The Time Beneath the Concrete: Palestine Between Camp and Colony

Finalised during the Israeli genocide in Gaza, which Israel started on 7 October, 2023, Nasser Abourahme’s study, The Time Beneath the Concrete: Palestine Between Camp and Colony (Duke University Press, 2025), brings the Palestinian refugee camp and its many layers of context and significance to the helm. “The only way to really understand how we came to be faced with a frenzied genocidal campaign in Gaza at the end of 2023 is to think about the historical and temporal contradictions of Zionism as a settler colonial project faced with renewed forms of struggle and refusal,” Abourahme writes in the preface. Palestinians have refused to disappear, and thus, Zionist settler colonialism remained at an impasse.

Israel, Abourahme writes, is unable “to move past the past,” while Palestinians refuse: “The closure of the past into settler futurity.” These observations are gleaned from the camp itself because, as the author states: “It is materially and politically installed at the centre of the ongoing history of colonial struggle in Palestine.”

The camp itself presents a multitude of meanings. Palestine being inhabited by Palestinians only reinforced the notion of acquiring land by force, but Zionist discourse imposed nomadic terms upon the indigenous to facilitate the concept and eventual implementation of removal. Zionism faced its own contradiction in promoting negating discourse – disappearing Palestinians – while Palestine was already a thriving land with global economic connections and its own established social structures.

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