The following discussion with Abdaljawad Omar was conducted over the month of March 2024 by email. Abadaljawad Omar is a scholar in the West Bank, a doctoral candidate, and part-time lecturer at Birzeit University. He has published numerous articles and essays about the Palestinian struggle for self-determination (some of which are referenced below), as well as interviews for podcasts such as Millennials Are Killing Capitalism. Although Abdaljawad had initially hoped to write an essay for this issue of Material, the dire situation in Palestine was not conducive to the deadline. Instead, he graciously agreed to engage in a discussion/interview about the current conjuncture in Palestine. This discussion represents both a snapshot of where things were at in the struggle for Palestinian self-determination in March, and an analysis of structures, formations, and strategy that has wider reaching implications.
Material: Although we want to examine broader issues regarding strategy and resistance in this discussion, we would be remiss if we did not begin by discussing the current conjuncture of Palestinian resistance and the social context in which you think and live. At the moment of this interview it is now five months into Israel’s current genocidal offensive in Gaza. As more weeks since October 7 2023 accumulate, so does the wreckage of bodies and civil infrastructure. It has reached the point where the IOF can target hospitals and food trucks, can carry out multiple massacres a day, and the most powerful states in the world can just shrug it off and allow what even their liberal human rights discourses would condemn become normal. Steven Salaita, among others, noted that it was once presumed Israel would continue, post-Nakba, with more covert forms of removal and ethnic cleansing under the legal mechanisms of apartheid (mechanisms such as policies of debilitation as examined in Jasbir Puar’s The Right To Maim1) with the occasional short-term military operation. What has been happening since October, though, resembles the kind of settler-colonial war of conquest and clearing that was supposed to belong to the past. As you noted in your interview with Louis Allday for Ebb Magazine five weeks into this war, “if Israel finds enough international willingness to turn a blind eye it will attempt to commit in this century another Nakba.”2 It has now been five months and your assessment is sadly proving to be prescient.
Although you live in the West Bank, settler violence has become more belligerent since October, as has the larger imperialist push to build more settlements and recruit more settlers to the colonial vision of Eretz Israel.3 Indeed, a few days before beginning this discussion, Zionist organizations in Toronto were hosting a real-estate event to sell Palestinian land to Canadian would-be settlers. Can you comment on this conjuncture, on how you see the characteristics of this war within the broader context of colonial counter-insurgency, and the impact the genocidal devastation in Gaza has had on life in the West Bank?
Abdaljawad Omar: There are several issues here to disentangle. The first is whether Israel’s war on Gaza fits within the counterinsurgency framework, particularly from an American perspective, where the separation of insurgents from civilians underpins its approach to establishing a system of governance that complies with the interest of the conquering power—the traitors, the compradors, the traditional hierarchies that can be bought off or given symbolic and political power through their reliance on the conquering power. In counterinsurgency proponents’ view, distinguishing between insurgents and civilians aims to portray the conquering power as also serving the broader population’s interests, thereby reducing resistance to its presence, and enabling such cooperation to come to the fore.
The primary methods Israel has been using in this war echo the era of pre-precision artillery and total warfare doctrines, where the civilian population is the main target. The breakdown of Gaza’s central civic nodes is just one phase in a series of strategies that include inducing famine, torture, humiliation, and degradation. These tactics aim to dismantle Gaza’s social fabric and keep it in a state of perpetual trauma, while also pursuing, to the extent politically feasible, the ethnic cleansing of Gaza to render it uninhabitable. This strategy is not particularly new; massacres have occurred throughout Palestinian history, from the early days of British rule to the present, with the specter of massacre looming over Palestinian politics both as a historical fact and a future threat. Each massacre is unique, tied to its specific context, the immediate conditions prompting it, the prevailing logic, the available technologies and tools for execution, and the system of alliances that support and legitimize it. In other words, Israel’s current doctrine has elevated civilians and civilian infrastructure to a “center of gravity” while downgrading the traditional set of targets—leadership of resistance groups, military infrastructure, resistance fighters, etc.4 This is evident in the lack of what American policymakers term a day after of the war, in the rhetoric of military and political leaders in Israel, and of course in the ultimate use of massacre as a nihilistic tool of elimination.
The Nakba, from a Zionist point of view, was an unfinished and incomplete endeavor. While it enabled the establishment of the state of Israel, it did not conclude the conflict or struggle over Palestine. The demographic, political, and social presence of Palestinians, along with their capacity for various forms of resistance—such as civil disobedience, steadfastness, refusal to leave, and armed resistance—have persisted. Israel finds itself ensnared in a paradigm where it holds “sovereign” power yet remains fragile, vulnerable, and unable to assert its presence without relying on barricades, garrisons, modern-day castles (i.e., illegal settlements), walls, checkpoints, prisons, and daily acts of violence. Within the mosaic of Zionist ideological currents, the fascist right wing, which advocates for a decisive end to Palestinian existence on the land of Palestine, epitomizes this drive toward annihilation. This is not a matter of differing desires among most Zionist ideological factions, as the majority wish for the disappearance of the Palestinians. The distinctions lie in the tactics and strategic consequences. It is, therefore, not surprising that Israel would see on October 7th an opportunity for the programmatic end of Palestinian life, not only in Gaza but throughout historic Palestine.
The challenges it faces are fourfold. First, there is the tenacity of the armed resistance in the Gaza Strip and the support that allies and forces of the Palestinian resistance are providing for Gaza. Second is the system of alliances that Israel has built with the help of the United States, which allows the current situation to unfold without a concrete response from the Arab state system. However, it also imposes certain “conditions” on the Israeli state, including its inability to expel the Palestinians from historic Palestine despite cornering them in Rafah or adjacent to the Egyptian border, without risking the breakdown or erosion of these alliances. The third challenge arises from the potential for a wider eruption among Palestinians in the West Bank, Jerusalem, and inside the 1948 lands, which could leave Israel facing three fronts and disrupt the day-to-day life of Israelis, especially in the West Bank and Jerusalem. A fourth challenge is the willingness of Israeli society to sustain the war for months with no end in sight, entering a zone of attrition that will cost Israel morally, diplomatically, legally, and in terms of international public opinion. These forces will have long-term implications, but they will also exact a price on Israel for its current drive to extinguish the hope for Palestine and to end the presence of Palestinians in the land.
What is perhaps central in all of this is time, the time to expand the horizon of the massacre faced head on with the time of Palestinian ability to withstand one of the largest, most equipped, and pampered military forces in the world. It’s a struggle over time, and in many ways, Palestinians understand this; they are fighting to “compress” this time to shorten it, but are also unwilling to end to war through capitulation.
Throughout the current war and massacres in Gaza, Palestinians in Gaza have been posing a legitimate question: Where is the rest of Palestine? This question reflects a pervasive feeling among many in Gaza that they are enduring their hardships alone, and the simplicity of the question hides the complexity of the reality of the West Bank and Jerusalem. The spatial arrangements in the West Bank and the current political and economic systems—built on the premise of cooperation—reflect the historic victory of the pragmatist-realist current in the PLO following the Second Intifada, which resulted in the West Bank’s politics being dominated by cooperation with Israel. Cooperation that is built on the holy trinity: defeatism, comprador class interests, and separation. The defeatism is central to the ability of the current system to reproduce itself in time. It simply claims that resistance brings to the fore nightmares. It does not work; it has not worked and it will not work. The comprador class made of an alliance between Palestinian security heads, capitalist class interests, and political figures benefits from the extraction of surplus through its hold of the Palestinian economy. The third spatial separateness with Israel renders mass forms of action and tactics ineffective. Palestinians are locked in ghettos and Bantustans without the ability to conjure up effective collection action.5
Despite this, there is a growing realization in the West Bank of what was already known: We live in a horizon of annihilation and if Israel succeeds in Gaza, it’s a matter of time before things will happen and unfold in the rest of Palestine. This is an uncomfortable truth, but one that is beginning to be acknowledged. While this does not necessarily mean we will witness a mass eruption of an intifada, it does however have implications for the nature of Palestinian responses to Gaza, from fear and paralysis to truth and its realization, towards a more confrontational and defiant politics.
Material: We would like to discuss the balance of forces as they existed historically and as they exist now in regards to strategic implications for “a more confrontational and defiant politics,” but we want to first examine something that was striking in your above response. Namely, what you said about the kind of exterminationist counterinsurgency methods Israel is utilizing. There is something historic about this, as you imply, and it also stretches back to the genocidal colonial warfare that marked, for example, the construction of the US and Canadian settler projects. In these periods, the logic of Conquest, and then the logic of counter-insurgency following Conquest, did not distinguish between civilians and combatants amongst the Indigenous populations because it sought to replace them. But even though we are hundreds of years from these events, that same counter-insurgent logic manifests whenever the surviving nations of that period of genocide resist.
What seems important here is that there is a particular logic in settler-colonial contexts that informs the way in which settler states function—militarily, socially, ideologically. Recently, there has been a general refusal to grasp this amongst certain sectors of the “left.” Ben Burgis, for example, wrote a terrible piece for Jacobin claiming that such an analysis was akin to ethno-nationalism, treating the Zionist claim that Israeli settlers were also “Indigenous” because of their religion, as valid.6 Even some academics who uphold forms of “decolonial” analysis have failed in this area—I’m thinking of Adam Shatz who you aptly responded to back in November with your article for Mondoweiss.7 Can you discuss the value of a rigorous understanding of colonialism, and a rigorous anti-colonial viewpoint, as necessary for what we would call a concrete analysis of a concrete situation?
Abdaljawad Omar: The Palestinian ordeal, when viewed through the Western lens, is intrinsically linked to the profound, philosophical, political, economic, and cultural roots of what Eduard Glissant defines as “The West as Project.” There exists an intricate and multi-layered relationship with Israel, imbued with historical, cultural, and psychological nuances. However, fundamentally, Israel embodies a colonial endeavor—a belated colonial enterprise, a testament to colonialism that emerged out of time, at the very moment that direct forms of colonialism were coming to an end—it simply arrived too late. Tony Judt eloquently stated the paradox of Israel’s situation: it emerged prominently just as other colonial endeavors like the United States, Canada, South Africa, and Australia had solidified their existence at the expense of indigenous peoples.
It is particularly revealing, for example, that when Israeli logic of expansion and elimination is questioned by Americans or representatives from various settler colonial nations, the response from Israelis often delves into highlighting the colonial past of the interrogators themselves. This deflection/reminder underscores a shared legacy of colonization and conquest. An attempt by Israelis to remind their interrogators, “I am you.”
Such dynamics paint Israel not just as a geopolitical entity but as a symbol, epitomizing the darkest exploits of grander imperialist and colonial powers over five centuries—marked by conquest, enslavement, relentless capitalist expansion, exploitation, and extermination. Yet, there is also an element of nostalgic exercise, a resurgence of the Western demons, reflecting a repressed collective unconscious that finds secret validation through Israel’s logic of annihilation of the Palestinians. The entrenched systems of racial segregation, the devaluation of life, and the devastation witnessed in Gaza extend beyond the physical confines of that besieged land, reflecting a broader, more pervasive imperial and colonial tendency.
Indeed, there is considerable discourse regarding Israel’s relationship with European anti-Semitism. However, it would be a significant error to restrict our understanding of Zionism solely to the Jewish experience in 19th and 20th-century Europe. Equally, confining the current conflict to the geographical confines of Gaza, now devastated, would overlook the broader implications of maintaining this imperial and colonial stronghold (Israel) as a marker of “Western” and European influence in the Eastern Mediterranean and Arab world. Thus, a pivotal question emerges from the events of October 7th—a question often ignored or marginalized: does the “left”—a precarious term at best—belong to the transformative event of October 7th, or will it insist on remaining an outsider? How do we construct an idiom to encapsulate this moment, its implications, and its relevance to people’s struggles across the globe—both in the metropole and in the colonies and neo-colonies?
The typical response is to reduce the struggle over Palestine to a cultural or tribal issue, simplifying it to a quarrel between ancient kin and thus avoiding the revolutionary implications it holds. Others elevate the religious ideology of Hamas to denounce the attack or scrutinize the lack of distinction between civilians and combatants to delegitimize resistance, thereby sidestepping the necessity for an ethical judgment grounded in concrete situations. For those, a moral formula exists where condemnation can be bequeathed without the rigorous excavation of conditions and contradictions, without a process of examination, and without an intellectual due process.
This avoidance is why many on the left find themselves on the “outside” to such a pivotal event. I wish to clarify that I am not addressing tactics designed for broad political appeal, but rather the intrinsic challenge posed by the Al-Aqsa Flood.8 This military action necessitates a profound and often uncomfortable response from those broadly speaking sympathetic to the Palestinian predicament or permits the rise of new lines of differentiation among large political coalitions. Within these confines, the dialectical constitution of political action, the historicity of the Palestinian subject, and the creative agency of Palestinians are sent to the gallows of profanity and moral abhorrence. I have never fetishized resistance or rendered it an object that can also become a fetishistic object of admiration. I find both positions to be problematic: the profane and sacred. Resistance is a complex phenomenon, in its genesis, effects, predicaments, organizational modalities, choices, creativity, and psycho-affective, political, and ideological elements. Yet I find it abhorrent to render it beyond the pale, as a phenomenon of the underworld, or simply as a metaphysical call to action. Resistance is grounded in the concrete, and its analysis is also an analysis of concrete. Tragically, when this is done it is almost done only by the enemies of resistance.
Furthermore, some on the left take seriously the narratives colonizers craft about themselves, notably their claims to indigenous status in Palestine. Here, genetic, biblical, and Talmudic claims are utilized to justify what is essentially a conquest masquerading as a return to an ancestral homeland—a notion historically and politically fraught with issues. This pattern is not unique to Israel; colonial history is replete with settlers claiming native status or divine rights, from the Afrikaners in South Africa to the European settlers in the Americas. While it’s true that connections to the land of Palestine span across all Abrahamic faiths, the portrayal of European Zionists as reclaimers rather than settlers dismisses the complex histories of those who lived and intermingled in the region. This argument, suggesting a rightful return rather than an imposition, is fundamentally flawed. The arrival of European Zionists was not about coexistence or living among or with Palestinians but an existence at the expense of Palestinians, a declaration of colonial sovereignty where Palestinians are reduced to an exception and removed by force from the land. Many others migrated to Palestine and lived with Palestinians; Armenians, Moroccans, Algerians, Kurds, Circassians, and others. The European Zionists came as colonial conquerors intending to sustain a sovereign hold on Palestine and the arguments over their indigeneity are meant to legitimize their offensive war on Palestinians. It is in this light, that the identity of the current unfolding genocide in Gaza is wrapped with Jewish cloths, where the Zionists instrumentalize the Jews to create a narrative about the necessity of catastrophe, the realization of Nakba 2.0.
For this reason and much more, it seems to me that October 7th embodies a central question about our contemporary era. It presents those who answer the question I posed earlier in the affirmative. Indeed, it’s a question of belonging to the wrath of the oppressed, to the desire to break through the “impossible” wall of persistent imperialism, colonialism, and capitalist exploitation, and presents us with a new task for thinking, to broach walls and rethink what Gramsci would exalt as “common sense.” The systematic production of death and corpses signifies the destruction of the “moral” code of a liberal international legal and international order, one that is premised on the notion of shared “humanity.” It has exposed the rot in the center of liberal pretensions. But more significantly, the event, this breakthrough, and the flood are not a local Palestinian event.
The assault on Palestine and the corpses of Palestinians buried under the rubble signify an attack not only on Palestinians but on the human condition itself. This historical trajectory hails from the early voyages of Christopher Columbus, weaving through the enduring legacies of colonialism and imperial expansion. In Gaza, we witness not merely the present anguish but the spectral presence of the enslaved embarking on their voyages across the Atlantic. We encounter the silent testimonies of Algerians executed by the French. Attentively listening, we become custodians of the residual pain from colonial conflicts—the lamentations of Indian farmers, the extensive killings in the Philippines, and the catastrophic bombings in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. We stand witness to the disintegration of Iraq and Syria and the persistent suffering of Africa. The dismemberment of Indigenous societies in both South and North America, with millions sacrificed on the altar of European supremacy and domination, unfolds before us, all at once, all in this moment.
In this extensive historical lineage, we discern that for Europeans, the “Other,” the Indigenous, was never truly considered an “Other,” meaning a human who deserves recognition. Intriguingly, this history also reveals that the only “Other” sanctioned to emerge as an Other is the internal “other”—the Zionist Jews expelled from Europe and authorized to construct their “villa” in the so-called West Asian “jungle,” just beyond the confines of the European “garden.” Indeed, the contemporary epoch is imbued with nostalgia for many, an aching for a bygone era of unchallenged conquest and genocide, unencumbered by the need for justification, and capable of unleashing horror without remorse, responsibility, or consequences. Its danger lies not only in that it is currently inflicted on Gaza but the potential it holds to boomerang across the globe. Not to mention the very fact that it is also a message to the wretched, global south, and all people on earth that this is what imperial technological superiority can inflict on you.
Yet, my pity extends towards this “colonial left,” which persists in championing social justice selectively, and which culturalizes or pathologizes the outcries and ingenuity of the oppressed Palestinians, thereby ensuring their nocturnal tranquility. This left, I pity, because it occludes the avenues for organizing, for collective action, for the unearthing of truths, and forging class alliances, for refusing to think and stretch the criteria for the possibility of judgment. It abandons the transformative potential inherent in moments of upheaval by opting to remain on the outside of the question of belonging to an uprising such as the one that unfolded on October 7th.
Material: It’s definitely true that there is something to be pitied in those sections of the left that possess this selective myopia. This is sadly, as we’re sure you know, not an isolated phenomenon; at key historical moments and contexts certain sectors of the anti-capitalist left have failed in their historical task. We have seen this from the great revolutionary movements in the past, to every meaningful struggle. Line struggle is always immanent since the dominant ideologies are this reality’s “common sense” and rigorous work is required to break from them—especially in the imperialist metropoles. Many fail in this area, which is why antagonistic contradictions emerge within this left itself, with many individuals and groups falling into mechanical liberal analyses that dictate their practice, if they even have a form of practice to begin with. Which is why, as you note above, “the rigorous excavation of conditions and contradictions, without a process of examination, without an intellectual due process,” is going to fail to produce any form of meaningful resistance, let alone solidarity with the oppressed in Palestine or elsewhere.
In the above answer you note the importance of thinking this concrete situation, which is something that is part of Material’s mission statement: one of the reasons for founding this journal was because we thought it was important for having a comradely struggle in the realm of thought amongst various (and non-chauvinist) traditions of the anti-capitalist left. So with that in mind we want to pivot to the topic we mentioned earlier and one that immediately comes to mind when you talk about “the rise of new lines of differentiation among large political coalitions” as well as the “organizational modalities, choices, creativity” of resistance. Your own research work is interested in issues of tactics, operations, strategy, and militant epistemology—grounded, of course, in the kind of concrete analysis of the concrete situation we’ve been talking about. So let’s move towards these questions in regards to Palestine and, hopefully, to their implications and relationship with other resistance movements.
Here we want to begin by discussing the balance of forces in Palestine. In the past worldwide anti-imperialist movement, the secular left forces were quite strong. Groups like the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine were eventually decimated and temporarily marginalized; Fatah (as you indicated in a previous point of our discussion) under Arafat turned into the Palestinian Authority post-Oslo and ended up managing and containing Palestinian revolt; since then there was the growth of Islamicist organizations such as Hamas. During this period there was also the emergence of spontaneous mass rebellions—the two Intifadas which you research—that injected new life into the movement but without the same structures for those operationalized by these rebellions to enter and renew. Can you speak a little about this history and what the balance of forces look like in Palestine now?
Abdaljawad Omar: I have been thinking deeply about our current historical conjuncture. I am attempting to outline a network of forces that intersect across the psycho-affective, military, ideological, and political challenges faced directly by Palestinians, within which the current war exists as a suspended moment, one that remains plagued by the fog of war and the metamorphosis of this war into a programmatic genocide. At this juncture, it appears we are witnessing a deformation of the colonial condition and its regimes of forms as it stood pre-October 7th, yet decolonization remains unachieved. Historically, one of the broad effects of resistance in Palestine has been its ability to instigate this process of deformation. In this context, many, for instance, may perceive the Oslo process in the 1990s as a “capitulation” by the PLO, and largely, they would be correct in making such an assessment. However, I maintain that this should not be the sole lens through which we view Oslo or the 1990s.
Oslo represented the culmination of the deformation of direct military occupation, a process significantly shaped by the resistances that emerged within occupied Palestine in the late 1980s. In this light, Oslo emerged as the outcome of a dynamic interplay of contradictions and forces, which could be interpreted as the PLO’s symbolic capitulation grappling with its exile to the margins in Tunisia. Simultaneously, it underscored Israel’s inability to sustain its colonial project without granting at least a nominal recognition of the Palestinian people and establishing a political and spatial separation, alongside a local authority to implement its directives. This turning point was a direct result of the First Intifada. This uprising signaled a call to action and marked a historic shift in the locus of resistance from being predominantly based within the diaspora’s refugee camps to embedding itself in the villages, towns, and camps of the West Bank and Gaza. This shift does not suggest that the West Bank and Gaza were devoid of resistance before this; rather, it indicates that the epicenter of resistance and the quest for liberation found a new locus. There is much to be discussed regarding the transmission of the ideas and practices of resistance. However, delving into this would lead us to a different inquiry, one that delves into the complexity of contingencies, geopolitical conditions, outcomes of past conflicts, and the enduring commitment to resistance in the region, most notably in Lebanon.
Alongside the ideological, institutional, and coercive war that accompanied Oslo a war that led to the NGOization of the radical left, the erection of a captive bureaucracy composed of local Palestinian forces mixed with the professional revolutionary cadre of the PLO that returned with Oslo, the rise of consumerist ideologies with its emphasis on individuality and class differentiation, the production of new desires, tastes, and accompanied with intergenerational trauma. These developments were analytically investigated by many academics, thinkers, and writers prescribing the “hegemonic” moment that Oslo signified. A space of defeat where politics is rendered impossible. This is in essence what Oslo also embodied in these works on political economy, social transformations and disfigurations, labor, and bureaucracy and ultimately, we can say that fell intentionally or unintentionally within sociologies, anthropologies, and political economies of defeat or were attempts to defend what was already judged as a “lost cause.”
However, the 1990s in the West Bank and Gaza were also the beginnings of a large-scale program of arming the Palestinians, the production of new novel objects of insurgency like IEDs and the human bomb, the creation of new tactics, and developing capacities to resist while also reformulating modulations of revolutionary and militant organizing. This line of flight, to quote Deleuze and Guattari, is perhaps the unrepresented core that goes unnoticed in Palestinian politics and by many in the Palestinian intelligentsia culminating in October 7th.9 Therefore, October 7th is the break and continuance at once. It serves to highlight the maturation of armed resistance and its capacity to conduct an offensive military operation, to surprise and take the war to 1948 occupied lands, and a testament to its capacity to resist the brutal aerial bombardment, the wide-scale invasion of Israel’s ground forces. But it is also a break not due to its military tactics, nor infrastructure, but in large part due to its offensive character and the scale of the offensive.
Now, we need to situate the offensive character of October 7th in a more concrete sense. It is a product of endogenous projects tied to the Palestinian fidelity to the intifadas and the accumulation of power since the 1980s within Palestine, one in which Gaza became the primary locus after the defeat of resistances in the Second Intifada in the West Bank. But this attack was also the consequence of regional resistant formations that have been accumulating power since the early 1980s. In other words, it is part of the complex history of disparate forces bound through their anti-imperial and anti-colonial resistance. In the 1980s, we saw the rise of Hezbollah as a militant force that began protracted warfare aimed at forcing Israeli and other international forces to retreat from Lebanon, culminating in a mismanaged and hasty Israeli withdrawal in 2000, or the liberation of Southern Lebanon. These regional forces have been accumulating power, including the power of deterrence, attempting, despite the asymmetry in power, to achieve a balance of forces with Israel. In 2006, the Israel war on Lebanon reinforced the need for a strategy that builds on the notion of mutually assured pain.
One of the most surprising aspects of this accumulation of Power on the part of resistances is the fact that Israel never pounced on the opportunity that the Syrian civil war opened up to launch a preemptive war on Lebanon. In 1967, Israel took Egypt and Syria by surprise during Egyptian involvement in the Yemeni Civil War between 1962 and 1970. Israel has always pounced on opportunities when its arch-enemies were bogged down in conflicts that took a toll on their military capabilities and posture. One of the primary factors for not pouncing was the equilibrium of forces and the mutually assured pain that resistances in the region have forced on Israel. Since 2006, no major war occurred outside historic Palestine with Israel. This was already indicative that despite the blows that Israel managed to accumulate through American and international support within Iran, Syria, and Lebanon, the strategic accumulation of power on the part of Iran and its system of alliances was well underway. After Hezbollah’s withdrawal from the Syrian civil war, the resistance formations in the region initiated a strategy of linking its disparate “zones” and forces, a policy that was titled the “unity of squares.” This strategy signaled the move from managing the outcomes of the Arab Spring and its consequences in Yemen, Iraq, and Syria towards a refocus on Palestine. The idea was the create a military alliance pact that would link the entire network in key moments of conflict with the US and Israel. October 7th, in many ways, could be seen as an opening salvo in a new phase of struggle with Israel, one that moved from strategic defense (1982–2006) to a second stage of strategic equilibrium (2006–2023), and now an attempt at an initial strategic offensive through a cunning initiative.
The October 7th is an attempt to put into practice the Maoist concept of a third stage in a protracted war. However, it remains within the confines of an initial salvo wedded to the asymmetric power conditions, and intended to take the war to Israel. This stage sees guerilla and resistance forces moving towards a counter-offensive. Mao described his three stages as a “rough sketch,” not a concrete, predetermined outcome from which one could predict any concrete end. However, we can roughly outline the phases of Palestinian resistance: initiated through civil disobedience in the First Intifada, moving into consolidation during the Second Intifada in Gaza specifically, and then laboring to produce a counter-offensive, exemplified by the events of October 7th, and conjoined with this regional formation that supplanted the Palestinian resistance with know-how, weapons, and ultimately with support in the current war. The war of attrition in Lebanon and the targeted closure of Bab Al-Mandab in Yemen stand out. Within this framework, October 7th stands out as a significant marker of the capacity to dismantle Israel’s construction of space and its modalities of control, surveillance, and governing regimes in the Gaza Strip and its environs. More significantly, October 7th marks a shift in the balance of forces. It heralded the rise of an armed movement, equipped with the capacity to innovate and create, to build and labor, and to train and arm, thereby launching an offensive attack at the frontiers of the Settler State.
The war remains a “suspended moment,” with no end in sight. The current conflict has proven successful on three fronts: it has shifted public opinion in the imperial core, particularly among a new generation; reignited third-world solidarities as symbolically, legally, and politically articulated by many post-colonial states or political formations in the global south; and elevated the issue of Palestine to a pressing international and geopolitical predicament for the empire.
These are significant shifts on the global battlefield, exacting moral, diplomatic, economic, and political costs from Israel—effects that will take time to fully manifest. Secondly, the massive offensive maneuver against a paranoid power (Israel), exposed to all the genocidal collective unconscious of Israel. In essence, it has unveiled to outsiders the reality and conditions of a war characterized by the continuous expansion of illegal settlements, land confiscation, exploitation of Palestinian labor, extensive carceral systems, and regimes of death and annihilation faced by Palestinians, with or without October 7th. Thirdly, it has deepened the line of differentiation in the Arab world between comprador Arab classes managing various post-colonial states and the forces of resistance in the region. This has produced a galvanizing effect that will also take time to manifest openly, especially among states that have rendered throughout the Arab spring its opposition forces mute, terrified, and dispersed—unions, student movements, and political formations.
Israel’s strategy was not one of retreat, but one of doubling down. To exact on Palestinians a murderous offensive, hoping to turn the Palestinian exploration of the third stage of protracted war into an opportunity to intensify its desire for the liquidation of the Palestinian presence in the land of Palestine. It takes solace in imperial identification and support, its system of alliances in the region, and the military prowess it possesses, what its ex-military chief called, “an efficient killing machine.” It’s fighting to contain the flood to its systems but is bogging itself down in the war of attrition in Gaza and Lebanon. Exhibiting its unremorseful ability to kill, its zero-sum logic, and its lack of hesitancy in using and employing weapons and systems to kill Gaza. This is precisely the role its fascist messianic spearhead movements—Itamar Ben Gvir and others—play in its body politics; “use what you have and don’t think twice, unleash the beast.”
The current balance of forces has a historical twist. Israel’s military doctrine has generally been joined to the notion of speedy, compressed wars fought on the terrain of the enemy. Currently, Palestinian resistance seeks to both compress the war and ensure the mitigation of some of its worst outcomes—the return of the displaced Palestinians, the entry of humanitarian aid, the return of governance structures, rebuilding of generations of infrastructure destroyed by Israel. It was the result of Israel’s deliberate targeting of the Palestinian civic space and Palestinian society at large that the compression of war became a necessity. Meaning, without this particular total strategy, the prolongation of the war is amenable to an armed strategy that draws Israel in and then exhausts its military in the long-drawn war of attrition. The historical twist lies in that: a desire among Palestinians to compress the “time of the war” as opposed to Israel’s insistence on extending it. This was partially the outcome of the paranoid fear that permeates Israeli society and its existential anxiety born out of the subterranean truth that Israel was constructed on the trinity of lies, theft, and killing. A moment Israeli society has read as one that demands sustained and prolonged warfare and is reinforced by misinformation, disinformation, and control of the flow of information coming out of Gaza and its battlefield. Indeed, three elements will prove vital in the ability of Israel to continue this war; the first is its own will or erosion of this will (with little sign that this is changing), the second, the expansion of the war to other fronts in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, West Bank, Jerusalem, and the region. The third is the imperial centers’ continued support for Israel’s war and the nature of this support. A fourth factor, also difficult to foreknow, is capitulation on the part of Palestinian resistance. It is difficult to foresee precisely because Israel has chosen this form of total warfare on life in Gaza. It simply left resistance forces with little to lose.
The immediate future is bleak as we enter into this zone of Israel’s insistence on a day after when Gaza either is annihilated or ethnically cleansed or remains ungovernable with persistent military occupation. However, it is also entering a space for the perpetuation of friction, as military parlance would have it, of the return of body bags and injured, and tough dilemmas as the economic, political, moral, and diplomatic costs incur. Not to mention its inability to be decisive thus far when it comes to confronting head-on armed forces exacting a price on its northern frontiers or in other locales in the region. As things stand, the strategic dilemmas Israel faces are numerous, and it include the formation and consolidation of an axis with extensive geography, personal and military power embodied in Iran, Hezbollah, Ansar Allah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and PFLP among others. It stands to either risk the expansion of the war to other fronts or draw its imperial supporters to a large-scale regional war that would disrupt the economic recovery after COVID and could lead, among other things, to embroilment of the US in another major Middle East war, with outcomes uncertain, and also in some of scenarios apocalyptic—possible use of nuclear weapons (a non-zero chance).
Many of Israel’s security elite and strategists are hopeful that by the end of this year, the tide will turn to their side. That as it enters 2025, Israel will have a better outlook, and it will come out having defeated the resistance in Gaza and rendered Lebanon mute. Those in Israel hope that it will also consolidate its alliances with Arab states, and eventually, it will be able to contain the public opinion fallout from its mass killing across the globe. However, it is also possible that outcomes will not match these hopes. That Israel will become a pariah state protected only by a handful of elites in the Arab world and the West. It will be seen as a dependent colony that is more of a burden than an asset, and one that will have to face increasing boycotts, divestment, and sanctions among other legal and economic costs. Its society will see the breakdown in its security doctrines, incompetency, callousness in dealing with those imprisoned by the Palestinian resistance in the wake of October 7th, and rejection from the world as a price too high to pay, or one the indicates the rot and decay in the state itself. The momentary unity of Israeli society around the war could easily break down as its political class fights to get rid of Prime Minister Netanyahu and the significant coalition he represents. The struggle over Israel itself from within will return with a vengeance.
This could be coupled with the increasing American hold and influence over Israel, one that was already apparent in the initial days when Israel called for American deterrence to support it in containing any possible offensive moves from the regional formation of resistances led by Iran. It is also apparent in Israel’s dependency on weapons from the US, including vital supplies of precision missiles, artillery, and ammunition, without which it would be hard for Israel to sustain a prolonged war. The long-hailed Israeli desire for independence and its self-perception as a power in itself was exposed to be more myth than reality. This dependence will incur costs for Israel as other powers will have more influence over its political and strategic choices. Israel feels that time is on its side and that its extension of power serves to postpone internal reckoning, but this will also erode the ability of the Palestinian resistance to sustain the war. What is true, however, is that for the first time in decades, Israel’s war has ramifications on its home front; economically, it displaces Israelis from the frontiers along the border with Gaza and Lebanon, the extensive loss of personal and material resources, dependence on foreign powers, and a postponed internal reckoning coming at the heels of the biggest rift in Israeli politics, including the drafting of the Haredim and the proposed changes to the legal system by the religious right-wing.10 But in many ways, time also works against Israel; it is like someone addicted to smoking who hails the effects of nicotine on metabolism while dismissing the lung cancer spreading throughout his body. But more importantly, it’s the fact that Israel has used its extensive power, it has unleashed its arsenal—large-scale air bombardment and invasion—that gives this moment a radical potentiality, contingent on the ability of resistance to withstand and persevere in Gaza and across the region. Frustrating a more-equipped power like Israel does not necessitate a decisive victory on the battlefield, but is only contingent on the ability of resistance to deny victory. This reality will prove to Israel and its society that its military—the hammer it wields on every problem—is not the answer, and will mold Israeli consciousness in the medium-run in ways that open up numerous political possibilities. Israel is heading towards a triad of issues: becoming on many levels an electoral and strategic liability, increased isolation, and most likely the inability to proclaim a decisive victory.
Material: This “momentary unity” of Israeli society is worth digging into. As we discussed regarding the settler-colonial context, in moments when the colonized resist, large swathes of settler society suddenly become united. In Canada, as one of the articles in this issue of Material discusses, when the Indigenous community of Kahnesatake put up barricades to resist settler incursion in 1990—and the Canadian Armed Forces were eventually called in—the majority of the Canadian settler population in the surrounding regions suddenly became colonial defenders, even if some of these had been more liberal and friendly neighbors beforehand. Suddenly they were burning Mohawk effigies and chanting “savages,” or lining up on the road to assault the Mohawk elders and children who were being evacuated from the warzone.
Similarly, political divisions in the majority of Israeli society have become unified in the belief that the unfolding genocide in Gaza is necessary. They may talk about this colonial “necessity” in different ways (the more liberal might deny it is a genocide, might claim it is all about self defense, whereas the more conservative will openly celebrate ethnic cleansing), but there is this unity. In what you call “the world before October 7th” there was a division in Israeli society regarding Netanyahu, but now that division is revealed as being largely cosmetic. Indeed, all sections of the political class reflect this agreement about the genocidal war on Gaza—if they differ, it seems to only be on tactics—which means it is hardly a Netanyahu problem as some liberals in the US, Canada, and Europe like to say. So, are there any internal divisions within colonial society that are meaningful right now, any fault lines that can be utilized by the Palestinian resistance?
Abdaljawad Omar: It is perhaps fundamental to understand the extent and depth of the militarism that has pervaded the construction of the Zionist state at the heart of the Arab world. The scope of this project is immense, as it involves not only the displacement of the Palestinian people but also the construction and perpetuation of a regional order that acquiesces to Israel’s persistence in the region. This partially explains why the conflict over Palestine is not solely a Palestinian issue in the strictest sense. This militarism was so foundational for the Zionist movement that Ze’ev Jabotinsky11 acknowledged from the beginning that Israel lives and dies by the sword. This militarism is so pervasive that it forms the very fabric of the construction of the “new Hebrew,” the mythical foundation upon which Zionism builds its edifice of technological superiority, military power, and the assertion that ultimately “might equals right.”
Much has been said about fascism being closely tied to the paternal figure, promising societal and individual transformation, its reliance on and repetition of propaganda, and its celebration of military chauvinism. This is also why Fascism found a sympathetic audience within the Zionist movement; the ethos of vertical mobilization and unapologetic militarism permeated many of its foundational texts and political formations, later becoming part of Israel’s institutional and social ethos. The People’s Army served as both the ground for the shaping and reshaping of this ideological conceptualization of the “new Hebrew” and as one of the primary pedagogical institutions for the perpetuation of Zionism, a rite of passage immortalized through mandatory military service. This ethos is also intricately connected to the racialization and exclusion of Palestinian Arabs, perpetuating their otherness, leading to their being stripped, humiliated, arrested, killed, and ultimately erased.
Many around the world highlight ideological differences among various Zionist factions. They cite the liberal-left emphasis on constitutional frameworks, the importance of democracy, and the crucial role of the judiciary in checking political leadership excesses. They underline the internal struggle within Israel over the trajectory of its society and politics. However, it is crucial to recognize that, seen through Palestinian eyes, this differentiation collapses. Regarding the treatment of Palestinians, the dominant narrative within Zionism remains predominantly fascistic and eliminatory. The supposedly progressive vision of Rabin, a liberal-leftist Israeli political leader and the lion of the Israeli left, wished that “Gaza would be swallowed by the sea.” The parapraxis and unconscious desires of the Israeli Zionist left are simply the conscious and professed biases of its religious and fascist pole.
Interestingly, you mention Benjamin Netanyahu, who epitomizes for me this characteristic of shrewdness, his clever and calculated political maneuvers, his fluent English, and his capacity to rally significant segments of Israel’s society behind his ambitions and glory. Following the events of October 7th, the entire world dismissed the ability of Netanyahu to survive the political fallout from the breakdown in Israel’s Iron Wall security doctrine. However, these assessments were too hasty. Netanyahu is currently navigating the energies of the right wing while promoting their agenda for the transformation of Israeli institutions and society through a wide-ranging reform program.
This program aims to make Israel more religious and less democratic, even within its “Jewish” space, and more committed to eradicating the “Arab problem.” This agenda is the result of demographic shifts in Israel’s social fabric and the desire for ideological closure that a doctrine based on divine religious rights sanctions. Within this framework, Benjamin Netanyahu stands as both an astute political figure and a master of his political craft, but also as a figure who shields the outright fascists from any possible backlash by the imperial metropolis. In many ways, Netanyahu personifies this paternal figure, respected and manipulated by his right-wing adherents. I do not believe that October 7th represents the end of his career; even if he occupies a position on the right wing in the next elections, he remains a figure who will continue to influence Israel’s political landscape. He will give a sense of stability even within the terms of disorder that he and his coalition face (war) or initiate (internal reforms). The power and paradox of Netanyahu are twofold, he is at once a father figure, both loved and hated, capable of mobilizing large swaths, and creating alliances of convenience, while also arousing defiance and resistance by the other pole of Israeli society—the Tel Avivians and liberals. The Israeli center thinks that the fall of Netanyahu is the fall of this right-wing hegemony and religious direction. However, Netanyahu is a symptom of demographic changes within Israeli society, the rise of new social groups, and the increasing energy and power of spearheading movements mobilized, and always on the move, embodying the drive behind expansion and replacement at the expense of Palestinians. It was almost logical that this once small minority would slowly but surely attempt to hegemonize Israeli politics and reformulate its social contract. Currently, they see Netanyahu as a vulnerable and powerful ally. The chances of him staying in power are not insignificant.
We have also witnessed the scope and depth of this division in the past year when the remnants of Israel’s liberal-center base engaged in a political standoff, organizing and mobilizing large segments to thwart the flood of institutional reforms proposed by the right-wing parliamentary majority. This was a war on the streets and a war of position, empowered by the Ashkenazi liberal security elite’s influence throughout the courts, the army, and bureaucracy. For the first time, this standoff extended to the military, with concrete threats from Israeli air force pilots, primarily drawn from the ranks of Israel’s Ashkenazi elite, to resign from service. Alongside this civil and military standoff, Israel faces numerous internal socio-economic and political challenges: the battle over the role of religion in the state, the perpetual conflict with the Haredim (Ultra-Orthodox Jews) population, which continues to safeguard its status as a group subsidized by the state while rejecting military conscription. The future of Israel’s relations with the Palestinians is not a decisive point of contention. The difference between these two poles is also apparent in the fighting in Gaza. Most massacres committed in Gaza were the result and consequences of Israel’s air force being dominated by the Ashkenazi liberal segment of Israeli society, while those fighting on the ground in combat units largely hail from the settlements of the West Bank and Israel’s working-class population of Sephardic Jews, etc. Of course, this is a bit simplistic, but it is also to an extent true. The first group kills more and destroys more but from a safe distance, the other kills in close combat and is at least exposed to the possibility of being killed. One group is unapologetic and showcases its pleasure in killing; the other group kills in silence but kills more and from a distance.
Are there some Israelis against the war? Or Israelis who support territorial pragmatism and compromise? There are. However, they are a small and dispersed minority with no real power in Israeli society. They will discursively reject some of the excesses of their military policies; however, they will concede that it remains a “necessary evil,” especially at times when the threat of decolonization looms. As you have already noted in your question, there is that moment when the settler society appears unified in their exalting of the indigenous as a despicable and diabolical enemy. These are the moments when these lines of differentiation are erased, and when tribal, ethnic, and as loose as it might be, religious affiliations come to the fore. Of course, traumatic events such as October 7th in the immediate sense place the existential question to the fore, reminding people of what they stand to lose but also reminding them of the vulnerability of the enterprise they invested their lives in building and securing. It strengthens the resolve and at the same time exposes the rot in the center of Israeli society.
But it is also important to outline something else within Zionism; it is its need for an enemy as a threshold on which it can sustain its spatial expansion and from whom it seeks recognition of its victory and its righteousness. Palestinians are, for now, vanishing mediators that are destined for elimination, but not before they recognize the righteousness of the Zionist cause and legitimize the Zionist claim on Palestine. In other words, “Just before they kill you, they need you to utter the words of recognition.”
The current war is traumatic in every sense of the word for the Zionist ethos, traumatic since it exposed the vulnerability at the heart of the militaristic ethos, and revealed the vulnerability on a register that exceeds Israel’s own discursive and psychological exhalation of “existential anxiety.” In many ways, it was as if a paranoid met his worst fears. This moment transformed Israeli society into one that desires vengeance, is willing to sacrifice, and is invested in the conscious discourse of its right-wing pole. Almost everyone became Itamar Ben-Gvir.12 The response that Israelis desired was to unleash its killing machine. The most popular songs in Israel are about drunken power, about the uninhibited employment of weapons. Instead of carrying a weapon as a marker of dominance, Israeli society insisted on its use, showing little differentiation among its variously conflicting tribes.
The only scant fault line pertain to the families of those imprisoned by the Palestinian resistance. Will Israel endure in its tradition of paying any price for those who fall prisoners in the hands of Palestinian and Arab resistances, or will it break the social pact with its citizens and immunize itself to such negotiated prisoner exchanges? The implications of these choices are expressed in the priorities among its political formations, with the right-wing calling not to accede to such negotiated outcomes, and treating the Israelis imprisoned as “already killed.” The other pole fears such treatment will slowly and surely weaken the attractive pole of Israel as an economic, social, and political bastion that does everything in its power to protect its settlers both collectively and individually, as a state that can both attract new settlers and maintain its current ones. But also, this liberal pole is responsive to the cries of protesters from the families of the imprisoned who feel betrayed by the state on multiple fronts: its inability to prevent the offensive attack, its killing of some of the imprisoned in Gaza, and its prioritization (or lack thereof) of the return of those imprisoned.
The second fault line relates to who will be ultimately responsible for October 7th. The only “day after” on the mind of most Israeli politicians and security elites relates to this reckoning. Who will fall on their sword, who will be blamed for the events, and who will survive the coming storm? Of course, this fault line is also tied to the struggles over Israel’s future among its warring factions. For now, the enmity with the Palestinians is convenient. It always allows the perpetuation of the war without reckoning. It is also an attempt by Israel to reconstitute itself as a nation still capable of producing heroes. Ultimately, the ferociousness of the internal rift will be exacerbated by this war, especially if Israel emerges bloodied with significant losses on diplomatic, legal, economic, and military fronts. The depth, breadth, and scope of this reckoning remain contingent on the outcomes of the current war, and the perceptions of Israelis of their success and failures, of having met limits, or have exceeded expectations. However, even in failure, a sinking ship with nuclear weapons is also dangerous.
Material: Although Palestinians according to the Zionist narrative are, as you put it, “vanishing mediators that are destined for elimination,” the long history of anti-colonial resistance demonstrates that such an elimination is being stymied and hopefully will never come to fruition. But it is obviously the case that day-to-day existence for Palestinians who live under Israeli domination is always subjected to this colonial destiny of elimination. Aside from those living in Gaza whose daily existence is now being subjected to open genocidal warfare, what is the phenomenological existence for most Palestinians—what are some common thoughts, feelings, beliefs—living in the West Bank and in so-called “Israel proper?” In your essay Crosshairs you wrote eloquently about the sense of feeling hunted, the subordination of life to “math and machine”—similar to what Achille Mbembe referred to as “vertical sovereignty” in his famous essay on necropolitics13—but you also spoke of it generating a form of resistance that affirmed existence. And indeed, despite the unfolding genocide in Gaza, during this interview you have demonstrated a resistant hope in the face of annihilation. Is that kind of hope common?
Abdaljawad Omar: The inquiry into hope, its dissection, the cutting open of that peculiar, affective yearning for liberation, or even its positioning in the concrete, straddles the Palestinian condition as a pathological undercurrent. Mahmoud Darwish placed it perfectly when he said, “We Palestinians suffer from an incurable disease called hope.”
In considering hope as an affliction or a disease, as a symptomatic trace, we are also entangling ourselves in the effects born from the enduring and unyielding imperial and colonial onslaught upon Palestine. To categorize this hope as pathological is to position it at the epicenter, not merely as a condition but as a testament to a broader, suffocating reality. It’s to understand, perhaps with a disconcerting clarity, its echo in the utterances of those who oppose Palestinian existence, those who slip, revealingly, into acknowledging “Hamas is an idea”—a phrase that inadvertently grants substance to the presence of hope in the very condition of possibility that the appearance of resistance permits. The Colonial machinery sees in “hope” its primary enemy, for hope transforms the “Good Arab” in its terminology, into the defiant, transgressive Arab, to the “Bad Arab.”
One could posit that the large literature, intellectual musings, and political discourses swirling around the question of Palestine, especially within Palestine, find their gravitas around the notion of “hope.” It’s a space where justifiable beliefs in alternative horizons are not just fostered but clung to. Hope, in this schema, assumes the paradoxical guise of a beloved antagonist—loathing it for the very reason that ensnares you in its tempting, yet elusive, embrace. I am not sure in this sense that I have ever had a discussion—political, intellectual, or even day-to-day—where hope was not its absent center. Indeed, I do not think I have written anything that did not emanate from this hopeless clinging to hope.
However, hope, like all the affective textures that weave through Palestinian existence, carries with it the potential for peril; to rephrase, it can also manifest as a hallucinatory veneer, a tapestry of wishful thinking. Emile Habibi, the Palestinian novelist from that inaugural cohort of Political and literary leaders who lingered in Palestine post-Nakba, articulated in his lauded novel, The Secret Life of Saeed, an emotional state he dubbed the “pessoptimist,” embodying the knitted cobwebs of pessimism and optimism. The intertwinement of optimism and pessimism is articulated in his narrative, blurring the boundaries to such an extent that they meld into a singular term. This neologism, “pessoptimist,” fuses these distinct dispositions, erasing the gap, obfuscating the divide, and rendering both undifferentiated. A pessoptimist occupies neither the joyful land of the optimists nor the dystopian realm of the pessimists, existing in a space that is neither wholly here nor there, neither entirely conquered nor entirely triumphant.
Edward Said once proclaimed while placing his humanist, secular, and universalist gaze, that Palestinian nationalism as a “self-defensive nationalism” appears as a necessity. The ontological cut of the Palestinian subject lies in the very encounter with colonialism, and for Said, liberation would also ultimately signify the end of the “Palestinian,” the dissolution of this identity. Said was hoping for the moment in time when Palestinians efface the need to identify with Palestine.
We can also invert this proposition, can a Palestinian subject exit without hope? I think that would be equivalent to a suicidal gesture, a self-effacement, the metamorphosis to a life without hope. We can see this gesture today in the politics of Mahmoud Abbas and his comprador cohort, where the emphasis is placed on the colossal wall of reality. A wall without windows or doors, without narrative or fantasy. A wall built from the ruins of unmet expectations and forgone revolution, and a wall that marks this desire to break free from hope, by perpetuating and eternalizing defeat. In this political register, the delinking from hope is an attempt to annihilate the “Palestinian subject” without the burden of resistance. In Said, liberation is the condition of possibility for thinking about ourselves beyond Palestine. For Abbas, the persistence of colonialism is the acting force to efface the Palestinian subject, to annihilate the Palestinian before his physical annihilation. One could also claim that these are the two primary political registers within Palestine, registers that co-exist in the secret life of all Palestinians.
Finally, to crack open the wall both figuratively and materially was the core of the October 7th offensive maneuver. Within this maneuver is an endeavor to test, to tease out one of the fundamental questions that Palestinians ask, a question that Kant raised in the Critique of Pure Reason; “For What May I Hope?” Hope is common, more common than the hopeless in Palestine themselves at times admit.
Material: Although that very thoughtful analysis of hope would be a good place to end, we just want to ask you one final question to expand the scope to the international dimension. As you know, the Palestinian struggle has a long history of internationalism. There was a time when it was plugged into a worldwide anti-imperialist movement where its most advanced organizations were connected to the actions of militants and revolutionaries, not just in the region, but throughout the world. In the 1960s and 1970s organizations such as the Japanese Red Army and the Red Army Faction would train with the PLO and carry out joint actions. The so-called Blekingegade Gang in Denmark would rob banks and use the money to provide material support for the PFLP. These examples, and many others, speak to a period of time that no longer exists—largely because of the collapse of the cold war balance of power. The fact that Germany is currently hunting down and arresting the remaining fugitives of the RAF while prosecuting all pro-Palestinian activity, in some ways represents the ghost of that period. But meanwhile we have witnessed the reemergence of people’s wars, the strongest ones right now being those carried out by the Communist Party of the Philippines and the Communist Party of India (Maoist). What are your thoughts about the possibility of a new anti-imperialist internationalism beyond the solidarity of militant factions in the region (i.e., Yemen, Lebanon)? While it is true that the Palestinian struggle has much to teach the world, is it possible that it can also learn from these other struggles, or at least conceptualize ways for mutual solidarity?
Abdaljawad Omar: Solidarity has undergone radical reframing in the context of Palestine’s post-Oslo epoch. The nature, character, and modes of practice that have come to define the notion of solidarity are both starkly disembodied and highly conflictive. The focus of the vast majority of Palestinian political and civil society is on the Global North. This form of solidarity has come to be dominated by conceptual lexicons that for instance analogize the Palestinian issue by linking it to apartheid, or situate it as a Human Rights issue that is understood through a liberal-internationalist vocabulary. This reality produced new forms of activism, of an activist franca-lingua and new political subjectivities that center on “human rights.” Much of the current moment speaks to four dominant forms of practices: a politics of appeal, countering Zionist propaganda, limited political organizing and actions, and a war of positions (universities, editorial collectives, media, book industry, churches, etc.), and the persistence of the Palestinian BDS movement. It also includes some, although limited, moves the nation-states like South Africa have made to provide more protection for Palestinians by employing the legal mechanisms available to them in the international legal system.
We could discuss at length why this moment led to the dissolution of an anti-colonial and anti-imperial coalition—the Soviet Union collapse, the dissipation of the organized left in the West, and the defeat of the Palestinian revolution in Beirut. However, it must also be stated outright that much of the problem stems from Palestinian political dispositions. These politics have either played a fundamental role in the regional imperialist alliance system (current form of PLO) or have chosen to elevate its cultural tradition and the notions of umma, the universalism of Islam, in its political discourse and practices (Hamas). Thus far, the new forces leading the Palestinian resistance—Hamas and Islamic Jihad—have not been able to produce an effective political and ideological imagination outside the boundaries of the umma. The frail Palestinian left remains an intellectual and ideological force but has largely abandoned the concept of “people’s war,” at least on the level of practice. This issue has a complex history, and exploring it would require considerable space. Not to make the answer simple, but the absence of an organized left, and the foreclosure of such possibilities by Islamist forces create this lack. Moreover, the limited success of some anticolonial movements across the global south through flag independence has also meant that Palestinians have lost the ground on which much of the complex network of alliances was built in the 1960s and 1970s. These movements took control over state institutions and many became embroiled in the international liberal order.
Moreover, solidarity with Palestine reflects the emergence of post-colonial temporality amid an ongoing settler-colonial enterprise; it is fuzzy, ill-defined, malleable, and transitory. Solidarity has come to mean everything and nothing, designating practices, sentiments, and forms of action that are widely disparate and contain many conflicting stances: political, ideological, and phantasmic. I sometimes feel Palestine has become an empty signifier on which many project their own revolutionary fantasies, or their own political dispositions.
The 1960s and ‘70s witnessed the build-up of solidarity in action and praxis; it was based on jointly testing the power of disrupting the world order, with a wide variety of political formations, largely drawn from the leftist revolutionary tradition. The Palestinian revolution was a pioneer in strategies like airplane piracy and supporting active radical groups aimed at societal and political transformations. Moreover, this era significantly impacted the imperial order in societies of the global north. The globe was seen as their field of action, with limitations only based on the specific countries’ stances on the Palestinian cause. At that particular moment, the idea of retribution in a world that shunned Palestinians and facilitated their ethnic cleansing was central. But also, it was highly influenced by a left that was still energetic, organized, and by many measures was not defeated.
The past should serve as a signpost, not merely as a nostalgic exercise or a romanticization of a bygone era. We have spoken here many times about the concrete, analyzing the concrete, and operating from the concrete. However, a concrete analysis that delimits Palestine to its geography, to its place, would end up eschewing not only the interconnections between Palestine as a laboratory for empire, as a test case in counterinsurgency, a dissected geography for the development of surveillance technologies, but also in Palestine as hope for other struggles, and other struggles as a hope for Palestine.
This requires a pedagogy that also recognizes other struggles and disruptive moments as symptoms of the global order. Seeing others’ struggles and learning from them has been and remains a fundamental approach for Palestinian revolutionaries. Learning from the praxis of others was never truly absent; it was always seen as necessary, as understanding how others have accumulated, managed, and produced counter-power helps forge a nuanced understanding of the successes and failures of specific struggles. It also helps broaden the horizon of thinking liberation, not just as the liberation of particularities but as the liberation of the whole. We must think beyond national boundaries that sometimes seem to limit our field of action and, indeed, our field of thought. This is why to me Palestine is not my issue or a Palestinian issue. Neither is any issue where an oppressive machinery operates, particularly the machinery that defines and delimits our current global economic and political order. Today, many in the world are stating outright, “I am a Palestinian too.” But we are also the refugees crossing the Mediterranean, the laborers of rural Asian societies, the struggle in India and the Philippines, the cries of all those agonized from the world that remains not theirs, a world that also remains not ours.
- Abdaljawad Omar has also talked about this policy of maiming, at being shot by an IOF sniper below the waist, in his article Crosshairs (www.rustedradishes.com/crosshairs).
- “An unyielding will to continue”: An Interview with Abdaljawad Omar on October 7th and the Palestinian Resistance (www.ebb-magazine.com/essays/an-unyielding-will-to-continue).
- “Eretz Israel” is a Zionist expansionist concept, referring to the supposed historical borders of ancient Israel.
- Center of Gravity is a concept developed by Carl Von Clausewitz and is meant to denote where mass is concentrated. In military studies, the term is often used to identify the most effective targets in military operations or the targets that would render the enemy incapable of further resistance.
- Bantustans were small territories set aside by the settler regime in Apartheid South Africa. The term means homeland. Similarly, the West Bank has been divided by Israel into three distinct areas: Area A where most Palestinians live constitutes about 18% of land in the West Bank, Area B has a significant Palestinian presence and constitutes 22% of land, and Area C is around 60% of the West is under total Israeli control.
- Ben Burgis, “No One’s Rights Should Depend on Where Their Ancestors Lived,” Jacobin, March 7, 2024, jacobin.com/2024/03/rights-ancestors-land-israel-palestine.
- Abdaljawad Omar, “Hopeful pathologies in the war for Palestine: a reply to Adam Shatz,” Mondoweiss, November 8, 2023, mondoweiss.net/2023/11/hopeful-pathologies-in-the-war-for-palestine-a-reply-to-adam-shatz.
- Al-Aqsa Flood is the name of the offensive military operation the Palestinian resistances in Gaza conducted on October 7th.
- A line of flight for Deleuze and Guattari is a path of mutations and changes that is linked to the capacity to affect and be affected. It is a concept developed in A Thousand Plateaus and was meant to underscore the ability and capacity to generate new forms of existence, a process of becoming that defies existing systems. For Deleuze and Guattari these mutations chart new territories for thought and action.
- The Haredim are an ultra-Orthodox Jewish denomination exempted from military service at the outset of the establishment of the state in 1948. Currently, Israel hopes to use this moment to expand its recruits and integrate a growing demographic through its recruitment in the army. The religious-secular struggle within Israel is old, but the increasing number of ultra-orthodox in Israeli society, the economic burden they represent, and their refusal to partake in secular institutions—economy and army—is increasingly becoming an Israeli fault line.
- Jabotinsky was one of the key architects of Zionism and author of The Iron Wall. An anti-communist and an admirer of Italian Fascism, Jabotinsky organized opposition to the Jewish Labour Bund in Europe and made overtures to Mussolini. He is most notorious, however, for founding the Irgun, the colonial death squad responsible for numerous acts of ethnic cleansing during the Nakba including (alongside the Lehi, a paramilitary organization) the infamous massacre of Deir Yassin.
- Itamar Ben-Gvir is a religious Zionist leader who has served as the Minister of National Security since 2022. Ben-Gvir heads the Jewish Power party (Otzma Yehudit) and lives in the illegal settler colony of Kiryat Arba in Hebron in the West Bank. His political brand emphasizes the need to eliminate the Palestinians by forced expulsion from Palestine.
- See Achille Mbembe’s Necropolitics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019). For Mbembe, necropolitics (the political power to decide who lives and who dies) result in death worlds where entire populations are treated as the living dead. Mbembe argued that Gaza was one such death world, subjected to the necropolitics of the Zionist settler state.