Reading the Dead of Gaza: Musha’ as mentality

I am trying to read the Dead during the ongoing sought-after annihilation of Life in Palestine’s so-called Gaza Strip. Accompanying me is Denise Ferreira da Silva’s essay ‘Reading the Dead: A Black Feminist Poethical Reading of Global Capital’.1 There the philosopher writes, ‘the wounded flesh exposes total violence as a means that ensures profit and its accumulation through the appropriation of total value, that is, that global capital consists in nothing more than the expropriated productive capacity of slave bodies and Native lands’.2 I keep in mind that no two contexts are the same – Palestine’s ongoing genocide, unfolding over two centuries, is not the same as the long pasts of the Indigenous communities of the Americas, of over 500 years of genocide and slavery. In Palestine, I focus on Native lands, where vital recovery of land can only be liberatory if the relationship humans once had to that land is critically reclaimed. While holding space for the material and psychological consequences of Israel’s attempted annihilation of Life in Palestine, most especially in Gaza, I want to identify the radical potential for Life, through the act of listening to the Dead who lie inside its lands.

In her essay, Da Silva builds on critical theoretical categories introduced by the literary critic Hortense Spillers in her essay ‘Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe’ written in the summer of 1987, months before the Palestinian Intifada shook the Zionist colonization project to its core:

But I would make a distinction in this case between ‘body’ and ‘flesh’ and impose that distinction as the central one between captive and liberated subject-positions. In that sense, before the ‘body’ there is the ‘flesh,’ that zero degree of social conceptualization that does not escape concealment under the brush of discourse, or the reflexes of iconography … If we think of the ‘flesh’ as a primary narrative, then we mean its seared, divided, ripped-apartness, riveted to the ship’s hole, fallen, or ‘escaped’ overboard.3

Spillers created the category of the ‘flesh’ because she had found herself unable to theorize the horror of lived colonized, enslaved, murdered Black lives – a moment where, as she writes, ‘the language broke down’.4

Today, again, the language has broken down.

After spending weeks in the Gaza Strip as a volunteer, surgeon Ghassan Abu Sitta asks, ‘Where do you bury a little boy’s leg?’5 He maps out the workings of one of Israel’s illegal weapons: ‘Phosphorous burns drill their way through until they have reached a very deep part of the body because as a chemical it continues to burn until it is no longer exposed to oxygen.’6 In January 2024, someone in Gaza City said: ‘They follow us to our graves even after we are dead.’7 Reports detail the invading soldiers opening graves to steal warm bodies; elsewhere Israeli military bulldozers destroy graves, leaving tracks identifiable on footage from space.8 ‘For the past 435 days, I’ve seen a dead body every single day. I’ve heard the screams of parents every single day. I’ve seen the flesh of children every single day’ – journalist Hossam Shabat.9 ‘The dogs took out a body from one of the graves and were eating it’, says Rehab Abu Daqqa, living with her children in a tent near a cemetery in Rafah.10 While Israel’s blatant theft of Palestinian land in the West Bank has increased exponentially since 7 October 2023, its collaborator, the Palestinian Authority, sends its security forces to crush Palestinian resistance, killing both fighters and bystanders.11 ‘They embezzle us with some of our own flesh’, one Jenin resident says referring to the local authorities.12 Mohamed al-Kurd begins a talk with the disclaimer, ‘no debate while flesh is still burning’.13

How to speak – how to write – of the grief, the agony, the fear, the despair, the loneliness, the shock, the hunger, the pain, the pain, the pain, the disdain of the world’s centres of power in their full approval of all this? What to do in the face of their excusing, defending, whitewashing, funding, and arming the perpetrator?

For if the flesh holds, as a mark/sign, colonial violence, the Dead’s rotting flesh returns this marking to the soil, and the Dead then remain in the very compositions of anything, yes, as matter, raw material, that nourishes the instruments of production, labor, and capital itself. That is how the dead slave/Native lives in/as capital.14

The flesh of Palestinians marks the open wound of the ongoing sought-after annihilation of Life in Palestine – persisting even during a ceasefire – binding it not only to a settler colonialism, but to global capital. Such processes of indiscriminate murder, mutilation and theft of flesh – of kidnapping and torture of bodies – are permitted because it serves global capital. The eradication of Life in Palestine profits the global weapons industry and simultaneously is an unabashed testing ground for its newest technologies.15 Almost an afterthought are Gaza’s yet-unexploited gas fields, which multinationals are ready to devour off its shores – likely already siphoned off for years by Israel’s nearby drilling – to keep sustaining the gluttonous industries of capital in the centres of power complicit in the annihilation.16

دون أن يودّع أحداً
ولا حتى لحمه

And bid no one farewell
not even to his flesh

writes Refaat Alareer.17 The Israeli military assassinated the poet and educator in his home alongside his family, likely because, days earlier on live TV, he had made the comparison between the Warsaw Ghetto uprising and al-Aqsa Flood, what some have called ‘the Great Intifada’18 – breaking through an imposed colonial boundary and opening the imaginary for the possibility of Return.19 Alareer echoes the argument of the militant psychiatrist Frantz Fanon on the legitimacy of revolutionary violence in response to relentless colonial brutality. That argument, by now a cliché, is only still urgent in the echo chambers of neocolonial self-righteousness.20 Yet, the act of resistance and ultimately liberation is not limited to the initial breach of the colonial barrier and Palestinians crossing back into their stolen lands, but since the outpouring of absolute destruction on Gazans, it is the ongoing daily radical will of people to live, to breathe, to forage for food, to cook, to study, to dig for the living and the dead beneath the rubble, of mothers to nurse the babies of other murdered mothers, of doctors to operate on the injured without vital supplies, to tend to the sick; every single act heroic, and the heroes, protagonists in a narrative of liberation across all of Palestine and along the still-expanding borders of Israel.21

Nadera Shaloub-Kevorkian identifies the wounded flesh as exposing something more, a liberatory tendency in the act of searching for ashlaa’ – the flesh of the shredded body – of strangers and loved ones. For the Palestinian criminologist, ashlaa’ is ‘both a sign of extreme violence and terror, as well as a refusal of such genocidal dehumanization’, while those who search for and speak of ashlaa’ are powerfully ‘using their own language and Arabic syntax, producing their own morphology’.22 These acts of resistance stage ‘the architecture of the shredded body as a source of power against the violence of anti-Palestinian racism and Zionist supremacy’, by which, she writes, ‘Gazans are refusing physical and social dismemberment, instead choosing the path of actual and epistemic reunification through collecting and unifying the ashlaa’ … [and thereby] connect the past and the present, the living and the dead’.23

Such a reading challenges and breaks with certain norms of common reason. In the face of unspeakable brutality of the genocide, a reading of the Dead must entail a ‘refusal to engage, to maintain thinking within the limits … of modern thought’.24

Death is not defeat in revolutionary struggle.25

Musha’ as mentality

Once we break from our own commitments to the liberal paradigm – once we stop being occupied by its ludicrous claims – only then can we ask: What do the Dead of Gaza, the ashlaa’ of Palestinians, mean for the coming liberation – all of ours?26 In order to venerate the Dead there must be a radical break with modernity’s present, sincerely seeking ‘the destruction of pre-existing institutions’ – guerrilla warfare’s raison d’être, a striving for ‘the end of the world as we know it, which entails listening to the Dead’.27 Those who stand with Palestinians while living outside Palestine must take advantage of the luxury of not being consumed by the eye of the storm, and act on the premonition that ‘the enemy never withdraws sincerely’.28

What have the Dead of Gaza been saying?

The act of refusal in the face of the genocidal killing machine, the act of persistence, the streaming of inhabitants of Gaza back to their mostly obliterated homes in the North – is an act of defiance, and devotion to the land. The living and the Dead of Gaza embody the cosmology of sumoud, a cleaving to the land. The priority of colonizers on the other hand, has always been the taking of land, which by necessity entailed the violent transformation of peoples’ communal relations to the land, into one of ownership.29 The jurist and Nazi Carl Schmitt wrote of that colonial act: ‘In every case, land-appropriation, both internally and externally, is the primary legal title that underlies all subsequent law.’30 As elsewhere, it applies in Palestine, where the ‘transformation of ‘Palestine’ into the ‘Land of Israel’ by colonial default entailed the expropriation of land’, since the Zionists believed that ‘after the Arabs are transferred, the country will be wide open for us … . Not a single village or a single tribe must be left’.31 If the founding principle of the colonial enterprise is the expropriation of land – as Schmitt laid bare – one that is still ongoing today in Israel’s expansion everywhere it can, be it Northern Gaza, the West Bank, Southern Lebanon, or Southwestern Syria, then decolonization must certainly include the undoing of that expropriation, and vitally entail the dismantling of the mentality which that expropriation imposes.

If one listens closely enough, they might make out ancestors everywhere speaking of the necessity of undoing the relationship to land that the colonizers enforced in order to make possible the expropriation: private property, which causes the separation between humans and the land through the destruction of land commons, in Palestine and its environs أرض مشاع.

The term ard musha’ is used differently from region to region within the former Ottoman Empire, referencing a variety of systems of land distribution, it is the dominant understanding of it that I will be referring to here.32 For many people in the region ard musha’ once identified ‘the community … as a custodian of the right to produce (i.e., to subsist) to which each member is entitled by virtue of kinship or residence’, it is a system of collective stewardship outside the liberal rights regime.33 Musha’ land demarcated a social relation within the community and with the land itself, reverberating across the Earth, ‘for everyone, everything’. Al-ard al-musha’ is critically anti-capitalist as our struggles must be, while realigning human relations with the Earth by countering capital’s drive of infinite expansion, certainly a proponent of the sought-after annihilation of Life in Palestine.34 Al-ard al-musha’ was a critical obstacle to the colonizing mission and its claim to progress. Colonialism’s end must entail the return of stolen land, yet fully putting out colonialism’s flame requires the undoing of its enforced ideology of private property.35

On 1 January 1994, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, EZLN) stormed onto the Mexican political scene in response to the ultimate attempt to break up their communal lands (ejido), an ongoing struggle that started with the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors in 1519 but only reached its apex with the neocolonial Mexican government’s privatization of the remaining ejido, as a prerequisite for Mexico signing onto the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which would come into effect on that New Year’s Day.36 And so it was on 1 January 1994, that the EZLN occupied towns in the south of Mexico, and burned papers in the state’s land registry. The first political act of the EZLN was to return the ejido to the stewardship of communities, recovering it from capital that sought to finish the job of turning communal land into private property. Later that year, the EZLN published the ‘Second Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle’, which included the words with which Da Silva grapples in her essay:

Facing the mountain we speak with our dead so that they will reveal to us in their word the path down which our veiled faces should turn. The drums rang out and in the voice of the earth our pain spoke and our history spoke.

’For everyone, everything’, say our dead. ’Until it is so, there will be nothing for us’.37

Thirty years later, after ongoing struggles with the state over land, as well as reflection and consultation with their elders, the Zapatistas have come to the realization that despite its communal nature, the ejido remains within the logic of the state, because ‘communal property … only existed if it was registered and that, with the same laws … [the state can] diminish it until it disappears’.38 Consequently, the EZLN called for the critical category of ‘non-property’ outside the purview of the state. While the Ottoman Empire in its final years sought to eliminate property held in common, it was too weak to implement the decision and contrary to the officials’ desires, musha’ lands expanded, reaching an estimated 70 percent of land in Palestine at the moment of its occupation by the British.39 Under Ottoman rule, the land that fell under the musha’ category was considered the ownership of God, who in the Empire was represented by the Sultan, and who in turn conferred it to communities as its collective stewards. Until the failed attempt of the Ottoman Empire and the arrival of colonizers, ard musha’ existed outside the liberal regime of property of the modern nation-state. ‘We should be wary of reifying the notion of al-musha’, writes the anthropologist Martha Mundy, ‘at issue is not a uniform system of tenure but an idiom of cultivators for thinking relations within the village, to the fisc and to land, in terms of shares’.40 This might weaken the term’s applicability as a fixed concept with which to oppose colonialism’s logic, yet this is the case only if we continue to operate within the chokehold of modernity’s workings. Al-ard al-musha’ offers a relationship to land, and a set of strategies, not a totalizing concept, precisely because it didn’t appease the juridical categories of the modern state, thus further strengthening its applicability as a mentality with which to counter the making private, the separation of humans and the land, as well as the state itself, the custodian of this separation. When musha’ becomes a mentality, it allows our ‘political imagination to learn to do without’ the rules of modern thought, one critical step towards decolonization, arguing not for an implementation of ard musha’ as a fixed system in an archaic return to the past, but rather than an embracing of spiral of time by re-assessing past practices for the present.41 In Palestine, this entails retaining the land materially from the Zionist occupation, conceptually from the British colonial project before it, and critically also keeping it from the elites / ruling class of a sought- after Palestinian state.42 What the Zapatistas teach, is that this collectivization of land outside of the purview of the state is ‘necessary to be able to face the storm – nature[’s] … way of protesting, increasingly louder and increasingly terrible’ against modernity’s sowing of ‘darkness, death, destruction’.43 The Zionist occupier’s onslaught continues to annihilate Life, beings of all kind, humans, animals, plants, trees, and finally the soil.44 Israel has imbued the colonial act of ‘scorched earth’ new meaning, including the destruction even of the colonial demarcation of land made private – in areas of its deepest incursions removing every proof of the Carob tree that was the border – Gaza thus demarcates a reset.45 A destruction with a mission of: ‘Everything for us’.

Against this, ‘everything for everyone’ asserted by a musha’ mentality, is the unthinkable transformation from destruction into radical possibility. For what should be done with the land that was once owned by families, the entirety of which the Zionist occupier has brutally wiped out? As of 21 January 2025, the number of these families is estimated at 2092.46 ‘Everything for everyone’ – make it common. The land for the community as musha’, is an affront to the colonization effort of all types, the martyrs’ decomposing flesh bringing about the land’s renewal. In Mexico, the struggle for land commons has ebbed and flowed for over 500 years and since 1994, communities are once again making lands communal. Making the land musha’, is a place to begin to prepare for the end of the colonization of Palestine, because end it will, as all colonialisms do: it is only a matter of time.47 Under the tyranny of modern thought, decolonization in Palestine is incomprehensible. Yet after Palestinians broke through the colonial walls and returned to their ancestral land – even if temporarily – on the day of 7 October 2023, decolonization is more imaginable than ever.

‘From the river to the sea’, the Dead of Gaza insistently whisper, ‘for everyone, everything’. Prior to the establishment of a Jewish supremacist state in 1948, residents of Palestine, irrelevant of faith, lived side by side; prior to British occupation in 1914, a majority of the inhabitants of the land, and the land itself lived free of the myth of private property.48 ‘From the river to the sea’ expresses a notion that is not national, but decolonial. ‘From the river to the sea’ articulates radical relations between all beings, including humans to the land. ‘From the river to the sea’ relays the necessity to re-set our compasses – all of them.

Postscript, May 2026

This text was completed during a short ceasefire in Gaza in the winter of 2025. In spite of the latest ceasefire agreement, Israeli state and non-state actors continue to annihilate life in Palestine. On Monday, 11 May 2026, the Israeli parliament passed a law determining that all Palestinians deemed to have participated in the 7 October attacks will be put on trial before a military tribunal, which determines the public execution by hanging of anyone found guilty.49 This manifests yet another level to the ongoing murder of Palestinian life by systematic, state-sanctioned judicial means.

Meanwhile, another shift is taking place in the blowback to the recent brutal and illegal attacks by the US and Israel on Iran. By the day, by the hour, a geopolitical realignment is taking shape that will continue to affect realities in Palestine and the region around it, with significant threat to Western narratives of supremacy. The impending show trials of Palestinians will not save the Zionist project in the face of the haughtiness of its leaders and its people.50 The breaking of old systems entails an opening. A vision is necessary for Palestinian life that builds on the past, but is enlivened for the present. A vision that sets an example for the world.

Glory to the martyrs
المجد للشهداء

The author thanks Linda Quiquivix, Denise Ferreira da Silva, and Marwa Arsanios for their feedback on earlier drafts. Notes: The author has chosen to link archive.is for online sources where possible. However, the original url is listed in the link.