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Since October 2023, we have witnessed the first livestreamed genocide. Scrolling through my social media feeds, I encounter the sounds of carnage—wailing mothers caressing lifeless children’s faces; the frenzied scuffle of blistered hands clawing at tons of rubble; a rasping plea that Rashid, Mustafa, Jana, and Asmaa can be reached in time—buttressed between US news segments guessing at who will be the next president, videos of well-tended cats lazing about sun-soaked sofas, and influencers frolicking to the latest TikTok challenge.
I flick downwards thrice on my device’s interface, deriding myself for looking away, for my inability to bear the voices so full of grief that they echo, resonate, and rebound in a continuous feedback loop within the four walls of my apartment. Given the transiency of the online variations of our lives—the technological mediation through social media that divorces sound, signal and noise alike, from their contextual temporo-spatiality—I ask myself if the brave, terrified, terrorized man whose voice just reached my ears from a post he uploaded seven hours ago is even still alive.
Sonic sensation is inherently ephemeral, and it “shift[s] the felt nature of memory, time, and place, disrupting the naturalized chronotype” as Samuels et al. write in “Soundscapes: Toward a Sounded Anthropology.” As specters of the Nakba haunt this settler-colonial, genocidal campaign waged by Israel, I seek to attune my ears to the survivance of Palestinian people, listening closely for signals amidst the din of occupation’s imposed soundscape, demonstrating that sounds of communal care are dissonant to such an imposition. Survivance, here, can be understood as “overliving” by “maintaining a Palestinian presence in the global imaginary” through cultural production and fugitive footage that elevate a “placeholder politics … helping to preserve a collectivity until conditions allows that collectivity to act politically,” to quote Nadia Yaqub.
Beyond this, there is a distinction between listening and hearing. Hearing implies passive sensorial experience, while listening requires conscious attention toward distinct sounds. Though there is certainly overlap, in the context of listening for Palestinian sounds of relational care, we must grapple with the overlay of certain imagistic scripts upon our listening practices. Rather than watching and hearing, there is importance in discovering meaningful signals of care parsed from bombardment, and though communication is fraught, the occupier and the occupied sound one another into being.
The boundaries between signal and noise are blurred by a superstructure that inflicts precarity. As I gather fragments of the thousands of clips uploaded by Palestinians in the Gaza Strip since October 2023 alone, I listen for the ways my ears are primed to manipulate the signals shared by Gazans; this manipulation is not intentional but is endemic to the flawed listening strategies that accompany enculturation into epistemically violent research practices. Amplifying the signal—that is, acts of communal care shared between Gazans and found within the footage they upload—requires an acknowledgement of the savage slot and the complicity of scholars, myself included, in failing to advance a precise representation of those who reside in the Global South.
Sound studies offer alternative frames to accurately understand and then portray the range of experiences, multimodal methods of resistance, embodiment of histories, and power dynamics inherent in our listening strategies. This article, born from digital ethnographic research conducted for my thesis, will thus attempt to contend with the sound body of Palestine, particularly as we have seen in the Gaza Strip since October 2023. The sound body resonates, resounds, and experiences, and it is in stark opposition to the legal body; it cannot be owned, contained, or folded into the structures that oppress legal bodies.
The sky above Gaza buzzes incessantly, ever on cue, as Israeli drones remind Palestinians below that there is no solace for them so long as they remain, that their movements are tracked by the zanana (which in Gaza has come to refer both to the drones themselves and the buzzing sound they emit). The buzz has become a maddening backdrop to Gazan life, a phenomenon that, per Fatma, has only grown louder, closer, and stronger since October 2023. Israel’s omnipresent drones serve to chip at Gazans’ capacity for relational care. Fatma describes displacements across multiple refugee camps in which the residents are subjected to sonic torture that “wreck[s]…nerves, irritating [them] and other [family members], causing tension and escalating arguments.” More noise.
The screams of a child pierce the April air in Nuseirat, interrupting the usual drone hum. Signal. These screams, however, are a sonic invention. Mohammed Nabhan reports hearing a woman pleading for help followed by a child calling out for their mother; upon further investigation, he realized that it was a “sound system” attached to an Israeli quadcopter carrying this supposed signal toward tents housing the displaced. Warnings of this sonic weapon did not reach Abu Anas al-Shahrour, who was killed by the quadcopter as he searched for the source of the noise to administer assistance. The rupture between signal and noise within the soundscape of occupation and genocide can be rife with interference and faulty connections. This white noise of drones, a sort of sonic forcefield that fences in Gaza, drowns out the lull of the Mediterranean Sea and the songs of birds above.
This noise follows David Novak’s definition of a “context of sensory experience, but also a moving subject of circulation, of sound and listening, that emerges in the process of navigating the world and its differences.” The noise emitted by drones, the ringing tinnitus induced by an exploding bomb, and the staccato of gunfire are sensorily felt by Palestinians in a world constructed of and by difference. Ahmed Ashour shares that Gazans “only dream of a quiet night without screams or the whistling of warplanes.” Noise, here, is inherently relational—though opposing—to the sounds of living in Gaza that include the scrape of a knife over a cutting board as civilians in community kitchens attempt to feed the starving, or the reassurances whispered while a mother braids her daughter’s hair in a “displacement tent to prepare a future scholar for her makeshift classroom,” to quote Maha Hussaini. The noise of industrialized genocide seeks to silence the sounds of survival. I concur with Novak that “noise in sound communication is far from meaningless,” as it would be absurd to deny that the sounds of structural death (here, read as noise) do not slice emotionally or perpetuate immense psychological harm to the survivors of this genocide.
Indeed, Farah echoes thousands of other Gazan voices, noting, “The noise of the rockets makes an unbearable pressure inside [her] ears,” and that “[Gazans’] mental health is ruined. [They] cannot live with this war any longer.” It is a cognitive impossibility to comprehend the volume of the martyred; what burden and relief are held simultaneously as essential aid workers signal through the blare of an ambulance siren that help is coming 186,000 times over? If we hold space for the noise of suffering and listen closely, we can untangle agentive signals against the erasure of structural violence. Gazans are crafting an alternative sonic archive; to grasp the significance of these ephemeral moments, we turn from noise to signal, from imposed soundscape to emergent acoustemology.
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Practicing deeper listening strategies unravels signals. We can grasp how sounds of communal care are knowledge systems within themselves. Sounds are bound to adaptations required by given landscapes, and in the case of Palestinians living in Gaza, this includes a sounded knowledge system crafted in resistance to the Israeli aircraft above, tanks and bulldozers within the enclave, and boots on the ground inside occupied homes. Acoustemology figures in the lived experiences of cohabitation that are significant across time and space, and it is particularly attuned to the resonance of ancestors, the echoes of ghosts, that inform the materiality of present bodies. Laura Albast highlights this weight of carrying ancestral testimony, noting that “with every source, [she] scroll[s] through: back once to ’82, the bodies on the ground, scrolling up to 2024, the limbs in the rubble,” and “the screams live inside [her].”
Approaching Palestinian acts of communal care as a particular Indigenous knowledge system provides a microphone better suited to capture whispers, murmurs, and thundering voices that are dissonant to a soundscape aimed at Palestinian erasure, dispossession, and annihilation. Keeping with Steven Feld’s writing against the soundscape, Palestinian relational care values histories of listening and sounding, deconstructing the premise that knowledge is passively acquired; an attunement to such relational, multivocal elements of Palestinian knowledge production and dissemination during the intensification of genocide allows for a historicity of sounding that is inseparable from and informed by settler encroachment and Israeli occupation.
The sounds of Palestinian relational care, then, are dissonant to sounds of structural death—bombs, gunfire, drones—in that they perform an agitation against the goal of annihilation. Caring for self and others during such violence implies a sonic relationality between Palestinian sounding/voicing and the sounds of industrialized mass murder; the latter attempts to silence the former in this matrix of sounded relations while the former continues to adapt and share the evolving body of knowledge, of evasion and fugitivity, that empowers Palestinians to continue surviving. What is the utility of attuning ourselves to sound, especially now? What radical possibilities emerge when we isolate sound as a variable in this context? How can we listen closely for the echoes of Palestinian connectedness to their homeland, of registering history through sound via the footage they curate and share while under siege? Echoing DJ Hatfield, “Punctuating the diffuseness of occupation, sound abets ethical transformation” and dissolves understandings of a “hierarchy of places” beyond the perils of rigid nationalist frames.
Against the barrage of footage depicting Palestinian death, against the dehumanization inherent in the hawkish language utilized to portray Palestinian suffering by mainstream media, Palestinians heighten sounds of survival and more-than-living. For every moment a bomb obliterates a home, for each time a Palestinian is tortured while detained, for all the nervous systems ravaged by perpetual bombing, Palestine sounds back. When descendants of Nakba survivors carry their ancestors’ keys in hopes of returning to former family homes either long razed or occupied by settlers, when children excitedly play soccer amongst the rubble of a cousin’s world or squeal with joy while transforming bombed cityscapes into a playground slide, when a trembling boy hurtles a stone at a tank and it lands with a thwack, and when thousands of Gazans stomp in unison toward the Israeli fence demanding the right of return, Palestinian dissonance reverberates ever louder against the subjugation of Israeli occupation and genocide.
Rahaf Nasser, a medical student, sings within a landscape of rubble to audiences of Gazan children despite losing her physical home to share her message with the world, that “[Palestinians] love life; [they] love to live.” Signal. Khalid Saeed Naji strokes the purring family cat as he and his family members continue living in the remains of the home he built “brick by brick” in Deir al-Balah; while laughing with a neighbor, he remarks, “This all can be rebuilt, and nothing will stay as it is now.” Signal. Mohammad Abu Sultan continues to care for his cooing pigeons within a displacement tent in Khan Younis; he tends pigeons that “are almost extinct in Gaza,” electing to feed them from his small daily portions of food, refusing to allow them to die. Signal.
As leaflets litter the ground warning of yet another massacre, another catastrophe, another small death through displacement, Palestinians form a miles-long caravan destined for their destroyed homes in the north of the Gaza Strip, as they pledge to rebuild their lives there. Palestinians under siege in Gaza have learned through the circumstances of their oppression—evidenced by policies such as Israeli mowing the grass—how to differentiate which aircrafts carry bombs, how much time remains to warn others, and where to shelter before the impact collides. So long as there are Palestinians remaining in Palestine and in diaspora, they will sound back, in resonance with ancestors demanding return, and in an adapted key to suit the latest moment of dispossession. Palestinian sound bodies defy containment or contamination by settler fantasies that seek to disappear them.
The sonic landscape of Gaza today is one of contradiction, where annihilation and endurance coexist in trembling harmony. Within this violent orchestration, Palestinians continue to sound their being. In charting the difference between signal and noise, we come to understand that listening itself is an ethical and political act. It means refusing the flattening of Palestinian experience into silenced suffering while acknowledging, as Bisan Owda informs us, that “survival has become difficult; death is the easiest thing for [Gazans]. Genocide is when the human being is exhausted. And the machine is exhausted. And the clothes are exhausted. And the tent is exhausted. And the earth is exhausted.”
We choose to tune into the stubborn frequency of life, memory, and resistance. Hana Eleiwa documents a journey through storytelling in the Gaza Strip in search of refusals of submission to suffering, and she finds herself in a tent with members of Sol Band, a group that continues Gaza’s music-making tradition despite being disallowed to “say farewell to details” because of genocide’s taxing toll. Sound becomes a site of knowledge production, and acoustemology a method through which we can grasp the rhythms of refusal, return, and futurity. Palestinian dissonance inheres in every sonic act that defies erasure, reorienting what constitutes archive, which narratives construct history, and who is worthy of being heard.
This sound body—this unfixed, reverberating body that cannot be silenced or seized—resists dominant epistemologies that fail to contend with Palestinians in their fullness. Reframing listening as co-resistance is one method to unlearn colonial scripts of perception. In so doing, we create intentional space to hear both the agonizing scale of suffering that Palestinians endure during genocide and the practices of care that seize back life. Despite genocidal decibels and sonic rupture, Palestine sounds care—itself a vehicle for liberation.