al-aqsa-flood-act-of-decolonization.pdf
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“T held my gun so that the generations after me could hold a sickle”
—Palestinian song, Abd Allab Ma Nerbal (By God We Won't Leave)

Decolonization is disruptive. It is a disruption to the status quo of
the subjugation of the racialized, and thus dehumanized, Indigenous
masses for the benefit of the settler-colonial class. It is a process that
necessarily entails upheaval, social unrest, and conflict, paving the way
for a new social and political order that reflects the aspirations and
values of the liberated people.

Algeria, Haiti, and Vietnam's years of bloody struggle all came to
mind more than ever for Palestinians this week. In all these cases, their
peoples courageously fought juggernauts of military power. They
‘were told these powers were undefeatable, that they were undeserving
of ruling themselves and controlling their own destinies, and that
they would find the price too high to pay. Scorched earth tactics and
guerrilla warfare flipped the power dynamics on their heads, and the
very infrastructure that had been used to exploit and suppress
them was used to the revolutionaries’ advantage. In the case of the
‘Vietnam Tet Offensive in particular, the timing, scope, coordination,
media coverage, and psychological impact of their resilience eroded
public support for the war. Could we perhaps bear witness to the same
phenomenon today? In all these cases, their peoples decimated the
physical and ideological barriers standing in the way of the new world
they knew was on the horizon,

Palestinians, too, will reach this new world.

‘Much of the commentary around the “Al Aqsa Flood” operation,
where Palestinian resistance fighters from Gaza broke free from the
concentration camp we know as the Gaza Strip, dismisses or outright
ignores two things that every Palestinian knows to be true:

1) There is no form of violence that Israel can hope to punish us with
for the first time now. Massacres, home demolitions, life imprisonment
sentences where prisoners are tortured and sexually assaulted,
blockade and siege, execution in the streets. Over and over again, we
watch funeral after funeral, and we know that in horror we will see
many more.
2) We do not intend to remain a population of oppressed refugees and
prisoners and denied access to the land that is our way of life forever.

Palestinian resistance is paving the way for the end of this violence and
denial of land that has been Israeli colonialism.

‘This end is the beginning of Palestinians rebuilding our villages that
were destroyed in the many massacres of 1948. Ie will be reparations
to compensate for our homes that we were robbed of and everything
stolen to bolster their libraries and museums from the Palestinians
‘who were ethnically cleansed and, to this day, are deemed “absentee.”
Te will be us finally accessing our beautiful nature to farm and enjoy,
free of the colonial bureaucratic structure in place currently
preventing this. It will allow us to undo the political brainwashing that
ur lives are less full and deserving of being lived because we are not
Jewish. This includes proving wrong the greenwashing that we don’t
deserve the land because we don’t know how to take care of it and
that they made the desert bloom when really all they did was take our
homeland and turn it into a series of heavily surveilled ghettoes.

‘This will all start with Land Back, the call to return land to Indigenous
peoples. Jaskiran Dhillon, an Indigenous scholar, defines Land Back
as “a call for the return of Indigenous lands and a reimagining of
Indigenous relations to the land, centered on autonomy and consent.”
Itis essential to decolonization because of how central it is to creating
a new political and economic order for the Indigenous, rather than
at their expense. Fanon put it in concrete terms: “For a colonized
people the most essential value... first and foremost the land: the land
‘which will bring them bread and, above all, dignity.”

“The resistance fighters came from the Gaza Strip, where the vast
majority of the population are refugees ethnically cleansed from their
villages, many of which have been destroyed and had settlements
built over their remains, like Sderot. They have since been shoved into
camps, where rather than having bread and dignity, they are denied
access to food, water, and medicine. They have been living at the whim
of the settlers who built their lives on the remains of their villages and
land.

From the moment those fighters flew in on paramotors, disrupting
the parallel reality that was this music festival, they accomplished

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something profound (one must wonder what it felt like for these
‘Siahters to see a party just outside where they have been trapped under a suffocating
blockade). They reimagined their relation to the land not as something
in the distance but as a tangible place for them to set foot on. They
entered the rest of their homeland not through a checkpoint hoping
to be granted a permit, but as a force to be reckoned with. They were
autonomous, enacting their will by force against this population of
heavily militarized settlers, the very vast majority of whom have
“served” or are currently in the Israeli military where careers are
made out of Palestinian suffering and death. That moment when a
(Palestinian! For Oncel) bulldozer took down the fence was
decolonization in practice: that fence, and the snipers behind it
defending the settler-colonial order, were overcome.

‘The Palestinian resistance did nothing less than lay the groundwork
for the end of violent Israeli rule over our lands. They did so by
employing a violence to end the root cause of the oppression of
Palestinians, not do another spin of the so-called “cycle.” As Paulo
Freire put it, violence had a/ready begun “with the establishment of
a relationship of oppression...never in history has violence been
initiated by the oppressed. How could they be the initiatiors, if they
themselves are the result of violence?”

Or, as Palestinian author Mourid Barghouthi put it, the resistance
rejected starting the story with “Secondly”:

“Start your story with ‘Secondly,’ and the arrows of the native
Ameritans are the original criminals and the guns of the white men
care entirely the victim. It is enough to start with Secondly’ for the
anger of the Black man against the white to be barbarous, and the
burned Vietnamese will have wounded the humanity of the napalm, and
Victor Jara’s songs will be the shameful thing and not Pinochet’
bullets..1t is enongh to start the story with ‘Secondly,’ for my
grandmother, Umm ‘Ata, to become the criminal and Ariel Sharon ber
victim.”

Starting the story with “firstly” has made some uncomfortable; this is
a testament to the decades of hegemony-building around who has the
monopoly on violence. This same monopoly decrees who gets to be
seen as full people with lives and loved ones and who are treated as
numbers. Over and over again, in the West in particular, Palestinians

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have been relegated to the latter. Some of those appalled by armed
Palestinian resistance and unable to see it for the defense that it is
perhaps see themselves reflected in the Israeli settler-soldier rather
than the Palestinian fighter. They may do so either because of their
own role in a settler society or because they have never had to try to
grapple with the physical and psychological existential threat level of
violence Palestinians have been subjected to all our lives. Regardless,
someone who thought decolonization would be an act of telekinesis
or who only thinks about us when we're trending is in no position to
lecture.

Many Palestinians would have preferred to see the walls come down
through boycotts and petitions and the other endless tried-and-not-
true methods we have long been undertaking, But it was not the
Palestinians who decided things had to be this way. Poetry and social
media posts have gotten us imprisoned; we have marched unarmed
and been met with tear gas and bullets; we have watched our children
be put through military court, and our people and their bodies pulled
out from under rubble, as they have been again and again in Gaza.

Palestinians know this annihilatory violence is being inflicted on the
Palestinians of Gaza as this is being written. We also understand that
when Israelis make jokes on Tik Tok about having access to water and
clectricity and about how “new real estate opening up,” itis the logical
conclusion of Zionist settler-colonialism: as much of Palestinian land
with as few Palestinians alive left on it.

But we have hope because we know, now more than ever, that these
horrors in the name of upholding a racist settler-colonial occupation
are not going to last forever. Anyone who ever thought it would will
be astounded in hindsight.
Decolonizing movements
decimate the physical
and ideological barriers
standing in the way of the
new world the oppressed
know is on the horizon.
After the ‘Al Aqsa Flood,’
Palestinians know more
than ever that they will
reach this world _ too.