“Ash to Ashlaa’” is an original piece by David Lloyd for Communis. This essay originated in a brief talk given at the conference on Southern Political Concepts, held at the University of California, Irvine, in January 2025. In it, Lloyd engages in a meditation on the specificity of genocide, taking off from the work of the Palestinian scholar Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, who is currently writing a book on ashlaa’.

“Just as the features of the crime of apartheid, which Israel not only practices but is grounded in, are not exhausted by analogies with South Africa but defined in international law, so too genocide is not confined to practices resembling the Nazi atrocity. Ashlaa’ is a material signifier of the ongoing genocide that may allow us to identify the specific characteristics of Israel’s two-year genocide at a time when the concept of genocide and its legal and political applications continue to be constrained by the apparent singularity of the Holocaust.”

— David Lloyd

 

For Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian

But, against the Zionist settler colony’s determination to transform Palestinian life into dismembered death, ashlaa’ offers Palestinians—and those who would bear witness—a vital concept for grasping racialized death and overkilling: it makes visible the strategies, policies, and practices of state violence and its management of death to assert sovereignty.

Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian

Let me begin by acknowledging that the term ashlaa’ in my title is a Palestinian vernacular concept elaborated by Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian in her current and ongoing work. I have neither the philological nor the cultural expertise to plumb its resonances fully, and that is not my intent here. But in short, ashlaa’ is the Arabic word for the scattering of limbs or body parts, a word that has gained atrocious force in the context of the ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza and the daily shattering of women’s, children’s and men’s bodies into often unrecognizable fragments by bombs, shells, and mines.

Shalhoub-Kevorkian writes:

Using the cut and bloody ashlaa’ to think about global transformation is crucial in this time of genocide. Ashlaa’ connect the past and the present, the living and the dead, the shredded and still intact bodies of the settler colony. To invoke ashlaa’ is to rupture the colonial dialectics of history. Ashlaa’ represent the struggle for psycho-affective survival and agency amidst the agonies of relentless attack. Centering ashlaa’ in an analysis of the genocidal violence toward Palestinians in Gaza is not only about refusing ontological non-being and deprivation of wholeness suffered by the colonized, but about naming and reclaiming ashlaa’ to problematize the Israeli state’s racial, geo-political, and aesthetic investment in violence.[i]

Ashlaa’ names the impact of Israel’s relentless and brutal attacks on the individual bodies of non-combatants, mothers, children, fathers, siblings. But its fullest resonances are also fractal in their reach: while ashlaa’ refers most immediately to the shattered body, in Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s elaboration of the term it scales up to signify also the fragmentation or shattering of infrastructure, dwellings, cultural and educational sites, and ultimately to the partitioned land itself and to the scattered Palestinian refugees and exiles, el-shattat. “Gazan words and actions reveal that they see an interrelatedness between the psychic, corporeal, territorial, and the social-national body of ashlaa’” (ibid.). At every level, the production of ashlaa’ is the settler project, such that the term becomes “a signifier revealing Israel’s ongoing desire to speak power through the smattering of flesh and blood, and by attempts to prevent both Palestinians and Palestine from being whole” (ibid.). In their unbroken resistance to that project, she argues, “Gazan testimonies have centered ashlaa’ using their own language and Arabic syntax, producing their own morphology. Their use of ashlaa’ stages the architecture of the shredded body as a source of power against the violence of anti-Palestinian racism and Zionist supremacy” (ibid.). Their insistence on “choosing the path of actual and epistemic reunification through collecting and unifying the ashlaa’ (not only of body parts, but as also of socially dismembered entities)” constitutes in turn “a liberatory act of reunification (lamm shamil, lammlamehl)” (ibid.).

Though Shalhoub-Kevorkian consistently emphasizes the gathering of those parts, and their holding together as acts of remembrance and honoring of the dead that constitutes a mode of Palestinian resistance against their genocidal erasure, I want to dwell for now on this word and the phenomenon it so singularly describes. Ashlaa’ is a material signifier of the ongoing genocide that may allow us to identify the specific characteristics of Israel’s two-year genocide at a time when the concept of genocide and its legal and political applications continue to be constrained by the apparent singularity of the Holocaust or Shoah, a singularity steadily promulgated by the “holocaust industry,” to borrow Norman Finkelstein’s polemical term for its political exploitation in the name of justifying a settler-colonial enterprise.[ii] In the immediate wake of Operation Aqsa Flood, both Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and US President Biden were quick to invoke the Holocaust in ways that implicitly and explicitly legitimated the use of total violence against the Palestinian people. On the other hand, naming Israel’s total war on the Gazan population a genocide is met with accusations of antisemitism, despite the overwhelming evidence of its inhumane destruction and the multiple statements of genocidal intent by the state’s leaders.[iii] Where an exact analogy with the Holocaust, with its camps and gas chambers and technical and bureaucratic mechanisms is misconstrued as the necessary condition for naming the project and the effort to eliminate a population and destroy its conditions of existence a genocide, then the term is legally and politically defanged and the Jewish state can protest with the appearance of plausibility the scandal of accusing it of a comparable crime.

But just as the features of the crime of apartheid, which Israel not only practices but is grounded in, are not exhausted by analogies with South Africa but defined in international law, so too genocide—as Raphael Lemkin’s careful definitions made clear and the international Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide codified—is not confined to practices resembling the Nazi atrocity.[iv] Nor, as Aimé Césaire so eloquently and devastatingly observed in 1950, were Nazism and its extermination camps an anomaly: their foundations were laid in the genocidal logic and the spaces of colonialism, a coming-home or techniques and technologies that had formerly been legitimized because they were applied only to non-European peoples. The Holocaust belongs in a series of genocidal acts which it extends with new instruments and was foreshadowed everywhere that an Indigenous population needed to be removed or enslaved, from Namibia to California, from Tasmania to the Caribbean.[v] Accordingly, Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s attention to the term ashlaa’, and the way in which as a focalizing figure it unflinchingly fixes our attention on a kind of degree zero of the genocide in Gaza, equally forces us to observe not the parallels but the distinction between two modalities of genocide, one signified here by ashlaa’, the other by ash.  My title, “Ash to Ashlaa’,” may seem initially a tasteless pun, but I want to dwell on these figures in order to open up the historical significance of the distinction they suggest between different modes in which genocide may be inflicted on a population and therefore to genocide as an historically specific set of practices.

With that distinction in mind, I have found myself returning to the literature on the Holocaust or Shoah in order to try to understand both the protocols of that genocide and what it signifies now, whether in operating as the excuse for or in highlighting the scandal of Israel’s warfare against Palestinians. That war, which has been intermittently but resolutely pursued since 1948 and constitutes an ongoing Nakba, is intimately linked to the Shoah, which became, nearly two decades after its founding, quite cynically bound to the very existence and self-legitimation of the settler colony even as it has pursued its own genocide against the Palestinian people. Since I am neither a historian nor a legal scholar, I’ve returned in particular to the work of two of the most profound and unsparingly honest witnesses of the camps, Paul Celan and Primo Levi. Reading them, one cannot but be struck by the figure of ash as a metonym for the nadir of dehumanization in what Levi calls “the useless violence” of the Nazi Holocaust, a brutality that exceeded all rationality and in which “human remains after death … were not human remains but indifferent brute matter, in the best of cases good for some industrial use.”[vi] Of the ash “used instead of gravel to cover paths of the SS village located near the camp,” Levi remarks that “I couldn’t say whether out of pure callousness or because, due to its origins, it was regarded as material to be trampled on.” (Levi 139-40).

Likewise, the figure of ash haunts Celan’s poetry, from the refrain “your ashen hair Shulamith” in “Todesfuge” to the pivotal lines of the later fugal poem “Engführung”:

Came a word, came

came through the night,

wanted to shine, wanted to shine

Ash.

Ash, ash.

Night.[vii]

Let me also cite at length the later poem from Die Niemandsrose, “Chymisch,” or “Alchemical”:

Great, grey

sisterly shape

near like all that is lost.

All the names, all those

names

burnt with the rest. So much

ash to be blessed. So much

land won

above

the weightless, so weightless

rings

of souls.

Great. Grey one. Cinder-

less.[viii]

Ash, ash and smoke rings, rising from the stacks: these are the grim signifiers that have come to be indelibly associated with the Holocaust, the burnt sacrifices to nothingness after all value has been extracted from them.

The litany of “all those names burnt with the rest,” reduced to ashes, seems a vain effort to make sacred the discarded, incinerated corpses of those casually, systematically murdered in the Nazi camps. It also resonates inevitably now with the litanies of Palestinians murdered in the past 24 months that have punctuated every encampment or protest against this latest genocide, the terribly interminable lists of infants Israel has slaughtered even before they reached one year old, many of them burned alive and reduced to ash in the tents in which, in their displacement, they had found an all-too-short-lived shelter. My point here, however, is that beyond these resonances, inevitable as they are, ash signifies a different modality of genocidal logic than what has unfolded before the world’s eyes in Gaza and that is the reduction of human beings to the form of ashlaa’.

Levi, the industrial chemist, makes the point with clinical sobriety:

The human ashes coming from the crematoria, tons daily, were easily recognized as such, because they often contained teeth or vertebrae. Nevertheless, they were employed for several purposes: as fill for swamp lands, as thermal insulation between the walls of wooden buildings, as phosphate fertilizer; and especially notable, they were used instead of gravel to cover the paths of the SS village located near the camp. [Levi, 139]

The most degraded remains, the cremains, of the human retained a macabre use value. Levi records how every aspect of the human was, in the camps, converted into a product, from the clothing and jewelry with which the victims arrived to the fillings in their teeth and the hair of their heads. For all this, ash is the lowest common denominator. Ash represents the reductio ad absurdum of the industrial mode of production whose technologies, processes, and logics, as many have noted, made the operations of the camps possible. If, as I think, the moment of its total violence reveals the moment of truth in any mode of production, the Holocaust is the point zero of industrial capitalism that had already reduced individuals to units of labor power and whose tendency was to transform everything into commodifiable matter, into value, that is, into capital.

With ashlaa’ we confront a quite different logic: ashlaa’ signifies remains without any value, sheer wastage as the discards of an unspeakably cruel warfare. In Israel’s eyes, the Palestinian population of Gaza has no function and no value: they signify a waste material that is shattered and fragmented in order to be disposed of, all too often with the wanton callousness of the video-gaming drone operators or in the grotesque target practice of IDF snipers. The practice of genocide itself proceeds through a kind of fragmented or dispersed sequencing, the serial accumulation of strikes whose appearance of randomness or moment-by-moment unpredictability follows the aleatory processes of artificial intelligence rather than the logic of massification or concentration. Its aim remains, nonetheless, the total and genocidal elimination of a population whose very existence resists the smooth territorial appropriations of the supremacist settler state. Not human bodies, even as repositories of potential labor, but the land cleared of its population constitutes this entirely colonial moment of capital as terra nullius.[ix]

In this, ashlaa’ signals the moment of truth of Israel’s colonial project, which has always sought not only the elimination of the Palestinian presence on the land, but also, as Samera Esmeir has written, “the destruction of the historicity of the Palestinians.” [x] But this is also the moment of truth of late neoliberalism, for which Israel now serves as a little laboratory, and suggests the form into which, in a different modality of fascism, it is at this moment transforming. Driven by an ongoing crisis of accumulation, the neoliberal mode of production was characterized from the start not so much by the exploitation of labor power as by the effort to emancipate capital from its dependence on a labor power that is its most variable cost. In this logic, humans are for the most part no longer the objects of the state’s biopower and governmentality, but a redundancy to be controlled by sheer force, subject—in the eugenicist logic that has possessed the pseudo-intellectuals of Silicon Valley—to elimination or incarceration. They are also bodies compartmentalized into “gig” functions to be used or discarded at will. Scaled up, the logic of production that David Harvey dubbed “flexible accumulation” functions by the fragmentation of production itself and by laying hold of the labor of precarious and disposable populations across scattered global geographies.[xi]

As Patrick Wolfe and I argued elsewhere, the settler colony offers the laboratory and the model for this refunctioned mode of production that is the endpoint of neoliberalism. The model is that of the longstanding and foundational if theoretically peripheralized colonial mode of racial capitalism in which total violence and disposable populations undergirded a system of hyperexploitation now refunctioned in the mode of flexible accumulation that has laid hold with particular avidity on production sites in former colonies that are now the neo-colonies of capital.[xii] Gaza’s genocide is the concentrated form of this mode of production to which Israel’s own hi-tech economy has for a long time now been so studiously wedded. It also furnishes a chilling experimental “death zone” in which the “overkilling” (to use Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s expressions) of Palestinians functions as the testing ground for the total violence through which the monopoly of violence of the territorial nation-state is transforming into the globalized violence of the core neoliberal states—in particular, the US, NATO, and Israel—whose militarism is directed at the containment of populations rather than the protection of citizens. And ashlaa’ is the material signifier of the logic of elimination just as Gaza’s reduction since 2007 to a 141 square-mile concentration camp has long been the exemplary instance of the containment of a population made redundant and scheduled for elimination.

This mode of genocide forces us to think beyond all the post-Holocaust terms of humanity, human rights, and humanitarian law that were the products of the liberal, biopolitical state and to ask what comes after the human when all beings are vulnerable to being reduced to things of no value, sheer waste without even a use. As Colombian President Gustavo Petro has warned, “What we see in Gaza is the rehearsal of the future.”[xiii] Under the relentless attack of the Jewish state that proclaimed its right to exist and declared its legitimacy even as this regime of rights emerged from the ruins of Europe’s holocaust, Palestine is the frontline not only of new modes of total war aimed at the elimination of populations deemed disposable things, but also of the questions and the practices that demand another possible world. In this most extreme of emergencies that is Gaza, can we grasp in the resistance of Palestinian life, insisting on the ingathering of ashlaa’, the offer of a countermodel of solidarity beyond value, the persistence of a life-in-common predicated on the shared vulnerability of the human body?

______________

Notes

[i] Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, “Ashlaa’ and the Genocide in Gaza: Livability against Fragmented Flesh”, Cultural Anthropology, October 31, 2024, https://www.culanth.org/fieldsights/ashlaa-and-the-genocide-in-gaza.

[ii] Norman Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering second edition (London: Verso, 2003).

[iii] Omer Bartov, “I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It”, New York Times, July 15, 2025. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/15/opinion/israel-gaza-holocaust-genocide-palestinians.html.

[iv] Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide, Article II, specifies precisely but with general application the crimes that constitute genocide: https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/convention-prevention-and-punishment-crime-genocide.

[v] Aimé Césaire grasped this fact with great clarity in the immediate wake of the Second World War in his Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham, intro by Robin D.G. Kelley (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), pp.36-7.

[vi] Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (London: Abacus, 1989), pp.138-9.

[vii] Paul Celan, “Engführung”, trans. By Michael Hamburger as “The Straitening” in Paul Celan: Poems (Manchester: Carcanet New Press, 1980), p. 119.

[viii] Celan, “Alchemical”, in Poems, p. 147.

[ix] Nothing could make this point clearer than Israel’s self-declared fascist and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich’s unspeakable remark that “the Gaza Strip is becoming a real estate bonanza”: Haaretz, September 17, 2025, https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2025-09-17/ty-article/.premium/real-estate-bonanza-smotrich-says-israel-in-talks-with-u-s-on-dividing-gazas-land/00000199-588b-d907-a5db-7def13e40000. Brenna Bhandar has brilliantly traced the linkage between settler-colonial elimination of the native and the propertization of depopulated land into real estate, from Australia to Canada to Palestine, in Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land, and Racial Regimes of Ownership (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018).

[x] Samera Esmeir, “The End of Colonial Government”, in From the River to the Sea: Essays for a Free Palestine, ed Sai Englert, Michal Schatz and Rosie Warren (London and New York: 2023), p. 88.

[xi] David Harvey, “From Fordism to flexible accumulation”, Chapter 9 of The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), pp. 141-172. Harvey underscores the relation between the “enhanced powers of flexibility” and the “stronger pressures of labour control” they enabled and that are essential to the neoliberal mode of production.

[xii] David Lloyd and Patrick Wolfe, “Settler colonial logics and the neoliberal regime,” Settler Colonial Studies (2015), pp. 1-10.

[xiii] Laura Gamba, “What we see in Gaza is the rehearsal of the future’: Colombian President at UN climate summit”, https://www.thesouthasiatimes.com/story/colombia-president-gaza (consulted September 25, 2025).

Featured image: A few ink drawings from Maisara Baroud’s Still Alive collection | Photo Credit: Courtesy @maisarart via The Hindu.

David Lloyd