This issue of Spectre is dedicated to Refaat Alareer (1979–2023), a Palestinian professor, writer, and poet from Gaza. Refaat taught English and comparative literature at the Islamic University of Gaza and mentored young Palestinian writers to tell their stories of life under occupation, blockade, and war.
Born in Shuja’iyya, a neighborhood of Gaza that Refaat described as “a thorn in Israel’s side,” Refaat embodied a spirit of defiance, while also facing each day with levity and optimism. Refaat refused to leave Gaza City during Israel’s destruction and forced evacuation in the fall, even after his home was bombed, and he faced threats and repeated displacement.
He was killed in a targeted bombing of his sister’s home in Shuja’iyya, Gaza City, on December 7, 2023, which also killed two of his siblings and four of their children. Refaat edited and contributed to Gaza Writes Back (2014), and contributed to Gaza Unsilenced (2015), and Light in Gaza (2022). We have reprinted his poem, “If I Must Die,” on the back of the print issue.
HISTORIAN ROBIN D.G. KELLEY states that “the ground zero of a liberated world is Palestine.”1Saree Makdisi, Ussama Makdisi and Karim Makdisi, “‘The Ground Zero of a Liberated World is Palestine’ w/ Robin D.G. Kelley” (Interview), Makdisi Street, January 30, 2024. This beautifully captures the utter centrality of Palestine to any politics of liberation today. Of course, in the context of Israel’s genocide, Gaza has become quite literally a ground zero.
The Israeli state is striving to make Palestinian life unsustainable, slaughtering tens of thousands of people as of March 2024, permanently maiming untold numbers more, destroying water and sewage systems, demolishing hospitals, schools, and housing, and displacing more than 90 percent of the population with the goal of permanently removing them from Gaza. It has also escalated its murderous assaults on the Palestinian population living under occupation in the West Bank, suggesting a dangerous and precarious future for the remaining Palestinian population across historic Palestine.
Yet this is not the full story. The other side of this unadulterated horror is a growing worldwide revulsion at this slaughter. Israel’s genocide, backed by the governments of the US, Britain, Canada, and Germany, has galvanized mass global opposition.
In Our Thousands, In Our Millions, We Are All Palestinians
The most important component of opposition is of course resistance by Palestinians, in Palestine and in the global diaspora. While armed resistance and civil disobedience have always been braided strands in Palestinian history, never before has such resistance sparked a worldwide solidarity movement on this scale.
Activists have blockaded highways and ports. Students have walked out of classes and launched hunger strikes. Thousands of Black churches in the US have raised their voices.2Maya King, “Black Churches Pressure Biden to Call a Cease-Fire in Gaza,” New York Times, January 31, 2024. Anti-Zionist Jews have mobilized audaciously. Unions have spoken out in solidarity in greater numbers than ever before. Cries of “Viva, Viva Palestina,” carried by hundreds of thousands, have echoed from city to city.
None of this has moved the backers of genocide. Unable to win broad consent for their war on the Palestinian people, Western capitalists and their political representatives have resorted to rabid attacks on all those standing up for justice and humanity. They have witch-hunted outspoken actors, teachers, professors, and journalists, some of whom have lost jobs as a result.
They have banned campus groups like Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace. They have repeatedly slandered those who stand for solidarity with Palestine as “terrorists” and “antisemites.” And still, they are losing the battle for legitimacy.
Public opinion polls show a huge drop in support for Israel around the world.3Anna Gordon, “New Polling Shows How Much Global Support Israel Has Lost,” Time Magazine, January 17, 2024. And the eloquent and compelling case made in January by the South African legal team before the Inter- national Court of Justice, which charged Israel with committing genocide in Gaza, has only accelerated that shift.
As in the 1960s and early 1970s, millions of people in the US are breaking with the establishment’s bipartisan support for war and colonialism.
As part of this growing wave of sympathy with Palestine, hundreds of thousands of Jews have called for ceasefire, joined Palestine solidarity protests, and flocked to anti-Zionist organizations. Jewish Voice for Peace in the US, for instance, has added three hundred thousand people to its mailing list since October of last year.4Ross Barkin, “How October 7 Drove a Wedge into the Democratic Party,” New York Times, February 7, 2024.
A Vietnam Moment
There is a very real sense in which we are witnessing something akin to a Vietnam moment with respect to support for Israel. As in the 1960s and early 1970s, millions of people in the US are breaking with the establishment’s bipartisan support for war and colonialism. This is especially noteworthy because, while the US finances the Israeli Defense Forces and maintains bases and troops throughout the Middle East, there is no plan to commit large numbers of American boots on the ground in support of Israel’s genocidal assault in Gaza.
Those protesting in the US are joined by millions more in every corner of the globe. And even within the institutions of the ruling class, dissent is flaring. Public protests have broken out among Biden’s White House staff, employees of the World Health Organization, and journalists at multiple media outlets. More than seventy US cities, including Chicago and Seattle, have passed ceasefire resolutions in defiance of establishment opinion. The challenge now is to massively strengthen the grassroots movements in solidarity with the Palestinian liberation struggle.
Over the past twenty-five years, the Palestine solidarity movement has expanded across the US, largely propelled through grassroots activism and Students for Justice in Palestine campus chapters. Time and again, the movement has managed to break beyond repression and dehumanization, most notably in the weeks after October 7, 2023, when suppression and Islamophobic smears of Palestine solidarity activists were at their height.
Now more than ever, the movement has been crucial in challenging the narrative put forward by politicians and publications such as the New York Times. The movement has managed to popularize an understanding of solidarity with the oppressed and has promoted the framework of colonialism, not “conflict,” in understanding Palestine. This time around, it has also managed to put forward a massive rejection of Biden, culminating in “Uncommitted” and “No Preference” votes ranging from 14 to 20 percent in a number of states.
Still, the movement faces major challenges. Palestine solidarity activists and organizations will continue to face repression and backlash over the coming months and years. Widespread rejection of Biden within the movement might not coalesce into a lasting rejection of the Democratic Party as a pillar of US imperialism. And the US left, as a whole, is being recrafted by the new anti-imperialist upsurge.
There is an urgent need to create democratic, bottom-up organizing spaces where debate around strategy and tactics can flourish and create new coalitions.
There is thus an urgent need to create democratic, bottom-up organizing spaces where debate around strategy and tactics can flourish and create new coalitions. Older left habits of romanticizing despotic regimes that oppose the US can be countered in such open, democratic debates.
Despite the challenges facing us, the movement is learning every day from the Palestinian struggle. We are inspired by the movement’s latest push to rely on grassroots mobilization rather than politicians, by the diversity of tactics of civil disobedience, and by the tireless organizing each and every day, even in the face of loss.
A Linchpin of World Politics
One part of strengthening the grassroots movement involves dedicated campaigns of mass education. And critical here is understanding why the Palestinian struggle for freedom is a linchpin of world politics, and why it defines our age.
The Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonization will not disappear from the center of world politics for two reasons. The first is the critical position of the region to capitalist accumulation on a world scale. The Middle East is not only the site of some of the largest deposits of petroleum and natural gas in the world; it is equally crucial to the global movement of commodities, given its centrality to world shipping.
In addition, as Adam Hanieh has argued, the Middle East has become central to circuits of international banking and finance.5Adam Hanieh, 2011, Capitalism and Class in the Gulf Arab States (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). As such, for a hundred years, Western empires have wanted a loyal state that can act as its police force in the region, ready to take political and military action against nationalist regimes or popular uprisings.
Both the imperial support for the 1917 Balfour Declaration that announced British sponsorship of the Zionist colonization of Palestine and the current US economic and military subsidies to the Israeli state flow from the self-interest of the dominant capitalist powers. The British military governor of Palestine in the early part of the twentieth century, Ronald Storrs, once declared that a Jewish state in the Middle East would be “a little loyal Jewish Ulster in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism.”6David Cronin, “Winston Churchill Sent the Black and Tans to Palestine,” The Irish Times, May 19, 2017.
Ulster, of course, was the part of Ireland packed with Protestants loyal to England. Israel was meant to be something similar in the Middle East: a client state that gets rewarded for defending the interests of the western US ruling classes.
The centrality of the region to world capitalism explains why the imperialist powers have supported, funded, and armed Israel for decades. It also reveals why the US in particular, but other powers including China and Russia as well, have been intent to normalize Israel and its relations with the surrounding regimes.
This process began with President Jimmy Carter’s Camp David Accords and continued with President Donald Trump’s Abraham Accords that established diplomatic relations between Israel and other states in the region. These pacts were all designed to stabilize this key nodal point of global capitalism.
Globalize the Intifada
The second reason that Palestine will continue to be central to world politics is the tenacity of the Palestinian resistance. While Israel was able to expropriate and expel most Palestinians during the Nakba of 1948, Palestinians survived in exile in other Arab majority societies and reorganized their resistance by the mid-1950s. Israel’s victory in the 1967 war established its military supremacy in the region but the cost of occupying the West Bank and Gaza was dealing with their dense and organized Palestinian populations.
These populations have organized mass resistance movements like the First Intifada (1987–1991) and the Second Intifada (1999–2005). Even were Israel to succeed in ethnically cleansing Gaza, Palestinians both inside and outside the Israeli state will remain a threat to the Zionist project and its international backers.
The international character of Palestinian oppression requires an internationalist approach to its struggle for liberation. At the heart of that struggle is, of course, the Palestinian resistance in all its forms both within historic Palestine and throughout the diaspora.
Especially in light of imperialist backing of Zionism, the resistance of Palestinians themselves must be buttressed by an anti-imperialist movement in the US and Europe focused on closing the spigot of support, aid, and investment through a sustained struggle for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS). Finally, to counter the regional powers’ commitments to “stability” and their increasing political and economic integration with Israel, the struggle of working people throughout the region will need to both build solidarity with the Palestinian struggle and overthrow their own ruling classes and their despotic regimes.
Resistance is Justified When People Are Occupied
The legitimation of Zionism relies heavily upon two claims of exceptionalism: first, that Palestinian resistance is exceptionally violent; and second, that Israel is singled out as an exceptionally racist regime, measuring its racist violence by an unfair metric. In truth, the Palestinian resistance is not nearly as violent—against civilians or otherwise—as resistance fighters have been in countless other struggles against colonial rule.
As Palestinian American literary critic Saree Makdisi argued:
During the Haitian revolution in the early 19th century, former slaves massacred white settler men, women, and children. During Nat Turner’s revolt in 1831, insurgent slaves massacred white men, women, and children. During the Indian uprising of 1857, Indian rebels massacred English men, women, and children. During the Mau Mau uprising of the 1950s, Kenyan rebels massacred settler men, women, and children. At Oran in 1962, Algerian revolutionaries massacred French men, women, and children. Why should anyone expect Palestinians—or anyone else—to be different?7Saree Makdisi, “No Human Being Can Exist,” n+1, October 25, 2023.
As Makdisi makes quite clear, there is nothing exceptional about the Palestinian struggle in this regard—including the unfortunate killing of noncombatants. It is yet another instance of the right of colonized people to use force in their struggle for liberation.
There is nothing exceptional about the Palestinian struggle for liberation. What would be exceptional is if Palestinians did not resist in this context. But of course, Zionism has little use for history, which is why it dehistoricizes in order to exceptionalize Palestinian resistance.
There is a profound irony in these claims. In refusing to consider Palestinian resistance in comparative historical perspective, Zionists abstract the violence of this struggle from history—all the while accusing their own critics of exceptionalizing Israel. They seek in turn to exceptionalize Palestinians as brutal. But that’s precisely the issue here: Palestinian resistance is not exceptionally violent.
There is a long and predictable history to the racist association of anticolonial violence with the “backwardness” of the “natives,” one that accords with the long history of racist regimes invoking “Western civilization” against the barbarism of Indigenous populations. Today we see these racist sentiments echoed in what Nada Elia, in this issue, has called the Israeli “weaponization of rape.”
The Moral Litmus Test for the World
When Zionists insist that Palestine solidarity activists are Israel-obsessed, that we’re singling Israel out and therefore antisemitic, they again ignore the actual history. The claim that opposition to Zionism is antisemitic masks the reality that Zionism, from its beginnings, was a capitulation to antisemitic racism. As John Will’s essay in this issue documents, modern Zionism embraced the worldview of antisemites—the claim that Jews and non-Jews could not, and should not, live together as equals.
This led to a long history of Zionist collaboration with antisemitic, imperialist regimes like Britain. It also led David Ben-Gurion, in the late 1930s, to prioritize the Zionist project in Palestine over the fate of millions of Jews faced with Nazi extermination:
If I knew that it was possible to save all the children of Germany by transporting them to England, and only half by transferring them to the Land of Israel, I would choose the latter, for before us lies not only the numbers of these children but the historical reckoning of the people of Israel.8Quoted in Martin Gilbert, “Israel Was Everything” New York Times, June 21, 1987.
Unsurprisingly, Zionism enjoyed the support of only a tiny minority of Jews around the world before World War II. Today, antisemites rank among the largest and most prominent defenders of Israeli genocide—“Christian Zionists” such as Mike Johnson and Elise Stepanek who have promoted the antisemitic “great replacement” theory while denouncing Palestine solidarity activists as “Jew haters.”
Palestine must be today at the heart of any anti-imperialist politics worth its salt. As Angela Davis puts it, Palestine is ‘a moral litmus test for the world.’
To be clear, our movement is Palestine-obsessed—just as we were Vietnam-obsessed in the 1960s and 1970s and were South Africa-obsessed in the 1970s and 1980s. Indeed, we’re obsessed with the struggles of all oppressed peoples, struggles that have embodied the aspiration for global freedom. In the same spirit, Palestine must be today at the heart of any anti-imperialist politics worth its salt. As Angela Davis puts it, Palestine is “a moral litmus test for the world.”9“Angela Davis: ‘Palestine is a Moral Litmus Test for the World,’” Aljazeera, October 27, 2023.
At the same time, there is nothing particularly special about Israel. We’re critical of Israel because we’re critical of all settler colonies the world over. Zionists have attempted to paint their critics as aloof academics who only recently developed the term “settler colonialism” with special reference to Israel. As one of the New York Times’ court jesters argued in February, “It’s fine to oppose settler colonialism, but in that case, one also must be consistent and principled,”10Bret Stephens, “Settler Colonialism: A Guide for the Sincere,” New York Times, February 6, 2024. as if he were telling anti-Zionists something they don’t already know.
We oppose settler colonialism everywhere: in North America, in Kashmir, in southern Africa, in the Maghreb, in Oceania, and yes, in Palestine. There is nothing exceptional about Israeli settler colonialism. Just as Mahmood Mamdani famously argued that apartheid South Africa was the last remaining divide-and-rule colony on the African continent, we want to insist that Israel is the latest instance of the settler colonial project.11Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism, 2nd edition, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018). It certainly isn’t the only one, which is precisely why we also mobilize against settler colonialism where we (as editors) work and live: in North America.
From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will Be Free
Why then are we quoting Davis on the question of Palestine being “a moral litmus test?” The settler colonial project in Palestine is both recent and ongoing. The United States and Canada treat Indigenous populations horribly, relegating them to “reservations” while parading them around as mascots. We express unconditional solidarity with all Indigenous peoples facing vicious marginalization and containment.
Indigenous groups in North America have long stood for Palestinian liberation and found common ground in struggle. In Palestine, we still have a chance to stop a genocide as it is unfolding—not to memorialize or express abstract solidarity but to actually challenge an ongoing project of violent displacement, dispossession, starvation, and targeted mass murder.
In fact, solidarity with Palestine today embodies a global politics of life against death, one that challenges the genocidal death cult of late imperial capitalism. As Rafeef Ziadah puts it about her phrase, “We Teach Life,” in her interview in this issue, “In the face of a televised genocide and a barrage of racist rhetoric against Palestinians, ‘We Teach Life’ serves as a humble, defiant assertion of our humanity. ‘We Teach Life’ asserts that we are neither superhuman nor mythical creatures, but we share a common desire with others who face oppression—the urge to rebel, refusing to accept the role of silent victims. In this sense, Palestine, as cartoonist El Ali Naji writes, is not a geographical location only, but a symbol for every just cause, and a stand against every oppression.’
Palestinian-American poet Fady Joudah makes a similar point in his interview in this issue. Talking about his new volume of poetry, […], he says, “I choose Eros as a vehicle to celebrate life as expressed by my Palestinian sensibility.”
The project of death in Palestine has a name: Zionism. And it is for this reason that we as an editorial board resolutely proclaim ourselves opponents of Zionism—anti-Zionists—and long to see the fall of the apartheid regime. To reiterate, this is not because we have some kind of special animosity toward Israel. We despise all ethno-states, every last one on the planet. We have never seen a racist, exclusivist regime—a settler colonial regime—whose demise we wouldn’t cheer on. Insofar, then, as by “Israel” we mean an apartheid regime, an ethno-state, and a Jewish supremacist government, then no, Israel does not have a “right to exist.”
No states have some inherent right to exist; peoples do. Self-determination is for oppressed peoples, Jewish people included. But it certainly doesn’t constitute the right to create an exclusivist regime, actively working to oppress all other people living in the same territory. This is why we call ourselves anti-Zionists. And it is for this reason that we’re so certain that from the river to the sea, Palestine—all of it, for everyone who lives in it—will be free.
Notes & References
- Saree Makdisi, Ussama Makdisi and Karim Makdisi, “‘The Ground Zero of a Liberated World is Palestine’ w/ Robin D.G. Kelley” (Interview), Makdisi Street, January 30, 2024.
- Maya King, “Black Churches Pressure Biden to Call a Cease-Fire in Gaza,” New York Times, January 31, 2024.
- Anna Gordon, “New Polling Shows How Much Global Support Israel Has Lost,” Time Magazine, January 17, 2024.
- Ross Barkin, “How October 7 Drove a Wedge into the Democratic Party,” New York Times, February 7, 2024.
- Adam Hanieh, 2011, Capitalism and Class in the Gulf Arab States (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
- David Cronin, “Winston Churchill Sent the Black and Tans to Palestine,” The Irish Times, May 19, 2017.
- Saree Makdisi, “No Human Being Can Exist,” n+1, October 25, 2023.
- Quoted in Martin Gilbert, “Israel Was Everything” New York Times, June 21, 1987.
- “Angela Davis: ‘Palestine is a Moral Litmus Test for the World,’” Aljazeera, October 27, 2023.
- Bret Stephens, “Settler Colonialism: A Guide for the Sincere,” New York Times, February 6, 2024.
- Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism, 2nd edition, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018).