I.

I want to begin with a confession: I’m having a difficult time figuring out what to say. For months I have been immobilized at the level of language. That is, I have thoughts and ideas and opinions, but actually forming them into legible comments has been a significant challenge. My impulse was to go silent, speaking only in monologue, but eventually I recognized that a better course of action would be to figure out why language sometimes feels ineffective as a communication device.

I don’t claim to have found an answer, at least not a universal one, and I’m sure that plenty of linguists can provide an explanation, but it seems useful to consider the phenomenon in light of our current problems, in particular the problem of an insatiable, genocidal Zionist state and its irredeemable U.S. sponsor. In this environment, unpredictable and insecure, we’ve been disinherited of what old-timey philosophers used to call natural rights, the basis of liberty and prosperity and the architecture of our very consciousness. This disinheritance came about in a thousand small acts of coercion and large acts of repression, from the collapse of any coherent notion of the future to a dearth of faith in the world as it currently exists, beset by darkness and corruption and genocide.

It seems much easier and more satisfying to punch a wall, right? Well, that’s no accident. Punching a wall is the impulse that arises when our sense of utility has been reduced to individual rage. The act is futile and self-harming, but it dispels the perception of stasis. At least I’m doing something. What else is there to do, anyway? Vote? Most people aiming to end imperialism rightly see it as a waste of time. Write outraged emails? That stopped being a good idea twenty years ago. Engage in public dialogue? Nobody is in the mood to chat with Zionists. No, we’re not convinced by these precious civic rituals any longer. Not while the ruling classes openly mock our existence. Not while the world becomes unlivable before our eyes.

The impulse to punch goes deeper than disinheritance. It is not a primal expression. It is a recognition of the disparate power dynamics governing our lives. The recognition is coherent even when imprecise or unarticulated. It is a demand for humanity, actuated through a supposedly inhuman deed.

Let’s broaden the picture. Think about the impulse to punch a wall, or a pillow, or a politician—or simply entertaining the image of punching something, inanimate or alive. The origin of that feeling is identical to the sensation that arises when you see missiles landing in Tel Aviv. It exists at the nexus of anger and joy. A private act is realized through a geopolitical event. The anger can’t transform into joy until a power greater than the self enacts a private desire through public force. Hence the joy as Israelis, under intense rocket fire, scrambled underground.

Yes, joy. You felt it, too. It does no good to deny it. You don’t have to say so. I say it for you. It might not have been a sustained joy once you had time to reflect on things. Or maybe it was. You may have denied it in the moment or disavowed it later on. But I’m talking about that flash of joy you felt, seemingly visceral but unmistakable, the one that immediately disrupted years of social conditioning. The thing is, it wasn’t visceral. It wasn’t random. It wasn’t out of character.

You felt joy because of years of seeing that smug son-of-a-bitch Netanyahu, alongside his abusive wife and idiot son, gloat as he killed our icons and leaders, our defiant Sayyed, our intrepid Anas, our beloved Refaat. You felt joy on behalf of all the children who are orphaned, traumatized, incinerated by Israeli bombs. You felt joy because all other modes of expression have been suppressed by Zionists across the professional spectrum. You felt joy by remembering how mercilessly the genocidaires mocked and ridiculed people trapped beneath rubble. You felt joy as a defense against the incessant pathological whining from the very perpetrators of these atrocities.

Of course you felt joy, even if you tried to stop it. In the end, you felt joy because you’re humane. You’re not allowed to admit it in the West because that would make you a monster—merely extending the principle of self-defense to Arabs or Iranians is enough to make you a monster in the West. The West, in other words, has warped and restricted your sense of humanity, in service of its own monstrous pursuits. You’ve been uprooted, redefined, emptied of your ancestors’ values. Not any longer, though. The genocide has made it so that not a one of us should ever again accept moral authority from this wretched hemisphere.

Before the current war, we already knew that we hated the Zionist settlers, the psychotic tech leaders consigning us to digital servitude, the online influencers in the Gulf, the data centers popping up like pustules across the land, and the vapid pundits of the imperial core, but we didn’t understand the extent of the hatred until it occurred to us that we might no longer be subject to their ubiquity, that we might actually nourish intellectual sustenance rather than being force-fed the insipid entrails of the billionaire class. We wanted Iran, or anyone else, to take out the economic and logistical infrastructure of an ever-invasive, ecocidal technocracy.

It was a fanciful desire, no doubt. There will always be influencers and tech bros and ugly architecture. AI has already catalogued everything, including our misery. But it’s the psychology of these developments that matter. Nothing brings their deleterious effect on society into better focus than the promise of their obsolescence. We want to be free. We want dignity and respect. We want to live in a just and sustainable world. We aren’t hateful. Not at all. We are desperate for housing, for healthcare, for clean water, for breathable air—hell, for relief however it may come—prevented from existing by a transnational class of goblins and pedophiles. If only for a nanosecond, we can imagine this possibility when the eyes of the American-Zionist coalition get blackened. We can be happy. Such is the curative power of resistance.

This isn’t the phony joy workshopped by Democratic Party hacks into a slogan. It’s the cathartic joy of decolonial violence, a way to, as per Hezbollah councilmember Wafiq Safa, “restore prestige by force.”

When Iran struck Dimona, home to the Zionist entity’s nuclear program, it was undoubtedly a victory for humanity. If the foolish invasion of Iran collapses the AI bubble or undermines the petrodollar or wrecks the pyramid scheme pretending to be an economy, then it will be another great victory.

The feeling that arises in reaction to these possibilities is distinct. Perhaps you can call it pride. Or hope. Or cautious optimism. Or relief. I think it’s joy, though, borne of a sense that life might survive on this planet, after all.

II.

Whenever I hear a Western pundit or politician go on about “democracy,” I say to myself, “Oh hell, give it a rest. Nobody’s buying that crap anymore.” I think that people serious about Palestine and decolonization more broadly react skeptically to the term because we understand it to be the vocabulary of our own dispossession.

We don’t need to give up the idea of democracy, but we ought to recognize its discursive uses as a pretext for barbarity and repression. It starts by delinking the term from its popular usage and thinking about it instead as an anti-capitalist imperative. It has perhaps already been delinked by a good amount of people in the West. The Zionist genocide in Gaza decimated the platitudes of Western civic and cultural superiority. The high ground on which Western states propounded about civility is now a sinkhole.

It bears repeating because too many folks who should know better apparently still don’t get it: when the United States and its UK and EU minions start talking about democracy in a Global South country, understand that no matter what happens, democracy, by any definition, isn’t in the offing. Activists and academics repeat the propaganda because of either stupidity or cynicism. Whatever the reason, this impulse among Western intellectuals to ruminate about “democracy” in Iran, Cuba, Syria, Venezuela, and other targets of U.S. regime-change operations doesn’t work because it happens on the imperialists’ terms, on their terrain, using their vocabulary.

What did all the talk about “democracy” in Iran get us? An extremely predictable war, for starters. A potentially devastating blow to anti-Zionist movements, as well. Now, I’m not saying that the people who dreamed aloud about a democratic Iran caused the war, but they certainly facilitated its rationale and justified the assumptions on which that war is predicated. There is no democracy. Stop it. Using that metric only justifies the aggression you claim to oppose. Let people in Iran talk about democracy—what it could look like in view of so much Western hostility; how it functions in their own cultural and historical context; which conditions might create a thousand-year cycle rather than immediate devastation. You may be talking about democracy, but you’re speaking the language of war.

What does the talk about “democracy” in Palestine get us? A built-in rationale for Zionist genocide.

What does the talk about “democracy” in Cuba get us? A sanctions regime so brutal that hospitals cannot function.

Sooner or later, intellectuals have to realize that even with positive intentions their concern for “democracy” and “human rights” and “authoritarianism” reifies the very aggression they otherwise deplore. I can think of no example of U.S. intervention in the Global South, overt or covert, that led to a free and sovereign nation; every supposedly liberated nation that didn’t manage to repel the invader ended up a vassal state with an impoverished population, its resources having been extracted by a local elite subservient to foreign capital.

This stuff is self-evident. It’s not breaking news that the United States, like the UK and other European powers, is full of shit when claiming to bring freedom to the lesser creatures of the world. And yet people with advanced degrees keep falling for the line. It makes one suspect a level of disingenuity concordant to the rewards of compliance. The rest of us don’t have to be naïve or opportunistic, though. We understand that a much greater reward arises from resistance.

Westerners tend to obsess about the nature of Iran’s government, which they can’t comprehend in its own milieu. The right question to ask is “what happens if Iran’s government falls?” The outcome is entirely predictable: a patsy gets installed as leader; the treasury is looted; Iran becomes another U.S. client state; Western capital has a bonanza; sovereignty is gone; nearly all avenues of resistance to the Zionist entity deteriorate. The entire exercise is an epistemology of disempowerment.

A lot of this talk of democracy comes from diasporic communities. In trying to make sense of these communities, we should think in terms of a class politics subsumed by superficial identitarian concerns. Without saying it outright, and without necessarily meaning to (although often it is purposeful), a lot of diasporic commentators want their own people starved, bombed, and sanctioned. They advocate for regime change. And for what? According to them, for democracy. Perhaps less noble reasons hide in the shadows. Many in the diaspora have material interests in regime change. They want to invest in the “new economy.” They want think tank gigs and consultantships. They want to buy vacation homes in the motherland. They want to revitalize a nostalgia in which the nation exists solely as a means of personal comfort. Is this the totality of diasporic opposition? Of course not. But it is the textbook MO of a certain type of comprador.

III.

When we oppose Zionism, we are fighting for a principle. The point of this opposition isn’t—or shouldn’t be—prestige, approval, or profit. The point is to do right by our fellow human beings. To love Palestine is an act of empathy for the entire world, a declaration that we cannot abide the perpetuation of racism, poverty, and genocide, which we contest in fidelity to the downtrodden and in a self-replicating assertion of freedom and dignity.

We keep sight of these devotions not simply as an act of solidarity with the dispossessed, but to distinguish ourselves from our enemies. Adherents of capitalism, colonialism, imperialism, and Zionism cannot conceive of principle as the basis of decision-making; they only think in terms of profit. In their minds, there is no point in advocating for the oppressed when there is no economic benefit to the advocation. Anything other than lucre is impractical or unproductive. Wisdom is measured not by virtue, but by greed.

The mentality infests all aspects of the metropole and its client states. U.S. politicians supposedly representing the left, for example, constantly sacrifice principle for expedience. Zohran Mamdani’s language abruptly transformed from anti-Zionism to dissimulation. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez erased her foreign policy platform and began sucking up to Zionists before she was seated in Congress. The archetype of this unfortunate specimen, Bernie Sanders, has never put together a coherent criticism of Israel and certainly not of Zionism. The mass of left-centrists pretending to be socialist all end up affirming Israel’s right to exist. Because they have to, everyone laments. No, they don’t have to. That’s absurd. Ghassan Kanafani had to. Rasmea Odeh had to. Malcolm Shabazz had to. But they didn’t.

We all have to. But some of us don’t.

The politicians and potentates and other assorted big-to-dos choose to dispose of Palestine according to a calculation that measures career or reward against potential punishment. Why don’t the Yemenis choose security over privation? Their pantries are empty, they’ve been bombed for over a decade, and they fight at a severe disadvantage. Nevertheless, they steadfastly support Palestine’s liberation. As do the people of south Lebanon. And as do courageous people all over the world. This refusal, on principle, to abandon Palestine for economic or political expedience is the model we should emulate. Not everyone is willing to exist in a perpetually subservient position to the United States.

Therefore, let America be your periphery. We don’t have to make decisions that perpetuate an unjust system. We don’t have to distance ourselves from the sensibilities on which we were nurtured. We don’t have to submit to Zionist humiliation rituals: I condemn antisemitism; I condemn Hamas; I condemn every regime opposed to Israel; I condemn my own insistence on self-respect. We don’t have to do anything that the people on the frontlines of the struggle for liberation refuse to do as a matter of principle.

It doesn’t register to many Brits and Americans that somebody would fight for Palestine as a duty. “What do they get out of it?” must have a monetary answer or at least a purpose that satisfies capitalist notions of productivity. In Arab and Muslim communities—as, of course, in Palestine itself—a prevailing attitude is that resisting genocide is a simple feature of being human; foregoing resistance is no more viable than deciding to quit food or water. Practical components exist, as well. Conscious observers recognize that Zionism is anathema to sovereignty and development throughout West Asia and that to enter into the U.S. sphere of influence is to willingly assume the position of slave.

As an aside: I’m fully aware that the conditions of running for office in the United States differ significantly from participating in resistance in Lebanon, Palestine, Yemen, and so forth. I’m not conflating the two situations. I’m suggesting that we should be discerning about the sources of our inspiration.

IV.

Over the years, I’ve considered various ways to define liberal Zionism. It’s not an easy task considering that Palestinians perceive no small number of self-proclaimed anti-Zionists as inhabiting the category. This is the rough definition I’ve settled on: a liberal Zionist is somebody who cannot, whatever their stated ideology, accept or conceptualize Palestinian peoplehood beyond a framework of Jewish supervision. The liberal Zionist insists on defining any contested term in relation to Jewish exigency rather than assessing its impact on Palestinians. Likewise, the conditions of Palestinian liberation are always subject to the liberal Zionist’s consent, according to the liberal Zionist’s specifications. A liberal Zionist can cross the BDS picket line because they have a special purpose in communicating with Israelis while the Palestinian, stubborn and dogmatic, should have no access to an enlightened public sphere. A liberal Zionist can patrol anti-Zionist spaces and, when necessary, condemn Palestinians for using insufficiently humanistic language. A liberal Zionist can speak of “Palestinian violence” as a self-generating phenomenon disembodied from the continuously violent presence of the Jewish state.

(“Liberal Zionist” is not a contradiction or oxymoron, by the way. Western liberalism and Zionism are not only compatible; they are mutually constitutive. Liberal Zionism is the origin of both the kibbutz and the refugee camp.)

I raise the question of liberal Zionism because it illustrates how Western notions of pragmatism conform to specific limitations. Those limitations stop us from identifying with viewpoints and sentiments widely popular (or at least legible) in the Arab World. Today’s media ecosystem, more disaggregated but somehow more homogeneous than ever, has a way of erasing what Gramsci called “organic intellectuals,” those thinkers without fancy credentials who occupy working class spaces and put forth a sophisticated analysis of power. The Arab World is filled with these organic intellectuals. Israel murders or imprisons them. The liberal elite fear them. The compradors despise them. And the Middle East Studies networks in academe largely disregard them as cranks or ignore them altogether. What are these organic intellectuals saying? Lots of things, but they sure as hell aren’t circulating narratives that rationalize U.S. and Israeli aggression. In my line of work, this kind of intellectual tends to get filtered out by search and promotion committees or peer-reviewed into oblivion.

Thought-leaders, NGOs, politicians, influencers, and academics in the West tend to stay away from the vernacular of resistance as it exists among the downtrodden. Their purpose is to transform radical sentiment into fantasies of democratic redemption. They will argue that you can participate in civic life and simultaneously challenge the ruling classes, but the appeal to participation inherently marks revolutionary sentiment as infantile or counterproductive. In practice, we are left to pursue strategies preauthorized by the ruling classes. Those strategies are inevitably electoral. The ballot isn’t simply the physical manifestation of “democracy”; it is the basis of our civic consciousness. (If you don’t believe me, then try having a political conversation with Americans that doesn’t pivot to the topic of voting.)

Liberal Zionism, in other words, is the apotheosis of convention. It opposes Israeli behavior while reproducing the logic of Palestinian dispossession. Israel cannot function as a standalone entity. Its governing ideology requires expansion. An axis of resistance may be imperfect, but it is the only countervailing power capable of establishing self-determination for the countries of the Middle East. Acknowledging this plain reality is largely verboten in the Anglosphere. Israel becomes sacrosanct in the same moment that it is actually threatened.

This process isn’t always conscious. Part of it has to do with the limits of subjectivity. Jewish anti-Zionists know what it is like being a Jew opposed to Zionism, but they don’t always know what it is like to oppose Zionism from other points of view. It’s obvious who has never been around Palestinians or Arabs, has never spent time in a refugee camp, has never read the great anti-colonial thinkers, has never considered the emotional strain of persecution, has never really listened to their Palestinian colleagues. It’s obvious who doesn’t truly see us as colleagues, much less equals. There’s just certain stuff we’d never say, a certain language we’d never use, depending on context, timing, and audience, alongside an inverse sensibility that we possess, a shared instinct for when it’s appropriate to discuss flaws in our movement or the so-called Jewish question. There are anti-Zionist Jews who understand that Palestinians are going through a terrible period and stay discreet as a simple courtesy, or as an act of empathy. The ones who keep banging on about “antisemitism” come across as only being in it for themselves. We’re left to assume that their gratification supersedes our freedom.

Palestinians keep pointing to big names on social media as Zionist and then get lambasted. How is he a Zionist? Where is the evidence? Why are you being divisive? We won’t beg you to figure out what we already know. But, okay, fine, here are some possible reasons. He writes for Zionist publications. He spread atrocity propaganda after October 7. He treats resistance as illegitimate. He trades in discourses amenable to U.S. imperialism. Is that good enough for you? Does that not tell you all there is to know? If it doesn’t, then you understand neither Zionism nor anti-Zionism. A lack of understanding is forgivable, but in snidely questioning what should be obvious you’re choosing not to understand.

As an example, take Noam Chomsky. For years—decades—Palestinians have cautioned that he has some troublesome (indeed Zionist) positions vis-à-vis Palestine, opposition to BDS and right of return most glaringly. Whenever we brought up these troublesome positions, we were shouted down as wayward children too stupid or irrational to comprehend our own struggle. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard a liberal Zionist cite Chomsky as an authority on why we need to be more moderate. But Chomsky says! It was a veritable soundtrack for left-punching dimwits. But Chomsky says! And look how it turned out. Chomsky not only validated certain liberal Zionist positions; he was also buddies with a former Israeli prime minister and a sex trafficker with demonstrable ties to the Mossad.

(Whoops.)

When Palestinians identify an opinion or sensibility as Zionist—lowkey or explicit—I would encourage you to consider the possibility that we aren’t mindless or emotional. Perhaps we have a good reason for the judgment. You don’t have to agree in the end, but immediately going into a defensive posture outs you as somebody who cannot be trusted.

Another example: a debate recently broke out about Ezra Levin of the group Indivisible. Lots of people associated with (or who impose themselves on) the Palestine solidarity movement defended Levin against claims that he’s a Zionist, replete, as usual, with accusations of antisemitism. In December 2023, Levin tweeted, “If we could press a button to eliminate every Hamas fighter, I’d support it. But Netanyahu clings to power by making Israel and the world less safe for Jews. Indiscriminate killing of Gazan civilians doesn’t make anybody safer. The only moral and strategic answer is ceasefire now.”

By Israel’s reckoning, the category of “Hamas fighter” includes all Palestinians, so it is debatable that Levin does in fact oppose their indiscriminate killing. Even if he does oppose their indiscriminate killing, he seems bothered only to the degree that it makes Jewish people (and unspecified others) “less safe.” Then of course is the classic Bernie-esque maneuver of attributing Israeli barbarity to Netanyahu rather than to Zionism itself. Ezra Levin is a Zionist. It is completely unambiguous.

Whitewashing these tedious luminaries is worse than a waste of time; it is actively harmful to the development of a coherent anti-Zionist movement.

V.

In thinking about activism, organizing, whatever you want to call it, we first need to get our minds right. Above all, activism is an intellectual project. Let’s take a look at what is now before us.

The aggression against Iran has laid bare the precarity of the U.S.-led political and economic order. It relies on continual growth (i.e., extraction), military superiority, sanctions, surveillance, extortion, chokepoints, and brutal client states. Once any combination of these nodes is disrupted, significant portions of the world experience recession, on top of the inflation and wage decline already built into the model. By fighting the Imperium so capably, Iran has exposed to ordinary people how badly they’ve been getting screwed.

Let’s revisit what has been documented and theorized and subsequently ignored: that the abundance of the North relies on the privation of the South. This is a simple proposition, demonstrated by a thousand good thinkers, but the myth persisted on the Anglo left that abundance simply needs better domestic distribution. But now we see it in real time: those glittering buildings in Doha and Dubai; those cheap gas prices in the American Midwest; those displays of wealth presented as entertainment…all of it relied on the maintenance of a specific world order both ironclad and incredibly fragile. It’s plain as day now, isn’t it? Somebody finally challenges U.S. authority and, boom, everyone’s economy goes to hell. No longer can Americans, left or right, speak of a domestic politics; the local in the United States is international by design. It relies on immiseration, which itself relies on immiserated modes of thought among the intelligentsia of the metropole.

As ever, Palestine is the nexus of these upheavals. That’s the thing about Palestine: people in both the West and Arab World tried to ignore it, tried to dispose of it, tried to say it no longer matters. But you can’t get rid of Palestine, nor can you forget it. Palestine is the lifeforce of everything the United States, Europe, and Israel claim to represent: freedom, ethics, innovation, opportunity. These qualities cannot exist in the West because they are concentrated in Palestine. The contours of this beautiful nation extend far beyond its borders. All decent people are invested in its liberation.

VI.

Over twenty-five years ago, I studied at Birzeit University in the West Bank as part of the Palestine and Arab Studies program. I don’t know what it’s like these days, but back then the program was vibrant, with students from around the world. Most of my memories of that summer are hazy, but I well remember one seemingly pedestrian interaction.

I was with a group of friends in East Jerusalem. One of the women in the group, an American, had invited her boyfriend. It was pretty awkward when we discovered that he was Israeli. We were walking through the streets when one of the shopkeepers, seeing the boyfriend’s platinum hair and pasty skin, asked where he’s from. It wasn’t a hostile or suspicious question. The shopkeeper wore a smile and was surely planning to be hospitable.

“Ukraine,” the boyfriend said after a slight hesitation.

The shopkeeper expressed delight at meeting such a far-flung visitor and began chitchatting, insisting that we sit down for tea. Nobody in the group seemed perturbed, but I felt a sense of fascination along with a bit of disquiet. How would the affable shopkeeper act if he knew that the boyfriend was a settler? Presumably the boyfriend had asked himself the same question.

Here’s the thing: because the boyfriend was surrounded by other foreigners, it didn’t occur to the shopkeeper that the guy could be a local. He too was obviously foreign. Quite apart from physiology or fashion, one sees such things clearly.

Looking back, the lie was one of the most honest things I’ve ever heard from an Israeli. There was something deeply clarifying about the entire scene in general. Here was the jovial shopkeeper holding court with a huge smile, a man completely aligned with his environment. And then there was the boyfriend, dour and apprehensive, shifting foot to foot, ill at ease with the kind of street scene common to Jerusalem for over two millennia. I wonder if he was quietly experiencing an existential crisis in that moment. Probably not. It didn’t matter. I was able to force the crisis onto him. The shopkeeper was doing it without even trying.

Now, I have no idea whether the boyfriend was born in Palestine or had arrived there in recent years, but it makes no difference. He breezily assumed a foreign identity in a way that would be inconceivable for Palestinians. Not a one of us would claim to be from anywhere other than Palestine. The same holds for people in diaspora. Most Palestinians around the world, and certainly the ones in refugee camps in neighboring Arab countries, will identify Palestine as their country. My wife, born in the United States, refers to Palestine as “back home.” Refugee children name their ancestral cities and villages whenever somebody asks where they’re from—cities and villages they’ve never seen, some of which now exist beneath invasive flora. Claiming Palestine isn’t merely ideological. It’s a fact of history. It’s literally where we’re from.

The scene drove home a simple but consequential reality: Israelis will never not be foreign to Palestine. You can see why the moment you cross into what’s maddeningly called “Israel proper” from the West Bank or Gaza. “Israel proper” is an abruptly and mystifyingly different world. The sights and sounds change. The air feels heavier. The land is too manicured. The sunshine becomes hostile. The place is duller, more uptight, entirely mechanical. The West Bank and Gaza are each distinct, but each also has a general vibe similar to Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, and Egypt. Not so with “Israel.” It doesn’t feel like the Middle East. And, essentially, it isn’t. One gets the distinct sense of having been dropped into a farfetched simulation. Even in areas where the original Palestinian architecture has been retained, “Israel proper” never feels anything other than transitory. The entire project is a stunning feat of impropriety.

A critical recognition stayed with me from that day forward, one that I hope you too will remember with a feeling of joy amid the endless psychodrama imposed on us throughout this genocide: Israelis might control the land, but Palestinians don’t have to lie in order to belong.

Recording

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Courtesy of Steve Salaita