IMRAAN COOVADIA

People have begun to refer to the three hundred and sixty five square kilometre district of Gaza as a “death-world.” The phrase is Achille Mbembe’s but the concept draws on explorations of extremity in the twentieth century: the Soviet and Nazi camps, the Cambodia’s Year Zero, the starvation of millions in the Ukrainian Holodomor and the Chinese Great Leap Forward. These were places where a leviathan state confronted people to whom it denied any rights, including the right to survival. So much of modern political culture assumed that no modern state would create another such death world, let alone that Israel would be abetted and encouraged and protected by the superpower of the United States in starving and burning the entire population of the Gaza Strip. But the political and military class of the United States and Israel know exactly what they are doing. This is an unprecedented clarification of the meaning of the West.

Critics have counted the consolations of literary tragedy for more than two thousand years. To watch a tragedy on stage is to prepare for one’s own tragedies. Tragedy is a warning against ourselves. Tragedy offers a sense of consolation and infinitude, lifts our being from horror to pity and catharsis. But to watch a tragedy unfold in reality offers no rewards other than a certain clarification.

The United States is, with respect to the Palestinian people, an exterminationist superpower and much more so than China, Russia, Iran.

The United States and Israel are leading us into a world where extermination is a reasonable goal of state action. Their speed and decisiveness, not to say brazenness, pose a problem for any kind of non-violent response.

Does anyone think that holding another demonstration or signing another petition will forestall the destruction of Gaza City as planned for September 2025? And afterwards the creators and sponsors and border guards of the death world will still be in place. We will have to live with them in some way, and with ourselves, although we didn’t manage to pause the killing for a single day.

As South Africans we are accustomed to living amongst our abusers and exploiters, who almost never go to prison.

You learn to live with your sorcerers, as a proverb from another part of the continent goes. You learn to coexist with the perpetrators. You walk on the other side of the street from them. That kind of weird wisdom works to some degree for individuals and political parties. What it means to live with dominant states of bad magic and mass killing isn’t clear yet. But it isn’t difficult to imagine that their own plans are not going to work out in the way they think.