SOUND IN PALESTINE: SETTLER COLONIALISM AND THE ACT OF SELECTIVE DEAFNESS
Archisha Rai
The genocide of the people of Palestine is still ongoing. Despite a plethora of video evidence and testimonies from Palestine itself, the world remains deaf to the cries of Palestinians. Locating the sociality of sound and the act of political listening in the case of the ongoing genocide, it is argued that listening, in the truest sense, is a political act that shapes our experience of the social. When we close ourselves to the sounds of certain people, ideas, movements, etc, we create for ourselves a “socially induced hearing impairment,” which is crucial to the way we experience and perceive the social around us.
For the purpose of this article, we will delve deeply into how sound plays a crucial role in the construction of the social. We will look at how “socially induced hearing impairment” (Guru and Sarukkai 2019), a kind of selective deafness with regard to the voices of certain communities, becomes jarring in the case of the Palestinian people and the genocidal regime of Israel. We will look at how the act of political listening plays out here, and the denial of sound, of voices, becomes an act of the state to suppress resistance. As I write this article, more than 40,000 Palestinians have been killed, half of whom are children.
From 7 October 2023, Palestine is facing a systematic genocide at the hands of Israel, aided by the settler-colonial imperialist machinery headed by the United States (US). The internet is flooded with videos from Gaza, where we see the bodies of children being blasted off of rooftops, hundreds of people running towards food aid trucks and getting attacked by Israeli weaponry and videos of hospitals and universities being destroyed to the last stone, among others. The US has repeatedly vetoed the call for a ceasefire in Gaza. There are millions of people across the world, including but not restricted to, the international Jewish community, students, members of progressive political parties and civil society members who have been advocating for months for a ceasefire resolution in Gaza and the eventual recognition of Palestine as a nation. Why is this ongoing protest for Palestine absent from popular media? Why do we only get to know about the Palestinian’s voice when we look for it, while the Israeli perspective is peddled to us every day? And why, even when such news makes it to our feeds, are the headlines structured in such a way that the genocide in Palestine appears to be a war between Israel and Hamas? The explanations emerging from the state of Israel, Zionists and other imperialist powers avoid an admission of the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people, the reasons for the denial of Palestine as a nation are multitple, and not restricted to settler-colonialism, geopolitics, religious identities, capitalist-imperialist interests, a false sense of historical revenge, etc. We will look at the systematic denial of the Palestinian voice using the frameworks provided by Gopal Guru and Sundar Sarukkai (2019).
The Sociality of Sound
Before the advent of pictorial representations, or written language, sound became the medium for humans to communicate with each other. The development of sound has had a foundational role in the evolution of humankind. The mechanics of sound leads to the development of language as well as music. Sound in the everyday social shapes our reality; from the honking of cars in the city to the roar of industrial machinery, we rely heavily on our ability to hear for making sense of the social. Not just the hearing of man-made facets of our modern existence, but sound is necessary to stay in touch with nature; a bird’s call, a frog’s croak, the rushing sound of sea waves, etc, add to the tapestry of our existence. If we go deeper, “sound” as a category of stimuli does not exist in isolation. For sound to become a phenomenon, there needs to be a speaker and a listener. Thus, the act of making a sound becomes a social phenomenon. One could argue that if a sound is being made, but no one hears, does it really exist? But we shall look into a different extension of this question in a later part of this article.
Guru and Sarukkai (2019) in their book titled Experience, Caste and the Everyday Social problematise the idea of how to think about the social. They argue that “The everyday social is life as lived every day, by individuals who function within relationships with other individuals” (Guru and Sarukkai 2019). This everyday life of the social has to be understood in the very basic tenets of how we experience the social. We need to look at the different perceptions we create of the social. This is done through our senses, namely through sight, sound, smell, taste and touch. This means that if we assume that the “social” as a phenomenon exists outside of us, then it manifests itself through these five different modalities. And it is through our sensorial perceptions that we can make sense of the social. Thus, even though different philosophical traditions question whether there is a definitive social existing out there, for Sarukkai and Guru, we can see the social, smell the social, hear the social, taste the social, and also touch the social.
Sound “functions through a constructed morphology” (Guru and Sarukkai 2019: 69). This means that sound has a particular characteristic when studied with respect to a specific time and space context. It is concerning this constructed morphology that we begin to see a difference in sound and music. They argue that singing together creates the experience of being part of an entity bigger than yourself and one can experience the sociality of the situation as well. This will become clear when we look at the case of Palestinian music as resistance. “Sound is social through its communicability” (Guru and Sarukkai 2019: 69). We form associations through the collective utterances of different modalities of sound, such as language and music. It is important to differentiate sound from other sensory experiences because, unlike sight, sound cannot be understood as an individual phenomenon. We create our own realities based on the collective soundscape of our lives, and not individual sounds.
There is another dimension of sound which pertains to the objective of this article, which is the idea that sound is created as well as heard. Guru and Sarukkai (2019) give an example of a danger in the animal world for this argument. They say that when a monkey senses danger in the surroundings, he gives out a call to other monkeys as well as all other kinds of animals as a warning call. In this way, the call of the monkey and the sound produced through this becomes a moral act. Humans are also subject to similar expectations. Although humans are not hearing impaired to not be able to heed to warnings, they suffer through a kind of “socially induced hearing impairment” (Guru and Sarukkai 2019: 72). Through processes of socialisation and becoming assimilated into the order of things as we grow up, we are exposed to political ideas of hierarchy, inequality, difference, conflict etc, and these processes make us partial to a certain “sound” of communities. We turn a deaf ear to the sound of various groups around us, when we choose to hide behind a certain selective deafness. Thus, hearing in this process moves from being a natural process to being social. This selective deafness occurs when social is “classified.” Sound becomes a classified social when people are made to hear something that is not in their personal interest; what today we would call as propaganda. Another scenario where sound is privatised is when certain sounds and voices are systematically kept out of the dominant soundscape.
Sound in Palestine
Guru and Sarukkai (2019) talk about the morality of listening as we discussed above, giving the example of a monkey calling out to his species in times of danger. Listening here becomes a moral and responsible act. Following Hannah Arendt’s thought, speech and action are the only acts that lead to the creation of a political, democratic space. When one is deprived of this space, one is denied of their being. Thus, we see that both speaking and listening while we are part of a larger society become political acts. In the context of Palestine, since the Nakba of 1948, and even more so since 7 October 2024, there has been a systematic denial of the Palestinian voice. When a community of people, living in an open-air prison get bombed repeatedly for trying to break free from their occupiers, it is the duty of every human, every individual on the planet to sound their alarms—like the monkey does in the forest—to save their kin. An attack on the very being of one of us is an attack on all of us.
We shy away from this moral and social responsibility not just when we refuse to speak out against it, but also when we hear no sound from those under attack in the first place. Guru and Sarukkai (2019) write very aptly that “[…] although there is no hearing impairment for humans, they can nevertheless go for socially inducing hearing impairment.” We see this kind of socially impaired hearing, a selective deafness so to say, everywhere around us. Our social media is flooded with videos of hospitals, universities, children, and most importantly, journalists being consistently attacked and bombed, and yet people continue to say that this is not a genocide but a “war” between Israel and Hamas. Countless headlines by mainstream news media term this genocide as exactly that, a “war.” Every instance where popular media houses have reported about the ongoing genocide, Gazans have mysteriously “died” or “killed” without a killer, are “found dead,” and “die of hunger” instead of being starved. But every instance of an injury or death of an Israeli, is them being “murdered” and “attacked” by Hamas. Why do crimes against Palestinians have no face or culprit? When there is so much evidence of a population being completely obliterated at the hand of the imperialist, bureaucratic machinery, why does the sound of their screams not seem genuine or urgent enough?
Guru and Sarukkai (2019) talk about the “classified social” as a sound that is on its way to losing its natural quality because it has been classified. This includes making a set of people hear something which may not be in their interest or well-being. Social media as well as conventional media forms play a huge role in peddling anti-Palestinian propaganda. YouTube and Facebook algorithms in the Indian market at least, became supporters of Israel overnight. A country that was once one of the biggest oppositions to the settler-colonial project of Israel in the global South, became one of the biggest pro-Israel voices on social media overnight. The attack on Gaza also did not affect India’s position as the top importer of arms from Israel in any way. Of course, the Indian people’s support for Israel has much more to do with the rise of communal, majoritarian politics than their concern for global issues, but, nevertheless, our mediascapes have created a kind of vacuum. I conceptualise sound in this context in the form of propaganda that we see every day; the kind of propaganda that kills innocent lives every day. “… sound is fundamentally social and when it is individualised/privatised it goes against the meaning of sound itself” (Guru and Sarukkai 2019). Just as how patriarchy “converts the genuine cry of Sati to a dead silence,” Zionism converts the genuine cry of Palestine into cheers for blood. The imperialist, Zionist ideology hides behind the garb of historic wrongs and a misplaced sense of connection to the land. The Palestinian people have no right to return home to a place where their families have lived for centuries, but a Jew born in the US and not having any connection to the land can claim citizenship of both the US and Israel. There is a huge machinery at work that seeks to deny the Palestinians their right to their land, their sea, their river, and most importantly, their voice. “Conversely, patriarchy tries and puts its own voice on silence mode. Or some of them actively use technology to put the human cry to silence—first, they use drugs to silence the cry of the woman, then they will fence the pyre so she does not run away, then there will be a layer of security guards, and finally the creation of the counter-sound of drums to muffle the sound of the woman” (Guru and Sarukkai 2019). Similarly, Zionism, for decades, has pushed its own victims into silence. Journalists have been targeted and killed, internet and communications cut off, any and all protests being stifled. They use their modern weaponry to kill Palestinians, then make sure that the videos and proof do not go into the world outside, and then make sure to send out the counter-sound of the Israeli people being victims. This counter-sound is a necessary step for systematically denying the Palestinian people their right to life. As Arendt would argue, without the right to speech and action, one is robbed of their political/democratic life. This counter-sound is hateful, regressive, arrogant and authoritarian towards the oppressed. Guru and Sarukkai (2019) give the example of a soldier having to create a primordial sound when they conclude an act of killing. This kind of counter-sound is something that reaches us every day. The soldiers of the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) routinely post videos on the platform TikTok “showing off” their victorious acts of killing people in Palestine. We see an entire corner of the internet where IDF soldiers celebrate among the ruins in Gaza, displaying for their viewers the possessions of their late owners. The soldiers’ celebration of the act of killing is meant to kill power and meant to rouse people’s emotions to feel for him. Videos of ordinary Israeli citizens enjoying their lavish lives at home and celebrating the sound of bombs dropping on their neighbouring Arab populations are also part of this counter-sound characteristic of the settler colony. Certain sounds such as this counter-sound created by Israelis are celebrated and imposed on people. On another side of this sound spectrum, lies the repulsion of a particular kind of sound. In this particular case, it is the sound of Muslims in Palestine offering prayers in their mosques; the sound of students across Gaza studying and celebrating their education; the sounds of children playing in the open-air prison, the protesting sounds of The Freedom Theatre and the writer Refaat Alareer. This sound that is systematically meant to not be heard is not a natural resource anymore. It has been classified as well, and now becomes a socially compressed fact. This corruption of the human soul, of the brain and the heart, leads to the act of not listening and of denying the sound of an entire community.
“Hearing the small voices of history is a social need because it is also self-liberating and is not therefore social obligation” (Guru and Sarukkai 2019). When we open dialogue with other people and other identities, we build communities and solidarities that far exceed our differences. bell hooks talked about the act of love, of friendship as a revolutionary process that could change the world. “Whenever domination is present love is lacking,” she wrote in her 2000 book, Feminism Is for Everybody (Ransby 2022). A regime that is hell-bent on denying the voice of people, denying them the dignity to live as free, does not open the doors for love. When we adopt this selective deafness, we become socially impaired in our hearing. To be socially deaf is to deny our ability to listen freely. Thus, through this process of selective deafness, we deny ourselves the right to be human. Political listening is an act of compassion, of love. By doing otherwise, we deny ourselves the ability to love and be loved.
Conclusion
The US–United Kingdom-backed Israeli machinery is doing its best to produce a counter-sound that hides the reality of the Palestinian people. Imperialist propaganda reduces them into a population of good-for-nothing orthodox, conservative Muslims. The real sound of the Palestinian people lies in their resistance to this settler-colonialist regime. They laugh, they play, they write, they educate themselves, and most importantly, they build communities in their resistance. While our leaders have aided the genocide of the people in Gaza, the sound of Palestine has travelled across the seas, across the rivers, as evident in the worldwide protests.
Archisha Rai (archisha5678@gmail.com) is a student at the Centre for the Study of Social Systems, Jawaharlal Nehru University.