Gaza and the Geopolitics of Affect
Nouri gana
Kaouther Ben Hania’s The Voice of Hind Rajab received a nod at the 98th Academy Awards in 2026, but not, in the end, the requisite dignity of an acknowledgment. The distinction is not merely rhetorical. A nod registers that something has been seen, noticed, perhaps even momentarily felt, but is without consequence; it remains a fugitive gesture of awareness that harbors a dismissive impulse, discharging the very claim it appears to honor. An acknowledgment, by contrast, binds the witness to the witnessed. It implies that what has been heard makes a claim that obliges a response, interrupts the ordinary flow of the status quo, and carries within it the potential for redress.
A politics of the nod had already been choreographed a year earlier when No Other Land won the Academy Award for Best Documentary in 2025 without ever securing an American distributor. While it easily secured distribution in twenty-four countries (including the UK and France), major US studios and streamers shunned the film, leading the team to self-distribute its American theatrical release. Shortly after the Oscars ceremony, its Palestinian co-director, Hamdan Ballal, was assaulted by settlers in the Masafer Yatta region of the occupied West Bank and detained by the Israeli army. The Academy initially declined even to name him in its carefully delayed, sanctimoniously sanitized, and ultimately evasive statement of concern, apologizing only after hundreds of its members signed a letter of rebuke.
The Oscar statuette—whether conferred or merely dangled—stages a politics of the nod: an admission of knowledge underwritten by a denial of acknowledgment. Stanley Cavell captured this distinction very well when he observed that acknowledgment goes beyond mere knowledge “in its requirement that I do something or reveal something on the basis of that knowledge.” Knowledge without acknowledgment amounts therefore not to “a piece of ignorance, an absence of something, a blank,” but to “the presence of something, a confusion, an indifference, a callousness, an exhaustion, a coldness. Spiritual emptiness is not a blank.” A nod, in this sense, is precisely knowledge counterfeiting acknowledgment. Between the two lies a gap that is at once psychoaffective and geopolitical.
The voice at the center of Ben Hania’s film—a child’s call for rescue, sustained across minutes of fear, bureaucratic delay, and encroaching danger—has not lacked for real-time or live witnessers and listeners. It has, moreover, been circulated widely, replayed across platforms, translated across contexts, and absorbed into a global archive of suffering that is at once immediate and distant. The emergency call is perhaps the last genre of speech that still presumes answerability: to dial a dispatcher is to invoke an entire infrastructure premised on the conviction that a voice in distress obligates whoever hears it. Hind Rajab’s call is therefore not simply an instance of pain made audible; it is a scene of address. To hear it is to be placed, however briefly and however unwillingly, in the position of responder. But the contemporary media field into which her call was released is built to multiply hearing without obliging answer. It can amplify, replay, commemorate, and circulate. What it struggles, or refuses, to do is bind feeling to action.
Saidiya Hartman warned of this dynamic when she declined to reproduce, in the opening of Scenes of Subjection, the scene of Aunt Hester’s beating in Frederick Douglass’s Narrative. What does the routine reiteration of scenes of suffering do to those who consume them? Rather than inciting indignation, Hartman suggested, their very familiarity threatens to desensitize us to pain, to erode the uncertain line between witness and spectator. The itinerary of Hind’s audio recording bears out the worry. At Berkeley, student organizers played it on loop, at high volume, in one of the most trafficked corners of campus near Sather Gate; deployed to stoke action, the recording gradually blended into the university’s ambient soundscape, one signal among many. Likewise, on February 25, 2025, the Palestinian envoy Riyad Mansour played the same recording at a session of the United Nations Security Council—the very organ constituted to answer such calls: her voice filled the chamber, entered the record, and was answered with little to nothing. The same institution that could not answer her call would later host a screening of the documentary film made from it. The point is not to indict the student organizers, nor the Palestinian envoy, whose mutual wager was that repetition might finally hammer the address home. It is to register how swiftly even the most piercing scene of address can be absorbed into the hum of circulation—whether on a university campus or in a UN chamber—how saturation from below and proceduralism from above alike can come to stand in for the acknowledgment they immediately seek yet, eventually, forestall.
The film condenses, with brutal clarity, the larger geopolitical form that Gaza has come to occupy in the world: a space overinvested with image and sound, saturated with witness, but persistently denied the dignity of a response. It is seen. It is heard. It is debated. It is documented. It is shared. And yet it remains, in a crucial sense, unanswered. The issue is not simply that Gaza produces grief, horror, rage, or fatigue; it is that these feelings do not circulate evenly, nor do they carry the same weight or consequence across geopolitical contexts. Some forms of feeling are amplified and rendered legible; others are dismissed, suppressed, criminalized, or recoded as excessive, choreographed, inflammatory, or threatening. The result is not a shared emotional landscape but a differentiated economy of affect, structured by power differentials, in which certain lives are made to count as grievable and others are not, certain losses are made to matter and others are not, certain voices are heard as claims and others merely as noise.
This is the violence of silence and omission that haunted the Dolby Theatre. While the “voice” of Hind Rajab was permitted to travel through the soundscape of Hollywood prestige, the body of the film’s lead Palestinian actor, Motaz Malhees, was barred from the ceremony by a visa denial. This double movement is telling: the aestheticized voice is registered as an object of pity, or even sympathy, but the presence of the sentient, breathing, political body is contained and condemned in advance as a potential disturbance. The nod was an institutional registration of excellence—procedural, self-contained, and complete the moment it was extended. The denial of dignity lay in the systemic barriers—from visa rejections to the cautious silence of major North American distributors—that treated the film as a political liability rather than a human testament.
The Geopolitics of AffectThe Voice of Hind Rajab stages, in miniature, the entanglement of affect and geopolitical alignments. What does it mean for a voice to be heard without being acknowledged? What does it mean for suffering to be widely visible and still remain structurally unanswered? These are not merely ethical questions. They are questions about the organization of feeling itself—about how affect travels, where it stalls, and when it is allowed to become binding within a global field of power.
It is in this sense that one might speak of a geopolitics of affect. The term has circulated in different registers over the past two decades, often associated with attempts to map collective emotions onto regions, cultures, or civilizations. Among the most prominent of these efforts is Dominique Moïsi’s The Geopolitics of Emotion, which proposes a world divided into affective zones: cultures of fear in the West, cultures of humiliation in the Arab and Muslim worlds, and cultures of hope in parts of Asia. “Humiliation in Ifrane, hope in Mumbai, fear in London,” Moïsi sketches in vignette form.
Such a cartography offers a seductive clarity, promising to render the world intelligible through a limited set of dominant emotional dispositions. But, regardless of the descriptive purchase of this admittedly “impressionistic” framework, it proves strikingly inadequate to the affective scene in Gaza. At stake is not the expression of a stable, regionally bounded emotion, but the uneven circulation, regulation, and recognition of affect across multiple scales.
To characterize Gaza simply as a site of humiliation, as Moïsi’s schema suggests, is not categorically wrong so much as insufficient. It risks collapsing a complex field of feeling into a single, flattened register. Gaza is equally a site of sadness and melancholic attachment, of endurance and grit, of rage and love, of care and cynicism, of fear and hope, of despair and defiance. More importantly, these affects are not consigned to the local but always in motion; they are shared, transmitted, amplified, and contested across a global media environment that both intensifies or silences and distorts them.
What the current moment reveals is not a geography of distinct emotional cultures, but a differentiated economy of affect. Feelings do not simply belong to cultures or regions; they are governed through institutions and power relations that determine which affects become legible and which are rendered dangerous. The geopolitics of affect is thus less about identifying dominant emotions than about tracing the conditions under which affect becomes politically operative. When does grief compel recognition, and when is it contained? When does empathy translate into obligation? How does a nod at the Oscars amount to a denial rather than a confession of guilt? These questions require an analysis of the asymmetrical structures that govern affective circulation worldwide, and produce and reproduce affective maps across disparate geographies, societies, and geopolities.
Gaza makes these asymmetries visible with particular intensity. It is not that the genocide unfolding there goes unheard, unseen, or unfelt. On the contrary, it generates a saturation of images and testimonies that circulate globally, eliciting powerful emotional responses. Consider only the archive that has accumulated alongside Ben Hania’s film: the ad hoc press conference held by children outside al-Shifa hospital, pleading in English, “we want to live”; Bisan Owda’s dispatches, each opening with the refrain “this is Bisan from Gaza, and I’m still alive,” a greeting that has turned survival itself into serial news; Refaat Alareer’s 2011 poem “If I Must Die,” which traveled the world in dozens of translations after he was killed in an airstrike, its white kite becoming an emblem of the very grief it anticipated. Each of these circulated massively; each elicited feeling; none compelled the response it solicited. The affects generated by Gaza do not carry the same binding force across different contexts. They are amplified in some spaces, disavowed in others, and, crucially, often prevented from translating into forms of response that would alter the conditions they register.
To move beyond Moïsi’s cartography, then, it is crucial to shift the terms of analysis: instead of asking which regions feel humiliation, fear, or hope, we must rather discern how affect itself is differentially authorized, constrained, coopted and instrumentalized. The task, in other words, is not to map emotions onto the world, but to understand how imperial powers, settler-colonial regimes, and their aligned media conglomerates map and manage affect—how they produce, channel, filter, and, at times, foreclose or criminalize what can be publicly felt, displayed, and shared.
permissible feelingsA constantly livestreamed genocide ought to arouse, in any human being anywhere, something more than pity and more than revulsion. Karl Jaspers, writing from the ruins of another catastrophe, gave that something more a name: metaphysical guilt. “There exists a solidarity among men as human beings,” he wrote, “that makes each co-responsible for every wrong and every injustice in the world, especially for crimes committed in his presence or with his knowledge. If I fail to do whatever I can to prevent them, I too am guilty.” The real-time circulation of images of mass slaughter, infrastructural devastation, and the systematic targeting of civilians collapses the spatial and temporal distance that historically sheltered spectators from wartime atrocity—and, with it, the alibi of ignorance. Everything now happens in everyone’s presence, with everyone’s knowledge, and with everyone’s manifest torment, tacit compliance or conspicuous complicity. It is not surprising, therefore, that people around the globe took to the streets to denounce such depraved cruelty inflicted on a besieged and ceaselessly displaced population. What is surprising is the scale and intensity of the clampdown on demonstrations and acts of solidarity with Gazans across North America, Europe, Australia, and the Middle East.
States such as Israel, the United States, and Germany have made the management of affect a matter of policy, treating public displays of outrage over the Gaza genocide as a threat precisely because affect can crystallize into political mobilization. In Germany, demonstrations were banned and police dissolved the Palestine Congress in Berlin mid-session; in France, pro-Palestinian protests were prohibited outright in the early days of the genocide; in Britain, demonstrators were arrested over placards and chants; in the United States, encampments were cleared by riot police, students suspended and expelled, and legal residents detained and threatened with deportation for the content of their advocacy, while doxxing trucks circled campuses displaying the names and faces of protesting students. The regulation of affect thus operates as a form of intimidation, incrimination, and preemptive control, suppressing dissent while foreclosing the conditions under which shared suffering might be translated into acts of solidarity. In this way, the regulation of affect has become a central modality of contemporary state violence.
The result is the transformation of affect into an object of governance. In the effort to sever it from its political consequences, public mourning, funeral processions, vigils, and the display of flags have come under restriction, surveillance, and repression. At the same time, moments of joy, particularly those tied to survival, reunion, or the release of Palestinian prisoners, are framed as illegitimate or threatening provocations. Joy becomes suspect not because of what it expresses, but because of who expresses it. Israeli joy over the release of the hostages occupies pride of place in American mainstream media, broadcast as reunion and relief, while Palestinian joy over the release of prisoners, many of them held without charge, including women and children, is proscribed by Israel and pathologized by its aligned publics at home and abroad.
This double movement—of containing grief and disqualifying joy—reveals a structured delimitation of permissible affect: a set of rules that determine which feelings may appear, in what form, and with what consequences. Palestinian affect is not simply suppressed; it is meticulously managed, sorted, and hierarchized. Certain expressions are allowed insofar as they conform to recognizable scripts of suffering, while others are rendered excessive, inappropriate, or dangerous, if not anti-semetic tout court. Crucially, this regulation does not operate only through formal legal mechanisms. It is enacted through symbolic framing and media representation—the passive grammar of headlines in which Palestinians “die” while others “are killed.” The scare quotes hold Palestinian testimony at arm’s length—ensuring that affect is governed not merely at the level of expression but at the level of legibility: its meaning is pre-structured, its legitimacy pre-judged.
And yet the regulation is never total despite its ever tightening grip on the last commons left to the disenfranchised of this world: social media. On Instagram and TikTok, Palestinians have displayed the full affective range that mainstream framing forecloses: Renad Attallah, a ten-year-old who became one of Gaza’s most followed chefs by cooking improvised meals on a tent stove; weddings celebrated amid the rubble; jokes, games, chants, and dances; the stubborn domestication of displacement as families made homes of their encampments. These self-authored archives of steadfastness and even joy might seem to escape the economy of permissible affect—until one recalls that they, too, are regulated, no longer by biased editors and visa officers, but by a bigoted social media infrastructure. Human Rights Watch and the Palestinian digital-rights organization 7amleh (the Arab Center for Social Media Advancement) have documented the systematic suppression of Palestinian content on Meta’s platforms: posts removed, accounts throttled, reach quietly strangled. Joy is algorithmically demoted just as it is politically suspected. The dogged delimitation of permissible affect has not been totally outmaneuvered; instead, it has been brazenly delegated to code.
What emerges is a situation in which Palestinians are not only subjected to violence but are also constrained in how that violence can be registered or communicated. Seen in relation to the gap identified earlier between nod and acknowledgment, this governance of affect acquires particular significance. If, at the global level, Palestinian suffering is widely registered without binding response, at the local level it is often prevented from appearing in forms that could demand such response in the first place. The voice calls, but its conditions of audibility are constrained; grief insists, but its articulation is policed. What is foreclosed, in both instances, is the possibility that affect might become binding—that it might compel those who encounter it to respond.
The governance of affect thus forms a crucial dimension of the broader geopolitical landscape. It is not simply that Palestinians are denied their inalienable rights and freedoms, but that the very expression of everyday emotions, from residual sadness to fleeting joy, is subjected to regulation. Even basic rituals of mourning by local communities in Palestine are treated as a volatile threshold between affect and action, one that must be contained, lest it disrupt the narratives and coercive arrangements sustaining the Israeli imaginary as “the only democracy in the Middle East,” boasting “the most moral army in the world.” To govern affect in this way is to intervene at the level of subjectivity itself—to shape not only what can be done, but what can be felt and how it can be made visible. In this sense, the management of affect is inseparable from the management of life under conditions of occupation and siege.
withdrawal of affectThe settler-colonial regime, then, actively curtails Palestinian affective expression, as if feeling itself requires a permit. In parts of the Arab world with geopolitical affinities to that regime, something different occurs: affect is not curtailed but withdrawn—deliberately reoriented or foreclosed altogether. The normalization agreements (the so-called Abraham Accords) brokered by the United States in 2020 and 2021 between Israel and several Arab states—the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, later joined by Morocco and Sudan—mark not only a geopolitical shift, but an affective one, reconfiguring the structure of identification through which the question of Palestine had long been apprehended.
By identification I mean something quite distinct from empathy—indeed, something closer to its opposite. Here again Hartman is instructive. Analyzing the letters of John Rankin, a white abolitionist who imagined himself and his family in the place of the beaten slave the better to feel slavery’s horror, she showed how the substitution succeeds too well: in making the slave’s suffering his own, Rankin comes to feel for himself rather than for the enslaved, the captive body reduced to a vehicle for the spectator’s own sensations. Empathy is episodic, substitutive, spectatorial, and precarious; it visits the scene of suffering and returns home enlarged. It renders the other’s suffering intelligible precisely by displacing the other.
Identification, as I intend it here, is of another order: a durable libidinal investment, sedimented across generations, that constitutes the subject from within a common lifeworld and a shared sociocultural landscape. It is, in Diana Fuss’s formulation, “the detour through the other that defines a self,” the very “entry of history and culture into the subject, a subject that must bear the traces of each and every encounter with the external world.” For decades, Palestine functioned across the Arab world not as an object of pity, but as a cause through which political feeling itself was cognized and conveyed—a collective horizon of political commitment and moral alignment, never exempting Arabs from their basic responsibility toward Palestinians. However often this investment was exploited rhetorically by regimes in search of legitimacy, it sustained a foundational expectation: that Palestinian suffering would register as proximate, as one’s own, without ceasing to be Palestinian. Where empathy risks substituting the witness for the sufferer, identification binds them to each other.
The Abraham Accords upended this structure of identification. They inaugurated formal diplomatic relations between Israel and states that had previously withheld recognition in the absence of a resolution of the Palestinian question. They opened the way to direct trade, investment, tourism, technological cooperation, and increasingly explicit security coordination, while the United States accompanied normalization with bilateral incentives to several signatories: for the UAE, access to F-35 fighter jets; for Morocco, U.S. recognition of its sovereignty over Western Sahara; for Sudan, removal from the list of state sponsors of terrorism. But the Accords’ most radical innovation was sequential. The Arab Peace Initiative of 2002 had made normalization the endpoint of justice: recognition of Israel would follow the end of occupation and the establishment of a Palestinian state. The Accords inverted that order—normalization first, unconditional, with Palestine demoted from precondition to afterthought.
The Abraham Accords do not erase the enduring history of identification with the Palestininan cause, nor do they renegotiate it; they displace it altogether. Palestine ceased to function as the condition upon which regional integration with Israel depended. What emerges instead is a recalibration of feeling: a shift away from identification toward managed distance, in which strategic calculation takes precedence over inherited forms of solidarity. Within this register, to feel too strongly about Gaza risks appearing excessive or out of step with a reordered regional landscape. Solidarity is recoded as affective excess, while the language of injustice and resistance gives way, in part, to that of stability and security.
This transformation entails a redistribution of sympathy. Palestinian suffering does not disappear; it is absorbed into a broader field of concerns where it no longer commands a binding claim. The result is a geostrategic detachment: Gaza remains visible, its images and voices circulating as before, but the affective ties that might render its demands compelling are loosened. One sees, one hears, and one may even express concern, but without obligation.
Normalization thus amounts to nothing less than abandonment without acknowledgment. To acknowledge abandonment would be to register it as a loss and confront the attendant shame it foments. Instead, what we witness is a disavowal: a relinquishment that refuses to name itself as such. Ordinarily, to relinquish an object of identification requires mourning—a painful process of reckoning and negotiation, as Freud reminds us. Yet the leap into normalization amounts to a bastard form of mourning without mourning practices, in which loss is treated as already resolved even as it continues to insist.[1]
The result is an affective economy in which attachment is severed without being worked through, and in which the claims of the past are bracketed in the name of a brave and pragmatic future. The Abraham Accords thus mark not only a political realignment but a reorganization of affect: a shift from identification to detachment, from obligation to discretion, from acknowledgment to neutralization. In this sense, they mirror, in a different key, the global dynamic traced earlier—affect proliferates without binding those it reaches, and the demand for acknowledgment is continually evaded.
melancholy wagerWhat is puzzling about the leap into normalization with the aggressor is not only the short-circuiting of mourning, but the moral levity with which it is undertaken. No moral disturbance or melancholic maladjustment are discernible among the signatories of the Abraham Accords or their aligned publics. Ordinarily, such a radical realignment of historical and geopolitical identification would provoke a measure of moral guilt, even if immediately managed through bad-faith rationalization; if the loss of the Palestinian cause were acknowledged as a loss, it would have demanded a more profound psychic disturbance than any we have witnessed in the wake of the agreement.
In Freud’s classical account, mourning is a struggle of libidinal detachment from the lost object, one that encounters resistance at every turn. As he reminds us, “people never willingly abandon a libidinal position, not even, indeed, when a substitute is already beckoning to them” (SE 14:244). From this perspective, melancholia appears not as a pathological deviation from mourning, but as its underlying condition. If subjects “never willingly abandon” their attachments, then the persistence of libidinal investment precedes the work of detachment. Although melancholia initially appears in “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917) as pathological, characterized by moral self-reproach and diminished self-regard, in The Ego and the Id (1923) Freud argues that the ego is a “precipitate of abandoned object-cathexes” and that identification with the lost object is not an aberration but a routine psychic operation (SE 19:29).
Melancholia is thus not only a way to internalize and sustain loss, but also a mechanism of subjectivity. While this internalization results in relentless self-scrutiny, it nonetheless endows the melancholic subject with a “keener eye for the truth” (SE 14:246). The melancholic’s inward turn exposes what the normalized subject might otherwise disavow. This critical potential is decisive in the context of Palestine. When loss is produced by settler colonial dispossession, to “move on” is not to adjust to reality, but to capitulate to its terms. Melancholia becomes a refusal to normalize loss or detach from what has been taken by force. It is an ethical and political demand to address and redress an injustice that has not ended. This melancholic wager has structured Arab identification with Palestine since the 1948 Nakba, sustaining loss as a site of decolonial critique and a refusal to let go or move on.[2]
Of all the affective dispositions, melancholia is especially poised to carry ethical weight and moral lucidity. Fidelity to the lost object is also fidelity to the claim that object makes upon the living. The melancholic refuses to release herself from answerability; by keeping the loss open, she keeps herself exposed to its demand. In Cavell’s terms: the failure to acknowledge is never a blank, never a mere absence, but the presence of something—an indifference, a coldness. Guilt is that presence registered from within: the felt residue of a response withheld, the trace a claim leaves on those who have heard it and not answered it. This is what Joseph Wiinikka-Lydon, reading Iris Murdoch, calls moral injury: “the name for enduring suffering that insists on transformation and that shatters one’s preconceived notion of one’s relationship to others and the world.” Crucially, moral injury should not be seen “as a wound that must be healed as soon as possible,” but as something politically consequential, requiring “a more critical stance towards one’s society,” “pointing towards a different direction of one’s life, one that may be hard, but that is resisted at the peril of others, as well as oneself.”
It is telling that The Voice of Hind Rajab has been received in precisely these terms: its subject, as M. Gessen recognized, is not the deaths themselves but “the moral injury inflicted on people who became implicated in these deaths, even as they tried to prevent them.” Moral injury names the disturbance through which obligation may first become affectively inescapable. Without that disturbance, acknowledgment can remain cognitive and ceremonial. In this sense, melancholia is the psychic form acknowledgment takes when the world refuses redress. Where mourning quietly converts the other’s claim into the mourner’s recovery, melancholia holds the claim open at the price of the self’s own composure. This is why the melancholic’s self-reproach, however clinical its presentation, is never merely a symptom: it is the trace of an obligation that has not been met and will not be renounced.
This dimension of melancholia is illuminated—and complicated—by Douglas Crimp’s interventions during the AIDS crisis. Crimp’s initial quarrel was not with melancholia as such, but with its moralizing underside. Freud’s melancholic, after all, “represents his ego to us as worthless, incapable of any achievement and morally despicable; he reproaches himself, vilifies himself and expects to be cast out and punished” (SE 14:246). In the teeth of a homophobic society, such self-reproach could only reproduce the vilification it had internalized, teaching gay men to regard their own imperfectly liberated past as immature and immoral. Directed at queer life from within, melancholic moralism was homophobia’s echo chamber. Yet Crimp’s position evolved. Mourning—understood as detachment and a return to normalcy—came to seem inadequate, even treacherous, to the preservation of a vilified culture. “Mourning feels too much like capitulation,” he starkly admitted. He returned instead toward melancholia as a form of attachment that resists normalization: “my version of melancholia prevented me from acquiescing in and thus mourning the demise of a culture that had shown me the ethical alternative to conventional moralism.” Public displays of gay grief, in this light, were performative acts of melancholia, sustaining the very attachments they grieved and transforming that grief into an ongoing site of ethical and militant engagement. Mourning, it is true, becomes militancy; melancholia, one might say, was already militant.
It is from this vantage point that melancholic moralism must be reconsidered in the wake of Gaza. Crimp was right to resist a moralism that converted the suffering of queer subjects into evidence of their culpability. Gaza confronts us with the inverse problem: not the oppressive excess of moral accusation but the evacuation of moral disturbance altogether. The melancholic’s self-reproach acquires a different valence here. The guilt of having watched, known, and failed to stop mass violence is not a seizure of the moral high ground; it is the subjective register of what Jaspers called metaphysical guilt, and one of the psychic forms through which acknowledgment becomes binding.
At its extreme limit stands Aaron Bushnell, the young American airman who, declaring that he would “no longer be complicit in genocide,” set himself on fire in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C. His self-immolation stands as a tragic testimony to a metaphysical guilt that refused to remain rhetorical—unbearable proof that the moral self-indictment described here can bind conduct to conscience. Melancholic moralism does not guarantee action but it is the disposition from within which action has, again and again, actually proceeded.
Melancholic moralism speaks not from high up but from the position of one who accuses herself first, making the posture of inaction intolerable. Without this self-implicating outrage, affect risks dissipating into a spectacle of the nod: images are seen, voices are heard, grief is felt, but none of it binds the witness. Yet moral outrage, or lack of it thereof, is unevenly distributed. Among many, it takes the form of melancholic rage: a sustained, self-reflexive engagement with loss that refuses closure. Among others, however, it appears conspicuously absent. This absence bespeaks less a lack of affect than a foreclosure of the very psychic operations through which moral disturbance might arise.
shamelessness at largeIf melancholia, as Freud and Crimp suggest, sustains a critical relation to loss through a refusal of normalization, then the urgent question in the wake of Gaza is not whether melancholia exists in the Arab world, but where and how it remains operative. We are witnessing a fractured affective landscape: a division between a widespread, if uneven, disposition toward melancholic attachment among Arab populations and its conspicuous foreclosure at the level of several regimes and their aligned publics.
Among broad segments of Arab societies, the response to Gaza has taken the form of melancholic vigilance. Grief, outrage, and indignation have been palpable—in mass demonstrations from Rabat to Amman, in boycott campaigns that turned supermarket shelves into front lines, in digital campaigns and a relentless circulation of images that refuse to let the violence recede into abstraction. Nor is this vigilance solemn only: it thrives in everyday melancholy acts of coffeehouse talk, invective satire, comic ridicule, and blistering sarcasm, in popular jokes that flay Arab impotence as mercilessly as they flay Israeli brutality. This is not merely reactive affect, but sustained, recursive, and often self-critical feeling, its critique turning simultaneously outward toward the perpetrator and inward toward the failures of Arab leadership to act.
This disposition is not new. It is sedimented in a longer history of loss—of dispossession, defeat, and deferred liberation—stretching from the Nakba through successive wars and political disappointments, namely the 1967 Naksa and the subsequent, if gradual and highly contested, capitulation to the settler colonial and neoliberal financial dispensation. In this sense, Arab melancholia is not episodic but, as I have argued elsewhere, an enduring “psychopolitical disposition,” a way of inhabiting the present as saturated with unresolved pasts and losses neither fully acknowledged nor worked through. It is precisely this persistence of attachment that gives Arab melancholia its militant edge, sustaining a readiness not only to name injustice and demand reparation but also to act on both—as the genealogy running from the fedayeen to the Great March of Return through the successive Intifadas, the Arab uprisings, and the boycott movement attests.
At the level of regimes, however, a fundamentally different psychopolitical economy prevails. What is striking is not only the retreat from solidarity during the Gaza genocide, but the relative absence of feelings of moral injury and shame. Normalization did not pause for the genocide; in some respects, it deepened. The United Arab Emirates maintained, and expanded, the trade relationship formalized in its 2022 comprehensive economic partnership with Israel; Egypt and Jordan, as Rashid Khalidi observes, “have no shame in signing massive gas deals with Israel,” while Saudi Arabia and the UAE “have purchased Israeli weapons and security systems through American cut-outs that only thinly disguise their origins.” Official responses to the slaughter rarely exceeded the routine symbolic gestures of tandīd and istinkār—condemnation and denunciation—diplomacy’s equivalent of what Islamic tradition calls adʿaf al-īmān, the weakest degree of faith. None of this is accompanied by visible signs of moral disturbance, much less outrage. It is articulated instead through a language of pragmatism, stability, and national interest that neutralizes rather than engages affect.
This absence should not be mistaken for simple indifference; it is a foreclosure—a preemptive neutralization of the psychic conditions under which shame, guilt, and melancholic self-reproach might arise. The logic is that of a fantasy. Because Palestine remains an open wound, the principal wellspring of Arab shame and guilt, the temptation arises to overcome the feeling of shame rather than confront its cause, since any such reckoning would lead back to one’s own failure to do anything about it. Shamelessness is that fantasy institutionalized: the abandonment of the Palestinian cause is no longer experienced as a loss demanding mourning, but as a strategic adjustment requiring no affective reckoning. The language of pragmatism thus functions as a psychological buffer, insulating the cold rationale of the machinery of the state from the affective and moral disturbances of conscience.
This shamelessness is not without psychic cost. It requires a profound disavowal of attachment—a refusal to recognize Palestine as an object of identification whose loss-in-installments would ordinarily require mourning. And there is a further twist: the signatories of the Accords did relinquish an object that was never theirs to relinquish. Palestine was not theirs to lose; their renunciation is therefore performed on behalf of others, including a tacit call on Palestinians themselves to give up their attachment not only to what has been lost of historical Palestine, but to what remains of it. Yet disavowed attachments do not vanish; they persist in displaced or distorted forms, generating tensions managed through the tormented theatrics of denial, projection, or rationalization. The UAE, for instance, framed its signature of the Accords as a diplomatic achievement that halted Israeli plans to annex parts of the West Bank—plans that Israel never renounced and that daily settler incursions completely debunk. When the abandonment of Palestine is dressed up as a rescue mission, it becomes a symptom of shamelessness rather than an act of advocacy. The apparent composure of these renegade regimes thus conceals an unstable configuration in which unresolved attachments are continually pushed out of view to maintain the illusion of a fait accompli.
The contrast between Arab melancholia and regime shamelessness is therefore not merely descriptive but diagnostic. Where melancholia sustains attachment and critique, shamelessness enables detachment and accommodation; where the former insists on the persistence of the lost object, the latter treats its disappearance as a settled reality that no longer demands a response. Without attachment, there is no loss; without loss, no mourning; without mourning, no shame. And if the work of mourning promises, in the end, a return to normalcy, one must ask what normalcy the mourning of Palestine could possibly return anyone to. A return to the decolonial horizon of the anticolonial struggle might qualify but a capitulatory retreat into normalized ties with the dispossessor does not. Such normalization betrays neither mourning nor melancholia but the foreclosure of both—a “new normal” charted by the coercive clout of the adversary’s military superiority. What remains is a form of affective insulation: a political posture that can register the slaughter in Gaza as an event without being bound by it as a claim.
In this sense, the problem is not simply that regimes fail to act in accordance with popular sentiment. It is that they inhabit a different affective regime altogether—the affective regime of the regime—one in which the psychic operations that would render Gaza morally and politically binding have been neutralized. The result is a disjunction between a population that remains affectively entangled with the Palestinian cause and governing structures that have, to a significant extent, affectlessly disengaged from it.
thresholds of mourningAgainst this regional and global backdrop of circulation, regulation, and foreclosure, Palestinian affective life persists as a tenacious insistence under conditions that continually threaten to fragment and exhaust it. Affect here is neither freely expressed nor fully recognized; it is enacted and sustained in the midst of a violence that renders the distinction between the living and the dead unstable. In Gaza, mourning is not a post-script to violence; it is a practice forced to unfold in the absolute absence of an after. If the standard Freudian model requires a stable present from which to detach from the past, the Palestinian experience reveals the structural impossibility of such a resolution.
Since 1948, the threshold at which mourning might begin has been systematically raised, pushed further over an ever-receding horizon by a siege that weaponizes time and a devastation that refuses to pause. When the murdered Gazans accumulate faster than the living can name them, and when starvation hollows out the very bodies tasked with the labor of grief, mourning becomes an interrupted act—fragmentary, improvised, and perpetually deferred. This disjointed temporality has now bled into a wider regional catastrophe. As the Israeli genocidal war expanded beyond Gaza, the scene of address articulated in the voice of Hind Rajab finds a haunting echo in the cries of schoolgirls targeted in Iran and the families buried under the rubble of Beirut. These are not disparate tragedies; they are a singular, gathering chorus of the unanswered, where the civilian body is transformed into a site of managed detachment.
It is no accident, either, that the figures through whom the world consents, however inadequately, to grieve—Hind, the Lebanese mother, the Iranian schoolgirl—are girls and women. The economy of permissible affect is almost always a gendered economy: innocence is coded feminine and juvenile, while Palestinian men are pre-coded as combatants, their deaths pre-justified, their grievability foreclosed in advance. The pity extended, if at all, to the feminized victim is the obverse of the suspicion visited on her fathers and brothers—two faces of the same refusal to acknowledge.
In this landscape of continuous Nakba, the ordinary infrastructures of death are obliterated, leaving Gazans to navigate a suspended state where the catastrophe never concludes. The time of mourning is forced into a violent coexistence with new losses, where one does not mourn a singular death but mourns in the midst of ongoing death. To ask if this threshold will ever stabilize is to ask for a restoration of the Palestinian right to inhabit time itself—to inhabit a present that is not already a site of future loss.[3]
Yet this persistence of grief does not guarantee the dignity of closure, much less the dignity of acknowledgement it requires. The expansion of the war exposes the ultimate limit of a global order where the circulation of affect substitutes for response and where emotional saturation exhausts itself into burnout insouciance. The proliferation of images—burning tents in Rafah, flattened blocks in Beirut, bloodied schoolrooms in Iran—coexists with a persistent deferral of obligation. This is the differentiated economy of affect at its most brutal: a spectatorship that consumes the aesthetic of the tragedy while refusing to be bound by its claim.
If the world continues to register this loss only as a nod without the binding response of an acknowledgment, the threshold of mourning may never be reached, let alone traversed. Instead, grief is forced to transform into a permanent melancholic insistence: a refusal to relinquish the dead in a world that demands Palestinians move on before they have even been allowed to stand still. To insist on the dignity of acknowledgment is to refuse the substitution of knowledge for response. Until the threshold is recognized as a claim that must be answered—until the voices of Hind, the Lebanese mother, and the Iranian schoolgirls are bound to consequence—mourning remains an interrupted act.
For mourning to truly begin, the violence must not only cease; it must be acknowledged as a claim that binds the future to a different ethical order. The only path forward is to remain at this threshold, in a state of melancholic vigilance, refusing to allow these open wounds to be sutured by the hollow prestige of global recognition. It is time to move beyond the safety of hearing and toward the radical, necessary discomfort of binding oneself to a principled form of engagement—in the boycott that costs, in the strike that halts, in the rage that refuses to be appeased, in the refusal that interrupts, in the pursuit of solidarity action that acts on government officials, in the fanning of moral guilt that afflicts policymakers—until answering is measured not by what is said but by what is done on the ground.
[1]I borrow the expression “mourning without mourning practices” from Peter Homans, who used it to describe the demise of community-wide rituals of mourning in Western societies due to the consolidated split between public and private spaces. See Peter Homans, Symbolic Loss: The Ambiguity of Mourning and Memory at Century's End.
[2] This is the broad argument of my recent book, Melancholy Acts: Defeat and Cultural Critique in the Arab World (New York: Fordham University Press, 2023).
[3] I elaborate an extended reflection on Palestininan time as “afterity” in “Poetry after Gaza,” my Introduction to a forthcoming special issue of Middle Eastern Literatures bearing the same title.