Situational Awareness

This ideology reemerged unmistakably after October 7, 2023, becoming the dominant narrative across the media, with Hamas representing the generic Arab and serving to normalize the violence and daily brutality used to police Israel’s Manichean world of colonizer and colonized.¹⁴Of course, this is not at all new. The Arabic word Intifada (literally, resistance or uprising) brings fear. The first Intifada (1987–93) certainly was a mass uprising across the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The violence was one-sided (one hundred Israeli civilians and sixty Israeli soldiers were killed in contrast to 1,087 Palestinians (including 240 children) killed by the Israeli Defense Force (IDF). The first Intifada was not centrally organized but grew spontaneously with an emphasis on local and democratic decision-making that produced protests, civil disobedience, general strikes, boycotts, stone throwing, and more. Though no IDF soldier was killed, convicted stone throwers, many of whom were children, could receive a sentence of up twenty years. Stone throwing (with its connections to David and Goliath) was quickly decried as terroristic by mainstream US and UK media. After October 7, the survival of Gaza—an “open-air prison”—itself came into doubt as daily atrocities and massacres were unleashed against Palestinian civilians who had nowhere to escape. This obliteration is justified in the indisputable moral name of Never Again.

The reference to the Holocaust takes us back to Fanon’s first book, Black Skin, White Masks, in which he connects anti-Semitism and Negrophobia, remembering a speech by Aimé Césaire: “When I switch on my radio and hear that Black men are being lynched in America, I say that they have lied to us: Hitler isn’t dead. When I switch on my radio and hear that Jews are being insulted, persecuted, and massacred, I say that they have lied to us: Hitler isn’t dead.”¹⁵Fanon, Black Skin, 70.

In Discourse on Colonialism, Césaire would argue that Nazism is the product of a “boomerang effect” of European colonialism, where the exclusive savagery, violence, and brutality—the racism—toward non-European people rebounds with the largest holocaust in history, the systematic elimination of six million Jews. “At the end of formal humanism,” Césaire adds, “there is Hitler,” making it clear that Hitler was not dead but continues to appear in new forms.¹⁶Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001), 37.

To return to Fanon’s conception of colonial Manicheanism, its relevance now is borne out using the term apartheid to describe conditions of life for Palestinians. Introduced after the Second World War in South Africa with genuinely fascist connections, apartheid was about “population control” (that is, labor control) of South Africa’s Africans. It included pass laws—used to control the movement on “nonwhite” people—and the forced removal of people. The creation of Homelands or “Bantustans” for 87 percent of the population on 13 percent of the land was an attempt by late settler colonialism to develop a system of indirect rule based on the apartheid state sanctioning and supporting “tribal” rule outside of “White South Africa.”

In apartheid Israel, the “Bantustans” of Gaza and the West Bank are not primarily about labor control—though the pass laws work similarly—but about keeping the Palestinian population fixed in their exiled place, where this “surplus population” is essentially locked down.¹⁷One example is legal. Palestinians in the West Bank are subject to military law and military courts, and Jews are subject to civil law. Thus “two similar acts of terrorism…one committed by Jewish settlers, and one committed by Palestinians” are treated completely differently, and most acts of “settler violence” are ignored. See Ronen Bergman and Mark Mazzetti, “The Unpunished: How the Extremists Took Over Israel,” New York Times, May 16, 2024. With its foot on the neck of the colonized, the psychology of settler colonialism, based on a righteous fear, trades in trauma even while it traumatizes.

Fanon’s writings, focused as they are on the lived experience of being denied freedom of movement, of being hemmed into a “narrow world, strewn with prohibitions,” have an immediate resonance.¹⁸Fanon, Wretched, 37. In The Wretched of the Earth, for example, he writes of a million Algerian hostages behind barbed wire and three hundred thousand refugees on the Moroccan and Tunisian frontiers forced there by the French. The unheard-of levels of brutality, terror, and vengeance unleashed on the populace, he contends, creates a continuous “apocalyptic atmosphere” that is “the sole message [of] French democracy.” In extreme poverty and precarious living conditions, the colonized live in permanent insecurity, constantly in flight. Families are broken up and trauma is widespread. This “shameless colonialism,” Fanon continues, is only matched by apartheid South Africa.¹⁹Fanon, Dying Colonialism, 26.

Palestinians live under similar conditions and are also expected to express an emotional and affective control of the self that is situationally impossible. As Hamas’s murders on October 7 dominated the news, it was quickly forgotten that those breaching the fences and breaking into what Fanon called “forbidden quarters” were experiencing a physical moment of liberation.²⁰Fanon, Wretched, 40. As a psychiatrist, phenomenologist, and political theorist, Fanon engaged these contradictory and dehumanized realities.

Thus, recognizing the role that Hamas’s October 7 attacks have played in putting the question of Palestine back on a global stage, I contend that while sanctioning “all revolts, all desperate actions,” Fanon would be critical of Hamas’s political program and worldview.²¹In 2017, Hamas revised the language of its 1988 platform to say that its fight was not against Jews for their religion but against the “racist, aggressive, colonial and expansionist” Zionist project. Concerned about the difficult question of how to build a resistance that is democratic, his warning to the cadres of the National Liberation Front in Algeria could very much be directed at some of the Hamas actions. He writes, “Because we want a democratic and a renovated Algeria, because we believe one cannot rise and liberate oneself in one area and sink in another, we condemn, with pain in our hearts, those brothers who have flung themselves into revolutionary action with the almost physiological brutality that centuries of oppression give rise to and feed.”²²Fanon, Dying Colonialism, 25. Again, we recognize the physiological brutality as a product of colonial Manicheanism and dehumanization, and also recognize Nietzsche’s warning in Beyond Good and Evil: “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.”²³Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 89.

Pitfalls of National Consciousness

In Fanon’s schematic mapping of anticolonial activity, he argues that resistance is determined by the colonizer. And he appreciated the power of this militantly anticolonial inversion, proclaiming that the colonized reply “to the living lie of the colonial situation by an equal falsehood,” adding that in this colonist context “there is no truthful behavior: and the good is quite simply that which is evil for ‘them.’”²⁴Fanon, Wretched, 50.

While recognizing its logic, Fanon also warned that, along with what he calls “brutality of thought and a mistrust of subtlety which are typical of revolutions…there exists another kind of brutality which…is typically antirevolutionary, hazardous and anarchist.” If it is not “immediately combatted…this unmixed and total brutality…invariably leads to the defeat of the movement.”²⁵A slogan is one example of a “mistrust of subtlety.” Political education, thus becomes, for Fanon, essential to introduce “shades of meaning” to challenge the tendency among leaders to underestimate the people’s reasoning capabilities. This might sound almost idealistic, but it is essential to the cognitive break that Fanon argues can be brought about by a revolutionary moment. It can create a new politics, he argues, where “leaders and organizers living inside of history…take the lead with their brains and their muscles in the fight for national liberation” and create a politics which is “national, revolutionary and social.”²⁶Fanon, Wretched, 147.

Warning of the degeneration of national consciousness into chauvinism and ethno-nationalism (a fait accompli in the case of Israel), Fanon argues in The Wretched of the Earth that national consciousness is not nationalism, but if it does not open up during the struggle for freedom, becoming enriched and “deepened by a very rapid transformation into a consciousness of social and political needs, in other words into humanism…it leads to a dead-end.”²⁷Fanon, Wretched, 204. We continue to see these dead-ends reappear, reminding us that developing a radical humanism mediated through political and social (human) action and thought requires both intention and clarity.

This radical humanism, which reintroduces the whole of humankind into the world, calls not only for political education but for working out an idea of the future society to be discussed and decided with the people (reflecting their articulated social needs) in the struggle for liberation. Thus, to perceive the reason in revolt requires the development of new ways of thinking and understanding that seem implausible. For Fanon, “It is necessary to analyze, patiently and lucidly, each one of the reactions of the colonized, and every time we do not understand, we must tell ourselves that we are at the heart of the drama.”²⁸Fanon, Wretched, 106; Fanon, Dying Colonialism, 125. This is what we must attend.

The attitudes to the bombing of Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City in mid-October 2023 expresses the Manichean thinking that Fanon describes. While Israel and the US immediately insisted that it could not have been an Israeli bomb, across the region, mass demonstrations and expressions of outrage (including against their own Arab leaders) rejected that assessment. As Fanon puts it, “the ‘truth’ of the oppressor” becomes “an absolute lie,” and is countered by “another, an acted truth.”²⁹Fanon, Wretched, 76, my emphasis. Despite whatever “proof,” the masses had already made up their minds, connecting the violent destructive act directly to their experiences: the Palestinian experience of Israel’s military might, as well as the fear of a genocide. They knew that this would happen, and that thousands upon thousands of Palestinian children would be killed by Israeli airstrikes.

The arming of the ultra-right-wing Zionists to steal Palestinian land and the silencing of opposition to the war inside Israel is the logical expression of settler colonialism. While there is very little opposition among Israelis to the settlers, there is a widespread sense of existential dread of Arabs because it is the land, not the people, that is essential. At the same time, Fanon maintains that while colonial violence overpowers, it does not tame the colonized; they are “treated as an inferior but not convinced of their inferiority.”³⁰Fanon, Wretched, 56.

In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon understood the settler’s logic, which claims that “this land was created by us.”³¹Fanon, Wretched, 51. In other words, it is perceived as empty of humans before they arrived. Thus, among these settler groups today, it would not be surprising to hear them repeat what Fanon heard the Algerian colonists say, “Let’s each one of us take ten of them and bump them off and you’ll see the problem solved in no time.”³²Fanon, Wretched, 51; Fanon, Dying Colonialism, 56. This is the logic of the war on Gaza. But Fanon also reminds us that settler colonialism is not only the occupation of a territory but also the occupation of body and mind. As he puts it, “in the initial phase” it is “the action…of the occupier…[that] determine[s] the resistance around which a people’s will to survive becomes organized.”³³Fanon, Dying Colonialism, 47.

Indeed, after all the years since Fanon wrote these words, we keep returning to this initial phase, mediated by violence. As Gideon Levy put it in the liberal Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz immediately after the Hamas attacks: “They are already talking about wiping out entire neighborhoods in Gaza, about occupying the Strip and punishing Gaza ‘as it has never been punished before.’” Implicitly critical of the idea of Israel as a liberal democracy, he adds, “Israel hasn’t stopped punishing Gaza since 1948, not for a moment…Gaza, most of whose residents are refugees created by Israel. Gaza, which has never known a single day of freedom.”³⁴Gideon Levy, “Israel Can’t Imprison 2 Million Gazans Without Paying a Cruel Price,” Haaretz, October 9, 2023.

“On Violence,” Fanon, and a Media “Debate”

Thus, to ask how this present moment can make use of Fanon—since his sociodiagnostic is always critical and connected to social change—let’s start with Hannah Arendt’s pithy remark about The Wretched of the Earth: “it seems that only the book’s first chapter, ‘Concerning Violence,’ has been widely read.” Arendt notes that Fanon was more doubtful than his admirers, knowing that “unmixed and total brutality, if not immediately combatted invariably leads to the defeat of the movement.”³⁵Hannah Arendt, Crises of the Republic (Orlando FA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1969), 116, n. 19.

This seems to have taken on a new value after October 7, as Fanon is being promoted as the decolonial theorist of violence. This was immediately apparent in the challenge Najma Sharif, a writer for Soho House Magazine and Teen Vogue, made on X (formerly Twitter): “What did y’all think decolonization meant? vibes? papers? essays? losers.”³⁶Najma, “What Did Y’all Think,” @najmasharif, X, October 7, 2023. She didn’t mention Fanon, but he was surely lurking.

Responding to social media posts quoting Fanon’s promotion of violence, Mark LeVine, the director of the Program in Global Middle East Studies at University of California at Irvine, argued on Al Jazeera on October 9 that “Fanon’s conception of violence does not work in Palestine;” that he could only be “understood in the context of the fuller argument he was making.”³⁷Mark LeVine, “Fanon’s Conception of Violence Does Not Work in Palestine,” Al Jazeera, October 10, 2023. Fair enough, but he too doesn’t seem to have carefully read Fanon. After disagreeing with Fanon that settler colonialism and “more particularly Zionist settler colonialism” is very much a “thinking machine,” not an “unthinking machine,” he asks an important question: why is Ukraine’s national struggle against a powerful regime supported but Palestine’s national struggle against a powerful regime not?

Rather than addressing this, he argues, “I have yet to see any plausible scenarios in which Palestinians acquire the means to deploy ‘far greater violence’ vis-a-vis Israel/the Zionist entity for any length of time in any conceivable geostrategic balance of power.”³⁸See LeVine, “Fanon’s Conception.” And yet isn’t this exactly Fanon’s criticism of Engels and of the bourgeois nationalists in The Wretched of the Earth, as he points to Mau Mau (the Kenya Land and Freedom Army) who used homemade guns and the cover of night to bring fear into the heart of the British Empire?

It is impossible, Fanon proclaims, to retaliate with the same degree of violence as the oppressor. But, by responding. they shake the settler’s self-assuredness. As Fanon puts it, “the colonized discover that their life, their breath, their beating heart are the same as those of the settler. The settler’s skin is not of any more value than a colonized’s skin; and it must be said that this discovery shakes the world.”³⁹Fanon, 45. Indeed, isn’t that exactly what Hamas did on October 7 when breaking out of Gaza and defeating the local Israeli military shifted the geostrategic narrative? In other words, LeVine simply gets Fanon’s argument wrong at a basic level.⁴⁰This sloppiness is apparent in that his reference to the “cleansing” (his word) effect of violence is to Black Skin, White Masks, not The Wretched of the Earth.

Adam Shatz, whose book, The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon, was published in early 2024, received many reviews in hallowed pages including the New York Times and the New Yorker, only one of which mentioned Gaza.⁴¹Reviewing The Rebel’s Clinic in the LA Review of Books, Anthony Alessandrini, coeditor of Jadaliyya, did, expectedly, mention Gaza. He noted that Shatz’s insistence that “our world is not Fanon’s” means that Fanon’s ideas cannot be simply mapped “onto our time,” adding that he (Alessandrini) is writing as a genocide is being carried out in Gaza and that “the naked violence that is colonialism has hardly passed into history” (see Anthony Alessandrini “Ambivalent Fanonism: On Adam Shatz’s ‘The Rebel’s Clinic,’” LA Review of Books, February 7, 2024). But there is no such reference in Jennifer Szali’s review in the New York Times (January 21, 2024) whose title “When Violence Was What the Doctor Ordered,” seemed to be a re-tread of Shatz’s review of David Macey’s biography of Fanon, titled “The Doctor Prescribed Violence” (also in the New York Times, September 2, 2001). Nor did Shatz engage Gaza directly in his self-review opinion piece in the Times, “The World Has Caught Up with Frantz Fanon” (February 2, 2024). The same day, an article based on an interview with Shatz, “Would Frantz Fanon Have Supported the Oct. 7 Massacre? His Biographer Isn’t So Sure,” appeared in Haaretz, though there Shatz makes clear that what Fanon might have said about October 7 is more nuanced. Critical of thinking that substitutes ontology for history, he argues, “I don’t think Fanon would have been surprised by the fact that it happened. That the violence of oppression inevitably provokes the counterviolence of the oppressed is, after all, a Fanonian theme.” Shatz then wrote a serious critique in the London Review of Books entitled, “Vengeful Pathologies.” He argued that the motives behind the Al-Aqsa Flood on October 7

were hardly mysterious: to reassert the primacy of the Palestinian struggle at a time when it seemed to be falling off the agenda of the international community; to secure the release of political prisoners; to scuttle an Israeli-Saudi rapprochement; to further humiliate the impotent Palestinian Authority; to protest against the wave of settler violence in the West Bank, as well as the provocative visits of religious Jews and Israeli officials to the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem; and, not least, to send a message to the Israelis that they are not invincible, that there is a price to pay for maintaining the status quo in Gaza.⁴²Adam Shatz, “Vengeful Pathologies,” London Review of Books 45, no. 21 (November 2, 2023).

Criticizing the Western media, he is equally critical of the so-called “decolonial” admiration of Hamas, noting Najma Sharif’s tweet by acknowledging that while it is “true that Fanon advocated armed struggle against colonialism…he referred to the use of violence by the colonized as ‘disintoxicating,’ not ‘cleansing’, a widely circulated mistranslation. His understanding of the more murderous forms of anti-colonial violence was that of a psychiatrist, diagnosing a vengeful pathology formed under colonial oppression, rather than offering a prescription.”

This is certainly true, but rather than holding onto the contradiction and following Fanon, Shatz jumps to a conclusion: “To organize an effective movement…anti-colonial fighters would have to overcome the temptations of primordial revenge, and develop what Martin Luther King, citing Reinhold Niebuhr, called a ‘spiritual discipline against resentment.’”⁴³See Shatz, “Vengeful Pathologies.” Now Martin Luther King Jr, of course, had railed against the liberals in his Letter from Birmingham Jail, remembering “that everything Hitler did in Germany was ‘legal [and]…calls for a confrontation with the power structure….To use the words of Martin Buber, the great Jewish philosopher, segregation substitutes an ‘I–it’ relationship for the I–thou’ relationship and ends up by relegating persons to the status of things” (available at tinyurl.com/yujcunfd). It is the same for Palestinians. Shatz at least remembers the living mass movement, namely, the 2018–19 nonviolent Great March of Return, when Israeli forces killed 223 demonstrators and injured 8,000, many shot by marksmen aiming to kneecap. See Hilo Glazer, “’42 Knees in One Day’: Israeli Snipers Open Up about Shooting Gaza Protesters,” Haaretz, March 6, 2024. (Martin Buber was a critical Zionist and a humanist. Leaving Germany for Palestine in 1938, he remained critical of a Jewish state and continued to advocate for “genuine dialogue” and “binational state” until his death in 1965.) While Fanon importantly notes that “racism, hatred, resentment, and ‘the legitimate desire for revenge’ alone cannot nurture a war of liberation,” there is also a positive truth in the ressentiment of the damned of the earth that Shatz misses.⁴⁴See Zahi Zalloua, The Politics of the Wretched (London: Bloomsbury, forthcoming). Zalloua conceptualizes a dialectical ressentiment based on the rationality of revolt of the wretched of earth, and as a positive negation of oppression.

Based on his experience, Fanon remained committed to a politically organized counter-violence against settler colonialism. And he was concerned that the form, content, and goals of the anticolonial nationalist organization, sometimes uncritically imported from the West, are also reflected in their elitist perspectives and separation from the mass of people who conclude almost immediately after independence, “that ‘it wasn’t worthwhile’ fighting, and that nothing could really change.”⁴⁵Fanon, Wretched, 75–76.

In other words, the need to analyze the political situation and clearly explain where it is going means that disintoxification is also connected to acritique of the political leadership and its class character, politicizing the “dialectical substitution” of Black Skin, White Masks and making such a critique in connection with a living mass movement.⁴⁶This has a connection to Amilcar Cabral’s injunction that revolutionary leaders from privileged classes face the choice to “betray the revolution or to commit suicide as a class suicide.” See Cabral, “The Weapon of Theory,” (1966, repr., Amilicar Carbral Archive, n.d.), marxists.org/subject/africa/cabral/1966/weapon-theory.htm. This is what Fanon means when, in the famous chapter of The Wretched of the Earth on the pitfalls of national consciousness, he warns that the nationalist organization becomes incapable of rationalizing popular action and thus incapable of seeing “into the reasons for that action.”⁴⁷Fanon, Wretched, 149, my emphasis. It is this incapacity that continues to haunt the postcolonial world.

Twisting Fanon’s Legacy

Hamid Dabashi, the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, reacted to Shatz for “Twisting Frantz Fanon’s Legacy.”⁴⁸Hamid Dabashi, “War on Gaza: How Critics are Twisting Frantz Fanon’s Legacy,” Middle East Eye, March 5, 2024. Arguing that Shatz implies that Fanon is “irrelevant” to the Palestinian struggle, he suggests what is at issue is Fanon’s position on violence. For Dabashi the translation of the word désintoxique is a “red herring designed to preach nonviolence,” and he quotes from the final paragraph of the second chapter of The Wretched of the Earth, “The Strengths and Weaknesses of Spontaneity,” in which Fanon writes, “Violence alone, violence committed by the people, violence organized and educated by its leaders, makes it possible for the masses to understand social truths and gives the key to them. Without that struggle, without that knowledge of the practice of action, there’s nothing but a fancy-dress parade and the blare of the trumpets.”⁴⁹Fanon, Wretched, 147.

As noted, Shatz certainly has a point about désintoxique being a clinical term. The experience of disintoxification from colonial dehumanization and its internalizations is essential to break out of the Manicheanism of the colonizer who views the colonized in “zoological terms” as Fanon puts it, as when the Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant described Palestinians as “human animals.”⁵⁰Fanon, Wretched, 42. “Israel Defence Minister Yoav Gallant Calls Palestinians in Gaza ‘Human Animals,’ Orders Total Siege, The New Arab, n.d., youtube.com/watch?v=KeDQYgKDyj4.

Though Dabashi does not analyze that quote, this is the point missed by Shatz. Fanon is arguing for violence that is “organized and educated” that needs to be critically understood as a knowledge of practice expressed in the goals of what is being fought for. Without that, Fanon argues, independence is nothing but a fancy-dress parade. It is with this idea of a knowledge of practice, of understanding social truths, that Fanon turns to the pitfalls of national consciousness in the following chapter of The Wretched of the Earth.

Fanon’s understanding of the pathology of colonialism is described in both A Dying Colonialism and in The Wretched of the Earth. At the same time, he recognizes the emergence of the new “reality of the nation” out of the process of decolonization.⁵¹Frantz Fanon, Alienation and Freedom (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 679. In A Dying Colonialism, he argues that in Algeria a radical change in consciousness is taking place as a new reality of the nation is being born. When no such new reality of the nation seems emergent, Manicheanism reigns, underlining Fanon’s discussion of violence as a ceaseless pathological dystopian reality of permanent social dysfunction. It is as if this violence has no connection to the violence of ultra-orthodox Jewish settlers in the West Bank, the state-sponsored persecution of occupied Palestine, and the Arab states’ abandonment of the principle of Palestinian national self-determination.

The massacre of Israeli civilians on October 7 exposed the multiple layers and facets of Palestinian oppression. And it is this dialectic that has elicited global responses of support for Palestinian national self-determination, as well as, unsurprisingly, global rhetorical and actual anti-Semitic and Islamophobic violence.

The images of Gaza as a graveyard of children have motivated a worldwide response, especially among youth, offering a challenge to both Israelis and Palestinians, as well as opening new possibilities. As Fanon makes clear in the conclusion to Black Skin, White Masks, this includes the possibility “to move away from the inhuman voices of their respective ancestors so that a genuine communication can be born…to touch the other, feel the other, discover each other.”⁵²Fanon, Black Skin, 206.

In his 1960 speech “Why We Use Violence,” Fanon responds to the colonist’s perspective, saying that Algeria belongs to all. It is an idea of a future also included in the South African Freedom Charter written just a few years earlier. This radical imagining is what needs to be further considered in the slogan “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” Again, Fanon gives us a valuable answer connected with the radical humanist challenges laid out in A Dying Colonialism when he considers the importance of Algerian Jews and Europeans supporting the struggle as part of the new reality of the nation. In the 1960 speech, he continues:

We do not say…“You are a stranger, go away.” We do not say…“we will take over the leadership of the country and make you pay for your crimes and those of your ancestors.” We do not tell them that “to the past hatred of the Black we will oppose the present and future hatred of the White”…We say…“we are Algerians, banish all racism from our land, all forms of oppression and let us work for the flourishing and enrichment of humanity.” We agree, Algeria belongs to all of us, let us build it on democratic bases and together build an Algeria that is commensurate with our ambition and our love.⁵³Fanon, Alienation, 657.

He returns to this in the final pages of The Wretched of the Earth, which includes an existential social critique that is also a self-critique: it is, he writes, “necessary at all times and in all places to make explicit, to de-mystify, and to hunt down the insult to humankind that exists in oneself.”⁵⁴Fanon, Wretched, 204, translation altered.