Beyond Grief: Decolonial Love for Palestinian Life

Abstract

This essay is a Palestinian response to Judith Butler’s query about whether “we can mourn, without qualification, for the lives lost in Israel as well as those lost in Gaza,” published in the London Review of Books on October 13, 2023, in the midst of Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. “We cannot mourn our dead,” the author writes in this essay, “because we cannot reach our flesh.” A diaspora Palestinian witnessing the genocide from afar, the author questions colonial conceptualizations of grief, arguing that Palestinians do not have access to grieve the Palestinian lives killed by Israeli genocidal aggression. Instead, he asks: “What kind of love does it take to be present for so many of our loved ones who are being massacred?” In the apocalyptic hellscape of settler-colonial violence, the author concludes Palestinians journey beyond grief, choosing decolonial love for Palestinian life as resistance.

Keywords:

• Palestinian love
• decolonial love
• indigenous
• grief
• grievability
• genocide
• Gaza
• settler colonialism
• security

Notes

1 Judith Butler, “The Compass of Mourning,” London Review of Books 45, no. 20 (October 13, 2023): https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n20/judith-butler/the-compass-of-mourning. The author would like to acknowledge that after the initial, condensed version of this essay was published on the Institute for Palestine Studies’s blog, Palestine Square, on October 24, 2023 (https://www.palestine-studies.org/en/node/1654491), Judith Butler emailed him the following day, apologizing regretfully for their words.

2 Devin G. Atallah et al., CURCUM’s Trees: A Decolonial Healing Guide for Palestinian Community Health Workers (London: May Fly Books, 2023), https://mayflybooks.org/curcums-trees/.

3 Devin G. Atallah, “Reflections on Radical Love and Rebellion: Towards Decolonial Solidarity in Community Psychology Praxis,” in Decolonial Enactments in Community Psychology, ed. Shose Kessi, Shahnaaz Suffla, and Mohamed Seedat (Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2022), 75–97; Devin G. Atallah and Urmitapa Dutta, “‘Creatively in Coalition’ from Palestine to India: Weaving Stories of Refusal and Community as Decolonial Praxis,” Journal of Social Issues 78, no. 2 (June 2022): 434–51, https://doi.org/10.1111/josi.12460.

4 Hugo ka Canham, Riotous Deathscapes (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2023).

5 Devin G. Atallah et al., “Engaging Critical Community Resilience Praxis: A Qualitative Study with Mapuche Communities in Chile Facing Structural Racism and Disasters,” Journal of Community Psychology 46, no. 5 (2018): 575–97, https://doi.org/10.1002/jcop.21960.

6 Tareq Baconi, “Gaza without Pretenses,” New York Book Review, October 11, 2023, https://www.nybooks.com/online/2023/10/11/gaza-without-pretenses/.

7 Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Security Theology, Surveillance and the Politics of Fear (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).

8 I am not naming my people in the West Bank nor their connection to me to protect their privacy and security in a time of incredible violence against our people.

9 Poetry by Mahmoud Darwish, translated from the Arabic by Fady Joudah in The Butterfly’s Burden (Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2007), 267, as: “love is born a living creature before it becomes an idea.”

10 Sanjana Karanth, “Israeli Defense Minister Announces Siege on Gaza To Fight ‘Human Animals,’” Huffington Post, October 9, 2023, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/israel-defense-minister-human-animals-gaza-palestine_n_6524220ae4b09f4b8d412e0a.

11 Sarah Ihmoud, “Palestinian Feminism: Analytics, Praxes and Decolonial Futures,” Feminist Anthropology 3, no. 2 (November 2022): 284–98, https://doi.org/10.1002/fea2.12109.

12 Rita Segato, Contra-pedagogias de la crueldad (Buenos Aires, Argentina: Prometeo Libros, 2018).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Devin G. Atallah

Devin G. Atallah is an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. A diaspora Palestinian from the United States and Chile, Atallah is an activist, researcher, scholar, practitioner, and healer dedicated to decolonial movements and Palestinian liberation. Atallah’s ongoing work focuses on understanding and directly contributing to intergenerational resistance and healing justice praxis.