Weaponising meteorologies of immersive violence in Palestine (and beyond)

Keywords: Palestine, Gaza, Middle East, war, atmospheric violence, meteorology, breathing, colonial violence, atmospheres, materiality,
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

One of the key traits of Israel's brutal military violence in Gaza, and Lebanon, has been the deliberate targeting and annihilation of life supporting conditions. This is tied to infrastructures as much as environmental conditions, but importantly also shows how air can be weaponised through the immersion of breathing body in its atmospheric proximities. This paper looks at the 'moving matter' as central aspect in thinking such weaponisation of breathing. It shows various uses through which meteorologies of material atmospheres operate, not simply by relating bodies to what remains essentially outside of them – the more-than-human –, but through the indivision of being bodily immersed in proximities of moving air. Different forms of movement, rhythms, patterns, slow encroachments, metastatic states, lingering oscillations, intensifications, frictions, and so on, hence become crucial in how breathing becomes weaponised via meteorological violence. Here the pneumatic immersion cannot be taken as a positive way of becoming one with the world; it is rather a source of colonial violence, a necessary internalisation ('the body cannot not breathe') enabling brutal tactics of war, racial humiliation, and weathering of aerial contaminations. While the methods range from the use of white phosphorus to toxic and dusty aftermaths of carpet bombings, or from weathering of spaces with stinky and sticky skunk water to drones luring bodies to traps with a cry of a child, such violence does not merely target but importantly also materially (dis)constitutes us as bodily beings.