A rebellion for humanity on American campuses

• Published date: 06 May 2024
• Publication title: Mail & Guardian: Web Edition Articles (Johannesburg, South Africa)

Darwish died on 9 August 2008, at 69. Hearing the news, his friend Breyten Breytenbach recalled Darwish's last reading, in Arles in France: "The sun was setting, there was a soundless wind in the trees and from the neighbouring streets we could hear the voices of children playing. And for hours we sat on the ancient stone seats, spellbound by the depth and the beauty of this poetry."

Breytenbach wrote that Darwish was "reaching out even more profoundly than he'd ever done before for the universally shared fate and sense of being human".

Darwish wanted to be buried in Galilee where he was born and where his mother still lived. The Israelis would not allow it and so he was buried on a hill outside Ramallah. When John Berger visited the grave soon after Darwish's death mourners had left sheaves of green wheat and red anemones on the dug earth.

Berger captured some sense of suffering in a form and on a scale that overwhelms understanding: "Disasters are flowing together into a delta that has no name, and will only be given one by geographers, who will come later, much later."

What has happened, and is happening, to Gaza is beyond meaningful comprehension. It does not yet have a name, a name that, unlike genocide and more like the Nakba or the Shoah, is not amenable to legalistic reductions and has a simultaneous sense of both the ineffable and the concrete specificity of a particular horror.

We do know, though, that Israel — the Israeli state and Israeli society — is rank with the death drive of fascism. Humanity is being systematically denied and people systematically murdered.

We know that when murder on a mass scale, organised murder, is accompanied by the deliberate destruction of homes, schools, hospitals, universities and places for religious community and practice there is no intent for the survivors to come home when the killing has abated.

We know that the Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant declared that: "We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly."

We know that an eye witness has reported that before Israel destroyed the al Shifa Hospital, before hundreds of people were executed and their bodies pushed into mass graves with bulldozers, voices amplified from quadcopter drones kept saying: "Come out, you animals!"

We know that Edward Said showed that for Zionism, "The Arabs were seen as synonymous with everything degraded, fearsome, irrational and brutal."

We know that Ruth Wilson Gilmore defines racism as "the state-sanctioned or...