Patrick Anthony (Uppsala University) and Ghada Dimashk (American University of Beirut)
Baba, when will we study astronomy in school? … I want to learn about the moon and stars. (Banias, age 9, quoted in Humaid 2025)
Come out with us into the merciless night. You will later learn how the stars are arranged in the treasury of memory, and how loss is compensated for and made good by the power of expression. But … do not cry like your little brother, born a few days ago, lest your crying, broadcast aimlessly, guide the soldiers in our direction. (Darwish 2010: 21)
The Collapse of Imperial Optics
The epistemic distance that once shielded Western institutions from accountability is collapsing. The immediacy of livestreamed genocide in Gaza has forced a confrontation with the supposedly objective and neutral optics that have long insulated education, science, law, and media. Grassroots witnessing of Israel’s extermination campaign has triggered a profound epistemic shift: through social media, digital archiving, and decolonial cartography, Palestinians and their allies have transformed the software of imperial knowledge into an infrastructure of insurgent visibility and memory. As Achille Mbembe (2019: 61) warned, Western nations that “fomented misery and death far away—far from the gaze of their own citizens— … now dread the return of the law of the sword”. What Israel’s “ironclad” enablers did not anticipate is how Gaza would bring misery and death back into the Western gaze, bypassing legacy media to reshape public opinion through a surge in first-person testimony. Such counter-visuality has made Gaza the terrain of an epistemic intifada that is, in fact, already globalized.
In this way, eyewitnesses to genocide in Gaza have become “insurgent analysts” of empire (Said 1990: 73); Palestinians have reconfigured the terrain of visibility with “all eyes on Gaza”, radically disrupting the imperial optics customarily used to surveil and occlude them. The modern scientific episteme has long claimed white innocence through the “god trick” of objectivity, of seeing everything from nowhere (Haraway 1988: 581). Western universities cling desperately to this supremacist fantasy, which amounts to an apartheid pedagogy designed to safeguard Western interests and silence unwelcome witnesses. Shortly before Columbia University dealt international students and alumni off for deportation, it codified the curricular erasure of Palestine. A directive from early 2025 deemed the inclusion of Palestinian astronomy, for instance, an “unacceptable breach” in the sanctity of scientific training. This made for a reflexive lesson: readings on astronomy in Gaza were assessed to “insert political views” in an apparently apolitical science, whose historic claims to transcend imperial violence (Schaffer 2009) are now redeployed for the maintenance of an illegal occupation.
As it happens, “political views” are precisely what telescopes were made for. Galileo developed his spyglass for European battlefields before he tilted it up to the heavens; and even Columbia’s Astronomy Department boasts of lending the university’s first telescope to George Washington for use in his war for settler sovereignty. Unwilling to spare “15 minutes” for Palestinian astronomers, however, Columbia shielded its students from the necropolitics of science in the settler colony, where Gaza’s star-gazers defy surveillance drones. Observers who once gathered on the roof of Al-Aqsa University, for instance, worried that their telescopes, resembling rockets, might expose them to air strikes by occupation forces, such as flattening the Khan Younis campus in January 2024 (Sax 2020).
The same logic that would distance science from colonial violence also seeks to maintain the benign optics of academic complicity in an unrestrained war on Indigenous sovereignty in Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria. Also unrestrained are EU research funds for drone, cluster bomb, and chemical weapons manufacturers like Israel Aerospace Industries and Elbit Systems. The “god trick” of this science is enacted in divinely named drone programs like Skylord and the Israeli-made Hermes model, whose research “output” has made Gaza the highest concentration of child amputees on earth (Al Shami and Nashwan 2025). Long concealed from Western eyes, this research model was known to generations of insurgent analysts. Almost everywhere European colonizers went, newfangled observatories mapped three-dimensional space in the service of aggressive military and settler projects (Mercer and Simpson 2023). Episodes of resistance, in turn, register a keener sociology of science than Columbia was prepared to teach. A snapshot from Tahiti in 1769 shows a Polynesian chief dismantling the astronomical quadrant of James Cook, sent to derive precise nautical units for Britain’s plantation empire from a transit of Venus (Schaffer 2011). Some 250 years later, Indigenous Hawai‘ians mobilized against the construction of a mega-telescope atop the sacred volcano Mauna Kea in the so-called Thirty Meter Telescope protests (Joudah 2022). These scenes bear witness to the “merciless night” of modern sciences that specialize in remote acts of terror, whether by desecration or drone strikes (Darwish 2010: 21). They expose the deep material link between the astronomical quadrant aimed at celestial bodies and the gunner’s quadrant aimed at human ones, or as the EU now calls things that inquire and maim: “dual-use technologies”.
Grassroots witnessing in Gaza marks a formidable intervention in this episteme, arguably the first to contest the always-everywhere claims of imperial knowledge on its own global scale. The eye, once monopolized by empire, has relocated and splintered into millions of frames, documenting genocide from within its unfolding geography and circulating testimony to global audiences. Videos from Gaza, captured in real time through broken networks and burning skies, offered not just testimony but epistemic rupture: a counter-visuality that confronts the colonial politics of disappearance (Ghaddar 2025a; Shehadeh 2023). They did not merely record atrocity; they exposed a system of unrelenting elimination, starvation, and control, and in doing so radically collapsed the gap between observer and observed. What followed was a dramatic rise in academic criticism of the Israeli colony, marked by student-led solidarity movements and escalating institutional repression.
Disoriented by their sudden exposure, Western governments and institutions marshalled all available means of academic and digital repression against grassroots witnessing, unsuccessfully so far. These are the latest functions of a “geographic violence” that requires the myth of absolute distance between the West and the Other to obscure the proximity of colonial warfare (Said 1990: 77). What began as bureaucratic containment, to “combat” criticism of Israel on college campuses and promote the lie of liberal Zionism, has hardened into the authoritarianism of imperial preservation meant to shield the West from the “ethical pollution” of an unprecedentedly visible holocaust (Hage 2025: 410). Universities accessory to Israeli crimes escalated in the face of exposure, facilitating the arrest of some 3,100 anti-genocide protesters in the US by July 2024. Columbia alone expelled almost 80 pro-Palestine students this year. Just as revealing was the attempt to sever the virtual link between grassroots witnessing and global dissent, a digital siege to accompany Israel’s explicit starvation policy and, enablers hoped, reinforce the distance between observer and observed. Meta, Google, X, and other platform monopolies deployed algorithmic suppression and AI-driven “moderation” tools to restrict pro-Palestinian content—shadow-banning hashtags like #Gaza, removing eyewitness videos, and suspending accounts that document Israeli war crimes and inform legal action.
Counter-Archives in Real Time
Even as insurgent analysts are contained in Gaza concentration camps, subject to barbed wire barriers and multi-layered blackouts, millions have mobilized to break the algorithmic siege—resharing censored videos, saving livestreams, and building repositories beyond the reach of Silicon Valley. This is precisely why archiving has become a frontline practice: with hundreds of journalists and media workers killed—the deadliest conflict for the press on record—people save streams, mirror files, and build repositories to keep witness accounts alive. Unlike past colonial genocides, where imperial archives spoke over the silenced, we are now witnessing a collective insurgency against forgetting as counter-archives emerge in real time. Archival initiatives such as Fighting Erasure, We Are Not Numbers, Accountability Archive, Israel Exposed, and Airwars—alongside several independent efforts—have amassed tens of thousands of files: videos of bombings, documentation of university burnings, social media reactions, legal petitions, and protest art, preserved across decentralized platforms, hard drives, torrents, and encrypted servers. In a system built to delete, Palestinians and their allies have archived to remember, to resist, and to make forgetting impossible.
Global visibility has rapidly eroded one of the Zionist project’s key battlefields—narrative control—and catalysed legal action against Israel at the International Court of Justice, where South Africa’s case is built on an archive that refused erasure. A post from Israel Exposed on 4 July 2025 made the scale of this effort clear:
we have transferred over 8,500 terabytes of war crimes footage to people, which is apparently 8.5 … [petabytes] of data. This doesn’t include torrents. People are seeing the horror, that is for sure. Tomorrow we will release another 710 GB of war crimes footage, stay tuned.
The livestreaming of genocide has also reshaped the terrain of international law. However significant ICJ rulings may prove in holding genocidaires and their arms dealers to account, the crime of genocide has already been so powerfully documented by its own victims that the court itself now stands trial. One Western government has already moved to recognize Israel’s genocide, not because of court deliberation but because grassroots witnessing made denial untenable; others scramble to “recognize” Palestine to cover their complicity. But they fail to recognize a more profound shift brought on by the immediacy of genocide in Gaza: a distinct epistemology that refuses imperial detachment and, with each first-person testimony, brings the terrain of liberation closer into view. As a leading archivist has said: “we are closer to the reality in the footage broadcast live on the socials from Gaza than we ever are with the dominant media, even when it is the same footage, the same facts” (Ghaddar 2025b).
Proximity not only exposes Israeli war crimes but also the racialized and institutionally nested matrix of knowledge designed to obscure or even enable them. Despite the extensive scale of digital documentation by Palestinians, global organizations tasked with safeguarding cultural heritage—UNESCO foremost among them—have remained largely silent in the face of Israel’s deliberate eradication of Gaza’s libraries, museums, archives, and historical sites. Unlike the swift financial aid and preservation support mobilized for cultural sites in Ukraine, Gaza has received virtually no emergency funding and no substantial commitment to restore what genocide has erased. Meanwhile, International Archives Week in June 2024 celebrated themes of “truth” and “inclusion” without a single reference to the cultural genocide unfolding in Palestine. UNESCO’s passive statements regret “damage” done to Gaza’s cultural heritage, echoing the cartographic reduction of rampant urbicide and ecocide to “conflict damage assessments” in one of the most widely cited mappings of Gaza. Certainly, these maps form a vital archive of accountability in their own right. Based on data from the ESA’s Copernicus Sentinel-1 satellite—touted as “Europe’s eyes on Earth”—they indicate a hopeful repurposing of surveillance technologies customarily used against Palestinians (Agha 2019). Nevertheless, aerial assessments render atrocity remote. That the project earned a prestigious European award in Spring 2025—as Israel broke the ceasefire in a single night’s massacre of 174 children—exposes a research regime more adept at “monitoring” war crimes than stopping them.
Grassroots witnessing shatters classical optics into millions of posts, clips, and testimonies, as Gaza itself is disfigured into a “space-time exception” in the words of one physicist (El-Farra 2025). Documenting genocide, El-Farra invoked the language of physics—velocity, density, uncertainty—precisely to expose its inadequacy as an account of reality on the ground in Gaza. The “physics of death” (El-Farra 2024) recalls the martial ambiguity of telescopes, quadrants, and orbital “sentinels”. It begs the question: what argument can a map make, what authority can “Europe’s eye” claim, that the livestream of eyewitness testimony has not already broadcast?
Against the disfiguration of Palestinian space-time, counter-cartographies reclaim the map as a site of resistance—a reminder that grassroots witnessing in Gaza is ultimately part of a larger geographical project rooted in Indigenous ties to the land. Decolonial mapping spatializesandimplants the counter-archive as a means to reconstruct and “re-presence” Palestine itself (Ghaddar 2025a: 20; Joudah 2022). Alongside archival initiatives, projects like Palestine Open Maps expose historical structures of genocide in Palestine since the Nakba. In this context, Forensic Architecture’s plotting of Israeli airstrikes on “safe zones”, for instance, appears as the acceleration of the Zionist fantasy of extermination. Counter-mapping also reasserts Palestinians’ narrative sovereignty over the destruction of their land and heritage and provides the tools “to tangibly imagine the Palestinian right of return” (Agha 2020, 2025). This is part an older and foundational archival struggle against erasure: in contrast with the insecurity of Zionist settlers and war criminals, obsessively planting flags and bulldozing the Star of David, decolonial cartography realizes the inevitability of return through the atlas of pre-Nakba Palestine, as meticulously documented by Salman Abu-Sitta (2004, 2010) and the Palestine Land Society. Layered upon this atlas, the digital infrastructure of Palestinian witnessing and allied memory work has begun to dramatically and irreversibly expose the essential fragility of the Zionist project and the greatest of settler insecurities: the “obsession with eternity” that underpins Israel’s war on the structures that sustain Palestinian life and memory (Abu-Sittah 2025).
Gaza and the Gaze of Return
If Gaza is both site and method, as Nour Joudah argued in a 2020 Intervention, its people have since authored new insurgent modes of seeing and knowing, powerfully shattering myths of white innocence and Western detachment. More revealing than any satellite’s-eye damage assessment is the physicist El-Farra who, no longer able to recognize his own streets, looks to the constellation that “brightens in the east at this time of winter’s nights” to find his way home on the horizon of ruin (El-Farra 2025). Defying the erasure of Palestinian star-gazers, nine-year-old Banias dreams of studying astronomy to be closer to her Aunt Mayar, separated by the genocide—or hidden in the moonglow, as she explained to her parents one night in Gaza City (Humaid 2025). Others have made the flying kite a grassroots symbol of Gaza’s liberation, juxtaposed against occupation drones, jets, and quadcopters (Alareer 2024; Molavi 2024). “What if I’m a little kite lost up in the air?”, asks a poet from Gaza, Sahar Taiseer Kalloub:
What if I can get closer to that vexatious drone,
Wrap around its neck and see the frown
Let me walk side by side with the F16,
We’re equal now
We are covered by one cloud…
I could lightly pass over the apartheid wall.
Can you see Akka, Yaffa, Al-Quds, Isdud, Nablus, Ramallah?
Can you see the Palestine I never saw?[1]
From the physicist’s constellation to the flying kite, Gaza redraws the sky as a map of return. Not from above, but from below—by memory’s grip and the will to fight erasure. Even in dim moonglow, Gaza lights the path to liberation.
Endnote
[1] “A Flying Kite” by Sahar Taiseer Kalloub was composed in 2021 and read aloud by its author in Dublin, Ireland on 17 April 2024.
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Featured image: “The moon rises over destroyed buildings on Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip on December 15, 2024”, by Saher Alghorra; used here with permission. You can find more of his award-winning work on Instagram @saher_alghorra https://www.instagram.com/saher_alghorra/