Nowhere to Live, Nowhere to Die

NOT EVEN THE DEAD CAN REST IN GAZA.

The Baffler

We would be remiss to think of any graveyard as a dead space. Perhaps the greatest threat to the Zionist state is sewn into the earth beneath the treads of a tank—a network of social, political, and historical relations that challenge an exclusively Jewish civilizational claim over the whole of Palestine in the form of the burial ground. The subterranean targets of the IDF are both Hamas guerrillas and the deceased that Israel alleges are being used as human shields, even in death. The violation of the Bani Suheila cemetery and others like it is not merely collateral damage wrought by this latest war: the destruction of Palestinian graves was part and parcel to the violent founding of the Israeli state, and its continued encroachment onto the lands where Palestinians live and die.