On 31 October 2023, as Israel’s horrific bombing campaign on the occupied Gaza Strip entered its fourth week and as its ground incursion into northern Gaza entered its fourth day, a music video was released. The video’s thumbnail picture depicted a red map of historic Palestine with dark skies and smoke billowing behind it. The map was overlain with the word Raj`in (we are returning) in white Arabic script; below it stood silhouetted figures. I started to see the picture every time I opened YouTube. Eventually, I clicked, not sure what to expect.
Rajieen | راجعين
What I saw and heard was a rousing, eight-minute Arabic anthem that reflected discourses of the present moment while also containing refrains from the past. These discourses do not view Palestine primarily as a humanitarian cause but rather as an anti-colonial one.
Produced by Jordanian producer Nasir al-Bashir, “Rajieen,” as it is commonly transliterated, is a collaboration of twenty-five Arab performing artists, each a star in their own right. Palestinian-Jordanian singers Issam al-Najjar and Zayne are joined by artists from Morocco, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Kuwait, all of whom bring a range of musical styles.
Marketed as an updated version of the 1988 pan-Arab hit, “The Arab Dream,” this latest song has struck a chord. Seven weeks after its launch, “Rajieen” has been viewed, in whole or in part, millions of times across various social media platforms and through private messaging apps.
Much of the track is dedicated to memorializing the tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza being slaughtered by Israel’s genocidal war machine. By 20 December, the recorded number of Palestinian deaths in Gaza stood at over 20,000, with nearly 8,000 of them children.
The children of Gaza—comprising about half of the area’s 2.3 million residents—feature prominently in the song; images of Gaza’s children flash regularly across the screen. Egyptian rapper Afroto asks: “What crime did the murdered child commit, who dreamt of only a modest future? And what of the child who survived, only to lose their family?”
But “Rajieen” is not a lamentation. The more I listened to the track, the more I heard echoes of the defiant, anti-colonial Arab discourses that animated much of the twentieth century. Those discourses have consistently upheld the principle of Arab national independence, rejecting Zionism’s exclusionary claims over Palestine as well as the 1917 Balfour declaration that committed the British government to supporting the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine while denying Palestinian Arabs’ national claims.
Early in the track, Tunisian rapper Balti asks, “How can we declare peace when Balfour’s declaration stands?” By naming the Balfour declaration as the opening salvo in this “hundred years’ war on Palestine,” the track affirms the anti-colonial paradigm that has long animated Arab liberatory discourse on Palestine. It also rejects the dominant Western paradigm that seeks to absolve itself of its imperialist sins by positing Israelis and Palestinians as engaged in an interminable ethno-national “conflict.” The song returns the problem of Palestine firmly to its settler-colonial roots.
The “we” in that line is also a declaration that Palestinian political agency lies with the people themselves, not with the Arab governments or the Western-dominated international order. Seventy-five years after 750,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homes during the 1948 Nakba, fifty-six years after Israel’s military occupied the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza Strip, and thirty years after the Oslo Accords revealed the two-state solution to be a chimera, the track affirms that Palestinian refugees and their descendants do not seek permission from hostile imperial powers to return home. Al-Najjar leads the chorus:
The key to my home remains in my heart
And I’m returning with my children in my arms
Even if the whole world stands against me
I am returning, O my country
I am returning.
The refrain is significant. As Asmahan Qarjouli explains in her comparative analysis of “Rajieen” and “The Arab Dream,” unlike the earlier song’s longing hope that Arab governments unify to end the Israeli occupation, “Rajieen” insists that it is the Arab youth themselves who are “united as custodians of the Palestinian cause despite their sense of powerlessness. And that there is no defeat or division, firm in their belief of return.”
By formulating their return through both the singular present progressive tense (“I am returning”) and the plural present progressive tense (“we are returning”), the lyrics also return us to the Arab liberatory discourses of the mid-twentieth century. As I show in Brothers Apart: Palestinian Citizens of Israel and the Arab World (2017), Palestinian cultural producers in the 1950s and ‘60s utilized the principles of politically committed literature (adab al-iltizam) to articulate and popularize anti-colonial discourses that located political agency within individuals, not governments.
Free verse poetry – with its short, rhythmic lines – played a key role in this struggle. Poets would declaim their poems at festivals in front of large crowds; their direct, intimate verses connected them viscerally to the audience, who quickly memorized the poems and shared them with others. The interplay between the “I” and the “we” helped foster a sense of collective spirit, while the poems’ explicit anti-colonial message engendered political mobilization. By eschewing the apolitical aesthetic commonly found in European and North American literary productions at this time, such resistance poetry played a key role in helping spread leftist, anti-colonial consciousness, not only among Palestinians, but among Arabs more broadly.
And what were the contours of this Arab anti-colonial consciousness? As Laure Guiguis explains, the major ideological movements of the period – Marxism, communism, socialism, Baathism, Nasserism, pan-Arab (qawmi) nationalism, nation-state (watani) patriotism, and Third Worldism – all coalesced around a “transregional and even transnational, though diversified, universe of meaning and values,” that was “structured by debates on the best ways to lead the Arab/Palestinian revolution and achieve economic, social, and political emancipation” from Western hegemony.
The transnational aspect of this consciousness also linked Palestine to activists across the Global South at a time when they, too, were fighting to rid themselves of Western colonial and imperial domination. As Palestinian poet Hanna Abu Hanna declared in 1962, “My struggle embraces every struggle / and encompasses the world from pole to pole.”
Some cynics say that such anti-colonial discourse carries little weight in the face of Western military and economic hegemony. But this view ignores the power of discursive frameworks to grant legitimacy to (or withhold legitimacy from) those in power. Imperial regimes have expended much energy on waging discursive battles aimed at legitimizing their rule, from France’s “mission civilisatrice” and Britain’s “White man’s burden” to the US’ “rules-based international order.”
Those discourses have often been animated by racist tropes that depicted non-White populations as incapable of ruling over themselves and untethered to the land targeted for conquest. Proponents of Zionism have likewise deployed anti-Arab racist tropes to try to legitimize the Zionist conquest of land inhabited overwhelmingly by Palestinian Arabs. Following the 1948 Nakba, they mobilized these racist tropes to deny Zionist culpability for the mass expulsions of Palestinian Arabs from their homeland.
Palestinians have long waged a discursive battle against this “Nakba denialism.” Even after the Israeli state destroyed Palestinian villages and replaced their names with Hebrew ones, second- and third-generation Palestinian refugees continue to refer to them by their Arabic names. And they continue to insist upon return.
Today, with some Jewish extremists seeking to destroy the Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem and replace it with a Jewish temple, many Muslims see protecting the Aqsa Mosque as part of this anti-colonial struggle. In “Rajieen,” Libyan singer Fuad Gritli insists, “Al-Aqsa is ours / Even if my enemy erases its name.” Egyptian Trap artist Marwan Moussa vows, “I’m returning again to my land / Al-Aqsa is where I will hold my next prayer.” At a time when Muslims and Christians are frequently barred from accessing their holy sites in Jerusalem and subjected to attacks by Israeli police and Jewish settlers, the “return” here is also a promise of religious emancipation.
Yet “Rajieen” knows that the present moment is about much more than a contested holy site, important though it may be. In the last minute of the track, we see images of the massive, worldwide protests that have been held over the last two months, include that of young American Jews who took over New York’s Grand Central Station on 28 October, demanding an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. As we watch images of these protests flashing across the screen, we hear the refrain, “If I lose my voice, your voices won’t leave,” repeated eight times. It’s a trust that one group of youth is bestowing upon another.
Ultimately, the artists of “Rajieen” insist on returning the Palestine cause to its pan-Arab, anticolonial roots. At the end of the song, as the camera pans across the twenty-five young artists, a phrase appears: “We do not just stand in solidarity with the cause; we are its custodians.” It is a generational call, as young people around the world – and in the US – mobilize in the streets and battle censorship online to champion the Palestinian cause.
If this is truly the anthem of this generation, then despite the war’s horrifying, gut-wrenching toll on Palestinians lives, their liberation and return may indeed be closer than ever before.
Below are early critical reflections from within on the recent upheaval in Israel/Palestine highlighting the disastrous consequences of Hamas’s “boomerang” insurgency, which triggered mass destruction and the deepening of Israel’s apartheid. Articulation of a joint nonviolent struggle is urgently needed for decolonization and justice in our torn land.
The Black Sabbath
The black sabbath of 7 October in southern Israel will be remembered as one of the gravest national shocks ever. Even seven weeks later, the Negev region, from where I write, is engulfed in a state of collective mourning. Hamas’s surprising invasion unleashed mass terrorist killing and horrific, inhumane crimes of extreme cruelty on an unprecedented scale. 7 October was by far the largest day massacre in the history of the century-long conflict, with Hamas murdering and killing over twelve hundred Israelis. This was accompanied by injuring, burning, looting, abusing, and torturing thousands of defenseless civilians. Moreover, over two hundred Israelis, including elderly, women, and young children were kidnapped as hostages against all norms of warfare or human rights. The indiscriminate bombing of Israeli cities by Hamas and Hizballah has continued unabated since 7 October. Hundreds of thousands of Israelis are still displaced.
How can our conceptual optics account for this unprecedented series of brutally violent events? I offer here the optic of a boomerang insurgency, being a doomed attempt to violently rise against an oppressive regime using terrorist methods with little regard to the immense power and intentions of that regime. Boomerang insurgencies are often driven by a messianic belief in complete (religious or national) redemption with scant attention to the huge cost imposed on their own civilian populations.
Such boomerang (some may say suicidal) insurgencies have a long history among rebelling colonized or oppressed nations. We can recall the violent campaigns by groups such as the Chechens in southern Russia, the Kurds in eastern Turkey, and the Tamils in northeastern Sri Lanka—all using terrorist and suicide bombing as key tools in their arsenal.
These insurgencies have typically spawned severe reactions from ruling states using their own version of terrorism, inflicting massive casualties on civilian populations and destroying the just struggle for equality, resources, and/or sovereignty. In all three cases, following a period of armed insurgency, Chechen, Kurdish, and Tamil national movements suffered fatal blows and have not recovered for decades after their suicidal revolts.
Notably, this has often not been the case. Nonviolent campaigns for liberation also have a long history, with legendary leaders such as Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, or Nelson Mandela. Organizations such as the African National Congress (ANC), Irish Republican Army (IRA), the Zapatistas, or the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) became more effective once they laid down their arms or stopped using terroristic methods.
Failed boomerang insurgencies are also well-known by both Jews and Palestinians. Jews recall two rebellions against the mighty Roman empire that led to the ransacking of Jerusalem and the destruction of Jewish nationalism for millennia. The Palestinians, too, recall the Great Revolt of the 1930s that was crushed by the mighty British army, sending Palestinian leadership into exile. The effect of this seriously weakened the Palestinians and contributed to the disaster of the 1948 Nakba.
Deepening Apartheid
The background to Hamas’s insurgency is essential: the story does not start on 7 October. Israel was created in 1948 as an ethnocratic state committed to Jewish supremacy. Palestinians still live under the ongoing consequences of the Nakba—the 1948 ethnic cleansing of large parts of Palestine—and over fifty-six years of military rule, settler colonialism, and blockade in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. They suffer ongoing settler colonization and massive land grabs that saw most Palestinian lands nationalized and settled by Jews. More specifically in Gaza, following the disengagement—Israel’s partial retreat—and the violent 2007 takeover by Hamas, Israel imposed a sixteen-year suffocating siege, lasting until 7 October.
Over the last two decades, mainly under the hawkish leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu, the colonial Israeli regime has de facto annexed the West Bank. In addition, Israel has forced a sharp separation between the West Bank and Gaza and given Hamas’s leadership implicit backing. This prevented the emergence of a united Palestinian leadership. Coupled with discriminatory laws and policies against Palestinian citizens, Israel has established, step-by-step, a de facto apartheid regime bolstering Jewish supremacy and Palestinian fragmentation between River and Sea. This was exemplified in the opening sentence of the “basic principles” of the current Israeli government:
Hamas is not monolithic and enjoys substantial support among Palestinians. It has used a range of social, political, and terrorist tactics over the years. Nonetheless, it has consistently denied Israel’s right to exist and violently opposed any peace or reconciliation. Accordingly, Hamas’s 1988 Charter declared:
Needless to say, destructive violence is consistently employed by Israel. As an occupying and colonizing force, Israel’s main policies vis-à-vis the Palestinians have been framed by a pervasive use of force. It has persistently denied Palestinians basic individual and collective human rights, most notably the right of self-determination and return. Such violence is also highly destructive to the nature, stability and morality of Israeli society as well. Hence, the current asymmetric dialectics of violence rests on long dark histories, and can be likened to a deadly dance, born from the clash of active settler colonialism with Jihadist Islam.
Decolonization
The disaster of 7 October and its horrific boomerang consequences are plain to see. It is hence high time to reflect on the strategy of a violent insurgency with its deadly boomerang effect. The task for Palestinian, Jewish, and international circles supporting peace and Palestinian rights is to rebuild a renewed (preferably joint) Palestinian-Israeli nonviolent decolonization agenda. Such a campaign will resist Israeli apartheid and apply a range of civil, economic, political, and international forces to dismantle the apparatus of supremacy and occupation.
Renewed mobilization will combine political, popular, and moral strategies, and attempt to organize wide circles of support in a way armed resistance and terror are bound to fail. Several movements have already begun this task, including A Land for All, Combatants for Peace, and Standing Together—all joint Palestinian-Jewish movements with small yet growing followings. The task of rebuilding nonviolent campaigns is urgent, so that the dark clouds of 7 October do not cast a paralyzing shadow over the moral and political task of attaining the legitimate rights of all people residing in our dear, torn, and sorry land.
The spirit of that struggle was well articulated by late poet Mahmood Darwish:
Thank you again for the renewed invitation, and I find myself, again, asking you to please accept my apologies – if anything, my rage has been increasingly overwhelming, disorienting, smothering, and I really can’t find the words. And a good voice inside my head keeps warning me: whatever I write about Gaza right now will probably be used against me* and prevent me from entering Israel again in the foreseeable future, to see my relatives and loved ones. That, on top of the paralyzing realization that whatever I write will not save a single Gazan child. I know, we need to always speak out and never let go, even though we know deep down that it’s a “lost cause,” as Edward Said has taught us, but at times the cause seems so lost that words can’t help us find it, and get hold of it again.
I’ll let you know if this state of mind gives me some respite soon.
My best,
a.
* Everything we write
will be used against us
or against those we love.
These are the terms,
take them or leave them.
Poetry never stood a chance
of standing outside history . . .
– Adrienne Rich, “North American Time”
***
5 December 2023
The following is probably the last poem I’ve ever written in Hebrew, some forty years ago, in the wake of the Sabra and Shatila massacre at the outskirts of Beirut, in September 1982. Standing inside the same history, it came back to haunt me in recent weeks, this time in my English translation, as I watch the unfolding genocide in Gaza.
Requiem
Please hold on, until I’m ready. It’ll take some time, some precious
time, and you must be cold out there, no doubt, where you stand.
But both of us, how should I say, must wear the shroud
of patience, I mean especially I. What’d you say?
What’d you say, I say. Never mind. Our hearing
will become acute, as we turn keen ears to
each other’s mutters and moans, as mute time goes by. Sleep I will not give,
nor a single slumber, to mine eyes. As simple as that; no grudge.
For I’ll always stand guard. Cross my heart, I will. Always
on my guard, and never budge. It’ll take some time, as I said, precious time.
But everything, as you know, must come to an end;
and you, how should I say, will stay put, down the road –
a creditor who’s found a spot to collect his debt.
Who’s found a plot, waiting for the dead to rise.
The dead – that would be me. Me, I said. Never mind – you too are hard
to hear sometimes, through all the shrouds. Comes as no surprise. But please,
hush and hold tight. Don’t give up, repeat: don’t give up, if you can.
What’d you say? Don’t you rush. I’ll be right there with you. Here you are.
Late a bit, I have to say, but you must admit – quite a feat for a dead man.
Shatila, Rosh Hashanah, 1982… … and now Gaza, Hanukkah, 2023.
A Palestinian writer and translator of Arabic, Hebrew and English, Antón Shammás is Professor Emeritus of Middle East Literature in the Departments of Comparative Literature and Middle East Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is the author of the Critical Inquiry article “Torture into Affidavit, Dispossession into Poetry: On Translating Palestinian Pain” (2017).
I was born and raised in Kibbutz Kfar Aza, where my father, two siblings, and their families still live (or rather lived until 7 October). When I think about the attack, I think about it as occurring at night, not only because of the darkness of what happened, but because for the last twenty-five years, I have lived in the US. So for me, it started at 11:30 pm with the initial report by my family members that they entered their home-shelter, hearing shootings all around. (my beloved sister-in-law was murdered, the rest of my family survived).
I never went to bed that night, and at the end of the following day, trying to make sense of that which the mind still cannot grasp, one thought kept running in my head, and that was that I finally gained access to the depth of the words of the poets whose poetics have been at the center of my research for many years. Working on Hebrew literature while living in the US, I had always thought that I had an intimate understanding of the poet Avot Yeshurun’s (1904–1992) phrase, “the secret of the Torah of longing,” which he used to describe the pain of longing for his loved ones. But it turned out that I didn’t. Mine was the longing for a place and a community that I could still visit, something that these poets could not do. Having emigrated to Palestine before WWII, they learned of the destruction of their home communities in Europe and the murder of their entire families when they were already in a safe heaven.
I didn’t yet understand the longing for one’s own memories and the pain that such memories could bring. How can one recall the landscape of her childhood when it is tainted by the blood of family members, dear friends, and their own children or grandchildren? I used to tell my friends there that they live where my memories are, and now they, too, do not live (there) any longer. To be sure, I do not mean that what had been done to my childhood community is a Shoah—a word that some of the writers I work on, including Yeshurun, avoided (they used the traditional word Hurban—destruction—instead). But for me, 7 October is the closest I could get to what this generation of writers experienced when they learned of the loss of the world of their childhood and of the atrocities that had been done to their family members and loved ones.
The poet whom I was thinking about when I first realized that Kfar Aza, as I knew it, is gone was Uri Zvi Grinberg (1896–1986), a Yiddish and later Hebrew modernist whose 1951 monumental poetic response to the Holocaust gained a canonic place in the Jewish literary canon. But now that Gazan civilians are killed by the hundreds each day, it is Yeshurun to whom I return. Ever since that horrible night, I have not been able to get back to my new manuscript on Grinberg. Both poets wrote about their loved ones, the agony of losing them, and the world they lived in. Both poets expressed their longing for that world and bore a sense of guilt for leaving their family behind. The two poets lamented the destruction of their home community, but Grinberg’s lamentation is imbued with anger and an urge to take revenge, while Yeshurun never calls for revenge and focuses on the life that was lost rather than the circumstances of their death and those who were responsible for it. Yeshurun blames himself for leaving because he focuses on the pain of longing and his own actions (or lack thereof, such as not answering his mother’s letters) when his family and childhood community were still among the living. In the few poems in which he refers to a collective guilt, it is a collective guilt of an entire generation of young people who, like Yeshurun, left their families and communities in Europe and immigrated to a new land, leaving behind their Jewish tradition, language (that is, Yiddish), and culture:
I left a country, I left a language, I left a people,
I left a city. I left Perlmutters-Jews. I left their language.
I left my father, I left my mother and I left my brothers and my sister.
And I went to the Tel Avivian soil of the Land of Israel, and I took a Tel-Avivian Hebrew.
(December 12, 1988).
Moreover, while for Grinberg, Jewish suffering led to his Zionist and later radical right-wing, semi-fascist ideology that called for shedding blood for the sake of a Hebrew national redemption in the land of Israel, Yeshurun also identified with the pain of the Palestinian victims of the Nakba. He refused to ignore the agony of losing one’s land, home, and community. He viewed instead the loss of his family and the destruction of his hometown as a moral legacy to forever remember this pain and, therefore, never inflict it on others:
וְאַבָּא-אִמָּא, מִן מִלְקוֹחַ
– אֵש-אֵל-רַבְרַבָּא מִלְקָח –
.צִוּוּנוּ יַהְנְדֶס לֹא לִשְכֹּח
.וְעַל פּוֹילִין לֹא לִשְכַּח
[And father-mother
Ordered us from the fire
Not to forget [our] Jewishness
Not to forget [what happened] in Poland. ]
(“Pesach al Kukhim,” 1952).
In his idiosyncratic language (to which a translation cannot do justice), Yeshurun uses the word Yandes, in the Yiddish dialect of his parents, which means Judaism or Jewishness, and embodies a deep moral commitment to do no harm onto others.[1] The notion that his Jewishness obliged him to remember the Holocaust is not exceptional, of course. But for Yeshurun, this memory of the atrocities is important not for the sake of revenge or for preventing them from reoccurring to Jews, but for precluding them from reoccurring to any people, to anyone. Perhaps most important is the moral injunction that he finds in his Jewishness to never become the perpetrators ourselves. In other words, as Jews, we are obliged to never do to others that which had been done to us. It is the legacy of Jewish suffering that calls for empathy for the suffering of others and for moral responsibility to never be on the side that inflicts this pain. Yeshurun, like Grinberg, speaks in the name of the murdered Jews, but while Grinberg cites them as calling for revenge, Yeshurun invokes his poetics to remind his fellow Jews that for traditional Jews, what it means to be a Jew is very different than what is done in their names. Many of the people who were murdered on 7 October were not observant Jews, and their world was very far from the world of traditional Jewish communities. Living right next to Gaza, many of them were peace activists who were not blind to the pain of the Gazans, and in that sense, they had more Yandes—Jewishness—in them than religious nationalists who call for the murder of Palestinian children, women, and the elderly, because they were born on the wrong side of the border. The dead that I lament call us to maintain our Yandes and not kill young children in their names.
There is another reason this call is relevant to me today here in America. In the academic circles of which I am a part, some leftist scholars and intellectuals refuse to see the perpetrators of the 7 October attack for what they are. They cannot bring themselves to acknowledge the humanity and, therefore, the pain and suffering of the innocent victims of the atrocities committed by Hamas. My hope is that both they, as well as those who call to wipe Gaza from the face of the earth, will find in themselves their Yandes-Jewishness, in Yeshurun’s sense of the word, namely, guided by the moral injunction to see the pain of innocent others as they see their own.
Neta Stahl is associate professor of Modern Hebrew Literature and director of the Stulman Program in Jewish Studies at Johns Hopkins University.
[1] For a meticulous discussion of the meaning of Yandes in Yeshurun’s work, see Amos Noy, “Those Who Pass Over,” Te’oriah ve-Bikoret 41 (Summer 2013): 199–221.
In the hours and days following the hideous massacres of 7 October, I did not want to think about history; I simply wanted to find out who was amongst the dead and how they died and then to mourn and to cry. But we do need to at least try to understand how we got to this place, although I don’t believe that historians can provide an exact point zero when and where these crises began nor convey an iota of the pains of a parent who has lost a child.
The Historical Before
Writing history depends on your starting point, and each of these starting points can lead to a different narrative. I start with World War I, when Gaza, which was under Muslim rule since 643, was occupied by the British. Although the entirety of Palestine, and indeed the Middle East, suffered tremendously during the years of the war, Gaza faced massive British attacks beginning on 26 March 1917, with relentless bombardment from air and sea, which devastated the city. The destroyed city and its hinterlands were rebuilt during the years of the British occupation of Palestine in the form of a mandate from the League of Nations, which ended in 1948.[1]
The 1948 War, known in Palestinian history as the Nakba, changed Gaza. As Israel was fighting regular armies from Egypt in the South, Egypt assumed control of a territory known as the Gaza Strip, a small territory 41 km long and 6 to 12 km wide, which included the city of Gaza and neighboring communities such as Beit Hanun, Beit Lahiya, Jebaliya, Dir al-Balakh, Khan Yunis. More importantly, many of the refugees ethnically cleansed from Southern Israel arrived in Gaza, doubling its original population, when 130,000 homeless refugees settled in tents in haphazardly built camps. The Gazans were now isolated from their Palestinian brethren under Israeli and Jordanian control and lived under Egyptian military rule, which severely limited movement outside of the strip. At the same time, the Palestinians in the strip resisted attempts to transfer them to the Sinai; in March 1955 both communists and Muslim Brothers protested such a plan in a series of mass demonstrations.
The third occupation of Gaza occurred in October 1956 by Israel as part of a joint campaign of Israel, the UK, and France to defeat Egypt, whose regime at the time led an anticolonial, Pan-Arab, and Pan African regional movement. Israel had to evacuate the region a few months later due to international pressure, but the war cost Palestinian lives; 275 Palestinians were killed in the protests of Khan Yunis and Rafah, for example.
The fourth, and longest, occupation of Gaza occurred in June 1967, again by Israel, as part of its June 1967 War, during which Israel also occupied the West Bank, the Sinai, and the Golan Heights. From this period onwards, the Gaza Strip’s supply of electricity, water, and basic services were dependent on Israel. The economics of Israel and Gaza Strip became intertwined, with Gazans working as low wage laborers in Israel. Moreover, Israeli illegal settlements were built in the southern region of the strip, which later became known as Gush Katif. The idea, developed by Itzhak Rabin and Yigal Alon, was to split the southern part of the strip from the city of Gaza by populating it with Jews.
Already in the 1950s, Palestinians in the Gaza strip, and those in Jordan and Lebanon, crossed the borders with Israel, attempting to return to fields and homes. Individuals also attacked Israeli civilian and military targets; these individuals were known as fedayeen, namely, individuals engaged in a battle to liberate Palestine who were willing to sacrifice their life for this cause. After Israel’s massive victory in 1967, Palestinians strongly believed that they, rather than Arab states, should take hold of their own fate, which led to the rise of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO, founded in 1964), and several similarly radical organizations; these organizations embraced the ideology of armed struggle, the theory according to which Palestine will be liberated by force. Consequently, they targeted both Israeli soldiers and civilians, who were deemed legitimate targets as part of the Zionist settlement project. Categorized as terrorist organizations in most of the Western world, they forged connections with other groups in the New Left and the Global South. In this period, the slogan “from the river to the sea” came into being, which initially meant the liberation of all of Palestine, allowing only the Jews who lived there before the Zionist settlement project to remain, though the question of whom should remain after decolonization changed over the years. The endgame was envisioned as a secular Palestinian state and, according to some organizations, a liberation of the entire region from its corrupt pro-Western regimes.
The Gaza Strip is surrounded by the Gaza Envelop—that is, Israeli communities—like the Kibbutzim, Nirim, Kfar Azza, Beri, and the city of Sderot. These communities were meant to create facts on the ground before 1948, allowing the future Jewish state to grab more territory; after 1948, the new villages and kibbutzim were meant to protect the border with Egypt. Some of the Ashkenazi (European Jewish) members of the Envelope’s settlements were themselves, or were the descendants of, Jews who escaped Europe in the 1930s and the 1940s. At this point, when states closed their borders to Jews fleeing Nazism, these Jews could either stay in Europe and die, or, if lucky, settle in Palestine. They chose the latter. Other Ashkenazim are, or are descendants of, Holocaust survivors. The people of the city of Sderot, in contrast, are mostly North African. After the creation of the state of Israel, Jewish communities in Arab states found themselves as pawns between the Israeli state who wanted them for its own ideological and demographic concerns, and for Arab states whose ultranationalist elites considered every Jew a Zionist. They could not withhold under these pressures, and many chose to immigrate to Israel. Arab states confiscated their property, and they suffered discrimination in Israel because they were not European Jews. The city of Sderot included first Iranian and Kurdish Jews and then many Moroccan Jews. In the 1990s, Soviet and Ethiopian Jews joined Sderot. The communities by the border suffered tremendously from the attacks of the Fidayeen, and the speech that Moshe Dayan gave in the funeral of a young man killed, mutilated, and dragged to the border became one of the cornerstones of Israeli martyrology.
In 1987, the first Intifada, mostly a series of grassroot protests against Israeli rule in the West Bank and Gaza, broke out. It started in the Gaza strip, in a refugee camp, after four Palestinian workers were killed by an Israeli truck driver. During the Intifada, HAMAS, a new organization that emerged from the Muslim Brotherhood, was founded. Its ideology was different than that of the secular Palestinian organizations. Hamas, whose acronym stands for “the Islamic resistance movement,” appropriated a term essential to the secular organizations, resistance, but redefined it in religious terms. Its goal was to establish a Palestinian Muslim state; its resistance to Zionism and to relinquishing any Palestinian territory to Israel was based on religious principles that a holy territory—Palestine—cannot be given up to non-Muslims. Its charter modeled its approach to Jews not only as settlers but also based that approach on Quranic verses and prophetic traditions about Jewish resistance to the Prophet Muhammad, and it also referred to Zionists as Nazis. While PLO intellectuals theorized about settler colonialism and armed struggle, then, Hamas turned to a religious language.
Gaza strip’s leadership changed once more in Israel’s peace deal with the PLO in 1993, known as the Oslo Agreement, when the PLO was given partial control of some of the strip’s territory. The PLO was now morphed into the Palestinian Authority (PA), an entity that was to run the West Bank and Gaza in coordination with, and under strict supervision of, Israel. I visited Gaza as part of peace groups twice in the 1990s, meeting with educators and community leaders, when some dared to be hopeful that they would be able to build a new city and a new life. What I remember most were the women who worked with children, suffering from ongoing trauma, having witnessed soldiers raiding their homes. Leaving Gaza, I saw elderly men, old enough to be my father, rushing through the Israeli crossing point, trying to catch a bus after a long day of work in Israel. Their hopes were short lived. The disingenuous attempt to create a two state solution led to the Second Intifada, a much more violent outburst against Israeli rule, which ended up in the collapse of the Oslo process and the deadly Israeli invasion of the West Bank. Hamas presented itself in this period as an alternative to an ineffective, subservient, and corrupt PA, and it orchestrated a series of suicide bombings against Israeli civilians in coffeeshops, malls, and especially buses.
The Gaza strip seemingly moved in a positive direction when Israel evacuated all the Gush Katif settlements, leaving full control to the PA in September 2005. In the Legislative elections held in the next year in West Bank and Gaza (January 2006), Hamas won. This victory led to internal conflict within Palestine, at the end of which the PA remained mostly active in the West Bank, while the Gaza Strip was governed by Hamas. This phase started what is known as the Siege of Gaza. Israel argued that it could not have a ruthless terrorist organization at its borders, and, with Egypt, it prevented exit and entry of peoples and goods to Gaza from land, sea, and air, allowing movement through three crossings.
The Immediate Before
The years of siege created incredible devastation in the strip. After the end of the second intifada, Hamas stopped using suicide bombing as its main weapon and turned to using Qassam rockets turned to Israel, most prominently the Gaza Envelope, rendering the lives of its denizens very difficult. The truces between Israel and Hamas were broken again and again, leading to Israeli military operations (mostly from air), especially following the kidnapping of soldiers and settlers, which devastated the strip. One of the deadliest, in 2014, resulted in 2,310 dead Palestinians. Although isolated since 1948, Gaza was always part of a broader Palestinian community, and Hamas itself linked its attacks on soldiers and civilians to developments in the West Bank and especially to the fate of the al-Aqsa Mosque. In 2018–2019, Gaza orchestrated a series of demonstrations known as the Great March of Return, where they marched towards the border wall, demanding the end of the blockade.
On 29 December 2022, the thirty-seventh Israeli government was sworn in, the sixth government led by Benjamin Netanyahu. After a decade of unstable governments and ongoing elections, Netanyahu, who faced several corruption charges in the Israeli courts, was finally able to form a rightwing government that included, and essentially whitewashed, the most radical Jewish supremacists. Palestinians and Israelis do not agree on much these days, but there is a veritable consensus that this government played a role in the present disaster. The rightwing government strove to curb the powers of the supreme court. Many of the rightwing coalition members cited the supreme court’s support of the disengagement from the Gaza Strip and the evacuation of the Gush Katif settlements as main rationales for distrusting the legal system. Key ministers, themselves West Bank settlers, such as the ministers of finance, were involved in attempts to stop the disengagement from Gaza. The mass demonstrations against the government’s legal “reforms” engulfed most of Israel. During the protests, however, hundreds of Jewish intellectuals, including many liberal Zionists, signed the “The Elephant in the Room” petition, calling attention to the direct link between Israel’s attack on the judiciary and its illegal occupation of Palestinians, which many of the protesters ignored. The protests, however, reached the Israeli military, with soldiers, pilots, and officers on reserve declaring that they would not serve.
Netanyahu, moreover, was in support of the siege and the “weak Hamas” policy. He believed that allowing humanitarian aid and the entry of workers from Gaza to Israel, while maintaining the blockade, would be the best strategy to avoid negotiating the future of settlements or ever reaching a two-state solution. Hamas, he believed, was a terrorist organization which would receive no global recognition and would be fearful of Israeli attacks, and the weak PA in the West Bank would be unable to enforce any unity between itself and Gaza, let alone a unity with Palestinians who are Israeli citizens. What Israelis and Palestinians, for very different reasons, are asking themselves today, however, is how on earth Netanyahu, the self-proclaimed expert on security and terrorism, did not perceive that an organization that calls itself the Islamic resistance movement, which orchestrated some of the deadliest attacks on Israeli citizens in recent years, would yield to these conditions? Worse yet, Netanyahu was cautioned by several bodies, including Israeli intelligence officers, that Hamas realized the weakness of the state and would attack; days before 7 October, female soldiers watching the border warned their commanders of suspicious activities, but they received no response. Most died in the attacks.
Another front that Netanyahu lost was the Jewish American Diaspora, although the US is a stanch supporter of Israel in this war and many Jewish communities stand by its side. During the Trump administration, Netanyahu was able to win significant achievements, such as US recognition of Israel’s status in the Golan Heights and Jerusalem. Israel’s successful normalization efforts under the American umbrella, Netanyahu believed, would make the Palestinian Question irrelevant. Once Netanyahu acknowledged the results of the 2020 elections, however, Trump was quick to denounce him. Nevertheless, Netanyahu’s support of Trump, while American Jews suffered from anti-Semitism and white nationalism under his administration and Netanyahu’s allegiance with Republican and evangelical groups, distanced Democratic and especially progressive Jews from Israel, while Palestinian activists created coalitions with progressives at the very same time.
The After?
Two weeks ago, I was happy, for a first time after weeks, to see a pause, a moment when the bombing temporarily stopped, when Hamas released hostages, and Israel freed Palestinian prisoners. I think this process should continue immediately. I don’t think that saving human lives is a form of defeatism; it is an ethical obligation. A significant part of my research deals with Jews in Arab states, and, as such, I’m in contact with both Israeli and Arab scholars. When I ask them how they are, the answer they mostly provide is khara, the Arabic and Hebrew word for “shit.” We are all depressed and anxious about the future. In October, my Israeli friends and colleagues spent their time between Shivas, memorials, and attending to the needs of internal Israeli refugees as government services collapsed. My West Bank friends and colleagues are petrified from settler violence, which increased dramatically in recent months. The Palestinian Israeli citizens are afraid to speak. The Gazans don’t know if their family members will survive. For many Arabs, this war triggers other painful memories of siege and aerial bombardment, from the American occupation of Iraq to the Syrian Civil War.
I am a descendent of Zionist settlers in mandatory Palestine. My paternal grandfather tried desperately to enter the US but was denied entry. He immigrated from Belorussia to Cuba, trying to make his way illegally to the US, and was arrested and deported. When offered the choice between death in Belorussia (the fate faced by most of his family members after Nazi occupation) or settlement, he chose to settle. I strongly believe that our tragic lot should not have come at the expense of the Palestinian indigenous population, and these horrible sixty six days will not shatter this belief. In the long run, the solution for this century-old conflict lies in the principles for democracy, equality, and justice. For all.
Orit Bashkin is the Mabel Greene Myers Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History and a coeditor of Critical Inquiry.
I would like to focus on some concerns I have as a feminist scholar with close personal connections to Palestinian feminist colleagues.[1] Their situations and their insights have helped me see aspects of the dynamics now at work in the devastating human nightmare unfolding in Gaza.
What is perhaps most distinctive about our current moment is that the seventy-five years of Palestinian dispossession and subjection to genocidal violence is happening in real time and on camera. There’s nothing new in Israeli aims to force Palestinians to accept their subjugation or to expel them. But the intensity and visibility are unprecedented. In the past, those supporting Israeli rule tried to organize their debates around disputes about facts—who started what, who did what, who refused what. But they cannot now dispute the scale of the deaths, injuries, deprivations, and displacements. So, they have to try to frame the issues in ways that distract us from what we are seeing. I’ll give just two examples that have shown this tactic starkly.
First, I want to discuss the reaction of the heads of the Hebrew University in Jeruslaem (HUJI) to a public letter signed by Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, a Palestinian colleague with whom I worked for years and collaborated recently on The Cunning of Gender Violence: Geopolitics and Feminism (2023). Shalhoub-Kevorkian is a chaired professor of law and social work at HUJI and a brilliant and accomplished scholar, one of only a handful of tenured Palestinian women in the top ranks of the Israeli academy.
On 26 October, she signed the public letter “Childhood Researchers and Students Call for Immediate Ceasefire in Gaza.” She speaks as an expert and the author of, most recently, Incarcerated Childhood and the Politics of Unchilding (2019). She is also a therapist, social worker, feminist antiviolence activist, consummate ethnographer, and a sophisticated theorist of the effects of militarization and securitization on women and on children. The open letter that has by now garnered over two thousand signatures from experts on childhood is about the devastating effects on children of the Israeli bombardment of Gaza, with arms provided by Western powers; the forced evacuation of over a million people by the Israeli Defense Forces; and the denial of food, water, and fuel by the Israeli state. The letter placed this in the framework of seventy-five years of settler-colonial occupation of Palestine and seventeen years in which Gaza has been little more than an open-air prison. The letter points out that children are losing their lives, their futures, and their ability to breathe.
I want to point out that they refused to accept the open letter’s framing of the bombardment and ground incursion as a genocidal war, calling it an “appalling claim regarding the extermination of a nation that Israel is allegedly committing”; and they denied as “absurd” the by now well-documented history of the colonization of Palestine and the effects of the Nakba (catastrophe) in 1948 and the ongoing settler colonial expansion and rule through law, prisons, and violent appropriation in the years that followed, including the present; and they were silent on the substance or content of the letter, which was, after all, about children and the traumatic and inhumane debilitation of children’s lives by war. They objected not because of the facts she had described about what was happening to the people of Gaza but because of the way the letter framed the ongoing events. They objected to the framing because they could not dispute the facts. It was intolerable for them to see the victimization of children and their mothers and uncles and aunts; so, they called instead for the resignation of a courageous, brilliant, and internationally recognized feminist member of their faculty.
They threatened not just Professor Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s dignity and livelihood but her personal safety. She feared arrest. She hid in her apartment. She still does not know whether she will be teaching when HUJI reopens. This story matters to me not just because she is a colleague and friend but because one of the most important things she taught me while we worked together on our book on gender violence is that we must attend to how violence is framed. The final paragraph of our introduction offered some guidelines: “Untangling the multiple entwined and layered forms of violence that devastate the lives—physical, social, and psychic—of so many around the world is a first step to resisting the selectivity of the violences that are made visible, the willed blindness to ‘collateral’ harms, and the suspension of judgment about the complex political interests at stake in the worlds we inhabit” (p. 38). We urged the reframing of an important feminist agenda to widen the definitions of what constitutes violence and what violence matters. What happened to Shalhoub-Kevorkian is significant for the way it reveals the power of framing.
Anti-Semitism is about who one is; anti-Zionism is about a political project. The two should not be confused. But Zioness confuses them deliberately. It is sad to see a feminist organization that worked on progressive issues like reproductive rights and social justice capitulating to this kind of framing of reality. When they called on their members to go out and march, their cause was the return of the hostages. It was not for a ceasefire that would be good for everyone, including those being held. They did not advocate an end to violence, an end to militarism, an end to war. But militarism and war, and the ways they destroy lives and families everywhere, have long been core feminist issues, issues that Professor Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian risked so much to highlight in the letter on children that she signed.
I have been truly moved over these last two months by the visible leadership of feminists, women, and the LGBTQ+ community in their calls for ceasefire and their charges of genocidal violence. At marches and rallies, in actions around the country, I see how they have learned to shout through bullhorns, determined to keep attention focused on what we are all seeing with our own eyes. They are naming the existential conditions under which Palestinians have been forced to live and die, whether under bombardment or scattered, expelled, and dispossessed. They insist that history did not begin on 7 October. My grandmother, my father, my uncles and aunts, and some of my oldest cousins were forced into exile. My friends and colleagues who stayed, whether in ’48 Palestine or internally displaced in the West Bank or Gaza, have been subjected to the harsh rule of the Zionist project of the Israeli security state. The students and activists have refused to be silenced, and I consider this the kind of feminism I want to stand with and the kind of feminism that Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian models for us—a feminism that embraces humanity.
Lila Abu-Lughod is the Joseph L. Buttenweiser Professor of Social Science at Columbia University in the Department of Anthropology and the Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender. She studies cultural forms from poetry to media and writes on the politics of representation, gender, nationalism, and women’s rights discourses. She is the author of the Critical Inquiry article “Imagining Palestine’s Alter-Natives: Settler Colonialism and Museum Politics” (2020).
[1] The following short essay was originally written for the faculty panel “On Feminism and Palestine” organized at Columbia University on 4 December 2023.
This series includes entries by members of our scholarly community on the War in Gaza. CI has a long history of theorizing questions related to settlement, racism, colonialism, postcolonialism, and antisemitism in Palestine/Israel and elsewhere in the world. Over the years we have published articles by Edward Said, Aamir Mufti, Lila Abu Lughod, Ann Laura Stoler and other scholars on these themes. Our commentators might not agree with one another, but we offer this platform as a call against the culture of academic silencing, bullying, and doxxing and as a way of informing ourselves, and others, about the conflict, its contexts, and its meanings.
In the Moment 