of the Strip, and of the provisionof basic amenities, including electricity, water, fuel and gas. In 2007, after the Hamas seized controlof Gaza, Israel had severely increased its restriction of these flows, turning its blockading of Gaza into

© 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis GroupThis is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided theoriginal work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.

CONTACT Merav Amir m.amir@qub.ac.uk School of Natural and Built Environment, Geography, Queen’s UniversityBelfast, Elmwood Building, Belfast, BT7 1NN, UK

GEOGRAFISKA ANNALER: SERIES B, HUMAN GEOGRAPHYhttps://doi.org/10.1080/04353684.2021.1958357

a full-fledged siege,1 which, at the time of writing these words in 2021, shows no sign of relenting. Atthe same time, Israel also classified the Strip as a ‘hostile territory’ (Bhungalia 2010). Since then, theIsraeli position has been that the Disengagement has ended its occupation of the Strip, and that itconsequently no longer bore any responsibilities towards its residents as an occupier.

The Palestinian leadership has not accepted this position. As stated in 2005 by chief Palestiniannegotiator Saeb Erekat (2005), the Disengagement may have ended Israel’s colonization of Gaza, yetnot the occupation, as Israel still controls Gaza. Israel’s position is further considered highly con-troversial among international law experts and the international community more generally (Luft2017). While some experts ascertain that the definition of an occupation is no longer applicable toGaza, as the Israeli military is no longer present in the Strip (Samson 2010; Cuyckens 2016), thepredominant legal opinion, also sustained by the United Nations, is that the Disengagement hasyet to bring about the end to the Israeli occupation (Hajjar 2014).2 Setting legal discussionsaside, there are political arguments, which are no less substantial, for questioning the Israeli asser-tion that it should not be considered an occupying power in Gaza. As Erekat (2015) highlights, itkeeps ‘the Gaza Strip out of the Palestinian space’ and is therefore intended ‘to prevent the creationof a Palestinian state, which cannot be established without Gaza’. The Israeli position thereforefurther aggravates the geographic disconnect between Gaza and the West Bank brought about byits blockading of the Strip through an undermining the political unity of Palestine, a unity towhich Israel has formally committed in the Oslo Accords. Israel’s denial that it controls the Striphas hence been subtending the eluding of its responsibilities towards the Gazan population, evadingcriticisms of its repression of this population, while further frustrating the prospect of Palestinianself-determination.

Querying whether Gaza should still be considered occupied is therefore not only legally contro-versial and politically contentious, but also may lend itself to consequential misreadings. Still, analy-sis of the formations of domination Gaza has been subjected to exposes their incongruence withdiscernable configurations of an occupation. In its pursuit of the adequate accurate analytic cat-egory and explanatory framework for deciphering the post-Disengagement configurations of Israelirule over the Gaza Strip, this paper therefore argues that the broad classification of an ‘occupation’ isinsufficient for deciphering Israel’s modalities of power. To clarify, this analysis does not questionthat for all intents and purposes Israel is still occupying the Gaza Strip. This assertion, however,merely reflects the formal status, giving us little by way of deciphering the shaping of Israel’s mod-alities of power which followed the Disengagement. Providing such an account calls for a methodo-logical suspension of formal categorizations, merely for analytic purposes, in an effort to investigatede-facto praxes. The analysis which follows is therefore neither of the normative type, nor is it pre-scriptive in nature. Rather, it argues that the Israeli rule over Gaza has been reshaped to the extentthat the ‘occupation’ give us little by way of adequately depicting this form of domination.

Notably, the failure of Israeli rule of the Strip, following the Disengagement, to align with aneasily identifiable occupation is anything but incidental, as the Disengagement and the impositionof the siege abide by contradictory rationales. The Disengagement most evidently demarcated thenullification of Israel’s territorial claims over the Strip. Occupations, nevertheless, are not only aseizure of land, but are also regimes of population control. Alongside the evacuation of its militaryinstallations and civilian settlements, in disengaging from the strip Israel also dismantled its gov-ernmentalizing apparatuses, signifying its disinterest in directly controlling the Palestinians resid-ing there. While the imposition of the siege did not reproduce an equivalent governmentalizingstructure, it has nevertheless allowed Israel to reconstitute, rather than forsake this control. Consid-ering this discrepancy, Helga Tawil-Souri (2012) classified the siege as a substitute mechanism, inwhich the meticulous management of Gazans that characterized the pre-Disengagement period hasbeen replaced with a more distant and violent domination – nevertheless equally intrusive. This vio-lent domination has been characterized by Darryl Li (2008) as ‘controlled abandonment’, where theretraction of Israeli ruling apparatuses has been accompanied with a frustrating of the emergence ofsustainable alternatives, while for Lisa Bhungalia (2012, 270), it constitutes a particular form of

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biopower which is neither invested in propagating life, nor is wholly necropolitical, but managesthis population on ‘a thin threshold between life and death’.

In such analysis Israel’s repudiation of this control is mostly assumed to be nothing more than arhetorical ploy, a diversion tactic use to deny its persisting obligations as an occupier. Yet, this repu-diation should not be brushed aside so easily. Most notably, this repudiation is eminent preciselybecause Israel has reshaped its control of the Strip in an effort to distance it from identifiable for-mations of an occupation; this supposition has therefore come to define its modalities of power overGaza. Put differently: following the Disengagement, Israel has reconstituted the control it sustainsover Gaza in a clear effort to distance it from what can clearly be identified as an occupation. Thesevery efforts of disqualifying the adherence of this control with an occupation are therefore instru-mental for deciphering the rationalities subtending the reconstitution of their formation. By payingparticular attention to the efforts Israel has put into ensuring that its control of Gaza fails to clearlyconfirm with an occupation, the analysis here exposes that the inflection, and more particularly thetense of this proposition, is of the essence, as Israel’s assertion that it is no longer occupying Gaza hasnot only altered the spatial operationalization of this rule, but also its temporal constitution. Thispaper therefore argues that Israel has predicated its modes of control through the relegation ofthe occupation of Gaza to the past, and has accordingly aligned this control with a rationality ofa post-occupation. The analysis which follows first examines the temporal formation of a post-occu-pation as a disheveling of political time. Explicating the temporal underpinnings of the Disengage-ment and the siege, it then claims that when considered in tandem, they constitute politicaltechnologies for arresting time. It finally argues that by designating the occupation of Gaza tothe past, Israel has substituted direct spatial management of people and land to a dominationover political trajectories, replacing territorial absolutism with a seizure of the region’s politicalfuturity.

The time of post-occupation

Asserting that the State of Israel should not be regarded as the occupying power of Gaza is regularlyemployed by Israel’s spokespeople and Israeli apologists to rationalize and normalize the persist-ence of Israeli domination over the Strip. Still, a growing body of scholarship presents compellingarguments for departing from the concept of an ‘occupation’ for analysing Israel’s modalities ofpower, not only for Gaza, but for the Israeli rule over Palestine more generally. Importantly,these scholars distance themselves from such rhetorical maneuvering in defense of Israel’s repres-sive policies, offering instead alternative, and perhaps more compelling, analytic frameworks forcritiquing the Israeli regime, which extend beyond the confinements of the legal definition of anoccupation. This research is not driven by measuring the compliance of the Israeli configurationsof control with an ‘ideal type’ of an occupation. As Ann Stoler (2006b) teaches us, every colonialregime is unique in its own way – an observation which is no less applicable to settler colonialismor apartheid (Evri and Kotef 2020), or to military occupations, for that matter. Rather, it is motiv-ated by the wish to provide a more persuasive critique of the formations of Israel’s domination overthe Palestinians, and offer a conceptual account which will best service such critique.

Most notably, Patrick Wolfe’s (2006) highlighting of Zionism as a paradigmatic case of settlercolonialism was followed with a renewed prominence of this paradigm in much of the critical think-ing on Israel/Palestine.3 Such efforts aim to de-exceptionalize this region, while emphasizing thecontinuities of the Zionist settlement enterprise across the Green Line. Yet, this classification hasreceived its fair share of criticism. For Rachel Busbridge (2018), for instance, the settler-colonialdefinition – which is based on New World settlement – glosses over the nationalism underpinningthe Zionist project, hence conscripting its decolonizing applicability. Similarly, Lorenzo Veracini(2013) argues that whereas Israel successfully implemented settler colonialism within the 1948boundaries, it failed to manifest the same in the areas conquered by Israel in 1967, where its rule(Veracini claims) more closely fits the pattern of a colonial enterprise. Others have contended

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that alternative definitions, such as apartheid or ethnocracy, are better suited for describing theIsraeli regime in its entirety (Yiftachel 2006, 2018; du Plessis et al. 2009; Tilley 2012). Honaida Gha-nim (2019) argues that as much as these adjacent definitions (settler/colonialism, apartheid, ethnoc-racy, occupation) may prove useful in expounding the rationales, motivations and impulses drivingIsrael, they all relatedly fail to adequately typify what she terms the ‘hybridity’ of its control. Withinthe realm of these established definitions (while also steering away from exceptionalizing Israel yetagain), and following Ron J Smith (2011) call for providing a more nuanced analysis which mayaccount for what he terms the microgeographies of Israeli rule over the Palestinians, this paperendeavours to offer an interpretive framework for explicating the specificities of Israeli rule, asthose manifest themselves in Gaza. It argues that if we shift our focus from a predominantly spatialanalysis, to an examination which integrates a temporal perspective, Israel’s modalities of powerover the Strip reveal themselves as abiding by the rationale of a post-occupation.

This proclamation calls for a careful explication, as designating a territory to the status of ‘post-occupation’ seems to imply that the occupying powers have rescinded, and that the region in ques-tion is progressing towards full independence. Indeed, in their human rights-focused analysis, Bashiand Feldman (2011) call for seeing the ‘end of occupation’, not as a singular event, but rather as agradual process, and suggest that Gaza is residing on a continuum stretching between occupationand independence. While this analysis may allow for an explication of where Israel has relinquishedsome aspects of control over Gaza, and where it still maintains other forms of governmental power,it nevertheless positions Gaza on an implied emancipatory trajectory. There is little dispute that thePalestinians in Gaza indeed do enjoy a certain degree of self-governance under the Hamas govern-ment (Sayigh 2010; Berti 2015; Gross 2017); yet, it would be erroneous to conclude that thisrestricted self-government implies that Gaza has progressed towards full independence. Claimingthat Gaza complies with a post-occupation condition therefore departs from such presuppositions.Suspending historicist assumptions of an innate progressivity, for which decolonialization is aninevitability, assumptions which fail to account for what Derek Gregory (2004) characterizes asour ‘colonial present’, in what follows I argue that Gaza may comply with a post-occupation con-dition, without necessarily inferring that the region is en route to self-determination.

The ‘post’ prefix itself yields to querying such teleological assumptions. As identified by WendyBrown (2010, 9), this prefix signifies an affixing, rather than a departure from a past: ‘“Post” indi-cates a very particular condition of afterness in which what is past is not left behind, but, on thecontrary, relentlessly conditions, even dominates a present that nevertheless also breaks in someway with this past’. Accordingly, what sets the post-feminist apart from plain old chauvinism, orwhat distinguishes post-Zionist from non-Zionist, is the unyielding influence of what is assumedto have been displaced (cf. Pappé 2002; McRobbie 2004). The persistent inability to disassociatefrom the past (albeit nowin a distinctly new form) is applicable to all ‘post’ terminology; yet insome instances, what makes such concepts legible is the inability to distinguish between past andpresent. The most ready examples are, perhaps, the postcolonial, the post-conflict and the post-trauma. The postcolonial condition demarcates the prolongation of the colonial legacies into thepresent, well after the colonial world order subsided (Loomba 1998). Relatedly, a post-conflictsociety is one in which the residues of conflict remain very much salient (Connolly 2006; Pinkerton2011). And perhaps most evidently, the post-trauma denotes a failure to depart from the compul-sive recurrence of the past (Fisher 2014).

The ‘post’ prefix therefore

demarcates what Mark Fisher (2012) calls ‘broken time’, a dishevelment of normative narrations oftemporality as linear, progressive and sequential. Importantly, drawing on Derrida’s concept of‘hauntology’, Fisher sees broken time as potentially encompassing two directionalities. While thetemporal disjunction of broken time is destined to be shaped by what is supposedly in the past,but is very much still actual, it may equally be unsettled by the imposition of its future: ‘that

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which (in actuality) has not yet happened, but which is already effective in the virtual’ (19). Thisbidirectional disruption of time is particularly applicable to the post-occupation condition. Unlikethe post-trauma which is predominantly compelled by an unrelenting past event, the post-occu-pation condition is affixed to an occupation which cannot be left behind, while it is no less persua-sively weighed on by a future independence. This independence fallaciously, and prematurely,appears as already actualized, yet in fact remains out of reach. The analysis which follows thereforeargues that it would be erroneous to conclude that the rendering of Gaza to the time of the post-occupation infers that this region has progressed, or is progressing, towards full independence.Rather, by capturing Gaza in the time of a post-occupation, Israel has compressed the time ofthe Strip. Gaza is therefore caught within a staggered temporality which is concurrently disturbedby the endurance of the occupation, and by the impelled future independence onto the present.Thus, Israel’s designation of Gaza to a post-occupation landscape, it claims, strangles the Strip ina protracted stagnation, rendering it to a time which is deprived of both past and future.

Disengagement time

The disengagement is actually formaldehyde. It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that’s necessary so thatthere will not be a political process with the Palestinians.

Dov Weisglass (Shavit 2004).

The dually strangulated time of Gaza, and the burdening of the present by a future in particular,reveal themselves most evidently when examining the divergence of the temporal formation ofthe Disengagement from that of an occupation. Since the 1967 War, Israel’s control of the WestBank and the Gaza Strip has been rationalized and justified by Israel as merely temporary, pendinga future peace agreement. The impermanence of the Israeli control of these regions, which was firstthe derivative of its classification as an occupation, a status which is, by its very definition, timebounded, was later formalized through the Oslo Accords which were defined as interim. Sincethen, as identified by Adi Ophir (2016)

temporariness has become a constitutive moment in the structure of the Israeli regime… The indeterminacyof the Occupation is not a result of a political impasse and the failure to decide between the two options [ofeither withdrawal or annexation]

he claims, ‘but rather of the power of the system to postpone the decision’ (31). As highlighted bymany of the researchers examining the post-Oslo period, this enduring temporariness has become,perhaps, its most conspicuous feature. While having been subjected to the temporality of anextended temporariness, as Amal Jamal (2016) shows, neither commence for the Palestiniansafter the signing of the Accords, nor began in 1967, but goes back to the 1948 Nakba, the OsloAccords have, he argues, intensified the predicating of Palestinian lives to the time of the prolongsuspension. This enduring temporariness has rendered Palestinians, in the words of Nayrouz AbuHatoum (2020, 102) to a ‘suspended existence of “living in the waiting”’.4 Israel, by contrast, hasbeen using it to serve its expansionist endeavours. As Ghanim (2020) argues, it has made wayfor Israel to resolve the inherent contradictions between a military occupation and of settler colo-nialism, allowing it to maintain a de-jure occupation in conditions of de-facto apartheid. Indeed, itis not only that the occupation legally rests on its ostensive temporariness (Lynk 2005; Gross 2017),its presume impermanence also makes way for its sanctioning by the international community(Grinberg 2016; Dajani 2017). Furthermore, as Azoulay and Ophir demonstrate (2012), the formaldifferentiation between the occupation and Israel’s procedural democracy inside the 1948 bound-aries has been sustained through the alleged temporariness of the former. Its servicing in sustainingits settler colonial formations notwithstanding, the Israeli hold of the oPt has been nevertheless sub-jected to the same (formal) logic of impermanence, at least in principle.

The execution of the Disengagement Plan, I argue, has marked Israel’s departure from the tem-porality of enduring suspension. This calls for an explication. As stated above, since the

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Disengagement, the Israeli position has been that it is no longer the occupying power in Gaza, aposition which was then ratified by the Israeli High Court of Justice (HCJ 9132/07). The policiesenacted by Israel towards the Strip and its population since had accordingly not been subject tothe same presumed impermanence of Israeli measures in the oPt. Prima facie, the extraction ofthe Strip from its status as occupied territory could have inferred that it, similarly, has escapedfrom the perpetual temporariness of the Israeli occupation. However, Neither complying withthe temporariness of an occupation, nor adhering to the future-oriented progressive regularity ofmodern statehood (Giddens and Pierson 1998), Gaza is caught in the limbo of its indeterminatestatus, deprived from abiding by recognizable political trajectories. In what follows, I first examinehow the Disengagement has been effected to cement Gaza to the occupation, throttling its ability tofree itself from this past. I then continue by demonstrating how it has allowed Israel to similarlyweaponize the future of Gaza. By relegating Gaza to this indeterminate condition, I argue, the Pales-tinian self-determination, which the Israeli occupation has been mechanized to defer in perpetuum,appears as a simulacra of a sort, as the ostensive materialization of this future is folded onto Gaza’spresent. Thus, by way of the Disengagement, Israel has rendered Gaza to the bidirectional brokentime of a post-occupation.

Leaving much wreckage in its wake (Salamanca 2011), the unilateral Disengagement was carriedout with no coordination with the Palestinian Authority (PA) (Geist Pinfold 2019), fostering thepolitical clashes between the PA and Hamas which ensued (Milton-Edwards 2008). Furthermore,despite heavily relying on the assumed temporariness of the occupation to suit its colonizingneeds, Israel had never fully recognized that it occupied Gaza – or the rest of the Palestinian terri-tory for that matter – resorting instead to a selective implementation of international law (Gross2017). The Israeli government’s declaration of its Disengagement Plan accordingly deploys rhetori-cal acrobatics to avoid acknowledgement of the occupation, even retroactively, stating that afterexecuting the Disengagement, ‘there will be no basis for claiming that the Gaza Strip is occupied ter-ritory’.5 The Israeli withdrawal from Gaza was entangled in this double negation: it ended an occu-pation which Israel never acknowledged, never fully owned up to, and for which there is thereforeno recompense. Hence, this declaration renounces the responsibilities which the ending of an occu-pation would have otherwise entailed, and averts the reparations and constructive obligations thatthis should have imposed on Israel. Such reparations would have gone some way towards fosteringthe reconstruction of Gaza, allowing it to avoid the wallowing in economic stagnation whichensued. The Disengagement has rendered the Strip to what Ann Stoler (2008) has classified as‘imperial debris’: not merely a spectacular event of devastation, circumscribe to the evacuationitself, it was fashioned to perpetuate the ongoing decimation of Gaza. Examined in isolationfrom the escalating attacks which soon followed, and the suffocation of the relentless siege, the Dis-engagement alone is exposed as devised to foster ongoing ruination.

Gaza’s future prospects, following the Disengagement, have been weighing on it no less persua-sively, predominantly through Israel’s fallacious propagation that Gaza is now independent. This isa deliberate misconstruing. As candidly explained by Dov Weisglass, Sharon’s confidant whodevised the Plan, the purpose of the Disengagement was that the establishment of a Palestinianstate would be indefinitely postponed. ‘The significance [of the Disengagement] is the freezing ofthe political process’ he boasted in a 2004 interview, ‘Effectively, this whole package that is calledthe Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed from our agenda indefinitely’ (Shavit2004). The counterfactuality of Palestinian independence in Gaza substitutes the occupation’shighly effective yet provisional suspension of the future with a preemptive foreclosing of this future,as the Disengagement has been narrated by Israel as setting future pathways for Gaza and region-ally. Most explicitly, imageries of the Disengagement setting the Strip on a path towards a different,better, future have dominated the Israeli political discourse since.

Gaza’s future is curiously represented through its prospects of becoming the ‘Singapore of theMiddle East’. This formulation is not original. It first emerged among Palestinian intellectualsand some of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) leaders during the First Intifada and

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in the years leading to the signing of the Oslo Accords. Examining this analogy, Joseph Massad(1997) claims that these Palestinian intellectuals – who he classifies as realist-pragmatist – weredrawing on the notion of Singapore to propagate Palestine’s significant developmental potential;one which will, according to this vision, prevent it from turning into ‘another third world country’(29). Denouncing their orientalistic overtures and their ‘arrogance and contempt for the thirdworld’, Masad identified the alienation of such intellectuals from the Palestinian political project.6

Emptied of the inferences of Israel’s control, the future of Gaza has emerged in Israeli discourses asa blank canvas onto which ‘Singapore’may be projected. In a 2018 video address (ostensibly) to thepeople of Gaza, for instance, Avigdor Lieberman, Israel’s Minister of Defense at the time stated:‘You can choose between poverty and unemployment or work and making a livelihood. Betweenhatred and bloodshed or coexistence and personal security’. He continued by arguing that if theydecide to do so, they can ‘turn the refugee camps into the Singapore of the Middle East’.7 Speakingdirectly to the camera, Lieberman told the people of Gaza that their future is theirs to control: all ofthis is achievable, he claimed, if the Gazans stopped fighting Israel and agree to demilitarize theStrip. He then urged them to overthrow their government, if Hamas did not concede to thesedemands. This video perpetuates the story which the Israeli political leadership has been forcefullynarrating, a story which portrays the Disengagement as offering Gazans the opportunity to flourish,and arguing that the warmongering Hamas government has been squandering this opportunity.Rather than investing in housing and infrastructure, in education and economic development,the Gazan leadership prioritized building assault tunnels and purchasing missiles (cf. IDI 2015;Achimeir 2018; Gilad 2018; Heller 2018).

Performatively appealing to the people of Gaza with an empowering message, this was a thinly-veiled propaganda speech-act, whose actual intended audience was the Jewish-Israeli public andIsrael’s supporters internationally. Thus, as misguided and overly optimistic the reference to thetrope of Singapore for delineating Gaza’s prospective future by some Palestinian intellectuals inthe early nineties may have been, its evocation by Israeli leaders since the Disengagement doesnot possess the same level of sincerity. In the Israeli political discourse, Singapore appears as afuture unreal conditional, and thus as a backward-facing denunciation. Instead of demarcatingpotential, ‘Singapore’ denotes a future of Gaza that is always already lost, signifying the failure ofGazans and their leadership. This reverse trajectory becomes apparent in Lieberman’s blamingHamas for the dire conditions in Gaza. This condemnation does not only deliberately obscurethe implications of a more than decade-long siege, but also the decade and a half of Israel-imposedeconomic strangulation, through the blockade of Gaza, which preceded it, well before Hamas tookover (Roy 2016). Importantly, this video was released in July of 2018, as Israel was embarking on yetanother military assault on the Strip. By fabricating the future of Gaza as a generative horizon whichis for the Palestinians of Gaza to take command of, this mise-en-scene exposes that this address goesbeyond this blame game. Implying that the people of Gaza, and not only their leadership, couldhave chosen economic prosperity over war, Lieberman sought to implicate this civilian populationin the militant escalations which would soon ensue. As such, it is embroiled in Israel’s campaigns ofjustifying the targeting of civilians in Gaza (see also Bisharat 2009; Bhungalia 2010; Kotef 2010; Gor-don and Perugini 2020).

As an aside, it should be noted that the use of the metaphor of Singapore by the Israeli leadershipas signifying Gaza’s lost future is particularly telling. Most notably, unlike Gaza, Singapore is anisland. Hence, even in this image of the bright future which supposedly could await it, the Stripis still narrated as detached from its surroundings. To an extent, this could be read as a projection,since Israel itself (of its own volition) operates as an island (Razin and Charney 2015). Yet, unlikeIsrael’s self-imposed detachment, the Palestinians are very much embedded into the Middle East.Projecting the isolation of Gaza onto this bright future which allegedly awaits it, this discourseconflates geographic disconnect with political and economic isolation. The likening of Gaza toan island further naturalizes, and hence depoliticizes, the Israeli-imposed siege of the Strip, andthe severing of Gaza from its terrestrial geography. Equating the Strip to an island therefore serves

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to implicitly disavow Israel’s responsibility for Gaza’s deprivation, since, as island-states bridge theirgeographic disconnect from the continent, Gaza could purportedly overcome its own isolation.

While, admittedly, the use of such blunt ploys serves nothing more than to nourish Israeli mech-anisms of self-justification, they should not be regarded as insignificant, since the measures under-taken by the Israeli government to stifle Palestinian national aspirations are very much dependenton the acquiescence of its Jewish-Israeli public. For this public, these articulations of the futureswhich could have awaited Gaza are mainly aimed at asserting that the Disengagement has grantedGaza with its long-awaited independence and a state-like political agency, and serve nothing morethan justifying Israel’s aggressions in the Strip. Yet, even within such articulations, in which Pales-tinian political agency discursively emerges as nothing more than a rhetorical epiphenomenon, thisagency is only made legible through its failure to materialize, as they ritualistically lament the nowbygone potentialities of the Strip. This failure allegedly attests the Palestinians’ innate ‘unreadiness’to assume independence, in a particular form of whataboutery (Robinson 2018, 84), that can becalled ‘butGaza-ism’. Unlike classic whataboutery, ‘butGaza-ism’ is not primarily used to assertblame or to compete for superior victimhood status, though there is also plenty of that, but to ren-der any discussion about future Israeli withdrawals from occupied territory mute. ‘ButGaza-ism’ isusually thrusted at anyone suggesting that Israel should strive to reach a peace agreement whichcomplies with the two-state solution, and is usually formulated as ‘but we gave them Gaza andall they did was to build attack tunnels and bombard us with missiles in return’ (Eldar 2012). Itis therefore garnered to foreclose Palestinian national trajectories more generally. While furtherdestining Palestinian independence to Dipesh Chakrabarty’s (2000) ‘waiting room of history’, ithas further allowed Israel to extract its configurations of control alone from the rationality of tem-porariness. By distancing its settler-colonial formations from their evident compliance with anoccupation,

Israel has been fortifying its regional domination. Importantly, through a negation that the Dis-engagement has subtended the perpetuation, rather than ended, Israel’s control of the Strip, thisextraction is predicated on a refutation of the endurance of this rule, and on a counterfactual nega-tion of its persistence. Through a mimicking of the end of an occupation, this counterfactualityforecloses future prospects, as it serve to negate its underlying (violent) political reality, whilepre-empting the prospect of change.

Siege time

In the last 11 years of blockade I lost my future: I was 18 when the siege started, I spent my youth under block-ade and restrictions… just like every one of you is living happily and peacefully, we have the right to live.Enough is enough, we are fed up.

Asmaa Abu Daqqa, the Gaza Strip, (quoted in Amnesty International 2018)

The compelling spectacularity of the cycles of war that Israel has waged in Gaza since the Disen-gagement – five extensive campaigns and smaller, yet much more regular bombardment fromthe air8 – and the extensive devastation to life and the environment they leave in their wake,tend at times to overshadow the brutality of the siege itself. By all measures, the prolonged siegealone has been detrimental for the close to two million residents of the Strip. Obstructing almostall mobility beyond the small confines of the Strip, the siege cuts Gaza’s residents off from theirnext of kin, social relations and communities, in the West Bank, inside Israel, in East Jerusalemand in the Palestinian diaspora (Bashi and Diamond 2015). It has also denied the sick and the dis-abled access to adequate medical care beyond the severely diminished capacity of Gaza’s alreadyfrail healthcare system (WHO 2017). The siege has brought about the economic ruination of theStrip, while stifling any initiatives directed toward its regeneration, turning a previously productiveeconomy to a predominantly consumer import-dependent market (Eltalla 2014). The frequent air-strikes and periodic full-scale military campaigns have also deliberately targeted much of Gaza’sinfrastructure (Salamanca 2011), leaving the provision of clean water, electricity, fuel and gas

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scant (Gisha 2018a). Constituting what Omar Jabary Salamanca (2011) calls infrastructural vio-lence, the siege severely curtails the movement of people and goods, inflicting severe deprivationon the people of Gaza. Characterized by some as economic warfare (Meisels 2011; Lowe and Tza-nakopoulos 2012), the persistent crisis that the siege had imposed has led to high levels of householddebt, and to unemployment rates exceeding international records (Gisha 2020). These contribute tolevels of dependency on humanitarian aid equated with the depth and extent of refugee camps.9

Imposed after the Hamas government was established in 2007, the siege has subjected the civilianpopulation of the Gaza Strip to living in a relentless war zone from which there is no escape.

The fortified fences and walls surrounding the Strip; the warships patrolling its coasts, enforcingthe sea blockade; the drones ceaselessly hovering in its airspace: the spatiality of Israel’s dominationover the Strip is easily discernable. Yet, the siege harms and kills no less through its accumulativesustainment. Identified by some as an extreme instance of ‘slow violence’ (Puar and Medien2018),10 the siege that Israel is inflicting on the people of Gaza can no less be characterized as violentslowness: disrupting the constitution of individual and communal time as holding the prospect ofprogress and change. Its predominant spatiality notwithstanding, the siege is therefore no less a typeof temporal warfare, disrupting the circularity of motion (of bodies, goods, ideas) which life in mod-ernity has come to depend on. Arresting the educational, professional and personal development ofGazans (Gisha 2018b), many residents of Gaza have come to describe the Israeli-imposed siege asdestining them to a ‘slow death’ (Khader 2014; Manduca et al. 2014; Puar and Medien 2018; Nijim2020). The extensive humanitarianization of Gaza’s households further aggravates this temporaldispossession. Humanitarian dependency, as Cathrine Brun (2016) shows, detaches biologicallife from the biographical. According to Brun, humanitarianism’s focus on the present disengagesthe recipients of aid from the personal and communal sense of continuity, severing one’s correspon-dence to the past and the future. This humanitarianization of the population of Gaza also has exten-sive political implications, as it not only infers a material deprivation, but also de-politicizes thecause of the deprivation, thus eroding the sense of a collective future (Jefferess 2013).

By confining the circulation of people and goods, the siege reveals itself, most evidently, as a bio-political technology for obstructing regeneration and imposing decay. Yet, the siege is not onlyoperationalized to force stasis onto the residents of the Strip; the rationalization of the siege as acentral component in the Israeli economy of violence, as the less injurious alternative within a con-trived logic of constraints, further exposes the impounding of the futurity which subtends it.Despite its imposition of more than thirteen years (to date), the siege is often rationalized by Israelas a provisional security measure, devised to stop the firing of rockets by Gaza’s militants. Yet,examining Israel’s rationalization of the siege shows that the language of security encapsulates a pri-marily political agenda. Tzipi Livni, Israel’s Minister of Foreign Affairs in 2007, when the siege wasfirst imposed, made this point most clearly, stating that ‘it would be a mistake’ to see the siege from‘a narrow security perspective only’ (Quoted in Turkel 2011, 57). Rather, she explicates, the siege isprimarily deployed to secure Israel’s political objective: the delegitimization of Hamas. Let us,momentarily, set aside the cardinal questions of whether such an extreme measure against a civilianpopulation for attaining a political objective is legal, effective or, more crucially, moral, and examinethe implications of this rationale on the temporality underpinning the sustainment of the siege.

Israel’s obsession with its own ostensive delegitimization notwithstanding,11 this objective doesnot sit easily within the realm of political aims. Defining delegitimization as ‘categorization of agroup, or groups, into extremely negative social categories that exclude it, or them, from the sphereof human groups that act within the limits of acceptable norms and/or values’, Bar-Tal and Ham-mack (2012, 29) show how delegitimization entrenches conflicts while justifying extreme violenceand immoral acts. No doubt, by delegitimizing Hamas – and, by extension, the population of Gaza –Israel’s leadership garners Israeli support for the brutality that it inflicts on the residents of the Strip.Focusing on the psycho-social, and inter-group dynamics, Bar-Tal and Hammack’s account offerslittle by explicating the political effects of delegitimization campaigns aimed at political entities.While gaining legitimacy is a pillar of any authority (Habermas 1988), it is a quandary of

GEOGRAFISKA ANNALER: SERIES B, HUMAN GEOGRAPHY 9

governance, foreign to the realm of international politics, where recognition (or the lack thereof)order alliances and conflicts. The Israeli evocation of ‘delegitimization’ highlights yet again theliminality of Palestinian space, which is neither internalized nor allowed to be externalized to theIsraeli realm – what Ophir, Givoni, and Sārī (2009) characterize as an ‘inclusive exclusion’.

In this instance, the delegitimization of Hamas is most evidently contrasted with a recognition ofthis leadership as a legitimate representative of the Palestinians. The siege therefore allows theIsraeli leadership to portray itself as obstructing such recognition, as it subtends Israel’s refusalto negotiate with Hamas, rendering the mere prospect of such negotiations a taboo in the Jew-ish-Israeli political arena. This refusal is primarily performative, since Israel has, and continuesto negotiate with Hamas, (albeit primarily through third-party mediation (Neumann 2007)). Itfurther made way for the mainstreaming of the calls to topple this regime. Michael Oren (2014),Israel’s former ambassador to the US, voiced this view explicitly. Writing during the 2014 war,he urged the Israeli government to bring down the Hamas: ‘to guarantee peace’, he argues, ‘thiswar must be given a chance’, in what sounds too close to an Orwellian proposition for comfort.Yet, despite having the means in its disposal to take down the Hamas, Israel has consistentlyrefrained from destroying it completely (Shamir and Hecht 2014). This refraining

sheds light on the interweaving of the siege into Israel’s political economy of violence. Accordingto Amnon Aran (2012), Israel has been rationalizing the siege by drawing on the American RogueState Doctrine, and its justification for resorting to punitive measures over diplomatic alternatives,when dealing with regimes defined as beyond the (Western) pale. Equated with the American-ledsanctions and embargos on Iran and North Korea, the siege on Gaza is rationalized as spatially andpolitically containing Hamas. Yet, it would be more accurate to claim that rather than containingthe Hamas, the siege is operationalized to contain Israel. Explaining that the siege has been obtain-ing its goals, Benyamin Netanyahu, Israel’s Prime Minister, stated that the ‘Hamas is restrained andwants to keep things quiet’, and continues by claiming that the only alternative for Israel, ‘is tooccupy and control Gaza. You don’t have anyone else to give it to. I won’t give it to Abu Mazen[Mahmoud Abbas, the President of the PA in the West Bank]’ (quoted in Bismot and Lord2019). Beyond exposing that Netanyahu sees Gaza as his to give, this articulation shows that Israelimilitary attacks are deliberately restrained, falling short of delivering a fatal blow to Hamas.

Examining the earlier years of the siege, Azoulay and Ophir (2012) argue that Israel has managedthe population of Gaza through the administration of a ‘catastrophic threshold’. Maintaining con-ditions in Gaza on the brink of a humanitarian catastrophe had allowed Israel to substitute its directrule of Gaza with this form of proximate control. In the years since, Israel has abandoned thisapproach, and has become content with allowing Gaza to become uninhabitable (Trew 2019); how-ever the siege maintains Gaza at a threshold of an abyss, yet of a different kind. Rather than theprospect of humanitarian devastation, Gaza is one military campaign away from the utter destruc-tion of Palestinian self-governance. Operationalized to curb the extent of Israeli onslaughts, thedelegitimization which the siege is geared to attain is no longer in opposition to recognition, butrather is contrasted against unrestrained military savagery. Indeed, as Aran sustains, the siegeabides by the logic of containment – yet not merely the spatio-political containment of Hamasthat he identifies, but a measure of self-containment, restraining Israel’s own violence.

Accordingly, the temporal underpinning of the rationalization of the siege are twofold. First,forestalling the spectre of Gaza’s absolute destruction, the siege is a katechon of a sort. As such,by its very constitution, it is structured to preclude the ominous catastrophic future of Gazafrom unfolding. Second, since what awaits Gaza if the siege were to be lifted is the ruination andreoccupation of the Strip, the endless prolongation of the siege is sustained through its operationa-lization as a stabilizing mechanism deferring such graver prospects. As such, the siege has finallycome to abide by what Ross Beveridge (2011) calls a ‘Politics of Inevitability’, precluding all alterna-tives. In this logic of constraints, holding Gaza under siege is no longer a contingent measure to belifted once the right conditions are met. Undermining its presumed temporariness, the rationaliz-ation of the siege has instead constituted it as inexorable.

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The actual conditions in the Strip further disrupt the constitution of time. Acute depravation inthe Strip subjects life to the rationale of the emergency, governed by the recourse to short-termmeans, attending to the immediate and the urgent. Oscillating between full-scale war (inflictingextensive devastation to life and property) and to periods of tentative quiet, with long stretchesof low-intensity warfare in between, such episodic disruptions have, to a large extent, themselvesbecome regularized. Concurrently, when the fighting (temporarily) subsides, the siege subjectslife in the Strip to a protracted suspension. The present of Gaza is unsettled, as its future stagnationis overdetermined. Winter (2016) claims that while scholars of empire have associated colonialexpansion with the rationalization of space, the siege of Gaza exemplifies that what he calls ‘terri-torial de-rationalization’ is a no less effective tool of control. The siege, he states, ‘has constitutedGaza as a disordered hybrid space’ (5). Alongside Gaza’s juridico-political ambiguity, the unhingingof time which the siege entails has constituted its time as similarly hybrid and disordered. Yet, tem-poral de-rationalization cannot be straightforwardly equated to a spatial one. The intangibility oftime infers its fragility. Constituting what Kyoo Lee (2013) describes as temporal deprivation,the injurious socio-psycho effects of losing command of individual and communal time are welldocumented (Turner 2005). There are, however, additional political corollaries at stake for thePalestinians.

As Anthony Giddens (1998) has established, moderate progressivity is not simply what wehave come to expect from normal rulership. The future has become compelling for modernsocieties, and this future-orientation, and the management of this future, is central to the insti-tutionalization of the systems of government. Accordingly, Peter Osborne (1994) argues that ‘thepolitical’ is a mode of temporalization, and claims ‘all politics as centrally involving strugglesover the experience of time’ (7). Deprived of the ability to fashion the future, Palestinianself-rule in Gaza has been destined to be restricted to the execution of applied administrationof the everyday, devoid of the actual ability to harness this self-governance to managing thethreats and the promises faced by any society. Vacated of the ability to shape its own future,this administration is emptied of the actual power of governance, no matter how much govern-mental capacity the Hamas government may sustain. Through instating this post-occupationcondition on Gaza, by way of the withdrawal and the imposition of the siege, Israel has there-fore replaced its meticulous control of space, and the domination over the minutia of govern-mentalization that such control allows, with a grip over political trajectories. The derailing ofGaza from the ready trajectories of coherent configurations of modern rulership has thereforedissipated the futurity of Gaza.

Post-occupation Gaza

Today, most observers — including Amnesty International — tacitly accept Israel’s framing of the conflict inGaza as an armed conflict… This shift, if accepted, would encourage occupiers to follow Israel’s lead, exter-nalizing military control while shedding all responsibilities to occupied populations.

George Bisharat (2009)

Through an interplay of continuities and discontinuities, and the rendering Gaza to the post-occu-pation condition, Israel has weaponized the presumed nearing of Palestinian independence whileunhinging Palestinian political time. Most significantly, Israel’s designation of Gaza to the timeof a post-occupation decimates any clear delineation of its political projection.

The Israeli Disengagement from Gaza, and its insistence that Gaza is no longer occupied, hasfurther allowed Israel to (successfully, thus far) deflect criticism of its policies, and to evade internalor international pressure to relinquish its enduring grip on the Strip. As noted by George Bisharat(2009), even if Israel had not managed to convince the international community that the occupationhad ended, many international observers have largely concurred with the Israeli stance that thereclassification of Israel’s aggressions in the Strip fall under the law of armed conflict, ratherthan complying with the law of occupation. Israel has therefore succeeded in reshaping the political

GEOGRAFISKA ANNALER: SERIES B, HUMAN GEOGRAPHY 11

imaginaries of its control for international observers, by effectively projecting what Winter (2016)terms a ‘fantasy of an international border’ (313) on its bounding of the Gaza Strip. The spectaclemateriality of the siege, with its heavily guarded fortifications mimicking border installations,further fosters this very same discourse, as borders imply a recognition of the sovereign authorityresiding beyond them (Schaefer 2014). Importantly, Israel’s boundary with the Strip fails to consti-tute a stable border by any standard. This border more closely complies with what Ann Stoler(2006a) classifies as ‘zones of ambiguity’ characterizing the boundaries of empire: overtly constric-tive for Palestinians, this border is completely permeable for Israel.

Israel’s insistence that the occupation of Gaza has ended folds Palestine’s prospective indepen-dent future into the present. The projection of this futurity to the present serves Israel in ensuringthe sustainability of the siege, by undermining any opposition to its policies, while holding thePalestinian futures captive.

The post-occupation condition of Gaza is therefore not an intermediate position between anoccupation which has latterly ended and a forthcoming full independence, as this title may infer.Rather, it forecloses the region’s future, while derailing its plausible alternative trajectories. Thecounterfactual designation of Gaza to the time of a post-occupation exposed here further entanglesit in a web of shattered time, as this condition is predicated on a deliberate misconstruing of theregion’s trajectory. The endurance of Israeli domination into the time of this post-occupation,and its predication on a refutation of the perseverance of this domination, has meant that thepost-occupation of Gaza rests on counterfactual foundations which fragment its continuity. Asthe post-occupation of the Strip subtends the perseverance of Israel’s control, the past imposeson the present not only as that which cannot be forsaken, or that which fails to be reconciled;the suppressed persistence of Israeli rule over Palestinian people and land unsettles the distinctionbetween past and present. Implying that the end of the occupation has already occurred, it similarlycompels the projection of a prospective emancipated Palestinian future on the present. The con-trived and premature summoning of this future frustrates the transformative potentiality of futureunfoldings, vacating their prospective alterity, since this future has purportedly already been rea-lized. The entangling of Palestinian decolonization in the dually disjointed post-occupation timetherefore does not only unhinge the present; it is structurally constituted to pull the future intoits web through a forward projection of its disrupted temporality. Thus, as Palestinian indepen-dence is concomitantly subtending Israeli configurations of power, and that which these sameconfigurations are constituted to preclude, Israel’s designation of Gaza to a post-occupation land-scape strangles the Strip in a protracted stagnation, while the forgone occupation overshadows notonly the present, but also the future.

This paper argued that through the reconfiguration of its modes of control, Israel substituted aburdensome and costly occupation with a more parsimonious spatial containment of Gaza, whichallowed it to retain its grasp of Palestinian futurity. Explicating the rationalization of the siege, Ifurther claimed that it serves to temper the extent of Israeli irruptive warfare, such as bombing cam-paigns or ground invasions. Understood as such, the rationale subtending the siege is exposed asgeared towards the forestalling of time. Thus, a spatial restructuration, predicated on the annulmentof Israeli occupation and deployed to foreclose avenues of conflict resolution, has culminated in theshaping of a futureless region, depriving Gaza from the mere notion of a future.

Post-occupation Gaza further demarcates a spatio-temporal modality of power which Israel isgradually adopting in the West Bank as well: a modality of power which substitutes direct spatialcontrol (entailing a governmentalization of the occupied population) with a domination over pol-itical trajectories. Unlike in Gaza, the perpetual temporariness of the occupation of the West Bankhas been constituted to serve Israel’s expansionist enterprise. Israel’s annexation plans in the WestBank demarcate a diversion from this course. As the many critics of the plan have argued at length,such an annexation would conclusively annul the prospects of the two-state solution (Benn 2008;Sharvit Baruch 2018; Haaretz Editorial 2019). Yet, as an extensive body of research has alreadyexhaustingly demonstrated, the prospects of the two-state solution, and the establishment of an

12 M. AMIR

independent Palestine from ever materializing has long expired, if it were ever viable, not the leastby the extent of the Israeli settlement enterprise in the West Bank.12 An Israeli annexation of WestBank territory therefore should not be understood as mounting further obstacles towards Palesti-nian independence.

Much like the Disengagement, it would similarly entail a forsaking of Israel’s claims to some ter-ritory (the Palestinians enclaves of Areas A and B in the case of the West Bank), and a relinquishingof the Greater Israel vision propagated by the Zionist nationalistic right [Author’s referenceomitted]. It would therefore constitute a recalibration of Israel’s spacio-temporality of controlover its ex-territories and non-citizen population, whereby territorial concessions (limited asthey may be) give way to a domination over future projections.

What the analysis here failed to provide is an account for how the people of Gaza live, and resist,living in a futureless region from which there is no escape. This paper cannot do justice for such anaccount, but we cannot conclude without acknowledging what has been perhaps the most evidentpolitical project of resistance in recent years. At noon on March 30 2018, a large crowd of around30,000 people gathered in the Gaza Strip and started marching towards the heavily guarded Israel-Gaza barrier. This was the first demonstration of the Great March of Return. By the end of that day,59 Palestinians were killed and over 1,400 were injured, making it one of the deadliest in Gaza inrecent decades (Amnesty International 2018). However, this did not deter the protesters. What wasoriginally planned as the first in a six-week campaign became one of the greatest showcases of Pales-tinian resistance, continuing on a weekly basis for almost 18 months. By the time it concluded, therewere 214 fatalities amongst the demonstrators and more than 35,000 injured (Israel Palestine News2018) –many losing limbs to sniper shooting, as Israel extensively exercised what Jasbir Puar (2017)called its ‘right to maim’.

Importantly, the Great March of Return – as its name infers – was not only protesting thesiege, but demarcated the desire of the Palestinian refugees to go back to their homes, inside theState of Israel, from which they had been dispelled some 70 years prior.13 The protesters’ evoca-tion of the notion of Palestinian return is of significance. The language of return, as Diana Allenshows, has become the hallmark of the future for Palestinian refugees, and has come to rep-resent a hopeful trajectory for Palestinians more generally (Allan 2013, 32). The demonstrators’resolution to redefine the future expressed a (symbolic, yet no less substantial) fundamentaldefiance of Israel’s control over Palestinian futures. The insistence on emphasizing historicalcontinuities was not only protesting Israeli policies, but contested the response of the inter-national community, which had not only failed to challenge Israel’s siege of Gaza, but was con-tent in relegating the Palestinians to humanitarian dependency. This campaign, which was metwith nothing but resolute gunfire, was not merely drawing on the sheer desperation broughtabout by a decade-long siege; rather, it was an act of defiance, aimed against Israel’s commandof Palestinian futures. By invoking the trope of return, the protesters were, therefore, engender-ing what, following Ghassan Hage (2012), can be termed ‘societal hope’ in an Israeli-designatedlandscape of despair.

At the time of writing these words, in the spring of 2021, the Great March of Return protestshave subsided and the global Covid-19 crisis has pushed Gaza further away from the internationalnewsfeed. In this historical present, the prospect of the struggle for Palestinian freedom seems to bebleaker than ever. Yet, this crisis, and its implications for communities across the world, has under-scored the fragility of collective futures. As these futures are put into question, one does not need tolive in Gaza, to be trapped within its boundaries, to experience the debilitating effects of spatialconfinement on futures and to have a glimpse of the personal and collective costs which such adeprived future entails. Grappling with the pandemic and its aftermaths may therefore bringinto sharp focus the casualties of the war being waged by Israel on futures, not only of the residentsof the Gaza Strip, but on Palestinian national aspirations more generally. As the tectonic plates ofthe international political scene move under our feet, one might see a glimpse of hope for Palesti-nian futures in a crisis of this scale.

GEOGRAFISKA ANNALER: SERIES B, HUMAN GEOGRAPHY 13

Notes

1. For a discussion of the blockading of Gaza as a siege, see Winter (2016).2. Providing an alternative legal perspective, Aeyal Gross (2017) argues that such discussions amount to no more

than legal pedantry, since the category of an ‘occupation’ is too blunt a tool to adequately define the status ofGaza, and that the scope of control which Israel retains over the Strip suffices to hold it responsible for theregion’s residents.

3. This is not to suggest that this is a novel perspective. The interpretation of Zionism as a settler colonial projectcan be traced back to early days of Zionism (Pappe 2015). Yet, this interpretive framework has seen a resur-gence more recently (Salamanca et al. 2012). For a review of these debates, see Kotef (2020).

4. For accounts of the effects of living in the time of a temporariness from which there is no escape, and how ithas come to shape almost every aspect of Palestinian lives in the oPt, see, for instance, Abourahme (2011);Wick (2011); Hammami (2015); Tawil-Souri (2017); Naamneh, al-Botmeh, and Salameh (2018); Peteet(2018); Abu Hatoum (2020).

5. Available at: https://mfa.gov.il/mfa/foreignpolicy/peace/mfadocuments/pages/disengagement%20plan%20-%20general%20outline.aspx. Emphasis added.

6. Similarly, Edward Said (1995) criticized the PLO leadership for alluding to such imagery in their false prom-ises of prosperity. He stated that implying that Gaza will turn into a ’new Singapore’ as ’illusions that interestonly those who repeat them. They have no foundation at all’ (177). For similar critiques, see also Alkhalili(2019).

7. Available at: https://videopress.com/v/7xoT1Uf9.8. These include Operation Summer Rains in 2006, Operation Hot Winter in February of 2008, Operation Cast

Lead between December 2008 and January 2009, and Operation Protective Edge in 2014.9. It is estimated that approximately 80% of the population of Gaza is dependent on humanitarian aid for sus-

tenance (World Bank 2018).10. On slow violence more generally, see also Pain (2019), Nixon (2011), Christian and Dowler (2019).11. See also [author’s reference omitted].12. For such analysis see, for instance, Benvenisti (1984); Jamal (2001); Falah (2005); Beinin and Stein (2006); Far-

ouk-Alli (2007); Zertal and Eldar (2007); El-Atrash (2016); Faris (2013); O’Malley (2015).13. According to United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), in December of

2019 there were 1,460,315 refugees from the 1948 war living in the Gaza Strip, making up nearly 70% ofthe entire population of the Strip (UNRWA 2020).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

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