First of all, the death of Ismail Haniyeh must be freed from any projection of temporal intelligibility. It has to be rescued from the terrorism of naming and classification. The only shared feeling since the beginning of the Gaza genocide last October is the absolute loss of sharable meaning.
It must be lifted from secular trappings, and the immediate temptation of classifying into available but exhausted categories must be forcefully aborted. We understand the force of current frameworks that might lead us to helplessly wander into empty spaces and reckon whether it was a violation of the territorial sovereignty of a nation-state. Into questions like: can we safely call what is happening a genocide?; is what Israel is doing proportional in the eyes of international law?; what instruments in international law can be invoked now?; what avenues do open up from an international relations perspective?; is there any respite in digging into geopolitics? etc. I can bet this exercise will prove to be utterly futile and will do another violence—the violence of containment. It will contain the act of dying and detach it from the haloes of truth and transcendence.
I wish I had the ability to place this death in the realm of truth. Truth is abstract and transcendent, and this and thousands of deaths so far have to be afforded some abstraction in front of solid, ossified, and evil fiction. To call these deaths by any other name except shahadah, such as killings and damages, would amount to terrorism by naming. Shahadah is a witness to the truth, and these deaths have done exactly that. It has exposed the artificiality of our systems, categories, and frameworks. It has laid bare the fictions that sustain and conceal the naked power that governs us. It retold us the fact that we were gradually unlearning that a large section of humanity remains in the grip and control of those sitting in the so-called first world. It has made us learn that denying the truth is bad, but creating the truth is worse. These deaths have pulled off the mask from the actors and institutions that have been the upholders of artificiality and falsehood. It has created a crack for us to peek into exteriority. It has challenged the claims of closure and opened up the possibility of exteriority.
In these deaths, I see truth placed in the middle to pick up from there and live for that. I know truth is not material, but when I say truth in the middle, I mean the openings for alternative imagination. I mean the strength that comes from its momentary revelation—the strength that allows us to assume the unbearable task of engaging with our hard conditioning and cognitive structures. In times of inexplicable despair, I see hope in these moments of unconcealment. Never before had I sincerely thought about it, but now I hope for shahadah. It’s not a win-lose game; it is to live with truth and live forever by dying for it or die by living on the side of fiction. I have made up my mind, thanks to Ismail Haniyeh and thousands of forever-living friends of GAZA. May Allah be pleased with them!
