Rebel. Agitate. Organize.
For over two weeks now, the Zionist project has extended its murderous rampage to Lebanon, targeting densely populated urban areas, villages, farms, refugee camps, and medical facilities. The occupying forces have not simply “turned” their warmongering schemes to Lebanon; it is but a continuation of the genocide they have been committing in Gaza and the West Bank, and a clear intent to annihilate any and all resistance to their colonial project.
The geographical scope is no coincidence. The genocide unfolding today is not the direct result of political circumstances, which would be characterized by a far-right turn in the governing “state” of the Zionist settlers. We are coming up against a colonial expansionist project, the heart of which has been the occupation of Palestine, and that is currently attempting to invade, and occupy once again, larger parts of Lebanon (and other strategic lands, such as the West Bank’s camps, Palestinian towns bordering the settlements, and Gaza itself). Settler colonialism as a tool for population control has always dehumanized and targeted any resistance to it, no matter its shape or form, and the Zionist project in the region has been no exception since its inception. Our anticolonial struggle is therefore the same, from Gaza to Beirut.
For decades now, as activists and thinkers, we have been tamed by the moral pleas, the legal routes, the diplomatic processes, the awareness campaigns. We have raised our voices; we have begged for justice. But the systems that sustain oppression will not capitulate kindly. The time for pleading is over. The time for action is now.
Expansionist zionism operates through multiple functions to maintain its objectives of land theft and settler genocide. Its most direct function is the destruction of the infrastructures of resistance. This is very obvious in the strategy adopted by the occupiers to carpet-bomb indiscriminately anything they consider to remotely belong to or aid armed resistance movements (in Gaza, the West Bank, and now Lebanon), with technologically-advanced weapons of mass destruction largely obtained from the west. As for the destruction of ideological infrastructures, it is apparent in the violent suppression of “civil” resistance movements. The consequences are twofold: first, Arab states and authorities increasingly normalize their relations with the colonial presence in the region, which then intensifies even further the repression of political expression or organizing around resistance.
A second function is that of population control via mass displacement, migration, and exile, which has been ongoing since the Nakba and until today. Palestinians continue to be forced to scatter within neighboring Arab states and beyond the region’s borders, which simultaneously serves as a strategy of population replacement and of preventing organizing to take place in an effective way. Even now, the act of internally displacing populations in Palestine and Lebanon is a tool of intimidation and terror, which aims to subjugate those who come up against the occupation and to dissuade others from resisting. On the other hand, it is important to remember that the Zionist regime will not fall from within (settlers will not dismantle their own colony) – its demise will be determined from without. The survival of the occupying force is intrinsically tied to the power structures of the Global North and their allies in Arab states. It is these forces that must be shaken, and we can be actors in their shaking because we are positioned everywhere.
A third function is that of political and ideological surrender. As thinkers, we have seen the struggle against Israeli colonialism become increasingly marginal in recent years, a reality reinforced by the complicity of the states in the region. We stand in solidarity and sign petitions when “solidarity” is rendering us docile, as if we were outsiders to the struggle, as if it weren’t our people who are dying, as if it weren’t our lands that are being stolen and destroyed. Surrender takes the form of non-politicized solidarity, promoted by the NGOization of our movements of resistance in the region, and the disciplining and fear we contend with at the hands of western states in the diaspora. We have been placed in the service of western states in more ways than one, our energies sapped by the illusion of collective performativity and moral discourse. It is time we refuse that the larger struggle is fragmented into individual battles.
How to organize from scattered geographies against the manufactured disengagement from the struggle, instigated by a cyclical loss of infrastructure and means, population exile, and a logic of surrender and control?
1. We need to organize as workers in the diversity of our workplace. Where labor unions are absent, we must organize anyway, but not along the lines of aid structures, clientelism, or charity. We must be the incursion; we must fight so that no resources are put at the service of the Zionist project, and disrupt the economic structures that serve its so-called perpetuity.
2. We can and must disrupt complicit institutions, physically and ideologically. Wherever we may be, exile can be turned into a battlefield; our actions and thoughts can amplify the struggle on the ground.
3. We must mobilize in any way possible to halt the flow of weapons to the occupation, normalized by the west, and dismantle the military-industrial complex that treats our people as experiments and attempts to obliterate our resistance.
4. We have to contend with the contradictions within the contexts we inhabit, draw clear objectives, and craft an internationalist anticolonial vision. We should not dilute our actions in stages, but determine short- and long-term strategies.
5. We must fight the fight wherever we find ourselves. We must become a force of escalation and a continuation of the resistance. We cannot be bound by the timid frameworks of global solidarity. This is not a show of support; this is a declaration of war.