“Even the Dead Will Not Be Safe”: Postmortem Warfare in Gaza and Beyond

Contemporary warfare intentionally deprives the deceased of the right to be grieved and remembered as a form of psychological warfare. This paper is an attempt to offer a comparative view of postmortem warfare by examining Gaza within the larger context of contemporary genocide in the Middle East. Postmortem warfare is a modality of necroviolence (Jason de Leon) as such it seeks to kill the enemy beyond biological life, chasing its target into the afterlife. The “unreal” enemy is upheld by the libidinal desire to not only destroy but to erase all traces of the enemy. Modern warfare is capable of obliterating and evaporating the human remains that tie deceased and living descendants through ritual and mourning. Muna Haddad has shown in her history of Palestinian corpsing that although necroviolence (Jason de Leon) has its roots in much more ancient warfare, the assault on the dead has been a continuous Israeli war strategy since 1948. Necroviolence has been increasingly adapted in other places as a strategy to attack on “the national pattern” (Raphael Lemkin) of a group by depriving communities a connection to the dead. The examples I will offer are multifold from the marginal Kurdish and queer dead in Turkey; Asad’s targeting of opposition corpses and cemeteries in Syria; and the targeting of Armenian cemeteries by Azerbaijan, to name a few. By linking arguments in death/queer studies together with those happening within genocide and Palestinian studies, this paper asks: should attacks on the dead, prohibited in international humanitarian law and the Geneva conventions, should be included within the definition of genocide?