“Who Can Be Defended? The Emancipatory Power of the Palestinian Revolution” was presented by Jodi Dean as a lecture at Morey Hall at the University of Rochester on March 4, 2024. And abridged version of Dean’s argument, under the title “Palestine speaks for everyone,” appeared afterwards on the blog of Verso Books, on 9 April 2024. The text that follows was translated into Spanish and included as an afterword in Camarada. Ensayo sobre la pertenencia política (Verso Libros-Communis, 2024), the first Spanish edition of Comrade: An Essay on Political Belonging (Verso, 2019). It is now reprinted on Communis, with the author’s permission, on the second anniversary of the Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, simultaneously with its Spanish translation.

“The provocative claim that we are all Palestinians should not be understood as that kind of sentimental identification that says that all forms of suffering are variations of the same suffering so we should all get along. Rather, it’s the political slogan of radical universal emancipation that responds to the subject as an effect of the Palestinian cause. Not everyone speaks for Palestine, but Palestine speaks for everyone.”

— Jodi Dean

Before the defeat of the Soviet Union, devastation of globalized neoliberalism, and widespread disintegration of organized left political movements, comradeship was a legible feature of the political terrain. By the end of the seventies, Edward Said tell us, “there was not a progressive political cause that did not identify with the Palestinian movement.”[i] Solidarity with Palestine united the left, knitting liberation struggles together in an anti-imperialist front. These days — or up until October 7, 2023 — people complain that the left doesn’t exist or, if not complaining, imagine left politics in terms of a multitude of singularities, innumerable individuals with all their specific choices and feelings. Even as appeals to intersectionality attempt to make connections between issues that four decades of neoliberal fragmentation have sought to keep apart, the liberal legal foundations of the concept too often position the individual as the intersection and the issues as questions of identity. Depoliticized at the level of organization, issues are repoliticized in and as individuals. What does an individual think and does she feel comfortable expressing it? What expressions threaten this comfort and undermine her sense of safety? The constriction of politics to managing individual anxieties reframes self-centeredness as moral on university campuses, and across the US. This constriction is but one moment in the more general and systemic displacement of politics by moralism manifest in the substitution of aid work for militant political organization, administration for struggle, and NGOs and CSOs for revolutionary parties.[ii] In this setting, criticism of the party form and the discipline of comradeship appears as the radical rejection of centralism and hierarchy instead of the political incapacitation that demobilizes popular resistance. Left depoliticization is the flipside of Right resurgence.

In a sense, what we encounter is not actually depoliticization, it’s defeat. Politics continues, but in a form structured by this defeat. Unable to constitute ourselves as a coherent side in the struggle against imperialism, we have trouble taking a side, failing to see or ask: which side are we on? Even recognizing sides is dismissed as binary thinking or a childish inability to accept complexity and ambiguity. This political devolution is significant, a rejection of the revolutionary subject more broadly. Since the dramatic gap the Al Aqsa flood attack inscribed in our constricted sense of political possibility, such a revolutionary subject has begun to reappear, globally present in the battle over sides.

The Freedom Side

As is well known, Hamas (Islamic Resistance Movement) is the leader of the Palestinian liberation struggle. Charlotte Kates, the international coordinator of Samidoun Palestinian Political Prisoner Solidarity Network, emphasizes:

Every Palestinian left organization with any kind of meaningful presence is 100% on board with the development of the resistance, with the actions of October 7th, with the leading role of the Islamic resistance movement and with participating in what’s been called the joint operations room of the Palestinian resistance in Gaza and elsewhere, there isn’t a debate taking place about this and there isn’t an internal struggle about this and the Palestinian movement left organizations are 100 percent part of this resistance and supporting it. But the forces leading it, the forces that have the highest level of popular mobilization, the highest level of popular support and the level of military advancement and development are the Islamic resistance forces.[iii]

Mainstream media in the imperialist core, in keeping with Zionist and imperialist state practice, insist that any mention of Hamas, or Israel’s war of extermination against the Palestinian people, begin with condemnation. Condemnation of Hamas a condition for speaking. It’s been going on for decades. Tareq Baconi describes watching news programs in 2014, when Israel was demolishing Gaza in Operation Protective Edge: Palestinian analysts were “rudely silenced on the air for failing to condemn Hamas as a terrorist organization outright.”[iv] Everyone is expected to speak as a state, to conduct themselves as representatives of a state conditioned to act in accordance with the practices deemed acceptable to the imperialist world order. The form of interaction is established in advance as norms of permissible speech. Increasingly, these norms are backed by the coercive power of public and private institutions, as anti-terrorist legislation and ever-expanding definitions of antisemitism penalize support for Palestinian liberation.  In the US, UK, and Germany, defense of Hamas is impermissible. When we recognize, with Charlotte Kates, that Hamas is fighting a national liberation struggle and that October 7 was “a reassertion of the Palestinian revolution,” we can see that the proscription against defending Hamas is an injunction to take a side against the revolution.[v] Defending Hamas is disallowed because Palestinian national liberation has been pushed off the table, repressed as a political project.

What’s appalling is how prominent voices ostensibly on the left parrot official condemnations of Hamas, confirming the condition for speaking that they produce and reinforcing the normative order the Palestinian revolution rejects. Judith Butler’s October 19, 2023 essay in the London Review of Books is a prime example. Rather than centering the seventy-five-year Nakba and Palestinian resistance, Butler criticized Harvard students for a statement they issued holding the Israeli regime “entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.”[vi] Butler’s essay foreshadowed the attitude that subsequently overtook US academia, as happened at Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, and elsewhere. The essay displaces attention from the reality of apartheid, occupation, and siege and onto the affective environment of safe and privileged US universities. Butler’s targeting of the students’ – their language and feeling, how they expressed themselves – similarly prefigured the congressional hearings that led to the resignations of the presidents of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania.

Against the Harvard students, Butler condemns “without qualification the violence committed by Hamas.”[vii] Butler does not think that such condemnation is the end of politics or that it precludes learning the history of the region. On the contrary, Butler insists that condemnation be accompanied by moral vision. Such a vision includes or may include equal grievability and rights to mourn as well as “new forms of political freedom and justice.” For Butler, though, this vision excludes Hamas. Butler treats Hamas as singularly responsible for October 7, ignoring the fact that the armed forces of multiple Palestinian groups participated in the action thereby signaling a support for the action extending far beyond the military arm of the party democratically elected to govern Gaza. Moreover, Butler wants to be part of “imagining and struggling” for the kind of equality that “would compel groups like Hamas to disappear.”[viii] It’s not clear what counts as being like Hamas, which characteristics would target a group for being disappeared. If, for example, what matters is the violent use of force, then the liberation struggle of a colonized, occupied, and oppressed people is ruled out in advance. The political horizon that united progressive forces by the end of the seventies is foreshortened.

With regard to wanting to “compel groups like Hamas to disappear,” Butler’s position overlaps with Biden’s and Netanyahu’s. Unlike them, Butler names and rejects the occupation. But Butler echoes their position — and their tactic of separating Hamas from Palestine and making Palestinian liberation conditional on this separation — when Butler aspires to be “part of the struggle for a free Palestine in which Hamas would be dissolved.” When Hamas is the widely acknowledged and accepted leader of the struggle for a free Palestine, hoping for its dissolution is a failure of international solidarity. It strikes a blow against and drives a wedge into a front united in resistance to imperialism. Butler says that Hamas has “one terrifying and appalling answer” to the question of what world is possible after the end of settler-colonial rule. Butler doesn’t tell us what Hamas’s answer is. The political document the group issued in 2017 “accepted the creation of a Palestinian state on the 1967 borders, UN Resolution 194 for the right of return, and the notion of restricting armed struggle to operate within the limits of international law.”[ix] This strikes me as neither terrifying nor appalling even if it is hard to imagine given the proliferation of illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank. On December 13, Butler issued an apology to the Harvard students. She acknowledged the possibility that Hamas is “a movement for armed resistance” that could be situated in a longer history of armed struggle, or at least that these are “important questions.”[x]

Oppressed people fight back against their oppressors by any means necessary. They choose — and are forced to choose by the settings in which their liberation struggles take place – the strategies and tactics they need to win. This choosing necessarily requires compromises, alternatives, creativity, and sacrifices, especially because the oppressor determines the settings. How much dissent will the oppressor tolerate? How much force will the oppressor use to quash rebellion? How dependent is the oppressor on the compliance of the oppressed? How much moral opprobrium is the oppressor willing to absorb? To recognize the right to resist an oppressor, the right to national self-determination, means defending those willing and able to fight back against their oppressors. Such defense need not be uncritical — it’s often that individuals, groups, and states find themselves in the political position of defending those with whom they disagree. But this defense must take its orientation from the oppressed in their struggle for liberation, not from the oppressor or from the larger imperialist order that enables and validates oppression. It has to root solidarity in “commonalities of resistance” rather than “commonalities of oppression,” to use Robin D. G. Kelley’s formulation.[xi] This idea isn’t new; it has a long history in anti-imperialist and national liberation struggles.

Policing Affect

In left art and activist spaces, we frequently encounter champions of resistance and transgression, celebrations of creative praxis and thinking otherwise, rejections of the normative and conventional. Yet to defend Hamas seems abominable. It’s so unconscionable as barely to be broached; it’s headed off by condemnation in advance, as if to seal a door already closed and locked. Transgression and resistance are not unlimited. A constitutive exclusion keeps them in place. Just as the right of self-defense is exclusive to those who accept the terms and conditions of the dominant order, so is the right to resist. As we argued over October 7, a German colleague insisted “not all resistance is emancipative.” She said this in response to an explanation I gave for not signing a statement circulating among academics. I declined to sign the statement because it began with a condemnation of Hamas. Her response: “this is just brutal.” It wasn’t quite clear what the “this” referred to – my refusal? The Al-Aqsa flood operation? Rather than being an effect of texting on WhatsApp, the unclarity here is indicative of a larger pattern of elision especially pronounced in the last few months.

The feelings expressed by those of us far away from Gaza, our words and slogans, are not merely criticized when they fail to condemn Hamas. When they fail to proceed from this concession, to obey imperialism’s rules for speaking and thinking about Palestine, they are equated with the military actions of October 7. They are merged with these actions, inseparable from them. A slogan on a university campus is taken to be an act of violence, a missile launched into a crowd where no one can flee to safety. Fear, even of those at extraordinary distance from Gaza, the possibility –no matter how remote — that they might be harmed, displaces attention from the actuality of unfolding genocide, 8000 dead; 15,000 thousand dead; 30,000 dead. Restrictions on what we can say and how we can say it aim to redirect feeling and outrage away from apartheid, occupation, and blockade. They police and attempt to control the affective environment enabling genocide. Feelings deemed inappropriate are met with disgust; they are condemned. Progressives who should know better make concessions: let’s not say “from the river to the sea” if some people are offended; let’s not shout “there is only one solution intifada revolution.” There are alternatives that can make everyone comfortable and keep this genocide civil.

The policing of feeling and regulation of affect drove events at Cornell University in October 2023. Russell Rickford, a professor of African American history, was condemned for calling the October 7 attack energizing and exhilarating.[xii] Cornell’s President and the Chair of its Board of Trustees issued a statement calling Rickford’s remarks “reprehensible.”[xiii] A petition demanding that Rickford be fired garnered nearly 12,000 signatures.[xiv] New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand agreed that Rickford should be fired: “”There’s certainly no space for pro-Hamas protestors. That is someone who is supporting death, destruction, rape, murder, and slaughtering of innocent children, and families and seniors and holding hostages, so that cannot be supported.”[xv] Rickford apologized for the pain his remarks caused, conceding that some of his language was indeed reprehensible. He took a leave of absence from the university.[xvi]

My German colleague said “not all resistance is emancipative.” We should ask to and for whom? The images of paragliders evading Israeli air defenses captured a moment of freedom, freedom from walls and the expectations of submission to occupation and siege. We witnessed seemingly impossible acts of bravery and defiance in the face of impossible odds and with knowledge of the devastation that would follow. Who could not feel exhilarated seeing oppressed people bulldozing the fences enclosing them, taking to the skies in escape, and soaring in momentary freedom? The shattering of the collective sense of what is possible made it seem as if anyone could be free, as if imperialism, occupation, and oppression can and will be overthrown. In her autobiography, Leila Khaled reflects on a successful hijacking: “it seemed the more spectacular the action the better the morale of our people.”[xvii] Spectacular actions puncture expectations and create a new sense of possibility, liberating people from hopelessness and despair. They are the exciting cause of a revolutionary subject. [xviii]

When we witness such actions, many of us also feel this sense of openness, our response indicative of the subject effect the actions unleash: something in the world has changed because a subject has inscribed a gap in the given. We see the action as caused by a subject, producing that subject as a retroactive effect. It’s not a surprise that imperialism tries to shut these feelings down before they spread too far, that it condemns them and forces them out of bounds. It wants to prevent the subject from appearing by foreclosing its effects. For example, in one speech US president Joe Biden said the Palestinian Authority was not to govern Gaza because PA president Mahmoud Abbas hadn’t condemned the October 7 attack and some of the ministers celebrated it.[xix] Controlling speech and feeling is part of the political struggle. Anything that ignites the feeling that the oppressed will break free, that occupations and blockades will end, has to be extinguished.[xx] Imperialists and Zionists reduce October 7 to a list of horrors not simply to block from view the history and reality of colonialism, occupation, and siege. They do it to prevent the gap of the disruption from producing the subject that caused it.

Flying

As part of the struggle over what we can feel, I’ve assembled an affective carousel that takes the energies and feelings Zionism and imperialism attempt to foreclose and uses them to force a gap in our sense of permissible feeling. I emphasize flight, taking to the skies, the exhilaration of transcendence. Images associated with flying can incite solidarity with the freedom struggle, with the hope and will to win. If they can escape, and they must escape, so can we all.

Most of the images of Palestinians that most of us encounter in our imperialist settings depict devastation, bereavement, and death. Palestinians’ humanity is made conditional on their suffering, on what they’ve have lost, and what they endure. This makes sense as a way to counter racist presentations of terrorists and animals. At the same time, the dominance of the image of the victim produces the “good Palestinian” as a civilian, even better as a child, woman, or elder. Palestinians can be victims but not comrades. Those who fight back, especially as part of organized groups, and especially if they are brave enough to kill and die, are bad and should be compelled to disappear.

The predominance of suffering and grief also reinforces the displacement of politics by moralism. Palestinians get sympathy but not emancipation; emancipation would eat away at sympathy. Sara Roy writes compellingly about Israel’s deliberate transformation of Gaza into a humanitarian problem as a means of managing the underlying political issue.[xxi] Persistent and ongoing economic, environmental, and infrastructural devastation push survival questions to the fore, forever postponing the political question of Palestinian statehood. Institutionalized humanitarian assistance normalizes occupation. When moralism replaces politics, we continue and solidify our depoliticization. We see Palestinians buried under the rubble, or even in supply tunnels, but not when they free themselves from the forces pressing them down and begin to soar.

The first intifada, in 1987, began with the “Night of the Gliders.”[xxii] On November 25 and 26, two Palestinian guerrilla fighters from the PFLP – GC (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command) landed in Israeli occupied territory. Both were killed. One killed six and injured seven Israeli soldiers before he died.[xxiii] Palestinians made the guerrilla a national hero; Gazans wrote 6:1 on their walls to taunt the IDF troops.[xxiv] PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat praised the fighters: ”The attack demonstrated that there could be no barriers or obstacles to prevent a guerrilla who has decided to become a martyr.”[xxv] Nothing could hold them down or block them in if they had the will to fly. The Night of the Gliders reignited the affective energies of the Palestinian revolution that had followed in the wake of Arab defeat in June 1967 and stimulated the growth of the guerrilla movement after the battle of Karama in March 1968. After the Night of the Gliders and into the first intifada, to be Palestinian again involved rebellion and resistance rather than acquiescence to second-class citizenship and refugee status.[xxvi]

In 2018, during the Great March of Return, Gazans used kites and balloons to evade Israeli air defenses and start fires in Israeli territory. It seems as if Palestinian youth first started sending the fire kites; Hamas then got involved, creating the al-Zouari unit that specialized in making and launching incendiary kites and balloons.[xxvii] In addition to colorful birthday balloons, they inflated condoms and sent them flying over the fence.[xxviii] The kites and balloons boosted morale in Gaza, while damaging the Israeli economy and irritating Israelis living near the Gaza border.[xxix] In response to an Italian journalist’s remarks about the “iconic new weapon” that was “driving Israel crazy,” Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar explained,

Kites are not a weapon. At most, they set on fire some stubble. An extinguisher, and it’s over. They are not a weapon, they are a message. Because they are just twine and paper and an oil-soaked rag, while each battery of the Iron Dome costs $100 million. Those kites say: you are immensely more powerful. But you will never win. Really. Never.[xxx]

There’s further context for reading kites in Gaza as messages from a people that refuses to submit. In 2011, 15 thousand Palestinian children on a Gaza beach broke the world record for the most kites flown at the same time. Many of the kites featured Palestinian flags and symbols, as well as wishes for peace and hope. An eleven-year-old, Rawia, who made her kite the Palestinian flag, said, “When I fly it, I feel like I’m raising my country and my flag up, up in the sky.”[xxxi] The 2013 documentary “Flying Paper,” directed by Nitin Sawhney and Roger Hill, tells the story of some of the young kite fliers. “When we fly kites, we feel like we are the ones flying in the sky. We feel that we have freedom. That there is no siege on Gaza. When we fly the kite, we know that freedom exists.”[xxxii] Earlier this year, kites in solidarity demonstrations took place around the world, expressing and amplifying a hope and a will for Palestinian freedom.

Refaat Alareer’s last poem, “If I Must Die,” draws on the association of kites and hope. You may have seen the video of Brian Cox reading the poem that circulated online after the IDF killed Alareer in an airstrike that demolished his building.[xxxiii] Here’s the poem:

If I must die,
you must live
to tell my story
to sell my things
to buy a piece of cloth
and some strings,
(make it white with a long tail)
so that a child, somewhere in Gaza
while looking heaven in the eye
awaiting his dad who left in a blaze —
and bid no one farewell
not even to his flesh
not even to himself —
sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up above,
and thinks for a moment an angel is there
bringing back love.

If I must die
let it bring hope,
let it be a story.

The kite is a message of love. It’s something made to fly and in flying create hope. Alareer’s words attend to the making of the kite, its crafting out of cloth and strings, as well as its flight. Making the kite is more than mourning; it’s an engagement in practical optimism, an element of the subjective process that establishes the subject of a politics.[xxxiv]

One last example of the practical optimism flight engenders is Yasser Arafat International Airport. Palestinians built it in 1998. Israeli bulldozers demolished it in 2001, during the second intifada. Hind Khoudary explains that the airport was deeply interconnected with the dream of Palestinian statehood. She interviewed workers who built the runway that’s been reduced to rubble and sand. Khoudary writes: “Gaza airport was more than a project. It was a symbol of freedom for Palestinians. Flying the Palestinian flag in the sky was the dream of every Palestinian.”[xxxv]

The paragliders who flew into Israel on October 7 continue the revolutionary association of liberation and flight. Although imperialist and Zionist forces try to condense the action onto a singular figure of Hamas terrorism, insisting against all evidence to the contrary that with the extermination of Hamas Palestinian resistance will disappear, the will to fight for Palestinian freedom precedes and exceeds Hamas. Hamas wasn’t the subject of the October 7 action; it was an agent hoping that the subject would emerge as an effect of its action, the latest instantiation of the Palestinian revolution. Words used by Lelia Khaled to defend the justness of the PFLP’s hijacking tactic apply equally well to October 7. Khaled writes:

As a comrade has said: We act heroically in a cowardly world to prove that the enemy is not invincible. We act “violently” in order to blow the wax out of the ears of the deaf Western liberals and to remove the straws that block their vision. We act as revolutionaries to inspire the masses and to trigger off the revolutionary upheaval in an era of counter-revolution.[xxxvi]

How can an oppressed people believe that change is possible? How can movements that have experienced decades of defeat ever feel like our fights are winnable? Sara Roy documented the despair pervading Gaza and the West bank prior to October 7. Factionalism and the sense that not just Fatah but Hamas as well was cooperating too much with Israel had unraveled confidence in any national unifying project. No doubt Hamas’s harsh response to demonstrations against tax increases and the collapse of living standards in the strip didn’t help. A friend told Roy, “Our past demands have become meaningless. No one speaks of Jerusalem or the right-of-return. We just want food security and open crossings.”[xxxvii] Al Aqsa flood attacked that despair. The coalition of resistance fighters led by Hamas and PIJ (Palestinian Islamic Jihad) refused to accept defeat and submit to the indignity of slow death. Their action was a subjectivation designed so that the revolutionary subject would appear as its effect.

The Palestinian cause

In 2017, the PFLP republished its 1969 Strategy for the Liberation of Palestine as part of its fiftieth anniversary celebration. Drafted in 1967, following Arab defeat in the June war, the text was the party’s founding document. It’s a fascinating text, not least because of its window into the revolutionary world of African, Asian, Arab, and Latin American national liberation movements. Particularly interesting is the party’s presentation of imperialism as the international context necessary for understanding the Palestinian struggle. The PFLP outlines changes in imperialism following the Second World War, the most significant being the gathering together of the colonial capitalist forces into one camp, led by US capital, and the constitution of the socialist countries and liberation struggles as an opposing revolutionary camp.

According to the PFLP’s analysis, the US attempts to realize its interests through neo-colonialist techniques that endeavor to contain and coexist with national liberation struggles. Nevertheless, the party observes, US invasions of Vietnam, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic (1965) prove that the US will use armed force. Accordingly, when the US failed in its attempts to bargain with the Arab liberation movement “and keep it from organic fusion with the world revolutionary camp,” the US gave full military support to Israel.[xxxviii] Faced with imperialism’s enormous power and technological advantage, Palestine as a matter of strategy has to “enter into full alliance with all the revolutionary forces on the world level.”[xxxix] The document states:

Our first friends are the enslaved peoples who are suffering from imperialism and imperialist exploitation of their efforts and wealth, or who are living in the same danger represented by the U.S. today in attempting to impose its influence on rising peoples. The peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America are daily suffering the life of wretchedness, poverty, ignorance and backwardness, which is a result of colonialism and imperialism in their lives. The major conflict experienced by the world of today is the conflict between exploiting world imperialism on the one hand and these peoples and the socialist camp on the other. The alliance of the Palestinian and Arab national liberation movement with the liberation movement in Vietnam, the revolutionary situation in Cuba and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and the national liberation movements in Asia, Africa and Latin America is the only way to create the camp that is capable of facing and triumphing over the imperialist camp.

Already by the time the document was published, Palestine had become “a global cause for the Left, and iconic symbol of solidarity and support.”[xl] In the words of Ghassan Kanafani, quoted in the 2017 introduction, “The Pales­tinian cause is not a cause for Palestinians only, but a cause for every revolutionary, wherever they are, as a cause of the exploited and oppressed masses in our era.” The anti-imperialist left is an effect of the Palestinian cause. Kanafani was a writer and founding member of the PFLP. He was assassinated by Israel in 1972.

On a number of colleges campuses, the slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” has been banned. There’s even been a national and international “debate” over the slogan, another part of the war on feeling solidarity with Palestine and extinguishing the subjective process October 7 ignited. What the imperialists should really get upset about is another slogan “In our thousands, in our millions, we are all Palestinians.” This slogan rejects fragmentation and recognizes the anti-imperialist subject as an effect of the Palestinian cause. It replaces the individualizing suppositions of neoliberal managerialism and humanitarianism with the divisive universalism of anti-imperialism. The slogan isn’t new. At demonstrations in the early seventies, Egyptian students shouted, “we are all Palestinians.”[xli] In 1978, Iranians protesting against in the Shah similarly identified with Palestine.[xlii] The slogan has continued — 2014, 2021, 2023 — each repetition fueled by the global impact of imperialist destruction and fanning a global movement to oppose and defeat it.

From symptom to side

The will to foreclose solidarity with Palestine expresses an underlying truth: to support Palestine is to reject the repression of political subjectivity under conditions of liberal acquiescence to fragmentation and humanitarian management. Taking the side of the Palestinian resistance, one responds to a revolutionary subject — the subject fighting against occupation and oppression — recognizing this subject as an effect of a contested and open process. Which side are you on? Liberation or Zionism and imperialism? There are two sides and no alternative, no negotiation of the relation between oppressor and oppressed. Oppression isn’t managed via enervating concessions; it’s overturned. The illusion of a middle and a multitude withers away as the division constitutive of the political appears in all its stark brutality.

This appearance of the political may suggest Carl Schmitt’s classic formulation of the political in terms of the intensification of the friend/enemy relationship. Where it differs is in its recognition of hierarchy. Colonial occupation and imperialist exploitation produce enmity; enmity isn’t the affective setting of equals in conflict. It’s not a war of all against all (to invoke Hobbes’ classic description of the condition where political authority is absent). It’s a war of oppressed against their oppressor, the rebellion of those whose right to self-determination is denied against those who deny it. The two sides employ radically different orders of meaning: from within one, the other appears crazed and monstrous, utterly nonsensical. There is no third point from which to assess the situation, no neutral sovereign authority or system of legality that is not swept onto one side or the other. Deaths can’t be tabulated and plugged into a calculation guaranteed to establish when it all evens out. History doesn’t determine the matter. Dates from which to begin to narrate the sequence of relevant events aren’t simply alternatives. The division constitutive of the political goes all the way down.

It could be tempting to treat Palestine as the symptom of some larger failure – of international law and the human rights regime or of the smooth world of globalized neoliberalism, for example. Here Palestine would mark that point at which these systems come into contradiction with themselves, their constitutive exclusion.[xliii] This temptation should be resisted. Law always encounters hard cases and implementation challenges without crumbling to pieces. Globalized neoliberalism has proliferated fragmentation, separation, and perforation of political space into myriad zones. As Quinn Slobodian demonstrates, decentralization has been a primary mechanism for securing capitalist class interests.[xliv] Palestine doesn’t name a symptom; it names a side in the struggle against imperialism. When the Palestinian resistance dramatically punctures its setting of occupation and oppression, the fact of this side reemerges. It confronts an order that wants to ignore it with the continued will to be free — to persist, to redress injustice, to reclaim what has been taken, and to be recognized as a people, a nation, a state with a right of self-determination. Palestine names a political subject.

A rich literature can be enlisted to fill out the idea of Palestinian political subjectivity. Key points might include: the centrality of resistance to the imagining of a national identity in the wake of the Nakba; the specificity of Palestinian religious diversity (Muslim, Christian, Jewish); and, the dispersion of Palestinians across Israel, the occupied territories, and the diaspora. More compelling is the provocative claim that we are all Palestinians. This claim should not be understood as that kind of sentimental identification that says all forms of suffering are variations of the same suffering so we should all get along. Rather, it’s the political slogan of radical universal emancipation that responds to the subject as an effect of the Palestinian cause. Not everyone speaks for Palestine, but Palestine speaks for everyone.

PFLP’s strategy for Palestinian liberation demonstrates why this is the case. The PFLP’s aim is the establishment of a democratic national state in Palestine where Arabs and Jews will be citizens with equal rights and obligations.[xlv] This liberatory aim brings the PFLP into conflict with the ethno-nationalist state of Israel, with Zionism as a racist ideology, and with imperialism as the force that arms and supports Israel as part of its larger territorial division of the world and expropriation of Asian and African resources. The political solution to the problem of Palestine necessarily unfolds as a global struggle against imperialism. The “we” of “we are all Palestinians” is the name of the side that fights for all of us.

Edward Said writes that “The idea of resistance gets content and muscle from Palestine.”[xlvi] We can put this in conversation with Jacqueline Rose: “If in political vocabularies, resistance is the passage to freedom, for psychoanalysis, it is repetition, blockage, blind obeisance to crushing internal constraint.”[xlvii] Rose is writing in The Last Resistance, a book that thinks through challenges related to Israel and Palestine and includes a thoughtful meditation on Said. Palestine’s liberation struggle gives content to resistance in both Rose’s sense, political and psychoanalytic, as freedom and the effort to crush it. My German colleague is correct that “not all resistance is emancipative.” Of course, it isn’t. There is a resistance to emancipation, a resistance to politics, and a resistance to the emergence of the political subject who compels us to take a side. As the majority of people in the world recognize, Palestinian resistance is emancipative; rejection of it is not.

Geneva, New York, March 1, 2024.

Notes

[i] Edward W. Said, The Question of Palestine (London: Vintage, 1992), x.

[ii] See Linda Tabar, “People’s Power: Lessons from the First Intifada,” Center for Development Studies, Birzeit University, April 2013.

[iii] Charlotte Kates, “Stop the Genocide! Free Palestine!”, interview in Agrarian South Network. Research Bulletin (nov.- dec. 2023), http://www.agrariansouth.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/ASN-RB-Nov-Dec-2023-1.pdf, 26. The solidarity of left Palestinian parties with Islamic parties is nothing new. Already in 1992, PFLP and DFLP worked in an opposition faction that included Hamas and Islamic Jihad. See also Yezid Sayigh, Armed Struggle and the Search for State. The Palestinian National Movement (1949-1993) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 650, as well as the joint statement from December 2023, https://www.struggle-la-lucha.org/2023/12/28/palestinian-resistance-statement-affirms-national-unity-and-determination/.

[iv]Tareq Baconi, Hamas Contained (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018), xi.

[v] Kates, 27.

[vi] https://www.thecrimson.com/widget/2023/10/10/psc-statement/.

[vii] https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n20/judith-butler/the-compass-of-mourning.

[viii] Groups participating in the attack included the armed militias associated with Fatah, Palestian Islamic Jihad, the PFLP, and the DFLP and others, https://flashpoint.io/blog/israel-hamas-war-military-and-terrorist-groups/ and https://today.lorientlejour.com/article/1359030/other-armed-groups-involved-in-hamass-oct-7-attack.html

[ix] Baconi, 245.

[x] https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/there-can-be-no-critique/.

[xi] https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/2509-yes-i-said-national-liberation.

[xii] https://www.thecornellreview.org/breaking-cornell-prof-hamas-attacks-exhilarating-energizing/.

[xiii] https://statements.cornell.edu/2023/20231017-rickford-comments.cfm.

[xiv] https://www.change.org/p/demand-cornell-university-to-terminate-associate-professor-russell-for-hate-speech.

[xv] https://cnycentral.com/news/local/new-york-senator-calls-for-firing-of-cornell-university-professor.

[xvi] https://www.thecornellreview.org/rickford-called-hamas-attacks-exhilarating-takes-leave/.

[xvii] Leila Khaled, My People Shall Live. The Autobiography of a Revolutionary, as told to George Hajjar (ed. George Hajjar) (Raleigh: NC Press, 1973)

[xviii] From Badiou, see my discussion in Jodi Dean’s Crowds and Party (London & New York: Verso, 2018).

[xix] https://www.timesofisrael.com/biden-calls-for-global-security-regime-in-gaza-floats-visa-ban-on-violent-settlers/.

[xx] See Kate on Germany and France’s outlawing of protests as a way of clamping down on the responsive sentiment of sympathy and solidarity with Palestine, 25.

[xxi] Sara Roy, “Before Before Gaza, After Gaza: Examining the New Reality in Israel/Palestine,” in Unsilencing Gaza, (London: Pluto Press, 2021), ch. 8. The essay was originally published in 2013.

[xxii] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_of_the_Gliders.

[xxiii] https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1987/11/27/israel-cites-army-blunders-in-raid-on-base/a35d52b3-01c5-4608-a2da-86521770ba4e/.

[xxiv] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_of_the_Gliders.

[xxv] https://www.nytimes.com/1987/12/04/world/israelis-face-charges-over-raid.html.

[xxvi] See Yezid Sayigh, Institute for Palestinian Studies, Armed Struggle and the Search for State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 179-197.

[xxvii] https://securityanddefence.pl/The-use-of-weaponized-kites-and-balloons-in-the-Israeli-Palestinian-conflict,108677,0,2.html.

[xxviii] https://www.timesofisrael.com/condoms-kites-birthday-balloons-silly-gaza-weapons-could-lead-to-serious-war/.

[xxix] https://securityanddefence.pl/The-use-of-weaponized-kites-and-balloons-in-the-Israeli-Palestinian-conflict,108677,0,2.html.

[xxx] Francesca Borri & Yahya Sinwar, “Sinwar: ‘It’s time for a change, end the siege’”, ynetnews.com, 5 October 2018.

[xxxi] https://www.wvi.org/jerusalem-west-bank-gaza/article/high-fliers-gaza%E2%80%99s-children-break-through-hopelessness-soaring.

[xxxii] https://mondoweiss.net/2013/10/documentary-creativity-palestinian/.

[xxxiii] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMpk2vynJiQ.

[xxxiv] See Crowds and Party.

[xxxv] https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2020/12/27/gaza-airport-the-legacy-of-a-palestinian-dream.

[xxxvi] Khaled, 53.

[xxxvii] Roy, Unsilencing Gaza, ch. 25 “An Unacceptable Absence: Countering Gaza’s Exceptionalism.”

[xxxviii] PFLP, 90.

[xxxix] Idem.

[xl] Sune Haugbolle & Pelle Valentin Olsen,” Emergence of Palestine as a Global Cause,” Middle East Critique, 32:1, 2023, 129-148, 129.

[xli] Said, 125.

[xlii] idem.

[xliii] See Slavoj Zizek ‘s The Sublime Object of Ideology (London & New York: Verso, 2009).

[xliv] See Quinn Slobodian’s Crack-Up Capitalism. Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2023).

[xlv] PFLP, 101-102.

[xlvi] Said, 125.

[xlvii] See Jacqueline Rose’s The Last Resistance (London & New York: Verso, 2009), p. 21.

Jodi Dean