Living in Death: The New Dystopian Reality of Israeli Settler Colonialism in Gaza

Viver-morrendo: a nova realidade distópica do colonialismo por povoamento israelense em Gaza

Abstract

The contemporary case of settler colonialism in Palestine/Israel generates debates about the different types of violence – physical, territorial, and mental – experienced by the Palestinians. For more than 15 years, the Gaza Strip has been under blockade and isolated from the other Palestinian territories and the world. This reality has led to interpretations of Gaza as a laboratory, where remote-controlled weapons and the limits of human survival are tested. This makes Gazans use expressions such as ‘slow death’ or ‘living death’ to describe their lives. This article analyses six short stories from the science fiction book ‘Palestine +100: Stories from a century after the Nakba’ (2019) to investigate how the Israeli settler colonialism impacts Palestinian fictional production on Gaza. We argue that the persistence of the Nakba in the Palestinian present through continued expulsions, destruction and assassinations by Israel has made life an everyday dystopia. Furthermore, it made Palestinians’ imaginations regarding their future no longer utopian dreams of liberation, but dystopian and cyclical nightmares of confinement and death. Living eternally in the nightmare, as observed in Palestinian artistic productions, works as a colonial counterrevolutionary strategy. In this bleak reality, Gazans are left with the alternative of ‘living in death.’

Keywords
Dystopia; Gaza Strip; Palestinian science fiction; death; utopia