Is impotence always sexual?

According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, more than thirty-one thousand Palestinian-humans, of which 72% are children and women, are so far killed and another seventy-two thousand injured by the necro-sovereign Israel from October 2023 to March 2024. It is like killing more than two hundred people and injuring nearly five hundred people per month, in a time-slot of less than five months. This shows the tremendous performance of Israeli competence in inflicting death, and its capacity in creating death-worlds. While Israel merits appreciation, for the so-called Muslim World, the Ummah, it is perhaps more than just shame to wait and watch. It is impotence; and impotence does not always need to be sexual.

Mbembe, a Caribbean scholar, has theorised Necropolitics which fundamentally informs us how a sovereign creates death worlds by creating a space of exception under the pretext of emergency. The recent Israelite aggression began as the counter strike to the Hamas attack which can be situated as the pretext of emergency helping the necro-sovereign Israel to create the death-world that we witness in Gaza. What happens within the framework of Necropolitics is that the sovereign employs power to inflict death unquestionably and hunts down its enemies and eliminates them in any manner and number it so desires. The meaning of life shifts and the deaths create no remorse but are merely taken as collectivities of skeletons stockpiled. Human life is problematised and held in what is called a state of suspension. This state creates an effect of oscillation where human lives sometimes appear as bodies and at times as mere objects. They are bodies merely by dint of their fleshy makes which can abruptly be reduced to the status of objects and treated likewise. This oscillating state between body and object creates a construct called the Zoo.

Gaza is not a war-torn place; it is the space of exception created by Israel where the Palestinian lives are held in a state of suspension sliding between bodies and objects. Like it happens in the zoos that a distance is observed between those caged and those coming to see them, similarly in the Gaza Zoo this distance is observed between the Palestinian objects and the Muslim Ummah. Like those who visit the zoo must follow this rule of distance for their own safety, so is the Muslim Ummah following this rule in the case of Gaza Zoo for their own safety. Like it happens in the zoos that no matter what happens to the encaged objects, the visitor does not need to rescue, similarly the Muslim Ummah is doing nothing no matter what happens to the encaged Palestinian objects in the Gaza Zoo. Like it is told not to feed anything to the encaged objects in the zoos, similarly nothing is to be fed to the leftover Palestinian objects in the Gaza Zoo. Like in the zoos it happens that you are not to shout at the caged objects as not to turn them violent, similarly is sensitive the Muslim Ummah not to shout for Palestine.

It is interesting to analyse that in the zoo it is the zookeeper who decides what must happen within the territorial and biophysical space of the zoo. The zookeeper both creates the space and governs it. What makes the Gaza Zoo the most interesting is its spatial temporality: where is it located? This Zoo is located in a space which is surrounded on all sides by the grand Muslim Ummah and bound by another historically powerful Muslim country in the Mediterranean. What is more interesting is that the zookeeper is both alien and settler.

Thus, such unique positionality of this zoo within the heart of the Muslim Ummah testifies many things of which one most critical thing is that “impotence does not always need to be sexual”.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 19^th, 2024.

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