This essay is a response to Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian's "Ashlaa’ and the Genocide in Gaza: Livability against Fragmented Flesh."

The character of settler-colonial violence is, by its nature, performative, spectacular, and thus patently non-utilitarian. Colonial violence must be exercised in ways that are seen not to confer on the perpetrator any military or security advantage. Its brutality is meant to be seen only in the end result and not in the very means of destruction.

In the current war on Gaza, an expression of its unadulterated violence has been the use of fragmentation munitions that disproportionately cause amputations and the use of bombs whose destructive power far exceeds that needed for the intended target. As a surgeon that served Gazans, and as someone that saw, and witnessed first-hand, the making of ashlaa’, I experienced viscerally their performative power.

For many Palestinians trying to grieve and bury their slain loved ones, a complete body, if any at all, is a luxury many are not afforded. Medical teams in the operating rooms of the Gaza Strip would take an amputated limb and place it in a cardboard box at the end of surgery. The cardboard box would then be taped up and the patient’s name is written on the box. The limb-coffin would then be given to the family to bury, with as much dignity as they could manage. In one night at al-Ahli hospital we filled six such limb-coffins.

Following a missile attack, survivors try to collect the ashlaa’ of their beloved in order that, at least in death, they remain unaltered and undiminished; that they remain themselves. The less fortunate have to wait days, weeks, if not months to return to the rubble of their home or the shallow mass-graves once the Israeli ground forces withdraw from the area so that they can search and piece back together the decayed and scavenged remains of their children, siblings, parents, or relatives. As horrific as that is, they are luckier than those who have not been able to access or find the bodies buried under tons of rubble; or that, once hit by a two thousand pound bomb, where there is simply nothing left of the human body to find.

Of the 21,000 children in Gaza that Save the Children says are currently missing, the majority belong to these two categories: they are either buried under the rubble or they have been pulverized. But even those who were buried whole are not safe and might not escape being turned into ashlaa’ after death. Israeli army bulldozers and tanks have intentionally ploughed up cemeteries during their many incursions and repeat incursions, digging up bodies in their wake and turning bodies buried whole into ashlaa’. For Israel, death is not the end point of the violence. It pursues its victims beyond death to reinjure, or over-injure them post-mortem.

Nadera Shaloub-Kevorkian’s theorization explores the significance of this phenomenon of dismemberment, or more accurately, making ashlaa’, for victims and survivors trying to resist the intensifying dismemberment of their loved ones; as well as for the rest of us trying to make sense of unfathomable levels of racialized violence by the perpetrator and the racialized indifference of the Western world.

The meaning of ashlaa’ in Arabic is more than fragmented remains, however. It encompasses an implicit understanding that the sum of the ashlaa’ or body parts will not make a deceased person whole again, and thus there is certain futility in their collection.

After my forty-three days working as a surgeon in this genocidal war in Gaza and twenty years as a war surgeon, I came to the following conclusion. The difference between a war and a genocide is that the former destroys the present in order to alter the future whereas a genocide destroys the past and the present in order to prevent the future from happening. Visiting the graves of loved ones is a way of encountering the past that allows people to move forward from a painful present to a more hopeful future. Israel’s dismemberment of the dead Palestinian body into unburyable ashlaa’ is part of preventing such a future.