A croissant, in some instances, becomes a logistical issue–  even one of global import.  

Part II of III

In Gaza right now, humanitarian aid and calibrated mass starvation are not competing agendas, but one coordinated matrix of genocide.  In the first part of this writing I read the logistics of this occupation-as-starvation through a close reading of croissants.  In this second part, I turn to reading as an act.  Through the urgency of this moment, especially on campuses, a mode of reading emerges that refuses the old Enlightenment mind-body split.  In the third part I will return to the croissant and what it makes legible about the matrix of control innovated around Gaza. The coordinated matrix of control requires highly calibrated material and spatial protocols, which also require multiple data paradigms.

The blockaded croissants of April 8th reveal a calculated will to starve over a million residents of Gaza.   Nine days before the April 8th delivery of aid-as-starvation, Neve Gordon and Muna Haddad published The Road to Famine in Gaza in The New York Review of Books.  The article summarizes a long history of the Israeli Occupation deploying famine as weapon.  To quote just part of the devastating evidence: “Since October 7 at least 171 UNRWA team members have been killed. On several occasions Israeli forces have fired on UN trucks carrying food supplies along routes the military itself had designated safe, destroying the aid and suspending the deliveries.”  For decades, Israel inflicted hunger on occupied Palestinians as punishment. 

My focus on this recent blockade of croissants is, obviously, not because the denial of croissants is the most violent or gruesome or even the most consistent form of deprivation.  Rather, something can be read through the croissant blockade, in its specificity and illicit circumventing of aid protocols.  This is beyond a question of honesty or transparency, beyond terms of governance.  The croissant blockade makes evident not only a starvation protocol that persists in the midst of aid, but also a process of parsing human and not-human.  In the blockade of croissants, the Israeli Occupation enacts not only starvation, but genocidal rhetoric.  In this blockade the rhetoric that calls Palestinians of Gaza “human animals” becomes active. 

On October 9th, after two days of Israeli aerial bombing civilians in response to Hamas’ paramilitary attacks and kidnapping, Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant declared "I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed." Gallant continued, "We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly."  The distinction between civilian and non-civilian relies on the pretext of humanity.    The genocidal rhetoric unfurls as if we are not all human animals, mammals who tell stories.  

In the denial of the croissants we see the protocol of ‘human animal’ at work, just as it is in the incessant bombing, the destruction of apartment buildings, hospitals, and universities. The parsing of food maintains a chain of being at play.  Some food is too human for the occupied.  The logistics of Occupation relies upon a chain of being, where humans eat croissants; animals eat grain and waste.

In 1992 cultural theorist Sylvia Wynter wrote an essay in the midst of the acquittal of the police officers who beat Rodney King.  Titled, “No Humans Involved,”  the essay takes the form of a letter to her colleagues in the humanities.  The letter does not report on the response to the acquittal verdict. Rather, Wynter reads one term of Los Angeles policing to open a large set of questions about the responsibility and culpability of the humanities in defining the human.  The phrase - N.H.I., an acronym for “No Humans Involved”--  circulated in the Los Angeles judicial system to refer to cases involving unemployed young Black men.  

In her essay by the same title, Wynter makes the case that a racialized notion of the species relies upon the humanities.  This antiblack notion of the human, specifically relies upon a Humanities curriculum that centers European histories and subjects.  The culpability and responsibility lies not only in this centering and erasure, but also in the adjacencies to the sciences that naturalize this subject and classificatory logics that accord with race.  What Wynter calls the ‘economic ethic’ can be studied in any discipline as this and that type, evolving this and that way, closer or farther from some center or some ideal.  

Wynter sees in the Rodney King beating and the acquittal of the officers, then, not (only) a failure of a judicial system, but a misrecognition of human kinship that she traces to the core of the university.  As she concludes, “The starving fellah, (or the jobless inner city N.H.I., the global New Poor or les damnés), Fanon pointed out, does not have to inquire into the truth.  He is, they are, the Truth.  It is we who institute this ‘Truth.’  We must now undo their narratively condemned status.” (30)

Students on campuses around the world, whether or not they have read Wynter’s letter, are responding now to the displacement, starvation, and bombing of Gaza.  They are responding not only to the material violence, but also to counter any complicity with what Wynter calls the misrecognition of human kinship.  The university is a privileged place where the human is made.  It is the crucial place to make such a protest for Gaza– a protest which stages a disruption in the misrecognition of human kinship.  The students’ demands to divest– from the state of Israel for the duration of its Apartheid policies, and from military technology and weaponry– can be understood as demands to redesign the terms of accountability and kinship.  The demand to divest can be understood as a species-level question, as significant as climate change.

Why do students organizing for this form of accountability and re-writing of species kinship need to protest in the public spaces of universities and, specifically, in the form of encampments with tents?  

The tent makes an inside into an outside, rejects the existing as unlivable.  The collective form of the encampment as public university, with or without the tents, casts the insider as outside.  The almost-formless form of this counter university refuses the status quo and its species-level misrecognition.