“The dead have names. The weapons have serial numbers. The vetoes have timestamps.”— Laâla Bechetoula
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I was born in Laghouat, at the edge of the Algerian Sahara, in the house of Ahmed Chatta — a man abducted by French colonial forces in 1958 and never seen again. No grave. No body. No official accounting. Only absence.
Colonial systems often erase in two stages. First the body disappears. Then the archive is organized around the disappearance.
For that reason, when the first images from Gaza emerged after October 7, 2023, I recognized something immediately. Not the event itself. History never repeats itself mechanically. What I recognized was the grammar: the structure through which an entire population is progressively transformed into a demographic problem, a security burden, an obstacle to be managed, displaced, fragmented, or eliminated.
Girl in Gaza on her way to get food (CC BY-SA 4.0)
The vocabulary changes across centuries. The mechanism rarely does.
The destruction of civilian infrastructure. The separation of populations under different legal systems. The language of biological threat. The normalization of mass death. The bureaucratic management of starvation. The transformation of entire urban spaces into kill zones.
These are not accidental excesses appearing suddenly in wartime. They belong to a recognizable historical architecture.
Source: Global Research
