“On this land”. Gaza, Palestine, and the Politics of Presence

16 April — Ruba Salih | Università di Bologna
“On this land”. Gaza, Palestine, and the Politics of Presence
Months ago, an AI-generated video depicting a phantasmagorical, futuristic Gaza was released, showing a hyper-modernized “Gaza Trump”: a petro-dollar riviera beach accompanied by a song declaring “no more tunnels, no more fears.” The clip features figures such as Trump and Netanyahu enjoying cocktails, and Elon Musk smiling against a backdrop of skyscrapers and raining dollars. Hamas fighters are reimagined as belly dancers, and the desolated landscape of Gaza is transformed into a golden, capitalist playground, with Teslas and a statue of the US president overseeing the scene, while a caption promises, “Trump will free you.”

This video exemplifies the aesthetics of an imperial or colonial fantasy that seeks to erase indigenous Palestinians and the visions embedded in the struggle for Palestine. It contrasts sharply with the ongoing reality of violence, dispossession, and loss.

Such representations serve as a point of departure for broader reflections on dominant fantasies and the possibilities for decolonial horizons amid ongoing annihilation. Attention is required not only to the hallucinatory aesthetics of settler-colonial desire but also to how Palestinians, from vastly different circumstances, continue to imagine futures beyond the rubble of destruction. This raises questions about the political and emotional work that enables survival and presence through political imaginaries and visions despite repeated dispossession.

In exploring this, the work of late poet Mahmood Darwish is particularly instructive. Darwish described Palestinians as not returning but arriving, emphasizing a continuous presence even under conditions of colonial erasure, while acknowledging that return cannot simply restore a past existence. Building on the legacies of Darwish, Elias Sanbar, Edward Said, and other Palestinian scholars, these concepts of return and arrival can be reconsidered in terms of their meanings and political horizons for those ethnically cleansed nearly eighty years ago and their descendants.

Next seminar:

18 May — Ilaria Favretto | ILCS School of Advanced Study | University of London
Cultural Models of Contention, Protest Tactics, and Labour Conflicts in post-1945 Italy