Afkar-e-taza! From Imperial OverKill to Decolonial OverLife: the Ground Zero of Palestinian and Iranian Resistance and a Feminism that Embraces Life

“Is that you again? Didn’t I kill you?

I said…you killed me…and I forgot, like you, to die.”

– Mahmoud Darwish, “In Jerusalem”

My esteemed colleague, the beautiful human being named Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, a Palestinian Armenian scholar from Jerusalem, reviled and chased out of her tenured full professor position at Hebrew University for daring to call the genocide of Gazans by its proper name, and who has been a Visiting Professor this past year at Princeton with me in the Gender and Sexuality Program, elaborates on this verse of her compatriot, the late poet Mahmoud Darwish, through her chilling concept of Overkill[1].  Like the related term “Necropolitics” as adumbrated by African scholar Achille Mbembe, “Overkill” signals the murderous policies enacted on the bodies of SOME citizens (deemed unworthy, abject)–by neoliberal capitalist states in the contemporary world order, of which the entity of Israel is a prime example. Overkill, she explains, is a colonial necro-economy. As a colonial technology, overkill operates through the systematic evisceration of the colonized socio-political body—attacking its cohesion, interdependence, and capacity for regeneration. It subjects populations to continuous and routinized death, rendering human life, family, and community continuity no longer sacred but instrumentalized in the service of power. In her analysis and theorization of the ongoing genocidal Nakba in Gaza, Shalhoub-Kevorkian thus calls attention to “the centrality of death and overkill apparent in the ashlaa’ [body parts] of decomposed babies in incubators”  bringing into our view “the ordinary terror inhabiting the most vulnerable bodies – newborns and children – and most vulnerable spaces: homes, schools, and hospitals” (540).

Her analysis exposes the racist, white supremacist, necropolitical ideology of the Israeli state that “reduces children and newborn bodies into decomposing, dismembered objects to support the larger project of demarcating the ontological boundary between the human and the non-human, the should-be-shredded, decomposed, and killed to disappear.” In other words, some bodies—seen as sub or rather, non-human—like those of brown Arab Palestinians—are ripe for killing—again, and again and again: this is overkill. Contrasted to the Israeli babies whose birth is celebrated by their soldier-fathers even as they are simultaneously killing and maiming Palestinian ones, shows that this racist ideology claims only the colonizer’s bodies as human, worthy of being saved, preserved, and celebrated.  Yet, the brutal inscription of Israeli state power on Palestinian flesh, as Shalhoub-Kevorkian explains, links these dead and “dying bodies to the settler colonial state” permanently, eternally, for historians to excavate forever in perpetuity[2]. In an ever-more searing gesture of anamnesia, when parents of dead babies and children look for the scattered remains of the flesh of their flesh, a finger, a hand, a severed foot—this lamlameh, this process of in-gathering, of community resolve in the face of unimaginable grief and loss, this collecting of ashlaa’, tethers flesh and body, delivering the supreme blow of resistance: the gestus of re-membering  dis-membered parts,  that (re) connects Palestinian “individual and collective lives … establish [ing] a  renewed peoplehood.” Thus, Palestinians refuse to be reduced to body parts, their wholeness fragmented, they refuse to succumb to the erasure the oppressor so desperately tries to ensure with all the military might at its disposal, supplied by the arch-imperialist nation of the USA, whose watchdog in the (so-called) Middle East Israel has always been. Instead, Israeli OverKill results in Palestinian OverLife— life beyond life, a hauntology that the settler colonial state can neither resolve nor whose consequences, escape, is condemned to live in its spectral present, haunted by lost futures and pasts that refuse to die. As Darwish had written in 2005, addressing the Israeli Overkill machine, “you killed me…and I forgot, like you, to die.” Overkill is the paradoxical condition of Overlife:  Operation Enduring Resistance.

Which brings us to an understanding—demanding admiration– of the Iranian state’s response (that is supported by the overwhelming majority of its people, including critics of the Islamic regime)–to the unprovoked and illegal aggression reigning death and destruction since February 28^th  on its sovereign land and citizenry by  US/Israel’s combined military might.

Just like Israeli airpower targeted and blew up civilian spaces in Gaza that are protected by International Law such as schools, hospitals, homes, places of worship (what a joke International Law has become!)—so too in the vicious early phase of lethal bombing on Tehran and elsewhere in Iran, an elementary school for girls was targeted and destroyed, shattering into ashlaa the bodies of its young students, most completely burned, many identifiable only by personal items such as school bags. Pete Hegseth, US Secretary of War, a willing accomplice like his master in Israel’s war (yes, the tail now wags the dog), allowed false and outdated intelligence to guide his orders to target the school.

In the wake of this heinous war crime, a panel of Special Rapporteurs–experts– appointed by the United Nations Human Rights Council, had this to say:

The killing of a reported 168 people, primarily schoolgirls, in the bombing of the Shajareh Tayyebeh school in Minab in Iran has shaken to its very core the conscience of the world.

The attack, carried out nearly two weeks ago when classes were under way, reduced the school building to rubble. Parents who had sent their daughters to school discovered minutes later that classrooms had become mass graves.

This UN human rights panel has gone on to demand that the killings must be “Urgently, independently and effectively investigated, with accountability for any violations”.

Skepticism about what such a “demand” issued by an international body now widely seen to be utterly weak and in thrall to its western donors can effectively accomplish aside–this same UN panel does something worse. It attempts at shifting the blame onto the Iranian victims of Israel violence, by detailing a litany of gender-based discriminations ascribed to the Islamist government in the same breath as it condemns the attacks by US forces on Iran (egged on by Israel’s deliberately faulty intelligence).

For example, these special rapporteurs follow their handwringing at the devastating attacks by noting that the reported attack unfolds against a backdrop of entrenched, systematic gender-based discrimination in Iran that has profoundly affected women’s and girls’ right to life and their civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights, from marriage, divorce and inheritance to access to justice. Women continue to be executed under the qisas system for homicide, often after killing partners in the context of domestic violence, sexual abuse and child marriage. Meanwhile, discriminatory laws shield male perpetrators of femicide from standard penalties by allowing claims of so-called “honour”, a woman’s perceived disobedience, or her attempt to leave a marriage to serve as justification. During the nationwide protests that began in December 2025, over 200 children, including girls, were reportedly killed by security forces, and many others remain arbitrarily detained, including children, and are reportedly facing the death penalty.

What is the purpose of these remarks other than to set up a sly justification for the Israeli/US attacks as harbingers of “freedom” for Iranians from the yoke of Islamist tyranny Are Iranian women who are purportedly chafing at the bit to throw off their veils in imitation of a white western understanding of what constitutes feminist liberation, asking to be saved from the burqa by being killed in a shower of bombs? ? is that what liberation for school girls mean? another mode of overkill….where all parties “kill and kill more’, to “save and liberate”? Is this the logic that should guide us?

Like the 20-year “War on (of!) Terror” unleashed by the US and its western allies on people of Afghanistan, the war on Iran—also just like the Israeli genocide in Gaza that claimed as a goal the erasure of the Islamist extremism of Hamas to secure Palestinian women’s and LGBTQ rights– so too this latest US/raeli aggression against Iran attempts to peg its Orwellian justification on to the hook of women’s bodies. This latest war against Iran—like other aggressions unleashed against the Islamic regime since 1979–was certainly launched in the name of a liberal, individualist and separatist conception of women’s rights associated with White Western Feminism-a war seeking to hoodwink the world by white-washing ( pun intended)—its criminal intent through invoking as justification, the noble purpose of “saving brown women from brown men”.

None of this is happening out of the blue, as it has a prehistory that haunts the present: this present that is peopled by the ghosts of lost futures and pasts, bodies and memories that refuse to die, will not die, as long as injustice continues its reign of terror. Sadly, even radical American feminists such as Kate Millett succumbed to the hegemonic definitions rooted in white supremacist liberal definitions of feminism back in 1979, which resulted in or should I say instantiated the self-cloaking mechanism that obfuscates even the best-intentioned progressive activists in the Imperium. Like other well intentioned and concerned feminists of her ilk, and certainly far more progressive and (somewhat) better informed than other well- known white feminists of the era like Gloria Steinem for eg, Millet could nonetheless not grasp the complexity of the social transformation that heralded the turning point in Iranian history symbolized by the overthrow of the Shah and the subsequent takeover by Imam Khomeini. It was an event that shook the foundations of the imperialist Western capitalist hegemonic system that sought to keep control over a postcolonial world order revolutionized by the dreams and hopes of the Bandung era and the Non-Aligned Movement. Iran’s Islamic Revolution has to be understood in that historical context. Seen thus in the light of nationalist movements of decolonial liberation that preceded it elsewhere in the Third World, what Millet could not grasp then, and what the West (of whose colonialist past Israel is the only surviving remnant in the Present) also remains deaf, dumb and blind to, today–is the fact that Iranian women are embedded in the larger anti imperial resistance now, as then.  As analyzed in Iranian scholar Negar Mottahedeh’s book, Whisper Tapes (2015), Kate Millett possessed a “socially constructed state of unknowledge” about Iranian culture, leading her to misinterpret the urgency and nuanced demands of Iranian women, who were battling both state-sponsored sexism and foreign intervention.

In 1979, with typical Western arrogance, Millett (mis)read what was a strategic unity of women and men in the protests as submissive, as caving in to Muslim patriarchy, whereas it was, for many Iranian feminists, a tactical decision to prevent their demands from being labeled “counterrevolutionary” or elitist. In a similar fashion, today’s experts in the UN and elsewhere, and including many Iranians in the diaspora who were former supporters of the Shah—continue to inhabit what Mottahedeh called a “socially constructed  state of unknowledge.” These so-called “experts”  also refuse to acknowledge inconvenient facts such as post-revolutionary Iranian women’s preponderance as students in universities. For example, we know (or ought to)—that Iranian women’s university enrollment has risen dramatically in post-revolutionary Iran, growing from approximately 3% in 1978 to over 55–60% of total university students in recent years. This represents nearly a 20-fold increase in the share of women in higher education since the 1979 Revolution, with women now comprising roughly 70% of STEM graduates (AI generated summary, for a fuller picture see https://www.workers.org/).

As a lifelong feminist dedicated to a definition of feminism that is transnational in scope and that centers the ideals of social justice in the quest for a people’s as opposed to a narrowly defined “women’s” liberation movement—I am not here offering a blanket endorsement of the Islamic regime that has ruled Iran since 1979. What I am saying is that in the two weeks that Israel and the USA have been engaged with their far, far superior military hardware against Iran, Iran as David, is winning the battle for our hearts and minds against the Goliath that is US/rael. In my recent visit to my motherland, Pakistan, where I was invited to give a series of talks based on my scholarly, artistic and activist career to students and faculty beyond the elite urban university centers by an organization called Thinkfest, translated (in a Persianate Urdu) as Afkar-e-taza , meaning: “to think in new ways”–  I heard amongst those I met and among my friends and family, including among Pakistani feminists, only praise and admiration for Iran, standing up to, rebuffing, and even inflicting damage on its powerful antagonists trying to reduce Iran’s 5000 year old civilization to rubble. The Iranian state and people are seen as engaged in a brave and just war of self-defense, exhorting other Muslim nations who are in the US/raeli orbit to reconsider their shameful capitulations to the imperialist West. Indeed, the world is being asked to think in new ways—afkar-e-taza–beyond the overkill of Empire that breeds endless cycles of violence.

One can only hope the enormous sacrifices made by Iranians, like those of the Palestinians, especially the Gazans, whose genocide continues apace,  will serve as a wake-up call. Iran, which has always supported openly a Free Palestine (and paid the price)—serves as a beacon for the world, lighting the way out of the darkness of capitulation and submission to the powers that be, and who, inshallah, wont remain so in the years to come.

Iran, and Iranians, like Palestine and its people, are showing the rest of us how to stay human, to maintain our dignity, to fight for a just world for men, women, other humans, animals, ecologies.

Now THAT is a feminism that can save us all, a politics of being that has the power to negate the death drive of nonbeing that has the world in the grip of overkill.

The Eros of the majority, against the Thanatos of the minority.

Solidarity of the Oppressed against the cynical and self-serving alliances of the Powerful.

Please listen to this Iranian mother, who when asked how she plans to change her 2-year-old son’s diapers should hot water in the freezing cold in Tehran become unavailable, tells her interviewer:

God is Great

We don’t think about these things

What about the Palestinian children who have been in this situation for years?

How is my child any different from them?

We fight today so they can live more easily tomorrow

My son can live more comfortably in the future

If we continue to fear the loss of hot water today, the world will continue on this path of oppression.

Someone must stand up to this oppression.

And there you have it. This is Feminism. This is Life. This is the real meaning of Zan, Zindagi, Azadi: Women, Life, Liberty.

It is past time to get rid of, once and for all, the faux feminism that has been pushed down our throats for far too long, a feminism that has, and today continues to, serve the cause of imperialism, settler colonialism, and racialized capitalism.

Long live Iran.

Free, free Palestine

From the rivers to the seas—till we are all free.

Notes.

[1] See Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, “Five Pillars of Zionist Genocidal Apparatus: A Palestinian Problematization of Genocide Studies,” in JOURNAL OF GENOCIDE RESEARCH2026, VOL. 28, NO. 3, 540–552.

[2] This anamnesiac process by which the colonized body if forever tethered to its colonial oppressor who can never sever the links with the colonized body it “overkills”–is highlighted in the work of the brilliant Algerian chronicler of the Algerian War of Independence against the French, Assia Djebar. See especially her novel, Fantasia: an Algerian Cavalcade (1989).

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