From Lundi Matin #441, 02/09/2024.
What if old words like ‘genocide’ (and why not ‘colonisation’) were false friends? What if the new technologies that subjugate our emotions when we think we’re expressing them were also betraying us? And what if we ourselves were betraying the witnesses in this way? And how can we articulate more than snatches of truth when events take our breath away? This text is not an answer. No answer to the ongoing tragedy is a text.
O gentlemen, the time of life is short!
To spend that shortness basely were too long
If life did ride upon a dial’s point,
Still ending at the arrival of an hour.
And if we live, we live to tread on kings;
William Shakespeare, King Henry IV, The First Part
Having to prove every day, every night, every moment, that we are being colonised, occupied, exploited, expelled, decimated and eradicated, and all of this well before a supposedly fateful date, having to prove again and again massacre after massacre, having to prove the devastating process of ethnic and cultural cleansing that began more than seven decades ago and continues unabated, that is the absolute tragedy, the tragedy of the Palestinians. Having to prove that you are being exterminated, having to prove it over and over again. Because no, ‘our’ images prove nothing, they are not ‘their’ images. ‘Nor are our words. Our dead even less so.
Every word is disputed, contested, and the more imposing, insurpassable, insurmountable it is, the more it is quibbled with, deconstructed, argued over and counter-argued. Such is the case with the word ‘genocide’. It can only be ‘theirs’, in their lexicon alone. Their own sanctuary. We can only sully it. Reality, ‘our’ reality, is mocked, relativised, nuanced, drowned in a pathetic semantic argument.
We no longer live in times when a power colonises you, expropriates you, crushes you, exterminates you, without the slightest discourse or justification – although the divine will has more than once been invoked, brandished, but in the sense of the great civilisational good, never as a divine, eternal promise. No lands were ever promised, only conquered. We are no longer living in times of pure conquest by the strongest who came to take, seize, despoil, enslave, annihilate all resistance, all persistence in preserving a culture considered inferior, backward; we are living in these new times in which the victors afflict themselves by constantly undoing reality, holding a thousand and one press conferences, imposing themselves on television and radio programmes, inflicting this too on the vanquished. These are times of repeated, tenacious disinformation, times of permanent inversion of reality.
The tools of modern propagation are these traps that are constantly being set. It is no longer enough to see, to be able to see at all; ‘our’ images are not only suspect in their eyes, they are simply not ‘theirs’. The illusion of producing images, of producing narrative, is the absolute trap set for us by capitalism and its supreme stage, imperialism. The tools are there, at our fingertips, we are told, but even if we hijack them, pirate them, they are still ‘their’ tools, objects of immoderate consumption that will never be turned against them.
And we are always one step behind, one step less, in the face of their formidable propaganda machine. The present, even if it’s live, in full view of everyone, has become the new scapegoat, the new public enemy, against whom ‘they’ revel and rage, unleashing all the sad passions of our societies. The various silent majorities are their numerical soldiers, never reassured. The absolute vice is that, ‘at the same time’, they give us the perfect illusion of participating in the great media game, of being able, not to influence it, but to be part of it. The ‘integrated spectacular’, as Guy Debord puts it in his Commentaries on the Society of the Spectacle, is the absolute gift of our time. We are so conditioned that we cannot but participate fully in this great game of death. The hollows of our hands – which are constantly clutching our various intelligent devices – and our index fingers scanning images and texts day and night, trivialising their horror, are the perfect embodiment of this chimera, torturers and victims alike.
‘No one bears witness for the witness,’ wrote Paul Celan. The witness is alone, irreplaceable, no one can testify for him. What he sees, hears and touches, which is neither knowledge nor information, can never be proven. The witness is. Like a secret that cannot be shared with anyone, not even with the person to whom the oath or testimony is addressed, whom they take with them. But today the witness is out in the open, before his own imminent annihilation, his testimony is ‘live’, shared and sharable. He fills the sphere of the real that has become virtual, and vice versa. He more or less escapes the sphere of total control, unless he goes beyond it, except that he is now precisely in the visible sphere, i.e., in the sphere of the rules of the game, thus losing his status. He must now constantly prove himself, proving both his own presence and his own extinction. The witness is now even more cumbersome than ever, his solitude greater than ever.
On the 25th August, Jameel Meqdad wrote the following on his X account: ‘Any attempt to write from outside Gaza about its reality and its annihilation is unacceptable, because nothing can describe it, no one can and no one will. It’s bigger than you can imagine, bigger than you see, bigger than you expect. Don’t try.’
Ghassan Salhab is a film-maker. From Beirut, he reports on the situation in Lebanon and beyond.
Ghassan Salhab: Trompe-l’œil
From Lundi Matin #441, 02/09/2024.
What if old words like ‘genocide’ (and why not ‘colonisation’) were false friends? What if the new technologies that subjugate our emotions when we think we’re expressing them were also betraying us? And what if we ourselves were betraying the witnesses in this way? And how can we articulate more than snatches of truth when events take our breath away? This text is not an answer. No answer to the ongoing tragedy is a text.
O gentlemen, the time of life is short!
To spend that shortness basely were too long
If life did ride upon a dial’s point,
Still ending at the arrival of an hour.
And if we live, we live to tread on kings;
William Shakespeare, King Henry IV, The First Part
Having to prove every day, every night, every moment, that we are being colonised, occupied, exploited, expelled, decimated and eradicated, and all of this well before a supposedly fateful date, having to prove again and again massacre after massacre, having to prove the devastating process of ethnic and cultural cleansing that began more than seven decades ago and continues unabated, that is the absolute tragedy, the tragedy of the Palestinians. Having to prove that you are being exterminated, having to prove it over and over again. Because no, ‘our’ images prove nothing, they are not ‘their’ images. ‘Nor are our words. Our dead even less so.
Every word is disputed, contested, and the more imposing, insurpassable, insurmountable it is, the more it is quibbled with, deconstructed, argued over and counter-argued. Such is the case with the word ‘genocide’. It can only be ‘theirs’, in their lexicon alone. Their own sanctuary. We can only sully it. Reality, ‘our’ reality, is mocked, relativised, nuanced, drowned in a pathetic semantic argument.
We no longer live in times when a power colonises you, expropriates you, crushes you, exterminates you, without the slightest discourse or justification – although the divine will has more than once been invoked, brandished, but in the sense of the great civilisational good, never as a divine, eternal promise. No lands were ever promised, only conquered. We are no longer living in times of pure conquest by the strongest who came to take, seize, despoil, enslave, annihilate all resistance, all persistence in preserving a culture considered inferior, backward; we are living in these new times in which the victors afflict themselves by constantly undoing reality, holding a thousand and one press conferences, imposing themselves on television and radio programmes, inflicting this too on the vanquished. These are times of repeated, tenacious disinformation, times of permanent inversion of reality.
The tools of modern propagation are these traps that are constantly being set. It is no longer enough to see, to be able to see at all; ‘our’ images are not only suspect in their eyes, they are simply not ‘theirs’. The illusion of producing images, of producing narrative, is the absolute trap set for us by capitalism and its supreme stage, imperialism. The tools are there, at our fingertips, we are told, but even if we hijack them, pirate them, they are still ‘their’ tools, objects of immoderate consumption that will never be turned against them.
And we are always one step behind, one step less, in the face of their formidable propaganda machine. The present, even if it’s live, in full view of everyone, has become the new scapegoat, the new public enemy, against whom ‘they’ revel and rage, unleashing all the sad passions of our societies. The various silent majorities are their numerical soldiers, never reassured. The absolute vice is that, ‘at the same time’, they give us the perfect illusion of participating in the great media game, of being able, not to influence it, but to be part of it. The ‘integrated spectacular’, as Guy Debord puts it in his Commentaries on the Society of the Spectacle, is the absolute gift of our time. We are so conditioned that we cannot but participate fully in this great game of death. The hollows of our hands – which are constantly clutching our various intelligent devices – and our index fingers scanning images and texts day and night, trivialising their horror, are the perfect embodiment of this chimera, torturers and victims alike.
‘No one bears witness for the witness,’ wrote Paul Celan. The witness is alone, irreplaceable, no one can testify for him. What he sees, hears and touches, which is neither knowledge nor information, can never be proven. The witness is. Like a secret that cannot be shared with anyone, not even with the person to whom the oath or testimony is addressed, whom they take with them. But today the witness is out in the open, before his own imminent annihilation, his testimony is ‘live’, shared and sharable. He fills the sphere of the real that has become virtual, and vice versa. He more or less escapes the sphere of total control, unless he goes beyond it, except that he is now precisely in the visible sphere, i.e., in the sphere of the rules of the game, thus losing his status. He must now constantly prove himself, proving both his own presence and his own extinction. The witness is now even more cumbersome than ever, his solitude greater than ever.
On the 25th August, Jameel Meqdad wrote the following on his X account: ‘Any attempt to write from outside Gaza about its reality and its annihilation is unacceptable, because nothing can describe it, no one can and no one will. It’s bigger than you can imagine, bigger than you see, bigger than you expect. Don’t try.’
Ghassan Salhab is a film-maker. From Beirut, he reports on the situation in Lebanon and beyond.