Solidarity and the Palestinian Cause

Zahi Zalloua could not have known that their book, Solidarity and the Palestine Cause, would be read as a field guide to the post-October 7, 2023, war on Gaza. Yet, as it mines the past 75 years of mythmaking about and dehumanization of Palestinians, it reads as an uncanny analysis of the present and future. This is because Zalloua’s rigorous and intelligent analysis of Palestinian disposability offers an analysis of the limits of liberal terms like humanity and self-determination as horizons for Palestinian freedom. Zalloua offers a stark analysis of the necropolitical calculus of Israeli settler colonialism, as well as of the promise and perils of analogies across settler-colonial states. Far from being a nihilistic assessment of the future of Palestinian life, however, Zalloua’s analysis is something of a futurist assessment of alternative worlds constituted by nonliberal forms of binationalism and conviviality, futures that reject racial superiority of all kinds. Zalloua’s futuristic analysis arrives at a nonstatist solution, one that Palestinian-American scholar Sophia Azeb, among others, has called the “no-state solution.”1Solidarity and the Palestinian Cause is not so much a history of international solidarity, as it is a meditation on the terms of analogy across Palestinian, Black, and Indigenous studies. There are features of Palestinians’ conditions under settler colonialism that mirror Black and Indigenous existence in the West, and yet Zalloua refuses simplistic analogizing, instead hoping to problematize the question of analogy itself. For example, Zalloua notes how Black and Palestinian bodies are each treated as disposable by the racial-settler regimes in which they exist. In both cases, this disposability is constituted by dehumanization and necropolitical calculus. And yet, questions of sovereignty, of exile, and of statehood read differently across geospatial and temporal terrains. Perhaps most importantly, Zalloua’s analysis avoids the trap of identifying a political “solution,” instead exemplifying a comparative analysis that draws on Black and Indigenous studies and a re-engagement with a Palestinian intellectual tradition of binationalism. Zalloua reads Saidiya Hartman and Edward Said together in order to theorize Palestinian decolonization as an exilic formation. Here, Zalloua invokes the critical interventions of Ghassan Kanafani and Mourid Barghouti, who develop a contrapuntal analysis of world revolution that reads global solidarity movements in productive tensions.In the introduction, Zalloua illuminates the constitutive dehumanization of Palestinians in liberal/Western/Zionist discourse. This dehumanization consigns Palestinians to death and inherent illiberalism in ways that echo Achille Mbembe’s insights about “necropolitics.” Thinking in conversation with critical Indigenous studies scholars, Zalloua theorizes the fraught meanings of Palestinian indigeneity. The Zionist movement consigns Palestinians to an indigeneity that assumes Palestinian nonbeing, one that posits Palestinians as nonhumans that cannot claim existence prior to Zionist presence in the land. On the other hand, Palestinians have asserted indigeneity to assert rights to decolonial resistance and existence. Zalloua’s work is to show how contending epistemes of indigeneity operate in both the violence targeted at Palestinians and in the making of Palestinian anticolonial resistance. Parsing the nuances of indigeneity, reading with and across fields of critical Indigenous and decolonial studies, enables Zalloua to posit Palestinians in a horizon of resistance that cannot be understood as merely a universal call for humanitarianism, but one in which the very category of the human is contested and, in the case of some Palestinian anticolonialism, rejected altogether.If critical Indigenous studies help Zalloua read the fraught politics of Palestinian indigeneity, resistance, and recognition, critical Black studies helps him to comprehend the possibilities and meanings of (un)freedom and anti-Palestinian racism. Noting the resurgent politics of Black radical solidarity with Palestinians, Zalloua theorizes the terms of analogy that constitute solidarity. In doing so, he engages with the Afropessimist critique of analogy developed by thinkers such as Frank Wilderson. For Wilderson, analogizing across Black/Palestinian bodies and polities ignores the anti-Blackness at the core of Western humanism. Demands to “free Palestine,” in Wilderson’s analysis, are essentially Palestinians’ demand to join an anti-Black terrain of humanity. If the human is, a priori, an anti-Black category, then Palestinians’ calls for freedom are inherently overdetermined by an anti-Black calculus. Yet, Zalloua rejects what he considers “Black exceptionalism” inherent in Wilderson’s analysis; instead, he argues that Wilderson elides the chasm between natives and settlers, ignoring ways that Zionism establishes a racial caste system even among Jews. Rather than accept Wilderson’s analysis of the “rouse of analogy,” Zalloua invokes the Derridean concept of ensemble to move beyond questions of sameness and difference in the making of solidarity. Drawing on ensemble, Zalloua posits a new framework of solidarity, one “that is not based on a shared positive humanity (which would foreclose the birth of new identities, new realities, new humanisms), a narcissistic reduction of Other’s trauma to one’s own (which would iron out differences and frictions), nor a ‘shared analogy of oppression,’ but on a common struggle for emancipation or ‘shared principles of liberation’” (65–66).Ultimately, Zalloua theorizes Palestinian decolonization not as a desire for humanism or statehood but instead as a binationalism that eradicates all colonial privileges and racial superiority. “Decolonization,” he writes, “thus remedies the colonial situation not by depriving settlers of their rights but by subtracting their ‘colonial privilege’—their preferred treatment in the allocation of rights under Zionism—where the rights of settlers are precisely conditioned on the denial, or severe curtailing of Indigenous rights” (144). Ultimately, Zalloua’s notion of decolonialization is also a call for a notion of sovereignty rooted to “relationality . . . a sovereignty forged in refusal; it divests the sovereign of its phantasmatic privileges over Others: the right to decide ‘who matters and who does not, who is disposable and who is not’” (151).At a time when the United Nations has found “reasonable grounds” that a genocide is taking place in Gaza, one wonders whether Zalloua’s binationalist futurism holds the same radical potential it did in previous eras—this will be for Palestinians to debate. What seems clear is that Zalloua’s theorizing of the relationality between Black, Indigenous, and Palestinian studies will remain a critical resource

Physics · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Solidarity · Universality (dynamical systems · Condensed Matter Physics · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · Law · Middle East Politics and Society