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I. Terror and Jubilation

When I was a graduate student many years ago, I got to spend time
in a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon. Life in the camp was
challenging, but community bonds were strong despite the adversity.
Internal tensions existed, but return to Palestine served as a unifying
principle.

Tewas an active era of Palestinian resistance—what Western journalists
and intellectuals lazily refer to as “Palestinian violence.” A major tactic
at the time was the suicide bomb. Sometimes the attacker would go
after a military installation. At other times, he (or she) targeted public
spaces. Western pundits and intellectuals, along with a fair number of
their counterparts in the Arab World, declared the tactic a byproduct
of atavistic evil and collected the usual plaudits in return. ‘To even
suggest the possibility of sociological factors was a monstrous breach
of professional standards. According to the orthodoxy, Palestinian
behavior was rash and unreasoned.

‘As in many neighborhoods around the region, television sets in the
camp often streamed a news channel, if only as background noise.
‘Whenever the presenter reported on a new operation, cheers emerged
from the crowded flats throughout the camp. The reaction didn’t
bother me—they were living in squalid conditions, after all, and their
cause was undeniably just—but I didn’t fully understand it, either. I
simply registered the cheering as a notable memory.

At the time, I had a vague but definite sense that the jubilation wasn’t
an expression of bloodlust. That kind of interpretation seemed to
me simplistic and ungenerous. I had experienced too much warmth
and hospitality to ascribe any evil to my hosts. Besides, I knew why
the people surrounding me were refugees. I knew the history of
massacres spread over two countries. I knew the stories of torment
and humiliation, of yearning and exile, of loss and agony. Bromides
‘wouldn't do.

In time, I came to understand that the jubilation was largely an
expression of hope. And a simple hope, at that: the deeply
human desire to return home. Every operation against the colonizer
represented a possibility of return. The Palestinians weren’t looking
at the situation through an abstract or idealistic lens. They were

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consummately practical.

Nobody wanted to live in a refugee camp anymore.

eee

Earlier this month, the Palestinian resistance in Gaza launched a
remarkable offensive, unprecedented in its scope and design.
Hundreds of rockets bypassed Istael’s ballyhooed Iron Dome and
landed everywhere from Ashgelon to Tel Aviv. Simultaneously,
Hamas operatives stole into southern Israel and captured various
civilians and IOF personnel. Fighters infiltrated Zionist settlements,
leaving behind dozens of casualties. One of the operations targeted
a music festival near the Gaza Strip. For the first time in decades,
Palestinians controlled land inside the so-called Green Line between
Israel and the Occupied Territories.

“The resistance called on its allies in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, and Iran to
join the operation, setting up the possibility of a regional war. The
‘world’s attention was again focused on Palestine.

Israel's response was exceptionally brutal, surpassing the horror of
its protracted assaults on Gaza in 2009 and 2014,

‘The music festival would become the main rationale for that
brutality. Western media falsely reported that Palestinians were
dismembering babies and practicing widespread rape, falsehoods
repeated by the president of the United States.

‘The IOF indiscriminately targeted civilians, cut gas and electricity,
locked down the West Bank, engineered mass displacement,
eviscerated rescue workers, shut off internet, bombed hospitals, and
refused to allow aid from Egypt. In a colonial project that has spent
over a century committing atrocities, the so-called war on Hamas was
one of its ugliest episodes.

tebe

In corporate media of the anglophone world, siding with Palestinians,
even haltingly, wasn’t an option. Quashing pro-Palestine sentiment has
always been the norm in these environs, but the suppression in this

2
case was harsher than usual. Politicians on both sides of the aisle
rushed to condemn Palestinian terrorism. Corporations performed
their usual gestures of anguish and concern. And in a type of
pandering that came across more as cruel than vapid, a long list of
celebrities pledged support for Israel.

Had this embargo on sympathy for Palestinians not existed, then more
Americans might have learned useful context and considered some of
the meaningful questions arising from Palestinian resistance.

Useful context begins with the nature of the Israeli state, an avatar
of belligerence and inequality. Beyond its role as a force of extraction
in the global nexus of US. imperialism, Israel was founded by
conquest which has yet to be rectified. That conquest included
mass displacement of Palestinian Arabs, theft of land, murder of
entire villages, appropriation of resources, and destruction of the
natural environment.

Given this context, the notion of “self-defense,” the Zionist’s
discursive go-to, becomes more complicated. How can an occupying
power be in a position of subjection or helplessness? Only in unusual
circumstances does the historical oppressor get to claim self-defense.
This isn’t one of those circumstances: Israel’s hostility as an
occupying power is entirely routine. Checkpoints are aggressive.
Border crossings are aggressive. Military patrols are aggressive.
Embargoes are aggressive. Home demolition is aggressive. Settlement
construction is aggressive. Extraction of land and water is aggressive.
One cannot invoke self-defense as a counterpoint to nonstop
aggression.

In short, there is no such thing as Israeli self-defense. It is a categorical
impossibility.

‘Then again, maybe the problem with Americans isn't ignorance or lack
of information. Maybe they know damn well that Israel kills in great
numbers and are glad of it. Maybe they're acclimated to the spectacle
of colonial violence. Maybe they see it as a benefit to humanity. Maybe
they perceive in bloodshed the world as it ought to be. Maybe they
know all they need to know about Israel, which is that it acts as a
mirror for their own fantasies of heroism and probity.
II. Why the Violence

Israel’ trance community had gathered in the desert near the
settlement of Re’im a few miles from the Gaza Strip. They were there
to enjoy a psychedelic festival of techno-electronica music, Nova, one
stop among an itinerant lifestyle of sensuality and peaceful vibes.

Nova. The name evokes stargazing, wanderlust, possibility. It is
mysterious and fascinating, a portal to a different world, one that
promises escape from the drudgeries of this deteriorating planet. Just
out of the ravers’ view were two million people of the Gaza Strip,
consigned to the drudgery of sanctions, immobility, and military
occupation. They too dreamed of another world, But that world didn’t
exist in the cosmos. It is already here, on this earth, in the homeland
from which they were expelled.

‘These dreams of different worlds were in unavoidable conflict.
Each world required the disappearance of the other. The Israeli
ravers thought they had already achieved their goal and had only the
heavens to contemplate. But the people in Gaza haven't consented to
that destiny.

‘This contrast calls to mind Frantz Fanon’s observation that “the
colonial context is characterized by the dichotomy it inflicts on the
world.” If nothing else, the operation from Gaza was profoundly
Fanonian—or perhaps we can say that Fanon accurately described the
inevitable logic of Indigenous resistance.

‘There is plenty of temptation to wag fingers in the aftermath of the
operation, but surely that task is not the domain of academics and
activists in the metropole. Nor should it be the priority of diaspora
Palestinians (among whom I include myself). In our environs, filled
with their own kind of hostility, the priority should be to defend
Palestinians against the torment to which they have been subjected by
the entire industrialized world. Among politicians, artists, celebrities,
and intellectuals, Palestinians have no shortage of critics happy to
cosign Zionist genocide. Those ctitics don’t need or desire our
validation, anyway. Abandoning our brethren in order to appease the
Zionist establishment will deliver no accolades. In the end, the aspirant
to respectability is left only with the shame of conciliation,
Palestinians are perfectly capable of formulating strategy and thinking
through complex problems without the guidance of outsiders; they
certainly don’t need half-baked moralism from dorks and social
climbers in the West. The Palestinian story isn’t esoteric or
inaccessible. In fact, one can discover the rationale for Palestinian
violence anywhere in the great mass of revolutionary writing from
Amilcar Cabral to Bassel al-Araj. That intellectuals who have made
lucrative careers with tough-sounding buzzwords were so eager to
condemn an actual instance of Indigenous resistance is a damning
(and in my mind permanent) indictment of Western academe.

It didn’t take long, in any case, for many of the early reports of
Palestinian savagery to prove false or exaggerated. Israeli babies
‘weren't beheaded and the mass rape event turned out to be complete
nonsense. Atleast two Israeli captives gave interviews stating that they
‘were treated humanely. Israeli police and military personnel hid among
civilians and were responsible for some of the casualties attributed to
Palestinians. Nevertheless, the story of Palestinian depravity continued
to circulate as Israel killed innocents by the thousand and turned
significant portions of the Gaza Strip into rubble.

Israel's response thus illuminated the rationale for the Palestinians’
operation. Everyone expected maliciousness. That expectation didn’t
atise from thin air. The operation wasn’t some random expression
of hatred. It was a tactical counterpoint to the colonizer’s systematic
malice.

‘The Palestinians, like all colonized people, have to measure a hunger
for dignity against the agony of retribution. They cannot sit passively
while the oppressor inflicts continuous misery and they refuse to
accept an ethno-religious narrative in which they exist only to be
vanquished. What, then, is left for them to do? They must fight. The
fight might be ugly in accordance to the situation imposed by the
occupying power. It might challenge observers’ perception of
victimhood. Sometimes it might even transgress the boundaries of
‘what Western intellectuals consider proper civil etiquette.

‘The psychic characteristics of the fight provide the dignity unavailable
in the colonizer’s fantasy world. Thus itis a cause for jubilation. A few
months ago, a group of unruly white revelers jumped a Black dock
worker on the Montgomery (Alabama) waterfront. It was a familiar

5
scene: a bunch of Southern preppies with enormous entitlement
visiting aggression on a scapegoat for their racial animus. The worker
fought valiantly but was badly outnumbered. Soon, though, dozens of
bystanders came to his defense, by land and water. They walloped the
white offenders in a chaotic scene captured by multiple camera angles.
‘Their resistance was intense. One white woman was whacked on the
head with a folding chair. One of the white men ended up in the river.

On social media (and beyond), there was great celebration by Black
users. They quickly made memes of the violence and handed out
nicknames to participants in the brawl. This mass of users was, in a
‘word, jubilant.

‘The jubilation lasted more than a week.
Tr conveyed a distinct message: “we are no longer defenseless.”

For Palestinians, resistance delivers a similar message: we will not sit
passively in these concentration camps and get starved and bombed
into oblivion, They are moved by the desperation of survival, for if
their colonizer gets to decide then they will disappear from the earth.
‘Their supposedly irrational violence is the very definition of self-
defense.

‘The violence isn’t purely psychological. It has material purposes, as
well. The idea is that the settlers can never be comfortable, for it is
in comfort that the settlers feel as if they have accomplished their
objectives. The land is theirs. The natives did indeed forget. History
has finally ended,

Palestinians are inviting Israelis to abandon the romantic idea of
their colony. It is not your exclusive utopia. It will never be a place of

respite. You cannot be secure and prosperous at our expense.

And so no small number of Palestinians were jubilant when they saw
Israeli settlers boarding airplanes to somewhere else.

III. Compulsion to Genocide

Commentators in the West have taken to describing the current
situation as the “Israel-Hamas war.” The term is inaccurate on two
counts. First, it suggests a kind of equivalence that papers over
economic and technological disparities between Israeli and Palestinian
societies. And second, Israel isn’t on the offensive against a political
party; it is waging war on the entire Palestinian populace.

Israel's goal isn't merely to defeat Hamas. It wants to eradicate
Palestine altogether. When Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant
declared that Israel would treat Palestinians like animals, he was
conveying, in clear and direct language, a compulsion to genocide.

By calling Palestinians animals, Gallant, along with many of his
colleagues, may think he is describing Palestinian inhumanity, but in
fact he is presupposing and thus justifying their violence. Zionists,
after all, introduced the concept of race to which Palestinians have
been acclimated (through suffering and exclusion). Zionists set up and
maintained the dichotomy between human and animal. As a result,
Zionists invented a Palestinian subject they could never subsequently
control. They had no choice. The settler is nothing without the
animalistic native. In the final balance, Gallant was subconsciously
endorsing suicide.

IV. The Professional Left Accedes

One can discern the seriousness of an insurgency in the Global
South or in the ghettoes and reservations of North America by the
type of reaction it inspires among the progressive intelligentsia. If the
insurgency promises to inflict real damage on the oppressor, then
members of that intelligentsia will rush to condemn it on moral
grounds.

Tt happened in the United States with the usual politicians and public
intellectuals: Bernie Sanders, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, Naomi Klein,
Jamelle Bouie, and on through the Rolodex. Slightly more surprising
‘was Judith Butler's insipid reflection on the unwillingness of
Palestinians to make liberation more comfortable for their oppressor.

‘Many of us have always known that shitting on Palestine is a rite of
passage for aspirants to political office or cable news studios. We
therefore understand that for the wannabe influencer both Israeli and
Palestinian death isn’t actually 2 moral concern; it is a professional
opportunity. Here we see the pitiful upshot of “resistance” as an
online brand: total abandonment of an encaged population to
genocide.

Knowing that the approval or even the comprehension of the
professional classes will never be forthcoming is one reason why
violence is essential to national liberation, Palestinians have determined
to proceed without their Western custodians. Decolonization
is a grueling project, generally beyond the acumen of those weaned in
comfort.

‘The professional classes are stuck in bourgeois abstractions (from
which they derive so many rewards) or profess a material politics they
don’t in reality support. They demand a bloodless liberation, but only
without the colonizer’s blood, even as the native bleeds out in full view
of the world. They demand a revolt without consequence, a caucus
of pristine victims politely asking to stay alive. They have taught
Fanon but ignored his observation that decolonization “cannot be
accomplished by the wave of a magic wand, a natural cataclysm, or a
gentleman’s agreement.”

‘These erstwhile liberals don't need to consult Palestinians to see how
‘wrong they ate. Zionists have been explaining for decades that Israel
must be defeated by force.

V. Palestine Tells All

Palestine is the canary and the coal mine. It forces self-professed
radicals to admit that they are furtively liberal. (Ideology: the coal mine.
Liberalism: its noxious gasses) It gives lie to the Western lionization of
free speech as a means to assert civilizational superiority. (Free speech:
the coal mine. Racial supremacism: its noxious gasses) It reveals
which governments around the world are serious about human rights.
(Governments: the coal mine, Human rights: its noxious gasses)

Whenever Palestinian resistance threatens to gum up imperialism,
cities throughout the democratic West readily enact fascist policies,
shutting down protests, firing or arresting dissenters, doing away with
civil liberties, and demanding obedience. In the immediate aftermath
of the Palestinian operation, media outlets across the spectrum
deployed a vocabulary that would facilitate Israeli genocide. The lite
bits of sympathetic coverage took the form of Jews talking to other
Jews about Israel, which further consigned Palestine to a place of
foreignness and unfamiliarity (the conditions for genocide in the first
place). Boardrooms enacted swift discipline. University presidents
made clear that Palestinian students and employees were prohibited
from speaking.

‘The real conflict doesn't exist between civility and terrorism; it exists
between Palestinian fortitude and Western anxiety.

hee

I remember those days in the refugee camp with fondness. Its
scenery is forever imprinted in my brain: the weathered buildings more
askance as they grew taller; the noise of children in every alcove and
stairwell; the scent of hot oil, thyme, and untreated water; the alleyways
scarcely wider than a set of shoulders,

‘The camp was precatious. Even in times of joy it was tense. That's the
nature of any ghetto or shanty. At any moment it can be overrun by
violence. A refugee camp is filled with surplus for whom important
people spare no concern. The Israelis could come, or the Lebanese
military, or the US, Marines. There could be a siege. There could be
an internecine war. There could be a food shortage. There could be
untreatable disease. Possibility itself was a source of constant stress.

But just down the coast was Palestine.

‘What would it take to get there? People spent surprisingly litle time
on this question, probably because everyone already knew the answer.

“Whatever is necessary to return.”
Palestinians are _ inviting
Israelis to abandon the
romantic idea of their colony.
It is not your exclusive utopia.
It will never be a place of
respite. You cannot be secure
and prosperous at our expense.