No Compromise under Genocide

The idea for this special dossier germinated, alongside the OVOF (Our Voices, Our Futures) Consortium, a few months before the genocide on Gaza intensified from October 7, 2023, continuing until today. We initially wanted to look at the ways in which queer feminist dissent, in Lebanon and the region, was being cracked down on and criminalized, by carceral/police states, banking systems, capitalist work environments, and colonial occupation.

The special dossier comes two years later than planned, to warn of unprecedented wars of annihilation. That a genocide of this magnitude is still allowed to continue, that those who oppose it are, more often than not, threatened with loss of income, imprisonment, or deportation, all point to a global reality we can no longer ignore: in today’s world, it is largely anti-colonial dissent that is criminalized, regardless of whether it is queer or not. Even at the scale of Kohl, a queer, radical, niche publication, we were sanctioned by multiple funders who did not renew grant contracts as of January 2024. In other words, they withdrew funding. Compounded with failing economies, this drastic loss in resources (two-thirds of our budget was cut) meant that we had to revert back to a partially unwaged model, where the publication is sustained by the freely given labor of a small collective, and the financial support of less than a handful of exceptional feminist funds and Global South-led networks and groups. One thing is clear: states, foundations, and institutions will never work against what they were created to do in the first place – which is to maintain a world order we no longer want to entertain, with our bodies, with our stories, and our thoughts.

This is not a divergence of paths in a world that has been described as polarized. It is standing in stark opposition, not out of reactionary politics, but out of necessity of survival and moral steadfastness. By the time we regrouped again earlier this year and picked up the work on the dossier, the genocidal entity had expanded its colonial war to Lebanon, and sporadically to the region. Yet, and despite the clear interconnectedness of our geographies and struggles, writing about Lebanon has been an almost impossible task. In the immediate sense, our authors wanted to direct our gaze, resources, labor, organizing, and affects to Palestine and to the urgency of stopping the genocide in any way possible. Second, we came to question the relevance of continuing a publication like Kohl, because we came to question the relevance of knowledge production as a whole, even when it is rooted in regional “authenticity.” After all, the factions calling for normalization with the zionist genocidal occupiers as “the only solution for Lebanon” are “authentic” and local in equal measures. With all the above in mind, talking about Lebanon in isolation, with the kind of exceptionalism neoliberal ideologies want to confer to it, misses a crucial geopolitical reality: Lebanon is, at once, complicit in maintaining state structures of settler colonialism, and part of a broader colonial project for the region that it must continue to resist.1

In other words, this dossier privileges localized articulations of knowledge that directly and unapologetically oppose the doings of colonial and institutional power. It also deals with three major impasses that anti-colonial knowledge production has to contend with today.

The first has to do with the cul-de-sac of the imposed reality of the nation-state. After two years of intensified genocide in Gaza, and attacks and land theft in the West Bank, many western powers are rushing to recognize Palestine as a state, while continuing to supply arms to the genocidal zionist entity. What does it mean, in any case, to “recognize” a state on a land that is decimated by settlements? What does it mean to agree to a model of statehood that would legitimize the occupation? At the same time, how can we deny Palestinians a state, when statelessness is not viable in a world where borders have an almost existential function, as Nadine Sayegh and Heidi Affi grapple with? Beyond mainstream political analysis of development, sustainability, and democracy, the pieces in the dossier reveal the collective failure of statehood; by challenging the borders of colonial nation-states, they read nation-states as inherently colonial, hence their inescapability.

The second impasse that anti-colonial knowledge production faces today is the tension between facts and fiction, a binary that “research” and “advocacy” ask us to establish. But facts, as Julie-Yara Atz argues, are always required of the colonized, as evidence of colonization. The colonizer, however, can engage in myth and fiction at will, because their rootedness in “facts” is taken for granted. On the other hand, Karim Kattan argues, through fiction in The Palace on the Higher Hill (2025), that the colonized is accused of being fictional in a first instance, before being paradoxically erased and memorialized. To memorialize, thus, is also to become “the stuff of fiction.” In other words, the questions of what is real and what is fiction, which is to say who is real and who is fiction in the colonial mind, prove that once again, these parameters are determined by systems of power rather than an absolute scale, or a measuring tool. No matter how many facts are established as evidence of genocide,2 the genocide is still continuing under the guise of it, and Palestinians, being fictional.

This brings us to the third point: we must, once and for all, do away with the colonial myth of scientific objectivity. The impasse is not so much within objectivity itself – it goes without saying that the states and institutions that have made the continuation of genocide possible, from centers of research and innovative technologies to school curricula and privately owned media, have lost all claims not only to knowledgeability itself but to their so-called objectivity too. If anything, objectivity, as demonstrated by Elena Vasiliou, is used to whitewash the crimes of genocide; when disciplines of knowledge supposed to intervene about the world favor neutrality and staying silent, what acts of epistemic disobedience might we do then, Vasiliou asks? As knowledge producers, the impasse, therefore, is in how our dissent is tamed before it even begins; in how we are made to use the same tools employed by imperialist and colonialist modes of inquiry, not only in the content we produce, but also in its form. This impasse, however, is already contested by queer works at the intersection of art and research, such as Yasmine Rifaii and Nadim Choufi’s I Will Always Be Looking For You (2025), which see the light not in spite of annihilation wars, but because of our refusal to comply with the current world order.

There cannot, and should not, be any “critical distance” (Atz) under genocide. In this dossier, our authors attempt to disrupt colonial time, by asking questions about capitalism and work when everything is falling apart, and what the language of “ceasefire” even means when colonial violence is a continuum (Chaar; Taleb). Lama Taleb’s journal not only chronicles this continuum, but also provides reflections in which the parts are different than the whole – embracing the contradictions of memory and remembrance. In the realm of “evidence” and “facts,” to ask us to write and remember with clarity and coherence as we are being bombed is a cruel form of colonial arrogance. To be perpetually forced to be “on the record” against disappearance (Kattan) is a way to prevent us from asking Julie-Yara Atz’ question (following Syria’s liberation from Assad’s reign): “what else might be?”

The failures of discourse and politics today very much translate materially. They start with the contradiction of continuing to arm a genocidal entity while condemning it, and continue with the shameful “aid” and funding schemes that are distributed as “humanitarian relief,” as explored in depth by Presica Chaar. They purposely create the impression that all we can do is sit on the sidelines in fear, overthinking our words, calculating our next move, and appealing to the mysteriously fickle powers of “diplomacy” and “international law.” And yet, everywhere we go, and particularly across the Asian continent and countries of the imperial North, we are witnessing unprecedented anti-colonial popular mobilizations against genocide, as imperfect as these might be. As anti-colonial knowledge producers, our mandate has to be unapologetic. No matter how frightened we might feel, no matter how exhausted we are made to become, no matter how isolating our respective contexts might be, a genocide is ongoing in Palestine. We cannot afford to compromise.

• 1. Zebdawi and Mahmoud, 2024.
• 2. Ahmed, 2016.