Disjunctive Temporalities of the Twelve-Day War

Abstract This article reads the Twelve-Day War against ongoing transformations of capital and power in the Middle East, arguing that it unfolds across three disjunctive temporal registers. (1) As genocide in Gaza intensifies after October 7, Israel pivots from a managed interwar tempo of attritional strikes to near-permanent war, while Iran and allies within the Axis of Resistance persist in the in-between time of neither war nor peace. (2) Israel's temporal mutation is mediated by its integration into logistical-transnational circuits of accumulation amid the breakdown of US hegemonic synchronization, fracturing the world market into a centrifugal multipolarity that increasingly centered on rivalries over logistical power of capital circulation—ports, corridors, chokepoints. (3) The temporality of campism is out-of-sync with a globalized yet differentiated capitalism in which imperial domination is pluralized beyond the historical West. From strategic to doctrinaire, these campist positions and tendenciesback the Islamic Republic of Iran against Western imperialism while bracketing internal repression and regional interventions. Against both campism and Western imperialism, how might an internationalist politics of time, linking Woman, Life, Freedom in Iran to Palestinian anti-colonial resistance, be regrounded in these disjunctive temporalities to coordinate counter-synchronizations that disrupt corridors of war and accumulation while defending the logistics of life?