Even as the current issue of Theory and Criticism goes to print, the fighting in Gaza continues. On March 18, 2025, Israel broke a two-month ceasefire with a bloody attack that killed more than four hundred people in half an hour. Since then, the army has continued bombing from the air, killing dozens of people every day. Israel is preventing the supply of food and humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip, and hunger is increasing. Tens of thousands of internally displaced people are moving back to displacement camps in search of safety, but there is none to be found. A bomb dropped on al-Mawasi, which until recently was a humanitarian zone, set tents on fire and killed thirty-seven people; fifteen aid workers were murdered in Rafah. Trump’s plan to empty the strip of all its residents is not being implemented, but the army is establishing ever-expanding “buffer zones” where there are no longer any Palestinians. The mechanism of displacement and destruction is working with tremendous force – with the support of Western countries, many of which contribute to its armament – and with no significant political force in Israel demanding that it be stopped. Even those who call for a hostage deal in exchange for an end to the war are actually asking for the suspension of war for a certain period, after which it will be resumed. These “deals” do not end the war but rather reorganize it. The recent ceasefire allowed for an increase in attacks on the Palestinian population in the West Bank; its collapse was planned, and the return to fighting in Gaza was known from the start.
We are captives of war, trapped in its web, caught in its grip – captives of a war whose central symbol in Israel and its supposed cause and purpose, are the Israeli captives in Gaza. Following Nitzan Rotem’s article in this issue, we will insist here on calling the Israeli civilians and soldiers held in Gaza captives and not hostages. Kidnapping is an unexpected, sudden act, carried out in a flash; it originates in ancient mythological spaces and the world of crime; it is an act involving individuals. Captivity, on the other hand, is part of a broader social system, involving collectives, which are those who bear responsibility for it. Kidnapping is an event devoid of context; it is a result of a malicious whim or an impulse to violate a boundary, it disavows results and has no future. Captivity, on the other hand, is bursting with meaning and steeped in history: it has explanations and reasons, it’s rooted in a political context, a moment in motion, a stage in a process. It is no coincidence that the Israelis held in Gaza are defined as hostages, implying that just as their abduction was swift, so too will be their return. “All of them, now”, as the slogans calling for their release call — as if it is a kind of terrible mistake that must be rectified at once, a horrible malfunction that must be overcome. Captivity, on the other hand, is bound to the world in which it occurred and where it continues to exist; it is not an exception that can be canceled, but rather an act tied to logic and order that must be interrupted and brought to a conclusion.
War and captivity are intertwined. Captivity is a component of the occurrences of war, and war captures its actors. Israel has been trapped in war, and not just since October 2023, writes Rashid Khalidi in his latest book, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine (2020). It is possible that what has erupted so forcefully in the past year and a half is an extreme expression of the actions of a society that has been taken captive by war and has existed in it, knowingly and unknowingly, by necessity and willingly, for many decades: The deepening of the occupation and the shaping of a regime of separation and oppression, the fragmentation of the Palestinian people and the depletion of their resources, the ever-expanding cooperation between the settlers and the army, and the formalization of nation-state laws – all of these are the result of decades of a war that was convenient for Israel, a “low intensity” war with a small number of casualties while experiencing economic prosperity and relative social stability. Thus, the current war in Gaza is not a tragic turn in narrative, for which a murderous organization and a corrupt leader are to blame. While rearranging the playing field, it also realizes long-awaited plans and fulfills not-so-secret publicly recognized dreams. This war is not just a dead end, a road to nowhere, a historical mistake that will yet be judged. It enables a war economy, has war beneficiaries, and offers a way out to quite a few people who submit to it, respond to its call, and even participate in it enthusiastically. It’s not just the settler right that sees October 2023 as the beginning of redemption, but also “non-ideological” people who find meaning in war, connect with their national identity, experience exaltation on the actual battlefield or in the media; who live with high intensity, with intense vibration. This war is taking many of its subjects captive. It draws them in and they are wrapped around it: mixing disaster and opportunity, fate and desire. The great rightward drift that is now sweeping through almost all sectors of Israeli society is a result of the captivity of war. It is ecstatic or melancholic, it involves social belonging and political alienation, it can take place in the heart of the country or on the journey out of it, and it is powerful.
A few years ago, Ilai Rauner published a daring novel in which he presented the grip of the captivity of war on social life far removed from it. In Praise of War describes a group of boys, high school students from central Tel Aviv, who embark on brash and violent expeditions against their literature teacher. These expeditions coincide with one of the previous Gaza wars, Operation Protective Edge (Miv’tza Tzuk Eitan) in 2014:
Fortunately for them, the war in Gaza broke out at the beginning of the summer, and rockets were fired at the coastal cities. For the first time, it seemed to them that their world was bound to the collective fate of the country in which they were raised. Now they were no longer lost. No longer not understandable or out of control. Historical time seized their lives and threw them back into the streets. One evening, the first barrage of rockets was fired at Tel Aviv. The sky opened above them and the alarms rose like great waves that rise and fall, drowning the entire city in a sense of destruction (Rauner, 2019, 74).
This is the convergence we are experiencing now. This issue of Theory and Criticism continues the project we began in the previous issue, published in the summer of 2024: to write the critique of war while it takes place, to do so in Israel and Hebrew, based on critical theory and within its scope, in the face of the rightward drift that is also affecting the local academic community. The first part of the issue addresses the captivity in endless war. As a social system, captivity always contains the possibility of return – the return of the Israelis held in the tunnels in Gaza; the return of the Palestinians, thousands of whom were taken as bargaining chips at the beginning of the war, from the detention centers in Israel; the return of the soldiers operating in Gaza again to their own border; the return of Gaza to a state of existence that allows for Palestinian life. But the return from captivity does not end the captivity or free one from it. It is a stage in the story of captivity, and in order to escape the captivity of war, it is necessary to break through some of the basic assumptions that establish the course of existence in Israel/Palestine.
Rivers of words have been written about the war, and these flow alongside the continuous flood of images and news reports. At times, they seem to be part of the captivity of the war, accompanying its course and enabling it. I hope that the war articles published in Theory and Criticism are texts that call for a different kind of reading: one that is more suspended, principled, and yet urgent. Much has been written in the past year and a half about the failure of theory, the betrayal of theory, and the need to free ourselves from theory. The articles in these issues seek to open a door to a different understanding of the reality of war, which requires theory, but in which theory is not the object.
***
The issue begins with an article by Hagit Keysar, who returns to the Hamas attack in October 2023 and asks what led to it and made it possible, as well as what made it unfathomable until the moment it occurred. Keysar examines Gaza not only as a political space of control and oppression but also as a space for technological development. She shows how Gaza has become a laboratory for experimental technology over the past two decades – both for powerful and expensive Israeli military technology and cheap, do-it-yourself Palestinian technology. To that end, Keysar offers a genealogy of the open air as a military space in wartime and a space of control and surveillance in peacetime, showing how the air above what became known as an “open-air prison” became a site and medium of Israeli combat and Palestinian struggle. Keysar follows a paradigmatic object of the Gazan air, the kite, a symbol of the struggle for liberation and the possibility of crossing borders and fences, which became a real weapon, breaching the border and penetrating Israel. This movement between the symbolic and the real was neither sudden nor one-directional; there was no dreadful transformation here one day, from a game and a toy into weaponry and a device of sabotage. There were many signs and various precursors involved in this movement during the years leading to the Hamas attack, and Keysar outlines them in her article. The Israeli military, relying on its technological superiority, ignored them and saw them as a mistake, a disruption, and an accident. This was a disregard for forms of experimental development not backed by a wealthy and powerful industry, a disregard for forms of knowledge creation and dissemination. The article focuses on the techno-political space formed in Gaza over two decades, whose development, suppression, and denial prepared the ground and air for October 2023.
From the conditions that made the war possible, Nitzan Rotem’s article turns to what accompanies it throughout – the Israeli soldiers and civilians held in Gaza. In non-ideological language, which refers to them as captives of war and does not see their release as a deal but rather an agreement for the exchange of captives by both sides, Rotem examines the transformation in the meaning of captivity in recent decades and its radical expression in this war. She returns to the foundations of sociology and the conceptualization of captivity not as a crime, existing on the edge of the social, but as an infrastructural social system that functions as a mechanism for the transition and change of collectives. Rotem traces the privatization of captivity, which began after the Yom Kippur War with the medicalization and psychologization of the treatment of prisoners of war, and shows how these are reflected in the current war. The sporadic release of captives, their hospitalization, the detailed protocols for their treatment, and the many embraces they receive marking their return – all of these are rituals that privatize the treatment of captives and as a result, remove collective responsibility towards them. As the Hannibal directive makes brutally clear, captivity is now something that must be avoided at all costs, even at the cost of killing the captive. This is because captivity, as Rotem explains, has ceased to function as a social system. Her article suggests that the ongoing failure to ransom prisoners in this war is not rooted solely in the cruelty of the leader or government’s policy; it is the sad result of Israeli society’s disintegration from a meaningful mechanism, that outlines a process and enables its termination.
Uri Katz‘s article also addresses captivity in times of war and examines a particular type of captive – the soldier whose body has not been found and whose death has not been determined with certainty. One who exists in the borderland between the living and the dead. Katz examines four cases in which the bodies of Israeli soldiers were held in Lebanon and Gaza and despite many signs indicating that they died in battle, were not officially declared war casualties. Katz offers a discourse analysis of these cases: he examines their media coverage, traces legal and parliamentary documents on the subject, and presents the various social actors who operated in the public arena and took part in the struggle over the ontological status of the captive. But instead of deciding on the question of “dead or alive?”, the article shows how a new liminal status was created in these cases, one which exists through the absence of a body and polysemous rhetoric of ambiguity – a status that satisfies private family wishes while it is exploited for governmental needs. Thus, following Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics, Katz describes how the sovereign creates and maintains a threshold zone and applies it not only to the body, present in its life or death, but also to the absent body, positing death as an open, limitless, endless movement. The article was submitted to the journal’s editorial board before the war, and seems to have preceded and predicted the seemingly spontaneous, but superbly managed, public frenzy surrounding the numerous Israeli captives in Gaza, whose deaths were known to the government but who were kept alive in public discourse for many months; the article was updated following the war.
The portfolio presented in the issue also addresses the war and the widespread, unreported deaths in Gaza. Ofri Cnaani has created a textual-visual essay that questions how we view images of horror from the war. These images flow from international media and social networks to personal mobile devices and place a Crisis in the Palm of My Hand, as the series of photographs Cnaani took for the essay and which accompany it are called. Cnaani examines the mediated proximity to horror and the formations of the sensory-visual relation to it. However, she does not do so as a simple phenomenological examination of a subject perceiving an already existing object but rather investigates the transformation of these images into objects of observation through their processing and distribution according to computational protocols. The relationship between the statistical models that direct the network flow of images and the images themselves of multiple, dismembered bodies, of ruptured bodies, creates a completely privatized observation, according to Cnaani. This is an excited or incidental observation of the multitude of images that move between fact and fiction and appear and disappear on screen with the force of a swipe. In contrast, the essay formulates another relation, which is not merely observational or tactile; a haptic relation of collective physical closeness, which can be practiced with the help of works of art that halt the flow of horrific images and their individual consumption in favor of bodies that can also sense each other through the technological medium.
***
The articles in the second part of the issue do not address the war. In her article, Nana Ariel raises and seeks to challenge the increasing connection in recent years between today’s populist leaders and the ancient Greek sophists – those with no interest in investigating the truth, relativists who engage in empty rhetoric, sophisticated orators who know how to sway the masses. This image of the Sophists was created by their sworn opponents, the philosophers. It is enshrined in their writings and is biased and distorted. Ariel returns to the moment of the Sophists’ appearance, to their speeches and their depiction, and interoperates them differently: As early humanists whose main concern was education, who studied the relationship between knowledge and power, who saw truth as impermanent, something that no one has control over, and who valued debate over dogma. The article traces the history of reading the Sophists and shows how the attitude towards them changed so that at crucial moments of thought they constituted a point of reference and even a source of inspiration for the critique of philosophy and its renewal. Ariel suggests that today, with widespread claims about the prevalence of post-truth in public discourse, as if until Donald Trump the search for truth dominated the world of media and politics, we can learn a thing or two from the Sophists about living in a world with no preconceived certainties, subject to constant debate, medial and rhetorical, as well as about cultivating a complex attitude towards truth that involves neither exalting it nor disabling it.
Netta Schramm‘s article also offers an alternative approach to reading familiar writings. Schramm turns to Yeshayahu Leibowitz and Ovadia Yosef and seeks to understand their relationship to Zionism. However, instead of reading and interpreting their writings, she listens to the audio recordings and watches the numerous video recordings that have documented the words of these two thinkers, examining them as performances that must be analyzed, while considering their many registers. Leibowitz and Yosef conveyed the main points of their teachings orally, in sermons, speeches, interviews, and conversations, and not in written articles and tracts. Therefore, in order to understand them, we must respond to the act of live speech and extract meaning from its various registers. For example, Schram analyzes a sentence that Leibowitz said in an interview and dwells on the rhythm of his words, his sudden change in tone, his body language, and his mischievous smile, and thus reveals his ironic meaning, which disappears when only recording the interview as written text. Leibowitz’s short, sharp, and outrageous wording is loaded with an additional layer of meaning. Meanwhile, Ovadia Yosef’s long sermons are analyzed in the article from the perspective of legend and fantasy that permeate them and the amusing and parodic language he uses, which emotionally stimulates the listeners and thus conveys their meaning. Despite their many differences, Leibowitz and Yosef were two heterodox Zionist thinkers, whose political doctrine was neither systematic nor forged, nor summarized in writing. Schram’s work reveals how, in their lively, sharp, or blatant speech, each of them presented a flexible, non-total political theology of Zionism.
Noam Gal‘s essay addresses “Material Imagination,” the permanent exhibition of the Israeli collection at the Tel Aviv Museum curated by Dalit Matatyahu. The exhibition opened in 2022 and has since been changed several times through a deliberate process of removing and adding works. It generated great interest in the local art scene, due to the manner in which it was organized, which was strikingly removed from any historical – national or critical – narrative of art in Israel. Gal examines the exhibition in relation to the extensive transformations that have taken place in how collections are displayed in museums around the world. This, in light of the postcolonial turn and the unraveling of the unifying national narrative and in the face of critical museology and its demands for radical systemic reorganization of the way museum treasures are presented. The essay offers different perspectives on the exhibition – on the works chosen for display, the connections between them, the question of the material, and on the possibilities for political reading, despite everything, during the period of the legal reform and the Gaza War.
The Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro is familiar to readers of Theory and Criticism from Eliran Arazi‘s article on the Andoque tribe and reverse anthropology, published in issue 54. In this issue, we present a Hebrew translation of Viveiros de Castro’s writings for the first time – two chapters from his masterpiece Cannibalistic Metaphysics. This book uncovers an extensive meta-research move that draws on various ethnographies of the indigenous Amazon, including Viveiros de Castro’s research. It is a philosophy in the spirit of Deleuze and Guattari, based on the construction of concepts. However, in this case, the concepts are Indigenous ideas – no longer understood as beliefs, positions, or opinions that must be analyzed and interpreted using the concepts of anthropology, but rather as concepts in themselves, such as must be experienced and understood from within the Indigenous world but at the same time in our world as well. Uri Landsberg translated two chapters, which are different in nature, from the book: one addresses the metaphysics of prey and presents a comparative examination of sacrificial rituals conducted among the Araweté and Tupinambá peoples in the Brazilian Amazon, to extract the system of relationships between self and other that underlies them. Unlike a system based on the concepts of friend or foe, as in the Platonic dialogues or Montaigne’s essays, or one based on conflict within identity, as in the Hegelian dialectic, the relationships here are those of enemies that establish the self through the enemy who is killed and consumed until it is assimilated and speaks from within us. The self therefore contains the enemy and the relationship of hostility as a mode of predation and counter-predation. The second chapter translated here focuses on the implications of this same structure of hostility when it is understood not only as Indigenous metaphysics but as a relationship between different sets of meanings: What happens when the relationship between the Western and Indigenous systems of meaning is itself a relationship of mutual predation, of hostility that enters from one conceptual system into the conceptualization of the other system? The importance of these questions cannot be overstated, not only for anthropology but as a challenge to any system based on separateness: The separation of the ruler from the ruled, of different beliefs or life systems, or separation as the non-translatability of one conceptual system into another. Eliran Arazi wrote an introduction to the translation in which he places VDK within the genealogy of anthropology – from participant observation, through Levi-Straussian structuralism, bypassing the crisis of representation and up to the ontological turn. He demonstrates how the image of the enemy was cast from the brother-in-law – the sister’s husband – as a stranger who is brought into the family and has a relationship of difference and assimilation of otherness with the siblings that underlies social relations in the Amazon. He explores radical otherness in this paradigm while emphasizing its empirical limitations, and in doing so, recounts several surprising stories from the Andoque tradition.
While working on this issue, Einat Arnheim was appointed deputy editor of Theory and Criticism. I wish her much success in her role.
More Articles from this issue
