​Creativity against Catastrophe

​The Genocide in Palestine 

​Farhan Shah

The ongoing genocide in Palestine presents not only a profound moral and political crisis but also an ontological and philosophical rupture. It forces us to confront the metaphysical assumptions that underpin our political systems, ethical discourses, and Western modes of thought. While most responses rightly focus on international law, humanitarian obligations, and historical injustice, the genocide also raises fundamental questions about the nature of existence, power, futurity, and responsibility. In this context, the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, often confined to metaphysics, ecology, or philosophy of science, may offer unexpected resources. In particular, Whitehead’s concept of creativity as the ultimate principle of existence and his insistence on the openness of the future furnish an important lens through which to rethink Palestinian existence beyond death, domination, and despair. It offers not a redemptive optimism, but a metaphysical affirmation that no power, however genocidal, can fully foreclose the ontological incompleteness of the oppressed. 

Creativity as the Primordial Fact 

At the heart of Whitehead’s metaphysical system lies the category of creativity, which he calls “the universal of universals,” a principle more fundamental than God, matter, or substance. Creativity is the condition of possibility for novelty, becoming, and difference. As he writes in Process and Reality, “Creativity is the principle of novelty. An actual entity is a novel entity diverse from any entity in the ‘many’ which it unifies.” All beings, whether persons, organisms, or galaxies, are actualizations of this boundless and perpetual process of creative advance. 

In the face of genocidal violence, which seeks to render a people disposable, annihilable, and ontologically absent, this affirmation of creativity is a powerful counter-gesture. It insists that the Palestinian people, despite attempts at total erasure, are part of the world’s ongoing becoming, not as passive victims, but as agents of historical and cosmological process. Their cries, resistance, endurance, and dreams are not merely residual traces of a people being exterminated, but expressions of creative concrescence, that is, moments in which the many (trauma, loss, memory, culture, grief, revolt) become one actual occasion of creative defiance. 

Where colonial systems impose stasis and hierarchy, Whiteheadian creativity reintroduces becoming, contingency, and ontological ruptures. Even in the rubble of Rafah, even in the starvation of children and the silence of abandoned hospitals, something in existence remains unmasterable. Whitehead’s metaphysics, though not born of a decolonial context, resonates here with anti-colonial and decolonial thought, especially in its rejection of ontological closure. Like Fanon’s notion of revolutionary humanism or Muhammad Iqbal’s vision of the self (khudi) as metaphysically in question, Whitehead posits a cosmos where determinism is never final. 

The Openness of the Future: A Metaphysical Rebellion 

In direct opposition to metaphysical systems that assume a closed or predetermined future, Whitehead’s process thought emphasizes that the future is not merely unknown, it is ontologically indeterminate. Each actual occasion becomes by synthesizing past influences with potential forms of feeling, but never in a preordained manner. This affirmation of futurity as an open field of potential stands as a direct philosophical rebuke to all discourses that treat the Palestinian question as “intractable,” “irreconcilable,” or already lost. Such fatalism is the hallmark of colonial realism: the belief that the oppressed must accept the limits of what the empire deems possible. But in Whitehead’s cosmos, no such closure is metaphysically legitimate. The future is always unfinished. And because every becoming is a creative synthesis, even acts of resistance, mourning, storytelling, and communal solidarity are not reactive residues but active infusions of novelty into the world as a process of becoming.  

When a father in Gaza holds his dead child and refuses to say this death was meaningless; when artists paint the ruins with verses of hope; when displaced families rebuild homes yet again despite the knowledge that drones hover above, these are not just acts of endurance. In a Whiteheadian sense, they are affirmations of creativity against catastrophe. They assert that the future remains in play. That colonial power may shape the conditions of becoming, but it can never determine them. 

Relational Ontology and Global Complicity 

Whitehead’s ontology is also relational. That is, every actual occasion is constituted by its “prehensions” of others, its felt relations to what has come before. However, it is essential not to romanticize this interconnectedness. Relationality in Whitehead’s metaphysics does not imply fusion, harmony, or some idealized unity of being. Instead, it underscores a world constituted by dynamic, often conflicting pluralities, where connection does not erase distinction, and influence does not negate agency. Every act of becoming incorporates the past but selects and reconfigures it freely. This irreducibility grounds responsibility. We are influenced by others but not determined by them. 

This distinction is crucial in responding to the ongoing genocide in Palestine. It is not enough to claim that “we are all connected” if such a claim deflects from responsibility or dilutes the force of ethical obligation. Connection alone does not produce solidarity. It is the ethical response to relationality, the recognition that our becoming is entangled with the suffering and creativity of others that demand choices. Neutrality, silence, or moral evasion in the face of colonial violence are not passive positions; they are choices that shape the collective process of becoming.  

In this way, to acknowledge relationality is not to disappear into it. It is to stand within the web of connection while affirming the unique agency of each actual occasion, including the Palestinian child who paints amid ruins, the father who chooses to speak the names of his dead, or the global witness who refuses to look away. Ontological pluralism is not fragmentation; it is the condition for genuine responsibility. Each entity’s spontaneity is not a retreat from the world but a site from which the world is remade. 

Creativity as Insurrection, Not Consolation 

As I see it, Whitehead’s metaphysical vision does not offer naive solace. It demands confrontation. To affirm creativity as the primordial fact of existence is to expose the lie at the heart of every colonial narrative: the lie that certain lives are disposable, that some futures are foreclosed by divine will or geopolitical necessity, that resistance is futile in the face of overwhelming power. If creativity is the groundlessness ground of being, then no state, no ideology, no empire possesses the authority to define what counts as real, or whose becoming is valid. 

This, as I see it, has urgent consequences. To recognize the creativity of the Palestinian people is not a poetic gesture. It is an ontological affirmation that undoes the colonial imagination which casts them as problems to be managed, extremists to be feared, or relics of a past that must make way for a “modern” settler future. Whitehead’s philosophy compels us to see Palestinians not merely as victims of catastrophe, but as agents of becoming, shaping the world through their defiance, their mourning, their refusal to die quietly. Their resistance, far from being exceptional, is the very pulse of creativity in a world that has tried to render them invisible. In this sense, to resist is to philosophize, and to philosophize authentically is to resist any metaphysics that collaborates with the logics of annihilation. The world does not proceed by the decree of those in power, but by the unpredictable emergence of novelty from places of abandonment and silence. Gaza, thus understood, is not just a site of destruction; it is a site where the future itself is being contested. 
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To side with the Palestinian people is not merely to take a political stance. Rather, it is to take an ontological one. It is to reject the closure of the world as the empire envisions it, and to declare that even in the most violated of places, the creativity of existence endures. And it is to understand, in a decolonial spirit, that the future is not waiting to be revealed, it is waiting to be made. 

On Guilt, Silence, and Symbolic Collapse

It is important to recognize that the widespread silence, especially in Euro-American intellectual circles, on the colonial violence against Palestinians is not merely a matter of political caution but is often structured by a deeper psychohistorical guilt linked to the Holocaust. In this context, sanctions or critiques aimed at the Israeli state are frequently misread as acts of antisemitism, resulting in a defensive silence that confuses ethical clarity with historical compensation. 

Psychologically, this reflects a symbolic collapse: the trauma of the Holocaust is displaced onto the Israeli state, which is treated as the sole guarantor of Jewish safety and continuity. Consequently, any challenge to Israel’s militarized policies is recognized not as a political critique, but as an existential threat to Jewish identity itself. This collapse is deeply problematic. It not only obscures the settler-colonial reality on the ground but also does profound harm to Jewish cultural and ethical traditions, which have long included powerful critiques of injustice and domination. 
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Such silence, shaped by unresolved guilt, ultimately becomes a form of complicity, reinforcing colonial power while stripping Jewish identity of its moral plurality and complexity. Breaking this symbolic entanglement is not an act of betrayal, but an act of fidelity to justice, for Palestinians, for Jewish communities. And, for that matter, for the intrinsic value of all beings at the heart of Whiteheadian thought. ​

Farhan Shah, philosopher, PhD  

Stop the Killing
​

Jay McDaniel

Farhan Shah offers his essay to affirm the creativity and agency of Palestinians, as active participants in the world’s becoming, despite the enormity of violence directed against them. He also argues for the importance of shared resistance across global lines of solidarity, rooted in a metaphysics that refuses closure and reaffirms ontological pluralism. His essay offers a metaphysics of resistance, as opposed to a metaphysics of annihilation. 

As a colleague and friend, I offer two additional points to what Farhan says. I realize that my own country, the United States, is complicit in the violence to which Farhan is protesting, and that I myself am likewise complicit through my tax dollars and too-often silence. There is no excuse. But Farhan's Whiteheadian approach prompts me to articulate two additional points that come to my mind. These points mean nothing to people on the ground, but perhaps they can spur others to heed Farhan's call.

One is the Whiteheadian affirmation that the cosmos itself includes a normative dimension, namely ideals of truth, goodness and beauty. These ideals are part of the very fabric of the universe, no less than gravity and electromagnetism. They are present in the very mind of God, who is the living unity (tawhid) of the universe, understood as having a life of its own. The genocide of Palestinians is a violation of the very values God holds so dear. It is a strike against the truth of Palestinian lives, the goodness of so many Palestinian people, and beauty of Palestinian culture. In the very life of God, too, there is pain and heartbreak. to which images of wrath point. The Jewish philosopher Abraham Heschel suggests that image of divine wrath are the flip-side of divine pain, divine heartbreak. Just as a loving mother feels pain at the violations against her children, and responds with outbreaks of tears and rage, so the divine One feels pain. If we feel anger, if we feel wrath, we are not alone. 

The second point is still more important; it concerns the value of life. In a Whiteheadian concept no human being - no Palestinian child, no Palestinian mother, no Palestinian father, indeed, no Palestinian sister, no Palestinian brother - is a mere instrument in a web of social connections. Each person is an embodiment of intrinsic value: the value that a person has for himself or herself, as a living being with a felt world of his or her own. This felt world includes hopes, dreams, fears, yearnings, enjoyments and suffering. The Catholic tradition speaks of this as 'the inherent dignity of each person,'

This dignity is more than a person's capacity for creative agency, including even an agency to resist. It is a person's capacity to feel, to receive, the surrounding world, and to matter to himself or herself, amid this receptivity. Consider a baby as she feeds from her mother's breast, or a grandfather as he enjoys his grandchildren. The baby, the mother, the grandfather, the grandchildren - all have value for themselves amid their relations with one another; and any ethical life involves respecting their value as individuals, as subjects of their own lives. The genocide of Palestinians violates that subjectivity. So does the killing that occurs in any war, including the cruel and obscene terrorist attacks on October 7.  The baby, the mother, the grandfather, the grandchildren are precious; so are the lives of all the hostages, their families and those who were killed on October 7. This preciousness, this inherent dignity, is ruptured in all acts of violence - and the violence deserves our wholesale condemnation, for life's sake. Stop the killing,

​- Jay McDaniel