Spatial Practice
of Return
Mahdi Sabbagh
January 27, 2025
Day 477 of genocide in Palestine, during the temporary “ceasefire.”
Scenes of half a million people marching north towards Gaza City pierced through the fog of grief. For many months, grief had become our most intimate companion — always in the room, engulfing every thought, every feeling, and every word. One particular photograph taken from an elevation, maybe a small hill, showed a sprawling crowd of people moving along the coast in a continuous line almost perfectly parallel with the sea. They were heading north, returning to the city, undoing our fate of perpetual displacement. With every return, the grief withers, or perhaps it is replaced by another grief; one that entails confronting the magnitude of loss. Return to what? For how long? And under which conditions?
The act of returning to northern Gaza demonstrates what it means to be of a place, to belong, and to be Palestinian. This return restructured the power dynamics that had been meticulously and relentlessly designed by the Israeli-American genocide, making clear that the logic of genocide is not a totality. Despite more than a hundred years of colonialism and an ongoing Nakba, it cannot dictate everything, and it does not encompass the entirety of the world. Palestinian return not only derails the goals of genocide, but it shakes the raison-d’être of Zionism. It exposes the ideology’s misunderstanding of Palestinians and of Palestine. Return and the logic of genocide are not in a dialectic relationship. Genocide, through its eliminatory structure, aims to form conditions of no return. But return persists, despite the unspeakable horrors unleashed on the people of Gaza, because return is not a reaction, response, or a singular event: There is no “day” of return. There is no plan or structure for return. Return is a spatial practice; it is an enactment of a tradition that emerged from a learned sensibility, a tradition that can be spatialized through many forms: actions, movements, rehearsals, and experiments, which make return possible. That is to say, spatial practices of return do not have to be final, or total, or even temporally bound, but in their enactment and mediation, they reinforce the tradition of Palestinian return. They are spatial practices that suggest futurities outside the logic of genocide which is central to Zionism’s survival.
Examples of these spatial practices can be found today across Palestine at varying scales and geographies — its mountains (جبال ), coast (ساحل), and desert (صحراء) — and through the hundreds of imposed borders, zones, areas, and camps. The annual Land Day marches of Palestinians in the Galilee and the Triangle are spatial practices of return: Communities march towards lands that were confiscated from them, and for a few hours they inhabit these lands, connect with them, and pay them tribute. The weekly prayers at Iqrit’s church and only remaining building are spatial practices of return: a congregation on lands and in buildings that the settler state refuses to return to its rightful owners. The sit-in tents, activated sidewalks and open houses in Silwan and Sheikh Jarrah are spatial practices of return: a sumud, an insistence on the right to stay in one’s home, to host, to gather, and to return to these daily practices. When Palestinians from Jerusalem go on walks throughout the ruins of Lifta or Suba, they rehearse their inalienable right to be on sites and lands that are central to their history and identity, and they insist on calling the sites by their Indigenous names, not their state-sanctioned Hebraized labels. The walk on confiscated land is a spatial practice of return: an opportunity for temporary landedness, foraging, and knowledge exchange. Bedouin Palestinians continue to rebuild their village of al-Araqeeb even after it was demolished by the settler state more than two hundred times. In 2018–2019, Palestinians in Gaza marched towards the border fence every Friday in the Great March of Return. Despite the bodies gunned down and maimed by the settler state’s forces, the marches were rehearsals for a future possibility in which the borders are gone and all Palestinians return to their ancestral lands.
Return can happen even in the darkest depths of mourning and can last for a generation, a day, even an hour. It is a tradition that was born and continues to grow out of this uncertainty; a lived reality in which anything can be eliminated at any moment. This tradition teaches us how to continue to practice return, regardless of the horrors of the world around us. In today’s Gaza City, Palestinians who stayed put and those who returned work daily to rebuild.1 The very intimacies of coming together, sweeping rubble, cooking for each other, setting up tents, and of simply making do constitute spatial practices of return. In the return to Gaza — the return to each other — in these intimacies, these spatial practices, one finds a way out of the impossibility of life during genocide. A way forward; a way that, in enacting return, challenges the paralysis of profound loss and grief by rehearsing towards futurity.
1. Farah Barqawi, “America & The War on Palestine,” Panel discussion, The Palestine Festival of Literature, New York, 2024.
This text was edited by Ahmed Morsi and published in The New York War Crimes, Vol. III, no. 18, on July 4, 2025.
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