AMAN is an Arabic Word for Peace: Gaza is Where it Ends

Dr. Fella Lahmar

Some mornings, night prevails; it stalks, muted, oppressive, unyielding, as it trounces through sleep, unsettles dreams, and refuses to ascend at the threshold of waking. This morning was no exception, as the news alerts arose from Gaza touting predictable tragedy, I knew what would confront me. I glanced anyway.

The headline was blunt: On Sunday evening, 10 August 2025, a small tent outside Gaza City’s al-Shifa medical complex was reduced to ash after an Israeli direct strike, and with it fell five witnesses that were never just press cards, but hearts that beat in words, images, and truth. Al Jazeera correspondents Anas al-Sharif and Mohammed Qreiqa, along with photographers Ibrahim Zahir, Moamen Aliwa, and Mohammed Noufal, were killed by Israel in a moment that stripped away any illusion about the dangers journalists face in Gaza’s streets, and about the price truth is made to pay on a land under siege and genocide.

This was not the abstraction of “collateral damage,” but the Israeli deliberate extinguishing of witnesses , the kind of act in which the story itself is assassinated alongside those who would have told it.

The silencing of witnesses is thus more than the end of five lives; it is an effort to unmake the space in which reality is tested, judged, and remembered. The names remain as a claim upon our responsibility to see, to speak, and to keep the common world fit for truth and justice.

Yet for many of us, looking has become a ritual; it fails to console, it cannot inform, but it does confirm. Crushed buildings, the remains of homes that once resounded with embracing hearts and loving voices, children with limbs torn away, infants too weak to cry; women weeping into dust salvaging the remains of their families. Doctors gunned down as they clung to their oaths to save others while gasping their final breath.  Mass graves dug in the bellows of the earth where hospitals once stood. The images are no longer fresh, and their repetition is not accidental. The horror lies not only in what is shown, but in the fact that it can be shown repeatedly, without consequence, and at times, with justification.

Are we voyeurs or witnesses?  Is to watch enough? Can witnessing be active when the violence grinds constantly, so routinised, that it blurs into background noise, even for those who think they care? I drink my tea; a bitter aftertaste lingers, an accumulation of seeing, hearing, and knowing.

The pools of sadness that swirl in the eyes of the children stare back from the screen, not pleading for analysis, not reaching for theory, not asking for my academic self; demanding something more basic: that I still feel and recognise their humanity in a world that has chosen to selectively forget. Bitterness baulks in my throat ejecting a helplessness lodged deeper still.

To be a deep thinker amid this daily tsunami of atrocities is to live the grief of every child killed, and to hear their pleas to save them. Since the war began in Gaza, every single day has claimed—on average—the lives of an entire classroom of children^[1].

To research, teach, and live as an engaged academic with a sense of responsible presence is to stride an uneasy line between knowledge and witness, between the clinical dehumanised vocabulary of institutions and the embodied grief of a debased humanity. The callous lexicon of international law, intent to destroy, civilian infrastructure, collective punishment, reveals the sterility of inhumanity when measured against the scale of human loss. And yet, language remains one of the few tools to resist the erasure of human dignity, to assert historical and legal truths where denial festers and erases to absolve guilt, to mask complicity, to reconfigure the conscience of power.

So, what does it mean to perform academic work in the shadow of catastrophe?  I enquire from a place of depletion, of moral fatigue, and of a deepening conviction that silence equates to complicity, rather than from a rhetorical stance. The sense of entitled superiority that colonial powers embody in daily synergy and unspoken assumptions targeting the colonised grows institutionally, and delves genocidally, into this catastrophe. Yet, speaking—writing, teaching, naming—extracts its own toll. The energy of attentiveness to distant suffering, to bear witness through screens, reports, and images, while addressing academic demands, appears unsustainable at times.

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that stems not only from grief, but from the structural normalisation of violence, what Mahmood Mamdani has called the politics of naming, and what Achille Mbembe situates within the necropolitical management of life and death. In Gaza, these are not abstract theoretical terms, these are lived realities. To observe them from afar is to experience a form of secondary trauma, intensified by the widening dissonance between what we know and what we can do. Of course, this is Gaza—not Ukraine, not the lives of non-Muslim White Westerners, whose geopolitical and racial identities continue to confer differential recognition and protection. As Srebrenica made tragically clear, Whiteness alone offered no protection when the victims were Muslim. Human life, once again, has proven to be unequally valued.

To come from the colonised world, to carry a body assigned diminished worth in Western hierarchies of grief, is to inhabit the space of the sometimes tolerated but the never entitled. One is expected to remain oblivious to the architecture of violence, to silently observe its intimacy, yet refrain from naming it. Recognition must always be measured, contingent, granted, never claimed. The discourse of rights was not meant for those whose lives were deigned worthless, whose deaths require no justification because their value, in the global moral imaginary, was never fully authorised.

 We remain familiar with this story. Why is the bombing of Ukrainian infrastructure condemned as a war crime, while Gaza’s destruction is rationalised as “self-defence” or military necessity? Why did world leaders march for Charlie Hebdo in defence of press freedom, while the systematic targeting of Palestinian journalists is met with silence? Why was the U.S. invasion of Iraq framed as counterinsurgency, but the violence in Darfur named genocide? What distinguishes imperial violence from humanitarian concern in the eyes of global power and interests? Why do Western feminists rally against the forced hijab in Iran but remain quiet when Muslim women in France are excluded from education and employment for wearing one? What makes coercion oppressive in one place, liberating in another? And worse: where is this same feminist voice when Palestinian women in Gaza are not merely denied school or work, but denied the right to live at all? What determines whose suffering becomes global outrage, and whose is rendered invisible, bearable, or even deserved? Who holds the authority to name genocide, to declare whose lives matter, whose resistance is legitimate, whose grief is real? What are the moral costs of this differential recognition, for the dead, for the living, and for the ethical foundations of any claim to universal rights?

In this regard, Susan Sontag’s warning in Regarding the Pain of Others, springs to mind: exposure to atrocity does not necessarily lead to understanding, and understanding does not guarantee action. Might our repeated exposure to annihilation anaesthetize us, render us numb to empathy, and dead to meaningful action? Still, I remain committed to a pedagogy that refuses apathy. Bearing witness and taking action, however small, may not be enough, but it is also not nothing. As scholars, particularly those in the humanities and social sciences, we are often trained to maintain critical distance, but in the face of genocide, distance can become a form of disengagement. This reflection does not seek to dispel the distinction between scholarship and activism, rather to acknowledge the porous commonalities between them. My intellectual commitments are not separate from my ethics.

Today, I am drained, not only by the decolonial paper I had planned to write, but by the emotional labour of caring for the depth of decolonisation beyond its career-driven commodification and performance. This, too, is part of academic life, though rarely recognised. To think deeply is to reflect with one’s full human complexity, which includes feeling. To remain open to the suffering of others in a world that rewards detachment is, perhaps, a radical act.

In honouring that act of openness, I choose to reflect, to write, to grieve—and to take part in something that does not ask for spectacle: a commitment to healing. As a Trustee of Mothers of Hind (MoH), I lead on the AMAN Project—Advancing Mental Awareness and Nurturing—a trauma-informed initiative rooted in the lived experience of loss, memory, and survival. AMAN, in Arabic, means peace, safety, protection, both physical and emotional. The word conveys what is denied in zones of unending violence: the possibility of living without fear, of healing without apology, not rendered as the absence of danger. AMAN grounds in the quiet, often invisible, work of soothing wounded psyches. It seeks to rectify what is systematically denied to those whose lives are deemed vulnerable by design.

Tomorrow, I will step back out of necessity rather than withdrawal, to regain what this work demands. To heal is not to turn away from reality, but to meet it differently because fatigue is not failure; it is the consequence of refusing to deny or ignore. I will rest to return with sharper intention, and with the life-affirming hope that, through MoH-AMAN, even a small voluntary act might help hold a life together from within. MoH gesture is not everything; yet in a world bent on the destruction of meaning, it is still something. Each gesture must strive toward the edge of what’s possible, refusing surrender to erasure.

^[1] UNRWA’s Deputy Director of Affairs in Gaza, Sam Rose, told BBC Radio 4 Today on 14 July 2025