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Loneliness

Baldeep Kaur

When I started writing this prediction in November 2023, the sixteenth Israeli bombing and invasion of Gaza had been underway for a month. By the time I finished the first draft in March 2024, over a million Palestinians concentrated in Rafah were being carpet bombed. With telecommunication blackouts, murdered or evacuated journalists and bombed cables, news from Gaza escaped in rapid bursts and remained ever unpredictable in its horror. The West Bank had recorded its highest death toll ever, along with more than 7000 Palestinians abducted by the Israeli Occupation Forces in the span of five months.

I am guilty of witnessing this genocide and then turning away to estimate the future. I did so with the uncomfortable awareness that I am literally watching the future dwindle. So much life has been taken – each promising and unique and capable of futurity – that the horizon of the future I am trying to predict has shrunk horribly. I have struggled to predict with the full force of my imagination as imperial violence continues relentlessly and relief from its machinations is rare, fragile, precarious. I feel I have no skin in the future; it does not feel made for me.

I write about the future of loneliness in a state bent on silencing people like me, isolating and fracturing a long-overdue political students’ movement. As I predict, I am assuming a future in which the conduct of the German state and its acceleration into fascism after 2023 is already well-documented and known to my readers. In exploiting past crimes to justify ongoing criminal complicity, Germany has eliminated a viable consideration of its future. It is unclear how the nation’s political leadership, universities and cultural institutions plan to recover from this. Inside these ever-fortified borders, pro-Palestine activists are a minority facing the full brunt of state repression. The choice is clear: either stand with the pariah state or be a pariah within the state.

What is the politics of refusing to move on? How can we manage the effects of choosing the unpopular option to stay and fight? I wonder how this perpetual minority-ness, as people protesting against genocide and occupation, is changing us. What does it do to someone to be as lonely as a Palestinian. I don’t know. Tell me if you know.

For students who began mobilising for Palestine in October 2023 in Germany, alongside the blunt force of state repression, there has been an overwhelming sense of existing in a vacuum, unable to find the links to previous students who organised in solidarity with Palestine on German university campuses. There is something about the design of the German public university that inhibits generational hand-overs between student activists, creating a situation where emerging student movements view themselves as isolated and ahistorical. As material conditions in Germany worsen – cuts in public funding, crumbling infrastructure, soaring rents, inflation – the hold of student politics on campuses has been slipping. The pressure to keep one’s head down and graduate, especially among international students, has gradually depoliticised student bodies. It has solidified the university as a space limited to state-sanctioned use, without explicitly forbidding the kind of civil disobedience and political action that can create meaningful pressure on the state via the university.

University administrators and politicians count on rapid enrolment cycles and the university’s refresh rate to break political memory. Simultaneously, the radical potential of student movements from the 30s, 60s and 80s has been captured and neutralised by those movements’ documentation in university and student committee archives (Allgemeiner Studierendenausschuss Archiv). Unless we reject the parameters of German institutional memory, the prognosis of student collectivising seems grim.

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The dominant predictive model’s timescale is an election cycle, predicated on an attention cycle shaped by social media and exhaustion. I will gear my prediction towards a generational scale instead, to try to recover some capacity for abundance. It is not enough to somehow live. I want to demand the unreasonable, what I cannot imagine. I demand the future(s) in which the murdered masses are alive with me, for better or worse. I reject the story of survival (alone) as the only story available from which to build a future. I refuse to inhabit it. What is and what is to come is shaped as much by life as not. Prediction is the work of life after death. I ask those who have been snatched from us: how do we go on without you?

In Palestine, after over eight decades of brutal occupation, everything reduces to numbers: people, children, olive trees, homes, checkpoints, calorie quotas, prisoners, illegal settlements, ceasefires, wars, graves, organs, aid trucks. AI systems like ‘Lavender’ and ‘Where’s Daddy’ automate and expand the abstraction of Palestinian life.1 An Israeli soldier presses a button, the number goes up. An Israeli settler conscientiously objects, the number goes up. The occupation can assume no form that isn’t lethal to Palestinian self-determination. In the overwhelm of escalating statistical suffering, the current of survival runs undetected, surfacing occasionally as story or something else.

How has Palestine managed to persist despite being structurally isolated and fragmented? Settler colonialism is a nervous predator: The borders of historic Palestine have shifted and militarised every few decades, and in response Palestinian resistance has refashioned itself over and over. With each displaced generation, under occupation and in diaspora, Palestinian writers, artists, fighters, peoples have determinedly preserved the story of how they got there. Palestine endures because Palestinians are determined to return. Resistance operates with the conviction that there is always more future to be made. Mary Turfah’s (2024) description of this ‘optimism of the will’ is a principle to organise by: ‘The people of the land, for all these decades, aren’t waiting on the particles to settle for the proper narrative frames to emerge… Narrative clarity follows the will to manifest it. Resistance is a narrative arc, liberation its conclusion.’

In contrast, why does student activism in Germany feel like we are starting from scratch, with no choice but to make it up as we go along? While we are protesting in support of Palestine, we have somehow failed to adopt the political lessons of this long-enduring resistance movement. Most of us turned to activism in response to the genocide in Gaza so that we would not have to bear witness alone. Witnessing the events in Palestine felt tremendously shameful. It took Elham Rahmati’s (2023, 8) question in a NO NIIN editorial to sober me up: ‘What does that shame accomplish apart from alienating us from the collective political sphere into a personal one where we merely resign to creating an illusion of self-progress?’

Members of the student movement in Berlin often marvel that this collectivising even exists. Given how high the repression is, it is truly remarkable that so many of us still come to meetings, research and report on university complicity, and join demonstrations. However, this narrative of miraculous exceptionalism has been our own undoing – we are stuck in recurring loops of high risk, low reward actions and there has been no serious collective inquiry into what has worked in the past, because present failures register as shameful personal failings. Our lack of exposure to the history of successful student organising in Germany – for instance, the 1968 Vietnam Congress at the Technical University, Berlin – means that our benchmarks of success rely on personal validation rather than an inspired vision of what political gains or success can look like. Dopamine hits will not win us the world.

German politics is a context that is difficult to intervene in, especially for international students, because it is designed to exhaust us and shut us out. The effort of thinking beyond where we find ourselves is tremendous. Reacting to crisis after crisis of state repression will deplete us. As students we can chart a genealogy of resistance for ourselves, learning from one revolutionary moment to the next, each a lighthouse that warns us off rocks that our precursors could not avoid. If we desire to be carried into liberatory futures, we must narrate ourselves in a way that allows future waves of organising to carry us along, absorb the impact of our failures and build upon our analyses. To do this, we will learn to avoid state capture, learn our local context, and operate with extreme political clarity about the world we want and how we intend to manifest it. The future of our political loneliness will transform dramatically when we recover habits of organising – flyering, reading, educating, archiving, narrating – that were lost when generational memory broke. That includes imagining a future where another kind of loneliness is welcome, one that strengthens us and breaks us in better places. There is no imagining a future without loneliness. I’m interested only in finding a way through.

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When I started writing this prediction in November 2023, Refaat Alareer was still alive. On 7 December 2023 he was killed by an Israeli airstrike on his house, along with six members of his family, four of whom were children. His profile on academia.edu is still online. He is still listed as a contributor on the website of We Are Not Numbers, his bio still in present tense. People in Gaza have eSims and internet access but conditions that give life a future – food, water, medicine, or sovereignty – remain under Israeli control.

There are no ‘both sides’ to consider. We are always living in the imagination of the colonial, the caste-supremacist, the capitalist. There is no point giving air to what exists despite us. There is the totalitarianism of the colonial and then there is the multifarious hot mess that we inhabit. What I do today determines the scope of what is possible tomorrow, and what I know today is insufficient to estimate or grasp the absolute wonders that futures are. We must celebrate the fact that we have futures at all; the investigation of what they could be belongs to us, we are obliged to stay curious about what happened before and what could happen next. It took me a while to understand where this piece was taking me, but I think I’m there now: the power of predicting a future comes from accepting that we will have to live in it.

What I write now is already being met with a response from my future self, or someone who will be kind enough to write back. I’m counting on that response to help me finish this piece.