The Counterattack in the Wars of Awareness and Meaning

SadaNews - I was inspired by a report from my friend and colleague Nidal Kna’aneh, which titled this article. This topic is not far from what I write, but rather at the core of what occupies my thoughts. Palestine is no longer just a bleeding geographical wound, but the war in and on it has become a clear and unambiguous war on meaning, encompassing all social, cultural, and existential dimensions. This is in an open confrontation with the implications of distortion and commodification, the distortion of visual testimonies, and the commodification of the human image, which necessarily shifts us from a state of contemplation to a state of action.

In the wars of image and meaning, it is not enough for the truth to show what the eye sees; we must liberate what the image says from all its meanings that are trapped within the rhetoric of speeches and their resonant slogans. This is not to scrutinize its similar or conflicting details, but to reshape the world’s awareness of what occurs in darkness and in public.

The battle is no longer merely a battle fought on the field; rather, it is fundamentally a tool of war on consciousness, and it forms a space for bias to be tested, where the ability to extract the narrative is either in favor of the victim as a conscious agent of what they desire or falls into the grip of the colonizer and what they want.

In the context of victory and defeat, it is no longer a military structure produced by armies, but rather a structure that forms in the minds and their interactions, which are aware of what occurs within and around them, based on what stabilizes with firmness and fragility, and with exploitation and transcendence, and with the sacred and the desecrated, and perhaps from details that can reflect the truth in its eternal struggle between the absolute and the relative, as well as between the objective and the subjective.

Therefore, we must realize that what is truly targeted, in addition to the human being and their existence, is the truth itself and its presence in the image, as a distinguished political and human text; the image here is meant to be entirely absent, not with distorted details, as we note from the warning of the office of the Prime Minister of extermination to the actors in delivering aid, "It is forbidden to photograph Gaza from the sky."

Thus, we are faced with a narrative that does not merely use starvation as a negotiating tool but also as a means to erase meaning and context; the meaning of an army that kills an entire people under the pretext of fighting "terrorism" in full view of the world, and the context of the international system that is either powerless or "complicit" in the presence of stripping the people under occupation of their right to life, their voice, their image, their bread, their water, and their history. Is there anything more horrific than an entire people being erased twice, once by hunger and once by silence and abandonment?

The Counterattack...

What the colonizer seeks in this confrontation against human civilization does not stop at preventing the visibility of Gaza from the sky but strives to obscure its face from visual memory; not just because the image of savagery is ugly or despicable, but because the image has ceased to be merely a medium for conveying news and has become a documentation of the event/crime, which has turned into a double crime: physical extermination and visual extermination; a crime that strives to strike at consciousness in its heart and to void meaning of its context, leaving the arena open for the re-production of the victim in the narratives of traditional media and its modern shadows on "social media."

This re-production, derived from the texts of the biblical myth and its military manifestations, compels us to work retrospectively on the collective identity and its targeted expressions, not merely as a definition of the self, but as a meaning and fabric capable of actively contributing to defining its role and interpreting its function in the context of shaping collective visions and aspirations carried by the civilizational heritage, where salvation cannot lie in individuality but must be manifested in the clear embodiment of the collective and its mechanisms aligning with the imagination of identity and the call of its metaphors, meanings, and forms of development in a way that grants it the necessary ability to confront and endure.

This counterattack urgently needs a dual diagnosis of reality and its conditions and outcomes on one hand, and the latent energy within the collective and its capabilities on the other; the main aim of this diagnosis is to establish what can be defined as "the concept of transcendence", transcending factors of alienation and the obstacles of division; transcending contradiction and dissonance, the fruitless debates between dogmas and interpretations, between the sacred and the desecrated, between what is deemed legitimate and what contradicts it; a transcendence that widely opens the field for a climate of consensus rather than polarization, so we can together rearrange the tools of confrontation in the wars of awareness and meaning.

This battle we are waging today revolves not around the image in its captured dimensions, nor around the discourse imbued with the traces of spilled blood, but centers around the meaning intended to be erased from its roots and reshaped according to the engineering of the victors for what remains for the vanquished; hence, the counterattack cannot enact change unless it transforms into a lever for a liberation project that begins with awareness and does not end with rephrasing the self and the essence of rights, as two cores that cannot be reduced to an image, nor can they be seized in discourse; for the battle is no longer about colonialism wanting to oust us, but rather a battle over how we are defined in awareness and meaning, whether we are seen as surplus to need or as a being deserving of life?