What is Palestinian liberation? What kind of transformation does it entail? And what form of reason does it require? A fruitful exercise for thinking through these questions is to introduce settler colonialism to the debate. If you’re wondering what somebody’s stance is on Palestine, ask them point blank about settler colonialism and you’re likely to get a good grasp of their position. If people are unfamiliar with settler colonialism, the conversation could become an opportunity to learn and communicate with others. But often, willful ignorance or outright hostility to the notion present a larger obstacle than lack of knowledge. Drawing attention to settler colonialism disrupts white folks’ comfort with an identity that is premised on self-deception, on the refusal to let your position of privilege be questioned and threatened by an exposure of all the infrastructure needed to subtend a racist and unjust system. Pointing out the Zionist racial ideology of settler colonialism disturbs Western assumptions about power and identity even more dramatically. One can be knowledgeable of what settler colonialism stands for, but reject the claim that Israel is a settler state—Jews escaping pogroms are not settlers is a familiar refrain among Zionists and their supporters. Howard Jacobson, for example, self-righteously asserts, “Fleeing from pogroms isn’t colonizing.” Yes, it isn’t colonizing unless your safety and security translate into the dispossession and ethnic cleansing of an Indigenous population. The Zionist narrative has with great success naturalized the plight of the vulnerable Jews but accomplished this task by racializing Palestinians, ideologically covering over Palestinian vulnerability, prepping them for colonial domination.[1] Zionism has always been a zero-sum liberation movement: Jewish liberation premised on Palestinian annihilation/subjugation.

Liberal interlocutors are not interested in Palestinian liberation. They may care about the Palestinian people, as decent people do, and even criticize the belligerent Settler movement in Israel, but they are typically unwilling to embrace anti-Zionism. They feel it to be too oppositional, too antagonistic. For liberals who hold this position, anti-Zionist critique is not necessary; rather, they find the language of empathy far more appealing, pragmatic, and even urgent. They understand Palestinian liberation to be tied to the affective and political labor of fixing an “empathy deficit”—in this case, a deficit between the West and its Palestinian others. In thinking this deficit, we need to ponder what an orientation toward empathy opens up and what, more importantly, it forecloses. While a focus on empathy fosters a basic recognition that Palestinians are human beings capable of suffering like anyone else in this world, it is underpinned by a humanitarian reason that fails to address the crucial antagonisms of the colonial situation, that misunderstands the devastating material effects of Zionism, how it shrinks Palestinian worldhood: Occupied Palestine is a “cramped world.”[2] Palestinian liberation requires instead an anti-colonial critique of Zionism and the settler state. For true revolution—a revolution that changes the social coordinates of the Israeli settler-colonial system—anti-Zionism is not a luxury.

Generating empathy for those killed, subjugated, and displaced by the Israeli state is part and parcel of a process of countering Zionist dehumanizations of Palestinians. If you don’t view Palestinians as humans, you’re less likely to be moved by their plight. Humanitarian reason intervenes here in reframing Palestinians as undeserving victims of Israeli aggression. Palestinian lives, like all other lives, must be protected. Humanitarian reason is the type of reason that liberals of all shades endorse. It makes them feel secure in their care for all human beings, and less callous about the Palestinian plight as their right-winger counterparts. But under this horizon, Palestinian victimhood sits in tension with Jewish victimhood. Focusing exclusively on the humanity of all does not provide a way to address political claims ideologically framed as disputes among equal parties, nor the deeper paradoxes marking liberalism and its violence.

For many decades, the West’s collective unconscious has been troubled by the internal contradictions of its liberalism and its own history of victimizing others. If you’re a white, Western, liberal subject, your default identification is often with these victims, the marginalized and excluded of the world. And in this moral universe, Jews occupy an authoritative place insofar as they were the victims of the Shoah, a genocide that became the genocide, the “crime of crimes,” the paradigm-setting exemplar of extreme violence and suffering. The command “Never Again” is unconsciously understood by the Western world as Never will the world allow what happened to Jews in World War II to happen again. If the white liberal subject is asked if the injunction against genocide is applicable to non-Jews, non-Europeans, she will most likely say, “Of course!” The injunction is meant to defend Jews and other vulnerable bodies in the world. But when the figure of the victim is naturalized and attached to Jews, functioning in the cultural imaginary as the paradigmatic Victim, Palestinian liberation—grounded in a politics of recognition, with empathy as its driving force—hits a wall.

Historically the liberal West has been wary of empathizing with Palestinians if it meant turning Israeli Jews into victimizers. It has always been easier to blame Palestinian leaders for Palestinian suffering—even now Israel puts all the blame for so-called collateral damage in Gaza on Hamas. But it is important to note that activists and scholars have successfully pushed back against a Zionist narrative of Israeli innocence or blamelessness. The perception of Palestinians as the “victims of the victims”[3] is finding some traction within liberal circles. The massive anti-war protests and encampments of 2023, 2024, and beyond demonstrate that it is difficult to cast children being starved and blown into pieces as victimizers. The sheer number of civilian deaths unsettles Zionism’s exculpatory narrative.

But there are significant drawbacks to humanitarian reason. It invisibilizes the settler-colonial framework. It may want to protect the rights of Palestinian civilians but it doesn’t see Israelis as occupiers of Indigenous land. Anti-colonial reason redirects us to the settler-colonial situation. Settler colonialism is the “the all-important context,”[4] the operative analytic framework governing Palestine/Israel. Unlike humanitarian reason, anti-colonial reason moves beyond the traps of empathy; it understands Palestinian resistance as a resistance to Zionist invaders. The Palestinian problem is not a 1967 problem (referring to the Six Day War in which Palestinians and Arab states suffered a devastating defeat, with East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza lost to Israeli control—what is typically but not unproblematically understood as the Occupation). We must return to 1948, and to the colonialist framework that gave birth to Israel as a settler state dedicated to the elimination of Palestinians. The project of Palestinian liberation compels us to begin with the beginning: the Nakba. Returning to ’48—with an eye as well for the British imperialist framework that produced the Balfour Declaration in 1917—recasts Israel as the colonial offspring of imperial forces, a child that is following in its supremacist parents’ footsteps in its genocide in Gaza, mirroring back to its Western enablers a horrifying blueprint—or a dress rehearsal—for the Gazafication of the world.

Palestinian revolution means refusing to acquiesce to Israel and saying No! to the necrocapitalism—showcased by the military-industrial complex—that has fueled Israel’s war machine. It confronts Zionism head-on. It condemns Zionism as a supremacist ideology, meant to legitimize Palestinian displacement and dispossession. Anti-colonial reason reckons with Zionism and a Zionist Israel. In the Israeli cultural imaginary, there is no genuine alternative to a Zionist Israel, to an Israel that aspires to be a Greater Israel (liberal Zionists are ok with the idea of a Greater Israel as long as it is pitched as a security solution—exterminate the brutes; a colonial settler remains dormant in the liberal psyche, to be awakened whenever a Zionist Israel is at risk). Anti-colonial reason returns to the settler-colonial context—not the “conflict” but the antagonism between settler and Native—and opens to the anti-Zionist project of decolonization, which involves a de-Zionization of the liberal mind (what decolonizing the mind—of/for the settler—actually means). However remote talk of a liberal, two-state solution might seem at this moment, there is always a liberal hunger for it, a way to manufacture nostalgia for this discredited path, where the terms are often dictated purely by Israeli leaders—as if land back is a matter of generosity and not international law. The success of Palestinian revolution requires an ontological shift from such abstract talks of co-existence to a model of co-resistance that starts with an ontological mutation in the predominant Zionist Israeli identity, a radical unsettling of a murderous supremacist sovereignty, and a liberation from the Zionist libidinal economy that has affectively captured/colonized Israeli and Western minds for disastrous ends.

Toward that end, we must remain ruthlessly critical and vigilant about what passes for change or genuine transformation. A couple recent examples of faux transformation come to mind. In June 2025, the international community singled out Israeli cabinet members Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich for targeted sanctions insofar. But as Gideon Levy immediately noticed, the desire to exceptionalize Ben-Gvir and Smotrich is not unproblematic insofar as “in Israel, all of us are now Ben-Gvir and Smotrich. All of us.” Yes, exceptionalizing Ben-Gvir and Smotrich can function as an ideological ruse, occluding the gravity of the situation—how deep the moral rot goes in Israel civil society. Ben-Gvir and Smotrich are not Israel’s bad-apple politicians—they stand for the whole of Israel. But there is an additional danger here. It is too easy to be caught up with the horrible present and overemphasize Israel’s shift toward the far Right (a shifting happening across continents). For Palestinians, Israel’s current fascism is not so new; it is a colonial fascism (the “exterminate the brutes” of colonial days) that has subtended political Zionism from its beginnings. If there is a narrowing of the gap between liberal Zionists and Ziofascists, that narrowing is better explained in terms of the initially distorted separation between the two, the same distortion that allowed liberal Zionists of the “peace camp” to maintain their moral superiority over the political and religious wing of Zionism without having to face their complicity with an apartheid state that has relentlessly cannibalized Palestinian land through illegal settlements for over three decades. I would say that Zionists have always acted as Ben-Gvirs and Smotrichs—some managed to repress or disavow it, but with the Gaza genocide, such maneuvers now lack any shred of credibility. So for those liberals who might be jubilant about the international condemnation of Ben-Gvir and Smotrich (as if they can have their separation again), what is their endgame? Are they dreaming of a time prior to Ben-Gvir and Smotrich (and of course the king genocidaire Benjamin Netanyahu)? If so, their politics must be rejected as irremediably nostalgic, marked by the desire for a more stable time, a time when their Zionist identity was beyond ethical and political scrutiny.

In May 2025, more than 1,400 Israeli academics expressed in an open letter their desire for the heads of Israeli academic institutions to urge the Israeli government to put an end the war on Gaza, stressing the unconscionable suffering of the Palestinian people. Unlike the large majority of the Israeli population,[5] these signatories are clearly uncomfortable with Israel’s crimes and refuse to be complicit with their government’s murderous actions (on bombing schools and hospitals and starving civilians they note, “this is a horrifying litany of war crimes and even crimes against humanity, all of our own doing”—though the word “genocide” is not mentioned in the letter). The final paragraph of the letter reads: “We cannot claim that we did not know. We have been silent for too long. For the sake of the lives of innocents and the safety of all the people of this land, Palestinians and Jews; for the sake of the return of the hostages; if we do not call to halt the war immediately, history will not forgive us. We will not forgive ourselves. It is our duty to act to stop the slaughter; it is our duty to save lives. It is our duty to save what can still be saved of this land’s future. The institutions of higher education in Israel must raise their voices, address their students and the public at large, look at reality directly and call things what they are—unspeakable actions being done in our name, with our own hands, that will ultimately result in destroying higher education in Israel and the entire society from within.”

Slavoj Žižek praises the letter as an example of a much-needed “public ethical act” that “counterattacks” the obscenity of the Israeli government’s position: “State powers do not simply identify directly with the evil they commit; in their public declarations, they still talk about peace and humanity (the IDF, for example, continues to claim to be the most humane army in the world, etc.). In short, the two levels co-exist: in a dispassionate way, the state continues to talk about peace and humanity without any subjective commitment behind it, while public opinion and parts of state propaganda simultaneously abound with openly displayed enjoyment in committing terrible crimes.”

Yes, the letter exploits this “gap” in the hope of exerting pressure on the government so that genuine talks about “peace and humanity” can take place. I am, however, more skeptical and pessimistic about the letter’s overall force, about its gaps and omissions. Stopping the immediate suffering of Palestinians is clearly a necessity, but the presentism of the letter (as with Levy’s focus of his intervention)—its occlusion of Israel’s coloniality—does give me pause. “We cannot claim that we did not know” applies to the current situation and the illegal blockade of Gaza, the Occupation, and settler colonialism. Faith in Israeli universities acting to alter government policies toward Palestinians appears cruelly naïve in light of their historic role. Israeli universities’ complicity with the Occupation, in the subjugation of Palestinians, is by no means new nor unknown. The letter reinforces the belief that Israel can reform itself, can fix its colonial proclivities, without altering its institutions—in other words, the belief that racial supremacy is a bug, not a feature, of the Israeli polity. The letter normalizes the Occupation; it begins and ends with humanitarian reason. We cannot.

Let me be blunt. What is needed is a radical civil rights march on Tel Aviv for all Palestinians—one that gives rights their full political force and thus poses a challenge to the racial matrix of the human, to the necropolitical logic that determines who matters and who doesn’t, that predicates, in other words, the mattering of some on the unmattering of others. In the struggle for Palestine, we are all anti-Zionists now. Anti-colonial reason advances Palestinian liberation when it calls for dismantling the settler’s tools—a regime change with a radical transformation of its society’s ways of knowing and doing, an upheaval in the Zionist libidinal economy.

As Audre Lorde did in memorably asserting that “poetry is not a luxury,” we must also remember that anti-Zionism is not an option or a frivolous pursuit for those working toward Palestinian liberation, but “a vital necessity of our existence.”[6] Poetry is not a privilege of the few nor something extra that can be dispensed with. It is about survival and meaning. Similarly, anti-Zionism shapes “the quality of light” within which Palestinians and their supporters generate their critiques and projects for the future, within which they lay the ground for their “hopes and dreams towards survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.”[7] While Lorde herself did not extend her own insights to the Palestinian cause, contemporary Black feminist June Jordan did so, powerfully and courageously denouncing Zionism’s violence and feminists who refused to counter it, particularly in the wake of the gruesome slaughter of Palestinians in Israeli-occupied Lebanon in 1982. Jordan practiced anti-colonial reason, objecting to the ways words like “holocaust” and “genocide” are only meant to apply to European Jewish victims, unconscionably ignoring the non-European/non-whites lives of Palestinians:

Neither the word holocaust nor the word genocide was invented to describe the loss of Jewish or European life. Both of these words mean what they mean whether the victim is Jewish or not. As the majority of the peoples of the world is neither Jewish nor European, it should amaze no one that we, Black and Third World people everywhere, attach fundamental importance to the question of Palestine.

Jordan’s anti-Zionism is a response to anti-Palestinian racism. Her anti-Zionism puts on full display the merits of anti-colonial reason. Against the colonial fascism underpinning American feminism, Jordan insisted on her transnational solidarity with Palestinians. Palestinian liberation means globalizing this Intifada, this uprising in thought, feeling, and creative thinking about how to live and thrive otherwise. We can’t wait for anti-Zionism to trickle down from the liberal political class—to wait, to adapt the words of Omar El Akkad, for that future day when everyone will have always been anti-Zionist.[8] An anti-Zionist perspective emerges against the backdrop of an “apocalyptic atmosphere.”[9] Why do I become anti-Zionist? Because I can’t breathe in a world where Palestinians are physically suffocated and suffocating, where a genocide is allowed, encouraged to go on, without a mounted effort from Western leaders to put a stop to it and hold the Israeli government accountable for its “crime of crimes.” Anti-Zionism is now! Anti-Zionism steals life back from the settler; it smuggles “oxygen,” “creates and shapes a new humanity.”[10] Anti-Zionism is not a luxury but a political and ethical necessity. It cultivates anti-fascist visions and desires, and is the only meaningful response to the Gazafication of Gaza, to a genocidal regime hellbent on the destruction of all things Palestinian.

Notes:

[1] See Lana Tatour and Ronit Lentin, ed. Race and the Question of Palestine (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2025).

[2] Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2004), 3.

[3] Edward Said, The Question of Palestine (New York: Pantheon Books, 1979), xxi.

[4] Tayseer Abu Odeh and Shahd Dibas. “Zionist Settler-Colonialism and the Logic of Genocide in Gaza: A Conversation with Professor Avi Shlaim,” Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies 24, no. 1 (2025): 19.

[5] 82% of Jewish Israelis back ethnic cleansing, euphemistically referred to as “transfer.”

[6] Audre Lorde, “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” in Sister Outsider (Berkeley: Crossing Press, 2007), 37.

[7] Lorde, “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” 37.

[8] Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This (Alfred A. Knopf: New York, 2025).

[9] Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, trans. Haakon Chevalier (New York: Grove Press, 1965), 26.

[10] Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 181.