The essays in this series were written during the summer of 2024, and may not fully address rapidly escalating violence in the region.

Antonio Gramsci describes “underground war” as one of three forms of war in anti-colonial struggles, but in the Prison Notebooks (1971) it is mentioned only briefly. Perhaps he was hinting at what should remain unknown or unknowable, especially in the language of the colonizer.

Underground war has been an essential form of resistance in Palestine. As anthropologist Esmail Nashif has argued, picking up on Gramsci’s framing, underground spaces and activities are sovereign zones that have shifted the power balance between the colonizer and the colonized (Nashif 2008). In Gaza, tunnels reveal the subterranean to be a space that evades colonial capture, despite Israel’s claims of military prowess. The only way Israel has been able to contend with the tunnels is through brute force and a policy of extermination.

Tunnels feature frequently in Gaza’s millennia-long history. Potters in Gaza have, for many generations, worked with local clay, and it is this intimate knowledge of the layers of earth that lent itself to the building of tunnels. The first modern tunnels in Gaza emerged in 1982, after the Camp David Accords led to the first border fence between the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula, effectively splitting the border town of Rafah in two.

Before this, the land between Gaza and Sinai had been contiguous and connected geographically and socially. Many families, tribes, and trade partners had long-standing relations spanning the newly divided border, which was a recent imposition by colonial Britain in 1906 as it confronted Ottoman rule in the region with little regard for the social geography. With the hardening of the border in 1982, well-worn ancient trade and pilgrimage routes—which had continued to serve as modern-day conduits for travel and trade—were suddenly cut off. Given this history and the social context, it should come as no surprise that tunnels reappeared, especially since the geology of the land lent itself to their clandestine construction under Israeli military occupation, which maintained a heavy presence in the Gaza Strip after Israel’s withdrawal from the Sinai.

The underground war in Gaza was so difficult to contain that it led to the Israeli so-called “disengagement” from the Gaza Strip—a departure from a direct boots-on-the ground occupation, during which Israeli soldiers were constant targets of the resistance—to an indirect occupation, one of containment and aerial bombardment. However, the containment was never complete, for Israel never had full control of the underground, a place where Palestinians reigned. During the bombardment of Gaza in 2014, also claimed by Israel to be aimed at stopping the tunnels, one relative asked me, “They have the land, the sea, the sky—they don’t want to leave us the underground?”

There is no technology to detect tunnels—Israel and the United States have been trying for years to develop it. The United States could not stop the Cu Chi tunnels of Vietnam, nor does it have a way to detect the many tunnels crossing the U.S.–Mexico border. It is heavily dependent on informants, despite millions invested in technology development. Israel, after years of claiming to be developing such technology, and despite several brutal bombing campaigns aimed at conquering the “tunnels,” has also failed to contain them. The opacity of the underground is a blind spot for colonial regimes of occupation and surveillance and for settler-colonial states that seek to eliminate the native. What then should we seek to know about the underground other than how it reveals colonizers’ inability to understand and contain it?

Western science cannot contend with the relations between colonized peoples and the land. The legacy of separating nature from culture endures to a great extent, especially in the earth sciences. Geology in particular emerged through British imperial military conquests and continues to inform the military apparatus of Western powers. Indigenous knowledge of the land has largely been enfolded into state institutions (Sangwan 1994), except in the case of settler states, where the local holders of knowledge are excluded through ethnic cleansing and other forms of erasure. This is the earth-knowledge gap that settler states cannot grasp.

But these forms of knowing and relations are difficult for even critical theory scholars to contend with. Indigenous scholars have for years criticized science studies scholars for attributing “agency” to non-human entities rather than taking seriously the idea of a deeper, spiritual human–non-human relationship (Watts 2013). In a recent article, one geographer researching Israel’s war on Gaza’s tunnels deployed assemblage theory and interviewed Israeli scientists and military personnel. He concluded that it is the agency of the subsoils that unsettled Israel’s territorial control and by extension, its territorial sovereignty (Slesinger 2018). Palestinians are entirely excluded from the story. Here lie the limits of assemblage theory; granting agency to the non-human material earth while severing that material’s relations from the humans who have known, shaped it, and lived with it so intimately for generations. Ignoring historical and social context is to underestimate the power of Indigenous relations with and knowledge of their land.

In a 1972 lecture, Native American scholar Vine Deloria describes the relations between Indigenous people and the land. He explains the difference—how the white Christian man is buried in a coffin, segregated from the land, whereas Native Americans (like most Palestinians) are buried directly in the earth without a coffin. This is why it is so unfathomable to “sell” their land: the first three feet of the land are actually the dust of their ancestors.

Palestinian resistance on (or in) the ground is made possible by this kind of relationship; they have long colluded with the land (and sea) in their underground warfare and against ethnic cleansing (Abu Hatoum and Assali 2023). These relations are loving reverence as expressed commonly in Palestinian song, poetry, political slogans, and even in forms of worship. A martyred fighter in Gaza was seen making sujood (prostration) on the ground as his life slipped away. Israel attempts to sever the relations between the people and their land through the removal of the people themselves. After decades of attempts to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from their land, they have now resorted to genocidal annihilation. But no genocide is ever complete. Palestinians say, “the land knows her people,” for, as Deloria explained, they are in fact one. What kind of “knowing” can explain this deep inextricable relation with the land? Should it not, as Gramsci once suggested, remain underground and opaque?