As Fanon states: “If my life is truly equal to that of the colonizer, his gaze can no longer frighten me or pin me down instantly, his voice can no longer petrify me or kill me. I no longer feel anxious in his presence. In fact, to hell with him.”
As Fanon states: “If my life is truly equal to that of the colonizer, his gaze can no longer frighten me or pin me down instantly, his voice can no longer petrify me or kill me. I no longer feel anxious in his presence. In fact, to hell with him.”
After October 7, the opinions of some Western critics and thinkers emerged regarding Operation Flood of Al-Aqsa and the war crimes and genocide committed by the Israeli occupation army against Palestinian civilians in the Gaza Strip, which included killing, starvation, and displacement of hundreds of thousands.
The most prominent voices commenting on what happened were the Slovenian cultural critic Slavoj Žižek and the American theorist Judith Butler, whose views were diametrically opposed.
The former took a shocking moral position that included and justified Israel’s right to defend itself by killing Gazan civilians, while the latter described what Israel was doing as genocide and saw Hamas as part of a resistance seeking national liberation, despite condemning what it did on October 7.
Partial Liberation
Butler’s views received widespread acclaim from her followers among proponents of national liberation and anti-colonialism in the Western world, as well as from some readers, writers, and intellectuals in the Arab world.
However, if we truly wish to return to the literature of genuine liberation, we must abandon Butler’s views that condemn the resistance and strive to understand the true theory of liberation, as exemplified by the French doctor and thinker Frantz Fanon, who provided an in-depth dissection and analysis of colonialism, its tools, its resistance, and how to liberate oneself from it both mentally and physically.
Judith Butler is unlike Slovenian cultural critic Slavoj Žižek or even the prominent German philosopher of communication Jürgen Habermas, both of them took positions in solidarity with Israel regarding the events of October 7th, supporting Israel’s right to defend itself without restrictions. They disagreed with describing Israel’s actions—killing, starving, and displacing hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilians—as genocide. They rationalized that Israel has the right to retaliate in any manner it deems fit.
As the French-Martinican doctor Frantz Fanon once said, “The tragedy of the white man lies in the fact that one day he killed another person, and to this day, they are trying to rationalize this inhumane stance.”
Butler was more rational and ethical in her view of the current reality, expressing that Hamas is part of the Palestinian people—a national liberation movement established in the mid-1980s, nearly 40 years after the Israeli occupation declared the establishment of its entity on the Palestinian lands after its armed organizations displaced hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and replaced themselves in their place.
However, she also condemns what happened on October 7th, though she does not consider Hamas a terrorist organization. Instead, she calls for viewing the conflict within its historical context rather than focusing only on current events, which include Israeli violations that surpass all human and international norms and laws.
Despite Butler’s condemnation of what happened on October 7, she was subjected to hate campaigns against her, and restrictions on all the academic and cultural events and seminars she attended, simply because she did not support “Israel’s” right to exterminate the Palestinian people.
Butler’s position is a progressive one and supportive of the Palestinian cause, especially in Western cultural circles, where part of the critical cultural movement aligns with the barbarism of the Israeli army.
But the residents of the Global South, believe that the issue of Palestine’s occupation is our issue. A few decades ago, Israel was killing and violating the surrounding countries—Egypt and Jordan—and to this day continues to violate Syria and Lebanon also drawing Russia into the conflict by attacking on its air bases in Syria.
The conflict was never solely a Palestinian-Israeli one before, except after the normalization agreements of the Egyptian and Jordanian regimes, and their desperate attempts to convince the Arab peoples that “Israel” is now a friendly neighboring country, and that the issue of occupation is the sole concern of the Palestinians.
Although Butler’s views have taken a more fair stance—at least in her clear condemnation of Israel and describing its actions as genocide—we, the people directly affected by this issue, must return to a theory that takes us to complete justice, not to partial justice.
A theory that establishes the concept of seeking to know our true right to defend our land and end colonialism by all possible means. Among these means, without any hesitation or submission, is adopting violence.
Instead of citing Butler’s words, we recall Frantz Fanon, the doctor and philosopher who witnessed the French and barbaric colonialism against the Algerian people, and who did not just reject it, but was one of the theorists of the right to use violence against it. Fanon also participated in the Algerian National Liberation Front, in its journalistic, media, organizational, and theoretical work.
Back to Frantz Fanon
“Decolonization is always a violent event,” says Frantz Fanon in his most famous book, The Wretched of the Earth (1959), and the book that preceded it, Black Skin, White Masks (1952), which remains a living guide for anyone to this day who wants to get rid of the horrors of colonialism and slavery.
Fanon means violence by his statement – influenced by the brutal French colonization of Algeria that he witnessed – that colonialism itself is inherently violent. It came, occupied, settled, and imposed violent practices on the other, the owners of the land, as happened in Palestine.
The British Mandate came and helped the armed Zionist organizations seize the land, killed and displaced those who inhabited it, until they were able later, during the 1948 war between the Zionist gangs and the Arab armies, and other resistance groups, to seize the lands of the Palestinians.
Thus, the occupation of Palestine was a violent event, and it will disappear except through similar violent practices, even if it takes centuries. What confirms this is that the lands seized by Israel after the June 1967 war, which the world recognizes as occupied territories, are still under Israeli control. Israel continues to expand its presence and control, transferring settlers there in blatant disregard for Palestinian rights and international humanitarian laws that criminalize settlement practices.
By examining the apartheid practices of the occupation against Palestinians—whether inside the 1948 borders, the West Bank, or Gaza—it is clear to any rational observer, even if they are not a philosopher like Butler, that these practices are nothing but oppressive, violent acts.
Palestinians are seen as disposable bodies, lacking the same human attributes that Israelis are believed to possess. They are seen as the “other,” with a body and face considered inferior, as described by the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas.
All forms of exploitation crafted and perfected by the Israeli occupation system have led Palestinians to reject not only negotiating with the occupier or even relying on international law for their freedom and the end of occupation but also to the realization that even if freedom were given to them, it would not be sufficient.
Instead, freedom must be seized. As Fanon says, “A man (i.e. the colonized Palestinian) cannot be a human being except to the extent that he tries to impose his existence on another human being to obtain recognition from him.” Here comes this recognition, through the power of the Palestinians imposed through violence, which forces the occupier to surrender, withdraw, and return the rights without consent or negotiation.
As always, Fanon, unlike Butler, who condemned the Al-Aqsa Flood operation abstractly, while deconstructing and understanding the context and motives, urges against surrendering to all the methods of subjugation practiced by the colonizer against the owners of the land, but rather calls for the utmost degree of resistance to it, beginning with establishing the concepts of freedom, dignity, and equality within the human consciousness, and ending with the use of violence to achieve these concepts, even if that violence destroys both the colonizer and the colonized.
As Fanon states: “If my life is truly equal to that of the colonizer, his gaze can no longer frighten me or pin me down instantly, his voice can no longer petrify me or kill me. I no longer feel anxious in his presence. In fact, to hell with him.”
Here comes the sacrifice of the colonized as a solution, salvation, and method towards liberation, for death is better than a life of inferiority at the mercy of the settler. Rather, he, the colonized, must realize that “since his birth, he must see this narrow world, that is, colonialism, planted with all kinds of prohibitions, that can only be changed by absolute violence. Moreover, violence is not only savior, or violence that is counter to colonial violence, but this violence is like a new birth for the colonized because the life of the colonized only arises from the decayed corpse of the colonizer.”
This is what the roles of liberation intellectuals are, the struggle to know and apply the concepts of freedom, dignity, and equality, not a dull, disjointed solidarity, or even an incompletely fair one.
As Fanon describes the intellectual, “It is not enough to fight for the freedom of your people. You must re-teach your people, and first, yourself, the full meaning of human worth, and this must be done as long as the fight continues.”
Fanon stresses the importance of instilling dignity and equality in the consciousness of the colonized because if, due to the subjugation they experience, they begin to feel that they possess a lesser degree of humanity than their colonizer—physically, emotionally, or spiritually—it would be tantamount to admitting the death of the colonized people and their submission to colonial machinery.
But what the Palestinian resistance did on October 7, despite our differences in estimating its political and strategic gains and outcomes, is positioned within an act of resistance, a war of liberation, which Fanon defines as “a grand effort made by a people who had been mummified, to rediscover its genius, reclaim its history, and assert its sovereignty.”
