Force Breeds Counterforce: On the Legitimacy of Resistance and its Methods

By Youssef Shawky

The widespread saying “to throw Israel into the sea” resonates with critics before advocates, and despite its unreasonableness in light of the current circumstances and arrangements, it carries within it a legitimate and logical right because Israel, since it has been invented, has been the one who always wants to throw the Palestinians into the sea. It seizes their land by implementing a depopulatory/substitutionary settler colonialism supported by a racist, religious ideology. As a result, resistance with a religious inclination is not only legitimate, but also a necessity in light of the cultural and historical characteristics of the Arab peoples and the ideological methods used by the occupation.

There is no escape from ideology; As it is the standard that classifies things and gives them different definitions and meanings. Humans, throughout their lives, indirectly interact with “reality,” resulting in a world of their own. That world is not the real world, but rather a world within which two types of relationships merge: imaginary relationships and real ones. If the individual is the first party in those relationships, the second party is the real material conditions of existence, which in turn consist of forces and relations of production, class, political and national power balances, etc. Thus, ideology is the expression of the relationship between the individual and her “world.”

Louis Althusser wrote that ideology is an imaginary representation of the imaginary relationships that a person gets into with the real conditions of her existence. Ideology is not an illusion, or a negative false consciousness, rather it effectively engages with real conditions.

This affirms that each conflicting party in any society formulates its own ideology in a way that serves the interests of the party in its conflict with the rest of the parties. The capitalists have their ideology, just as the proletariat has its ideology… and the two are in contradiction with each other. The same applies to the relationship of the colonizer with the colonized.

The ongoing genocide in Gaza and the explicit call for the displacement of Palestinians from Gaza to Sinai, or as the Zionist Finance Minister called, “dispersing them throughout the world,” has reminded many Arab writers of the term “depopulatory settler colonialism,” a colonialism which does not aim to exploit the local population in a system that appropriates surplus value and natural resources, as happened in South Africa and Algeria. Rather, it aims to seize the land of the indigenous people and displace or exterminate them to make space for settlers. Through this path, Zionist colonialism and the emergence of the State of Israel are similar to the emergence of the United States of America, with a clear historical difference that is not just several centuries separating the two events, but that Zionist colonialism occurred during the rise of national liberation movements, the awareness of the oppressed peoples about their rights including the Palestinian people, and the solidarity of the peoples of the Third World with them, especially the Arab peoples, who always emphasize the unity of their fate (and also their structural problems) with the fate of the Palestinian people. All of this created a strong ground for resistance, with which it is impossible for the fate of the Palestinians to be similar to that of native americans.

PLEASE SUPPORT OUR WORK BY MAKING A DONATION TODAY!

The substitutionary nature of Zionist colonialism is the general framework within which the occupation operates from its beginning until now. It is the method that appears clearly in the defining moments in the history of the occupation. The first, of course, is the beginning of the Zionist gangs immigrating to Palestine and planning to gradually acquire the lands before eventually launching a war to establish a colonial state on 78% of Palestinian land. In 1967, the occupation adopted the method of displacement in the West Bank and the canal cities in Sinai and the Syrian Golan and, over the years, has gradually been fragmenting the West Bank with new settlements, aiming to finally annex it to the Jewish state.

This is what is happening today after the real threat that the occupation faced on October 7th. It is now trying to pressure the Palestinians of Gaza to migrate to Sinai or face the risk of genocide.

This does not cancel other frameworks of occupation that depend on the historical stage and the strategic goals implemented by the occupation towards the Palestinians and Arabs. There is an apartheid system within the occupied land of 1948, where the so-called “Israeli Arabs” are exploited and deprived of land and professional and social opportunities. There are also neo-colonial relations that include exploiting the natural resources of neighboring Arab countries and forcing them to open up to Israeli goods in a process of Unequal exchange through unfair economic agreements signed by local compradors.

As colonial methods diversify, ideologies accompanying them also diversify; from neoliberal ideology to pacification ones. This makes us wonder about the general ideology governing the course of occupation. Based on its depopulationary nature, this ideology is supposed to reject the existence of the Other, fundamentally. It does not just claim that the Other is less important or that she does not have the same rights, or is less intelligent, strong, civilized or beautiful...etc. All of this justifies subjecting the Other, exploiting her and denying her rights, but it does not stipulate the annihilation of the other or ending her existence. Rather, the “substitutionary ideology” necessarily rejects the existence of the Other because her existence constitutes a threat to the depopulationary entity.

The greatest representative of this tendency is the racist religious ideology that the Jewish state has espoused since its invention and is evident in all of its internal and external practices, laws, demographics, popular literature, daily conversations, and colonial ambitions, even in the state’s name, flag, and national anthem.

In fact, when Zionists kill Palestinians, they do not consciously believe that they are doing these actions “because they are substitutionary colonizers,” as this thought would reflect objective, concrete reality. They believe in something like: “We are defending our land, which is our right, based on the divine promise,” or “We are expanding our possession of more lands based on the same promise,” or “We must depopulate these Muslim Arabs who hate us so that we can protect ourselves” or that “we are God’s chosen people” and other religious racist ideas that are not just illusions but illusions that transform zionists into depopulatory colonizers.

While the diversification of colonial methods induce a parallel diversification in resistance methods, an armed resistance with military planning will always remain the most important and influential resistance. The other forms integrate with it, support it, and increase its strength and influence. When the general form of occupation is the genocidal substitutionary form that always and forever seeks displacement, settlement, and even mass murder, the only effective form of resistance to it is the military form.

Regarding the ideology of resistance, any party or group does not create its own ideology consciously and freely or choose from many alternatives. Rather, the ideology is formed simultaneously with the formation of the group. The nature and content of the ideology emerge due to several factors, the most important of which are the goals of the group, its cultural and social history, and the ideologies, goals, and strategies adopted by the surrounding groups (maybe conflicting ones). 

On this basis, we can understand why global Zionism has adopted Jewish racism as an ideological façade, and we can also understand the ideological nature of the resistance and its religious component. Just as substitutionary colonialism has a racist, religious face, it is not strange for the resistance to have a religious  “national liberation” face. This is not identity politics, as the religious aspect of the resistance did not discourage it from its liberation tasks, but rather an increased commitment to the tasks. The success of national liberation relies on formulating an ideology stemming from the characteristics and way of thinking of the resisting masses, and not in a condescending manner with imposing ideas on them, but rather by discovering the “special/local” way for the masses to be liberated so we, or they, can discover their own path of modernity.

This does not negate the attempts of islamists (originated from Al-Qaeda terrorist organization supported by US) to empty the Palestinian cause of its liberation content through the use of religion… but these attempts have so-far failed. The resistance axes, such as Hamas and Hezbollah, have engaged in armed conflicts with such Takfiri terrorists (ISIS, Al-Nusra Front, and Islamic State – Sinai Province). Hamas has officially separated from the Muslim Brotherhood since 2017 according to its charter, and much evidence supports that the religious-faced resistance has no relationship with political islamism, whatever its form.

Thus, the arab liberal intellectuals and some arab leftists who do not support the resistance under the pretext of its religious tendency suffer from a lack of understanding of the historical characteristics of their people, the way they think and feel, the time and manner of their movement and revolution, and the time of their latency and indifference. In doing so, many of them, who resemblr elitists rather than revolutionaries, play the role of cultural compradors hindering the organization of the Arab masses to liberate themselves from colonial and neo-colonial powers.

What Would A Just Peace In Palestine Look Like?

By Chris Richards

A meme on Twitter has been asking "Where do the Israeli Jews go?" as if this is the supreme gotcha and this question completely invalidates all discussion of Palestinian liberation, as if Palestinian self-determination automatically means rendering the entire population of Israel homeless and stateless. This ignores the fact that the mere creation of Israel resulted in 750,000 to 1,000,000 Palestinians becoming homeless refugees. This also ignores the fact that, unless they have been naturalized as citizens in another country or are recognized as citizens of Israel, all Palestinians are stateless and have been for generations. The idea that justice for Palestinians automatically results in massive injustice for Israelis ignores that fact that restorative justice is in fact, not injustice at all. People whose homes were actually stolen when they were terrorized into abandoning them deserve their homes back.

The ethical gotcha behind "Where do the Israeli Jews go?" is that it would be unjust to put Israeli settlers in the same circumstances in which the Palestinians find themselves. This renders the vast injustice done to the Palestinians as a fait accompli that cannot be undone because it would cause even more harm. This would automatically eliminate the two state solution that American idealists and Israeli moderates have somewhat unrealistically clung to despite the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the unwillingness of any Israeli prime minsters who succeeded Rabin to risk the same fate. US President Joe Biden has been brandishing a two state solution as the ultimate and necessary solution to the "war" between the settlers and the Palestinians. Unfortunately for Joe Biden, if it is ethically beyond the pale to displace Israelis in the name of Palestinian liberation then any Palestinian state formed will be hopelessly undermined by hostile communities of settlers who will still see themselves as Israelis and reject Palestinian sovereignty over their communities. 

Let me repeat, as I said above, restorative justice is not injustice. This is not a question of generational guilt or punishing people today for crimes committed generations ago. The crime is still being committed. The crime is ongoing. The children of the thieves are not only living in stolen homes, but declaring their right to those homes and supporting the displacement or killing of more Palestinians so that more settlers can have homes. Former Prime Minister of Israel Naftali Bennett is the son of Americans from San Francisco who settled in Haifa after the Six Day War. It is not a coincidence that he advocates strongly for military expansionism. He was raised on a narrative of conquest and Israeli triumphalism. Well before the Nakba, Haifa was the scene of intense settlement by the Jewish Agency. A city that had 20,000 residents (of whom 6,000 were Jewish) in 1922 had a population of over 97,000 in 1948 ,and that larger population was 96% Jewish. The replacement of the Palestinian population with settlers didn't start during the Nakba. Ethnic cleansing is much older.

When this historical context is correctly understood then the following becomes clear: the two state solution requires an understanding that the Palestinians will not seek restorative justice past a certain point. The scope of justice allowed must be set by the party that did the harm and must commit to making restoration for justice to be possible. This is a dangerous situation that requires a maintained relationship of settler dominance and Palestinian acquiescence. If Palestinians do not acquiesce then their refusal to acquiesce puts us back in the same circumstances in which we began. The settler movement would have us believe that this is something for which the Palestinians, and not the settlers, are to blame. This is objectively false in the context of Palestinian history. The Palestinians are defending themselves from ethnic cleansing. Only sustained self-defense has prevented ethnic cleansing and population replacement at a faster rate.

PLEASE SUPPORT OUR WORK BY MAKING A DONATION TODAY!

There is, of course, another obstacle to the practicality of a two-state solution separate from the question of its justice. This is the Israelis themselves.

The alleged centrist who succeeded Naftali Bennett as Prime Minister as part of a bizarre power sharing agreement between the Israeli far right and the so-called "moderates" called for a two-state solution at the United Nations. To Yair Lapid, a two-state solution depends on a "peaceful Palestinian state that does not threaten Israel."  This has generally been interpreted in policy terms by the so-called Middle East experts as a "demilitarized Palestinian state."  This means that the proposed two-state  solution proposed by many experts is one that is unacceptable to Palestinians because they would still have the IDF as a neighbor and a significant population of settlers, with no means to defend themselves. How is this fundamentally different than the existing occupation of the West Bank and containment of Gaza? Yet the Israeli state has the power to set the terms of the existence of the Palestinian state and the Palestinian people are supposed to accept this as established fact. If they do not, it is their fault.

Once more, with feeling: restorative justice is not injustice.

A real two-state solution, with a Palestine equipped to defend itself, is a surrender to the settler fait accompli in the first place. It requires an act of acquiescence to happen. If the Palestinians are unwilling to acquiesce to only partial justice then it is impossible. These are objective facts. When the settler movement is so powerful that the Israeli state cannot even propose a true two-state solution, but must instead add impossible demands that only make Palestinian acceptance less likely then we must accept that the Israeli state is not serious about a two-state solution. A serious effort would involve every possible concession that would make acquiescence more acceptable to the Palestinians. The Israeli state has never engaged in such a peace process.

This brings us to the question I ask in the headline. What does a just peace look like?

It also brings us to the question of the meme and the settler movement. Where do the Israeli Jews go?

Only the Palestinians can answer the first question. I am a white American, which makes me a settler myself. I can't tell Palestinians what a just peace in Palestine looks like anymore than I can tell the Modoc what a just peace with the US government would really look like. That's why I support the land back movement and believe that the United States should be legally forced to honor its treaties with Indigenous nations. We should reject the arrogance that might lead us to suggest or force a solution to the question of Palestinian liberation. We should instead support the Palestinians in their struggle against the settler movement. Only the Palestinians can determine what a just peace would look like and what they are willing to acquiesce to short of "from the river to the sea." If they're not, only they can make that decision. We should still support them.

Once again, restorative justice is not injustice.

The settler movement's question remains. Where do the Israeli Jews go?

Only the Israeli Jews can answer that question, and their answer has no authority to determine whether or not the Palestinians should acquiesce to anything less than their full liberation. Most white Rhodesians chose to go to the UK, Australia, South Africa or Latin America when the Bush War ended and Rhodesia became Zimbabwe. Most white Kenyans stayed in Kenya after Kenyan independence, at one point the Black Kenyan government made white man Richard Leakey the cabinet secretary and head of the civil service. Most white South Africans remained in South Africa after the legal end of apartheid and the institution of formal legal equality and liberal democracy within the South African state. Far too many Israelis will choose to fight for the Israeli state, at least in the near future. What they do when the Palestinian struggle is won is up to them. If they commit crimes against the Palestinians that make them unwelcome, whose responsibility is that?

I still believe peace in the Middle East requires justice in the Middle East.

Palestinian Resistance and the Crisis of Liberal Humanism

By Yanis Iqbal

Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, launched by Hamas on October 7, 2023, was a huge blow to the settler-colonial state of Israel: Al-Qassam Brigades captured 20 settlements and 11 military sites in merely a few hours. The attacks on Israeli civilian and military outposts destroyed the narcissistic sense of security associated with the carefully orchestrated narratives of Zionist dominance, surveillance and intelligence. In the words of Saree Makdisi, the breakout “smashed, hopefully once and for all, the very idea that the Palestinians can just be ignored, talked to, or talked about rather than talking for and representing themselves, their interests and their rights.” Earlier, it was Palestinians who had to explain their presence and prove their humanity. Now, it is they are setting the contours of the narrative. That’s why Zionists are terrified.

Unqualified solidarity with the anti-colonial violence of the Palestinian resistance has been hindered by liberal humanism, a bourgeois ideology that uses abstract slogans of peace to accelerate the genocide of Palestinians. There are two components in this ideology. First, the supreme value of human life is proclaimed as an unproblematic moral statement, which everyone has to support. While liberal humanists may admit that the Israeli occupation has given rise to Palestinian violence, they remain adamant that the death of individuals can never be justified. Judith Butler, for instance, criticizes those who blame Zionist apartheid for contemporary violence, saying that “nothing should exonerate Hamas from responsibility for the hideous killings they have perpetrated”.

In the above conception, violence is conceived as an infringement of the individual human body, whose sanctity is guaranteed by an unquestionable morality. The physiological and juridical body is innately exposed to physical, psychological and moral persecution. This kind of body has no positive project; it is entirely defined by its vulnerability to attacks, which requires protection. Christopher Caudwell traces this ethical ideology to the systemic logic of the capitalist economy. In the struggle against feudal fetters, the bourgeoisie saw freedom as the abolition of social organization, as the ability of every individual to pursue his own affairs and interests. This is articulated “in the absolute character of bourgeois property together with its complete alienability.”

On the ideological terrain, this gives rise to the “bourgeois dream – freedom as the absolute elimination of social relations,” by which is meant the absence of any restraint on the ownership, acquisition and alienation of private property. Here, private property isn’t considered as a social restraint that should be abolished, as the bourgeois project is inevitably bound to its particularistic interests. When assembled into ethics, the bourgeois dream translates into ultra-individualist pacifism, wherein the purity of the soul has to be guarded from the “heinous guilt” of the “sin” that is violence. Caudwell calls this “spiritual laissez-faire,” which uses the commercial mentality of capitalists – its concern with economic status – to proclaim the right of remaining preoccupied with one’s own soul.

When liberal humanists talk about mushy-mushy sentiments of individual human life, it is crucial to ask whether such an abstraction even exists in the horrors of Israeli barbarism. On one side, we have settlers, whose material security is guaranteed by an authoritarian state apparatus. On the other side, we have natives, whose wretchedness is maintained through incessant violence. In this scenario, I ask you: where is the pristine divinity that you label as “human life”? I can only see the all-too onerous divides constructed by Zionist settler-colonialism. Preaching a higher moral reconciliation beyond these divides, trying to organize a peaceful dialogue between two completely antagonistic camps, is a pathetic attempt that is bound to fail. In the open-air concentration camp that is Gaza, it is criminal to think that there is an ever-present and ready-at-hand reserve of morality that can calm the clamor of reality. We have to dive into reality, into its thundering materiality, if we want to shoulder the global responsibility of solidarity that has been forced upon us by the Palestinian resistance.

When an interviewer told Ghassan Kanafani that it would be better for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) “to stop the war to stop the death,” Kanafani said, “Maybe to you, not to us. To us, to liberate our country, to have dignity, to have respect, to have our mere human rights; these are something as essential as life itself.” By absolutizing life, liberal humanists ignore how such a life doesn’t exist in a settler-colonial society. The boundary between life and death is not clear-cut. Huey P. Newton said, “I tell the comrades you can only die once, so do not die a thousand times worrying about it.” Liberal humanists ignore how death already walks among the Palestinians. This allows them to construe life as a personal capacity, as a possibility, that can be realized through a dialogue between the colonizer and the colonized. For the colonized, life is never a possibility. Colonialism is the violent closure of possibilities for the colonized. In the words of Mehdi Amel: “It…became impossible to define the structure of the colonized countries’ specific trajectories of becoming except within the colonial relation. What was possible before this relation became impossible after. This is what is novel in the structure of these countries’ history.”

Kanafani dispels the naive hope of humanistic possibility in the colonial context, starkly portraying the inhuman impossibility of peace talks between Israel and Palestine as “a conversation between the sword and the neck”. There is no mention here of the personal, biographical details of an abstract human life; they are replaced by impersonal metaphors. Why so? Because the liberal focus on human life conveys an ambience of integrity and security in a situation that is marked by disorder and destruction. By preserving the edifice of individual, non-violent agency, liberal humanism says that violence is optional, it is a matter of condonation or denunciation. Kanafani explodes this pious optimism by depicting Zionism as a structurally violent tool that is indifferent to our subjective feelings. Between the sword and the neck, there lies no other possibility than death.

The elision of the historical depth of Zionist violence is a core component of liberal humanism. Slavoj Žižek denounced the “barbarism” of Hamas by writing that the choice is not between Palestinian anti-colonial violence and Zionist settler-colonial violence but “between fundamentalists and all those who still believe in the possibility of peaceful coexistence”. The ruse of humanist possibility allows him to frame violence as a simplistic choice, whereas the toothless policy of dialogue comes off as the superior, more complex option. According to Joseph Stalin: “the Communists regard the substitution of one social system for another, not simply as a spontaneous and peaceful process, but as a complicated, long and violent process.” Here, the order of valuation is reversed. It is violence which is accorded the dignity of historical complexity. It is liberal humanism which is faulted for uncritically regarding the peacefulness of human life as an immediate, incontrovertible fact.

Reading Žižek, one is reminded of people whom Vladimir Lenin called the “spineless hangers-on of the bourgeoisie with intellectualist pretensions”. These “tyrannized, shocked and scared” intellectuals “have been flung into consternation at the sight of this unprecedentedly acute class struggle, have burst into tears, forgotten all their premises and demand that we perform the impossible, that we socialists achieve complete victory without fighting against the exploiters and without suppressing their resistance.” Decolonization is imagined as a peaceful project that can be “introduced” into the settler-colonial society. Liberal humanists forget how decolonization is forged in the intensity of national liberation, in “the struggles, the exploiters’ gnashing of teeth, or their diverse attempts to preserve the old order, or smuggle it back through the window”. What accounts for this ignorance? It can be traced to the liberal humanist delusion that a higher unity might emerge from the Zionist machine, that there is an element that might immediately unify the colonial compartments, that there is a humanist sensibility that lies hidden beneath colonialism. There is no such sensibility. Colonial violence has to be broken.

Instead of framing resistance in terms of the individual metric of human life, we have to take recourse to discourses that stress the concrete realities of colonized society. By inflating human life into a mythical capacity, liberal humanism paradoxically reveals a fundamental disregard for the human realities present in concrete societies. In order to avoid this extra-human concept, we must begin from the anti-colonial struggle. Liberal humanists begin with spiritual wishes for peace, attempting to convince people of an ideal method of resistance that will involve the least amount of death and suffering. Marxism doesn’t have any place for such a higher level of reconciliation. Lenin notes that Marxists appraise resistance “according to the class antagonisms and the class struggle which find expression in millions of facts of daily life.” Freedom is not a ready-made skill that can be invoked “in an atmosphere of cajoling and persuasion, in a school of mealy sermons or didactic declamations”. Rather, it is formed in the “school of life and struggle,” wherein the interests of the colonizers are exposed to the counter-interests of the colonized. Lenin puts it expressively:

“The proletariat must do its learning in the struggle, and stubborn, desperate struggle in earnest is the only real teacher. The greater the extremes of the exploiters’ resistance, the more vigorously, firmly, ruthlessly and successfully will they be suppressed by the exploited. The more varied the exploiters’ attempts to uphold the old, the sooner will the proletariat learn to ferret out its enemies from their last nook and corner, to pull up the roots of their domination, and cut the very ground which could (and had to) breed wage-slavery, mass poverty and the profiteering and effrontery of the money-bags.”

In a colonial situation, resistance is evaluated not according to the ethical ideology of human life but according to the contribution it makes to the opening of historical possibilities. Amilcar Cabral notes, “Resistance is the following: to destroy one thing for the sake of constructing another thing.” This terse statement is instructive because liberal humanists think of colonialism as a malleable arrangement that can be re-jigged to allow for a better outcome. Cabral brooks none of this. He identifies the inertia of colonialism that has to be destroyed, not merely reformed, to emancipate the colonized. It is because liberal humanists think that the possibility for life remains intact under colonialism that they are unable to appreciate the fight for such a life waged by the colonized. That’s why it is so clarifying to read Cabral’s searing words on the objective of national liberation:

“At the end of the day, we want the following: concrete and equal possibilities for any child of our land, man or woman, to advance as a human being, to give all of his or her capacity, to develop his or her body and spirit, in order to be a man or a woman at the height of his or her actual ability. We have to destroy everything that would be against this in our land, comrades. Step by step, one by one if it be necessary – but we have to destroy in order to construct a new life…our work is to destroy, in our resistance, whatever makes dogs of our people – men or women – so as to allow us to advance, to grow, to rise up like the flowers of our land, whatever can make our people valued human beings.”

The Pogrom, Indians, and Genealogies of the Israeli Settler-Vigilante

By Gary Fields

Republished from Monthly Review.

On February 26th of this year, the world witnessed an outbreak of untold savagery in the Palestinian town of Huwara perpetrated against town residents by vigilantes from nearby Israeli settlements. During this mayhem, settlers set fire to cars, businesses, and homes of Huwara residents, and killed one resident by gunfire as Israeli soldiers looked on and even assisted the perpetrators in committing these crimes. So depraved was this settler rampage that the Israeli military commander in the West Bank, Yehuda Fuchs described it as a “pogrom.”

The choice of the term, “pogrom” to label the carnage committed by these Jewish settlers was poignant. History is replete with examples of such mayhem committed against Jews by anti-Semitic European Christians, but the irony of Jews animated by similar kinds of racist animus toward the Palestinian “other,” and enlisting the same types of brutality against innocent Palestinian civilians, was particularly jarring. Sadly, it is no secret that Israeli settler violence against Palestinians has become routine in the Palestinian West Bank, especially in rural areas where groups of settlers target Palestinian farmers, often at gunpoint, while uprooting and setting fire to Palestinian croplands, especially olive trees (Fields, 2012).

At the time of events in Huwara, Israeli settler violence, was already on the rise, emboldened if not encouraged outright by the most settler-friendly, and arguably fascist government in Israel’s history. Trending at three attacks per day in February, settler violence is now averaging 7-9 daily attacks as documented by the Israeli human rights group, Yesh Din—with nary a condemnation by Israeli officials, and virtually no effort by Israeli authorities to prevent and punish this criminality.

Currently, as this settler regime continues its vengeful bombardment of Gaza, settlers in the West Bank have become even more brazen in their brutality—with Huwara as a model. Palestinian houses and cars are now being routinely targeted, vandalized, and set ablaze, Palestinian croplands ripped up and burned, and bodily attacks against Palestinians, above all olive harvesters, appear daily on the inventory of settler misdeeds.

In just one of countless incidents since October 7th, settlers in the West Bank town of Qusra near Nablus, shot and killed three Palestinians, and the following day attacked the funeral murdering another two men, ramming their cars into the funeral procession before stopping and opening fire on the procession. It is now the olive harvest in Palestine and in town after town, olive harvesters seeking to pick the crop confront setters with guns who threaten these Palestinians and order them off their own lands. Arguably the most revealing of this vigilantism in terms of motivation, however, occurred in the small Bedouin village of Wadi Seeq 10 kilometers East of Ramallah where settlers succeeded in terrorizing the residents so completely that the latter abandoned the village, fearing for their safety and leaving behind houses, livestock, and crops. Settlers have now taken possession of the village in what is surely a signal of the end game in this sinister activity.

It is tempting to view this settler violence as something so macabre and sinister as to be unique. There is, however, quite another way of understanding the Israeli settler-vigilante. This actor is actually the modern-day mirror image of a certain settler counterpart from the American colonial past. This genealogy not only imbues the Israeli settler with an identity as an historical actor. It enables a different kind of question to be posed about Israel settler violence: In what way is the vigilantism of the Israeli settler embedded in past colonial settler societies, and who is the Israeli setter-vigilante as an historical actor?

The Israeli Settler as Colonial Actor

In most major media accounts of settler terror against Palestinians, Israeli settler-vigilantes invariably escape critical categorization beyond the moniker of “extremist.” Portrayals of these perpetrators of violence invariably focus on the theme of fanaticism while presenting these figures as unsavory if misguided fringe elements in Israeli society. Such characterizations are naïve and incomplete.

The Israeli settler is the modern-day counterpart of a recurrent figure in settler societies worldwide but one specific example from American colonial history stands out in connecting the colonial past to present day.

In the early 19th century, in the American Southeast, most notably in Georgia, groups of settlers, believing themselves to be the deserving inheritors of American bounty and the rightful stewards of land in America, took it upon themselves to rid the landscape of those who would stand in their way. Their mission was to evict from the land those already anchored to the landscape whom these settlers believed to be impediments to their imagined vision of themselves and their rightfully dominant place on the landscape as ordained by God. Their target was none other than the Indigenous inhabitants of the American Southeast.

Motivated by theories of entitlement to land in the tradition of John Locke, and sentiments of superiority deriving from destiny and God’s will, these 19th century brethren of today’s Israeli setters squatted on Indian lands, burned Indian homes and croplands, stole Indian livestock and horses, and harassed and even killed Indians who failed to vacate their properties. These settlers, however, did not spring to life from any spontaneous impulses of self-organization.

For years, federal and state government officials along with voices from the white intelligentsia had been advocating publicly for the removal of Indians from the land contributing to a formidable “removal discourse” in American political, legal, and cultural life. These voices not only tolerated, but applauded acts of vigilantism against Indian groups as a useful instrument for helping accomplish what they were ultimately seeking through politics and the law—the removal of Indians from the landscape. Settler violence was a complement to this political, legal, and cultural climate. There was, in effect, a groundswell of support for Indian removal from the land, and the transfer of this group across the Mississippi to lands in the West. Settler violence was destined to play an integral role. What were the drivers of this project of removal and its complement of settler vigilantism in evicting Indians from their land?

Land Grab, Slavery, and Indian Removal

In the wake of the victorious Revolution against England, American colonial settlers were poised to be free of restrictions on acquisition of Indian lands that the English Crown had imposed on them. Nevertheless, administrations from George Washington through John Quincy Adams retained similar prohibitions on private acquisition of Indian land. Settlers who had expected freedom, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness from the Revolution were furious at what they perceived as this betrayal.

Those in Georgia pressured the State into a “Compact” (1802) with the Federal Government in which the latter agreed to extinguish Indian title to lands in the State and reallocate the Indian lands to settlers. In the years that followed, settlers and state officials in Georgia, including the Georgia Congressional delegation as well as politicians from other federal and state jurisdictions, clamored for the Federal Government to act more decisively in extinguishing Indian title to land and evicting Indians from the landscape. Settlers, believed that they could hasten this process of displacement, and reap the bounties they believed themselves entitled to, by direct action on the land. What made conflict on the land seemingly more inevitable, however, and what elevated the role of settler violence against Indians in this conflict was an economy poised to transform not only the American South but the world economy as well.

In the early decades of the 1800s, following refinements in the cotton gin and newly developed hybrid strains of cotton, settlers, especially in Georgia, saw untold opportunities for cotton-growing with slave labor on plantations. Plantation agriculture, however, required land but much of the land in Georgia coveted by these would-be cotton growers was held by Creeks and Cherokees. Although the federal government was indeed securing land in Georgia from these tribes and reallocating it to settlers in the spirit of the Georgia Compact, settlers and politicians alike from the State demanded that the Government hasten the pace of these acquisitions and evict Indians from their lands. Finally, in 1828, settlers found a sympathetic voice in a fiery populist whose presidential campaign focused on a single issue—Indian removal. The candidate was Andrew Jackson.

A decorated army General who made a name for himself from campaigns against Indians, Jackson the populist also championed “states’ rights” when it came to Indian affairs. Following his election, Jackson in 1829 emphasized that if states themselves voted to extend their own laws over Indians, he would not enlist the power of the federal government to prevent it (Cave, 2003: 1332). Jackson was thus prepared to use both states’ rights and the federal government to remove Indians from their lands and transfer them to lands West of the Mississippi River.

Equally critical, Jackson was also amenable to direct action by settlers as a complement to an already well-established climate of fear associated with the campaign to remove Indians from their land and did not conceal his support for such efforts. In 1829, he famously signaled his advocacy of settler violence as a component of Indian removal when he suggested to a Congressman from Georgia who was irate at delays in extinguishing Indian title to land from the Georgia Compact: “Build a fire under them [Indians]. When it gets hot enough, they’ll move” (from Cave, 2003: 1339). Settlers who would build these fires had little reason to fear retribution from either federal or state authorities for their criminal actions.

In 1830, Jackson signed the legislation that defined his presidency and became the law of the land, the Indian Removal Act. Even before the Act became law, however, Cherokee and Creek Indians in Georgia, aware of the incendiary removal discourse within the halls of government and among the colonial population, alongside the violence being committed by settlers on Indian lands, began “voluntarily” removing themselves to lands in the West. In this sense, setter violence and intimidation was successful as a complement to the Law. One Cherokee chief, wrote to Andrew Jackson to complain that white settlers had invaded Indian country to “steal our property” and that federal soldiers in the area not only refused to help the Indians, but aided the vigilantes in hunting down and shooting Indians who resisted “as if…they had been so many wild dogs” (Cave, 2003: 1340).

The parallels with the actions of Israeli settlers are unmistakable. A highly charged legal and political climate, complemented by settler rampages on Indian lands in which authorities did nothing to stop these activities had rendered life impossible for Indians. The latter believed that they had little choice but to transfer themselves West and escape the violence.

Final Solution: Vigilantism and Transferring Populations

If settler violence prior to passage of the Indian Removal Act of 1830 was critical in creating splits among Creeks and Cherokees and compelling large numbers of these tribes to move West voluntarily, a vast array of vigilante groups, emboldened by passage of the Removal Law, emerged after 1830 to finish the task of evicting Indians from their lands. From horse thieves known as “The Pony Club,” to various paramilitary formations engaged in burning homes and crops and terrorizing Indians populations, settler vigilantism became even more widespread in the aftermath of the Removal Act as a weapon against tribespeople who tried to resist the Law and remain in their lands.

By 1838, even Cherokee who had resisted the Indian Removal Act and remained steadfast in their homes, conceded that the incessant settler rampages against them, along with inaction by the authorities, left them no choice but to accept removal and move West. What ensued under the auspices of the Federal Government was one of the sorriest criminal events in American history, the death march of 60,000 Indians from the Southeast to Oklahoma known as “Trail of Tears.”

In effect, settler violence had become an unofficial but acceptable expedient for carrying out a policy of forcing Indians from their land and insuring the promise of economic opportunity for Georgia’s white citizen-settlers (Pratt, 2022). In many ways, settler vigilantes in the West Bank are staking out a similar role for themselves in the model of Huwara and Wadi Seeq. These vigilantes are involved in an unmistakable effort to make life for Palestinians so unbearable that the latter imitate their Indian brethren from the American Southeast and leave their lands.

In the end, settler violence in the service of Indian Removal in Georgia reveals an unsettling resonance with the Israeli settler-vigilante of today. The pogrom in Huwara and the countless incidents of Israeli settler vigilantism, both urban and rural, are essentially historical mirror images of the White man’s vision in the American Southeast, differing in time and place but aligned in their mutual determination to drive the Indigenous from their lands. This symmetry emphasizes once again that Palestine is not alone in its encounter with settler colonialism and its impulses of dispossession and ethnic cleansing. From the West Bank and Gaza, these impulses to subdue and subjugate Indigenous people through the most hideous kinds of carnage are on full display for the world. It is incumbent upon the world to wake up to this lesson of history and stop the madness that is now fully transparent for all to see.

References

Cave, Alfred A. (2003). “Abuse of Power: Andrew Jackson and the Indian Removal Act of 1830.” The Historian. Vol. 65 (6): 1333-1353.

Fields, Gary (2012). “This is Our Land’: Collective Violence, Property Law, and Imagining the Geography of Palestine.” Journal of Cultural Geography. Vol 29 (3): 267-91.

Pratt, Adam J. (2022). Toward Cherokee Removal: Land, Violence, and the White Man’s Chance. Athens: The University of Georgia Press.

The Battle Of Algiers Shows How Decolonization Is A Bloody And Messy Affair

By Eamon Tracy

On October 7th a group of around 2,000 Hamas militants breached a security barrier on the Gaza border astonishing the world and forever changing Israel’s sense of security. In response to that brazen attack, Israel has ruthlessly targeted 2.3 million people in Gaza who faced a siege for weeks facing an endless barrage of bombardments - which have so far amassed more than 25 times the tonnage of ordnance dropped on Hiroshima - and are currently experiencing a ground invasion by the IDF. Now more than ever, The Battle of Algiers is worth remembering. Not only is it a searing testament to collective resistance against foreign occupation, but it is also a reminder that rebellions or decolonization are a bloody procedure unfortunately full of atrocities.

It has been 75 years since the Nakba incident permanently displaced 720,000 Palestinians carried out by Israelis which occurred upon the establishment of the Jewish State in 1948. Professor Rashid Khalidi writes in his superb book The 100 Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance 1917-2017,

WHAT HAPPENED IS, of course, now well known. By the summer of 1949, the Palestinian polity had been devastated and most of its society uprooted. Some 80 percent of the Arab population of the territory that at war’s end became the new state of Israel had been forced from their homes and lost their lands and property. At least 720,000 of the 1.3 million Palestinians were made refugees. Thanks to this violent transformation, Israel controlled 78 percent of the territory of former Mandatory Palestine, and now ruled over the 160,000 Palestinian Arabs who had been able to remain, barely one-fifth of the prewar Arab population. This seismic upheaval—the Nakba, or the Catastrophe, as Palestinians call it—grounded in the defeat of the Great Revolt in 1939 and willed by the Zionist state-in-waiting, was also caused by factors that were on vivid display in the story my father told me: foreign interference and fierce inter-Arab rivalries. These problems were compounded by intractable Palestinian internal differences that endured after the defeat of the revolt, and by the absence of modern Palestinian state institutions. The Nakba was only finally made possible, however, by massive global shifts during World War II.

Today, 2.3 million people have survived living in what some refer to as a concentration camp, or at the very least an open-air prison. 70 percent of the people residing in Gaza, which is 25 miles long and 5 miles wide, are refugees from the Nakba tragedy. Gaza is one of the most densely populated places on the planet. Most of the limited but necessary resources like electricity, gas, and water are controlled by the Israeli government. Around 70% of the well water is undrinkable. In Lowenstein’s excellent book The Palestine Laboratory published by Verso, he thoroughly details Israel’s local and global techno-fascistic rule. In the beginning, he bluntly states, Even the publisher of Haaretz, Israel’s most progressive, albeit Zionist, newspaper, admits it. “The product of Zionism, the State of Israel, is not a Jewish and democratic state but instead has become an apartheid state, plain and simple,” Amos Schocken wrote in 2021. And as Israel’s government moves further to the Right, while increasing Zionist settlements, Palestinians have been forced into a desperate corner.

Israel’s Zionist government was formed off the political project fostered by the activist Theodor Herzl. His project was founded on the principle of a Jewish supremacist state. At a fundamental level, this extends the colonial crisis beyond a territorial conflict into a larger issue that is both religious and ethnic. Over the decades of Israeli occupation a growing number of Ashkenazi Jews, from Europe or America immigrated to Palestine ultimately kicking more indigenous Palestinians off their lands. Some of these moments have been documented in viral videos, where settlers are seen callously taking grieving families’ homes.

After Algeria was suffering under French occupation for over one hundred and thirty years, The National Liberation Front, or FLN formed in 1954 as a paramilitary force to fight back. During colonial rule, a majority of the Arabs were treated as subjects with second-class status, and only a small minority able to transcend their lower status if they renounced their faith and culture. The FLN wanted a right to self-determination and self-governance following Islamic beliefs. Although religious, the ideology encompassed an inclusive Pan-Arab society. One which would not be prejudiced against any race or ethnicity. It even included the emancipation of Women and other values drawn from modernity. If you have a look at the daily lives and constraints of a citizen within Gaza, this second-rate status is all too familiar. 

An avowed Marxist, Italian director Gillo Pontecorvo wanted to capture the incredible true story of an occupied Algeria removing the yoke of colonial rule. Pontecorvo’s yearning for truth led him to film in a verite style with such stark realism, that it could fool a modern-day audience into thinking it is an old newsreel or documentary. Sharing screenwriting credit with writer Franco Solinas, the two Italians cared about international struggles and noticed their inherent underlying solidarity. In Sergio Corbucci’s The Mercenary, written by Solinas, his story centered on a Polish capitalist who has a road to Damascus moment where he teams up with a couple of proletarians and helps a revolt against the Mexican government during the 1910s. Pontecorvo and Solinas’s screenplay for Battle of Algiers was based in part on the memoirs of Yacef Saadi, who wrote them in prison after serving as a leader for the FLN.

The Battle of Algiers begins in 1957 where a group of revolutionaries are meeting their end. It opens with an Algerian man who is still recovering, having just been tortured by the French military. Enter, the commander Col. Mathieu (played by Jean Martin, the only professional actor in the entire cast) instructs the man to put on a French uniform. With tears in his eyes, the man does so begrudgingly. In the next scene, Col Mathieu is speaking to the revolutionaries led by Ali who are hidden in a wall. They are told to give up and the story cuts back to 1954.

Before the Algerian revolution was sparked, Ali was a hustler wielding cards to sucker unsuspecting French citizens. Subsequently getting into an altercation, he is sent upriver on a five-month stint in prison, where he witnesses an inmate being executed by guillotine. Upon his release, Ali is more than ready for revenge. In the wake of the attempted assassination of a French police officer being sabotaged, Ali discovers it was a test orchestrated by FLN leader El-Hadi Jaffar. Saadi Yucef who plays El-Hadi Jaffar and Samia Kerbash who plays Fathia were both actual members of the FLN. Upon passing this dangerous test, Ali is accepted into the organization. Then he is forced to navigate a world of violence, traitors, and a nation’s youth being exposed to traumatic experiences or mistakenly caught in the crossfire. His journey is nothing short of compelling - as are most of the fearless fighters showcased on screen. The targeted killings of military officers and police led the occupying force to inflict unbridled state-sanctioned pain against the Algerian rebels and noncombatants alike. In one scene a car full of French soldiers places a bomb outside a residential building killing scores who were sleeping inside their beds. Col Mathieu looks to ratchet up the unrest so he can give the French forces an excuse to carry out even more brutal retribution.

When exploring similar historical events, two of the foremost intellectuals W.E.B. Dubois and C.L.R. James both acknowledged the atrocities carried out by the likes of John Brown during his uprising that preceded the Civil War, and the Haitians during their Revolution against the French. Nat Turner, who inspired John Brown, was similarly a religious fanatic, whose gospel was also rooted in blood and brimstone. Both men were more than willing to take lives and a large number of innocent civilians were killed in the process. But Turner was enslaved and dehumanized along with other Blacks who were subjugated to some of the worst conditions known to humanity. His blind rage was not necessarily admirable, but it was understandable. And as Turner’s Rebellion killed around sixty people, two times as many Blacks were killed in response. Most of them uninvolved with Turner’s actions were nonetheless horribly executed by White mobs. In James’s Black Jacobins detailing the Haitian Revolution, the racism and extraordinary number of mass murders were appalling. In an even crueler twist of fate, Haiti has been ordered to pay France billions in reparations due to revenue lost for their slaves and colony.

Pontecorvo and Solina displayed an understanding of the consequences when targeting civilians going about their business in a public space. Especially in the iconic scene where a group of women remove their hijabs before cutting their hair - changing their appearance to look more like their European occupiers. Armed with explosives, they are instructed to blow up a cafe full of French civilians. It is a tough scene to watch yet these guerilla bombing campaigns of terror undoubtedly turned the course to the FLN’s strategic favor. These attacks combined with labor strikes were an attempt to hit the security and economic sectors hardest while promoting solidarity.

Since the blockade was placed on Gaza in 2007, only under extenuating circumstances, are Palestinians allowed to leave the open-air prison. Reports of cancer patients and other preventable diseases have led to unnecessary deaths that could have been avoided if they were allowed to travel to clinics outside Gaza. And a majority of young people have never experienced any life outside the towering 21-foot-high walls that surround them, chock full of surveillance, AI systems, snipers, or remote-controlled devices that can shoot citizens, as well as drones hovering overhead every moment. These capabilities are laid out, once again from The Palestine Laboratory,

The IDF uses extensive facial recognition with a growing network of cameras and mobile phones to document every Palestinian in the West Bank. Starting in 2019, Israeli soldiers used the Blue Wolf app to capture Palestinian faces, which were then compared to a massive database of images dubbed the “Facebook for Palestinians.” Soldiers were told to compete by taking the most photos of Palestinians and the most prolific would win prizes.48 The system is most extreme in the city of Hebron, where facial recognition and numerous cameras are used to monitor Palestinians, including at times in their homes, instead of the extreme Jewish settlers living there, who routinely express genocidal threats against the Palestinians. The IDF claimed that the program was designed to “improve the quality of life for the Palestinian population.” In 2022, Israel installed a remote-controlled system for crowd control in Hebron, a tool with the ability to fire tear gas, sponge-tipped bullets, and stun grenades. It was created by the Israeli company Smart Shooter, which claims to successfully use artificial intelligence when finding targets. Smart Shooter is a regular presence on the international defense show circuit and has sold its equipment to more than a dozen countries. Blue Wolf was a smaller version of the Wolf Pack database, which contained the personal details of virtually every Palestinian in the West Bank, including educational status, photos, security level, and family history. Soldiers in the West Bank were instructed in 2022 to enter the details and photos of at least fifty Palestinians into the Blue Wolf system every shift and were not allowed to end their shift until they did so.

In The Battle of Algiers, when a group of French civilians joyfully letting loose at a dance hall is suddenly cut short by an explosion inside the club, it was hard not to see the comparison between October 7th. On that day a music festival full of carefree civilians who consciously or unconsciously participated in an active occupation became both crossfire by the IDF and the intended targets by members of Hamas. Made up of mainly young men, who perhaps were unleashing decades of pent-up aggression. The actions are admonishable, the loss of innocent lives is tragic, and the horrific consequences are comprehensible.

Israel’s catastrophic response exposes how the manufactured so-called rules-based order on which there is a broad permissive framing of what are considered war crimes, historically leaves imperialists like them unpunished. Just the other day, National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby, when asked if the double-bombing of a refugee camp that killed one hundred and ninety-five people constitutes a war crime, said, “I'm not in a position to say if it is or it isn't”.

Because it does not fit the model of imperialist or colonialist propaganda, The Battle of Algiers is rarely shown on TV or streaming beyond the Criterion Channel. Thus, most modern audiences have not seen Pontecorvo’s masterpiece. And being in French, with subtitles filmed in black and white does not help it reach American viewers. But interestingly, The Battle of Algiers is one of the few films in Oscar history to be nominated in two separate non-consecutive years. Originally it was a foreign film nominee in 1966, and then again it was nominated for screenplay and direction in 1968. Furthermore, It was screened by the Pentagon in 2003 for officials and civilians to showcase the challenges of occupying a country that wanted anything but.

Following civil wars in the 80s against various Islamist groups, the FLN regained control of the country in 2002. To this day Algeria mostly remains a testament to a modern society and thriving culture - not being occupied by foreign powers trying to extract valuable resources and labor. Whereas Hamas was propped up by the Israeli government to undermine and destabilize the Palestinian Liberation Organization or the PLO. As usual with these Faustian arrangements - they come back to haunt you. Hamas is a religious fundamentalist organization with troublesome elements, yet it is also the only security force the Palestinians have to rely on. We do not need more religious fundamentalist countries but it should be up to the indigenous peoples to decide their future. The best hope we have right now is a ceasefire - and ideally a peaceful resolution that specifically addresses the decades-long, illegal Israeli occupation.

The Savagery of the War Against the Palestinian People

By Vijay Prashad

Republished from People’s Dispatch.

Who knows how many Palestinian civilians will be killed by the time this report is published? Among the bodies that cannot be taken to a hospital or a morgue, because there will be no petrol or electricity, will be large numbers of children. They will have hidden in their homes, listening to the sound of the Israeli F-16 bombers coming closer and closer, the explosions advancing toward them like a swarm of red ants on the chase. They will have covered their ears with their hands, crouched with their parents in their darkened living rooms, waiting, waiting for the inevitable bomb to strike their home. By the time the rescue workers get to them under the mountains of rubble, their bodies would have become unrecognizable, their families weeping as familiar clothing or household goods are excavated. Such is the torment of the Palestinians who live in Gaza.

A friend of mine in Gaza who has a 17-year-old child told me on the first night of this recent spell of Israeli bombing that his child has lived through at least ten major Israeli assaults on the Palestinians in Gaza. As we spoke, we made a list of some of the wars we could remember (because these are Israel’s wars, we are using the Israeli army names for their attacks on Gaza):

• Operation Summer Rains (June 2006)

• Operation Autumn Clouds (October-November 2006)

• Operation Hot Winter (February-March 2008)

• Operation Cast Lead (December 2008-January 2009)

• Operation Running Echo (March 2012)

• Operation Pillar of Cloud (November 2012)

• Operation Protective Edge (July-August 2014)

• Operation Black Belt (November 2019)

• Operation Breaking Dawn (August 2022)

• Operation Shield and Arrow (May 2023)

Each of these attacks pulverizes the minimal infrastructure that remains intact in Gaza and hits the Palestinian civilians very hard. Civilian deaths and casualties are recorded by the Health Ministry in Gaza but disregarded by the Israelis and their Western enablers. As the current bombing intensified, journalist Muhammad Smiry said, “We might not survive this time.” Smiry’s worry is not isolated. Each time Israel sends in its fighter jets and missiles, the death and destruction are of an unimaginable proportion. This time, with a full-scale invasion, the destruction will be at a scale not previously witnessed.

The Ruin of Gaza

Gaza is a ruin populated by nearly two million people. After Israel’s horrific 2014 bombardment of Gaza, the United Nations reported that “people are literally sleeping amongst the rubble; children have died of hypothermia.” A variation of this sentence has been written after each of these bombings and will be written when this one finally comes to an end.

PLEASE SUPPORT OUR WORK BY MAKING A DONATION TODAY

In 2004, Israel’s National Security Director Giora Eiland said that Gaza is a “huge concentration camp.” This “huge concentration camp” was erected in 1948 when the newly created Israeli state’s ethnic cleansing policy removed Palestinians into refugee camps, including in Gaza. Two years later, Israeli intelligence reported that the refugees in Gaza had been “condemned to utter extinction.” That judgment has not altered in the intervening 73 years. Despite the formal withdrawal of Israeli settlers and troops in 2005, Israel remains the occupying power over the region by sealing off the land and sea borders of the Gaza Strip. Israel decides what enters Gaza and uses that power to throttle the people periodically.

Politicide

When the Palestinians in Gaza tried to elect their own leadership in January 2006, Hamas—formed in the first Intifada (Uprising) of 1987 in Gaza—won the election. The victory of Hamas (the Islamic Resistance Movement) was condemned by the Israelis and the West, who decided to use armed force to overthrow the election results. Operation Summer Rains and Operation Autumn Clouds introduced the Palestinians to a new dynamic: punctual bombardment as collective punishment for electing Hamas in the legislative elections. Gaza was never allowed a political process, in fact, never allowed to shape any kind of political authority to speak for the people. Israel has tried with force to eradicate Gaza’s political life and to force the people into a situation where the armed conflict becomes permanent. When the Palestinians conducted a non-violent Great March of Return in 2019, the Israeli army responded with brute force that killed two hundred people. When a non-violent protest is met with force, it becomes difficult to convince people to remain on that path and not take up arms.

As this conflict takes on the air of permanency, the frustration of Palestinian politics moves away from the impossibility of negotiations to the necessity of armed violence. No other avenue is left open. Palestine’s political leadership has been either tethered by the European Union and the United States and so been removed from popular aspirations or—if it continues to mirror those aspirations—it has been sent to one of Israel’s many, harsh prisons (four of 10 Palestinian men are in or have been in prison, while the leaders of most of the left parties spend long periods there under “administrative detention” orders). Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling has argued that the Israeli policy toward the Palestinians has resulted in “politicide,” the deliberate destruction of Palestinian political processes. The only road left open is armed struggle.

Indeed, by international law, armed struggle against an occupying power is not illegal. There are many international conventions and United Nations resolutions that affirm the right of self-determination: these include, Additional Protocol 1 of the 1949 Geneva Conventions, UN General Assembly Resolution 3314 (1974), and UN General Assembly Resolution 37/43 (1982). The 1982 resolution “reaffirms the legitimacy of the struggle of peoples for independence, territorial integrity, national unity and liberation from colonial and foreign domination and foreign occupation by all available means, including armed struggle.” You could not have a stronger statement that provides legal sanction for armed struggle against an illegal occupation.

Why does Hamas attack Israel? Because a political grammar has been imposed on the relationship between the Palestinians and the Israelis by the nature of the Israeli occupation. Indeed, any time there is a modest development for talks—often brokered by Qatar—between Hamas and the Israeli government, those talks are silenced by the sound of Israeli fighter jets.

War crimes

Each time these Israeli fighter jets hammer Gaza, leaders of Western countries line up metronomically to announce that they “stand with Israel” and that “Israel has a right to defend itself.” This last statement—about Israel having the right to defend itself—is legally erroneous. In 1967, Israeli forces crossed the 1948 Israeli “green lines” and seized East Jerusalem, Gaza, and the West Bank. United Nations Security Council Resolution 242 sought the “withdrawal of [Israeli] armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict.” The use of the term “occupied” is not innocent. Article 42 of the Hague Regulations (1907) states that a “territory is considered occupied when it is actually placed under the authority of the hostile army.” The Fourth Geneva Convention obliges the occupying power to be responsible for the welfare of those who have been occupied, most of the obligations violated by the Israeli government.

In fact, as far as Gaza has been concerned since 2005, Israeli high officials have not used the language of self-defense. They have spoken in the language of collective punishment. In the lead-up to the ongoing bombing, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, “We have decided to halt electricity, fuel, and goods transfer to Gaza.” His Defense Minister Yoav Gallant followed up, saying, “I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed.” Then, Israel’s Energy Minister Israel Katz said, “I instructed that the water supply from Israel to Gaza be cut off immediately.” Having followed up on these threats, they have sealed Gaza—including by bombing the Rafah crossing to Egypt—and closed down the lives of two million people. In the language of the Geneva Conventions, this is “collective punishment,” which constitutes a war crime. The International Criminal Court opened an investigation into Israeli war crimes in 2021 but was not able to move forward even to collect information.

The children huddle in their rooms waiting for the bombs sit in the dark because there is no electricity and wait—with parched throats and hungry bellies—for the end. After the 2014 Israeli bombardment, Umm Amjad Shalah spoke of her 10-year-old son Salman. The boy would not let his mother go, being in terror of the noise of the explosions and the death around him. “Sometimes he screams so loudly,” she says. “It almost sounds like he’s laughing loudly.”

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor, and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest books are Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism and (with Noam Chomsky) The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of US Power.

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

The Anti-Defamation League's Latest Front in the Battle Against Palestinian Liberation: High-School Students and Educators

By Palestinian Youth Movement - NYC

On November 10th, the Anti Defamation League (ADL) will host its yearly conference in New York City, billed as the “World’s Largest Annual Summit on Antisemitism and Hate.” Though the ADL enjoys a reputation for progressive values in mainstream advocacy and policy circles, the conference program makes clear that it occupies a role closer to “conservative think tank” than civil rights defender. The roster of speakers runs the gamut from the hawkish neoconservative Liz Cheney and former IDF major general Doron Almog to FBI Director Christopher Wray.

This discrepancy—between the ADL’s claims to fighting hate and the conference’s hate-promoting speakers—speaks to a larger contradiction. Although the ADL benefits from its status as a premier civil rights organization, it has a long and ignoble track record of undermining the civil liberties of marginalized groups and actively participating in the repression of social movements. Today, its reputation as a moral authority is being challenged by the #DropTheADL Campaign, which has garnered the endorsement of over 100 progressive organizations that have cut ties with the ADL and call on others to drop it as a partner in social justice movements. 

Although the ADL benefits from its status as a premier civil rights organization, it has a long and ignoble track record of undermining the civil liberties of marginalized groups and actively participating in the repression of social movements.

Its history includes efforts since the 1950s to inhibit Arab American participation in U.S. politics, its support for ineffective and discriminatory “Countering Violent Extremism” programs, and its ongoing accusations that the leading Muslim rights organization, CAIR, has terrorist affiliations. The ADL is also the single largest non-governmental police trainer in the U.S., organizing exchanges between U.S. and Israeli law enforcement agencies that fuel militarized policing in marginalized communities. Under the banner of civil rights, the ADL has surveilled and undermined leftist struggles, including movements for civil rights, socialism, the end of Apartheid, immigrants, farmworkers, queers, Palestinian liberation, and organized labor. Unsurprisingly, its legacy and tactics reveal a unquestioning fealty to US geopolitical interests and policy. 

Yet the ADL maintains an influential role in the civic sphere, particularly within educational institutions. Evidence of this is apparent in the conference’s “High School Track,” which boasts student-oriented sessions on “Anti-Zionism’s Global Reach” and “How Students Are Confronting Anti-Zionism and All Antisemitism on Campus.” Declining public support for Israel among progressives has provoked a crisis of legitimacy among Zionist institutions, resulting in an increasing focus on secondary and tertiary education as the prime “battleground” for combatting the increasing support for Palestinian liberation. 

The emphasis on recruiting students and educators into Zionist advocacy reflects two rising trends. First, Zionist organizations are increasingly targeting classrooms and campuses as “ideological battlegrounds” in an effort to quell growing youth support for Palestine. Second, these groups strive to conflate anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism, in order to smear advocacy for Palestinian liberation as a form of discrimination and lay the groundwork for legal action against activists. The ADL has long lobbied legislatures and organizations to adopt of a definition of anti-Semitism that includes criticism of Israel. These efforts represent not only a grave threat to First Amendment protections—they also aim to categorize pro-Palestinian stances as violations of Jewish Americans’ civil rights.

The ADL’s intervention into public education has already had disastrous consequences. In 2021, a coalition of right-wing advocacy groups, including the ADL, partnered in an assault on the California Board of Education’s proposed public high school Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum (ESMC), specifically targeting the inclusion of Palestine. Following this onslaught, the curriculum was warped beyond recognition, evidenced by the removal of modules about Palestine and Arab American Studies. A key provision of the new curriculum is the inclusion of the controversial IHRA definition of antisemitism, which equates criticism of Zionism with antisemitism. The result is an effort to force “Zionist-centric Ethnic Studies on public school students.” The ADL’s attacks on anti-racist education impacts all students from marginalized racial, social, and economic backgrounds. It threatens their right to a comprehensive education grounded in principles of justice, while also isolating educators who believe that their students have a right to a curriculum which reflects their conditions and histories.  

The ADL’s attempt to shape the political consciousness of students poses a particular threat to Palestinian and Arab youth in the U.S. who are denied access to the revolutionary histories that are the foundation of our national identity. Zionism’s attempt to consolidate itself in the education system leaves our youth isolated, with few public institutions to engage our history and struggle. For Palestinian and Arab students, the ADL’s efforts represents an assault on our ability to resist, or simply describe, the conditions of our people’s ongoing dispossession. 

The ADL seeks to make our history and struggle as Palestinians definitionally illegitimate. By collaborating with anti-Semitic, right-wing figures to advance this anti-Palestinian  agenda, the ADL is only vindicating the growing white supremacist movement that is unleashing an assault on Critical Race Theory and other anti-racist pedagogical frameworks. The silencing of our movement in the realm of public education represents a broader right-wing assault against movements for racial and economic justice. 

As the ADL brings together youth and educators in New York City tomorrow under the misleading banner of “fighting hate,” our movements must come together to affirm that the ADL is not an ally to working class and oppressed peoples, nor to students and teachers. 

The U.S. Gives Us Hell But It’s A Liberated Africa That Can Douse the Flames

By Mark P. Fancher

Republished from Black Agenda Report.

African Liberation Day is a reminder that African descended people make progress when joined together in international unity. Internationalism is essential.

When U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) was established in 2007, the only thing more offensive than its use of proxy African soldiers to carry out imperialist missions was the appointment of a Black man, William E. (“Kip”) Ward, to lead AFRICOM operations.

After Ward stepped down, white men assumed leadership of AFRICOM. But now, yet again, AFRICOM will be headed by a man of African descent. Lt. Gen. Michael Langley will assume the role of training and directing the armed forces of African countries to militarize Africa and plunder the continent’s resources for the benefit of foreign governments and corporations. The publication Stars and Stripes reported that for Langley “a top priority will be countering militants in the East African country of Somalia.”

The cynical use of Africans to control and exploit Africa is surpassed in its odiousness only by a willingness of Africans like Ward and Langley to engage in the enterprise. Those committed to Africa’s liberation have long been aware of the importance of ensuring that members of African communities decline such collaboration with oppressors. To that end, in 1963, the Organization of African Unity proclaimed May 25th as African Liberation Day - a day when the African World might orient itself to a serious commitment to achieving Africa’s genuine independence.

Although the commemoration of African Liberation Day throughout Africa and the African diaspora has become an ever-growing tradition, this year, in the wake of the racist massacre in Buffalo, New York, there are no doubt many Africans born and living in the U.S. who can’t bring themselves to think of Africa’s plight when their personal circumstances seem so precarious. If the only problems were violent white supremacists, prospects for survival might not seem so bleak. But the anti-Black hostility has manifested in so many ways that signal that help is not on the way from any of the quarters from whence Africans in America might expect it.

Specifically, in Grand Rapids, Michigan, a police bullet was fired into the head of Patrick Lyoya at point-blank range making him one of the latest of a very long series of Africans killed by cops and affirming yet again that not only are Africans unable to look to the police for protection, but that the police themselves are an enemy force.

Less blatant, but no less concerning, is the U.S. government’s seeming indifference to the international dilemma of WNBA star Brittney Griner, a captive in Russia, purportedly for drug-related offenses, even as the U.S. State Department fought more efficiently and vigorously for the release of others. In fact, it took weeks for the U.S. to even acknowledge its belief that Griner had been wrongfully detained. Concern is not limited to the plight of Griner as an individual, but it is also for the unmistakable message that a U.S. government that should presumably protect its nationals can’t be counted on if the person in question is Black.

It is not surprising then that persons of African descent in the U.S. might perceive themselves to be adrift, alone, vulnerable and unprotected even by the government entities charged with keeping them safe. The perceived intensity of the danger means that calls to work for Africa’s liberation may not resonate. While this is understandable, historically, the challenges of Africa’s diaspora have not deterred engagement in internationalist service.

The list of revolutionaries who have emerged from communities under stress but who have nevertheless thrown themselves into Africa’s struggles is long. Frantz Fanon left colonized Martinique to struggle alongside those fighting for Algeria’s independence. Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael) physically relocated himself from the U.S. where Civil Rights and Black Power struggles raged to become a vital member of the Democratic Party of Guinea. Che Guevara was not content with his sterling service to the Cuban revolution, and he fought in Congo and ultimately Bolivia where he was captured and killed.

In fact, some of the most important internationalist service to Africa has been rendered by Cuba, even in the face of extreme pressure from not only western imperialism but also from the Soviet Union. Of Cuba’s assistance to the efforts to liberate Angola, Piero Gleijeses, a Johns Hopkins University professor explained:

“In early November 1975, as South Africans were advancing along the coast, Angola sent a desperate appeal request to Cubans for help. The military mission also told Fidel [Castro] that the Cubans had to do something, because Luanda was going to fall. On November 4, Fidel decided to send troops to Angola. The Soviet Union was miffed, because it didn’t want the Cubans to intervene. It showed its annoyance by not assisting in the dispatch of Cuban troops to Angola. Until 1975 or 1976, the Cubans arrived by ship and old transport planes.”

Cuba went on to play a vital role in the liberation of Angola and the fall of apartheid in Namibia and South Africa. Cuba’s sacrifices for Africa neither began nor ended in Southern Africa. Even after its military forces withdrew from the region, they were replaced by brigades of Cuban physicians and other medical personnel deployed throughout the continent.

For Black people in America, internationalist service can be not only as noble as that rendered by forebears, but it can also be pragmatic. This is because Africans are not only a numerical minority in the U.S., but also a powerless minority. Meanwhile, Africa’s population is exploding. Foreign Policy columnist Adam Tooze explained that by 2050, Africa’s population will account for nearly 25 percent of the population of the planet. He said:

“In the 2040s alone, it is likely that in the order of 566 million children will be born in Africa. Around midcentury, African births will outnumber those in Asia, and Africans will constitute the largest population of people of prime working age anywhere in the world.”

It just makes good sense for Africans in the U.S. to see themselves as part of that mass of humanity. This does not even consider the potential of Africa to seize control of the continent’s natural resources and to use them for the benefit of Africans worldwide. Such global sharing and collaboration will happen more organically if the African diaspora participates not only in reaping the benefits of the power that flows from control of Africa’s natural wealth, but also in the struggle on the front end to make such control a reality.

While a united and socialist Africa, with all its resources could be a powerful social, economic and political engine for communities throughout the African diaspora, as a practical matter it would need to do nothing to impact them. The mere existence of a powerful, unified Africa would be a deterrent to every police officer inclined to kill brothers like Patrick Lyoya. When the Brittney Griners of our communities might find themselves in international predicaments, the State Department would likely turn somersaults if necessary to assist them because of the need to curry favor with a powerful Africa. In the end, Africans in America need to make Africa a primary focus of their struggles despite the many hardships and challenges presented by the U.S. It just makes good sense.

Mark P. Fancher is an attorney and writer. He is a member of the Black Alliance for Peace Africa Team and the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party. The views expressed are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of organizations with which he is affiliated. He can be contacted at mfancher[at]comcast.net.

We Have More Than a Moral Obligation to the People of Afghanistan

[Photo credit: Haroon Sabawoon | Anadolu Agency | Getty Images]

By Daniel Melo

Since the US exit and the subsequent collapse of its propped-up government in Afghanistan, the left has rightly decried the US’s failure to protect the lives of the Afghan people. There was seemingly little to no exit strategy for the many people who wished to depart the country and who might face future brutality by the Taliban. And while many on the left have been right to point out that the US has a moral obligation to take in any and all Afghan refugees, this does not end the inquiry. It is not enough to say that it is simply a question of right and wrong, or that we should feel sorry for the many left behind in the wake of bad US imperialist acts. Moral questions of this sort ultimately leave out the agency and necessity of those it is trying to help. And they are ripe for the kind of conservative-reactionary rhetoric that would morally place “American” lives above those of Afghan refugees. 

Limiting the question of whether the nation should assist Afghans who wish to depart as one of “right” or “wrong” removes the people of Afghanistan from their rightful political place as equals in discussions of their futures. It is not just a moral obligation to admit Afghan refugees (whether in the thousands or millions). It is also, fundamentally, a political one. And to help understand this political obligation, we can turn to a refugee from another war.

Political scientist, refugee, and scholar Hannah Arendt covered the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem at the end of WWII. Eichmann, an administrator and organizer of the Nazi Holocaust, was responsible for the death of millions of people. In Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt watched the court grapple with the realities of the magnitude of the crime before them. This led to questions about the nature of culpability and justice for acts that had no precedent within the legal order. Eichmann, for one, did not believe that he had committed any wrong whatsoever. A commandant of Auschwitz noted that Eichmann thought he was spearheading a noble mission, one that would “save the German people.” What’s more, there were no laws on the books at the time that could readily be applied to the situation. Eichmann believed that he a rather strict adherent to “the law” in his carrying out of Jewish extermination.

Thus, the Israeli court was put in the position of attempting to judge a man for whom there was no applicable law, particularly since he did not carry out the individual killing himself but facilitated the bureaucracy of death. Both then and now, many rightly conclude that regardless of the exact contours of the law, the condemnation of Eichmann was necessary because it deeply violates our sense of moral right and wrong, albeit on an unprecedented scale. But Arendt takes it beyond this sense of injustice and recognizes that his offenses and the subsequent judgment had to be more than legal affirmation of moral wrongs. The judgment had to be political— “The wrongdoer is brought to justice because his act has disturbed and gravely endangered the community as a whole . . . it is the body politic itself that stands in need of being ‘repaired[.]”

Mass death and violence, argues Arendt, move beyond remedying moral questions of individuals and instead are an affront to the very collective existence of humanity. In this sense, Arendt challenged the Israeli court to look beyond the strict legalities and to judge Eichmann politically.

In politics obedience and support are the same. And just as you supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people and the people of a number of other nations . . . we find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with you.

Thus, in the face of such things that move beyond the bounds of understanding within the law and even basic morality, we must turn to political judgment, the pursuit of reconciliation between the actor and the populace. Political justice demands an equal accounting for affronts to our collective humanity.

I am not attempting to compare or qualify the Holocaust and Nazi Germany with the US capitalist imperialism either in kind or substance. Rather, there is a more essential point that emerges from Arendt’s account--to fully reconcile these disparities, we must move beyond only making moral claims to making political ones. In this respect, it is high time we politically judged the capitalist-imperialist adventures into Afghanistan (and the world over). The human cost alone exceeds 240,000 lives, nearly a third of which were civilians. This is in addition to the 2.5 million Afghan refugees already registered elsewhere in the world (the second-largest refugee population).  Who knows what additional harm to the working people of Afghanistan is to come in the days ahead. The US incursion into Afghanistan and everything that has flowed from it requires political demands for agency in what is done to them.

In many senses, the US has already brought the Afghan people into the body politic. 20 years of occupation will necessarily have political ramifications for both those inside the territorial bounds of the US, as well as those within Afghanistan. And yet, this is threadbare at best; the US has also failed at its claimed guiding principle in the first place--any vague notion of democracy. The philosopher Rainer Forst notes that a foundational right of all people, and upon which all other rights are constructed, is the right to justification. While the theoretical discussion of this is both dense and long, it essentially boils down to a maxim within most political engagements between peoples--is what I am asking or demanding of you something you can ask and demand of me?

By limiting the inquiry of the US taking in Afghan refugees as a right/wrong question, we miss the opportunity to recognize that the Afghan people should have an essential participatory voice in how the US treats them. This is foundational to democracy. Thus, it becomes more than a question of what we think should happen to the Afghan people and broadens to what they and we think. It is not that morality is absent from this political claim, but rather that it is placed in a political context. As Forst says, it “expresses the demand that no political or social relations should exist that cannot be adequately justified towards those involved.”

And the political exclusion of the now-millions of Afghan people who seek to enter the empire that once encircled them lacks even the most basic justification. They are excluded from the US body politic because of arbitrary legal lines that denote them not being “us.” As Forst argues, “Justification does not end at borders.” In all real political senses, the US empire stepped across that gap 20 years ago, and now the time has come to assert political justice for those that remain in its bloody departure. To borrow from Forst once more— “democracy . . . is not ‘instrumental’ to justice; it is what justice demands.” (emphasis mine) Placing the US and Afghan people in this relationship of political justice compels their inclusion within the political framework of the US.

I recognize these demands border on the impossible within the mainstream conception of politics. But that is precisely why we must push for a radical vision. This is the lesson that Arendt offers up in the trial of Eichmann--when the present framework is insufficient to comprehend or achieve the required level of justice, we must seek alternatives. In the instant case, we must pursue a political project that comprehends the Afghan people, along with the millions of other displaced peoples, as deserving of more than pity or even moral obligation. We must advocate for them and the collective working class of the world as ends in themselves and reconcile that with the failures of capitalism. Justice, the working out of justifications, is ultimately a political project of reconciliation. And in this case, we must dare to judge—and condemn—imperialism and capitalism politically.

Daniel Melo is a public sector immigration lawyer in the American Southeast who primarily works with refugees and is the son of a migrant himself. His book, Borderlines, is out now from  Zer0 Books.

Sheikh Jarrah Is Not a New Event! It is Our Relived Generational Trauma

By Nazek Jawad

Growing up in Damascus, I didn’t realize the occupied Palestinian territories were a separate political entity from Syria, until I was in fourth grade. Up until then, I thought it was a part of Syria. This is how present the Palestinian cause has been in our daily lives. The shadows of generations of Palestinians, who were forced out of their homes, followed us in schools, in the streets, and in our homes. The shadows of the Palestinian “Children of the Stones” shared our desks with us in the classrooms. We grew up with the open wound of Palestine. We grew up with the pain of women protecting their olive trees from being uprooted by military tanks. With the agony of the stolen childhood of Palestinian kids, who looked like us, but had to become men at ten years old to defend their livelihood, their homes, and their families. 

In 1993, while the usual images of the Israeli destruction of Arab land in Palestine were on the front page of one of the daily newspapers, on the back page was an image of Hillary Clinton with Big Bird. I remember gazing at that image, staring at Big Bird’s fluffy yellow feathers and rounded big eyes. I felt sunnier just by looking at Big Bird. I stared at Clinton’s cheerful smile and in my eight years old mind I gushed to myself: It must feel lighter to exist on the other side of the world, without the weight of all what’s happening here- life tastes differently there, it is not as salty! That brightness of the image illuminated how life feels like, without the weight of an existential threat looming in the background.

Every night when the clock hits 8:30pm, it was the time for the news segment, a time for another Palestinian tragedy. In my child mind I would think to myself: Is this the one? Is this the tragedy that would finally get the world moving to help us end this misery? Does the world know what’s happening? Is everyone around the world watching the news? 

Silence. Silence was the answer to all my questions. Silence was the world’s answer to all what was happening.

You see, in a child’s mind the sense of humanity remains untouched and pure, from all man-made divisive concepts. You don’t know nationalities nor borders. All what you know is humanity. You understand people around the world as a continuum of individuals around you-you imagine them like your neighbors. When a suffering happens, it doesn’t matter on which side of which border it took place-in your mind, the world exists in one stretch. What matters is the world’s response, and its absence has always aggravated me, and later when I grew up, it pained me, as I understood the world is choosing to stand still while we bleed.

In geography classes, we practiced the map of the Arab land with all its pieces intact. Where the world map outlines Israel, we wrote Palestine! That was our form of defiance. It was our small way of claiming our agency, and resisting the injustice of land dispossession. That small dose of self-made justice felt very empowering. It helped ease the frustration at times, especially on days when the American UN ambassadors raised their hands to veto a UNSC resolution condemning an Israeli aggression. So, there you go! For each one of your vetoes, we will draw a map. We will mark Palestine with capital letters. We will hang the map on every wall. On every door. On the sun! That land is Palestine, and all the millions of dollars sent in aid to Israel will never be enough to erase Palestine from our consciousness, from our being. 

You see, a child’s mind does not understand politics, but can feel hostility. We didn’t understand the political calculation behind the imperialist aggression against our region, but we felt the animosity against us. To be denied a mere condemnation, we knew our suffering is not seen. We knew the wailing of Palestinian mothers over the dead bodies of their children and the ruins of their homes is not heard. We felt the rejection. We are not wanted, not even to exist on our own land. But, what does a child do when they are rejected? They fight back claiming the very identity that has been taken away from them by force! It simply did not matter what all American Foreign Affairs Secretaries planned and negotiated and announced with Israeli and Arab leaders. For us, these borders that we practiced and perfected, are the borders of Palestine.

In history classes we learned about the Israeli occupation, the failed Arab revolution to free Palestine, and all the UN resolutions. We memorized the dates of every peace treaty, the names of the towns of every massacre, the numbers of deaths, and the names of all the Arab martyrs. We gazed at images of the Golan, the occupied part of the Syrian land, which we knew we will never see, not even in our dreams. A land that is only a couple-hours’ drive from Damascus, but seemed impossible to reach. It’s beautiful, I always thought. I could almost smell its scent out of the page of my book, but I could never touch it. This wound grows to be another extension of you. The loss becomes your shadow. Your land is who you are. As you grow older, you move around the world knowing your existence is simply incomplete. 

After every history lesson, we had so many pressing questions for our teacher: Where is the world from what’s happening? How is this massive generational injustice even allowed to continue in an advanced world? Isn’t this the same world that preaches to us about international law and human rights? Well, what about our rights? 

Once again. Silence. Silence was the answer to all our questions. 

But there’s no such thing as silence in a child’s mind. A child’s mind will always find answers. We realized then that our human value is not equal to others. We learned at an early age that it didn’t matter whether our cause is a just cause, our human suffering is insignificant to the rest of the world because we are weaker. Only those who are strong can move the world when they are touched. 

I always thought, how unfortunate for us that the world doesn’t measure our strength by the thousands of years of our civilization. It doesn’t measure our strength by the hospitality of our homes, the tastefulness of our food, the craftiness of our people. Somehow, by some arbitrary measures, which we didn’t decide, we ended up on the weaker side, while our survival over that land, and the creativity and endurance it takes to continuously inhabit a place for thousands of years, measured up to nothing. 

When you are a victim on the weaker side, the world sits in silence watching, desensitized to your bloodshed, and when you resist, the world roars pointing at you calling you a villain. When all liberation movements around the world are celebrated, while you don’t even have the right to resist-you realize then that you don’t matter. It’s that simple. It’s that painful. 

For seventy-three years we have been reliving the same devastating images, hearing the same condemnation statements, frustrated with the same inaction. For seventy-three years, the only thing human race has been successful in recycling is human misery, and an agonizing inaction to this misery.

This relived trauma in our region has been passed down generation after generation, because no one can wash away the daily lived sense of loss. We simply don’t have the privilege to forget. We don’t have a choice but to feel the pain of our missing pieces. How can you forget when all you feel is the pain of that void?

Today, with all what’s happening in Sheikh Jarrah, I am thinking about the entirety of the region where I come from, that has been subject to injustice that feels as ancient as time. When the world is celebrating technology that reduces physical distance, this region feels more isolated than ever. I will never understand such cruelty. How could a place that has given so much to the world, a place that has been a safe haven to so many civilizations, be faced with such harshness? What could be worth of unconceivable amount of human suffering?

I will never understand.