The Right to Exist
Liberation from Annihilation
Rana Issa
The October 7 war is not the first Israeli war against Gaza or the Palestinians. Nor is Israel the only state in the Middle East that terrorizes an entire population while Western countries abet it or look the other way. When I witness how Israeli soldiers strip civilian men and boys to their underwear, rape and violate women and girls in captivity, and how people in Gaza are killed, maimed, traumatized, and displaced from their land, I recall how Bashar al-Assad persists in brutalizing Syria's population and has managed to displace half of them to a precarious life as refugees. Through war crimes and genocide, civilian populations are subdued, impoverished, and expelled, so that their properties and livelihoods are more easily annexed.
Genocides are not events. Rather, they are state policies, implemented daily through atrocious violence until the desired reduction of a certain population is achieved. The desired effects of the Holocaust took four years to carry out, and the various pogroms against Eastern European Jewry were up to two years long, repeated every few years, until the Jews were purged from their original homelands in the Russian empire. The duration of genocidal wars depends on several factors, including the demographic size of the people that the state wishes to eliminate from its body politic, the collaboration of a few leaders nominally providing official representation of the genocided, the genocidal state’s military capability to act swiftly and effectively, and finally the nature of the regional and international response to the crime.
As a writer committed to resisting injustice, I am often faced with the limitations of the written word. In hard times, I face the impossibility of articulating my existential despair. I find courage to write from knowing that our silence serves them: those who now attempt to muffle our voices and our demand to respect Palestinian rights. They censor, erase, and apply institutional violence. Our words cannot stop a genocide, our hands are always empty, yet German politicians scramble to punish pro-Palestinian protest and the American congress summons heads of universities to testify over charges of antisemitism. Far-right political parties have taken power in several European countries, and curtail the exercise of free speech and assembly just as the neoliberal face of the US has done since the beginning of this war. The October 7 war has made blatant for all that democracy and freedom of expression are no longer protected values the West guarantees. In this atmosphere, Palestine has emerged as a prism that magnifies colonial interests and racist policies of the white-on-top Western establishment.
“Palestine has emerged as a prism that magnifies colonial interests and racist policies of the white-on-top Western establishment.”
The war has taken a toll not only on those who it victimizes, kills, maims, and orphans, but also those of us who witness its destruction. The grief that swells in our hearts is debilitating, yet the ongoing genocide waits for no one. It goes on killing and reducing Palestinian lives to ash and rubble.
I assume that many people battle with their grief like me. Many days I spend watching the genocide live, paralyzed by horror at what I am witnessing. Since the war began, I took to calling my aunt in Gaza. Over the years, due to the impossibility of meeting, I hardly spoke to her. Only when I happen to walk in on my mother on a phone call with her do I exchange a few polite words with this woman, whom I loved very much until contact between our families became almost impossible. She moved to Gaza following the Oslo Peace Accords. The first few times I called her after the war began, she shared with me what conditions they suffer. By the fifth call she said to me, Rana, I hate to complain, I know you love me, but I have no good news to share. Khalas, I will send your mother a message every day to tell her that we are still alive. You don’t have to call anymore my dear.
I don’t call. Sometimes the guilt overpowers me, and I call. Someone in her extended family responds and tells me she is sleeping. I didn’t call when I heard the news of a planned ground invasion of Rafah, where she has taken refuge (for the fifth time since she left her home in Beit Hanoun in the early weeks of the war) with her family. I call my mother now instead to ask about her. Mother curses the day her sister moved to Gaza after the false promises of Oslo. My aunt, who underwent open heart surgery three months before the war began, has now contracted Covid. And the diabetes medicine has run out. Three of my cousins as well as my aunt suffer from the condition. The siege—with its continuous exposure to war and violence as well as poor nutrition—has made diabetes epidemic (currently 33% of the population suffer from the condition, a 35% increase in twenty years) among the people of Gaza. We fear the worst.
The impulse to search for meaning in times of disaster fortifies me a little and focuses my temporal orientation on the future, a future where our desire for liberation triumphs over our present annihilation. In the time of genocide, reading is an act of mourning, a journey into the conditions that have given rise to our pain. Reading separates feeling loss from the feeling of being lost. Books I read help me articulate the following question: what does it really mean when Palestinians are asked to recognize Israel's right to exist while they themselves are murdered and brutalized on live television? Who and what has the right to exist in historical Palestine today and in the future? By seeking a thorough knowledge of the truth, we can honor those who suffer and die. I have experienced the transformative power of words, both in this war and all the other wars I have witnessed. We read to learn, and to change our way of thinking. We read to find one another, for together we can work through the horrors of the present and collectively shape the path to change. We read to resist our death, to grieve our losses, and to stand determined to face our exterminators, asserting our rights in this land and in this world.
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"The state of Israel is a segregationist political project." Thus argue Marcelo Svirsky and Ronnen Ben-Arie in their historical and theoretical book From Shared Life to Co-Resistance in Historic Palestine. Reading through sources from Ottoman Palestine and other Arab regions, they show how Arab Jews lived together with Muslim and Christian Arabs in a state of organic and neighborly coexistence which ended when European Jews began to pour into Palestine after the late 1800s. The European newcomers who immigrated to Palestine shared a view of the indigenous population (Arab Muslims, Christians, and Jews) that corresponds to the typical colonial discourse on the Orient. The authors cite the Ze'ev Jabotinsky, who in the interwar period agitated for a massive relocation of Jews from Europe to Palestine out of fear of European aggression against the Jewish population in Europe, but also in Palestine, when the refugees turned settlers and aggravated Palestinian farmers who grouped and fought back for their lands. Despite his intention to save their lives, his solution replicated the colonial mindset, whose consciousness did not extend to the Jews, Muslims or Christians already living in Palestine. As he writes: "we came to the land of Israel, firstly for our national comfort, and secondly…to extend the borders of Europe to the Euphrates River." The entire indigenous population was exposed to the colonial violence of those words.
Palestinians of the three faiths in the land resisted Zionism's goal to separate Jews from other Arabs. They called on Jews immigrating from Europe to learn Arabic and get to know the indigenous population. Arab Jews even founded associations and groups against Zionist Judaism and segregation and wrote polemical articles in Arab newspapers against the Zionist invasion of their country. But the "new" Jews used their colonial tools and privileges, both money and military expertise (gained through serving colonial British rule), to enforce segregation and to erase Palestinians from their collective consciousness. This erasure structured the relations between the new Jews and the native inhabitants of the land long before the erection of the apartheid wall against the Palestinians in 2002, and decades earlier than the nakba nakba of 1948.
Palestinian leaders such as Jerusalem mayor Raghib Nashashibi, spoke clearly about European Jews as early as 1914. The problem, he argued, was not that they had immigrated, but that they insisted on separating themselves from the rest of the population and asserting their own superiority. "I do not object to the Ottoman Jews, but to the foreign subjects among them. The Ottoman Jew enjoys the same rights as we do, and if the foreign Jew indeed wishes to get closer to us, he would have adopted Ottoman citizenship and learned the language of the country, so that he would understand us and we would understand him, so that we would all work together for the benefit of the homeland." For Palestinians, throughout a century of struggle against Zionism, claiming rights to the homeland has meant caring for all forms of life that belong to the land. Israel on the other hand has destroyed, ravaged, and led to the extinction of many native populations, not only Palestinians, but also trees, animals, and shared values.
“For Palestinians, throughout a century of struggle against Zionism, claiming rights to the homeland has meant caring for all forms of life that belong to the land.”
Contrary to Israel's political project, Ottoman Palestine was a society that did not discriminate among its citizens and did not discriminate against people for their religious and ethnic affiliation. A liberated Palestine is a political project that seeks to recuperate the cohabitation of earlier times, and make political, legal, and social room for all its citizens: Muslims, Christians, and Jews. But Jews who identify with Israel must wake up from the psychosis they are currently in. We need them on our side. In this war, we were heartened by the solid commitment to anti-Zionism among Jewish people, especially in America and England, but we also have to confront how small such a movement is within Israel. As Israeli human rights lawyer Michael Sfard wrote in Haaretz in 2018: “We are witnessing the flourishing of a Jewish Ku Klux Klan movement.” This flourishing has been recorded by Tel Aviv University to be at 88% of Israeli Jews in support of the ongoing genocide, while 68.9% of them think that while that Gaza ought to be re-occupied by the settler, occupying army.
Our friends among Jews know that our liberation from segregation and the nakba is also their liberation from a national psychosis that constructs the strong, post-Holocaust Jew on our oppression.
Palestinians have been resisting the erasure of their existence brought about by processes of segregation, mass deportation, maiming and massacre for more than 75 years. They have used various means of struggle from both peaceful and armed modes of resistance. Israel’s consistent and singular response has been to crack down in the cruelest means possible. Raw force is their permanent approach against civilians going about their business, peaceful protestors, as well as armed Palestinians. The Israeli Occupation Forces and its affiliates are not known for mercy.
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What is a Palestinian to do?
Hamas was not the first to fly paragliders to fight Israel. On November 25, 1987, the People’s Front for the Liberation of Palestine’s commando faction sailed on paragliders from Lebanon to Israel and killed six Israeli soldiers. Less than two weeks later, the First Intifada broke out. Hamas, too, has its origins in the First Intifada. After October 7, we had to rethink our opinions about Hamas especially because after sixteen years, October 7 made it possible, if for a fleeting moment, for Palestinians, Israelis, and others watching around the world to imagine Gaza breaking free of its siege.
Most Palestinians would not call Hamas a terrorist organization, even if some of us have much to criticize in the Islamist ideology that drives the party. I know what I have read in the media over the years, but I have never seriously tried to understand their point of view. They are Islamists, I am a secularist, a chasm separates us. Tareq Baconi's Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of the Palestinian Resistance and Somdeep Sen's Decolonizing Palestine: Hamas between the Anticolonial and the Postcolonial help readers become more informed about the party. Baconi writes a comprehensive book that follows the development of the party from a social welfare organization partly funded by Israel to the state's strongest opponent in Palestine. As he concretizes this claim, Baconi situates it in the license Hamas originally sought to start The Islamic Association, a social, religious, educational, medical and legal service provider from Israel in 1976. The license was approved, which is often used against the party to claim that it receives funding from the enemy. As Baconi analyzes:
“Ostensibly driven by a policy of noninterference with social Islamic organizations, Israel approved the license and the association was established that same year. Israel had other reasons to support the growth of Islamic movements, particularly in Gaza, as it hoped that cultivating the brotherhood would produce a counterforce that could weaken other Palestinian nationalist movements. The brotherhood’s leadership pragmatically enjoyed this tacit arrangement with Israel and viewed it as a means of expanding its reach and confronting what it disapprovingly viewed as the secular influence of nationalist factions.”
Hamas started as a social welfare organization that later decided to take up arms against Israel. Sen focuses his analysis on the later period of their arms-taking and the paradox that defines Hamas as both a self-governing authority presiding over Gaza since 2006 and an armed liberation movement since the Oslo Accords.
In line with many other liberation movements both in Palestine and elsewhere, Hamas has been labeled a terrorist by Western states. Sen argues that the term is used to deprive Hamas of legitimacy and to legitimize serious war crimes by Israel against Palestinian civilians. Baconi documents how, since the end of the First Intifada and the signing of the Oslo Accords, Hamas has refused to commit to the negotiation process. However, this refusal gave way to their endorsement of the two-state solution when in 2007, Hamas ran for and won the first (and last) elections in Gaza.
Most Palestinians agree that Oslo brought nothing but more erasure, maiming, annexation, segregation, murder. And like most Palestinians, Hamas remains critical of the Oslo Accords, considering it to have entrenched the annexation and settlement state. Sen describes the Oslo Accords as solidifying a post-colonial imaginary that never translated into reality: Palestine is still colonized, and Palestinians are still being annihilated. When Hamas finally accepted the Accords, and won elections in 2007, they became responsible for the self-government of Gaza, which meant submitting to the post-colonial imaginary. Indeed, most Palestinians’ critique of the party is for their performance as a postcolonial authority. But they did not desist from the anticolonial struggle.
Hamas explains its governance of Gaza today through their early beginnings as a social welfare organization, and thus “historically, Hamas has maintained a dual operational profile, both socio-civilian and military, in respect of its liberation struggle.” This approach to governance, even if it succumbs to structures instated by the Oslo Accords, is not unlike what other liberation movements elsewhere have arrived at. Their brutal responses to local challenges to their rule can too be found elsewhere in anticolonial movements. In this way, their deployment of violence is contradictory. On the one hand, Hamas’s deployment of violence interrupts and momentarily unmakes Israeli systems of control and surveillance. Hamas, as Sen argues, is fully aware that their armed resistance is unable to subdue Israel’s supreme military capabilities, yet their violent means strive to capture the attention of Israeli society and foreground Palestine and Palestinians in their consciousness, as well as assert Palestinianness as a vital liberational activity. On the other hand, Hamas’s internal monopoly of arms, and authoritarian approach to the civilian population of Gaza, conceive of Palestinian identity solely through their own ideological positioning and party interests.
Hamas has managed to navigate a very complicated political context since winning the elections against Fatah. Throughout all of Israel's wars (the October 7 war is officially the seventh since 2007), Hamas has presided over Gaza politically, and defended Gaza militarily. It has also had to deal with the major regional political changes that came in the wake of the Arab Spring in 2010, particularly in Syria and Egypt. Although Hamas's political ideology also stems from the Muslim Brotherhood which briefly took power in Egypt after the fall of Mubarak, Gaza’s hope that Egypt would change its policy on the border soon dissipated. When Mohammad Morsi, leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, was elected as Egypt's president, he eased the siege on Gaza that Palestinians have suffered since 2007, and allowed the movement of people and goods. However, after an attack killing 16 Egyptian soldiers (likely to have been perpetrated by a Salafi Islamist group) at the border, things escalated in Egypt. “Reacting to the mass uproar in Egypt, Morsi promptly sealed the Rafah borders and closed the tunnels, sharply overturning Hamas’s hopes for greater openness between Egypt and Gaza under his presidency.”
Events in Syria made the situation even more difficult. Al-Assad committed war crimes against his own people (and against Palestinian refugees living in Syria) with the support of Iran. Hamas at the time was dependent on funding from Iran and political support from Syria. Nevertheless, they chose to celebrate the Syrian liberation struggle and moved their office from Damascus to Doha. Funding from Iran was greatly reduced, and Hamas had to find other regional funding sources to replace its economic and political losses. Among Palestinians however, Hamas was hailed as a principled liberation movement, and their slogan, that they are the true promise, rang true in many ears.
“Israel is a political entity, not a people: a state that brutalizes civilians as Israel does today should not exist.”
Although Hamas has transformed its position and recognized the 1967 border with Israel as a basic principle, Western journalists still accuse the party of wanting to annihilate Israel. This was the case when Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK) journalist Yama Wolasmal conducted an exclusive interview (interview link in English, here starts at min 3) with Hamas spokesman Oussama Hamdan for the evening news on 16 November last year. Wolasmal began with a statement: "According to Israel, Hamas wants to wipe Israel off the map of the world?" Hamdan answers with something that we Palestinians have said time and time again: the reality is that Israel wipes out Palestinians, and cries wolf! In the interview, Wolasmal presents Hamdan with the axiomatic basis for Western solidarity with Israel, namely that the Jewish people and Israel are one and the same, and that Israel has "the right to exist." But Israel is a political entity, not a people: a state that brutalizes civilians as Israel does today should not exist. Many people are capable of separating Israel from people born into the Jewish faith, even if we are not so desperate as some young men in Gaza and the West Bank to take up arms (and cause civilian casualties) in our refusal to accept Israel’s settler colonial reality. We are safe enough in our everyday lives to engage in activism, argumentation, demonstrations, and the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel and Israeli institutions.
In the Case for Sanctions Against Israel, edited by Audrea Lim and featuring a distinguished lineup of Palestinian and international academics, lawyers, activists, and politicians exceeding twenty-seven contributors, various aspects of the BDS campaign are presented, and calls are made for its urgent necessity. Drawing inspiration from the boycott movement in South Africa, the BDS campaign for Palestine seeks to make the occupation so costly for Israel that the entire structure of apartheid becomes untenable. Palestinians, South Africans, and their friends are well aware that “Israel operates a more sophisticated, evolved, and brutal form of apartheid than its South African predecessor,” writes Omar Barghouti. And that “Israel today is more reminiscent of the South Africa of the 1960s, with an impeccable economy that has grown even at times of global economic crisis, and despite (or perhaps thanks to) its being an occupying power,” as Jonathan Pollak elaborates. Ran Greenstein’s analysis of the South African and Palestinian models of oppression reveal the extent to which the Palestinians endure a calamitous form of erasure that their South African brethren were spared. Black South Africans were vital to the labor force and political economy in ways that Palestinians are not, for Israel has rendered Palestinian labor ancillary to state prosperity. What Israelis desire is the land, a land to be rendered without a people or with a transformed demography that ensures the permanence of Israeli dominance. Greenstein suggests that Palestine suffers from “an apartheid of a special type,” an apartheid that is combined with other repeated forms of violence that seeks a final solution for Palestinians.
The Palestinian predicament also finds resonance in the elaborate securitization of the Mexican border with the US. On the border, a highly militarized and brutalizing application of violence on Mexican, Central American, and other international refugees fleeing the consequences of US settler colonial policies and land annexation from Mexico is reminiscent of Israeli border violence and anti-Palestinian immigration policies. Biden’s Freudian slip that referred to Egypt’s collaborator-president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi as the Mexican president ironically expresses these similarities.
Palestinians are sensitive to the difference that makes their condition more menacing than South African apartheid and they are also aware of how their struggle resonates with people who suffer brutalizing policies that impoverish and restrict movement which may not directly fit the apartheid designation. Whereas apartheid is certainly a crime practiced against Palestinians, the oppressive Israeli regime commits other war crimes against Palestinians that are not within apartheid’s legal parameters. Preserving the integrity of the Palestinian struggle, and the conceptual specificity that it presents, enables forms of solidarity and comparative analysis that are wider than the South African precedent. For Palestine to continue to function as a prism and a rallying point for many other struggles, the nakba must be the conceptual prism to designate the Palestinian experience of oppression and the ground for identification between oppressed peoples, whose experience of violence intersects with the tactics and tools used to oppress Palestinians. In an article published after the commencement of the war, Rabea Eghbarieh calls to “consider Palestine through the iterations of Palestinians,” and suggests the nakba as an adequate description of a condition for Palestinian subjugation and erasure. Following Eghbarieh, I suggest the nakba as an affective political process, that also carries liberatoryl potential. The nakba is a structure of experience that captures the world turning upside down for Palestinians as they become refugees, prisoners, and victims of repeated Israeli violence. In the dictionary, I read that the nakba is “a painful calamity that hurts the person in what she holds dear, in possession or in intimates.” This pain is what the Palestinians center in the experience of their predicament, as they lose their place, livelihoods, and lives. Expressions of this pain are what Western states censor and repress in their scramble to support Israel’s claim that its right to exist necessitates the genocide of Gaza.
"Gaza is the metropolis of Palestine, its beating heart." This is what the Egyptian political prisoner Alaa Abdel Fattah writes in You Have Not Yet Been Defeated. Alaa regrets not having escaped from al-Sisi's tyrannical torture prison to Gaza. He writes “if I were free in Gaza instead of locked up in Cairo, I would read books, play with children, eat in the company of women, walk on the beach, work and make a living. I’d teach and I’d learn. I would live and be alive at this moment ... I regret not escaping to Gaza.” I re-read his essay “Palestine on my Mind” and wonder if the news of genocide has reached him and the sixty thousand political prisoners languishing in Egyptian prisons. As he understood, today Gaza is fighting for the rights of all Palestinians and all Arabs. Dismantling the state of Israel also means dismantling authoritarian regimes throughout the Arab region, from Morocco to Syria. It also means struggling against Western colonial power, to push Europe’s borders back to their geographical reality. It means creating a new Palestinian citizen, where religious and ethnic affiliation does not determine political rights. Until Palestine is liberated, I ask how Palestinians are going to work through living with Israelis after this genocide? As the academic and poet Refaat al-Areer, who was recently killed with his entire family, writes: “Sometimes I think that one day we may find it in our hearts to forgive Israeli leaders (when, among other things, occupation ends, apartheid is abolished, justice prevails, equal rights are guaranteed to all, refugees return, and reparations are made), but I do not think we will ever forgive them for not allowing our children to live a normal life.”