Given the scale of destruction already visited on Gaza, I surely hope that I am entirely wrong and that there will soon be an end to this endlessness. I have little hope that the old paradigm, that of “conflict management,” has indeed been shattered, as some proclaim.
by Liron Mor
This is the time of inqisām. A time of severance, of breaking apart, of the utter destruction of Gaza, the dissolution of its inhabitants, its communities, and its infrastructures, of lives and everything that sustains them, of the very habitability of the land.
But this word, inqisām, names much more. Meaning “severance” or “being partitioned” in Arabic, it helps designate and illuminate several political, conceptual, social, and psychological aspects of Israel’s war on Gaza and on Palestinians more broadly, both before and after October 2023. It is, first and foremost, the proper name for an Israeli mode of segregation, which separates not only colonizers from colonized but also, and more importantly, the colonized from one another. It indexes technologies of distancing that produce Israeli blindness and apathy to Palestinian subjectivity. It accurately manifests the current stage of what is known as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a stage defined by the temporally cyclical and spatially binary logic of blood feuds and revenge, with its tendency to decontextualize and its recurrent moral rebooting of history. Finally, it helps demonstrate that what is going on at present does not constitute a break with the previous Israeli paradigm of “conflict management,” which many declared to have been shattered. Instead, this severance is simply its continuation by other means. Since “conflict management” has long involved periodic large-scale operations of mass killing and infrastructural devastation—a violence whose seasonal nature is captured by the term Israeli politicians have given it, mowing the lawn—what sets apart the current violence in Gaza is primarily its unprecedented scale.
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| A Palestinian cooks food at a school in the northern Gaza Strip on April 27, 2024. The Palestinian death toll in the Gaza Strip from ongoing Israeli attacks has risen to 34,388, the Hamas-run Health Ministry said on Saturday. (Photo by Abdul Rahman Salama/Xinhua) |
Inqisām both encompasses and exceeds such practices as apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. In 2017, Bezalel Smotrich, then a member of the Israeli parliament and now Israel’s finance minister, devised a political plan, which he termed Tokhnit ha-Hakhraʿa. This phrase translates as “the plan of decision,” of verdict and decisiveness,but also as “the plan of subjugation.” Declaring his rejection of both the “conflict management” paradigm and the two-sides framework of conflict, Smotrich suggested that Israel should simply seize the power to “win” and take the liberty to unilaterally decree this conflict over and decided. It would then leave Palestinians between the river and the sea with three options: subjugation, or relinquishing all national rights for the sake of a right of residence (read: apartheid); voluntary emigration (read: ethnic cleansing or transfer); and struggle, which would be met with unbridled military aggression by the Israeli army, now unburdened of any legal or humanitarian considerations (read: genocide or, at least, a genocidal mode of engagement). These three options are presented by Smotrich as future prospects. In reality, however, they represent current conditions all over historic Palestine. Even prior to October 2023, these three modes of subjugation were operative—to varying degrees and in various permutations—in different sites in Palestine.
Apartheid, transfer, and genocide—like their conceptual relatives: occupation, conflict and siege—are incredibly valuable prisms for better investigating and spotlighting the oppression and dispossession of Palestinians, yet they are insufficient. None of these largely imported prisms fits perfectly with what is happening in Palestine-Israel or is specific enough to this context. Additionally, they pertain more to Israeli modes of oppression and dispossession than to Palestinian actions or epistemologies. Perhaps most importantly, they offer only partial frames. Each of these frameworks often attends to the structure of oppression of only one segment of the Palestinian population according to the modes of Israeli control to which it is subjected. These conceptual frameworks thus tend to replicate and reinforce the colonial division lines drawn in 1948, 1967, 1993, 2007, and so on. This partiality is not coincidental. Not at all a bug, it is rather a key feature of Israeli domination, which functions to a large degree by attempting to fragment Palestinian society along those colonial lines and by rendering unpredictable the specific manifestations of its own power in different times and places. One might argue that this combinatory and fracturing mode of control is in fact intentional, guaranteeing its own endurance and open-endedness—for, if articulating the problem is impossible, then confronting, redefining, or challenging it is out of the question.
This partiality—the severance of Palestinians into population segments by various Israeli technologies of oppression—is thus part and parcel of Israel’s mode of control and should be named as such. Considering Palestine on its own terms, I propose the term inqisām, drawn from the history of this place, as a way of conceptualizing the contemporary conditions there.
While scholars of Palestine tend to periodize our time as post-Oslo, as defined by the so-called Oslo Accords and their aftermath, perhaps the contemporary moment is better characterized as the time of inqisām, or post-inqisām. It is defined by the 2007 forced split between Gaza and the West Bank—a split known in Arabic as al–inqisām. Hamas’s victory in the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections put a strain on its political relations with Fatah (the largest faction of the PLO), which still controlled most administrative and security apparatuses in the West Bank. This clash, as well as Hamas’ subsequent seizure of power in Gaza, served as a pretext for Israel to impose a blockade on the Gaza Strip, thus effectively transforming a political split into a physical one. Following the Split, as the political theorist Nasser Abourahme puts it, “Hamas eventually settled for a besieged and ostracized fiefdom in Gaza, and a self-disciplining Fatah in the West Bank re-integrated into the global-imperial political order. Priorities shifted, and the national lost further traction in the face of renewed factionalism and the engineering of an internal enemy.” These two effects of al-inqisām—increased severance and fabricated internal animosity—are, I argue, the main political technologies constitutive of inqisām as a mode of separation and control.
The Split is indeed paradigmatic of the specific uses Israel makes of inqisām. Israeli politicians have long explicitly pitted Hamas against the Palestinian Authority (PA) and vice versa. Israel takes advantage of the collaborative attitude of the PA to “coordinate security” in the West Bank and to attempt to subdue Hamas there, while financially supporting Hamas in Gaza, propping it up for decades as an alternative to the PLO, then using its rocket fire as a perennial excuse to avoid political negotiations altogether. The Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has openly declared on several occasions that he views Hamas as an asset precisely because its status as a “terrorist organization” allows Israel to refuse any political settlement or change.
Crucially, then, severance differs from other modes of segregation, such as apartheid and “divide and rule.” Unlike apartheid, Israeli inqisām separates not only colonizers from colonized but also the colonized from one another. In the exemplary case of the Split, for instance, it is Hamas and the PA/PLO that are divided and made into antagonists. Unlike colonial “divide and rule,” moreover, this practice of inqisām does not elevate one segment of the spliced population to rule over the rest but instead plays off both Hamas and the PLO against one another to inspire internal hostility and division and to forestall political change.
The fragmentation wrought by inqisām is also far more granular than those generated by other modes of segregation. Fences, checkpoints, walls, the siege on Gaza, various surveillance and biometric border technologies, as well as the convoluted bureaucracy of the work permit regime, have all intensified in recent years, colluding to physically divide Palestinians on a nearly molecular scale. Such border technologies not only sever Palestinians “of the inside” (fī al-dākhil) from Palestinians “of the outside” (fī al-khārij), or the West Bank from the Gaza Strip; they also isolate communities and individuals from one another, operating on the smallest possible level of societal atomization.
In our post-inqisām time, the border has become the main site in and through which Israeli security apparatuses exercise control. As fences and walls continuously proliferate, the border, as well as its crossing, has become definitive of Palestinian experience. The exiled Palestinian intellectual and politician Azmi Bishara, for instance, named the occupied Palestinian territories “the land of checkpoints” and the historian Rashid Khalidi claimed that the shared anxiety of Palestinians at the checkpoint “proves that they are a people, if nothing else does.”
We saw the intensification of this severance recently in Gaza, during the disastrous war Israel has waged on the enclave. This severance started with a single split, between the northern and southern parts of the Strip, when early in October Israel commanded 1.1 million Palestinians to vacate all areas north of Wadi Gaza, transforming the wadi’s east-west axis into a de facto border, complete with buffer death zones and checkpoints. Soon after, infrastructure for more permeant-looking military bases appeared on site, suggesting that this severing border is gradually being solidified. In December, the process intensified when the Israeli military distributed a map of Gaza broken down into hundreds of land cells, some of which were designated as alleged “safe zones” to which Palestinians were to evacuate—a designation that kept changing in accordance with Israel’s strategic needs or its political talking points. Use of this map has shattered Gaza into innumerable geographic smithereens, whose perimeters were often illegible, tearing asunder the coevalness between these tiny enclaves, thus performing a major severance on a miniscule scale (fig. 1).
Figure 1: A map of coded zones, distributed by the IDF in Gaza, December 2023, https://www.idf.il/ar/جيش-الدفاع-الإسرائيلي/جيش-الدفاع-الإسرائيلي/swordsofiron-011223-150/
Inqisām designates not only the means Israel employs in its effort to subjugate Palestinians but also their effects on Palestinians, the ways Palestinians experience them. Scholars have long noted the disjointed timespaces created by the Bantustanization of the West Bank and the enclosure of Gaza. They demonstrated how the proliferation of borders and checkpoints in Palestine contributed to the loss of social cohesion not only by creating physical barriers but also by inspiring suspicion, economic competition and miscommunication.
Literary and cinematic works, too, help expose the various ways in which this severance spoils the very foundations of communal existence—its destructive effects on a shared sense of time, of space, of distance, of self and self-interests, of knowledge itself. In the short story “Dust,” for example, the Palestinian author Adania Shibli reveals the profound onto-epistemic uncertainty that the checkpoint breeds and its social effects. Complaining that her friends are chronically late because of the checkpoints, Shibli’s unnamed narrator ponders: “Why should I always arrive on time, wait, and suffer doubts about time, place, day, and the notion of clarity itself?” In Shibli’s writing, the border and its checkpoints undermine three key coordinates of being, which together form the very conditions of possibility for both knowledge and intersubjective relations—space, time, and self. Shibli’s narrator often describes moments of self-hatred and self-doubt: wondering whether she herself is a collaborator and whether the checkpoints are already inside her, she reports feeling like self-destruction is the only option left.
This internal severance is the profound meaning of inqisām. The renowned Palestinian scholar Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian has proposed the related concept of ashlāʾ, Arabic for dismembered flesh or butchered body parts, as a means for theorizing Israel’s genocide and its necropolitical regime. This concept—which Shalhoub-Kevorkian introduced in April in a podcast that later served the Israeli police and her employer, the Hebrew University, as pretext for unconscientiously persecuting and abusing her—points to an even more granular level at which Israel divides up Palestinians. It refers not only to the geographical, political, and social scattering of Palestinians,but also to the severance of the body itself, to the dismemberment of Gazans to such a degree that one is driven to hold up a bag of body parts and torn flesh to the camera, proclaiming: “these are my children.”
The distance introduced by inqisām has created a particularly distorted Zionist view of Palestinians, a view best described as its opposite—a blindness. In the media, many couched Hamas’s 7 October attack as demonstrating an Israeli failure of intelligence. Seeing things through the prism of inqisām, however, one might argue that the failure was never that of intelligence. All the information was readily available. Instead, it was a failure to truly take account of Palestinians, not merely as objective data points or “incited” mobs, but as real humans, with interiority and intentions that might change and develop over time.
This blindness is partly the result of a growing Israeli reliance on automated technologies—those surveillance, biometric, and algorithmic tools for “managing” conflict and, with it, the Palestinian population itself—which significantly increase the distance between Israeli security personnel and the Palestinians they subjugate. For example, since the Split, Israel has made the larger checkpoints, known as terminals, appear more and more like airport crossings, where biometric data is scanned and collected and where Palestinians are herded through a series of automated gates (whose opening, however, is still a decision that ultimately lies with a person). Similarly, in the past decade, Israeli security apparatuses have been employing algorithmic detection systems—some of them, like Levander and Where’s Daddy, use AI to rapidly produce “target banks” for bombardment in Gaza, while others allegedly detect “terrorists” and “inciters” based on data points, often operating preemptively, without any criminal action having taken place. Explaining the operation of one such system, an Israeli intelligence officer claimed in a press briefing in July 2016 that the system can detect a terrorist before “the kid even knows that he’s a terrorist yet.” In this way, Israeli institutions regard Palestinians merely as a threat to manage—as biopolitical carriers of terrorism and thus as data sets to tabulate and objects to surveil. Convinced that it truly knows these objects, the Israeli military, like Israelis more broadly, ignores Palestinians’ stated intentions, their interiority and—dare I say—their humanity.
This blindness is not the result of ignorance or of self-deception; lying to oneself still requires some knowledge of the truth. Instead, it is a matter of ignoring one’s ignorance, of repressing the very fact of repression, claiming that one already knows, that there is no more information to seek out. This repression of the repression, the conviction that one already knows, becomes immensely easier in light of automated and algorithmic procedures, which both prevent direct engagement and generate knowledge that appears objective.
Severance, then, produces a mode of knowledge that is familiar with Palestinians only with regards to their physical and algorithmic shell. It further renders distance a marker of political status as well as of moral and technological progress. While automated technologies bolster the impression of impartiality, they gradually foreclose opportunities for interpersonal contact. They sever relations, rendering all interactions mechanized and bureaucratic. Inqisām thus not only diminishes Jewish Israelis’ familiarity with Palestinians but also augments epistemic insecurity amongst Palestinians, as the representatives of Israeli power became inaccessible, opportunities for appeal are rescinded, and the process and its rules become grotesquely opaque. The distance introduced by severance blinds Israeli security personnel to the violence they inflict and short-circuits opportunities for raising questions, thus allowing them to regard themselves as neutral service providers, as mere “conflict managers,” and to maintain their self-image as the “most moral army in the world.”
But the border does not, in fact, function automatically. Who are those Israeli security personnel who operate its distancing technologies? Today, this task, like other close-contact roles, has been increasingly delegated to Mizrahim—Israeli Jews originating from the Arab and Muslim world—who have become the immoral face of Israel’s systemic violence. Overly represented in the police, the border police, and the security apparatuses, Mizrahi Jews are the ones managing the checkpoints that tear at the social and physical flesh of Palestinians. By front-lining Mizrahim, the state distances itself from the spectacle of violence and abdicates responsibility for it, while severing Mizrahi Jews from both their Arab past and Palestinians.
Elsewhere, I therefore employ the term inqisām for investigating the severance between Jewish Arabs (Mizrahi Jews) and Palestinian Arabs. Specifically, I examine why solidarities that seem likely, based on cultural similarities and class interests, do not in fact emerge between these two groups today (though they have at various moments in history). Severance was essential to the integration of Mizrahim into the Jewish collective, an integration achieved only by separating them from their home countries and cultures, from their families and communities. Mizrahi Jews were thus “de-Arabized,” socialized to associate their Arab cultures and pasts with the enemy and hence aim for assimilation. Simultaneously, however, they were also “Arabized”: though their backgrounds were highly diverse—in terms of geography, class, and culture—Mizrahim were perceived in Israel through a homogenizing prism, which rendered them akin to Palestinians and painted them as easily exploitable bodies. Owing to this perception, Zionism used Mizrahim for the purpose of competing with and replacing Palestinians. Regarded as fungible bodies, Mizrahi Jews were deployed as cheap labor to oust Palestinian workers and as a human security belt for the settlement of the frontiers—for fortifying the borders of newly colonized areas to prevent Palestinians from returning.
This logic of competitive replacement was operative in Zionism from the very beginning. It is evident, for instance, in arguments made already in 1909 in favor of importing Jewish Yemini workers to Palestine. Viewed as “natural workers,” Yemini Jews were nonetheless in need of rehabilitation and acculturation so that they would eventually “become the better contenders for every aspect of farming work. The Yemenis will then come to take, and they are indeed able to take, the place of the Arabs.” Because the labor, settlement, and security work of Mizrahim was largely coerced it was left unacknowledged, while similar “pioneering” efforts by a minority of Ashkenazim were lauded and heavily subsidized. Even today, after some Mizrahi Jews have ascended into the ranks of the middle class, this historic lack of recognition and the fear of falling once again to the bottom of the racialized barrel remain key factors driving many Mizrahim to insist on their intentional national belonging by vocally expressing animosity toward Palestinians.
This process has created a systemic adversarial relationship between Mizrahim and Palestinians, a zero-sum competition, whereby one is commanded to displace the other or risk becoming abject. The racialization of both groups was thus coconstitutive. It is because Mizrahim had to shed “Arabness” that it became definitive of disposability; it is because Mizrahi Jews could eventually be de-Arabized that Palestinians could not; and it is because Ashkenazi society in Israel delegated violence, settlement, and menial labor to others that it racialized them as primitive, illiberal, and immoral, while building itself up as white and socialist-liberal. What severance severs, and thus conceals, is this coconstitutive nature of the racializing structures that expendabilize both Palestinians and Mizrahim.
“Guard labor” on the border and high-friction combat in Gaza, increasingly delegated to Mizrahim, are the current incarnation of these longer severing processes, which succeeded at both de-Arabization—turning Mizrahim against Palestinians and their Arab past—and Arabization, rendering Mizrahi bodies more disposable, easily deployable in the service of executing the state’s violence on Palestinians, whose bodies are perceived as ultimately disposable. The racialized division of labor within the Israeli economy of violence also highlights a key severance within Jewish society in Israel—between the illiberal nationalist camp, whose exclusionary drive is explicit, and the liberal Zionist camp, attempting to disavow this same drive. This internal division is in fact productive in facilitating outward violence, for illiberal violence and illegal land grab—which serve the state’s interests and eventually earn its legalizing seal—can be presented as operating despite and outside the democratic rule of law, and liberal discourse is used as a screen behind which violent dispossession and colonization continue unperturbed.
Processes of inqisām are related not only to technological changes but also to a recent shift in the perception of conflict itself. A textbook example is the TV action series Fauda, whose cycle-of-revenge narrative bounces back and forth between an Israeli undercover army unit operated by Arabic-speaking Mizrahi men and Palestinian militants. The show betrays, perhaps despite itself, just how flimsy the racialized dividing line between the two groups is. It also reveals that Mizrahi Jews today perceive Palestinians as an enemy of equal stature, couching violence in familial terms, through the trope of the blood feud. This is quite different from the Orientalist supremacist attitude of historical Zionism, which regarded Palestinians as inferior (and thus as either deserving of dispossession or requiring “salvation”) and aimed for a political-juridical resolution, however deferred, violent, or insincere. This new imagined parity, too, is mired in violence, which becomes more annihilative the more differences are devoid of political values, dictated instead by the tautology of us versus them or by religious Zionism’s idiosyncratic mashup of Jewish and Evangelical messianic ideologies. This feud perception, which is becoming prevalent across Israeli society more broadly, is different than that traditional perception of violence as conflict because the faceoff is intended to establish not the truth or a new set of laws, but rather who is right by proving who is stronger. It is a binary logic of self or other, of winning or losing, of survival and domination or death and subjugation. In this schema, there is no longer any pretense of legality—of negotiations in front of an external judge who might bring about some sort of resolution, compromise, or “states.” As it is merely might that makes right, winning becomes all the more important.
Inqisām names, moreover, a prevalent contemporary rhetorical weapon—decontextualization, or severance from history. The core narrative force of the cycle of revenge, which produces the false symmetry in Fuada, also generates a distorted, cyclical, dehistoricizing, and preemptive temporality. Retribution always presents itself as a reaction to the opponent’s last act of violence, thus erasing from view everything else—the historical context, its nuances, and systemic, ongoing violence. By resetting the clock to point zero every time the enemy strikes, the revenge narrative paints the enemy’s violence as always necessarily unjust, even inexplicable. Israel has long practiced this radical form of de-historicization, rebooting history with every Palestinian attack, thus framing Palestinian violence as a pure evil materializing out of thin air rather than as actions in context, responding to both structural oppression and particular historical processes. By severing Palestinian violence from its context, Israel aims to position itself as the only victim, whose outsized response is thereby exonerated, while depicting Palestinians as irrational terrorists motivated by nothing other than perpetual, blind, baseless hatred (and, at best, by “incitement” or by a fundamentalist version of Islam).
Since 7 October, context has become a forbidden word. At times, it has even been regarded as nothing less than antisemitic. Any invocation of the context of Hamas’s deeds, we are told, is necessarily an attempt to justify “pure evil” or erase Israelis’ traumatic experiences. And yet—and I cannot believe this needs to be stated—nothing exists without context. Israeli representatives, too, often invoke context to justify Israel’s own crimes in Gaza (as in the case of the ICJ hearings). The Israeli tendency to disarticulate Palestinian actions from their context leads to an inflated and exceptionalized sense of victimhood, which no amount of violent defense could ever assuage. This process goes hand in glove with that dehumanizing blindness toward Palestinians, whose actions now appear as unfathomable, inhumane, and fanatical (even when explanations are issued). This severance of time and context is yet another meaning of inqisām. One might say that this is the qessem of inqisām, its special magical alchemy that turns aggression into victimhood and rationalizes wholesale violence. Indeed, the semantic field of the root of inqisām encompasses acts of conjuring and divination (in Arabic), as well as straight up magic (in Hebrew), thus helping to account for this mysterious reversal.
The concept of inqisām also allows us, finally, to zoom out and regard the present devastation in Palestine through a boarder temporal and geographical lens, one that links current colonial conditions with the longer histories of imperialism in the region. Inqisām shares its root with the Arabic word taqsīm, which means “partition” and connotes, more specifically, the Partition Resolution devised in 1947 by the UN and spearheaded by US. Partition was also the brainchild of Great Britain, following decades of its imperial involvement in Palestine. This inequitable severance plan, while ultimately conceding that Palestinians might deserve some sort of sovereignty and some part of the land, was the culmination of two imperialist ideas long held by Britain. The first is the notion and practice of “divide and rule,” which Britain attempted to enact in Palestine since 1917 by favoring the Jewish minority. The second was Christian Zionism, which has regarded Jews as those capable of serving as a bastion of the West in the East before Jews adopted Zionism.
Indeed, the notion of a Jewish state serving as a rampart of the West in the East is one that Theodor Herzl, the visionary of Zionism, borrowed from British writers, including, as Edward Said notes, from George Eliot, whose Daniel Deronda (1876) advocates for a Jewish state in Palestine that would serve as a bridge between East and West, a “medium of transmission and understanding.” (And it might be worth noting, as Ella Shohat does, that Eliot’s Daniel Deronda is an exoticized Sephardi Jew—a Mizrahi figure avant la lettre.) Note that this rampart is thus dialectical. It means a bulwark, a border that would separate the East from the West and distance the Oriental elements within Europe eastward; but it also means a traversable border, a conduit that will extract and translate—will make useful and comprehensible—the East for the West. It is in this sense that Israel is a rampart of Europe and the US in the Middle East, serving as an extension of their economic and political interests in the region as well as a distancing mechanism, a protective periphery.
Inqisām as a severing border is thus forever porous, a frontier whose inability to ever fully set renders it remarkably productive and profitable. A possible final point about “conflict management” through inqisām is thus precisely its potential endlessness (already implied earlier by the cyclical logic of revenge and by the boundless, unknowable nature of the infinite permutations of various Israeli modes of control). It was clear from the start that the war on Gaza will never achieve its stated goal, that it could never lead to a clear triumph, defined by Israeli politicians as the complete elimination of Hamas. It was thus clear that this war could never truly end or force a final separation. This endlessness, the dialectical underside of decisive severance, facilitates, as mentioned, the continuation of Israeli domination and allows certain Israeli politicians and parties to cling to power undemocratically. It also allows Israel and its allies to extract value from war (as long as warfare does not spill over and becomes a regional war). Israel profits from this forever war. And Israeli weapon and warfare technologies manufacturers, now more than ever, are eager to reestablish their prestige and the status of their products as “battle tested.” Despite predictions to the contrary, the Israeli industry of war technologies has only become more lucrative in recent months.
Given the scale of destruction already visited on Gaza, I surely hope that I am entirely wrong and that there will soon be an end to this endlessness. I have little hope that the old paradigm, that of “conflict management,” has indeed been shattered, as some proclaim. Left to their own devices, the US and Israel will continue in their current track. The “day after” the genocide in Gaza—Is there ever a day after genocide?—would then at best look like an “Oslo 2.0,” enclosing a maximal number of Palestinians on a minimal area of land and outsourcing most security and humanitarian work. Instead, to the extent that I have hope, it derives from seeing the cumulative effects of decades of Palestinian resistance and allies’ protests on global public opinion, which seems to be, finally and still too slowly, shifting.
*The Hebrew term hakhraʿa carries both meanings—subjugation and a decision, a ruling—perhaps because in both war and legal dispute opponents are brought down to kneel, li-khro’a.
Liron Mor is associate professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author of Conflicts: The Poetics and Politics of Palestine-Israel (2024).
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