content/trigger warnings: discussions of political violence, imperialism, and colonialism; references to police/state violence and delusional thinking; brief depictions of political assassinations; use of ableist language

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This week is what I call Parable of the Sower week: the seven days leading up to July 20, 2024. This is the day that inaugurates the narrative in Octavia E. Butler's Parable of the Sower, as well as the 15th birthday of its protagonist.

I'm what you might call superstitious about things like this, though I don't know if superstitious is the right word, since I consider myself and claim to be something of a clairvoyant.

I have feared for a very long time that something of great import would occur on the 20th, though I try to approach phenomena like clairvoyance, superstition, and serendipity soberly: things of great import occur every day, at every hour, at every moment. At the same time, things of great import don't really “occur” at all; they unfold, over much longer periods of time than a day, and in tandem with all other things, of import or no, in ways that are inextricable from each other.

Nevertheless, because of my particular vantage, I feel and understand the world in moments, hours, days. It's hard for me to not assign importance to the day at the end of this week, or even to the week itself (despite neither “day” nor “week” being particularly coherent temporal groupings anyways).

I often describe my writing as an attempt to intervene in the thorny political economy of art production, but you could just as well describe it as an attempt to democratize clairvoyance. If pressed, I would admit that I consider these projects to be one and the same. In my essay titled “Inca(r)n(t)ation,” I write:

The truth is that everyone is clairvoyant. Those who already know this know also that its source is trauma; trauma is the catalyst for clairvoyance. This is because clairvoyance is the same as hyperempathy; a better word for it may be hypersensitivity. Clairvoyants are sensitive to everything: the tiniest twitches, the most invisible winds. If you allow yourself to feel enough, you will have visions too.

My visions come to me mostly in my dreams, but also in my writing. Earlier this year, I dreamt a long dream—had a long vision—in which I shot a politician. I transcribed what I remembered of the dream after waking, and then turned it into a short story originally titled “Letters,” and later retitled “Los Anaranjados.” The short story follows three economically precarious siblings as they navigate the chaos initiated by a series of disturbing letters, sent out to seemingly random groups of residents of their unnamed metropolis. Each letter urges its recipient to commit a specific act of murder.

The original title was a nod to the power of language, that a city could be thrust into turmoil by a few handwritten words on paper. The change in title came from the speculative conceit that helped me give narrative coherence to my strange and violent vision.

From the story:

The mayor is holding a press conference, where he announces that he’s the one who’s been writing the letters. I push my way to the front of the crowd because I need to hear him speak. I want to understand.

The mayor says his office commissioned a novel law enforcement program, an artificial intelligence that can determine a person’s propensity for murder. It sorted residents into groups coded by color: fresa red, piña yellow, limón green. Of our populace of millions, eleven percent comprised the first group: extremely likely to kill or fatally injure another person. He says the program was defunded but his conscience remained ablaze. He says he illegally obtained the addresses of those flagged as killers—mailed letters to their residences, to goad them into doing what he thought they’d do anyways, what he’d be powerless to stop unless he got them to do it sooner, got them all off the streets and behind bars in one elegant swoop.

He corrects himself. Six elegant swoops.

Doing it all at once would have overwhelmed the postal service, he explains dispassionately. He says he’s sorry for the trouble and the trauma he’s caused. He says he sees now the error of his ways, and he says nothing else because I shoot him in the chest.

I buy a gun after the third letter because I know it will come in handy. I kill him as a matter of self-defense. As the city protecting itself, acting through me.

“Los Anaranjados” is Spanish for “the orange ones.” It's an oblique reference to the idea that, if there are groups of people “extremely likely to kill or fatally injure another person” (the red ones), and groups of people less likely to do so (the yellow and the green ones), there must also be the orange ones: those only extremely likely to kill or fatally injure another person under very specific circumstances.

For example, as a matter of self-defense.

And in a world riven by colonialism, the vast majority of us are in the business of defending ourselves.

As I wrote this part of the story, I left out a small detail: while the mayor talks about the artificial intelligence and its color-coded groupings, he gestures to a screen behind him. On it, a slide from a presentation depicts the three colors the narrator describes: “...fresa red, piña yellow, limón green.” In my mind, it was a pie chart with big, brightly colored slices, but I couldn't think of a good way to write this into the story, for two reasons. The first was that, earlier in the story, I referenced a “colorful infographic” that ran in the city paper, and I simply didn't think it artful to repeat such a detail. The second, more substantive reason was that I felt it took away from the explanation for the letters, which—at this point in the story—is essentially the story's climax. The city and the characters have been shaken up over the course of six rounds of letters, and the mayor's press conference is the big reveal that purportedly explains what they were all about. (Shortly thereafter, this is revealed to be a charade; the press conference was all lies, for reasons not relevant enough to this essay to explain here.)

I worried that cramming too much detail about the presentation into this moment would take away from the climax: the politician's speech, and the narrator's violent reaction.

***

I've followed the national news this week at something of a distance; I always do. I like to know the broad strokes, not because I think that it can tell me much about reality directly, but because what small fraction of information it has chosen to become the quote-unquote “broad strokes”—and how that fraction of information is depicted—can. Sometimes on social media I'll read a post that says people who watch reality TV are preternaturally intelligent because they are avid scholars of human behavior, but the problem with this thesis is that you are never really seeing human behavior on television, reality or otherwise. Reality TV provides insight into the psyches of reality TV producers, whom I definitely consider an interesting bunch to psychoanalyze, but are certainly not a representative slice of humanity writ large.

In the same way, keeping abreast of what most people refer to as quote-unquote “the news” does not provide any insight into what is actually unfolding in the world, but rather gives one insight into the psyches of news producers. And since news producers are beholden to all kinds of mechanisms of colonial power, watching the news is an excellent way to keep tabs on how empire is seeing itself. How it understands itself. How intensely it is rationalizing its contradictions. How close it is to its inevitable implosion.

***

A presidential assassination attempt inaugurated Parable of the Sower week. The assassination target in question wasn't the president at the time of the shooting, though he will likely soon be again, and he wasn't badly injured, nor is there much evidence that the whole affair wasn't staged, which—as is the case with all violence—is more or less irrelevant.

I don't bother to watch the footage save for the highlights that appear on my TikTok feed against my will—I try to engage with quote-unquote “political content” on TikTok as little as possible—and then the short clip posted on the front page of every major U.S. news website. In only one of those clips—one which I see days after the shooting, and the one which catalyzes the bulk of this essay—can you clearly see what was behind the assassination target at the moment of impact.

Photo of the 45th president of the so-called United States emoting at a podium while pointing during one of his political rallies on July 13, 2024, moments before he is shot. He, like the crowd behind him, is white, and dons a red MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN hat. Behind him is a large screen with a white background on which is displayed a compound line graph titled ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION INTO THE US. The bottom layer of the compound line graph is the largest, and is filled in with orange. The graph looks almost like the flame of a fire.

I am a bit taken aback by this, but only insomuch as any clairvoyant can be surprised by the accuracy of their visions. I quickly process the mechanism by which I came to see this before it happened: it is not uncommon for politicians to be framed during political rallies by a screen, or for that screen to display informational graphics like charts. It is not implausible for politicians to be shot during political rallies; in fact, it is more likely for them to be shot there than anywhere else. If you asked a million people to describe in detail what they saw if they carefully imagined a future presidential assassination attempt, the majority would likely include somewhere in their description a screen like the one in the photo and a chart like the one in my dream.

None of this contradicts my understanding of clairvoyance. It only reinforces it.

The thing I am actually taken aback by is how superstitious the assassination target turns out to be. Multiple times after the shooting, he publicly credits the chart for “saving his life,” most recently just yesterday, in a 90-minute speech on the closing night of the Republican National Convention. In the story he tells of his supposed near-death experience—a story he will tell and retell until the day on which death fails to elude him—the chart is the climax.

From his speech:

Behind me, and to the right, was a large screen that was displaying a chart of border crossings under my leadership. The numbers were absolutely amazing. In order to see the chart, I started to, like this, turn to my right, and was ready to begin a little bit further turn, which I’m very lucky I didn’t do, when I heard a loud whizzing sound and felt something hit me really, really hard. On my right ear. I said to myself, “Wow, what was that? It can only be a bullet.”

Photo of the 45th president of the so-called United States speaking at the Republican National Convention on July 18, 2024. He looks tiny behind a small metal podium on a large stage packed with nine differently sized screens that form an arc over him. Behind him is a facsimile of the White House. American flags bookend the stage. All nine screens display the chart depicted in the previous photo.

And again, later in the speech:

But you can see [the] chart that saved my life. That was the chart that saved my life. I said, “Look at, I’m so proud of it.” I think it’s one of the greatest — it was done by the Border Patrol — one of the greatest charts I’ve ever seen. It showed everything, just like that. You know the chart.

Oh, there it is. That’s pretty good. Wow.

***

In April, I receive an $75 scholarship to attend a short seminar on writing. The scholarship is randomly assigned via a lottery, so it is completely by chance that I receive it and attend (though I hope you have come to understand by now that there is no such thing as quote-unquote “chance”).

During the seminar, we undertake a far more practical writing exercise than most: putting together an artist's statement that argues why we deserve this or that share of a pool of funding. For many artists, these statements are what receiving meaningful funding hinges upon. We are constantly asked to explain and justify ourselves. I am no exception, in this regard and every other.

The seminar leader frames the exercise uniquely, and for this, I feel grateful. We are asked to take the strangest and most unpackageable part of our work and to package it up into a tidy, compelling artist's statement, strangeness be damned. At first, I resist my instinct to write about the topics in this essay—most of my time is spent worrying about whether or not I am using my clairvoyance appropriately—until finally I determine an interesting way into the exercise. How do you write about clairvoyance without sounding mad? How do you pitch delusional thinking as an asset?

In the few minutes we are given to produce a draft, I write the following:

As a prophetic writer, I conjure predictive fiction and nonfiction that traces the trajectory of the near-present and far future. The value of this work is its prescience; my readers can learn about the future the way they might learn about history from a textbook. Prophetic work is not uncommon or particularly esoteric in the age of big data: corporations, institutions, and governments regularly use data analysis, a tool of prophetic writing, to make weighty decisions about resource allocation.

Projection and prophecy, after all, are one and the same—equally flawed and equally potent.

***

Time, as it is commonly perceived, is hardly stable. I begin writing this essay on July 14, 2024, at 6:50 PM PST. I write this sentence on July 19, 2024, at 3:30 PM PST. If you read this essay, you will likely experience it in a single sitting, which will of course not correlate at all with the rhythm of the temporal arc over which the essay was written. And if you read it in pieces—or revisit it over and again as weeks, months, or years pass—that experience will not correlate with mine either. Time, as it is commonly conceived of, is inherently disjointed.

In most of the rest of the world, it is already July 20, 2024.

And it will be over 37 hours before July 20, 2024, has officially come to a close.

Looking outwards from so-called “American politics,” the news reports this morning are of a global tech outage across airlines, hospitals, emergency hotlines, retail stores, and more. One outlet refers to it as the most widespread information technology failure in history. I have been preparing for a cyberattack of these proportions—or larger—for some time, forgetting perhaps that the cyberattack already took place, over the course of many decades, carried out by countless attackers: the construction of a way of life in which critical biosocial functions are so reliant on fragile, interconnected digital networks that a bug in an otherwise banal software update can rewrite the trajectories of millions. It rerouted mine. I wouldn't have spent the last five minutes writing this paragraph if the outage had not made its way into the broad strokes of today's English-language news reports. There is no way to know what this paragraph—or the rest of this essay—would have said if it had not occurred.

There is also no way to know what this part of the essay would have said if I knew more about the countless processes that have proceeded, piecemeal, around the world since the start of July 20. Since the start of this week.

The present, as it is commonly perceived, is hardly complete. Reality, as it is commonly conceived of, is inherently disjointed. There is no way to know what today or tomorrow will hold.

I mean, of course, I have some ideas.

I am certain you do too.

length: 5,540 words

content/trigger warnings: discussions of mental health, the medical industrial complex, psychiatric incarceration, suicidal ideation, death, grief, ableism, substance abuse, the biomedicalization of transness, transphobia, hormone therapy, neurodivergence, sterility, settler colonialism, patriarchy, misogyny, cisheterosexism, white supremacy, violence, abuse, and intersexness, written from the perspective of someone who is not intersex; brief references to blood, gore, illness (cancer, dementia), surgery, bombings, murder, and gender dysphoria

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1

Still of Ellen Pompeo as Meredith Grey, a young brown-haired white woman, in the pilot episode of Grey’s Anatomy, in a brightly lit OR. The show’s subtitle reads, “I’m screwed.”

You’ll start watching Grey’s Anatomy because—four years into puberty, at 13—you’re already familiar with imminent death. The blood, the guts, the gore of injury and trauma: it fascinates you more than it upsets you. In a way, you feel at home. A scalpel making its way through someone’s body is the perfect metaphor for how you feel inside.

Plus, you’ve just been accepted into the country’s top-ranked high school. Dr. Webber’s speech in the pilot episode is repeated many times throughout the series, and will repeat in your mind as you navigate a world of incomparable wunderkinds. “Look around you. Say hello to your competition. Eight of you will switch to an easier specialty. Five will crack under the pressure. Two of you will be asked to leave.” This ratio is about right, both at your high school and at the prestigious institutions you’ll all spend four years working to gain entry into. Mostly things like depression and substance abuse will take your peers out. What you accurately diagnose as your alcoholism, and what professionals separately misdiagnose as bipolar disorder, will be the culprits for you.

But then this isn’t House, M.D.; your journey has little to do with the puzzle of diagnosis, or even with the process of treatment.

What matters on Grey’s is emotional interplay—between doctor and patient, doctor and doctor, medical case and personal life, personal life and the desire for so much more.

Desire, ambition, metaphor, melodrama: this is the lifeblood of Grey’s Anatomy.

You’re a brilliant young trans girl.

Of course you eat this up.

Don’t worry if none of this makes sense. At your age, your jumbled trans girl brain—not yet on hormones, but not by choice—can’t comprehend your gender, nor your sexuality, let alone why you, an aspiring creative writer, are so drawn to a show about cutthroat surgical interns. At your age, you mostly just like that the soundtrack is all cute indie music, and that there’s a member of the ensemble cast who’s a sensitive, effeminate buffoon.

Also, that the main character is sad.

Unlike the other main characters of the other shows you watch (the only possible exception here being Courage the Cowardly Dog), the main character of this show looks like she’s always on the verge of tears and is always being forced by her circumstances to hide them. This is new to you, and appealing: it is a joy to see someone on TV who’s as perpetually devastated as you.

8

Still from episode 8 of Grey’s Anatomy: a young white female doctor is telling a concerned-looking white male patient, “I brought the consent forms again.”

When you’re 14 years old is when you’ll start talking to yourself. When you’re 14 is when it’ll become a habit, a survival mechanism. Technically, it’ll keep you away from the thing you need most—a good talk therapist—but then that’s the paradox built into every survival mechanism.

At first, it is a rehearsal. Sitting on the floor of your bedroom closet, rocking back and forth, you’re preparing yourself to meet with a professional, one who will ask you all sorts of questions—hard questions. Abuse is neither simple to endure nor to share, and you can hardly do either. You’re certain your unedited answers would get you uprooted from your life; you need to be able to give the answers the professionals would prefer. You want care, you do—but only the kind you believe you’re capable of surviving.

Your imagination is so vivid that this imagined therapy, undertaken in stolen moments of utter privacy, satisfies your need to be heard. The only person hearing you is you, but you in someone else’s skin: alone in the closet, you don the costume of a caretaker, nodding at yourself with kindness, genuinely invested in your own suffering.

You’ll return to school to take your seat beside future Fulbright scholars, tech giants, Ivy League professors; you’ll watch them ingest the science and engineering curricula that will take them where they want—or have been told to want—to go. Lost in your thoughts at school as often as at home, you’re learning instead the value of roleplay, of acting—of benefiting from a semblance when you lack access to the real thing.

In the penultimate episode of Grey’s Anatomy’s inaugural season, a stubborn patient believes he’s clairvoyant, and is told this is an illness. The show is young, so it employs a silly trope: the patient mysteriously knows things he absolutely shouldn’t, with no logical explanation. It’s a suspension of believability the show won’t pull again without cues clearly indicating, for example, a tumor-induced hallucination.

The so-called clairvoyant does not have a tumor, but he does have an arteriovenous malformation. He puts off surgery partly for fear of death, but his bigger fear is losing his supposed gift.

You’ll put off therapy partly for fear of Child Protective Services, but your bigger fear is losing your supposed gifts. You’ve been marked since age five as “gifted and talented,” and even at 14, you already suspect this refers to something like clairvoyance—an invisible external force dictating the future to you from afar. You’ll contextualize this psychosis with logical explanations, like the vivid imagination of an aspiring writer. Whatever it is that makes you “special” (and you feel so different from everyone else, you build your identity around the idea that you, in fact, are), you don’t want to lose it to the medical industrial complex; to diagnosis and treatment; to talk therapy.

In the show, after much cajoling, the man is talked into having surgery. He wakes up to find his gift survives too.

As will soon become another habit, you’ll refuse to learn the lesson provided.

22

Still from episode 22 of Grey's Anatomy. George O’Malley, a young white male doctor with scraggly hair, is saying, “What, am I just supposed to lie to her?”

The ninth episode of the show leans on another silly trope. Dr. Burke’s supposedly virile friend turns out to be sterile and (surprise!) intersex. Literature has a long tradition of treating so-called sex/gender variation as a plot twist—for the person who’s the supposed variant, for the people around them, or else for the unsuspecting audience. The patient rages the rage of indignation and disgust pioneered and perfected by trans people, but mostly because his sterility indicates that his pregnant wife has had a secret affair.

The 22nd episode does trans rage a bit more justice: the patient is a kid with the killer name of Bex, who looks to the doctors (and presumably the audience) like a moody, tomboyish girl. Bex turns out to be intersex too. Their parents take up too much space for Bex to get to rage; instead, Bex quietly stews, pouring themselves into their comic art. The sensitive, effeminate buffoon’s arc also takes a twist when he defies his superior, refusing to conceal Bex’s diagnosis because, as he empathetically proclaims, Bex just wants to know why they’ve always felt so different. The episode never uses the word “trans,” but it’s implied at the end that Bex will transition, the first thing to happen during their storyline that makes the character smile. (At 32 years old, you’ll rewatch the series for the first time since beginning to transition, and this will be one of many scenes that will make you cry nonstop.)

But if the show’s going to go any further than surprise intersex diagnoses, it’s going to need a reason. (Remember, these episodes are premiering in 2005 and 2006—a veritable century ago in terms of “progressive representation.”) The answer is the most stereotypical plastic surgeon Grey’s Anatomy creator and showrunner Shonda Rhimes can muster: a self-described “man-whore” whom the characters call “McSteamy,” who’s defined by his abs, his jawline, and his propensity for sexually harassing his subordinates. He’s so distasteful, his character’s unforeseeable twist is that, when an out trans person arrives in episode 43 (played by an out trans person, the splendid Alexandra Billings), it’s shocking how kindly he treats her, chastising his colleagues for misgendering her, and respecting all of her demands, even when they run the risk of killing her. This melodramatic plotline leans on one more silly trope: the character turns out to have breast cancer. The episode’s formulation is that what makes her a woman will kill her. Her trans rage is that she’d rather die than stop taking hormones or be forced to put off indefinitely her impending vaginoplasty.

I’m sorry to say that this scenario will someday be more relatable than anyone could possibly bear.

27

Still from episode 22 of Grey's Anatomy. Bex, a white teenager wearing a beanie, looks out at their parents through the gridded rectangle of an exam room window.

“Intersex” is one of many diagnostic categories the medical industrial complex simply cannot handle. “Neurodivergence,” another. Youth, writ large—yet another.

You can replace “the medical industrial complex” here and elsewhere with “Western medicine,” “settler colonial conceptions of health and wellness,” or any number of equally pejorative but accurate phrases.

Your first dealings with the medical industrial complex revolve around your asthma. You’re hospitalized for it for the first time when you’re age 5, or 7, or maybe 8 years old, all of which would be good times for the doctors to ask you about your mental, social, and familial health.

They don’t.

Instead of meeting with a social worker or child psychologist (either of whom would make your life tremendously better or tremendously worse, with no possible in-between), you’ll be sent home with inhalers and a cool little rubberized tube, clear in the middle, cerulean at the ends. You might imagine a pinkish equivalent given to cis girls, but you’d only assume this because the rest of your dealings with the medical industrial complex will be so fucking gendered.

You’ll start seeing mental health professionals when you’re age 19, or 20, or maybe 22 years old (you’ll spend those years so intoxicated, you’ll remember too little, though the uglier truth is it’s maybe psychosomatic—a word/concept you’ll come to consider hopelessly out of touch). For over a decade, you’ll see more therapists than you can count, and almost every single one will be a straight, cisgender white woman. To them, you’ll be something of a sensitive, effeminate buffoon—well, that’s the gender you’ll be performing at the time. (Buffoon can be a gender, though the medical industrial complex has no place on its forms where that could possibly be noted.)

Because they’re cishet white women, and because the stories you’re drawn to up until that age are written by white gay men who portray cishet women as both enviable and irreparably damaged, or else by women of color who portray white women as both malevolent and sympathetic, you’ll simultaneously envy, distrust, pity, and want to heal them—these women who are supposed to be helping you heal (heal your mind, heal your brain, heal your heart; the medical industrial complex doesn’t have a decent metaphor for this; you’ll eventually prefer something like “soul”). You’ll always feel this way when you meet white, or cis, or straight people, which is why you’ll need to avoid them at all costs.

You’re trans. I.e.: you have too much empathy, and yet you have no choice but to conserve it.

Still, these women won’t be the reason you’ll be unable to tell your story.

They simply will not know any better.

Nor, at that point, will you.

By the time you get to therapy, you will have had more access to educational resources than most adults whom you encounter. You’ll have been given the opportunity to familiarize yourself with more theories, more histories, more information and analytical tools than most people on Earth. (This is not an asset: the well-known graph showing that personal happiness plateaus—and, in fact, decreases—beyond a certain threshold of income probably maps one-to-one to formal schooling. Trust your intuition here; people with/earning PhDs do not, on the whole, seem particularly thrilled to be alive.) What this means is that the people who are supposed to help you do not have the capacity, as you do, to detect invisibility—to know the future, to manipulate time and space as a storyteller can.

Heterosexuality is a perceptual cage from which you’ll have already escaped, but it is a cage enclosed by another cage (cisness) enclosed by another cage (whiteness). It will take you decades to escape these and other cages, and still, one foot will remain entangled in the bars—the price of making it out alive at all. When you do finally make it out, you will understand what it is to be gifted and talented. It is to know better, and for this to be a hindrance. Self-awareness, as the Book of Genesis implies, is the original, ultimate prison.

43

Still from episode 43 of Grey's Anatomy. A white male doctor seated across from Donna, a white trans woman, looks down as she tells him, “I've wanted this since I can remember. I've waited forever. I'm not stopping now.”

At 31 years old, you’ll thank God that the parking area for UCLA Beverly Hills Medical Center is underground. It means you’ll only be visible to the public for a short half-block walk, dressed awkwardly in a tight, purple V-neck sweater; a fluttery, ankle-length skirt; your favorite pink New Balance sneakers; your cherry red Ray-Ban eyeglasses, your fingernails painted to match; your face and arms shaved; your lips colored pomegranate by a makeup brand called Fenty (you haven’t heard of Rihanna yet, but you will, later in life, refer to her as our lord and savior), though your lips won’t even be visible under your N95 (you haven’t thought much about pandemics yet, but you will, later in life, whether you want to or not).

Your breasts will be small, your hair short, so to you, you’ll still look like a cis man in dress-up, and not in a good way, despite the string of cis celebrities who are now awarded brand deals and public praise for what would get you pilloried and pariahed in elementary school and junior high. Really, you’ll just look like a crossdresser (or, in your more self-deprecating moments, a brick), but crossdressers (and bricks) still fall under the trans-with-an-asterisk umbrella, and besides, there’s no one way to be trans. Forget this at your peril. Coming out as trans-with-an-asterisk will, thankfully, be the last time you’ll deal with feeling not [insert identity marker here] enough. But this is not yet your concern.

Outside UCLA Beverly Hills Medical Center, your concern will be safety. This is a fucking joke. There are few places safer than the journey to the Center’s esteemed Gender Health Program, cradled by the shell of your partner’s Mazda, your meals at this time in your life assured, your care at this particular place certain to be excellent. There’s a paradox to this, too. Your suicidality will always be entangled with survivor’s guilt. You’ll feel less suicidal, for example, when you start hoarding some of your estradiol, to give to any stranger who wants it, and you’ll feel more suicidal when you realize this isn’t particularly helpful unless you hoard your testosterone blockers too—which you can’t because your body’s not supposed to contain high levels of both hormones at once, and which you won’t because testosterone is what you’re most afraid of (the thing around which, completely irrationally, you feel least safe). As has already become another habit, you fear the things inside you more than anything outside.

This fear is misplaced, of course: there is nothing inherently wrong with testosterone, nor anything especially holy about estrogen either. The fear you will identify is the fear of ill-gotten gains, of the bargain you have made in order to transition.

You will be forced to tell a story, as many trans people must, in order to earn the medical designation of transgender. That story will have needed to include a neatly legible tale of persistent gender dysphoria and, wherever possible, indications that you exhibited signs of the diagnostic criterion at as early an age as possible (you’ll share with your doctors a childhood affinity for American Girl books, and how, when your mother unhelpfully used stickers to relabel them as American Boy books, you understood even then that she wanted you to paper over your idiosyncrasies, when what you wanted instead was affirmation that you were, indeed, an American girl). That story will not have room for facts like that, at my age, you like the look and feel of your beard, particularly the centimeter-length it stays at once you commence your hormone therapy; that you like to wear your old boy clothes sometimes, in an Avril Lavigne, tomboy punk, intersex Bex kind of way, which means you sometimes pass as male (and which is why you cannot wait for your breast augmentation, the clearest sign to any onlooker that they’re not dealing with someone cis); and that you don’t feel particularly strongly about any pronouns and only choose she/her upon transitioning because it seems powerful politically. In truth, if pressed, you’d identify as an imp, the way trans-with-an-asterisk legal scholar and Episcopal priest Pauli Murray did at the end of her/his/their/imp’s life.

The version of your story that omits these things, the version of the story you initially tell: it’s dangerous because it is compelling. Narratives always run the risk of ossifying upon their telling. We don’t yet have adequate technologies for presenting texts as malleable, ever-changing fluids. Whiteness, for example, cannot function without the rigid persistence of stories of superiority; cisheterosexism cannot succeed without the deceptively timeless fable of the nuclear family; colonialism cannot conquer without the infrastructure for disseminating narratives that justify dispossession at all costs.

You, like so many before you, will be tempted to offer up counter-narratives in response, to write the same old stories replacing the people at the center with people like yourself. You will feel the pressure to claim that representation matters, because it will feel good to finally be at the center of things. When you make this awful bargain, you will in the process justify the utility of story as a weapon, as a means for positioning yourself as superior to those whose lives and experiences cannot fit the mold of a story that’s neatly legible—to anyone, but particularly to our proliferation of industrial complexes, medical and otherwise.

You will someday suspect that if every art form were valued equally—if they all offered the same amount of pay—most people would not choose storytelling. Maybe no one would choose it at all. Language is a tool of communication, of interaction. When transmuted into an art performed in silence and solitude, it runs the risk of calcifying, and even the least capable doctor among us knows that calcification, in the wrong place at the wrong time, will lead to certain death.

52

Still from episode 53 of Grey's Anatomy. Meredith Grey lies on a gurney, intubated and surrounded by medical equipment, pale and presumably dead.

Whenever you visit a doctor, there is risk.

Your doctor may fail to diagnose you, may misdiagnose you. They may prescribe the wrong medication, or the incorrect dosage. They will likely ask the wrong questions, fail to consider the appropriate conditions. They are nearly guaranteed to fail to ask you about your home life, about the meaningful parts of your family history that have nothing to do with your internal organs. Even the doctors who are supposed to ask about these things will do it wrong (and you can replace the word “doctors” here with several equally pejorative but accurate phrases).

It is sensible, then, to be afraid. To feel unsafe. Watch enough episodes of Grey’s Anatomyand you will understand how often small amounts of wrong decisions can lead to certain death.

In episodes 25 and 26, Meredith Grey, the show’s titular character, nearly dies while helping surgically remove unexploded ammunition from a patient’s body cavity. Seconds after the explosive device is removed and transferred out of the operating room, it goes off—just a few yards in front of her, launching her in slow motion away from the member of the bomb squad who has become a cloud of pink mist. The ultradramatic two-parter during which this plotline unfolds is responsible for turning the show into a primetime juggernaut, and is bookended by oblique references to Meredith’s suicidality, which lie just beneath the surface of the show. They’re hidden under what looks like, to the casual viewer, the stress of having your abusive mother succumb to Alzheimer’s in a nursing home. (You, suicidal to varying degrees from ages 9 through 31, are not the casual viewer.)

Meredith states, at the beginning of episode 25, that she doesn’t want to go to work because she feels like she’s going to die today, her premonition prompting concerned looks from her friends, all surgeons. These are the kinds of looks you’ll become inured to after receiving them enough times; clairvoyance, since at least the time of Salem, has always been dreadfully suspect.

Still from episode 27 of Grey's Anatomy. Meredith Grey is looking disdainfully at someone off-screen, her eyes flooded with tears.

In the section labelled “27,” you’ll write about your excessive educational privileges, and the resulting curses this lays at your feet. You’ll skip over what actually happens in episode 27 of Grey’s Anatomy: how Meredith’s near-death experience compels her to visit her estranged father, who is at least partially at fault for the abuse Meredith experiences throughout her life at the hands of her emotionally tortured mother, and whom she visits in order to make this clear. In both 27's, someone is being centered at the expense of another—a practice for which there is always an unbearable price.

In episode 52 of Grey’s Anatomy, Meredith is unwell in every sense of the word. Her mother is in the hospital, suddenly lucid and desperate to inflict abuse on anyone who enters her vicinity—particularly Meredith, with whom she is disgusted and disappointed, in part for not having simply let her die and thus sparing her the indignities of dementia. Meredith—distracted and morose, attempting to save a man’s life at the scene of a chaotic mass casualty incident—accidentally falls into the sea. Shonda Rhimes, the show’s creator and the episode’s writer, gives Meredith the opportunity to drown. Meredith elects to take it.

Technically, Meredith dies; her doctors take extreme, extraordinary measures; ultimately, she is miraculously revived. The episode never uses the word “suicidality,” but many characters, including Meredith, finally recognize that it would be appropriate.

Still from episode 53 of Grey's Anatomy. Meredith Grey, in blue scrubs, is looking down and despondent, crying while saying, “I stopped fighting.”

Over the next several episodes, Meredith’s father and his new wife will use the newly clarified depths of her depression as a reasonable excuse to grow closer to her. Their daughter and newborn grandchild were, after all, successfully operated on by Meredith’s friends in episodes 46, 47, and 48. Meredith’s second near-death experience finally grants her a more positive outlook on life, and a chance at building a healthy relationship with her father and his family.

Because of this silly chain of events set in motion seasons prior, when Meredith’s father’s wife can’t stop hiccuping in episode 58, they will opt to visit Meredith’s hospital, where—in episode 59, after some rare but plausible complications—Meredith’s father’s wife will die.

Neither Meredith nor her father will ever be the same.

Over the course of the rest of the series, at the rate of about one episode per season, Meredith’s father will succumb to the bodily toll of alcoholism, of trauma that has ultimately been accumulated over the course of an entire lifetime.

It is possible, perhaps likely, that the preceding does not happen if Meredith does not visit and accost him in episode 27, making their estrangement about her and her alone (forgetting that a parent who abuses a child is just as likely to abuse a spouse). It is possible, perhaps likely, that the preceding does not happen if, in episodes 46 through 48, Meredith does not take the neonatal surgery needed by her father’s child as an opportunity to reconnect, rather than recusing herself as a doctor, or distancing herself as a relative stranger, as would have been ethical and appropriate (but then Meredith does not see things in black and white, hence her surname, and the title/premise of the show). It is possible, perhaps likely, that some or all of the preceding is Meredith’s fault. At least this is how Meredith’s father sees it, giving him a supposedly good reason to drink himself to death.

These kinds of plot arcs make for what we consider a good story. The trajectories of the new century’s most well-received TV shows embody this kind of seamlessness, like a puzzle that can only be put together one way. Every decision affects everything that comes after. Sometimes these shows are called “TV novels.” They employ the literary technique of making every plot point matter, a departure from a time when continuity on TV was an afterthought rather than the norm. On TV, as in novels, it effectively clarifies for the audience characters’ development over time. It’s effective because it’s how we perceive our lives.

Still from episode 52 of Grey's Anatomy. Meredith Grey is drowning, barely able to keep her head above water.

When you write this, you’ll be in episode 52 yourself. The metaphor you’ll use to describe your transition is the murder of your body’s prior occupant and his replacement with the woman you’ll become. You’ll give that man the opportunity to drown, then you’ll make him take it.

Other things will be out of order.

You’ll reconnect with your father before the quasi-death you’ll think of your gender transition as, in which you kill your father’s son and birth him a daughter.

You will, upon reconnection, make your estrangement all about you, thinking him at least partially at fault for the abuse you experience throughout your life at the hands of your emotionally tortured mother, but forgetting that a parent who abuses a child is just as likely to abuse a spouse.

Your mother will, at this point in your life, have become estranged too, so she will not yet have succumbed to dementia, at least as far as you will be aware of.

As for your father’s wife, she will not be dead; nor will he have blamed you for her death; nor will he have subsequently spiraled into alcoholism.

But if or when these things do happen (because they are possible, perhaps even likely), you will have remained at such a frustrating emotional distance that you will blame yourself—for being incapable of imparting whatever it is you possess, for being unwilling to listen to them tell their own stories, for failing to recognize that the trauma they’ve accumulated over their lifetimes has taken a lethal toll on their bodies. There are no doctors they would be willing to see capable of alleviating or addressing their pain. Sometimes what stands between injury and health is the decision-making of a relative stranger.

Still from episode 52 of Grey's Anatomy. Meredith Grey, mid-drowning, looks resigned. The show's subtitle reads, “There's more I have to say.”

It is always easy to talk about how you were failed. It is much harder to talk about how you failed others. There is no amount of pain large enough to make self-reflection a desirable alternative. You will hurt people, harm them, fail them, wrong them. You will too many times prioritize the inert, immature ideas in your writing over the living, breathing organisms in your orbit who need more than to simply watch you work. You will condemn those who care about you to emotional destitution because you will think your gifts so critical to your species’ survival, you will fail to realize this is one of the most inhuman things a person can possibly do.

You are a star, but you are not the star. At your age, you may be told you are the best and the brightest, but everyone around you is as good and bright as you. You’re a kid. I’m sorry everyone around you will fail you so many times. I’m sorry you will go on to fail everyone around you so many times. There’s no such thing, in real life, as a subplot; as a side character; as a filler episode. There are few things more dangerous than what your contemporaries call “main character energy.” I know why we draw on it as a power source. People like us have been denied at every turn everything we deserve: life, love, respect, dignity. For a queer and trans woman of color to center herself in a white supremacist, cisheterosexist world is a form of resistance.

A form. A semblance.

An acting-out. A roleplay.

Practice. Rehearsal.

Not necessarily the real thing. Not necessarily the thing you need.

Still from episode 22 of Grey's Anatomy. A doctor uses scissors to cut Bex's long hair short, as Bex looks into a handheld mirror with a hesitant, careful satisfaction.

Jules Gill-Peterson proclaims, in Histories of the Transgender Child, that no human being on Earth has earned the responsibility for the trans children in their care. You will read this and immediately concur, though it would take you at least as many words as contained in her book to argue this idea successfully to anyone outside your immediate vicinity, anyone who has not lived the childhood of a trans kid. You must find a way to bridge this unbridgeable gap. Transness, like queerness, can lurk in anyone’s future, and thus in anyone’s past. A childhood can become a trans childhood at any moment, the moment a trans adult comes out to themselves and/or those around them. Your story does not belong to you alone. It belongs to everyone whose story might become yours. Your story, after all, is only mine because you will become me. The right to care for a trans child is earned in the aftermath. It is forged in the making.

Right now, your father is likely sitting uncomfortably at a table too small for his liking, on the first floor of the last home he may ever inhabit. He will someday die but may beforehand undergo some kind of quasi-death too. He may become, for you, another mother, or a parent of some new and indeterminate gender.

Right now, his wife is likely thinking of and troubled by the uneven trajectories of her children, distracting herself with another novel, downloaded onto the e-reader you will gift her on one memorable, abundant Christmas. She will someday die, but may also someday undergo the same kind of quasi-death too.

Still from episode 43 of Grey's Anatomy. Donna, a white trans woman patient in a flowery, monochromatic robe, is saying, “My name is Donna.”

Their stories are not to be dismissed as footnotes in the story of a younger, nimbler, more formally educated relative/stranger. Their stories may be no different than your own. They may only be able to become themselves if you are willing to share your story—to contextualize it with care, as you will someday do for yourself with the story of Meredith Grey. This is the only value of knowledge and experience; this is self-awareness minus the self; this is the reason you exist at all.

If the people you care about are to be trans, they will have also been trans children. If you will someday become me and reach back through time to who you are right now, then reach across time towards the people around you when you get here—in other words, now, before the moment has passed.

You are, for better or worse, as much doctor as patient.

Look around you.

Say hello.

53

Still from episode 53 of Grey's Anatomy. Meredith Grey is sitting cross-legged in blue scrubs on a hospital floor. Her head is down, and she's surrounded by a growing pool of water.

There is an arrogance to the writer’s life mirrored in the attitudes of the surgeons on Grey’s Anatomy—of cutthroat flesh-cutters, hungry to rearrange muscle and bone so their patients might survive the special maladies that afflict them.

The person you will someday love—yes, even you, a brilliant, beautiful, broken trans girl, will get to be loved before it’s all over—calls writing a weapon of mass destruction. He is right, though when we refer to destruction en masse, we miss that a bomb is just an accumulation of scalpels. Open up the bodies of the bombed and you’ll see the same kinds of cuts a doctor might make.

This means that you—yes, even you, a brilliant, beautiful, broken trans girl—are dangerous. Your gift—the ability to know and change time and space as only a storyteller can—is and will always be dangerous.

Sometimes women—white women, cis women, women of all kinds who’ve amassed their little share of power and choose to wield it unquestioningly—will look back five, ten, or twenty years later, and see how much they’ve healed. They will count the ways in which oppression wounded them; they will touch the scars and wonder how it’s possible for such soft, fading marks to metaphorize what was once life-threatening damage. Really, the amount that they’ve healed equates to how much they leaned into the winnings of apartheid, of a world order that will give anyone who wants it a reasonable excuse to believe themselves superior. Sometimes what looks like healing is a compromising of the soul.

Young girl who is me, you would do well to acknowledge the danger you pose. Every choice you make matters. Your suicidality—the thing that draws you to Meredith Grey, the thing that draws you and me together through time—may yet be a glory.

Learn from what’s happened. What will happen. If you’re to survive the special maladies that afflict you, it is your duty to review. To be reviewed. Your show. Your story. Give it—sacrifice it, share it—freely.

If you do it with care, it may even someday serve as your guide.

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This essay is part of an in-progress book project tentatively titled The Trans Girl's Guide to Modern Television. A version of this essay was published by Under the Sun in May 2024.

contenido: 3 poemas

notas sobre el contenido: discusión de la muerte

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otro manifiesto

todo lo que existe

es una colaboración

entre los que quedan

y los que ya no están.
esto quiere decir que

todos los que han vivido

(todo lo que ha existido,

todo lo que podría existir,

todo lo que hubiera podido existir)

esta aquí,

con nosotros,

siempre.

una oración

¿usted escribe desde adentro de un lugar?
usted escribe desde adentro de un lugar.
usted escribe

desde adentro

de un lugar.
usted escribe.
desde adentro de un lugar

usted,

escribe.

reviento

una diente de león dejando caer sus pétalos

hasta que solamente queda

su corazón.
un girasol dando vueltas tan rápido

que sus pétalos ascienden y caen

como nieve.
un bosque lleno de viento,

un tornado hecho de

pinas.
un planeta siempre gira:

volteando, sin

regresando.
una canción que se repite.
una canción

que se repite.

length: 2 days

Palestinian writer and professor Refaat Alareer was murdered by the settler colonial state of so-called Israel on December 6, 2023. Forty days later, on January 15, 2024, people around the world partook in “Read for Refaat,” a day of action that kicks off a week of solidarity events focused on reading out loud and in public Alareer's work, the works of other Palestinian writers, and works about Palestine. You can learn more about “Read for Refaat” on Publishers for Palestine's website, and you can read, download, and listen to what I read aloud that week here.

On April 26, 2024, 142 days after Refaat's murder, his eldest daughter Shymaa, her husband Muhammad, and their newborn baby Abd al-Rahman were also murdered by so-called Israel. This news comes just as yet another potentially pivotal moment for anticolonial organizing in the imperial core unfolds, with thousands shutting down and occupying college campuses across the settler colonial state of the so-called U.S., as well as abroad, in solidarity with Palestinians.

On April 27 and 28, I will be posting recordings of myself reading selections from the texts listed below, which include those on Verso Books's “In Solidarity with the Students” page, available to download freely there and below. If you record yourself reading from these texts and want to make those recordings available on this page, please contact me at Work AT RiveraErica DOT com.

Note: Some of the audio files may be temporarily unavailable while I finish migrating this site from Ghost to WriteFreely. I'll remove this note once all the files are re-linked.

---

Source materials

In order to download the free books from Verso's website, you need to provide an e-mail and contact information; you can provide false information, but in case you're uncomfortable with that process, I've made them available for download them here.

Please note that I'm unsure why the first file is labelled as a ZIP file, but it should open up as an EPUB file. Also, for the selections from Verso, I apologize that I couldn't offer PDF files (though I may add them later on), as well as for the fact that these EPUB files are stamped with my name at the front. Finally, Ghost caps my downloadable files at 5 MB, and one of the books (Springtime, edited by Tania Palmieri and Clare Solomon) is 6.1 MB, so I'm not able to offer it for download here (yet).

From the River to the Sea: Essays for a Free Palestine, edited by Sai Englert, Michal Schatz, and Rosie Warren

Download EPUB of From the River to the Sea: Essays for a Free Palestine (866 KB)

Towers of Ivory and Steel by Maya Wind

Download EPUB of Towers of Ivory and Steel by Maya Wind (560 KB)

Human Capital by Laura Robson

Download EPUB of Human Capital by Laura Robson (399 KB)

The Case for Sanctions Against Israel, edited by Audrea Lim

[Download EPUB of The Case for Sanctions Against Israel, edited by Audrea Lim (449 KB)]() [Temporarily unavailable]

The Verso Book of Dissent, edited by Andrew Hsiao and Audrea Lim

Download EPUB of The Verso Book of Dissent, edited by Andrew Hsiao and Audrea Lim (678 KB)

Occupy!: Scenes from Occupied America, edited by Carla Blumenkranz, Keith Gessen, Mark Greif, Sarah Leonard, Sarah Resnick, Nikil Saval, Eli Schmitt and Astra Taylor

Download EPUB of Occupy!: Scenes from Occupied America (2 MB)

The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney

Download PDF of The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (1 MB)

TO THEM, WE ARE ALL OUTSIDE AGITATORS: ENCAMPMENTS & ESCALATION by Within Our Lifetime

Download PDF of TO THEM, WE ARE ALL OUTSIDE AGITATORS: ENCAMPMENTS & ESCALATION (2 MB)

April 27, 2024

content/trigger warnings: discussion and depiction of someone's home being destroyed by bombs

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“I couldn’t bid my apartment farewell” by Tawfiq Abu Shomer, from From the River to the Sea: Essays for a Free Palestine

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This article was first published in Arabic on the website of the Palestine News Network. It was translated by Meriam Mabrouk, first published in English by the Institute for Palestine Studies on their blog and republished in From the River to the Sea: Essays for a Free Palestine with permission.

I apologize to my library, filled with the memories of many years, because the Apache pilot only gave me a few minutes’ warning to save myself before they sentenced my small apartment to death. My heart aches for my apartment, which I built brick by brick with my own hands. I painstakingly selected each material, each tile, treating them as companions that would accompany me through life. I carried the packages of tiles with tenderness, just as I carried my firstborn child in his cradle. The joy I felt as each tile was laid and dried was immeasurable. I even distributed sweets around Gaza when I completed the row of tiles! Yet, the pilot decided to unleash their hatred upon my cherished tiles, dimming their brightness that I loved so deeply.

I had thought my son’s apartment next door would be a refuge when mine was destroyed. I had built it too, and another for my daughter. I reveled in the thought of having three independent apartments, all adjacent to each other. But a single bomb from a murderous occupier stole this happiness in mere seconds. The bomb obliterated the memories of choosing my bedroom furniture, which I had bought in installments. I regret not bidding it a final farewell.

I yearned to stand in the middle of the living room, filled with stories and memories, and salute this sanctuary of memories one last time. But all that remained were torn pieces after the bomb’s destruction.

Stepping on the fragments of my kitchen brings me immense pain. The pilot of the warplane took away my taste for traditional food, leaving me longing for my favorite flavors. How do I regain the flavor of my ceramic coffee cup, which had been a close friend to my writing projects? This cup was with me when I published four books, drops of bitter coffee seeping onto my pages. Now, I leave my traditional kitchen without seeing this cup because a bomb covered it in ashes and scattered its fragments among the rubble. My hands trembled as I collected its broken pieces.

Can I ever rid my two favorite plates of the smell of gunpowder? One plate was adorned by an image of a small black rose in the middle of white marble, the second was made out of polished metal. How can I get used to tasting food in my new shelter and forget the taste of these plates?

What caused my loss of appetite? At first, I thought it was due to losing everything and becoming homeless. But then I realized it was the absence of my two favorite plates. I can’t imagine ever adjusting to life without them. I never anticipated that the destruction of my apartment, and those of my son and daughter, would resurrect memories of my first cradle, seized by the Israeli occupier. Today, I feel closer to that first cradle than ever before.

Despite everything, I will continue to echo the words of renowned poet Pablo Neruda: “You can cut all the flowers, you can kill all the birds, but you cannot keep Spring from coming.”

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content/trigger warnings: graphic discussions and depictions of genocide

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“The end of colonial government” by Samera Esmeir, from From the River to the Sea: Essays for a Free Palestine

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“The end of colonial government” by Samera Esmeir, Part 2

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Danger looms heavy over Palestine. Israel’s production of the end times in Gaza is an enactment and a rehearsal, an attempted prefiguration of another end to come. If it is to be resisted, this danger must be diagnosed and named. What to say of this settler-colonial drive to incessantly start from scratch, to repeatedly empty the land of its Palestinian inhabitants, to insistently wish them out of existence, to tenaciously preempt the revolts of the colonized, nay, to prevent the thought of the thought of revolt? What does this relentless destruction disclose about the present and the future danger facing Palestinians from the river to the sea? And how does one mark this danger without reproducing its terms, affirming its destruction, indeed, taking on the position of the genocided?

The news media designation “the Israel-Gaza war” does not allow for comprehending this danger, but neither do the more critical formulations pointing to state violence, apartheid, and even genocide. These are all attempts, laudable and significant, at describing and opposing Israel’s subjugating and exterminating drive unleashed against the Palestinians. But even these formulations fall short of diagnosing the repetitive violation of an already violated land and people, the ongoing destruction of a life fashioned “from the ruins of earlier colonial desolations, the reprise of military raids in the hospitals that house the wounded from the same raids, and the insistence on transforming the largest open-air prison in the world into an open-air death camp. By centering the colonial mass killing of civilians and the apartheid-based government of the remaining living, these formulations do not catch up with the repetitive, cyclical rhythm of Israel’s obliteration machinery. Attention to this rhythm reveals Israel’s desire to wish Palestinians out of political and historical existence, to eradicate their historically cultivated way of life, to render them soulless bodies, to obliterate the conditions of the Palestinian inhabitation of the land—in short, the desire not to govern Palestinians.

To diagnose the looming danger, a sense, however intricate, of the details of the catastrophe in Gaza is necessary. These details fade when the images and reports from Gaza have become indistinguishable, even consistent and totalizing. But this totalization is not the outcome of the catastrophe as much as its modus operandi: catastrophizing totalizes to paralyze. Against this totalization, we may wish to find political instruction not in the hallowed ideals of an international order but in the details of the catastrophe: children who have no surviving family members, mothers who have lost their children, men who have ceased to be reliable witnesses and victims, elders reliving past forced displacements, injured girls dying from pain, bodies wrapped in bags, schools turned shelters and then death quarters, mass graves, dismembered limbs, disintegrated buildings, emptied neighborhoods, leveled streets, wrecked schools, fallen trees, squashed (infra)structures, flattened surfaces, banished shades, ubiquitous debris, blood that springs from the dust—land and limbs saturated with the two primary colors of destruction, gray and red. There are also the 1.7 million uprooted. Forced to move south to a yet smaller territorial stretch, many of them are murdered along routes of supposed safety while others are forced to leave behind loved ones unburied. Then there are the teachers, doctors, bakers, cooks, journalists, nurses, morticians, civil servants, volunteers, workers, and so many others; in their steadfastness and commitment to others, they have an intimate knowledge of the disaster in its collective, yet detailed, manifestations. These details tell of a danger not restricted to the killing of civilians but to the colonial desire to obliterate a place and its history, to evacuate the souls of the living, and to diminish the number of the governed. They also tell of formations of anticolonial steadfastness and resistance from the rubble.

Distinguished legal experts call the obliteration in Gaza genocide, which is the gravest of all crimes under international law. They note that Israeli officials stated their genocidal intentions and acted upon them. If technologies of artificial intelligence have availed civilians, en masse, of the means for collective obliterations, advanced weaponry and military systems provided by Western“states have executed the genocide of the Palestinian hostage population in Gaza.

As a legal category, the crime of genocide names actions calculated to bring about the destruction of a group as a whole or in part. It refers to the killing of members of a group, causing an injury to them, and “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” Acts of genocide target the physical life of group members in the present. But the crime also describes attempts at exterminating or minimizing the biological future of the targeted group. Genocide includes “imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group” and “forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.” Understood legally, then, acts of genocide target the life of the group in the present as well as in the future. The child is the figure extending the extermination in the present into the future. Eliminate children in the targeted group now, and you eliminate the future of this group.

Genocide is a clarifying frame for the unfolding Israeli extermination of the Palestinians. But what genocide in a restricted, legal meaning cannot fully frame are all those colonial obliterating acts that target not only the biological and physical life of a people but also houses, neighborhoods, mosques, churches, schools, streets, and finally, land—all those spaces that are not only the infrastructure of life in the present, but also the sites in which memory dwells, in which one can tell a story about her life, in which one inherits a collective life and can participate in it, in which one can perceive herself as a part of a more extended history, a past that exceeds her, and a struggle that marks her. Put differently, in centering the targeting of physical and biological life, present and future, genocide cannot frame the other target of the Israeli obliterating machine: the collective expansive existence of a resistant, resisting people, in short, its way of life, as it has been cultivated in struggle over time. Genocide as a frame is not sufficient to capture how Israel has been forcing Palestinians in Gaza, time and again, to start over and again, as though they did not exist before. The crime of genocide, despite its attention to physical, not only biological destruction, does not frame the destruction of the historicity of the Palestinians. This latter cruelty exceeds the gravest of all crimes under international law. It is what animates the repetitive, cyclical rhythm of Israel’s machinery of obliteration.

Israel seeks to eradicate a political collective existence cultivated historically through a bond with the land. This desire is expressed through the manifold efforts to terminate whatever protections the land offers Palestinians. Lacking a state to affirm their peoplehood, and in an international order that does not recognize non-peoples and whose constitutive unit is the state, the Palestinians have cultivated their sense of collective being, including their peoplehood, through their bond to the land they inhabit and from which Israel, through military and legal means, has repeatedly expelled them. The land has provided Palestinians with a collective existence in the world. As it maintains them in the world, the land protects them from vanishing into anonymity and endows them with historicity. The danger of vanishment was confronted in 1948 when the Zionist forces conquered most of Palestine and uprooted the Palestinians to make space for Israel. In Arabic, this vanishment from the land was named the Nakba, the Catastrophe. It indexes a double loss: of the land of Palestine and, consequently, of Palestinians. This is why the Nakba, or the severing from the land, was never accepted. Acquiescing to it would have been equivalent to consenting to self-destruction. Hence, the dual position of the Palestinian subject: she is at once marked by the catastrophe and cannot but struggle against it.

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content/trigger warnings: discussions and depictions of genocide, scholasticide, and epistemicide

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Selection from Chapter 6, “Academia Against Liberation,” from Towers of Ivory and Steel by Maya Wind

Selection from Towers of Ivory and Steel by Maya Wind, Part 1

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Selection from Towers of Ivory and Steel by Maya, Wind Part 2

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Selection from Towers of Ivory and Steel by Maya Wind, Part 3

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Before the mass expulsion of Palestinians in the Nakba and the founding of Israel, Palestinians pursued higher education at leading universities in Beirut, Damascus, and Cairo. After 1948, Palestinians displaced from their homes and lands—whether to the Gaza Strip, under Egyptian governance, or to the West Bank, under Jordanian authority—continued to travel for study at universities across the Middle East as well as in the Soviet Union, Europe, and the United States. Yet with the 1967 military occupation of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, Israel immediately escalated its war on Palestinian education. Palestinians were severed from neighboring Arab states and their travel severely restricted, closing off their opportunities to pursue higher education abroad. “Forcibly isolated from the intellectual and political life offered at universities across the Middle East and beyond, Palestinians in the OPT were compelled to establish their own system of higher education under the Israeli military government and despite its many obstacles.

The first comprehensive Palestinian institution of higher education was Birzeit University, on the outskirts of Ramallah. First opening its doors in 1924, the school of Birzeit later became one of several Palestinian institutions to offer associate’s degrees. But with Israel’s occupation, the institution’s administration began preparations to offer full four-year degree programs. Several years later, after waging a struggle against Israel’s military government to overcome its restrictive orders and demands for permit applications, the institution began enrolling students for bachelor’s degrees in 1972. Birzeit University became the first Palestinian university and has been a major center of Palestinian intellectual and political life for generations of Palestinian students.

From its early years, the Birzeit University campus was a site of Palestinian protest and a symbol of youthful civic resistance to Israeli military occupation. A hub of student activists advocating for Palestinian self-determination and articulating revolutionary anticolonial politics, the university was immediately regarded by Israel as a threat to its rule. The Israeli state was also particularly concerned about the university enrolling and potentially radicalizing Palestinian citizens of Israel and thereby fueling a broader Palestinian mobilization and liberatory politics. Almost immediately after Birzeit University opened its doors to enroll bachelor’s degree students, Israel began deploying the military to destabilize its educational programming. In 1973, the Israeli military closed the Birzeit University campus for two weeks, the first of fifteen such closures. Upon its reopening, the Israeli military governor of the occupied West Bank routinely invaded the campus to inspect classes, demanding copies of all assigned reading lists and textbooks for review and Israeli authorization. This campaign of harassment and suppression of academic freedom escalated with the Israeli military and Shin Bet arresting and interrogating senior Palestinian faculty and administrators and ousting and deporting the university’s president, Hanna Nasir, to Lebanon in 1974. Birzeit University and other institutions of higher education across the OPT have since become sites of continued struggle: the Israeli government has waged persistent campaigns to limit Palestinian education and repress resistance to its military rule, while Palestinian students and faculty have repeatedly defied Israeli military orders and continue to insist on their inalienable rights to education and to academic freedom.

Israel escalated its repression of Palestinian universities, then, in tandem with Palestinian popular uprisings. When the First Intifada erupted in 1987, Israel immediately targeted universities, labeling them sites of rebellion. Between 1988 and 1992, the Israeli military ordered the closure of Birzeit University, along with all Palestinian institutions of higher education, forcing faculty and students into underground study groups operating entirely off campus. The Israeli military surveilled and raided these study groups, terming them “cells of illegal education.” Students and faculty were arrested, interrogated, and sentenced to military prison for “public order” offenses for their participation in study groups, or even just for possession of a textbook. Nevertheless, Palestinian students and faculty continued to hold classes in defiance of Israeli military orders and kept the university alive. Sustained resistance across the OPT and the Palestinian Academic Freedom Network campaign in the United States that generated Congressional pressure ultimately forced Israel to permit Palestinians to return to their campuses.

With the outbreak of the Second Intifada in 2000, Israel tightened its control over Palestinian movement and further limited opportunities for students to travel within and outside the OPT to pursue higher education. The Israeli government severed ties between academic institutions in the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip, preventing joint research, teaching, and collaboration across Palestinian universities. In the occupied Gaza Strip, the Israeli military issued a blanket travel ban, preventing students from studying at West Bank universities or at institutions abroad. In the occupied West Bank, the Israeli military constructed a checkpoint on the main road to Birzeit University to hinder student access to campus, limiting their window for learning and using their commute to class as an opportunity to surveil and interrogate them. While Birzeit University was most frequently targeted throughout the Second Intifada, the Israeli military routinely invaded all Palestinian universities to intimidate and arrest both faculty and students.

Israeli military invasions of Palestinian campuses remain routine, including the use of tear gas, rubber bullets, and live ammunition. In 2014, the Israeli military raided the campuses of Birzeit University, the Arab American University in Jenin, and the Palestine Polytechnic University in Hebron, confiscating computers, banners, and student union materials. In 2016 and 2017, the Israeli military raided student union offices and other buildings at Birzeit University and Al-Quds University, damaging property and confiscating computers, flags, banners, and political materials. Following repeated raids on the Palestine Technical University in Tulkarm, in 2015 the Israeli military formed a temporary base and shooting range for military training on campus.

Throughout its use of the base, the Israeli military injured at least 138 faculty and students with live ammunition, and the campus became a site of regular student protest met with violent repression by the Israeli military. In 2018, the Israeli military regularly stationed soldiers outside the Palestine Technical University campus in the Al-Arroub refugee camp, where they surveilled, interrogated, and injured students. The Israeli military raided the Al-Quds University campus in the occupied East Jerusalem neighborhood of Abu Dis every year between 2015 and 2019, confiscating political materials and injuring students. At Al-Quds University’s Hind al-Husseini women’s college in Sheikh Jarrah, Israel banned an academic conference in 2018, detaining conference participants and temporarily shutting down the campus as punishment. In offensives on the Gaza Strip, the Israeli military has repeatedly targeted Palestinian universities and colleges in aerial and land strikes, killing and injuring students, faculty, and staff. The strikes continually destroy campus infrastructure, which is rebuilt and then again devastated. In the 2008–9 offensive, fourteen of the fifteen institutions of higher education in Gaza were damaged by Israeli military fire, with six of them directly targeted. Three colleges and six campus buildings were entirely destroyed. In the 2012 bombardment, seven universities were damaged by Israeli airstrikes. In the 2014 offensive, Israel targeted Gaza from the land, sea, and air over the course of fifty-one days, destroying or severely damaging over 18,000 homes and vital infrastructure, including 148 schools and eleven higher education facilities of three universities. Israeli missiles struck the campus of Al-Quds University in the Gaza Strip, killing twenty-two Palestinian students. A missile fired at the campus of the Islamic University in Gaza left its facilities in ruins. The University College of Applied Sciences was also targeted by missiles, destroying its administration building, conference hall, computer laboratories, and many classrooms. These aerial strikes inflicted millions of dollars of damage on these universities, plunging them into an even deeper financial crisis generated by the Israeli siege.

On May 11, 2021, with the start of the Unity Intifada, Israel launched an eleven-day aerial offensive on the Gaza Strip. The bombardment killed 252 Palestinians, including 66 children and 5 university students.52 Israeli fire wounded over 1,948 Palestinians and internally displaced over 107,000 during that campaign alone. Aerial strikes made over 2,400 homes uninhabitable and damaged over 50,000 units, including the headquarters of major Palestinian, Arab, and International media outlets.

Samir Mansour watched his printing house and bookshop reduced to rubble as the Israeli military destroyed the Kahil building adjacent to the Islamic University, which also housed several major cultural and educational centers and labs with expensive equipment. The bookshop was beloved by the university community and frequented by its students. It housed diverse collections of academic and literary texts, some of which were originally translated by the bookshop. Mansour had carefully collected and printed over 100,000 books across genres, proudly serving his community for decades. He described arriving at his bookshop after the bombing:

“The scene was frightening, as the building had come to ruins with only a few books covered by thick dust spared from the destruction. Some books could be seen to be strewn across the floor at great distances from the place, as they washed away 40 years’ worth of memories since the founding of a library that served as a beacon and outlet for academics, intellectuals and science students in Gaza.”

During the eleven-day offensive, all seven universities in the Gaza Strip were forced shut. In the wake of the campaign, they faced a long struggle to fully reopen. Israeli forces had bombed the Gaza Strip data center and communications network, disrupting internet service and forcing universities to suspend all online educational activity, which was essential throughout the pandemic. The Palestinian Minister of Communication reported that bringing in the necessary equipment to restore internet service in the Gaza Strip was impeded by Israeli restrictions, which he called “inhumane.” University students in the Gaza Strip decried the devastating effects of Israeli strikes. Iman Safi, a student at Al-Aqsa University, described the bombings as “causing a complete paralysis of life,” immediately derailing the academic trajectories of the hundreds of students who were maimed, whose homes were destroyed, and who lost family members in the aerial strikes. These students, Safi reported, were “in a state of dispersion, instability and homelessness.” Palestinian faculty and students know that the repeated aerial strikes on their universities are not coincidental. As Adnan Abu Amer, a professor at Ummah Open University, explained: “Educational buildings have always been primary targets for the Israeli forces in any attack on the Gaza Strip.” With Palestinian education regarded as a threat to Israeli rule, Palestinian universities are defined as military targets.

April 28

content/trigger warning: discussion of mass displacement and refugee exploitation

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Selection from Chapter 7, “Refugees versus 'Palestine Refugees': Race and the Postwar International Regime,” from Human Capital: A History of Putting Refugees to Work by Laura Robson

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The racialization of the refugee regime, already evident in the divergence between the destinies of Jewish and non-Jewish refugees, now became obvious in a still more dramatic way. In the 1948 war that birthed the new state of Israel, three-quarters of a million Palestinian Arabs were made refugees—not only by military strategies of expulsion during the war but also, perhaps more to the point, by the subsequent Israeli refusal to allow them to return. The attempts of the newly established “international community” in the form of the United Nations to deal with this new refugee problem layered on top of the older one revealed, above all, the extraordinary nonuniversality of the emerging refugee regime. The fact that different types of refugees were to be treated differently had, of course, been an evident aspect of the system from its early days in the 1920s, when the League explicitly declared that not all displaced or stateless people would qualify as refugees. Now, as the new Israeli government—backed by the UN, the IRO, and any number of private humanitarian organizations across Europe and the United States—moved Holocaust survivors out of European DP camps and into the towns, neighborhoods, and houses of exiled Palestinian Arabs, this long-acknowledged truth would become a formal legal commitment; indeed, the basis for a permanent legal premise that some kinds of refugees were entitled to more rights than others.

The emergence of Palestine as a test case for a racialized international refugee approach was, in part, a consequence of the UN’s own central role in the simultaneous birth of Israel and of the Palestinian refugee crisis. In November of 1947, following the British declaration of intent to give up its mandate over Palestine and turn the problem over to the UN, the General Assembly voted in favor of partitioning Palestine into a Jewish state and Arab “territories”—a decision whose implementation, as many at the time recognized, would necessarily involve the forcible expulsion of enormous numbers of Palestinians from the mooted Jewish nation. (At the time of the vote, Jews owned between 6 and 7 percent of Palestine’s land and constituted approximately 35 percent of the population; a previous British proposal for partition in 1937 had acknowledged that such a “solution” would require the removal of about 300,000 Palestinian Arabs, to create a much smaller Jewish state than the one being proposed now.) With the outbreak of war, this eventuality came to pass very quickly. In the first stage of the war, the so-called civil war that took place between December 1947 and May 1948, Zionist militias forced more than 300,000 Palestinians from their towns and villages. The second stage, in which the surrounding Arab countries declared war on the newly established state of Israel, saw the expansion of Israel’s borders well beyond the area proposed in the UN’s partition plan and the expulsion of a further 400,000 Palestinians. By the time of the armistice in 1949, a majority of the prewar Palestinian Arab population—some three-quarters of a million people—were refugees.

The United Nations, because of its own role in the conflict and because Palestine’s prominence made it a useful venue in which to assert the importance of this new form of internationalist authority, positioned itself in the war’s aftermath as the primary arbiter of the Palestine-Israel question. In December of 1948 it established something called the United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine (UNCCP), which was intended to take over the tasks of the former United Nations mediator Count Folke Bernadotte (murdered in September of 1948 by Zionist terrorists) and work towards a “final settlement” of the Palestine question. With respect to the refugees, the commission declared that those “wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return.” To this end, the UNCCP was instructed to facilitate their “repatriation, resettlement and economic and social rehabilitation … and the payment of compensation.”

This first showdown between the new state of Israel and the newly formulated United Nations clearly demonstrated, and not for the last time, the total impotence of internationalist rhetoric in the face of Israeli intransigence. The Israeli government refused utterly to entertain the idea of Palestinian return, declaring not only that they would constitute a security threat but that “the reintegration of the returning Arabs into normal life, and even their mere sustenance, would present an insuperable problem.” Given the realities on the ground (quietly supported by the UN’s power brokers in the form of the United States and the Soviet Union alike), officials turned their attention instead to the question of relief. In late 1949 the UN created a new agency it called the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) to assist Palestinian refugees with the practicalities of their displacement. This organization—established as a temporary one whose mandate would have to be re-upped every three years—essentially marked the abandonment of the political project of a “final settlement” in favor of basic material relief for the displaced. The UNCCP, charged with representing Palestinian interests in the search for a political settlement, slowly withered into invisibility. UNRWA, charged with the nonpolitical provision of practical aid on the ground, was serving nearly a million people by 1951.

The introduction of these two organizations, representing an approach to Palestinians that purported to believe both in the necessity of immediate assistance and in the possibility of an eventual political solution, provided cover for the United Nations to make the decision—as one legal scholar has put it—“to exclude Palestinians from the ‘universal’ refugee regime incorporated in the 1950 United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Statute and the 1951 Refugee Convention.” This exclusion rested on two separate legal bases. The first was through the Refugee Convention’s definition of the “refugee” specifically in terms of the Second World War, as someone who had had to leave his place of residence as a result of “events occurring in Europe before 1 January 1951” (one option for signatory states) or “events occurring in Europe or elsewhere before 1 January 1951” (an alternative option) and now could not return “owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted.” It was a definition whose application to refugees from a now-disbanded or ethnically reconstituted former colony was not at all clear—a circumstance Palestinian refugees shared with any number of other non-European displaced populations; for instance, the millions of people displaced almost simultaneously in the violent expulsions of Indian partition in the summer of 1947 and totally ignored by the makers of this new refugee regime. The second, arguably more functional basis for Palestinian exclusion was that no one could claim the protections of UNHCR who was receiving aid from another UN organization—so, in practice, the prior existence of UNRWA rendered impossible aid from UNHCR or protection under the convention.

Though it was by no means a unique experience for a displaced person to remain unrecognized as a refugee and therefore ineligible for UNHCR protection, some specificities of the category of “Palestine refugee” gradually emerged. Apart from the short-lived United Nations Korean Reconstruction Agency, disbanded in 1958, UNRWA was (and remains today) the only UN agency to deal solely with refugees of a single nationality. Its mandate did not really clarify who counted as a refugee or what their rights might be, and in the first years after the war relief providers often found themselves having to make essentially ad hoc decisions about who did and did not qualify for aid. As one Quaker worker in post-1948 Gaza noted, “We now feel the necessity of broadening our definition of refugee to include a considerable number of people who still live in their own houses but have been completely deprived of any source of livelihood due to the fact that their land is in the hands of the Jews.” Gradually, though, the UN began to enforce a procedural approach to Palestinian refugeedom that echoed its practical approach to the Refugee Convention from which Palestinians were formally and legally excluded: enforcing restrictions on the UNRWA rolls of refugees, limiting registration to those who had been physically displaced (rather than denationalized in place, as had happened to many Palestinians in Gaza), and requiring legal demonstration of claims of expulsion. By 1951 UNRWA had a serviceable legal conception of a “Palestine refugee,” which it began to use to determine eligibility for registration: “Persons whose normal place of residence was Palestine during the period 1 June 1946 to 15 May 1948, and who lost both home and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 conflict.” Palestinians who fell under this rubric were ineligible for UNHCR assistance or protection—partly because the UN did not want to confront Israel over its refusal to allow the refugees reentrance, but also because its Arab delegates feared that UNHCR resettlement practices would strip Palestinians of their right of return. “The refugees should be aided pending their repatriation,” the Saudi delegate declared, “repatriation being the only real solution of their problem.”

In other words, something truly important was happening here: the international community, in the form of the United Nations, was actively making the decision that there could be different categories of refugee, based on place of origin and method of dislocation. No one at the UN seriously disputed that the million or so displaced, denationalized, dispossessed Palestinians filing for international assistance by the early 1950s were, by any contemporary measure, refugees. But because they were not Europeans, and because they had been expelled as a consequence of a political project strongly supported by the UN’s main showrunners, and because admitting the permanence of their expulsion would anger so many in the rest of the Middle East and beyond, they could not be given the same political status as—for instance—the European Jews now being ushered into Israel with the approval and help of the IRO. The solution, then, was to subdivide the concept of refugee into different, distinct, particular legal categories, and to limit the possibility of seeking asylum in the West to only one of them. In the first instance, the concept of separate and unequal refugee status would apply almost exclusively to Palestinians, under the specific metrics of the 1951 convention. But the more general idea of differentiated refugee status based on point of origin and cause of expulsion would eventually come to dominate global systems of refugee law—not least because, as the Palestine case had now demonstrated, it offered a way to maintain a theoretical commitment to humanitarianism and the principles of the Refugee Convention while in practice closing off access to asylum, citizenship, and political rights to all but a select few.

Many relief workers within and without the UN, sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinians and not infrequently hostile to the Israeli state that had violently expelled them in the name of ethnonationalism, understood refugee return as the only real and just solution to Palestinian exile.

But the UN, and especially the Americans, had very different ideas. In April of 1949 Truman’s secretary of state Dean Acheson went on a tour of the Middle East. He was preparing, on the president’s instruction, to put together a new scheme for the mass resettlement of Palestinian refugees across the Middle East: a solution that would help stabilize the new Israel and guarantee its demographic future as a Jewish state, but also provide invaluable labor for various regional development schemes. To this end, he put together a new commission and called it the “United Nations Middle East Economic Survey Administration,” a name that subtly but clearly reflected the intent not only to disburse refugees across the whole of the region but to do so with an eye to American-backed economic development and labor needs. When the UN’s formal negotiations with Israel broke down over Israeli refusal to allow refugees to return, George McGhee—the new assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs—convened his own meeting, to which he invited not only the main refugee relief agencies but also commercial enterprises with interests in the region: “Oil companies, construction firms, a steamship line, and State Department personnel.” To the disappointment of AFSC representatives, the conversation revolved not around repatriation but resettlement: in Iraq (an idea proposed earlier by the OSS and the M Project), in the Sinai, in the Jordan Valley, and in Syria. As in some earlier American proposals, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA, Roosevelt’s 1930s-era project to harness the Tennessee River as a source of energy for comprehensive rural development across much of the American South) served as a kind of model for developmentalist schemes that might now be deployed in Jordan and Syria—to the mutual benefit of the American companies charged with their execution, the commercial enterprises around the region who required political stability for continued profit, and the impoverished refugees who would populate the area in lieu of going home.

The Israeli military government set up its own formal committee on transfer almost immediately upon consolidating its grip on its territory. Its refugee-related goals were very clear: to prevent refugee return, devolve responsibility for the Palestinian refugee problem onto the surrounding Arab states, move refugees away from the newly created border, make the preservation of a Palestinian national identity impossible, and moderate the diplomatic pressures on the Israeli state from external actors. Though there was overlap between these goals and those of some American administration members and hangers-on (Joseph Schechtman, for instance, moved from the OSS and the M Project directly into a position with the Israeli Cabinet Transfer Committee where he advocated for a mass transfer of Palestinians into Iraq), the Israeli and the American positions were not the same. For Israel, the rationale for and commitment to enforcing continued Palestinian exile was clear. For the United States, the priority was to stabilize the region enough to permit unencumbered commercial and strategic development, a goal that could encompass any number of different approaches to the refugee problem and did not preempt irritation with what Truman, at least, often viewed as uncooperative behavior on the part of Ben-Gurion and his new administration.

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content/trigger warning: reference to war crimes, discussion of genocide, some questionable language?

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“Rebirth of Student Activism” by Hesham Yafai, from Springtime, edited by Clare Solomon & Tania Palmieri

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One of the most remarkable features of the present wave of student activism has been its ability to place itself within a wider struggle: both with other areas of UK society under attack from the Coalition government, and with people in other parts of the world fighting for the right to education. We can see the former in events such as Goldsmiths’ occupation of Deptford town hall to protest at council cuts, King’s College London students joining RMT workers at tube stations to protest ticket office closures, and LSE students joining the fire-fighters on picket lines in solidarity with their efforts to prevent unfair contract changes. But to appreciate the movement’s internationalism, we need to return to 27 December 2008.

On that date Israel began its 22-day offensive against the besieged Gaza strip, in what Amnesty International has since called the ‘22 Days of Death and Destruction’. The official United Nations investigation into the attack found that Israel had committed war crimes and possibly crimes against humanity. While international leaders the world over trotted out their usual, tired chorus of rehearsed ‘condemnation’, in the UK hundreds of thousands of people joined demonstrations across the country as anger spilled out onto the streets.

Yet the anger did not end there. Students returned to their campuses and began to organize. There was an acknowledgement that the conventional democratic channels had failed them. To effect real change students realized they needed to self-organize and move to unconventional channels to fight the battles that lay ahead. In early 2009 students from the School of Oriental and African Studies occupied one of the university’s largest galleries in solidarity with the people of Palestine. The myth of the so-called ‘iPod generation’ had been exploded; suddenly, there was talk of the reawakening of the spirit of ’68. Dozens of universities soon followed, including Essex, Birmingham, Oxford, Cambridge and Manchester.

Students at the occupations began to organize effectively, ushered along by the visitations of experienced campaigners and activists from Tariq Ali and Alex Callinicos, to Ghada Karmi and Lindsey German. Lecture shut-outs, walkouts, demonstrations, stalls, stunts, planning meetings and large-scale events embraced colleges and universities up and down the country. It was truly a rebirth of student activism, transforming disempowered students to front-line resisters, spurred on by an injustice committed halfway across the world and signalling a new era in student politics.

The fact that British students were protesting in their name was not lost on the Palestinians, who sent thousands of messages of support and gratitude. Today, education in Palestine continues to come under attack from a variety of directions: the cantonization of the West Bank severely delays and periodically prevents students from reaching classes via check-points; the controlled Palestinian economy means tens of thousands of students wishing to study cannot afford to do so; strikes by UNRWA workers mean classes have to be cancelled; students constantly face risk of arrest and trial before a military court; schools and universities face closure and transmutation into military barracks; and so on. Despite these many adversities the Palestinians continue to struggle on and, remarkably, still exhibit the second highest literacy rates in the Arab world.

An international Right To Education campaign, which has its roots in Birzeit University, is gathering momentum: in the summer of 2010 it held an international conference in the West Bank. Right to Education week is slowly becoming a permanent fixture, and is helping to link up the various struggles across the world for a free and fair education. It is a struggle that crosses national borders, as has also been seen through the acts of solidarity with French and Greek students and workers.

So from Gaza to Golders Green, via Greece and beyond, a collective struggle is beginning to take place. International solidarity is back on the agenda and the sentiment of a shared cause is pervasive. Perhaps this sense of unity is best expressed through the statement most manifested in messages of solidarity between different groups across the world: ‘Our struggle is your struggle, and your struggle is ours.

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content/trigger warning: discussion of economic precarity, use of an anti-Roma slur?

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Selection from Chapter 1, “The University and the Undercommons,” from The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney

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THE ONLY POSSIBLE RELATIONSHIP TO THE UNIVERSITY TODAY IS A CRIMINAL ONE

“To the university I’ll steal, and there I’ll steal,” to borrow from Pistol at the end of Henry V, as he would surely borrow from us. This is the only possible relationship to the American university today. This may be true of universities everywhere. It may have to be true of the university in general. But certainly, this much is true in the United States: it cannot be denied that the university is a place of refuge, and it cannot be accepted that the university is a place of enlightenment. In the face of these conditions one can only sneak into the university and steal what one can. To abuse its hospitality, to spite its mission, to join its refugee colony, its gypsy encampment, to be in but not of – this is the path of the subversive intellectual in the modern university.

Worry about the university. This is the injunction today in the United States, one with a long history. Call for its restoration like Harold Bloom or Stanley Fish or Gerald Graff. Call for its reform like Derek Bok or Bill Readings or Cary Nelson. Call out to it as it calls to you. But for the subversive intellectual, all of this goes on upstairs, in polite company, among the rational men. After all, the subversive intellectual came under false pretenses, with bad documents, out of love. Her labor is as necessary as it is unwelcome. The university needs what she bears but cannot bear what she brings. And on top of all that, she disappears. She disappears into the underground, the downlow low-down maroon community of the university, into the undercommons of enlightenment, where the work gets done, where the work gets subverted, where the revolution is still black, still strong.

What is that work and what is its social capacity for both reproducing the university and producing fugitivity? If one were to say teaching, one would be performing the work of the university. Teaching is merely a profession and an operation of that onto-/auto-encyclopedic circle of the state” that Jacques Derrida calls the Universitas. But it is useful to invoke this operation to glimpse the hole in the fence where labor enters, to glimpse its hiring hall, its night quarters. The university needs teaching labor, despite itself, or as itself, self-identical withand thereby erased by it. It is not teaching that holds this social capacity, but something that produces the not visible other side of teaching, a thinking through the skin of teaching toward a collective orientation to the knowledge object as future project, and a commitment to what we want to call the prophetic organization. But it is teaching that brings us in. Before there are grants, research, conferences, books, and journals there is the experience of being taught and of teaching. Before the research post with no teaching, before the graduate students to mark the exams, before the string of sabbaticals, before the permanent reduction in teaching load, the appointment to run the Center, the consignment of pedagogy to a discipline called education, before the course designed to be a new book, teaching happened.

The moment of teaching for food is therefore often mistakenly taken to be a stage, as if eventually one should not teach for food. If the stage persists, there is a social pathology in the university. But if the teach- ing is successfully passed on, the stage is surpassed, and teaching is consigned to those who are known to remain in the stage, the sociopathological labor of the university. Kant interestingly calls such a stage “self-incurred minority.” He tries to contrast it with having the “deter- mination and courage to use one’s intelligence without being guided by another.” “Have the courage to use your own intelligence.” But what would it mean if teaching or rather what we might call “the beyond of teaching” is precisely what one is asked to get beyond, to stop taking sustenance? And what of those minorities who refuse, the tribe of moles who will not come back from beyond (that which is beyond “the beyond of teaching”), as if they will not be subjects, as if they want to think as objects, as minority? Certainly, the perfect subjects of communication, those successfully beyond teaching, will see them as waste. But their collective labor will always call into question who truly is taking the orders of the enlightenment. The waste lives for those moments beyond teaching when you give away the unexpected beautiful phrase – unexpected, no one has asked, beautiful, it will never come back. Is being the biopower of the enlightenment truly better than this?

Perhaps the biopower of the enlightenment knows this, or perhaps it is just reacting to the objecthood of this labor as it must. But even asit depends on these moles, these refugees, it will call them uncollegial, impractical, naive, unprofessional. And one may be given one last chance to be pragmatic – why steal when one can have it all, they will ask. But if one hides from this interpellation, neither agrees nor disagrees but goes with hands full into the underground of the university, into the Undercommons – this will be regarded as theft, as a criminal act. And it is at the same time, the only possible act.

In that undercommons of the university one can see that it is not a matter of teaching versus research or even the beyond of teaching versus the individualisation of research. To enter this space is to inhabit the ruptural and enraptured disclosure of the commons that fugitive enlightenment enacts, the criminal, matricidal, queer, in the cistern, on the stroll of the stolen life, the life stolen by enlightenment and stolen back, where the commons give refuge, where the refuge gives commons. What the beyond of teaching is really about is not finishing oneself, not passing, not completing; it’s about allowing subjectivity to be unlawfully overcome by others, a radical passion and passivity such that one becomes unfit for subjection, because one does not possess the kind of agency that can hold the regulatory forces of subjecthood, and one cannot initiate the auto-interpellative torque that biopower subjection requires and rewards. It is not so much the teaching as it is the prophecy in the organization of the act of teaching. The prophecy that predicts its own organization and has therefore passed, as commons, and the prophecy that exceeds its own organization and therefore as yet can only be organized. Against the prophetic organization of the undercommons is arrayed its own deadening labor for the university, and beyond that, the negligence of professionalization, and the professionalization of the critical academic. The undercommons is therefore always an unsafe neighborhood.

As Fredric Jameson reminds us, the university depends upon “Enlightenment-type critiques and demystification of belief and committed ideology, in order to clear the ground for unobstructed planning and ‘development.’” This is the weakness of the university, the lapse in its homeland security. It needs labor power for this “enlightenment-type critique,” but, somehow, labor always escapes.The premature subjects of the undercommons took the call seriously, or had to be serious about the call. They were not clear about planning, too mystical, too full of belief. And yet this labor force cannot reproduce itself, it must be reproduced. The university works for the day when it will be able to rid itself, like capital in general, of the trouble of labor. It will then be able to reproduce a labor force that understands itself as not only unnecessary but dangerous to the development of capitalism. Much pedagogy and scholarship is already dedicated in this direction. Students must come to see themselves as the problem, which, counter to the complaints of restorationist critics of the university, is precisely what it means to be a customer, to take on the burden of realisation and always necessarily be inadequate to it. Later, these students will be able to see themselves properly as obstacles to society, or perhaps, with lifelong learning, students will return having successfully diagnosed themselves as the problem.

Still, the dream of an undifferentiated labor that knows itself as superfluous is interrupted precisely by the labor of clearing away the burning roadblocks of ideology. While it is better that this police function be in the hands of the few, it still raises labor as difference, labor as the development of other labor, and therefore labor as a source of wealth. And although the enlightenment-type critique, as we suggest below, informs on, kisses the cheek of, any autonomous development as a result of this difference in labor, there is a break in the wall here, a shallow place in the river, a place to land under the rocks. The university still needs this clandestine labor to prepare this undifferentiated labor force, whose increasing specialisation and managerialist tendencies, again contra the restorationists, represent precisely the successful integration of the division of labor with the universe of exchange that commands restorationist loyalty.

Introducing this labor upon labor, and providing the space for its de- velopment, creates risks. Like the colonial police force recruited un- wittingly from guerrilla neighborhoods, university labor may harbor refugees, fugitives, renegades, and castaways. But there are good reasons for the university to be confident that such elements will be exposed or forced underground. Precautions have been taken, book lists have been drawn up, teaching observations conducted, invitations to contribute made. Yet against these precautions stands the immanence of transcendence, the necessary deregulation and the possibilities of criminality and fugitivity that labor upon labor requires. Maroon communities of composition teachers, mentorless graduate students, adjunct Marxist historians, out or queer management professors, state college ethnic studies departments, closed-down film programs, visa- expired Yemeni student newspaper editors, historically black college sociologists, and feminist engineers. And what will the university say of them? It will say they are unprofessional. This is not an arbitrary charge. It is the charge against the more than professional. How do those who exceed the profession, who exceed and by exceeding escape, how do those maroons problematize themselves, problematize the university, force the university to consider them a problem, a danger? The undercommons is not, in short, the kind of fanciful communities of whimsy invoked by Bill Readings at the end of his book. The undercommons, its maroons, are always at war, always in hiding.

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content/trigger warning: discussions of genocide and settler colonialism, depictions of police/state violence, references to starvation and arson

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“TO THEM, WE ARE ALL OUTSIDE AGITATORS: ENCAMPMENTS & ESCALATION” by Within Our Lifetime

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After over 40,000 martyrs, seven months, and 75 years, the movement to Free Palestine in the imperial core has reached a watershed moment. We have been marching, chanting, engaging in mass protest and direct action for decades, trying to show the world that our people in Gaza are worthy of life as they bear witness to 75 years of genocide. Yet it was the steadfastness of the Palestinian people and their resistance forces who won the support of the global majority.

Over forty thousand martyrs and seven months have largely demonstrated that the tactics and strategy of the movement in the imperial core has hit its ceiling. Large marches, milquetoast speeches from celebrities, half-hearted solidarity from organizations that are not committed to our liberation have taken us as far as we can go. None of it has been enough. None of it has stopped the bombs from dropping or filled the stomachs of Palestinians being starved by the zionist entity. In fact, settlers have only grown more brazen in their violence—from the West Bank where they are regularly burning Palestinian homes to Gaza where they are committing unfathomable acts of horror against men, women, and children. Our cause has always been righteous, but now the image is clear to anyone looking that we are facing a monstrous settler colony committed to our annihilation as a people.

A Single Spark Can Start a Prairie Fire

Yet, there are glimmers of hope in the belly of the beast. Our first real glimpse was April 15, a coordinated yet decentralized action that drove people all over the world to take action against points of production and logistics networks including ports, bridges, weapons manufacturers, financial institutions and more. The day of action was framed as “a shift from symbolic action” to materially effective action.

Over the past seven months of non-stop mobilization, the repression exerted by police, administrators, and politicians that we collectively have faced in all sectors of life has expanded and intensified. Death threats and doxxing have become the norm for people of conscience since October 7th. Unions have come under attack for expressing simple rhetorical (and not material) solidarity with Palestine.

Mobilizations are often indistinguishable from cop riots, with drone surveillance, arrests of youth, and repeated incidents of cops pulling off women’s hijabs quickly becoming routine. And students have been doxxed, harassed, suspended, expelled, evicted, and subjected to physical violence for supporting the rights of an exiled people to return to their homeland.

Although the universities, police forces, and politicians intend to force the people into submission with this wave of repression—to force us to accept that this genocide is inevitable and that we must allow it to proceed or else face severe consequences—it has done exactly the opposite. Seven months of this brutal repression have laid clear the task at hand and has forced all of us to become fearless. Protestors are not as frightened by the prospect of arrest as they used to be, students have been doxxed and have no reason to bite their tongues. As we confront zionism and imperialism, we are forced to confront the fact that we are not free at all and that any mobility we have within a dying empire can be stripped away in a heartbeat. So what is there left to do?

The students of the Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) coalition answered this question on Wednesday, April 17, when they set up the Gaza Solidarity Encampment on campus at 4 AM, insisting that they were not leaving until their demands were met. Columbia administration has shut down the university’s SJP and JVP chapters; suspended and evicted students; called the NYPD, FBI, Homeland Security, and even private investigators to surveil organizers; and allowed them to face a violent chemical attack committed by former IOF soldiers with no serious repercussions against the perpetrators. Columbia administration made it so deeply clear to its students that it does not stand with them and that its allegiance fully lies with the violent zionist project.

The struggle at the Gaza Solidarity Encampment has been historic, powerful, and awe-inspiring to today’s students across the country and those of 1968, who inspired the idea for a liberated zone on the lawn. CUAD has brought in students from other universities, dozens of organizations, and every day people who want to support what is seen not only as a serious escalation in movement strategy but a model for how the student movement can force power to concede to its demands. In only a few days, encampments have popped up all over the country from Cal Polytech to the City University of New York, from the ivy league to the public university. Within Our Lifetime salutes every student of every Gaza Solidarity Encampment and liberated zone and encourages everyone from all walks of life to plug into your local projects and support them however possible.

Confronting the Enemy

There is no further symbolic victory to be gained, there is no more “proving” that the Palestinian liberation struggle is just. There is no institution of power to appeal to, because every institution of power from the UN to the ICJ to our city councils and university administrations are corrupt and rotten to the core. Decades of electoral pandering has produced nothing but sellout politicians who demonize our resistance forces and our student organizing any chance they have. Years of appealing to the United Nations has produced international court rulings that are fundamentally incapable of stopping the bombs from raining on our people.

What these brave students have shown the world is that there are no allies within enemy institutions, no more appeals to be made, and certainly no more negotiating the terms of our existence and resistance. There is only an enemy to fight and a struggle that seeks victory. What is crucial in sustaining this moment is identifying clearly who our friends and enemies are. On the morning of the second day of Columbia’s Gaza Solidarity Encampment, President Minouche Shefik called on the NYPD to sweep the site and arrest the protestors. This same response was repeated at NYU, UT Austin, USC, Emerson, and more. At the time this statement is written, CUNY students are engaged in a standoff with the NYPD and CUNY Public Safety. On the first day of the CUNY encampment, CUNY students and community members successfully pushed out CUNY Public Safety from the encampment who had attacked members of the encampment with no justification. On the same day, CUNY Public Safety abducted a member of the encampment on the same day, a teenager, turned her over to the cops, and charged her with a felony for the crime of allegedly spraypainting the ground.

As the movement grows into a new phase, the terms of engagement with these enemies must be made clear. We cannot treat them as anything but hostile to our goals of ending the genocide of the people of Palestine. This is why we have made an effort to study, track, and report on the activities and capabilities of the New York Police Department. If they’re willing to throw us in jail and put us in the hospital every night for the egregious crime of using a megaphone without a permit, what would they do if we were on the precipice of truly throwing wrenches in the gears of the ongoing genocide? It is no use chanting “NYPD KKK IDF You’re All the Same” if we ignore the role of the US police forces in maintaining the status quo – which, for over 75 years, has included the genocide of our people. We understand the police as a functionary of US imperialism, and we understand that the zionist state wouldn’t last a Palestinian summer without the never-ending spigot of military and diplomatic aid provided to it by the US empire. If the police can quash the Palestinian solidarity movement on the streets of the U.S., that ensures that spigot does not have a domestic threat and can continue unabated.

At the same time as we assess who the forces of repression are, we must simultaneously be cautious not to let opportunists co-opt these spaces of revolutionary potential for photo-ops. Already, we have seen a number of individuals—many of whom have explicitly condemned the Palestinian resistance or even support the zionist entity’s existence—come and take photos, or even make speeches at the Gaza Solidarity Encampment. In New York, we’ve seen sell-outs like Alexa Aviles play revolutionary and take pictures at the Columbia encampment a year after helping evict Mexican and Latin American workers from Plaza Proletaria in Sunset Park. We’ve seen Alexandria Ocasio Cortez tweet in support of the encampments while demonizing “outside agitators” and condemning our resistance fighters in Palestine. Well-known intellectuals get on the mic and admonish us for daring to chant from the river to the sea, and implore us to consider the legitimacy of a settler-colonial state.

They are not our allies and they do not stand in solidarity with any of us. The attempt at co-optation by politicians, celebrities, and nonprofit organizations is a counterinsurgency strategy to de-escalate the encampments, de-fang the movement, and de-mobilize the momentum we have been building for so long.

Enough with De-Escalation Trainings; Where are the Escalation Trainings!

The movement trips over itself to provide endless trainings, webinars and infographics on de-escalation tactics to avoid bad press and antagonisms with police, zionist agitators, and university administrators. This is not inherently a bad thing and we are quite aware of the need to avoid pointless confrontation in order to build our camps and consolidate our forces. We ourselves have provided Know Your Rights trainings, for example, and employed this approach in specific protests and conditions. But like everything, we have a choice in what we prioritize and a responsibility to adapt to meet the moment. We need Know Your Rights trainings: but we also need Know Your Enemy trainings. We can choose to prioritize de-escalation trainings, or we can choose to prioritize escalation trainings. We can choose to learn how to build effective barricades, how to link arms most effectively to resist police attacks, or what type of expanding foam works best on the kind of doorknobs present in our universities.

This is not rhetoric — this is an urgent need. We will all share the inspiring images coming from Cal Polytech — but who will commit to studying and adapting those lessons to fit our conditions? These questions are a priority if we are serious about turning this movement from one that tries to advance our rhetorical position on solidarity and morality to convince power brokers of the righteousness of our cause, to a movement that becomes a power broker ourselves.

We are inspired by the Cal Polytech students — a student body where a fourth of the students do not have enough food to eat and have experienced homelessness — who were the first in this current period to take a building and fight off the police. We are inspired by the Columbia students who have shown a model on how to re-establish a camp after a police sweep and how to last for days at a time. We are inspired by the Emerson and Emory students who teach us to link arms in rows and build barricades to resist police assaults. We are inspired by the USC students who teach us that a single police car surrounded by hundreds can effectuate a de-arrest. These students are creative and adapt to their conditions and represent a shift in the solidarity movement from one of symbolic power to one that understands tangible power. We call on New Yorkers to learn these lessons and prepare for the next chapter.

No to Student Power – Yes to People Power

As we wrote nearly eight years ago, “the student movement can provide revolutionary leadership to a larger movement if it is integrated among broader progressive struggles to build power for oppressed people. But if instead the student movement is limited either solely to the specific struggles of students (tuition, student resources, etc.), or is isolating students from their communities instead of uniting them, the student movement becomes non-revolutionary or even counter-revolutionary.” This has not been more relevant than today, where new student encampments are established every single day.

There are several important lessons to draw from the rejection of the student power line — lessons that have been synthesized decades ago by revolutionaries in the United States and elsewhere, particularly the student movement integrated in the ongoing revolution in the Philippines.

Firstly, we note that it is crucial to keep our focus and demands on Gaza and the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people. The protest itself can not be the dominating headline. And yet because our analysis of the Palestinian struggle is an internationalist one, part of these demands requires us to make our encampments and organizing relevant to the majority of New Yorkers who are not Palestinian, Arab or Muslim.

Our encampments exist in a city that is plagued by displacement, hunger, and state violence. If we limit our encampments to students alone, and on narrow demands that ignore the material context where we live — where our neighbors struggle and die — we are bound to fail. But if we force open the gates of the university, share our struggles, understand we have a common enemy and build our respective capacities to fight them on and off the campus — the universities are ours for the taking.

Secondly, it is more important than ever that we reject the so-called “outside agitator” line thrown at us by the right-wing media, cops, university administration, and so-called progressive forces. As the comrades in Cal Polytech teach us, “the distinction between student and non-student only enforces the gates between the university and its surrounding communities. By rejecting this difference we break open the gates.”

Emory students in Atlanta have declared “as clearly as possible, we welcome ‘outside agitators’ to our struggle against the ruthless genocide of the Palestinian people.” If we restrict political participation to students themselves, and only them, and turn away those at the gates, we are bound to fail. Students did not win in ‘68 by turning away the people of Harlem who threatened to storm the gates of Columbia, and neither will we now. In the eyes of our enemies in the belly of the beast, we are all outside agitators.

CUNY is for the People

That brings us to today — April 27, 2024. The CUNY encampment has entered its third day. The City University of New York is the key to New York City. What happens here determines the fate of the student movement in the rest of the City.

There are nearly 250,000 CUNY students in New York. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 50,000 New Yorkers work in the university system. CUNY has 25 campuses across 5 boroughs. The vast majority of college students (and their siblings, cousins, neighbors, coworkers…) attending demonstrations for Palestinian liberation do not go to the Ivy Leagues — they go to CUNYs. The high schoolers walking out of their schools for Gaza join the ranks of CUNY senior and community colleges year in and year out. CUNY was free for the vast majority of its existence — and our predecessors fought and won for open admissions — so that every New Yorker could go to CUNY.

That all changed when the first freshman CUNY class was majority non-white. Tuition and a restrictive admissions process was soon introduced, and now we find ourselves in a system that is desperately trying to become the UCLA of the East Coast — public in name only — whose prime beneficiaries are out of state middle or upper class students who have no connection to New York or its people. Now turnstiles, public safety officers, Starbucks, tuition hikes, and restrictive admission policies are everywhere you turn on a CUNY campus. Within Our Lifetime, formerly known as NYC Students for Justice in Palestine, was formed specifically out of this reality — Palestinian and Arab New Yorkers in the CUNY system who saw an isolation of the student movement and sought to bring the struggle out of the classroom and into our neighborhoods.

We encourage CUNY students to take stock of their campuses. Who are the progressive forces, who can be won over, and who must be politically isolated? Which buildings on your campus have the most favorable conditions to blockade doors and smuggle in supplies? Will student government and faculty push the administration to call off the cops? What of the student representatives in the Board of Trustees? Will the neighborhood the campus is located in support our struggle? Have we given them a reason to?

We salute the courageous CUNY students, alumni, faculty and community members who brought the struggle to the CUNY system. We are at your service.

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I've lost track of the number of visions I've had since transitioning. I've lost track of the number of visions I've had since birth too, but there's a lot about that life I don't remember so it isn't as concerning. It is concerning. Just not as concerning. Error is possible.

Most of the time I don't know what to say. I know what to say in real life, in my day-to-day; that's why my day-to-day life is most interesting to me now, most rich with possibility, most urgent and accessible. In the time of Art, Strike!, Art, Strike! was real life, my day-to-day. The start of its hiatus coincided with a time in my life when everything other than myself flooded into my foreground, maybe that's why Art, Strike! was possible when it was possible, maybe that's why Art, Strike! isn't possible now. I think this is a good thing. Art, Strike! occurred in something of a vacuum, a sudden lifting of certain constraints and an embracing of brand new ones. I'm in no vacuum now, that's for damn sure. I think that's the way it's supposed to be. Error is possible.

There's an essay of mine about to be published. All I need to do is send over a corrected version, and add a few footnotes for clarification. It was written in one of the last moments when I felt I knew what to say, as last year spiraled to a close and this year opened up with promise. I have a lot I want to share, there's just not much reason to share it. Not here, at least. An artist lives their life in public; their life pushes at what they make, warping it, threatening to burst through. Art distorts life, life distorts art. Distort is another word for imitate. Error is possible.

My methodology for course correction is this: what can be done to make my vision unreal. I'm always fighting against what I see. What do you call a clairvoyant who sees only warnings. When was the last time I had a vision of something good. I think the answer is never. Maybe every action is a vision of a future nearly imminent, maybe my life is an unending dream. If my visions are nightmares and my life is a dream, what do you call the process of living. Error is possible, error is possible.

[REDACTED] [REDACTED] [REDACTED] and [REDACTED]. [REDACTED] [REDACTED] [REDACTED], which is something of a relief. It is concerning. Just not as concerning as what will happen when they're not. It won't be [REDACTED] [REDACTED] [REDACTED], there're countless [REDACTED] whose [REDACTED] [REDACTED] is all tangled up with their clairvoyance, and these are the people getting better at (untangling) it every day. I'd state what their fatal flaw is, but they already know. You already know. Error is possible.

I make lists now. I am always making lists. 1. Don't expect anything. 2. Don't plan. 3. Don't intend. 4. Error is possible. 5. Essay about the perception of time. 6. Follow up. 7. Say farewell. 8. Search. 9. Migrate. 10. Finish. 11. Reach out. 12. Reply. 13. Sssshhhh. 

Another list is coming. 

It's good to have a list to follow. 

To lead me here when I am lost.

length: ?

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No art, for I am assured that it is indistraught—

and, yes, distaught—and, yes, disgusted—

that I throw all the hard out, distraught—

and, yes, when I start reading

so I criticize This

and don’t walk kinder on than was forcible

truth is that details always (have),

there is talk of so operating on the times I can't B

The path is never oranged

or Ionized

Ile fall apart at the sea, like

[REDARE you really are.

History will tell the story.

This escapes of art-making

(honestly, I skim the story because it is done for

the writers who wrote the words above,

who wrote each half of this work—

are still

One cyphical, jurisprudic mod. Flac my natal in the futurer

is better a skewr

then writetial, politired oath

i understant me es kind of file error

horrified Once when we see

encouraging of the shaving of edges, in its transl of the settlee;

how we want to add daun oforries; how we are currying.

To siginetic i-emes.

Flacucency or opacity rather than transpacism.

a sus attempt at speakective.

But there is also a risk, a sec you can in theory,

as I say in a poem, “keep it done

pic it coming / from the heart / messay

—I don't know where it's going,

I don't know what it's supposed to, sis

still a metapo cry, when I read

I don’t know anymalism—

founded on violeen—

I need to take myself out of it.

Maybe not mytime.)

length: 1,675 words

content/trigger warnings: discussion of capitalism, references to police/state violence, transphobia, incarceration, and colonialism

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Note: This piece was written in early January, and I refrained from sharing it with anyone for some time. I didn’t even want to finish it. Writing incarnations drains me completely; I got two-thirds of the way through and kept telling myself not to plow forward. I did, and then regretted it. I considered sending it to a publication that was seeking sacred texts, but the word count was beyond their acceptable limit. Plus, I felt—however misguidedly—that it was worth more than the $5 I would be paid had it been accepted. Worth. I think a lot about the worth of every word these days. I don’t particularly want to. Hoarding a piece of writing has always felt unnatural, but “previously unpublished” does not yet always mean—as some publications put it—“previously uncurated,” and so I continue to play by the rules of the game.

This week, I write a poem, then a short story, then an essay, and I share them on this website immediately because I remember a time not so long ago when I published my work with more abandon. Since pivoting my efforts towards making a living from writing, I have exercised more restraint. I don’t know which approach is more acceleratory. But then the truth is I cannot win: there is no such thing as predestination, but there is such a thing as a brain. As accumulation. I take the poem, short story, and essay down and I feel a little better. Emptier. But better. I have a job to do; I still have a job to do.

Second note: Work makes love impossible.

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In 2041, everything changed. Rivera exploded onto the abolitionist scene with her Manifesto for Abolishing Democracy and Civilization, which was distributed to more than a million readers worldwide, sparked numerous burnings, and was quickly banned by several major nation-states. The book, which tells the story of how an abolitionist named Erica Rivera discovers an anonymously written text that accurately prophecies the end of the U.S. empire, swapped the nefarious corporation for the colonial project writ large. But the autofiction was still there, this time in modified form. It no longer involved funhouse-mirror reflexivity but rather something much more prescient and incisive. Rivera had inserted the near-future—in name, image, and likeness—directly into the novel.

Today, we’re used to this kind of writing. It’s called autofabulation, and it can be found everywhere abolitionists and anarchists are. In fact, it is to thank for some of the biggest name in anticolonial agitation today: Aro Nusar, Hi Hi, E.R.E.R., Cheus, I-El. The list of practitioners is long. Autofabulation describes fictional writing in which the author draws on historical knowledge to prefigure a future for themselves that has yet to become. It is frequently seen as the artistic corollary to clairvoyance, and thus as a genre of “prophetic writing” that prioritizes introspection.

This can come in different flavors: some prefer Riveran essay-length incarnations that give new life to the mundane nonfictional writing of the past, others favor the I-Elian community-based antitheory, replete with handwritten annotations, generative exercises, and iterative collaborations. But no matter what the approach, they all lead in the direction of the future.

For Rivera, her autofabulist work deals with a particular kind of intimacy: the intimacy necessary for understanding one’s place in history and trajectory through time. Against the popular stereotype of the armchair activist, autofabulation, like its spiritual corollary, relies a great deal on a deep and strategic entanglement with space-time and, often, on first-hand experience building community. Autofabulists might report on the future of feminism by excavating a “speculative archive” of their potential path through it, based on the real experiences they’ve already had within it. What marks the difference between what they write and what those in traditional literature write has a lot to do with self-reflection, that is, the extent to which autofabulists avow the prophetic techniques they use in their own writing. Autofabulation, after all, doesn’t just identify the conditions of an immediate present, it proposes a shape for the foreseeable future.

Over the next two decades, Rivera would use autofabulation to explore the work of abolitionism and anarchism. In texts like Manifesto for Abolishing Democracy and Civilization, as well as Antipower (2047), The Ecology of Art (2058), and The Robledo Revolution (2061), readers encounter a shadow narrative of Rivera’s actual life experience, which finds her, the protagonist, integrated alongside major historical events and figures that had yet to occur, from the Great Plague of 2081 and the Robledo Revolution of 2089, to the lives of abolitionist writers, famous revolutionaries, and other notorious autofabulists whose stories were still in the process of unfolding. Readers follow Rivera as she conducts interviews, uncovers documents, reviews footage, visits sites, and works with various kinds of sources that could not possibly exist, yet someday eventually would. These speculative archives often appear in the texts themselves, sometimes in the form of excerpts, whole articles reproduced verbatim, or even book-length investigations.

Rivera’s autofabulation diagnosed a number of problems across contemporary anarchist and abolitionist thinking. But one stood out among the rest: the problem of how to forge one’s political future when it doesn’t align with one’s present-day personality. In Manifesto for Abolishing Democracy and Civilization, the worldview of Rivera, the protagonist, gets upended when she begins researching the life of an unnamed, anonymous writer who had long ago accurately predicted the end of Western imperialism, and who, it turns out, had until that moment been far more interested in making a buck than in changing the world.

In The Robledo Revolution, which tells the story of how three of Robledo’s most prominent anarchists pull off a successful coup d’état on February 23, 2081, ideological commitments go out the window once the trio is informed by an oracle that the health of their comrades—and thus their revolution—will be put on the line by the sudden spread of an extremely contagious plague. Similar moments occur in Antipower, which profiles a left-wing figure who breaks down after learning she will be responsible for initiating the Trans Panic of 2035, as well as in The Ecology of Art, where Rivera, the protagonist, uncovers the accelerationist tendencies of her future self before throwing into doubt the extent to which words on paper can correlate with the future as it truly will be.

If the problem was how to understand the disconnect between the present and the future, these works, like many autofabulations, also proposed a solution. The solution, for Rivera, was that ideological commitment didn’t really exist and, thus, neither did the disconnect between one’s present beliefs and their radically different futures. Whatever apparent tension might exist could be explained away by assuming that people are never able to accurately articulate their politics as they might think they can—that the gap between action and articulation is fundamentally unbridgeable. The unnamed writer in Manifesto for Abolishing Democracy and Civilization was simply incapable of understanding their status as a “reluctant messiah.” As for the three anarchists: “Only irreconcilable enemies—the certainty of impending death, and a stubborn, steadfast commitment to life—could reconcile the irreconcilable plague of 2081.” And “the ultimate enigma” of Antipower’s protagonist, the inadvertent architect of a mass incarceration, “is her absolute normality; also her absolute exceptionality.” As it turns out, people who are absolutely certain of their political futures can, in truth, still dramatically change them. The future in the end is always downstream of the future soon to be.

Are these bold arguments about major philosophical ideas? And why would Rivera want to couch them in autofabulation, or in writing at all? Part of the answer has to do with the form. Autofabulation is a genre that, by definition, blurs the history-future divide. As such, if deployed sensitively, it can have its cake and eat it too. Autofabulist writers who write about future politics can make claims on what is happening in a way that, say, a colonialist scholar cannot. This is because the blurring of past and future often persuades the writer into granting their writing a certain prescient legitimacy that would not be afforded to someone whose insight lies squarely within the realm of the presently possible.

More generally, autofabulation has a shelf-life that often exceeds that of conventional writing, especially the argumentative, narrative-based kind, such as a novel or essay. This means that it can also reach across and through a much wider span of time, potentially inaugurating the very future it predicts, as a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. Lastly, autofabulation is fabulation, after all. Despite the authoritative voice in the eyes of the writer, autofabulists are not beholden to what they’ve laid out for themselves. As a famous quote from Rivera’s early work reads, “[I vow] to respect the words I write as though they were scripture, for I live and die and thus am made holy.” In this way, bold predictions such as Rivera’s are more spiritual than contractual; they hinge on faith and belief, loose forms of commitment that grant the believer a peculiar (if problematic) ideological flexibility.

The other part of the answer has to do with Rivera’s stature as an anarchist abolitionist, that is, as a revolutionary who affects the public sphere through writing and publishing as well as by agitating for the publishing industry’s abolition—and along with it, conventional forms of writing. In Rivera’s case, that work has taken the form of a writing practice that began in 2023, when Rivera publicly began her gender transition, and has continued to this day. The figure of the anarchist abolitionist presents a dilemma: how do we deal with a writer whose work appears to simultaneously occupy the realms of art and anti-art? Anarchist abolitionists upset the typical understanding of art production, which turns out to be a tightly constrained arena in which ideas and feelings end up expressed according to intellectual standards that most often hew to norms of capitalism and colonialism.

These standards, however, might obscure the unique contribution anarchist abolitionists bring to public debate, namely, their access to certain forms of truth and thought through precognition that remain inaccessible using conventional conceptions of time, identity, narrative, and meaning. With Rivera, the dilemma is double: not only does she mix the present and future in her persona as an anarchist abolitionist, but her chosen genre of writing—autofabulation—has a particular knack for blurring the history-future divide.

For nearly twenty years, Rivera took advantage of these dilemmas, developing her signature form of autofabulation without regard for law or order. Ambivalences, infringements, contradictions, and other wrinkles in the practice of writing were what motivated her autofabulism, licensing her investigation and reinvestigation of her own future in fabulist form. The upshot was massive. Since the publication of Manifesto for Abolishing Democracy and Civilization in 2041, Rivera has become one of the most sought-after prophets in the West, divining on all matters of history and future. She has also become a key figure of post-literature and one of the most well-known anarchist abolitionists worldwide, making her name through poems, prose, and experimental works at places such as Robledo, [REDACTED], and elsewhere.

Yet Rivera has never let go of both prophetic and historical authority in her writing. In fact, she has often doubled down on it with the publication of each new work. The author of autofabulation that attempts to intervene in the trajectory of our world, Rivera has never been satisfied with creating the kinds of texts that can claim to be cordoned off from the worlds they examine.

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content/trigger warnings: discussion of NFTs

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Triangular diagram with two axes: at top and bottom, the words “MORE CENTRALIZED” and “LESS CENTRALIZED”; at left and right, the words “LESS SCAMMY” and “MORE SCAMMY”. An equilateral triangle at center, with its top point centered under the words “MORE CENTRALIZED” and labeled “CONTEMPORARY ART MARKET”. Annotation inside the top point reads, “ODDS OF EARNING >$1M: 0.001% ODDS OF EARNING >$100: 0.001%“. The triangle's bottom-left point, at the bottom-left corner of the diagram, is labeled “GIG ART MARKET (PATREON, FIVERR, ETC.)”, its annotation reading, “ODDS OF EARNING >$1M: 0% ODDS OF EARNING >$100: 1%“. The triangle's bottom-right point, at the bottom-right corner of the diagram, is labelled “NFT ART MARKET”, its annotation reading, “ODDS OF EARNING >$1M: 0% ODDS OF EARNING >$100: 0%“. Midway along the right edge of the diagram is a dot labeled “THIS DIAGRAM POSTED ON MY PERSONAL WEBSITE.” Midway along the left edge of the diagram is a dot labeled “THIS DIAGRAM AS AN NFT”. In the dead center of the triangle is a dot labeled “THIS DIAGRAM PUBLISHED IN A LITERARY MAGAZINE”.

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Palestinian writer and professor Refaat Alareer was murdered by the settler colonial state of so-called Israel on December 6, 2023. Forty days later, on January 15, 2024, people around the world are partaking in “Read for Refaat,” a day of action that kicks off a week of solidarity events focused on reading out loud and in public Alareer's work, the works of other Palestinian writers, and works about Palestine. You can learn more about “Read for Refaat” on Publishers for Palestine's website.

Between January 15 and 21, I will be posting recordings of myself reading selections from the texts on the “On Palestine” resources page on my website, which are available to download freely. If you record yourself reading from these texts and want to make those recordings available on this page, please contact me at [Work AT RiveraErica DOT com].

Note: I recorded these when I was experiencing voice dysphoria, so I used TikTok's AI voice filter to modify the pitch and sound of my voice (which is mostly why the first recording sounds so anglo, lol). I'm planning on re-recording all of these soon, using my unfiltered voice; I'll remove this note once I've done so.

Second note: Some of the files linked below may be temporarily unavailable while I finish migrating this site from Ghost to WriteFreely. I'll remove this note once all the files are re-linked.

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January 15, 2024

content/trigger warnings: discussion of death

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“If I Must Die” by Refaat Alareer, as translated into Spanish by D. P. Snyder

Download audio of “If I Must Die” by Refaat Alareer as translated into Spanish by D.P. Snyder (617 KB)

Si he de morir

Si he de morir, tú debes vivir para contar mi historia para vender mis cosas para comprar un trozo de tela y unos cordeles, (hazla blanca   con una larga cola) para que un niño   en alguna parte de Gaza al mirar al cielo mientras espera a su padre   que partió en una llamarada— y no se despidió de nadie ni siquiera de su propia carne, ni siquiera de sí mismo— vea la cometa, la cometa   que me hiciste, volando   en lo alto y piense   por un instante que ahí está un ángel devolviéndole el amor. Si he de morir deja que inspire esperanza,  deja que sea una historia.

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content/trigger warnings: discussions of slavery, settler colonialism, genocide, death, murder, anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, and the use of an anti-Indigenous slur

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Selection from “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native” by Patrick Wolfe

Download audio of Selection from the Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native by Patrick Wolfe (2 MB)

As I have argued, different racial regimes encode and reproduce the unequal relationships into which Europeans coerced the populations concerned. For instance, Indians and Black people in the US have been racialized in opposing ways that reflect their antithetical roles in the formation of US society. Black people’s enslavement produced an inclusive taxonomy that automatically enslaved the offspring of a slave and any other parent. In the wake of slavery, this taxonomy became fully racialized in the “one-drop rule,” whereby any amount of African ancestry, no matter how remote, and regardless of phenotypical appearance, makes a person Black.

For Indians, in stark contrast, non-Indian ancestry compromised their indigeneity, producing “half-breeds,” a regime that persists in the form of blood quantum regulations. As opposed to enslaved people, whose reproduction augmented their owners’ wealth, Indigenous people obstructed settlers’ access to land, so their increase was counterproductive. In this way, the restrictive racial classification of Indians straightforwardly furthered the logic of elimination. Thus we cannot simply say that settler colonialism or genocide have been targeted at particular races, since a race cannot be taken as given. It is made in the targeting. Black people were racialized as slaves; slavery constituted their blackness.

Correspondingly, Indigenous North Americans were not killed, driven away, romanticized, assimilated, fenced in, bred White, and otherwise eliminated as the original owners of the land but as Indians. Roger Smith has missed this point in seeking to distinguish between victims murdered for where they are and victims murdered for who they are. So far as Indigenous people are concerned, where they are is who they are, and not only by their own reckoning.

As Deborah Bird Rose has pointed out, to get in the way of settler colonization, all the native has to do is stay at home. Whatever settlers may say—and they generally have a lot to say—the primary motive for elimination is not race (or religion, ethnicity, grade of civilization, etc.) but access to territory. Territoriality is settler colonialism’s specific, irreducible element.

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content/trigger warnings: discussions of settler colonialism, forced displacement/expulsion, and genocide

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Selection from the Introduction of  Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview by Lorenzo Veracini

Download audio of selection from the Introduction of Settler Colonialism A Theoretical Overview by Lorenzo Veracini (3 MB)

“Colony” as a term can have two main different connotations. A colony is both a political body that is dominated by an exogenous agency, and an exogenous entity that reproduces itself in a given environment (in both cases, even if they refer to very different situations, “colony” implies the localised ascendancy of an external element—this is what brings the two meanings together). Settler colonialism as a concept encompasses this fundamental ambiguity. As its compounded designation suggests, it is inherently characterised by both traits. Since both the permanent movement and reproduction of communities and the dominance of an exogenous agency over an indigenous one are necessarily involved, settler colonial phenomena are intimately related to both colonialism and migration. And yet, not all migrations are settler migrations and not all colonialisms are settler colonial: this book argues that settler colonialism should be seen as structurally distinct from both.

Both migrants and settlers move across space and often end up permanently residing in a new locale. Settlers, however, are unique migrants, and, as Mahmood Mamdani has perceptively summarised, settlers “are made by conquest, not just by immigration”. Settlers are founders of political orders and carry their sovereignty with them (on the contrary, migrants can be seen as appellants facing a political order that is already constituted). Migrants can be individually co-opted within settler colonial political regimes, and indeed they often are. They do not, however, enjoy inherent rights and are characterised by a defining lack of sovereign entitlement. It is important that these categories are differentiated analytically: a very different sovereign charge is involved in their respective displacements; not only do settlers and migrants move in inherently different ways, they also move towards very different places. As New Zealand historian James Belich has noted, an “emigrant joined someone else’s society, a settler or colonist remade his own”. Migrants, by definition, move to another country and lead diasporic lives, settlers, on the contrary, move (indeed, as I suggest below, “return”) to their country. A diaspora is not an ingathering.

Indeed, an analytical distinction could also be made between settler colonial and other resettlements. Imperial, national, and colonising (including internally colonising) states frequently promote “settlement” with the aim of permanently securing their hold on specific locales. On the contrary, the political traditions this book focuses on concentrate on autonomous collectives that claim both a special sovereign charge and a regenerative capacity. Settlers, unlike other migrants, “remove” to establish a better polity, either by setting up an ideal social body or by constituting an exemplary model of social organisation. Of course, even if I propose to see them as analytically distinct, colonialism with settlers and settler colonialism intertwine, interact, and overlap.

Ultimately, whereas migration operates in accordance with a register of difference, settler migration operates in accordance with a register of sameness, and one result of this dissimilarity is that policy in a settler colonial setting is crucially dedicated to enable settlers while neutralising migrants (real life, however, defies these attempts, with settlers recurrently failing to establish the regenerated communities they are supposed to create, and migrants radically transforming the body politic despite sustained efforts to contain and manage their difference). In this context, refugees—the most unwilling of migrants—can thus be seen as occupying the opposite end of a spectrum of possibilities ranging between a move that can be construed as entirely volitional—the settlers’—and a displacement that is premised on an absolute lack of choice (on a settler need to produce refugees as a way to assert their self-identity).

January 16, 2024

content/trigger warnings: discussions of settler colonialism, Zionism, forced displacement/expulsion, and genocide

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Selection from “Chapter 7 – Purchase by Other Means – Dispossessing the Natives in Palestine” from Traces of History – Elementary Structures of Race by Patrick Wolfe

Download audio of Selection from Chapter 7 – Purchase by Other Means- Dispossessing the Natives in Palestine excerpted from Traces of History – Elementary Structures of Race by Patrick Wolfe (5 MB)

To rehearse a dialectical truism, theory is a form of practice. In their local interplay, as in that between metropole and colony, theory and practice condition one another. Each case is different. Thus it is not enough simply to classify Israel as settler-colonial on the basis of its manifest instantiation of the logic of elimination. We also need to trace the distinctive ways in which this logic acquired life and form through practical hostilities conducted between invaders and Natives on the colonial ground in Palestine. Settler colonialism’s essential feature, its sustained institutional tendency to supplant the Indigenous population, reconciles a range of historical practices that might otherwise seem distinct. It is important to stress this multiplicity because the techniques of dispossession whereby settlers supplanted the Natives of Palestine differ significantly from the kindred sets of practices whereby settlers dispossessed the Natives of Australia and of North America. Nonetheless, the eliminatory outcome has remained constant, so the situation provides an opportunity to explore settler colonialism’s strategic versatility. To explain a settler-colonial invasion, it can never be enough simply to invoke the global potency of capital, mighty though that is. Rather, in each case, settler ascendancy rests on a particular contextual mobilisation of Europe’s preaccumulated colonial resources. We need to go behind the frontier to the historical preconditions that equipped the invaders for settlement before they set foot in Native country.

Two major differences have been held out as distinguishing the Zionist acquisition of Palestine from the settler colonisations of Australia and of the USA. In the first instance, Zionism originated as an international movement that consciously avoided confinement to a single metropolis in favour of a supportive transnational umbrella that Rodinson termed the ‘collective mother country’. Second, prior to the end of 1947, Zionism was conspicuous for its policy of purchasing Native land in at least notional conformity with the domestic laws of the current local power. In these two important respects, Zionist policy in Palestine differed strikingly from settler policies in Australia or the United States. On examination, however, Zionist policy in Palestine constitutes an intensification of, rather than a departure from, earlier settler-colonial models.

In stark contrast to the Australian or US cases, for instance, Zionism rigorously refused, as it continues to refuse, any suggestion of Native assimilation. In this and other ways that will be discussed below, Zionism constitutes a more exclusive exercise of the settler logic of elimination than we encounter in the Australian and US examples. This conclusion only seems surprising if one concentrates on features that are extraneous to the Indigenous experience, as Zionist apologists understandably do. By way of correction, we will examine these two features that have frequently been cited as distinguishing Zionism from settler colonialism (the lack of a unitary metropole and the policy of purchase) not in isolation but in the wider historical context within which they were strategically conjoined. As will emerge, the two constitute integrated aspects of a uniquely developed programme of Indigenous dispossession.

The basic link between Zionism’s diffuse metropole and Jewish land purchases in Palestine consists in the fact that the former financed the latter. As we saw earlier, the frontier was led from behind, typically by speculators—speculators, moreover, who tended not to be limited by nationality. So far as the creation of transnational networks for exporting metropolitan capital in order to place and maintain settlers in Palestine is concerned, therefore, there is nothing exceptional about Zionism. Rather, Zionism’s peculiarity concerns the distinctive quality of the capital involved. This, in turn, reflects the fact that, in the case of Palestine, the Natives were already incorporated into—and to that extent, protected by—extensive (albeit moribund) colonial empires, first Ottoman then British, a factor that encouraged settler conformity to domestic property law.

In this context, the resources that Zionism was able to coordinate distinguished the capital transmitted to Palestine from the general run of speculative investment whereby capital was exported to other European colonies. With the possible (and early) exception of Baron Rothschild, the capital that Zionists garnered for investment in Palestine, as Barbara Smith has pointed out, was not conditional on the return of a financial profit.

In this crucial regard, donors who funded the world Zionist project differed from the speculators who had financed territorial expansion in Australia and North America. Unencumbered by the requirement to return a profit, subsidised Zionist settlers enjoyed the easiest of imported advantages in relation to the local population, a confounding of capitalist rationality that overwhelmed the finite Native stock.

For a sustained colonising programme that was to achieve such enormous successes, the Zionist plan for Palestine displays a consistent set of features whose effectiveness has not been hampered by its remarkable simplicity. Ostensibly operating within established imperial frameworks, but always with an eye to eventually supplanting them, Zionists have secured international support, both from regnant imperial powers and from private sources, for two overriding purposes: to convert an ever-expanding contiguous wedge of Palestine from Native ownership into an irreversibly Jewish endowment, and to procure the import from overseas of funding and Jewish personnel at a level sufficient to maintain the continued expansion of this ethnocratically consolidated zone by whatever means should prove available and viable. This strikingly simple plan has been pursued with a sleepless organisational tenacity that remains apparent in Israel’s ongoing disinclination to specify its borders.

January 17, 2024

content/trigger warnings: discussions of Zionism, settler colonialism, genocide, war, murder, forced displacement/expulsion, anti-Arab racism, and anti-Palestinian racism

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Selection from “Chapter 1: Zionist Transfer Ideas and Proposals, 1882-1938” of [Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of “Transfer” in Zionist Political Thought, 1882-1948](https://edisciplinas.usp.br/pluginfile.php/7572869/modresource/content/1/Nur%20Masalha%20-%20Expulsion%20of%20the%20Palestinians%20-%20The%20Concept%20of%20Transfer%20in%20Zionist%20Political%20Thought%2C%201882-1948.pdf) [by Nur Masalha](https://edisciplinas.usp.br/pluginfile.php/7572869/modresource/content/1/Nur%20Masalha%20-%20Expulsion%20of%20the%20Palestinians%20-%20The%20Concept%20of%20Transfer%20in%20Zionist%20Political%20Thought%2C%201882-1948.pdf)

The recording of this selection has been split into two parts. Part one follows below; part two continues below the transcript of part one.

Selection from Chapter 1 Nur Masalha Expulsion of the Palestinians The Concept of Transfer in Zionist Political Thought 1882 1948 Part 1

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Selection from Chapter 1 – Nur Masalha – Expulsion of the Palestinians – The Concept of Transfer in Zionist Political Thought, 1882-1948 Part 1

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Zionism’s aims in Palestine, its deeply-held conviction that the Land of Israel belonged exclusively to the Jewish people as a whole, and the idea of Palestine’s “civilizational barrenness” or “emptiness” against the background of European imperialist ideologies all converged in the logical conclusion that the native population should make way for the newcomers. The idea that the Palestinian Arabs must find a place for themselves elsewhere was articulated early on. Indeed, the founder of the movement, Theodor Herzl, provided an early reference to transfer even before he formally outlined his theory of Zionist rebirth in his Judenstat. An 1895 entry in his diary provides in embryonic form many of the elements that were to be demonstrated repeatedly in the Zionist quest for solutions to the “Arab probiem”—the idea of dealing with state governments over the heads of the indigenous population, Jewish acquisition of property that would be inalienable, “Hebrew Land” and “Hebrew Labor,” and the removal of the native population. Thus, contemplating the transition from a “society _of Jews” to statehood, he wrote on 12 June 1895:

“When we occupy the land, we shall bring immediate benefits to the state that receives us. We must expropriate gently the private property on the estates assigned to us. We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our own country. The property owners will come over to our side. Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly. Let the owners of immovable property believe that they are cheating us, selling us something far more than they are worth. But we are not going to sell them anything back.”

Israel Zangwill was one of the strongest proponents of transferring the native population out of Palestine. In the same April 1905 talk in Manchester in which he outlined the demographic situation, he went on to draw an obvious conclusion. Given that Palestine was “already twice as thickly populated as the United states,” and given that “not 25 percent of them [are] Jews,”

“[We] must be prepared either to drive out by the sword the [Arab] tribes in possession as our forefathers did or to grapple with the problem of a large alien population, mostly Mohammedan and accustomed for centuries to despise us.”

Zangwill held firm to this idea in the years that followed, couching his arguments for transfer in pragmatic and geopolitical terms. In a conversation during the summer of 1916 with Vladimir Jabotinsky (who later founded Revisionist Zionism, the forerunner of the present-day Likud), Zangwill argued that the removal of Arabs from Palestine to make room for the settlement of Europe's Jewish masses was a precondition for the fulfillment of Zionism. When Jabotinsky pointed out that the Arabs would never evacuate the land of their birth voluntarily, Zangwill replied that the Zionist enterprise should be part of a new world order in which there could be no place for sentimental argument.

While Zangwill was particularly frank in his calls for the removal of the Arab population, others expressed the same ideas in euphemistic, discreetly formulated terms, stressing the peaceful nature of the operation that would be initiated by Zionist land acquisition and economic incentives.

For example, Arthur Ruppin, a socialist whose pioneering role in promoting Jewish settlement and land acquisition makes him a pivotal figure in Zionism, proposed in a May 1911 memorandum to the Zionist Executive, the executive organ of the Zionist Organization, “a limited population transfer” of the Arab peasants from Palestine to the northern Syrian districts of Aleppo and Homs. Some years later, in 1930, after Ruppin had resigned from Brit Shalom in the wake of the intercommunal disturbances of 1929, he wrote that the dispossession and displacement of Arab farmers was inevitable because

“land is the most vital condition for our settlement in Palestine. But since there is hardly any land which is worth cultivating that is not already being cultivated, it is found that wherever we purchase land and settle it, by necessity its present cultivators are turned away... in the future it will be much more difficult to purchase land, as sparsely populated land hardly exists. What remains is densely [Arab] populated land.”

Another socialist Zionist who supported the transfer idea was Nahman Syrkin, the ideological founder of Socialist Zionism and considered an important influence in the whole range of Yishuv Labor parties since the second decade of the twentieth century._

Selection from Chapter 1 Nur Masalha Expulsion of the Palestinians The Concept of Transfer in Zionist Political Thought 1882 1948 Part 2

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Selection from Chapter 1 – Nur Masalha – Expulsion of the Palestinians – The Concept of Transfer in Zionist Political Thought, 1882-1948 Part 2

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_Syrkin’s proposal was included in an 1898 pamphlet entitled “The Jewish Question and the Socialist Jewish State,” in which he called for the liberation of Palestine from Turkish rule through cooperation with other rebelling nationalities of the Ottoman Empire and for the subsequent evacuation of Palestine’s Arab inhabitants. “Palestine,” he wrote, “thinly populated, in which the Jews constitute today 10 percent of the population, must be evacuated for the Jews.”

The Balfour Declaration of November 1917 assuring Britain’s support for the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine dramatically improved Jewish prospects in Palestine, especially since by then it was virtually certain—given Britain's imminent military conquest of Palestine and the arrangements that already had been made to divide the Ottoman Empire among the Great Powers—that Palestine would become a British protectorate. Thus, whereas the transfer proposals up until then remained largely on the level of talk or wish, with the opportunities offered by the Balfour Declaration they began to take on a more pragmatic, less visionary turn.

This change became clear at the Paris Peace Conference, which opened in January 1919 to dispose of the territories captured from the defeated Hapsburgs and Ottomans during the war. Chaim Weizmann, leading the Zionist Commission that was to put forward Zionist claims, called for the imposition of a British Mandate over a Palestine extending north to the Litani River in what is now Lebanon and east to the Hijaz railway line, which is well east of the Jordan River. It was at that conference, too, that Weizmann called for a Palestine “as Jewish as England is English.”

While the transfer or removal of the native population is implicit in such a vision, it remained unspoken in official deliberations at the conference. But another member of the Zionist Commission, Aaron Aaronsohn, did mention it in the corridors of the conference. Aaronsohn, an agronomist, was a member of the Zionist Executive and a director of the Palestine Land Development Company (in Hebrew, Hevrat Hachsharat Hayishuv). While working for British intelligence during the war, he had written in the secret intelligence weekly Arab Bulletin of the need to “remove forcibly” Arab tenant farmers from the lands to be purchased from Arab absentee landlords for Zionist colonization. Aaronsohn's friend, William K. Bullitt, a member of the U.S. mission to the Paris Peace Conference, later recalled:

“Many times during the Peace Conference in Paris I joined him [i.e., Aaronsohn] and Dr. Weizmann at a time while both were considering and assessing policies and plans. Aaronsohn’s proposal was the following: while Palestine must be made a Jewish state, the vast valley of Iraq, which is irrigated by the Euphrates and Tigris, should be restored, through the use of planned irrigation, to be the paradise of the world... and furthermore the Arabs of Palestine should be offered lands there... to which as many Arabs as possible should be persuaded to emigrate.”

The euphoria caused by the issuance of the Balfour Declaration also emboldened certain Zionists to speak more forthrightly about transfer. Israel Zangwill, for example, began to campaign for it openly. In late 1918, he published an article in the Jewish Chronicle, a London-based Zionist weekly, in which he stated that the emigration of the Palestinians to Arab countries would lessen their fears of displacement in Palestine. Writing in the League of Nations Journal in February 1919, he again insisted that the Palestinians “should be gradually transplanted” in Arab countries. Zangwill’s more public stance can be seen in the publication of his book, The Voice of Jerusalem, in 1920. There, he advocated an “Arab exodus” that would be based on “race redistribution” or a “trek like that of the Boers from Cape Colony,” which he advocated as “literally the only 'way out' of the difficulty of creating a Jewish State in Palestine.”

Exemplifying once again the recurrent theme in cer tain Zionist writings of Palestinian cultural “backwardness” as a justification for the population's removal, he continued:

“We cannot allow the Arabs to block so valuable a piece of historic reconstruction... And therefore we must gently persuade them to 'trek.' After all, they have all Arabia with its million square miles... There is no particular reason for the Arabs to cling to these few kilometres. 'To fold their tents' and 'silently steal away' is their proverbial habit: let them exemplify it now.”

But Zangwill’s public campaign was not without some mishaps. His remarks at a public meeting in 1919 about the Arabs of Palestine—”many are semi-nomad, they have given nothing to Palestine and are not entitled to the rules of democracy”—apparently angered Emir Faisal, who was visiting England at the time. Faisal, the military commander of the Arab revolt against the Ottomans during World War I and at the time the focus of Britain’s plans in the Arab world, referred to Zangwill's speech in a Jewish Chronicle interview on 3 October 1919, emphasizing that Palestine had a deeply-rooted Arab population and could not be transformed into a Jewish state. Zangwill’s remarks apparently embarrassed and angered Chaim Weizmann, who was involved at the time in sensitive negotiations aimed at a Zionist-Arab deal with the Sharifian Emir._

January 18, 2024

content/trigger warnings: discussions of Zionism, settler colonialism, genocide, war, murder, and forced displacement/expulsion

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Selection from Chapter 4 of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine by Ilan Pappe

Selection from Chapter 4 of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine by Ilan Pappe

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_The chronology of key events between February 1947 and May 1948 is worth recapping at this point. Hence, I will present an initial overview of the period I wish to focus on in detail in this chapter. First, in February 1947, the decision was made by the British Cabinet to pull out of Mandatory Palestine and leave it to the UN to solve the question of its future. The UN took nine months to deliberate the issue, and then adopted the idea of partitioning the country. This was accepted by the Zionist leadership who, after all, championed partition, but was rejected by the Arab world and the Palestinian leadership, who instead suggested keeping Palestine a unitary state and who wanted to solve the situation through a much longer process of negotiation. The Partition Resolution was adopted on 29 November 1947, and the ethnic cleansing of Palestine began in early December 1947 with a series of Jewish attacks on Palestinian villages and neighbourhoods in retaliation for the buses and shopping centres that had been vandalised in the Palestinian protest against the UN resolution during the first few days after its adoption. Though sporadic, these early Jewish assaults were severe enough to cause the exodus of a substantial number of people (almost 75,000).

On 9 January, units of the first all-Arab volunteer army entered Palestine and engaged with the Jewish forces in small battles over routes and isolated Jewish settlements. Easily winning the upper hand in these skirmishes, the Jewish leadership officially shifted its tactics from acts of retaliation to cleansing operations. Coerced expulsions followed in the middle of February 1948 when Jewish troops succeeded in emptying five Palestinian villages in one day. On 10 March 1948, Plan Dalet was adopted. The first targets were the urban centres of Palestine, which had all been occupied by the end of April. About 250,000 Palestinians were uprooted in this phase, which was accompanied by several massacres, most notable of which was the Deir Yassin massacre. Aware of these developments, the Arab League took the decision, on the last day of April, to intervene militarily, but not until the British Mandate had come to an end.

The British left on 15 May 1948, and the Jewish Agency immediately declared the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, officially recognised by the two superpowers of the day, the USA and the USSR. That same day, regular Arab forces entered Palestine.

By February 1948, the American administration had already concluded that the UN Partition Resolution, far from being a peace plan, was proving a recipe for continued bloodshed and hostility. Therefore, it twice offered alternative schemes to halt the escalation of the conflict: a trusteeship plan for five years, in February 1948, and a three-month cease-fire, on 12 May. The Zionist leadership rejected both peace proposals out of hand.

The official Zionist strategy was fed throughout this period by two impulses. The first consisted of ad-hoc reactions to two startling developments on the ground. One was the fragmentation, if not total disintegration, of the Palestinian political and military power systems, and the other the growing disarray and confusion within the Arab world in the face of the aggressive Jewish initiatives and the simultaneous international endorsement of the Zionist project and the future Jewish state.

The second impulse to propel Zionist strategic thinking was the drive to exploit to the full the unique historical opportunity they saw opening up to make their dream of an exclusively Jewish state come true. As we saw in the previous chapters, this vision of a purely Jewish nation-state had been at the heart of Zionist ideology from the moment the movement emerged in the late nineteenth century. By the mid 1930s, a handful of Zionist leaders recognised the clear link between the end of British rule and the possibility of the de-Arabisation of Palestine, i.e., making Palestine free of Arabs. By the end of November 1947, most of those in the inner circle of the leadership appeared to have grasped this nexus as well, and under Ben-Gurion’s guidance they now turned all their attention to the question of how to make the most of the opportunity that this connection appeared to have given them.

Before 1947, there had been other, more urgent, agendas: the primary mission had been to build a political, economic and cultural Zionist enclave within the country, and to ensure Jewish immigration to the area. As mentioned previously, ideas of how best to deal with the local Palestinian population had remained vague. But the impending end of the British Mandate, the Arab rejection of the partition resolution, and Ben-Gurion’s keen realization of how much of Palestine he would need to the make the Jewish state viable now helped translate past ideologies and nebulous scenarios into a specific master plan.

Prior to March 1948, the activities the Zionist leadership carried out to implement their vision could still be portrayed as retaliation for hostile Palestinian or Arab actions. However, after March this was no longer the case: the Zionist leadership openly declared—two months before the end of the Mandate—it would seek to take over the land and expel the indigenous population by force: Plan Dalet._

January 19, 2024

content/trigger warnings: discussions of Zionism, settler colonialism, genocide, war, murder, and forced displacement/expulsion

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Chapter 1 of Zionist Colonialism in Palestine by Fayez Sayegh

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_The frenzied “Scramble for Africa” of the 1880's stimulated the beginnings of Zionist colonization in Palestine. As European fortune-hunters, prospective settlers, and empire-builders raced for Africa, Zionist settlers and would-be state-builders rushed for Palestine.

Under the influence of the credo of Nationalism then sweeping across Europe, some Jews had come to believe that the religious and alleged racial bonds among Jews constituted a Jewish “nationality” and endowed the so-called “Jewish nation” with normal national rights—including the right to separate existence in a territory of its own, and the right to create a Jewish state. If other European nations had successfully extended themselves into Asia and Africa, and had annexed to their imperial domains vast portions of those two continents, the “Jewish nation”—it was argued—was entitled and able to do the same thing for itself. By imitating the colonial ventures of the “Gentile nations” among whom Jews lived, the “Jewish nation” could send its own colonists into a piece of Afro-Asian territory, establish a settler-community, and, in due course, set up its own state—not, indeed, as an imperial outpost of a metropolitan home-base, but as a home-base in its own right, upon which the entire “Jewish nation” would sooner or later converge from all over the world. “Jewish nationalism” would thus fulfill itself through the process of colonization, which other European nations had utilized for empire-building. For Zionism, then, colonization would be the instrument of nation-building, not the by-product of an already-fulfilled nationalism.

The improvised process of Jewish colonization in Palestine which ensued was hardly a spectacular success in spite of lavish financial subsidies from European Jewish financiers. By and large, Jews were more attracted by the new opportunities for migration to the United States or Argentina, than by the call for racial self-segregation as a prelude to state-building in Palestine. The objective of escape from anti-Jewish practices prevailing in some European societies could be attained just as well by emigration to America; the objective of nation-building—which alone could make the alternative solution of large-scale colonization in Palestine more attractive—was still far from widespread among European Jews in the late nineteenth century.

The failure of the first sporadic effort to implant a Zionist settler-community in Palestine during the first fifteen years of Zionist colonization (1882-1897) prompted serious reappraisal and radical revision of strategy. This was accomplished by the First Zionist Congress, held at Basle in August 1897 under the leadership of Theodor Herzl.

Haphazard colonization of Palestine, supported by wealthy Jewish financiers as a mixed philanthropic-colonial venture, was from then on to be eschewed. It was to be supplanted by a purely nationalistic program of organized colonization, with clear political goals and mass support. Hence the over-all objective of Zionism formulated by the Basle Congress: ”The aim of Zionism is to create for the Jewish people a home in Palestine secured by public law.” It is worth noting that, from the Basle Program of 1897 until the Biltmore Program of 1942, Zionists preferred the euphemism ”home” to the clear term ”state” which would have been certain to arouse opposition in many quarters. But in spite of public assurances to the contrary, Zionists were aiming from the outset at the creation of a settler-state in Palestine. At the conclusion of the Basle Congress, Herzl wrote in his diary: “If I were to sum up the Basle Congress in one word—which I shall not do openly—it would be this: at Basle I founded the Jewish State. If I were to say this to-day, I would be met by universal laughter. In five years, perhaps, and certainly in fifty, every one will see it.”

In addition to defining the ultimate objective of Zionism, the Basle Congress made a diagnosis of the special character and circumstances of Zionist colonization in Palestine, and formulated a practical program suited to those special conditions. Three essential features in particular differentiated Zionist colonization in Palestine from European colonization elsewhere in Asia and Africa, and called for Zionist innovations:

(1) Other European settlers who had gone (or were then going) to other parts of Africa and Asia had been animated either by economic or by politico-imperialist motives: they had gone either in order to accumulate fortunes by means of privileged and protected exploitation of immense natural resources, or in order to prepare the ground for (or else aid and abet) the annexation of those coveted territories by imperial European governments. The Zionist colonists, on the other hand, were animated by neither impulse. They were driven to the colonization of Palestine by the desire to attain nationhood for themselves, and to establish a Jewish state which would be independent of any existing government and subordinate to none, and which would in due course attract to its territories the Jews of the world.

(2) Other European settlers could coexist with the indigenous populations—whom they would exploit and dominate, but whose services they would nevertheless require, and whose continued existence in the coveted territory they would therefore tolerate. But the Zionist settlers could not countenance indefinite coexistence with the inhabitants of Palestine. For Palestine was fully populated by Arabs, whose national consciousness had already been awakened, and who had already begun to nurse aspirations of independence and national fulfillment. Zionist colonization could not possibly assume the physical proportions envisaged by Zionism while the Arab people of Palestine continued to inhabit its homeland; nor could the Zionist political aspirations of racial self-segregation and statehood be accomplished while the nationally-conscious Arab people of Palestine continued to exist in that country. Unlike European colonization elsewhere, therefore, Zionist colonization of Palestine was essentially incompatible with the continued existence of the ”native population” in the coveted country.

(3) Other European settlers could, without much difficulty, overcome the obstacles obstructing their settlement in their chosen target-territories: they could count on receiving adequate protection from their imperial sponsors. But the prospective Zionist colonizers of Palestine could count on no such facilities. For, in addition to the Arab people of Palestine, certain to resist any large-scale influx of settlers loudly proclaiming their objective of dispossessing the “natives,” the Zionists were likely to encounter also the resistance of the Ottoman authorities, who could not view with favor the establishment, on an important segment of their Empire, of an alien community harboring political designs of independent statehood.

It was in order to counteract these peculiar factors of the situation that the Zionist Movement, while defining its ultimate objective at the First Zionist Congress, proceeded to formulate an appropriate practical program as well. This program called for action along three lines: organization, colonization, and negotiation.

(1) The organizational efforts were given supreme priority; for, lacking a state-structure in a homebase of its own to mastermind and supervise the process of overseas colonization, the Zionist Movement required a quasi-state apparatus to perform those functions. The World Zionist Organization—with its Federations of local societies, its Congress, its General Council, and its Central Executive—was established at Basle in order to play that role.

(2) The instruments of systematic colonization were also promptly readied. The “Jewish Colonial Trust” (1898), the “Colonization Commission” (1898), the ”Jewish National Fund” (1901), the “Palestine Office” (1908), and the “Palestine Land Development Company” (1908), were among the first institutions established by the Zionist Organization. Their joint purpose was to plan, finance, and supervise the process of colonization, and to ensure that it would not meet the same fate which the earlier experiment of haphazard colonization had met.

(3) While the instruments of colonization were being laboriously created, diplomatic efforts were also being exerted to produce political conditions that would permit, facilitate, and protect large-scale colonization.

At the beginning, these efforts were focused mainly on the Ottoman Empire, then in control of the political fortunes of Palestine. Direct approaches to the Ottoman authorities were made; lucrative promises of financial grants and loans were dangled before the eyes of the Sultan and European Powers were urged to intercede at the Porte on behalf of the Zionist Organization, in order persuade the Sultan to grant the Organization a Charter for an autonomous Zionist settlement in Palestine. Other efforts were exerted to induce the German Emperor to endorse the creation of a Chartered Land Development Company, which would be operated by Zionists in Palestine under German protection. Still other attempts were made to obtain permission from the British Government to establish an autonomous Zionist settlement in the Sinai Peninsula, as a stepping-stone towards colonization in Palestine. But none of these efforts bore fruit.

By the end of the first decade following the inauguration of the new Zionist Movement in 1897, Zionism had made little progress towards putting its elaborate colonization apparatus to work, and had scored even less success in its political efforts to obtain governmental permission and facilities for colonization in Palestine.

Its hopes for de jure colonization shattered, Zionism shifted its strategy once more, and turned to de facto colonization—hoping to gain thereby some political leverage which would serve it in good stead when the time came for renewal of its attempts to secure political recognition. In 1907/1908, therefore, a new phase of Zionist colonization was inaugurated, without prior ”legalization” or sponsorship by a European Power. It was more consciously nationalistic in impulse, more militantly segregationist in its attitude towards the Palestinian Arabs, and more concerned with strategic and political considerations in its selection of locations for its new settlements. But, for all its enhanced dynamism and sharpened ideological consciousness, the second wave of Zionist colonization was not appreciably more successful than the first, as far as its magnitude was concerned.

By the outbreak of the first World War, therefore, the Zionist colonization of Palestine had met with only modest success in over thirty years of action. In the first place, Zionists were still an infinitesimal minority of about 1% of the Jews of the world. Their activities had aroused the fear and opposition of other Jews, who sought the solution of the “Jewish Problem” in “assimilation” in Western Europe and the United States, not in “self-segregation” in Palestine. In the second place, Zionist colonization had proceeded very slowly. After thirty years of immigration to Palestine, Jews were still under 8% of the total population of the country, in possession of no more than 2 ½% of the land. And, in the third place, Zionism had failed to obtain political endorsement from the Ottoman authorities controlling Palestine, or from any European Power.

The War, however, created new circumstances which were destined to improve considerably the fortunes of Zionist colonization in Palestine. For the War set the stage for an alliance—concluded in 1917—between British Imperialism and Zionist Colonialism, which, during the following thirty years, opened the gates of Palestine to Zionist colonizers, facilitated the establishment of a Zionist settler-community, and paved the way for the dispossession and expulsion of the Arab people of Palestine and the creation of the Zionist settler-state in 1948.

Whereas unilateral Zionist colonization failed, in the thirty years preceding the First World War, to make much headway, the alliance of Zionist Colonialism and British Imperialism succeeded, during the thirty years following the First World War, in accomplishing the objectives of both parties._

Chapter 4 of Zionist Colonialism in Palestine by Fayez Sayegh

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_The response to the people of Palestine to the menace of Zionism has passed through five stages.

(1) At the outset—when Zionists were coming in relatively small numbers and emphasizing the religious or humanitarian motives of their enterprise, while concealing the political ideological and colonial racist character of their movement—the Arabs of Palestine believed the immigrants to be “pilgrims” animated by religious longing for the holy land, or else “refugees” fleeing persecution in Eastern Europe and seeking safety in Palestine. Palestinian Arabs, therefore accorded the immigrants a hospitable welcome. Even Herzl noted the “friendly attitude of the population” to the first wave of Zionist colonists.

(2) When, after the inauguration of the new Zionist movement in 1897, the second wave of Zionist colonization began to roll onto the shores of Palestine (from 1907/1908 onward), Arab friendliness began to give way to suspicion of resentment. The methodical ouster of Arab farmers, laborers, and watchmen from the new Zionist colonies, and the systematic boycott of Arab produce, aroused Arab anger. But the larger political nationalist dimensions of the Zionist program remain concealed from Arab sight: it was the immediate impact of the Zionists' presence upon the Arabs directly affected by the Zionists' race-exclusivist and race-supremacist practices, that was causing Arab wrath. Inasmuch as Zionist colonization was still of modest proportions however, the hostility it provoked remained more or less local.

(3) The alliance of British Imperialism and Zionist Colonialism, concretely expressed in the Balfour Declaration of 2 November 1917, and the British capture of Jerusalem on 9 December 1917, at last opened Arab eyes to the true significance of what was happening, and brought home the realization that nothing less than dislodgment was in store for the Arabs, if Zionism was to be permitted to have its way. Palestinian masses instinctively recognized the events of the day as an occurrence of dire portent; and, for thirty years thereafter, Palestine was to be the scene of persistent and tireless Arab resistance to the Anglo-Zionist partnership. The period from 1917 to 1948 was the period of Arab resistance par excellence.

The disquiet which followed the publication or Balfour Declaration was momentarily calmed, however, by British assurances made during 1918. An official Declaration by the British Government (issued on 16 June 1918) assured the Arabs that, as far as the territories occupied by the Allied armies were concerned, “the future government of those territories should be based on the principle of the consent of the governed. This policy will always be that of His Majesty's Government.” And, only four days before the Armistice, a widely-publicized joint Anglo-French Declaration (issued on 7 November 1918) notified the Arabs of Syria, Iraq, and Palestine that it was the intention of the two Allies “to further and assist in the setting up of indigenous governments” and ”to recognise them as soon as they are actually set up.” These declarations—though they soon proved to be insincere and dishonest—served in the meantime to allay the fears of the people of Palestine.

As 1919 opened, all eyes were on Paris: the Peace Conference was hopefully expected to resolve the contradictions of Allied wartime promises and to inaugurate the long-awaited new era of world history, founded on the principle of national self-determination, of which President Wilson had made emphatic enunciation. But, as those hopes dwindled and the influx of Zionist colonists—interrupted during the War—was resumed, Arab fears were revived. And so was Arab resistance to the twin dangers of protracted British occupation and expanded Zionist colonization.

Palestinian Arab opposition to the Anglo-Zionist partnership was first expressed, in 1919, in diplomatic representations and in collective declarations of the general will of the people.

The American King-Crane Commission was left in no doubt about the true feelings of the people of Palestine. On 29 August 1919, the Commission reported that:

”...the non-Jewish population of Palestine—nearly nine-tenths of the whole—are emphatically against the entire Zionist program... There was no one thing upon which the population of Palestine was more agreed than upon this...”

The findings of the Commission corroborated the decisions of the General Syrian Congress, consisting of elected representatives of the populations of Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria. A resolution, passed unanimously by the Congress on 2 July 1919, announced:

“We oppose the pretentions of the Zionists to create a Jewish Commonwealth in the southern part of Syria, known as Palestine, and oppose Zionist migration to any part of our country; for we do not acknowledge their title but consider them a grave peril to our people from the national, economical, and political points of view. Our Jewish compatriots shall enjoy our common rights and assume the common responsibilities.”

Similar utterances of unqualified rejection of Zionism continued to be made by every Palestinian Arab gathering throughout the decades of British occupation of Palestine. Not once did a Palestinian Arab group or conference express acceptance—even partial or qualified—of Zionist colonization. And the feelings, so unequivocally expressed to the King-Crane Commission in 1919, continued thereafter to be expressed, with equal forcefulness, to the Mandatory Government and its countless Commissions, as well as to the League of Nations and the United Nations, by every Palestinian delegation that had a chance to appear before any of those bodies.

But declarations of opposition, however important as an expression of national will, were not the only means of resistance to which the people of Palestine had recourse.

In March 1920, armed hostilities broke out between Arab villagers and Zionist colonists in northern Palestine; and in April 1920, Arab-Zionist fighting took place in Jerusalem. These were followed by uprisings in 1921, 1929, and 1933, and by a country-wide rebellion in 1936 which was renewed in 1937 and lasted until the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939. And, from December 1947 until the withdrawal of Britain and the simultaneous proclamation of the Zionist settler-state in May 1948, Palestinian Arabs were engaged in a life-and-death with the British garrison as well as with the Zionist colonists.

By their untiring reiteration of their rejection of Zionist Colonialism and by their unstinting sacrifice of life and limb in defense of the sanctity of the homeland over thirty years, Palestinians of all walks of life eloquently testified—by word as well as deed, in ink as well as blood—to their devotion to their national rights and their unqualified opposition to the Zionization of their country.

The range of means by which Palestinians chose to express their opposition to the partnership of Zionist Colonialism and British Imperialism, from 1917 to 1948, was not confined to declaration and rebellion. In more prosaic—and perhaps more difficult and more costly—methods, the unqualified “No!“ of the Arabs of Palestine was addressed to empire-builders and to racist colonists alike.

At the height of the famous rebellion of 1936, the people of Palestine launched a devastating civil disobedience movement, coupled with a country-wide strike which lasted for 174 days (perhaps the longest national strike in history) and affected all businesses, communications, and government services run by Arabs. In spite of its high cost to themselves, the men and women of Palestine persisted in their strike, resisting all efforts of the Mandatory Power to break it, and did not call it off until the rulers of the neighboring Arab States intervened and promised to initiate collective Arab negotiations with the British Government with a view to remedying the causes of Palestinian Arab grievances.

More importantly, the Palestinian Arabs brought into their struggle against the Zionization of Palestine the only remaining weapon at their command: if they had no control over the immigration of Zionist colonists into Palestine, they did have some control over the sale of land to those colonists. This weapon they used unsparingly, throughout the period of the Mandate.

The record shows that, during thirty years of British occupation and active encouragement of Zionist colonization —while the Zionists were allowed by the Mandatory Power to multiply to twelve times their number in 1917, and while the ratio of the Zionists to the total population was allowed to rise to one-third—Zionist acquisition of land grew at a snail's pace, as a result of the Arabs' refusal to sell their land to the colonists. Statistics published by the British Government reveal that the total area acquired by Zionists from 1920, when land registries were opened, until the dislodgment of the Arabs, was under 4% of the total area of Palestine. Of this Zionist-acquired land, a part was sold by non-Palestinian absentee land-owners, and another part was transferred to the Zionist colonization funds by the British Government itself (public domain, over which the Mandatory Government was trustee for the Palestinian people). In fact, an official spokesman for the Jewish Agency disclosed to a British Commission that, “of the land purchased by the Jews relatively small areas not exceeding in all 10 percent were acquired from peasants.”

(4) In 1948, the Palestinian Arab people was forcibly dispossessed. Most Palestinians were evicted from their country. Their unyielding resistance and their costly sacrifices over three decades had failed to avert the national catastrophe.

But those sacrifices were not in vain. For they safeguarded the Palestinian national rights and underscored the legitimacy of the Arabs' claim to their national heritage. Rights undefended are rights surrendered. Unopposed and acquiesced in, usurpation is legitimized by default. For forfeiture of its patrimony, the Palestinian generation of the inter-War era will never be indicted by the Palestinian generations to come. It lost indeed—but not without fighting. It was dislodged indeed—but not for want of the will to defend its heritage.

Nor has the people of Palestine retroactively bestowed undeserved legitimacy upon the Zionist colonization of Palestine by recognizing the fait accompli after the fact. Many have been the self-appointed counselors of “realism”, urging upon Palestinians acknowledgement of the new status quo in Palestine and acceptance of their exile “in good grace”; and many have been the lucrative offers of economic aid for “resettlement” and “rehabilitation” outside Palestine. But the people which had remained for thirty years undaunted by the combined power of British Imperialism and Zionist Colonialism, and which subsequently refused to allow the seizure of its land and the dispersal of its body to conquer its soul also, knew very well how to resist those siren-calls.

The Zionist settler-state, therefore, has remained a usurper, lacking even the semblance of legitimacy—because the people of Palestine has remained loyal to its heritage and faithful to its rights.

(5) The people of Palestine, notwithstanding all its travails and misfortunes, still has undiminished faith in its future.

And the people of Palestine knows that the pathway to that future is the liberation of its homeland.

It was in this belief that the Palestinian people—after sixteen years of dispersion and exile, during which it had reposed its faith in its return to its country in world conscience and international public opinion, in the United Nations, and/or in the Arab states—chose at least to seize the initiative. In 1964, it reasserted its corporate personality by creating the Palestine Liberation Organization.

Only in the liberation of Palestine, spearheaded by Palestinians prepared to pay the price, can the supreme sacrifices of past generations of Palestinians be vindicated, and the visions of hopes of living Palestinians be transformed into reality._

January 20, 2024

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Selection from “The Morning After” by Edward Said 

Also available to read on the London Review of Books website

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_Now that some of the euphoria has lifted, it is possible to re-examine the Israeli-PLO agreement with the required common sense. What emerges from such scrutiny is a deal that is more flawed and, for most of the Palestinian people, more unfavourably weighted than many had first supposed. The fashion-show vulgarities of the White House ceremony, the degrading spectacle of Yasser Arafat thanking everyone for the suspension of most of his people’s rights, and the fatuous solemnity of Bill Clinton’s performance, like a 20th-century Roman emperor shepherding two vassal kings through rituals of reconciliation and obeisance: all these only temporarily obscure the truly astonishing proportions of the Palestinian capitulation.

So first of all let us call the agreement by its real name: an instrument of Palestinian surrender, a Palestinian Versailles. What makes it worse is that for at least the past fifteen years the PLO could have negotiated a better arrangement than this modified Allon Plan, one not requiring so many unilateral concessions to Israel. For reasons best known to the leadership it refused all previous overtures. To take one example of which I have personal knowledge: in the late Seventies, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance asked me to persuade Arafat to accept Resolution 242 with a reservation (accepted by the US) to be added by the PLO which would insist on the national rights of the Palestinian people as well as Palestinian self-determination. Vance said that the US would immediately recognise the PLO and inaugurate negotiations between it and Israel. Arafat categorically turned the offer down, as he did similar offers. Then the Gulf War occurred, and because of the disastrous positions it took then, the PLO lost even more ground. The gains of the intifada were squandered, and today advocates of the new document say: ‘We had no alternative.’ The correct way of phrasing that is: ‘We had no alternative because we either lost or threw away a lot of others, leaving us only this one.’

In order to advance towards Palestinian self-determination—which has a meaning only if freedom, sovereignly and equality, rather than perpetual subservience to Israel, are its goal—we need an honest acknowledgment of where we are, now that the interim agreement is about to be negotiated. What is particularly mystifying is how so many Palestinian leaders and their intellectuals can persist in speaking of the agreement as a ‘victory’. Nabil Shaath has called it one of ‘complete parity’ between Israelis and Palestinians. The fact is that Israel has conceded nothing, as former Secretary Of State James Baker said in a TV interview, except, blandly, the existence of ‘the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people’. Or as the Israeli ‘dove’ Amos Oz reportedly put it in the course of a BBC interview, ‘this is the second biggest victory in the history of Zionism.’

By contrast Arafat’s recognition of Israel’s right to exist carries with it a whole series of renunciations: of the PLO Charter; of violence and terrorism; of all relevant UN resolutions, except 242 and 338, which do not have one word in them about the Palestinians, their rights or aspirations. By implication, the PLO set aside numerous other UN resolutions (which, with Israel and the US, it is now apparently undertaking to modify or rescind) that, since 1948, have given Palestinians refugee rights, including either compensation or repatriation. The Palestinians had won numerous international resolutions—passed by, among others, the EC, the non-aligned movement, the Islamic Conference and the Arab League, as well as the UN—which disallowed or censured Israeli settlements, annexations and crimes against the people under occupation.

It would therefore seem that the PLO has ended the intifada, which embodied not terrorism or violence but the Palestinian right to resist, even though Israel remains in occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. The primary consideration in the document is for Israel’s security, with none for the Palestinians’ security from Israel’s incursions. In his 13 September press conference Rabin was straightforward about Israels continuing control over sovereignty; in addition, he said, Israel would hold the River Jordan, the boundaries with Egypt and Jordan, the sea, the land between Gaza and Jericho, Jerusalem, the settlements and the roads. There is little in the document to suggest that Israel will give up its violence against Palestinians or, as Iraq was required to do after it withdrew from Kuwait, compensate those who have been the victims of its policies over the past 45 years.

Neither Arafat nor any of his Palestinian partners who met the Israelis in Oslo has ever seen an Israeli settlement. There are now over two hundred of them, principally on hills, promontories and strategic points throughout the West Bank and Gaza. Many will probably shrivel and die, but the largest are designed for permanence. An independent system of roads connects them to Israel, and creates a disabling discontinuity between the main centres of Palestinian population. The actual land taken by these settlements, plus the land designated for expropriation, amounts—it is guessed—to over 55 percent of the total land area of the Occupied Territories. Greater Jerusalem alone, annexed by Israel, comprises a huge tranche of virtually stolen land, at least 25 percent of the total amount. In Gaza settlements in the north (three), the middle (two) and the south, along the coast from the Egyptian border past Khan Yunis (12), constitute at least 30 percent of the Strip. In addition, Israel has tapped into every aquifer on the West Bank, and now uses about 80 percent of the water there for the settlements and for Israel proper. (There are probably similar water installations in Israel’s Lebanese ‘security zone’.) So the domination (if not the outright theft) of land and water resources is either overlooked, in the case of water, or, in the case of land, postponed by the Oslo accord.

What makes matters worse is that all the information on settlements, land and water is held by Israel, which hasn’t shared most of these data with the Palestinians, any more than it has shared the revenues raised by the inordinately high taxes it has imposed on them for 26 years. All sorts of technical committees (in which non-resident Palestinians have participated) have been set up by the PLO in the territories to consider such questions, but there is little evidence that committee findings (if any) were made use of by the Palestinian side in Oslo. So the impression of a huge discrepancy between what Israel got and what the Palestinians conceded or overlooked remains unrectified.

I doubt that there was a single Palestinian who watched the White House ceremony who did not also feel that a century of sacrifice, dispossession and heroic struggle had finally come to nought. Indeed, what was most troubling is that Rabin in effect gave the Palestinian speech while Arafat pronounced words that had all the flair of a rental agreement. So far from being seen as the victims of Zionism, the Palestinians were characterised before the world as its now repentant assailants: as if the thousands killed by Israel’s bombing of refugee camps, hospitals and schools in Lebanon; Israel’s expulsion of 800,000 people in 1948 (whose descendants now number about three million, many of them stateless); the conquest of their land and property; the destruction of over four hundred Palestinian villages; the invasion of Lebanon; the ravages of 26 years of brutal military Occupation – it was as if these sufferings had been reduced to the status of terrorism and violence, to be renounced retrospectively or passed over in silence. Israel has always described Palestinian resistance as terrorism and violence, so even in the matter of wording it received a moral and historical gift.

In return for exactly what? Israel’s recognition of the PLO – undoubtedly a significant step forward. Beyond that, by accepting that questions of land and sovereignty are being postponed till ‘final Status negotiations’, the Palestinians have in effect discounted their unilateral and internationally acknowledged claim to the West Bank and Gaza: these have now become ‘disputed territories’. Thus with Palestinian assistance Israel has been awarded at least an equal claim to them. The Israeli calculation seems to be that by agreeing to police Gaza—a job which Begin tried to give Sadat fifteen years ago—the PLO would soon fall foul of local competitors, of whom Hamas is only one. Moreover, rather than becoming stronger during the interim period, the Palestinians may grow weaker, come more under the Israeli thumb, and therefore be less able to dispute the Israeli claim when the last set of negotiations begins. But on the matter of how, by what specific mechanism, to get from an interim status to a later one, the document is purposefully silent. Does this mean, ominously, that the interim stage may be the final one?

Israeli commentators have been suggesting that within, say, six months the PLO and Rabin’s government will negotiate a new agreement further postponing elections, and thereby allowing the PLO to continue to rule. It is worth mentioning that at least twice during the past summer Arafat said that his experience of government consisted of the ten years during which he ‘controlled’ Lebanon, hardly a comfort to the many Lebanese and Palestinians who recollect that sorry period. Nor is there at present any concrete way for elections to be held should they even be scheduled. The imposition of rule from above, plus the long legacy of the occupation, have not contributed much to the growth of democratic, grass-roots institutions. There are unconfirmed reports in the Arabic press indicating that the PLO has already appointed ministers from its own inner circle in Tunis, and deputy ministers from among trusted residents of the West Bank and Gaza. Will there ever be truly representative institutions? One cannot be very sanguine, given Arafat’s absolute refusal to share or delegate power, to say nothing of the financial assets he alone knows about and controls.

In both internal security and development, Israel and the PLO are now aligned with each Other. PLO members or consultants have been meeting with Mossad officials since last October to discuss security problems, including Arafat’s own security. And this at the time of the worst Israeli repression of Palestinians under military occupation. The thinking behind the collaboration is that it will deter any Palestinian from demonstrating against the occupation, which will not withdraw, but merely redeploy. Besides, Israeli settlers will remain living, as they always have, under a different jurisdiction. The PLO will thus become Israel’s enforcer, an unhappy prospect for most Palestinians Interestingly, the ANC has consistently refused to supply the South African government with police officials until after power is shared, precisely in order to avoid appearing as the white government’s enforcer. It was reported from Amman a few days ago that 170 members of the Palestine Liberation Army, now being trained in Jordan for police work in Gaza, have refused to co-operate for precisely that reason. With about 14,000 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails—some of whom Israel says it may release—there is an inherent contradiction, not to say incoherence, to the new security arrangements. Will more room be made in them for Palestinian security?

The one subject on which most Palestinians agree is development, which is being described in the most naive terms imaginable. The world community will be expected to give the nearly autonomous areas large-scale financial support; the Palestinian diaspora is expected, indeed preparing, to do the same. Yet all development for Palestine must be funnelled through the joint Palestinian-Israeli Economic Co-operation Committee, even though, according to the document, ‘both sides will co-operate jointly and unilaterally with regional and international parties to support these aims.’ Israel is the dominant economic and political power in the region – and its power is of course enhanced by its alliance with the US. Over 80 percent of the West Bank and Gaza economy is dependent on Israel, which is likely to control Palestinian exports, manufacturing and labour for the foreseeable future. Aside from the small entrepreneurial and middle class, the vast majority of Palestinians are impoverished and landless, subject to the vagaries of the Israeli manufacturing and commercial community which employs Palestinians as cheap labour. Most Palestinians, economically speaking, will almost certainly remain as they are, although now they are expected to work in private-sector, partly Palestinian-controlled service industries, including resorts, small assembly-plants, farms and the like.

A recent study by the Israeli journalist Asher Davidi quotes Dov Lautman, president of the Israeli Manufacturers Association: ‘It’s not important whether there will be a Palestinian state, autonomy or a Palestinian-Jordanian state. The economic borders between Israel and the territories must remain open.’ With its well developed institutions, close relations with the US and aggressive economy, Israel will in effect incorporate the territories economically, keeping them in a state of permanent dependency. Then Israel will turn to the wider Arab world, using the political benefits of the Palestinian agreement as a Springboard to break into Arab markets, which it will also exploit and is likely to dominate.

Framing all this is the US, the only global power, whose idea of the New World Order is based on economic domination by a few giant corporations and pauperisation if necessary for many of the lesser peoples (even those in metropolitan countries). Economic aid for Palestine is being supervised and controlled by the US, bypassing the UN, some of whose agencies like UNRWA and UNDP are far better placed to administer it. Take Nicaragua and Vietnam. Both are former enemies of the US; Vietnam actually defeated the US but is now economically in need of it. A boycott against Vietnam continues and the history books are being written in such a way as to show how the Vietnamese sinned against and ‘mistreated’ the US for the latter’s idealistic gesture of having invaded, bombed and devastated their country. Nicaragua’s Sandinista government was attacked by the US-financed Contra movement; the country’s harbours were mined, its people ravaged by famine, boycotts and every conceivable type of subversion. After the 1991 elections, which brought a US-supported candidate, Mrs Chamorro, to power, the US promised many millions of dollars in aid, of which only 30 million have actually materialised. In mid-September all aid was cut off. There is now famine and civil war in Nicaragua. No less unfortunate have been the fates of El Salvador and Haiti. To throw oneself, as Arafat has done, on the tender mercies of the US is almost certainly to suffer the fate the US has meted out to rebellious or ‘terrorist’ peoples it has had to deal with in the Third World after they have promised not to resist the US any more._

January 21, 2024

content/trigger warnings: discussions of Zionism, settler colonialism, genocide, war, and forced displacement/expulsion

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Selection from Chapter 5 of Lineages of Revolt by Adam Hanieh

Selection from Chapter 5 of Lineages of Revolt by Adam Hanieh

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Selection from Chapter 5 of Lineages of Revolt by Adam Hanieh

Selection from Chapter 5 of Lineages of Revolt by Adam Hanieh.m4a

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_Since the first waves of colonization in Palestine there has been a conscious intent to splinter the Palestinian national identity into a patchwork of fragmented, dispersed territories that evolve as distinct social formations. This is clearly illustrated in the various categories that comprise the Palestinian people: Palestinian refugees, now the largest body of refugees in the world; Palestinians who remained on their land in 1948 and later became citizens of the Israeli state; those scattered in the cantons of the West Bank; and, most recently, others isolated in the Gaza Strip. All these groups of people constitute the Palestinian nation—but the denial of this unity has been the overriding logic of colonization since before 1948.

This fragmentation has been made possible by military power. Israel forcibly prevents Palestinian refugees from returning to their land, divides the West Bank and Gaza Strip from each other, places administrative restrictions on the movement of Palestinian citizens of Israel into the occupied territories, and completely controls movement in the West Bank itself. At the same time—and this is a crucial point that often goes unstated—dispossession and expulsion of Palestinians from their land continues in a slow-motion manner, confirming that al-nakba is ongoing. But fragmentation is not solely a spatial process; it necessarily rests upon a temporal disruption. The assault on history itself becomes an integral feature of how colonization functions, with the Palestinian experience dehistoricized and reduced to a recent narrative that accepts the results of fragmentation as permanent and given. It becomes possible to speak of “Gazans,” for example, around 70 percent of whom are actually refugees from 1948, with no reference to how this category was constructed through the forcible fragmentation of the Palestinian people as a whole—first during al-nakba, and then through the separation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Or to speak of “empty spaces” in the West Bank with no mention of the dispossession of one-fifth of the population in 1967. Because these categories are accepted as given—legitimized as the focus of political negotiations, financial aid packages, and development strategies—they continue to be reproduced. This process is normalized and sustained through the operational practices of foreign governments, NGOs, and a myriad of development agencies, thus providing a materiality to Israeli power.

At the same time as Israeli colonization was a military project aimed at the fragmentation and destruction of Palestinian identity, it also changed the Palestinian economy. In the West Bank, this has meant a type of “hothouse capitalism,” in which the power of the occupation generated many of the same processes of social trans- formation noted in previous chapters. Rural inhabitants were dispossessed from the land and forced to join migrant labor markets. A capitalist class developed through subcontracting and privileged trade relationships with the occupation. In more recent years, Palestinian policy makers eagerly embraced a neoliberal model of development in close partnership with IFIs. This is neoliberalism under occupation, one driven by an identical logic and reinforcing the same coincidence of poverty and enrichment as seen elsewhere in the region. In this sense, there is very little that is unique in the types of economic policies that are today being implemented by the PA—they have been the standard fare of governments across the Middle East for at least two decades.

Palestinian acquiescence to this process did not come about simply due to the corruption of individual leaders, misplaced political decisions, or an unfavorable international context. Indispensable to explaining the trajectory of the last forty-five years are these shifts that took place in the Palestinian political economy, in which the development of capitalism in the West Bank and Gaza Strip was accelerated by the whip of Israeli colonization, ensuring the ancillary integration of these areas into the Israeli economy. The profound transformation of Palestinian class structure that occurred in lockstep with Israel’s colonization underpins Palestinian submission to Oslo and the nature of the PA.

The specificity of the neoliberal experience in Palestine lies in the total subjugation of the population by an occupying force and the attempts of more than six decades to fragment and disperse a nation of people from their homeland. Neoliberalism works to reinforce this atomization—turning people away from collective struggle and toward individualized consumption, as mediated through finance. It has produced mass im- poverishment alongside the enrichment of a tiny layer of Palestinians that acts as the interlocutor with Israeli and foreign capital. A society constructed along these principles weakens the capacity of the Palestinian people to resist. Most importantly, it means that the question of Palestine cannot be reduced to a purely “humanitarian” issue or simply an issue of national liberation; it is an essential component of the broader strug- gle against the uneven development and control of wealth across the Middle East. Capitalist development has always acted to consolidate and deepen Israel’s power over Palestine, generating a layer of Palestinian society that stands against the interests of most of the population. In this sense, understanding and confronting the political economy of Palestinian capitalism is very much entwined with a struggle of national liberation and return—the success of one fully depends upon the success of the other._

In 2016, I had the great honor and privilege of being part of a university course dedicated to analyzing the history of Palestine through the lens of settler colonialism. Below follows a list of texts we were assigned to read for the course, sorted roughly by time period, as they were provided by the course facilitator. Combined, these texts form one of many excellent starting points for learning more about the history of Palestine, the experiences of Palestinians, and the infrastructures of settler colonialism. Wherever possible, I've linked to downloadable PDFs of the referenced texts. If you'd like assistance finding others, please e-mail me at [Work AT RiveraErica DOT com].

Read for Refaat

Between January 15 and 21, 2024, I participated in Read for Refaat, a day of action that kicked off a week of solidarity events focused on reading Refaat Alareer's work out loud and in public. You can listen to my recordings of selections from the texts on this page at the link above.

Read in Solidarity

On April 27 and 28, 2024, I also recorded myself reading from another list of texts relating to Palestine, including excerpts from the essay collection From the River to the Sea: Essays for a Free Palestine, as well as many of the texts that are available for free on Verso Books's “In Solidarity with the Students” page. You can download those texts on Verso's website or at the link above, and you can listen to those recordings at the link above as well.

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Understanding Settler Colonialism

Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native

by Patrick Wolfe  Alternative PDF download below

Download PDF of Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native by Patrick Wolfe (152 KB)

Introduction – The Settler Colonial Situation

excerpted from Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview by Lorenzo Veracini  PDF download below

Download PDF of the introduction to Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview by Lorenzo Veracini (303 KB)

1882 – 1947

Chapter 7 – Purchase by Other Means: Dispossessing the Natives in Palestine

excerpted from Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race by Patrick Wolfe  Alternative PDF download below

Download PDF of Traces of History by Patrick Wolfe (4 MB)

Introduction and Chapter 1 – Zionist Transfer Ideas and Proposals, 1882-1938

excerpted from Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of “Transfer” in Zionist Political Thought, 1882-1948 by Nur Masalha  Alternative PDF download below

Download PDF of Part 1 of Introduction and Chapter 1 – Nur Masalha – Expulsion of the Palestinians – The Concept of Transfer in Zionist Political Thought, 1882-1948 (3 MB)

Download PDF of Part 2 of Introduction and Chapter 1 – Nur Masalha – Expulsion of the Palestinians – The Concept of Transfer in Zionist Political Thought, 1882-1948 (3 MB)

1948 – 1966

Chapters 4-8 from The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine

by Ilan Pappe  Alternative PDF download below

Download PDF of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine by Ilan Pappe (3 MB)

Zionist Colonialism in Palestine

by Fayez Sayegh  Alternative PDF downloads below

Download PDF of Zionist Colonialism in Palestine by Fayez Sayegh Part 1 of 3 (4 MB)

Download PDF of Zionist Colonialism in Palestine by Fayez Sayegh Part 2 of 3 (5 MB)

Download PDF of Zionist Colonialism in Palestine by Fayez Sayegh Part 3 of 3 (3 MB)

1993 – 2000

“The Morning After”

by Edward Said  PDF download below

Download PDF of The Morning After by Edward Said | London Review of Books (70 KB)

The Political Economy of Israeli Occupation: What is Colonial about It?

by Leila Farsakh  Alternative PDF download below

Download PDF of The Political Economy of Israeli Occupation by Leila Farsakh (305 KB)

2000 – 2006

Hollow Land: Israel's Architecture of Occupation

by Eyal Weizman  Available via the Internet Archive

Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation

by Saree Makdisi  Available via the Internet Archive

2007 – present

“The Gaza Bombshell”

by David Rose  PDF downloads below

Download PDF of Part 1 of The Gaza Bombshell | Vanity Fair | April 2008 | David Rose (4 MB)

Download PDF of Part 2 of The Gaza Bombshell | Vanity Fair | April 2008 | David Rose (4 MB)

Chapter 5 – Class and State in the West Bank: Neoliberalism Under Occupation

Excerpted from Lineages of Revolt: Issues of contemporary capitalism in the Middle East by Adam Hanieh  Available via the Internet Archive Alternative PDF download below

Download PDF of Chapter 5 of Lineages of Revolt by Adam Hanieh (586 KB)

Report of the United Nations Fact-Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict

Also known as the Goldstone Report (2009)  Available via the Internet Archive Alternative PDF download below

Download PDF of Report of the United Nations Fact-Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict (3 MB)

This is How We Fought in Gaza: Soldiers' testimonies and photographs from Operation “Protective Edge”

Produced by Breaking the Silence