Afghan-Norwegian journalist Yama Wolasmal is perhaps one of the most impressive interviewers I have ever had the privilege to watch.
And yet, for me, the most impressive thing about this interview he conducts with Israeli deputy foreign minister Mrs. Sharren Haskel is not so much his acerbic, trenchant, penetrating, and yet preternaturally calm deconstruction of Israel's war against Gaza, or the fact that Israeli officials like Mrs. Haskel continue to present themselves to be tastefully disassembled under Yama's clinical gaze, it is the persistence of the frameworks that govern the storying of this ongoing war against Palestinians.
To wit: Mrs. Haskel continuously deploys the terms "intention" and "mistakes" to frame her story about the post-October 7 events in Gaza. She acknowledges that wars are difficult, and that, as such, "mistakes" are frequently made in the conduct of war. She suggests that Israel has no bad intentions towards Palestinians, and that - otherwise - they are a moral force for good, merely trying to protect their own people against the marauding terrorism of their neighbours. When she blames Hamas for their insectoid approaches to warfare, and Yama produces filmic evidence of the IDF doing the same things, she collapses back to her principal identitarian argument: that Israel is fundamentally good, that they have good intentions, and that the exercise of their agency often carries mistakes along the way.
The idea of an individual moral actor who stands outside history, wielding agency and intention like a sovereign, echoes colonizing sentiments implicated in the turbulences of our so-called late capitalist times.
It's easy to sympathize with this rendering of things, except that it leaves out too much. Haskel's is a modernist fantasy, a humanist rendering that obscures hidden logics, the paraterranean forces at work. The idea of an individual moral actor who stands outside history, wielding agency and intention like a sovereign, echoes colonizing sentiments implicated in the turbulences of our so-called late capitalist times. That idea is perhaps best countered by a relational metaphysics, which could help Haskel understand that intentions do not precede action. We like to think that the world is simply the backgrounded recipient of human intentions transcribed through actions. In this sense, intentions birth action. Instead, 'action' is diffuse, dispersed, and dense in a posthumanist way. It neither has simple origins nor is domiciled in a single wielder. As such, action enlists intention after the fact of its movement. Intention may be the ex post facto way modern subjectivities retain interior coherence. It doesn't matter whether one's intentions are "good" or "bad". To live in a more than human world is to be enlisted in patterns, algorithms, dense fields, and tensions that move body-minds in choreographies that exceed the isolated autonomous individual self or agent.
It doesn't matter whether one's intentions are "good" or "bad".
What Haskel calls "mistakes" are how an anthropocentric myth insists on recuperating itself, ingesting the errant phenomenon into its logic so that the narrative of choice - that we are in charge of our choices - is maintained. But what is painfully potent from Yama's deconstruction is that whether or not Israel feels justified in its performances of war, it is the very thing it is or has become fighting. Perhaps it has always been.
Holding on to its identity as a rational actor, a good one, in their war against Gaza, Israel's officials invite me to think about the processual provisionality of identity: how identity itself is always contingent, incomplete, partial, evental, and agonistic. A humanistic framing of identity risks essentializing it, decontextualizing it. But relationality forces us to ask: what are we becoming? How do we become that which we resist? How are we becoming entrained within logics that perpetuate the very thing we say we are against, despite our claims to pure intentions? In what ways might the designation of "an enemy", the promise of "victory at last", the ideas of "originary rights and entitlements" distract us from the ways we are maintaining and, perhaps, immortalizing the violence and traumas we seek to extinguish?
A humanistic framing of identity risks essentializing it, decontextualizing it. But relationality forces us to ask: what are we becoming? How do we become that which we resist?
Process philosophy's counter-cosmology refuses finality, and suggests victory is not an end but a crease in the middle. They may suggest that good intentions may actually be more incarcerating than anxieties about antagonistic others that seek our ruin. Most critically, they invite us to notice that wherever permanent solutions have been sought, unanticipated horrors tumbled out of the box as well. The dominant myths of our time are ontological traps that hold us in the repetition of violence. Every claim to victory births new horrors.
Wolasmal's conversation with Haskel was hard to watch - and I often found myself blinking rapidly, as if to distance the streaming images of IDF agents strapping a Palestinian civilian on the bonnet of an armored vehicle on its way out of a hostile situation, while Haskel kept on insisting that "Israel does not intend to harm civilians", calling incidences like those "terrible mistakes". At several points in the interview, I noticed a burst of vulnerable sincerity from Mrs. Haskel. She, at one time, spoke of her grandfather, and the promise she made to him on his deathbed to protect Israeli Jews.
Here then is war: not a battle between good and evil, not a simple matter of angels versus demons, not a thing that terminates in simple thresholds of declared victory, not even an event that is fully accounted by journalistic integrity, scales of destruction, mass graves, and body counts, as compelling and as gruesome as these matters are. War magnetizes primordial force fields and posthumanist considerations that are irreducible to the moralities of the hour, to notions of sides, to feelings of entitlement, and to blueprints and exit strategies. It will involve sincere actors, messy contradictions, blind spots and tall tales. This is not simply another way of saying there are no fair actors in war; this is a way of suggesting that the modernist cosmologies, humanist presumptions, essentializing categories, steady temporalities and teleologies of origins and destinations, narrative structures, and guiding frameworks of our time are critically incapable of holding the crushing weight of the crisis in the Middle East. Perhaps a poetics of relations might bring us down to earth, so that we might dimly sense that to win a war is to have been won by war.
Postscript: It is that circular rationality that forces me to think of the 'carousel' not merely as airport technology or conveyor system, but as the always provisional response to the tectonic ache of ethics, as morality, dolled up and dressed into the merry-go-round, and yet already contaminated by its histories and internal contradictions. The term 'carousel' is borrowed from the French 'carrousel', which is in turn borrowed from the Italian 'Carosello', which means "little war". 17th century Italians had equestrian games and tournaments that were named as such. By the 19th century, those games and fierce tournaments had become roundabout amusements. The carousel suggests that morality and its gestures of resolution are already 'exposed', already 'contaminated', and that solutions are embodied practices of postponing the tectonic forces of ethical displacements, instead of fixed conclusions and answers. Solutions will keep the carousel spinning. The solution to this war is how violence keeps on its logics and cosmological accounts of identity, agency, and human isolationism. We will need more than solutions now. We will need cracks.
Báyò Akómoláfé
