The Voices of the Dead as Impetus for Utopic Imaginings

Abstract

The Israeli genocide of the Palestinians does not only seek to eliminate Palestinian physical presence on the land, it also seeks to kill the Palestinian people’s will to imagine an alternative liberated future. The Israeli state believes that it can break the will of the Palestinians through the overwhelming magnitude and boundless terror of its violence. But these violences have been unleashed against the Palestinians for over 100 years, and yet the Palestinian people and their aspirations for an alternative liberated future persist. This reflection explores how the Israeli state’s very tool – the violence of settler colonial genocide – of eradicating Palestinian utopic imaginings, paradoxically ensures that Israel’s goal will never be achieved. Building on my previous theorizations of settler colonial violence, this piece explains this paradox by showing how the voices of those killed echo long after their death, revealing the limits of the Israeli attempt to debilitate Palestinian futurity. The voices of the killed Palestinians scream out for justice, and they reach spaces and times far beyond their immediate space-time. They give impetus to international solidarity with the Palestinians and ensure the intergenerational continuity of the struggle within Palestinian society. The reflection shows how this works in two examples: Refaat Alareer’s poem “If I must die,” which reached every corner of the globe, igniting a massive wave of support for the plight of the Palestinian people; and South Africa’s genocide against Israel at the International Court of Justice, which relied heavily on and was inspired by the voices of Palestinians in building its case.