In bed

I count the dead

the pregnant women and the potential newborns 

30 thousand

50 thousand

I count them in my head

I count and count and count 

Until sleep absorbs the count

Any day that we are alive and healthy is Eid.

The doorman outside our building came up to my mother as we were driving by to wish her a happy Eid, during Easter. “Any day can be a happy feast, an Eid, if we are alive and on our feet,” she said. I did not know why she displaced the doorman’s wishes in this manner, but perhaps it was a way for her to express herself during dark times. Easter is a day of resurrection, of coming back to life after death. In times of catastrophe, simply being on our feet becomes a form of life after death. In our time, the exceptional act of resurrection has become something ordinary or, rather, the ordinary has become exceptional. 

The celebration of powering through with everyday life during exceptional circumstances has always been lived, spoken and written about; from the heights of philosophically rooted thinking, to the journalists bearing witness. The question remains: Is this a testament to the triumph of everyday life in spite of horrific conditions? Or, is it simply the perpetuation of everyday life that swallows up these horrific conditions, turning them into the new normal, and emphasizing the celebration of the ordinary in the meantime? What is the role of rupture in this scenario? Of cessation, of arrest, of not wanting to go on anymore? And what shape does this rupture take? 

Imagining such rupture is a poetic act that has not been fully caught up with by philosophy. While descending from this lofty ambition instead into the exploration of the ordinary, that dialectic stuff that triumphs over the attempts to crush it (while also normalizing this crushing in the process), I stop to specifically consider the act of birth. 

Since the latest and ongoing war began in Gaza, I have been silently keeping my eyes on the number of survivors. To date, the death toll is nearing 39,000², of them more than 9,500 are women and more than 14,500 are children.³ However, British medical journal ‘The Lancet’ put the death toll at 186,000, calculating the indirect deaths caused by the destruction and disruption of livable conditions, alongside those directly killed in military strikes.⁴ The deaths of nearly 8% of the population is a futuristic numerical demonstration of what Ilan Pappe called the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, referring to the establishment of the Israeli state in the late 1940s.⁵ 

When this latest war erupted, 50,000 women were pregnant.⁶ By the seventh month, there were 155,000 pregnant women and new mothers.⁷ Also by the seventh month, some official estimates say around 100,000 people fled Gaza.⁸ 

In a desperate attempt to reason with the unreasonable math, my mind attempts to even out the lives yet to be birthed with those who left or died. I find myself trapped in a dehumanizing, (and perhaps illiberal), calculation, attempting to conclude a demographic victory of some sort. I catch myself repeating the premise of my query; the Palestinians will confront being decimated by Israel through reproduction. 

The premise is often frowned upon. Outside the context of a genocidal war, the typical external gaze condescends the incessant reproduction; Gaza is one of the most densely populated urban areas in the world. They have a high birth rate, is a sentence you often hear about the Palestinians of Gaza, with the words carrying along sentiments of othering, disapproval and degrading. An Egyptian official who was overlooking the humanitarian aid crossing when the Rafah border was still open before the invasion in May, dismissively said: Gazans are starving but the market is full of Viagra. 

The will of the modern state in relation to population control has seeped into the collective consciousness as an enactment of modernity. The state proclaims, we follow. In the case of birth control, the cause is rightful, especially when supported by progressive concerns like the climate crisis, wealth distribution, women’s rights and general access to a dignified life. 

But what happens when the ecosystem, the edifice of wealth distribution, women’s rights and a generally dignified life, is absent altogether? We give birth. 

Moreover, in modern genocidal warfare, these birthing women and babies are targeted. This is where modern warfare becomes the new face of population management, and their unifying premise is control. We add the word “modern” in order to excuse control, and the killing pretends to be bound by rules, to even be somehow polite. The benign face of this modern control in times of peace (or seemingly peace) becomes population management. The management of human lives starts with the possibility to control and some reliance on reason, be it for the greater good of the public or their land and resources, and is often intertwined with the means establishing this control. In their hegemonic take-over, modern means aid modern ends; they become one-another, servicing the need of the powers that be to self-perpetuate. 

In the words of Asef Bayat, the act of birth can be a “quiet encroachment of the ordinary” in this context, a “non-movement” that moves history, a silent war waged by the ordinary acts of everyday life. But there is more to this distant resistance that eventually allows power structures to move forward with their agendas. There is a compelling area of politics based on instinct and desire, where giving birth happens not necessarily as a form of resistance, but in defense of one’s own desires. In his work examining the philosophical potential of psychoanalysis, Slavoj Žižek points to a certain differentiation between ethics and morality. In ethics, you commit to your desires. It is a dedication and not simply for enjoyment. However, in morality, you are committed to the common good, and desire becomes obscene enjoyment. In pursuing a “higher ethics of life, historical necessity, and so on,” a so-called hero “violates (or rather suspends the validity of) existing explicit moral norms.” On the other hand, there’s the superego that designates moral law and norms, the survival of which rests on a certain amount of enjoyment from being under pressure. What is unlocked here is the “psychoanalytical ethics” of desire, a desire that is not simply the product of a libidinal archaic psychic substance, but that of sedimented and alienated histories.^9/10

What is the reason for conceiving under siege and warfare? Birth takes place from a moment of halted reason, the adhesive of community and morals. Birth is a time where subjective desire heroically prevails—an embodied desire to both create life and trouble—in the sense of life as a perilous and unknown undertaking. This is one way to read Hannah Arendt’s philosophy of natality; as the inherent capacity for action and newness, the resistance against totalitarianism that is embedded in the act of birth. 

We can claim that the sedimented and alienated substance of history is summoned in the act of birth; the newness that is not without a pre, a newness that does not know where it is going. A quest for liberation in a moment of self-generating capitalism resting on a surviving infrastructure of liberal modernity is metaphorically one such act of birth, of natality, of ongoing newness, born to its own history of struggle, living the unknown and not burdened with what could be its inevitable death. 

1.  I am thankful for Yasmine Shash for her close reading and generous editorial comments that helped this essay move forward.

2. This piece was submitted in July 2024.

3. https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2024/04/un-human-rights-chief-deplores-harrowing-killings-children-and-women-rafah

4. https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(24)01169-3/abstract

5. Ilan Pappe, "Life as politics: how ordinary people change the Middle East." Stanford University Press, 2013.

6. https://www.unfpa.org/video/gaza-under-attack

7. https://www.unfpa.org/news/“gaza-breaking-point”-health-workers-and-patients-describe-unfolding-catastrophe-rafah

8. https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/palestinian-embassy-seeks-temporary-status-gazans-who-entered-egypt-during-war-2024-05-02/

9. Slavoj Žižek, The Metastasis of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Women and Causality. Verso, 2006.

10. I am grateful for Kinda Hassan and our weekly reading sessions to decipher the above work by Žižek, a necessary process for us, the philosophy autodidacts.