As long as we call punishment security and genocide justice, as long as we worship the object instead of listening to the living, Gaza will remain our mirror and our shame (2025)

As long as we call punishment security and genocide justice, as long as we worship the object instead of listening to the living, Gaza will remain our mirror and our shame

Published online, August 2025.

No equivalence, no balance of disasters; let this be stated at the outset, so as not to confuse the dead and not to absolve oneself: we shall speak only of the logic that bites, segregation and fetish, denial upon language, and the Palestinians in the enclave where hunger is a measure and dust a unit, and water a verdict that opens or closes like a metal eyelid beneath bombs and bullets.

 

Thought, that fragment. Often fragmented, never as much as bodies. In bulk, a grocery store of ideas thrown out to try to see more clearly at the counter of History.

 

***

 

We have seen maps, corridors, lines like seams, we have seen the gates, the cameras, the faces framed in plastic, and we have seen that we were seeing; we knew that this obligated us and we did not want to know, we kept our hand on the switch of names; we said security, retaliation, necessity, so that sleep would still consent to admit us; and in the morning, on the screens, these were not fields but pixels of ruin, living dust, and we counted, and we counted, and accounting became a refuge, a rite, a way of not weeping.

 

And the bombs, let us say it without screen, fall as one throws hammers upon the world’s crockery: at night, in the morning, in the midst of bread, on the school at recess, on the hospital that smells of ether, on the tent that has replaced the house, on the water line, on the kitchen where one still kneads. These are not blunders, not errors of trajectory—the aim remains when the sentence denies; it is the relentlessness of a science that has lost the law, and that measures in megatons what decency measures in first names.

 

And the civilians lying massacred, families in clusters, ambulances struck, rescue workers shot like rabbits; and the journalists, PRESS vests in letters as large as roofs, lying near their cameras—the broken camera says enough that they no longer wanted to see. In the offices they will speak of proportion, of human shields, of contingencies—but here speech no longer covers, it uncovers: it is massacre, it is the naked word that remains when euphemisms burn.

 

And the other obscenity is the language of the powerful: this bad faith that twists like a nail under pliers, that denies in the morning what it admits in the evening in a footnote, that promises and postpones, that swears and betrays, that calls security what is only punishment. Israeli leaders, by clutching exception like an idol, have made themselves vile criminals: it is not the Shoah that commands this—it condemns it—it is the temptation to kill upon disaster so that it speaks in their place. Their right crumbles in their mouths, there remains only a power covered with laws that kill.

 

There are objects planted in the middle of the day like nails in the forehead, wagons of yesteryear, barriers of today, maps with red arrows, pallets under film, fluorescent armbands, and they say look, and they say move along, they are memory and excuse, seal and screen, iron bandages on a wound one does not want to dress, fetishes we cherish because they spare us from entering the room where loss works, the incomparable loss that has never finished speaking.

 

We know where the crypt comes from and what it guards, this people who rose from the ashes with the decision not to return there; we know and we name without irony, without venom; but we also see the cold shadow of apparatuses, memory become procedure, exception installed in the office like a lamp, and we hear the low instruction: kill upon disaster, cling to it as to the rock of history, and draw from this rock the right to tighten, to assign, to starve; and this too is a denial, not the forgetting of the Shoah but its consecration to the point of blindness, memory mounted on a spring, which no longer allows the common law to enter with its poor and stubborn thou shalt nots.

 

***

 

And because we come from three houses of the same God:

Name—Jews. The ember without image, the unspoken Name carried first: this is not forgiven. To have laid God bare from the start is to attract ancient hatred, resentment against precedence.

Son—Christians. An imaginary and carnal filiation to cross the abyss: a face for the Law, a body for the wound.

Seal—Muslims. The sealed Word that closes the chain, a yes without figure above the names.

 

These three paths toward the one tighten the same point, refuse to know it, cannot share it.

 

From these precedences were born jealousies of primogeniture, warring loyalties, quarrels over titles to stones and wells. The signifiers—Name, Son, Seal / Jews, Christians, Muslims—have been erected as objects to hold the Unnameable: domes, walls, relics, keys. Where loss cannot be mourned, it is changed into a thing; where one cannot speak, one builds; where one trembles, one administers. Thus are born fetishes: they protect by forgetting.

Each denies its loss according to its grammar: the first by encrypting, the second by incarnating, the third by sealing. From the friction of these loyalties, the earth becomes host, threshold, talisman; and the enclave—narrow—gathers, distills, explodes this old quarrel of primogeniture for the benefit of apparatuses.

 

And let it be said plainly: here, in this present reality of ruins and crushed bones, it is faith itself that is massacred—faith as openness, as the right not to kill in order to believe. And the three monotheisms bear the burden: not the souls, but their apparatuses; not those who pray, but their clergy, their princes, their parties who feast upon the Name. By dint of Name, Son, Seal / Jews, Christians, Muslims, they have delivered faith to customs, tied it to walls, enlisted it beneath bombs; they have made stones proxies of heaven and the living into justifications. Thus faith, beheaded, is brandished like a flag; thus God, taken hostage, speaks the language of summonses. Responsible, yes—historically responsible for having let loss become fetish and for having loved this fetish more than the living.

 

And for the record, disarmed faith: not religion in general-staff uniform, but the faith of empty hands—bread shared without liturgy, water passed from palm to palm, the threshold left open for the stranger, the bed lent to the wounded without asking for his flag. Faith that does not administer, that does not command, that has neither uniform nor hostages, that speaks in a low voice, that recites its thou shalt nots without drums: thou shalt not kill for God, thou shalt not humiliate for God, thou shalt not punish the child in the name of God. Faith that lets God be silent while one carries a stretcher, that signs with poor first names and tenacious gestures; faith that prefers to open rather than to prove, that keeps the house so that the night passes a little faster.

 

***

 

They, the Palestinians, in the enclave, this name that sounds like an administrative sarcasm, narrow strip where light is transfused, where air is rationed, where mothers’ patience is tested, where children are subjected to an arithmetic they should not know: how many hours for water, how many steps to the bag, how many nights without a roof, how many names lost in the columns, how many bombs per night, how many dead per hour; they are held there like guinea pigs of history and yet they still hold the cup, the key, the photo of the departed cousin, they hold language even when it cracks, they hold on through the obstinacy of the poor, which is the only treasure that politics has not managed to steal from them.

 

***

 

We who speak have no right to spare our sentence, we must return it to the dust, lift it then lay it down gently: there is a mechanism and we call it by its name: denial; we do not say that men lie, we say that perception remains and that obligation fades; we say that the enclave is a fetish, an iron bandage placed on an unassimilable loss, on one side the Shoah, on the other the Nakba, two abysses that look at each other and that one prefers to administer rather than to mourn; we say that when the fetish fails, the act occurs, pure and foolish flash, strike, rocket, desecration, abduction, as if one wanted to make loss appear beneath another loss, fresher, clearer, bloodier, so that finally something might be heard.

 

And we see the other liturgy, the useful yet captured liturgy: trucks lined up, laminated lists, blue seals, airlifts, weighings, cohorts of angels in vests who do not preach but measure, and their gestures save, we know this, and yet by dint of being necessary, they become the ornament of the scene, the curtain between the cry and the decision; charity held on a leash so that politics can absent itself with dignity.

 

We then call for gestures that would not be metaphors but things: ceasefire which is a calendar and not a slogan; guaranteed passages, which are gates that open at stated hours, three times a day, whatever happens; exchanges which are buses, hospital corridors, telephones that ring in kitchens and where voices answer; justice which is not a tone but procedures carried through to the end, despite the fatigue of the powerful, and where the seated witness speaks without being confiscated by the cause; these are objects against objects, acts against idols, the small carpentry of meaning against the steel of excuses.

 

We also know what gnaws at us, the black honey of jouissance: to hold the other in place, to count him, to name him by categories, to observe him through thick lenses; to pierce the map, to taunt the fortress, to display the flash as one displays a blazon; these excesses are twins, they engender and feed each other, they lend each other a hand over the dead.

 

***

 

And yet, if there is a language, let it at least serve this purpose: to demagnetize the object, to withdraw from the fetish its funereal majesty, not to enjoy the explanation as a victory, to reduce emphasis in favor of the common law, this thou shalt not that still stands when everything else wavers: thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not humiliate, thou shalt not punish the child for the father, thou shalt not starve, thou shalt not deport life outside of itself.

 

We shall not settle the accounts of a century that is not finished; we shall not lay down comparisons like flat stones; we shall speak, yes, from one side: on the side of the Palestinians held under siege, because it is there that segregation is total and visible, there that the child is a number before being a first name, there that law bends into procedure, there that pain can no longer be denied except by becoming ritual; and to speak from this side takes nothing away from other pains, it only removes from our mouths the temptation of balance.

 

I would like to write the list of simple things that undo enclosures: the cistern in the middle of the neighborhood with a tap that does not close from noon to two; the gate that rises and falls at fixed hours; the laminated card valid for twenty-four hours that no one tears up in front of the child; the flour that passes through; the telephone that rings; the bus that arrives; the woman who returns with a bag and who sleeps; the hostage who returns and who is silent, or who speaks, as he wishes; the judge who listens, and one does not know on whom he depends, and that is what does good; all this is not grandiose, it is operative, it is what the dead ask of the living when they close their eyes: not an explanation, a door.

 

And let it be left here, without flourish: this does not yet hold. These are only threads stretched in the dust, directions thrown in all directions, bits of images and words that one pulls to see if something comes. The solid idea is lacking, and must perhaps be lacking: one writes to feel out the world, not to conclude it; to make the knots play, not to consecrate them. Tomorrow, one thread will break, another will take hold; so be it—let us search, let us try, let us look again, and let language, poor thing, at least serve as a lamp while the living pass by.

 

Must even psychoanalysts consider anew faith, God, and their consequences? They who, by doing without the signifier of the Name-of-the-Father, had the power to go see on the other side of their own mirror and who, no doubt, have not yet quite dared to risk it. That which silences us, and makes our knees buckle.