Palestine After Analogy

“A Cause for Every Revolutionary”

Petro’s speech, coming from one of the most radical leaders of a new Latin American left wave, rekindled some of the spirit of earlier Third Worldist revolutionary kinships even as it underlined some of the starkly different historical stakes facing us at present—most starkly the specter of planetary-scale climate disaster. Indeed, our conjuncture recalls something of the way Palestine sat at the center of left and Marxist politics at the height of Third Worldism and the Tricontinental moment. For much of the 1960s and 1970s, the question of Palestine and the Palestinian Revolution were not just emblematic, they were part of the critical content of left internationalism. One could convincingly say, in the much-cited words attributed to the Palestinian revolutionary and writer Ghassan Kanafani, that “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.”9

This had much to do with how Palestine both circulated as a figurative analogy and opened itself up onto relational histories and joint struggles. In 1982 in Paris, Gilles Deleuze sat down with the Palestinian author Elias Sanbar for a conversation that would be published in the pages of Libération under the title “Les Indiens de Palestine” (The Indians of Palestine). It’s a short but striking conversation that, among other things, grappled with the particularities of what we now identify as settler colonialism (but which neither Deleuze nor Sanbar seemed to have the term for at the time). At its core—and in its title—is the work of analogy. In the history of the question of Palestine, the analogy with Indigenous peoples in the Americas (the figure of the “American Indian” or “Red Indian”) has taken different valences, some much more ambivalent than others, often directly wading into the tensions between Third and Fourth Worldisms. But for Sanbar the analogy is clear and key to the way he diagnoses Zionism as premised on the “disappearing” of Palestinians: “We are also the American Indians of the Jewish settlers in Palestine. In their eyes our one and only role consisted in disappearing. In this it is certain that the history of the establishment of Israel reproduces the process which gave birth to the United States of America.”10

For both Deleuze and Sanbar, the opening of the Palestinian struggle onto analogy is itself a site of political possibility internal to the very struggle. Deleuze (whose conceptual work was deeply influenced by the Palestinian Revolution) remarks that one of the Palestinian struggle’s manifestos is: We are “a people like others.” “It’s a cry,” he says, “whose meaning (sens) is multiple. In the first place it’s a reminder or an appeal. . . . In the second place, it’s in opposition to the Israeli manifesto, which is ‘we are not a people like others,’ by reason of our transcendence and the enormity of the persecutions we have suffered. . . . This is why the Palestinians hold fast to the opposite claim: to become what they are, that is, a completely ‘normal’ people.”11

In opposition to the mythological transcendent exceptionalism of Zionism—“not a people like others”—stands the universal but historical genericity of Palestinianism—“a people like others.” There’s nothing essential or originary about this. The figurative potential of Palestine is fundamentally historical; or more precisely, it’s about a different sense of history that opens itself up to possibility through multiplicity: “Against apocalyptic history, there is another sense of history that is only made with the possible, the multiplicity of the possible, the profusion of possibles at each moment.”12 Palestine becomes the name for a kind of shared antiracist refrain or disposition against the apocalyptic triumph of racial exceptionalisms and their common sense, a name for a buried but not yet killed “potential history.”13

Yet for all its power, there’s something that remains limited in the work of analogy in this exchange. The figures of the Palestinian and the American Indian (for all the mutual identification) remain only symbolically connected. And the self-declared exceptionalism of Zionism remains aloof from the global settler colonial complex that authorizes it. The material and historical relations between the American and Zionist settler orders and those between Indigenous anticolonial resistances are both out of frame. We know, for one, that the history of the establishment of Israel didn’t just “reproduce the process which gave birth to the United States”; it extended it in deep and constitutive relations with the Euro-American imperial-economic order that was itself in part only made possible by the colonization of the Americas.14

The early 1980s, from which Deleuze and Sanbar wrote, provide us with other examples that speak to these transnational and transcolonial connections in terms that exceed the analogical. In the spring of 1982, when Deleuze and Sanbar published their exchange, the Palestinian Revolution, headquartered in Beirut, was still riding relatively high. It was still a global hub for an anti-imperialist front that had only recently achieved stunning victory in Vietnam. But we know now that the autumn of that year would tell a very different story. The Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the siege of Beirut over the summer of 1982 left the city decimated and over thirty thousand dead. At its end, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was forced from Lebanon entirely and farther away from Palestine into deeper exile in Tunisia. The defeat would arguably mark the beginning of the collapse of the Third Worldist historical arc, presaging the end of the Cold War and the ascendance of the unipolar American era, one that would be crowned less than a decade later in the First Gulf War. But in the more immediate term, in September of 1982, the defeat and forced withdrawal of the PLO set the stage for the Sabra and Shatila massacre that saw Israeli proxy forces under the guidance of the Israeli army, which illuminated the night sky and watched from the perimeter, slaughter over three thousand people in the disarmed refugee camps of West Beirut. It took three days for the killing to come to an end. Deemed an “act of genocide” by the United Nations General Assembly, it was, in hindsight, a precursor of things to come.

The massacre prompted one of the most compelling literary acts of solidarity and mutual identification with Palestine that intentionally moved beyond analogy as its frame of relation in June Jordan’s poem “Moving Towards Home.” The poem moves through multiple scenes, the “unspeakable events” of the Sabra and Shatila massacre that Jordan insists over and over again “I do not wish to speak about.” Against the language of extermination and bestiality (back with us so explicitly today), she repeatedly marks this refusal so that she can get to something else: “because I need to speak about home / I need to speak about living room.” In the poem’s much-celebrated final stanza, Jordan writes:

I was born a Black woman

and now

I am become a Palestinian

against the relentless laughter of evil

there is less and less living room

and where are my loved ones?

It is time to make our way home.15

The poem is, in the aesthetics and epistemics of Black feminism, anti-identitarian: “It performs an arc of excessive identification on the part of the narrator that defies the protocols that make identitarianisms coherent.”16 Rather than analogically collapse two pregiven subject positions, “Black woman” and “Palestinian,” Jordan moves between the two in the space between birth and becoming. In the grammatically strange construction “I am become” she enacts (in terms Deleuze would no doubt appreciate) an open-ended becoming that nonetheless makes itself accountable to the subject position “Palestinian.” Jordan’s narrator doesn’t simply become Palestinian, she is becoming; a becoming that is itself, at least at that moment, continuous with being in the world as Palestinian—the becoming-Palestinian of the subject. In this sense, though it’s a much stronger intervention than the analogy at work in Deleuze and Sanbar’s exchange, it lines up nicely with Deleuze’s reading of the effect of the Palestinian struggle as “the profusion of possibles at each moment.”

Jordan enacts this movement not by eliding the differences in the contexts but in part by deploying “a practical consciousness of the past and present of divergent but interlocking state racisms (in Israel and the United States) within (neo)colonial capitalism.”17 The poem’s convergence between subject positions and experiences of domestic and imperial violence doesn’t mean these become indistinct—indeed, elsewhere Jordan repeatedly confronts her own complicities in imperial violence as an American taxpayer—but it does mean an insistence on both seeing and making their connection.18 In a later 1984 essay she wrote called “Life After Lebanon,” Jordan notes that while Israel might remain a “sacrosanct subject” for some, “exempt from rational discussion and dispute,” for others (presumably including herself) “Israel looked a whole lot like yet another country run by whitemen whose militarism tended to produce racist consequences; i.e. the disenfranchisement and subjugation of non-white peoples, peoples not nearly as strong as they.”19 To the exterminatory denial of sanctuary that was the massacre of mainly women and children refugees in their homes in Sabra and Shatila Camps, Jordan replies with a poetics of inhabitation that calls forth what Keith P. Feldman describes as “a relational enactment of home”: “Jordan’s lines evoke the need to breathe into words a convivial space of inhabitation, one made through the compact performance of becoming in the face of dispossession.”20

Jordan, who called Palestine “the moral litmus of her life,” paid a high price for her solidarity.21 Publishers and newspapers refused to work with her, she received death threats, she was excluded from parts of the women’s movement, publicly chastised by the executive director of PEN America, and, predictably, smeared as antisemitic.22 The hounding of Jordan signaled the growing dominance of American Zionism’s ideological project in the early and mid-1980s and its intolerance for critique. This was a period in which the boundaries of the sayable around Palestine and Zionism were much more viciously checked. It became, quite simply, much harder to talk about Palestine. In the same essay, Jordan called Zionism and Palestine “the ultimate taboo.”23 A decade and a half later, Edward W. Said called out Zionism as “quite literally the last taboo in American public life.”24

Jordan’s poem and activism and her subsequent punishment speak to how the question of Palestine has always been caught between presence and absence. Palestine has always lent, and perhaps overlent, itself to analogy and relationality, but it has also just as often been refused that possibility entirely; it has been both overloaded with meaning and denied any meaning at all. Both exception and analogy permeate the social construction of Palestine.

Palestine in Zionism’s Quarantine

None of this is to deny the particularities of the question of Palestine. There is something about the colonization of Palestine that exceeds the grammar we have at our disposal, that often defies easy analogy or straightforward classification. We don’t mean simply in the messy entanglement of Palestine with both Europe’s Jewish question and Europe’s most fetishized of Orientalist imagined geographies. Instead, we stress the reality of a historically late settler colonial project that drew on a whole host of preexisting colonial repertories and relations. John Berger gets at exactly this when he writes, “What has happened and is happening to the land of Palestine and its people is unclassifiable. None of the historical terms such as colonization, annexation, invasion or elimination are precise enough.”25 Yet that our conceptual tools aren’t always sufficient doesn’t really explain why relationality and solidarity with Palestine have been so assiduously policed in the West. Or why the questions of Palestine and Zionism have been for so long the constitutive exclusions of the fields of colonial and postcolonial studies, “systematically out of sight, largely absent from what long remained the canon.”26 Or why the frame of settler colonial studies has been so feverishly resisted in discussions of Zionism.

To come to terms with that is to come to terms with the singular place of Palestine/Zionism in the ordering of the postwar world. The genocidal violence meted out to Palestinians in Gaza in 2023–2024 seems to underline both exactly the enduring vocation of Zionism in this order and its possible unraveling. Not just because the genocide is, by most measures, more radical and extreme than other forms of contemporary state violence, but because it is evidently so much more necessary for what’s left of the global order. Rarely, if ever, has there been a genocide in recent memory so orchestrated, funded, and defended by almost the entirety of the Western liberal-democratic order in unison: “What we are seeing now might be the first advanced late capitalist genocide.”27 The closing of ranks and the near-total fealty of the political and media establishments in the West, with the United States and Germany as the main twin poles of material and ideological support, bespoke a political necessity that set this genocide apart.

The Palestine exception in this sense is but an effect or inverted reflection of Zionism’s place in the postwar Western order. This singular place is not just about the stark function of Israel as the forward base of U.S.-led imperialism in the heart of the Arab world—America’s permanent aircraft carrier in a region integrated into global capitalism precisely through war and militarization. It is also about the fact that insofar as Euro-America’s postwar/post-Holocaust moral order is premised on the embrace of Zionism, then at some level, the West—as a self-ascribed moral-ideological construct—exists only in and through the effective negation of Palestinians. That is, if Zionism and a fetishistic philosemitism (only ever the flipside of antisemitism, as American Christian Zionism always attests) are the civilizational salvage and moral alibi of the post-Holocaust and postcolonial West, then, at some level, it’s clear that the continued and recursive negation of the Palestinians is itself necessary for the very viability of a Western-led moral order. Is the Nakba not arguably the constitutive exclusion of the 1948 Genocide Convention?

For someone like Robert Meister, this exception and its hypocrisy are a core component of the human rights discourse so central to this order, especially in the era after the Cold War: “In post-Holocaust debates about human rights, the violence that Israel uses to defend itself has become a laboratory for the violence that the ‘world community’ (and especially the U.S.) would be obliged to use in protecting an Israel that could not defend itself. The post-Holocaust security of Israel thus stands as the constitutive exception on which twenty-first-century humanitarianism is based.”28 In this formation, Israel is always-already beyond analogy; it is the exception that proves the rule: “Anti-anti-Semitism now meant that Israel would henceforth be conceived neither as a nation like any other nor as a remnant of colonialism. It was, instead, the principal exception to the postcolonial condemnation of racialized states, because an attack against Israel (whether ideological or military) would amount to an attack on the Jews.”29

Zionism functions in this order, then, precisely as exception beyond analogy not just because it allows the West to close the chapter on Nazism and interwar fascism (as an internal aberration only it could diagnose and solve, completely separated from its own colonial histories) but also because it allows it to essentially absolve whiteness by displacing antisemitism onto the Black and brown peoples of the postcolonial world, since anti-antisemitism becomes almost entirely reducible to defending Zionism—what Houria Bouteldja calls the bid “to outsource republican racism.”30 Just, then, as explicit white supremacy and direct colonial rule were delegitimized, Zionism fashioned an exception not only for itself but, by extension, for the liberal-democratic West that incubated and supported it. To put it somewhat schematically: It’s not just that the West makes Zionism possible, but also that Zionism makes the West—as a white civilizational moral order—possible. Just take Germany’s new citizenship law that requires new applicants to declare their belief in the state of Israel’s right to exist, in effect using Zionism as the purportedly antiracist means of racist and racializing discipline aimed at Germany’s nonwhite (and principally Muslim) populations.

This has been integral in the first instance not to the right but to postwar liberalism. It’s easy enough to demonstrate how white nationalists rhetorically incite Zionism as a legitimizing referent (Richard Spencer claiming that all he wants for America is “white Zionism” immediately comes to mind), but this is only possible because of the privileged place that Zionism has in the larger liberal ideological landscape.31 In fact, Zionism has always brought together and exposed the deep elective affinities between liberalism and the right; today in the United States it does the same, moving between, on the one hand, a post–civil rights formation that seeks to salvage Zionism as part of antidiscrimination discourse and, on the other, a protofascist right wing that wields Zionism as part of its explicitly racial and revanchist politics of resentment.32 Such that today, for example, we have ostensibly liberal administrators at universities now categorizing “Zionist” as a protected class or identity, and at the same time we have right-wing political representatives using Zionism as the sledgehammer with which to destroy everything they hate, including the very same post–civil rights architecture weaponized by liberals at precisely those same universities. Zionism in this sense has long exceeded its object. In the United States, it has functioned as a domestic disciplinary tool as much as anything else. It has been, at least since the early 1980s, “the tip of a spear aimed at the heart of a multiracial left,” not coincidentally consistently wielded against Black freedom struggles.33

What this means for Palestinians is that Sanbar was only partially right: It’s not only in the eyes of the settlers that Palestinians had to be made to disappear; “the world” itself in some sense also demanded the same. The figure of the Palestinian might be the last inassimilable remainder in the West. Palestine is held, then, beyond both analogy and relational connection, in a kind of quarantine by Zionism’s exceptional indispensability to the Western-led order. Or in the words of Feldman, it exists in the West in a permanent shadow. In some of his most urgent lines on the subject he writes of Palestine, “The figure that figures the other of political Zionism, its own self-definitional outside, is an animating lacuna of modern Euro-American thought. It is an absence that settler colonialism, racial liberalism, and genocide all persistently demand and produce, that they call into being and deterritorialize, that they banish and abandon.”34

Yet reading these words from our conjuncture today also points to how fast things are changing. It’s precisely the indispensability of Zionism to a creaking U.S.-led imperial order that millions around the world increasingly recognize and refuse, an indispensability so essential that the West is willing to cannibalize and destroy the very international institutions—from international law to human rights discourse—that were so central to its civilizational claims and its ability to legitimize its global interventions. The taboo seems to be crumbling and baby boomer Zionism, insists Darryl Li, is unraveling; it has been brought tumbling down in part not only by the weight of its own contradictions but also by the renewed politics of solidarity taking shape in the imperial core, not least the renewal of Black–Palestinian solidarity.35 This is not always clear at first glance. The forces of reaction are hard at work today: The censorship, repression, smearing, and doxing of Palestine activists, the weaponization of the language of antiracism and discourses of safety, and the shrill dehumanization of Palestinians across the political and media establishments are all at unprecedented levels. But all of this testifies to a vulnerability and weakness in the ideological apparatus more than anything else.

Palestine again sits at the center of a global politics of dissent. The refrain that in the struggle over Gaza hangs part of the fate of the world is no real exaggeration. But what is critical is that this insight has been given concrete shape in the activism and organization on the ground. Building on years of organizing, a global mood and wave of uprising that spans more than a decade, and on long-term crises of capital that have primed the social terrain, Palestine activism has ignited the biggest mobilization of left internationalism and the largest antiwar movement the United States has seen in generations. The fight for Palestine in the imperial core is today key to the very possibility of a genuine internationalist left alternative in the United States. Palestine then has escaped its quarantine to stand in again for a series of struggles—“In our thousands in our millions, we are all Palestinians.” But it does so not simply as analogy or comparison but as a critical link in the chain—and maybe a crack in the armor—of the connected structures of domination. Li is right when he places this mobilization within a growing internationalist historical consciousness in the United States that is much more attuned to the anti-imperialist imperative: “A greater share of the U.S. population than ever before consists of people for whom imperialism, settler colonialism, and racism are not abstractions but forces that have marked our families and even our bodies. We are better positioned not only to identify with Palestinians but also to see how Zionism has disciplined the racial regime under which we all live.”36 What is critical about this moment is precisely the finer appreciation of the connection of the Palestine question to the broader terrain of social struggle. Even more than the “forever wars,” Palestine emerges as key to a coherent reading of the connections between “foreign” and “domestic” political violence, between imperialism and fascism, between colonial genocide and climate catastrophe, between war and poverty, between counterinsurgency and policing, between settler colonialism and racial regimes, between decolonization and abolition.

* * *

Overview of Sections

A recurring voice heard through this issue is June Jordan’s, whose poetry has reignited an internationalist consciousness with Palestine at its center. Her poetics break out of the quarantine of identitarian affirmation or generalized analogy, reflecting the observation Monisha Das Gupta’s offers in her forum essay: “Movements are not akin. Instead, they nurture and proliferate kinship.” Proliferating kinship has also been catalyzed by the vision of a white kite, a ubiquitous fixture of mass protests that have surged globally. The imagery of the kite originates in the poem “If I Must Die” by Refaat Alareer, who was killed in Gaza with his family on December 6, 2023, in an Israeli airstrike. The galvanizing power of Jordan’s and Alareer’s poetry is not only in conveying the interconnectedness of human suffering under colonial domination but also in modeling what it means to see like a poet, to write the future into existence. We agree with Amanda Joyce Hall’s remark that poets are the “supplier of futurity, a part of the arch of revolution.”37 Jordan’s and Alareer’s claim on futurity is the inheritance and method that animates this issue.

The issue’s first set of articles interrogates the spectrum of “transnational warping” and creative insurgency that emerges from colonial, racial, and legal analogy.38 Adam Dahl’s “Palestinian Solidarity and the Limits of Colonial Analogy” offers an eye-opening genealogy of the colonial analogy in Black liberation struggles, extending from the Black Panthers to the contemporary Movement for Black Lives. Dahl carefully elucidates the roots of Black anticolonial identification with Zionism in the twentieth century, homing in on Black Panther leader and self-described Zionist Eldridge Cleaver. In contrast, the Movement for Black Lives reconceptualizes transnational solidarity less on the basis of analogy or identification and instead through the recognition of globally connected structures of colonial domination. Next, in a nuanced account of the distinctive formation of Israeli settler society, Nadeem Karkabi’s essay “On Assimilation Politics in Israel” rethinks the interplay of race and Indigeneity in Israel, offering an important challenge to Patrick Wolfe’s structural account of settler colonialism. He focuses on the “ambiguous assimilation” of the Mizrahim, Arab Jews who were simultaneously racialized and recruited into Israel’s settler population. Highlighting the Indigenizing function of religion in Zionist constructions of ethnicity, nationalism, and culture, Karkabi demonstrates how the unassimilability of Palestinians exceeds a dominant framework of settler colonialism wherein Indigenous peoples are subject to eliminatory tactics of colonial assimilation.

The final two essays emphasize the critical rewards of relational study and transnational solidarity. Bayan Abusneineh’s essay, “‘Who Is Entitled to Bear Children?’: Discourses of Race and Eugenics in the Law of Return,” highlights the pivotal role that eugenic principles play in settler colonial immigration policy. Abusneineh focuses on Israel’s 1950 Law of Return, which grants any Jewish person the right to Israeli citizenship. She places this legislation in dialogue with the U.S. Immigration Act of 1924, which barred immigration from Asian countries and placed quotas on immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe. Probing the racialized, gendered, and ableist construction of desirable national subjects in the United States and Israel, she magnifies the eugenic vision of political Zionism, which aimed to rehabilitate the “morally weak, parasitical, feminine, and without roots” Jew. Through immigration, this feminized diasporic subject could be transformed into a white, muscular Jew whose physical conquest of Palestine would help to construct a “Switzerland in the Middle East.” Rounding out this section is Omar Zahzah’s “‘Love Is Older than Israel’: The Solidarity Poetics of aja monet and Mohammed El-Kurd.” His essay’s focus on the Black–Palestinian transnational solidarity movement theorizes the development of “solidarity poetics” over the last decade. Through a moving reading of Palestinian poet El-Kurd and Caribbean American surrealist blues poet monet, Zahzah traces the revival of internationalist exchange through two poets who speak to one another across disparate geographies to mobilize against the colonial state’s “organizing grammar of ‘security.’”

The next two sections are devoted to the colonial logic of the prison. Under “Works-in-Translation,” we feature writing by and about the late political prisoner Walid Daqqa, a celebrated author and leading figure of Palestinian militancy. Through his novels and political writing, he explores the structural logic of imprisonment as a colonial tactic that “molds consciousness” in both Palestinian and Israeli societies. The essay by Nasser Abourahme, “‘Every Wound Has a Tale’: Consciousness Against the Logic of the Prison,” offers an eloquent appraisal of Daqqa’s prison writing over thirty-eight years until his death, which the Israeli prison hastened through deliberate medical neglect. Among the three translated works included in this section is an excerpt of his most well-known text, “Molding Consciousness: Or the Redefinition of Torture,” translated from Arabic by Nasser Abourahme and May Jayyusi.

This segment is followed by a featured interview, “Looking for Justice: Interview with Hashem Abu Maria of Defense of Children International in Palestine.” The interview was conducted in 2014 by Maryam Kashani on behalf of the Academic and Labor Delegation, who visited the Defense for Children International office in Hebron. Abu Maria elucidates the expansive reach of the colonial carceral system. Intersecting with Walid Daqqa’s reflections on his prison encounter with a preteen prisoner reprinted in this issue (“Uncle, Give Me a Cigarette”), Abu Maria recounts examples of Palestinian children as young as twelve who are routinely detained and tried in military courts. Sadly, six months after this interview, an Israeli sniper killed Abu Maria after a public protest in the West Bank against Israel’s Operation Protective Edge, which killed over 2,300 Gazans and injured thousands more.

“Poetry and Testimony from the Gaza Genocide” compiles poetry, testimonies, and living wills posted on social media by writers who have endured or been martyred by Israel’s ethnic cleansing campaign in Gaza. These works have been made available in English by Passages Through Genocide and Protean Magazine, and we are grateful for their permission to reprint them here. We also feature “Decolonial Futures Lab: Hawai‘i 2025 Syllabus,” by Sarah Ihmoud and Ali Musleh. This dynamic syllabus approaches Palestine and Hawai‘i as laboratories for decolonial futures, connecting movement-building organizations, collaborative fieldwork with Indigenous communities, and interdisciplinary critical theory.

Closing the issue is a forum that features a stunning set of responses to Cynthia G. Franklin’s monograph Narrating Humanity: Life Writing and Movement Politics from Palestine to Mauna Kea, published by Fordham University Press in 2023.

With essays by Lisa Cohen, Monisha Das Gupta, Maryam S. Griffin, Jennifer Kelly, and Fred Moten and a response by Franklin, these contributions get to the heart of the book’s interventions into the colonial circumscription of the “human,” a concept that “we cannot theorize away” despite its many shortcomings.39 Fred Moten identifies as one of the book’s signal achievements the way it “shifts our understanding such that the human is less an exalted identity and more a bloody battleground, a terrible obligation, and a set of hard-won chances.”

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We conclude with deep appreciation to the many people who helped to make this special issue possible. The issue was conceptualized before Operation Al-Aqsa Flood on October 7, 2023, and not everything went as planned as we adapted to the exigencies of the expanding war. A number of our contributors were called to redirect their time to organizing efforts on campuses and in communities. We recognize their sacrifice and commend their commitment to a movement that has been the target of such disproportionate repression and violence.

Many of the guiding questions and early conceptualizations of this issue are indebted to conversations with Rana Barakat, whose scholarship and activism have been a source of ongoing inspiration. Thanks also go to Lila Sharif for sharing her valuable time and wisdom in the early stages of the issue’s development. We are likewise indebted to members of the Critical Ethnic Studies editorial collective: Neel Ahuja, Neda Atanasoski, Christine Hong, Alyosha Goldstein, and Rana Jaleel. We are humbled by the collective’s commitment to scholar-activism and movement politics. It certainly goes without saying that this issue would not have been realized without the expertise and professionalism of three amazingly talented managing editors: Jane Komori, Danielle LaPlace, and Aisha Matthews. Each oversaw a distinct phase of the issue’s development, and we are grateful to them for keeping us on task and for overseeing a thousand moving pieces. Our heartfelt gratitude also goes to the peer reviewers, whose indispensable feedback helped to fine-tune each contributor’s arguments. Finally, we extend special thanks to artist Rafat Asad for permission to use his painting Unnatural Landscape, as well as MERIP, the family of Refaat Alareer, the Al Jazeera Centre for Studies, Protean Magazine, and Passages Through Genocide for their copyright permission.

We dedicate this issue to the people of Gaza.

Nasser Abourahme is a writer and teacher and currently assistant professor of Middle Eastern and North African studies at Bowdoin College. He’s the author of The Time Beneath the Concrete: Palestine Between Camp and Colony, forthcoming with Duke University Press in 2025.

Iyko Day is Elizabeth C. Small Professor and Chair of English and affiliated faculty in the Department of Critical Race and Political Economy at Mount Holyoke College. She is also a faculty member and former cochair of the Five College Asian/Pacific/American Studies Program. Day is the author of Alien Capital: Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capitalism (Duke University Press, 2016). She currently coedits the book series Critical Race, Indigeneity, and Relationality for Temple University Press and is a member of the Critical Ethnic Studies journal editorial collective.

Notes

1. 1. Gustavo Petro, “President Petro: The Unleash of Genocide and Barbarism on the Palestinian People Is What Awaits the Exodus of the Peoples of the South Unleashed by the Climate Crisis,” Statement of the President of the Republic of Colombia, December 1, 2023, at the COP28 High Level Segment National Statements Opening, available at Presidencia de la República, https://www.presidencia.gov.co/prensa/Paginas/President-Petro-The-unleash-of-genocide-and-barbarism-on-the-Palestinian-people-is-what-awaits-the-exodus-231201.aspx.

2. 2. Petro, “President Petro.” The reference to Césaire is of course to Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (Monthly Review Press, 2000).

3. 3. Here it is worth noting that the Israeli prerogative to carry out unchecked genocide with impunity is in effect the same prerogative of the Global North to emit carbon with impunity and build fortified lethal walls to deal with the fallout. Indeed, the genocide brings the two literally together, with reports indicating that “the planet-warming emissions generated by aerial and ground attacks during the first 120 days of the war on Gaza were greater than the annual carbon footprint of 26 of the world’s most climate-vulnerable nations.” See Nina Lakhani, “Revealed: Repairing Israel’s Destruction of Gaza Will Come at Huge Climate Cost,” Guardian, June 6, 2024, https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jun/06/rebuilding-gaza-climate-cost.

4. 4. Petro, “President Petro.”

5. 5. Israa Suliman, “Gaza Writes Story to Standing Rock: Your Story Is Our Story,” Mondoweiss, November 16, 2016, https://mondoweiss.net/2016/11/writes-standing-story/.

6. 6. Norman Finklestein, “Nat Turner in Gaza,” Norman G. Finkelstein (website), October 26, 2023, https://www.normanfinkelstein.com/nat-turner-in-gaza/.

7. 7. Jodi Dean, “Palestine Speaks for Everyone,” Verso Blog, April 9, 2024, https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/palestine-speaks-for-everyone.

8. 8. Dean, “Palestine Speaks for Everyone.”

9. 9. Kanafani quoted in Anni Kanafani, Ghassan Kanafani (Palestine Research Center, 1973), 65.

10. 10. Gilles Deleuze and Elias Sanbar, “The Indians of Palestine,” trans. Timothy S. Murphy, Discourse 20, no. 3 (Fall 1998): 27.

11. 11. Deleuze and Sanbar, “Indians of Palestine,” 29.

12. 12. Deleuze and Sanbar, “Indians of Palestine,” 29.

13. 13. Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (Verso, 2019).

14. 14. Deleuze and Sanbar, “Indians of Palestine,” 27.

15. 15. June Jordan, “Moving Towards Home,” in Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan, ed. Jan Heller Levi and Sara Miles (Copper Canyon Press, 2005), 398.

16. 16. Jodi Melamed, “Making Racialized and Gendered Difference Work for Neoliberal Multiculturalism,” in Strange Affinities: The Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative Racialization, ed. Grace Kyungwon Hong and Roderick A. Ferguson (Duke University Press, 2011), 79.

17. 17. Melamed, “Making Racialized and Gendered Difference,” 80.

18. 18. June Jordan, “Apologies to All the People in Lebanon,” in Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan (Copper Canyon Press, 2005).

19. 19. June Jordan, “Life After Lebanon,” in Some of Us Did Not Die: New and Selected Essays of June Jordan (Basic Civitas Books, 2002), 194.

20. 20. Keith P. Feldman, A Shadow over Palestine: The Imperial Life of Race in America (University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 186.

21. 21. Quoted in Feldman, Shadow over Palestine, 187.

22. 22. Marina Magloire, “Moving Towards Life,” Los Angeles Review of Books, August 7, 2024.

23. 23. Jordan, “Life After Lebanon,” 194.

24. 24. Edward W. Said, “America’s Last Taboo,” New Left Review 6 (November/December 2000): 46–47.

25. 25. John Berger, “Come Closer,” foreword to I Was Born There, I Was Born Here, by Mourid Barghouti (Walker & Company, 2011), xii.

26. 26. Ann Laura Stoler, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times (Duke University Press, 2016), 40.

27. 27. Andreas Malm, “The Destruction of Palestine Is the Destruction of the Earth,” Verso Blog, April 8, 2024, https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/the-destruction-of-palestine-is-the-destruction-of-the-earth.

28. 28. Robert Meister, After Evil: A Politics of Human Rights (Columbia University Press, 2011), ix.

29. 29. Meister, After Evil, 185.

30. 30. Houria Bouteldja, Whites, Jews, and Us: Toward a Politics of Revolutionary Love, trans. Rachel Valinksy (Semiotext(e), 2017), 55.

31. 31. Ali Abunimah, “Neo-Nazi Richard Spencer Says He Turns to Israel ‘for Guidance,’” Electronic Intifada, October 20, 2017, https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/neo-nazi-richard-spencer-says-he-turns-israel-guidance.

32. 32. Darryl Li, “The Rise and Fall of Baby Boomer Zionism,” Hammer & Hope 3 (Spring 2024): https://hammerandhope.org/article/boomer-zionism.

33. 33. Li, “Rise and Fall.”

34. 34. Feldman, “Shadow over Palestine,” 17.

35. 35. Li, “Rise and Fall.”

36. 36. Li, “Rise and Fall.”

37. 37. Amanda Joyce Hall, “June Jordan’s Anti-Apartheid Drafts from South Africa to Palestine,” Funambulist 52 (2024): 10.

38. 38. Lisa Yoneyama, Cold War Ruins: Transpacific Critique of American Justice and Japanese War Crimes (Duke University Press, 2016).

39. 39. Cynthia G. Franklin, Narrating Humanity: Life Writing and Movement Politics from Palestine to Mauna Kea (Fordham University Press, 2023), 1.