For Palestinians, Liberation is the Strategy

The coming of Ramadan in Palestine each year is accompanied by intensification of Israeli violence.  Whatever the reason, it always happens.  Perhaps Israel senses a certain Palestinian vulnerability during the month.  Perhaps in an expression of punitive authority, Israel takes pleasure in ruining the Palestinians’ celebration.  Or perhaps Israel simply doesn’t know what else to do.  Abusing the native is integral to Zionism. 

This Ramadan, Israeli Jews are preoccupied by their own government, making noise about “democracy” and “the rule of law.”  (They’re content to let the usual bloodletting in the Occupied Territories go unnoticed.)  It’s a curious but completely normal situation for the Zionist state:  Palestinians are an ever-present burden on the entity and yet Palestinians are also studiously absent from Zionist notions of civic life. 

Rather than trying to sort what domestic unrest means for Israel, it’s critical to focus on the complete picture, which means avoiding the colonizer’s silly and stinted notions of democracy and instead contemplating what a free and functional society would look like in historic Palestine. 

It begins and ends, of course, with the people capable of bringing this kind of nation into existence.  No matter how loudly Israelis hem and haw, they’ll never achieve a just society, in no small part because they don’t want one.  They want better access to a set of bourgeois rights apportioned through feats of biology. 

Only Palestinians possess the capacity for a liberatory politics—not because of some magical blueprint or unique insight, but by rejecting both the premise and practice of Zionism.  Doing so is a prerequisite for what colonizers like to call democracy.  Palestinians are also the rightful stewards of the area between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea.  Land must revert to its Indigenous form in order to sustain life. 

This movement filled with ugly flags and political dullness is immaterial to Palestinian liberation, but nonetheless instructive because it inadvertently highlights the same people airbrushed from the proceedings.  Israeli Jews are in the streets and on the news, but in reality they are ghosts in their own protest.  Palestinians control the possibilities of freedom even from their state of exclusion—precisely because they are excluded. 

For those of us watching from a distance, we can try to recover Palestine from its invisibility.  We understand the liberation of Palestine to be the goal of our collective work as journalists, organizers, scholars, laborers, artists, and so forth, but it’s easy to forget that the liberation of Palestine also must be the working mentality of the collective.  In other words, liberating Palestine isn’t simply the goal; it is also a strategy. 

How can an outcome be strategic?  Because liberation isn’t a fixed spot on the calendar; it is a process, forever in tension with forces of oppression.  And in that process we constantly navigate habits of logic and perception devised by the oppressor (what generally comes to be known as “common sense”).  Take the current protests in Israel.  What is their ultimate purpose?  With some deviation here and there, it’s a retrenchment of the colonial entity.  The entity’s survival doesn’t portend some breakthrough or preservation of democracy; it ensures continued Palestinian dispossession.  In this way, “democracy” and “rule of law” are platitudes deployed in contradistinction to their accepted meanings, as a tactic of ethnocentricity and exclusion.  Israeli Jews want to rescue a polity that functions as a graveyard for natives—life as an expression of civic demise. 

We speak often of strategies for liberation, which is an important topic that should continue into its own obsolescence.  But it’s also important to speak of liberation as the actual strategy. 

For instance, it’s unseemly to disavow armed resistance in order to generate approval in the metropole.  Like any other approach, armed resistance has its benefits and drawbacks, but it shouldn’t be discarded to appease the predilections of the oppressor. 

Likewise with the cynical, systematic accusations of “antisemitism” to punish critics of Israel.  By their nature these campaigns sever Palestinians from the language of resistance.  We don’t need to plead misinterpretation when we disparage Israel; it’s better to insist on the right of natives to speak freely of the settler.  That is, we do not grant the settler discursive jurisdiction.  This kind of right goes unrecognized in the metropole, but it is essential to the native’s ability to develop revolutionary consciousness. 

Those of us outside of Palestine suffer constant hostility and so it’s easy to slip into ways of speaking that contravene decolonial sensibilities.  We have to work hard to extricate ourselves from rhetorical and political norms designed to render us subservient to the colonizer’s proclivities.  We needn’t defer emphasis on Palestine’s liberation for the sake of a politician’s career.  We needn’t capitulate to the reasoning of people who won’t even acknowledge our existence.  And we needn’t give the oppressor our consent, even (or especially) when the oppressor performs gestures of self-improvement. 

So as you witness the current pageantry in the streets of Tel Aviv, remember that the protestors are fighting to repair a society that from its outset was irredeemable.  Let them clamor.  The only thing worth hearing is the exhilarating noise of their omissions.