Transcript
Arielle Angel: Hello. Hi, everyone. I am so honored to be moderating this last panel and to be here with this amazing group of people. I will very briefly introduce you to them. Dana El Kurd is an assistant professor at the University of Richmond in the Department of Political Science. Her first book, Polarized and Demobilized: Legacies of Authoritarianism in Palestine, was published in January 2020. Noura Erakat is a human rights attorney and a professor at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, in the Department of Africana Studies and the program of Criminal Justice. She is the author of Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine. Amjad Iraqi is a senior editor at +972 magazine and was previously an advocacy coordinator at the legal center, Adalah. Ahmed Moore is a Palestinian American writer and activist and the co-editor of After Zionism: One State for Israel and Palestine. Fadi Quran is the senior director of Avaze and previously served as the UN advocacy officer with Al-Haq’s legal research and advocacy unit in Palestine, where he specialized in international law and human rights advocacy. Thank you, guys, for being here today.
AA: So we have a lot of people, a huge topic, and not a lot of time. So we are not going to do Q&As. I’m sure you guys have amazing questions, and sorry, we are—I don’t have to tell anyone on this panel, or in this room—almost a year into a genocide in which Israel continues a near total destruction in Gaza. Many of us in this room are activists in one way or another and have been working to try to stop the genocide and to reach for liberation in Palestine and for real justice. And, of course, we have not been successful. So we’re here today to talk about the future of this movement, both on the ground and here in the US, which has, of course, completely bankrolled this genocide. A little bit of throat-clearing before we begin, which is that there is no one Palestinian panel that can represent the Palestinian experience. And this is a panel. And obviously, the context here is that we are having a conversation in English in the US, in the context of a Jewish magazine. And that is one kind of conversation that we’re gonna have today. So I want to release my panelists from having to be the representatives in this moment, and just be the amazing thinkers that you are. And we can start there.
AA: This conversation is gonna proceed in three parts. We’re gonna talk very, very briefly about the problem of leadership in Palestinian politics. We’re going to move toward questions of vision, and we’re going to end with questions of strategy, so hopefully we can get through it. Dana, I want to start with you. Your research has been on fragmentation of Palestinian politics and geographic fragmentation, and I just want to hear a little bit about the challenges there, and why we have a particular vacuum at this moment.
Dana El Kurd: Thank you so much for having me on the panel. As you said, my research has been on mechanisms of fragmentation in the Palestinian context. So how the United States, and Israel, and the international community generally have been able to control, manage, and demobilize the Palestinians, both in the territories and more broadly: First, in the creation of the Palestinian Authority, minimizing the Palestinian question to the issue of just the West Bank and Gaza Strip, which leaves a lot of different Palestinian realities outside of that equation. Secondly, by hollowing out grassroots organizations within the territories, which were the main vehicles by which Palestinians kept their leadership accountable, and then also—you told me to be brief, so I won’t get into all of it—creating conditions for the split in governance between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.
DEK: In the aftermath of that, developing and consolidating a new Palestinian Authority with funding and arms and a particular ideological perspective that has enabled the Palestinian Authority to become the subcontractor of occupation. And then, in the aftermath of that, maintaining a status quo of this violent equilibrium—I’m borrowing Tareq Baconi’s word here to describe the conditions before October 7 for the Gaza Strip—as well as a different violent equilibrium in the West Bank. So it is a geographic fragmentation, but it’s fundamentally more than that. It was a way to create divergences between political elites and their publics, between the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, and other realities. And so in that stagnation, in that moment prior to October 7, politics was happening, or real attempts to challenge this status quo was happening outside these formal institutions and these structures. So, for example, there was organizing in the diaspora. There were events like the 2021 Unity Intifada, which was transformative because it connected different Palestinian realities outside the fold of these organizations, and these formal structures. And then we also have to talk about the emergence of some of these militias in the West Bank that, by their own narrative, are attempting to challenge fragmentation because they are encompassing people of different partisan backgrounds. And so all of those are outside the fold of these formal structures.
DEK: But up to October 7, as I said, poll after poll (Palestinians are some of the most polled people) show Palestinians had a lot of cynicism and apathy with their political leadership in all major parties. In the aftermath of October 7, for reasons maybe we would like to discuss, Hamas has gone up in popularity, and I have some of the figures in front of me, but still, it’s largely in the West Bank and not in Gaza. And Fatah, or the Palestinian Authority (Fatah is the dominant party), remains largely illegitimate. Another problem is that political leadership with a space to function outside these bounds are nothing really that widely popular. So in this context, that’s why we see that diaspora has maybe stepped in a little bit, and has attempted to organize in places like the United States and Europe, Latin America. There have been initiatives to try to revive the PLO, the Palestine Liberation Organization. So, for example, there’s this initiative called the Palestinian National Conference, which we can talk about.
AA: Could you actually just pause there for a second and say what these kinds of efforts have been to revive the PLO?
DEK: So the Palestinian National Conference in particular, but I think people have been discussing the revival of the PLO as a larger umbrella organization, has attempted to bring together different Palestinian thinkers and people with community ties in different diaspora communities. So in the US, in the UK, in the Middle East (has ignored Latin America, be that as it may). So they’ve attempted to have these discussions in order to set a framework for demanding a move away from this binary that existed prior to October 7. But I think that these attempts carry inherent problems because costs are not evenly distributed amongst these different Palestinian realities. The diaspora dominating can be problematic in and of itself. And like I said, it’s not fully inclusive. And so this is something that we can continue to discuss, and I think I’ll leave it there.
AA: Does anyone want to respond specifically just on the question of leadership? Yeah.
Ahmed Moor: Thanks, Dana, for that framing. Thank you, Arielle. Thank you, everybody else. It’s great to be here with everybody. I don’t think we have a deficit of leadership within Palestine and elsewhere. We have leaders like Fadi in Ramallah. We have people like Noura here in the United States, and everybody else. We have an absence of institutional flexibility which could give expression to that leadership within Palestine. I think it’s a fine point.
AA: Yeah. Thank you for that reframe. I think that’s actually a very good segue. Because where I want to spend some real time here is thinking about vision in particular. And I think we have a situation, as you said, where there’s plenty of leaders but no specific political leadership. And there is, like, the BDS movement has been very good at putting forth a tactic for people to unite around, but it’s not holistic. I mean, it doesn’t contain the entirety of what we might organize for together. And so, actually, I wanted to start with you, Noura, on the question of: What do we do in the absence of that articulation of a greater vision? And where are these principles of unity that we might be able to organize around, even without a centralized movement?
Noura Erakat: Thank you, everyone. It is a great honor to be here. I want to also reiterate, it’s so hard to be an all-Palestinian panel, and the expectation is that we represent Palestine, and this is actually the crisis. Everyone represents a struggle for liberation, and yet nobody wants to take the mantle and explain and do what that is because of that lack of institutional flexibility that you describe. But here, that absence represents, I think, different kinds of anxieties. For Palestinians, that anxiety is the fact that we have the wherewithal, that we have the personnel, that we have generational knowledge, that we have commitment, that we have Sumud. That most of us, so many of us, at any age, are dedicating our lives, no matter what we’re doing, even if it’s not the prime labor that we do. We’re dedicating our lives some way to that
NE: And yet we’re afflicted by the fact that there is no national body that can speak in our holistic name with a legitimacy, whether that be electoral legitimacy or otherwise. And so that is an affliction that I think we grapple with because it puts us in a position like we’re in right now, where you have civil society pushing a full-frontal attack and resistance and asking for this—demanding that this be internationally recognized as genocide, that Israel be unseated from the United Nations as South Africa was unseated in 1974, that sanctions be applied. And yet our leadership, official electoral leadership, which is running without electoral mandate, won’t even embody the current moment in the same language that we’re using, but in fact, is using this in order to pivot themselves as somehow having more legitimacy vis a vis Hamas.
NE: That’s why this is, in so many ways, an internal conversation. What do we do with that? And why, in the absence of that, has international law, unfortunately, the language of international law, which is by its nature depoliticizing, taken up a disproportionate amount of space in the place of politics and political vision? But that’s our problem, and one that we’ve tried to address in many, many ways, including myself in 2006, as I was part of the initiative to revive something called the US Palestinian Community Network that wanted to create a Palestinian body in diaspora that would connect, in the similar spirit that Palestinian Youth Movement does, in the similar spirit the Palestinian Feminist Collective does. There are many initiatives that have tried to fill this lacuna without falling back into the trap of wanting to run and resurrect the PLO. The PLO was a coalition of all Palestinian political parties. You would have to start from resurrecting all the political parties in order to resurrect that body.
NE: That’s our problem. So I said that three times already. Why do I say that and emphasize it? Because there’s another problem, where that absence of leadership, and the obsession with it is an external problem of those who want to condition Palestinian liberation on some sort of guarantee, on a blueprint, on a conditionality of: what will it mean if we release you from a ghetto? Will you behave? And so that affliction is separate, and I think on so many levels, that conversation is the one that’s constantly being had about us, as the unruly natives who can’t be trusted. And it’s one that’s quite old and quite colonial.
NE: And so let me just move forward and say, I think it’s best to support what can be done to allow Palestinians to be able to resurrect, and to nourish, and to build their own leadership, perhaps by not imprisoning them. And that, obviously, is the short of it. I mean, not assassinating them is actually the major problem. But I wanted to say something else in this moment as well, which you say, the points of unity, and this came up in conversations. And that’s a translation of what I was saying about something in Arabic called the national points of unity. There are three national points of unity that have remained consistent in the Palestinian struggle for liberation, regardless of what the political configuration has looked like. And that is: the right to self-determination in Palestine. And in many iterations, it also includes Jerusalem as the capital. It also includes the right of return for refugees—in whatever political configuration is created, that Palestinian refugees have an inherent right that is not undercut by any form of political agreement.
NE: And the third is the right to armed force in order to advance that cause of liberation. That has been consistent. And even though we can differ on many of those things and what that looks like, including on the last one on the right to armed force. I mean, that’s not just a blanket right. That’s a responsible right. The right to armed force is the way that it’s been articulated by national liberation movements, the way it has been articulated by the PLO historically, the way it has been captured by international law and specifically international law, I’m talking here about the 1977 additional protocols which amend the Geneva Conventions of 1949 to basically recognize guerrilla fighters as soldiers. There’s a responsibility that that kind of force is a legitimate violence, specifically because it’s not used for individual enrichment, or organizational enrichment, like a mafia might use it, for example, but is used for national purposes and public benefit. And so that puts upon Palestinians a responsibility of how to use that violence, and how to organize it. So those principles have been consistent. And that has not changed. Not before October 7. Not after October 7. That remains the same. And here I want to kind of displace October 7, but maybe I’ll get another chance to do that.
NE: Let me just get to what is really different. Is that—
AA: We’ll get there. I think we’ll get there. I just want to move on quickly. Fadi, I want to bring you into the conversation. I mean, a lot was just put on the table to respond to. I also know that you have done, actually, a lot of work in terms of thinking about that internal Palestinian conversation, and a lot of research and a lot of talking to people to try to figure out what the broadest possible agreement can look like. I really want to hear you talk about the question of how you think that conversation, based on your research, can move forward. And also, whether you agree that actually, the centralization piece is not as important in whatever project is going to be built from there. So on one hand, what have you learned from the research? And on the other hand, do we have the tools right now to carry it out?
Fadi Quran: I want to start by saying—and I recognize there are many Palestinians in the room as well—that in this moment, as Palestinians, all, all of us are filled with a volcano of anger and despair at what’s happening. And any moment spent not engaging in the process of liberation feels like a waste of our time. So the responsibility, the core responsibility we have in this room, is to figure out, collectively, how do we move ourselves, with all of our potential, toward that accelerated liberation? That’s the key question Palestinians and those adjacent to Palestinians need to be asking themselves. And when we speak about leadership, we also need to realize that, collectively, we have not excelled to the level of leadership that the people in Gaza require of all of us.
FQ: And we need to take ownership of that, and take serious ownership of that because it will open the pathway toward that strategic liberation. Where I want to, in terms of answering your question and speaking to different groups of Palestinians all across the world: Palestinians right now, in this moment, are coalescing around three unities. First of all, returning to the core of the narrative, which is the idea of unity of land, which is that the homeland of the Palestinian people is from the river to the sea. The second point of unity is unity of the people; which is that the Palestinian people are all 15 million Palestinians across the world, and all of their rights matter. And they all have a responsibility to engage in this moment of struggle, wherever they are. And the third point of unity is the unity of struggle, which is if we want to achieve self-determination, freedom, justice and dignity, if we want to reconstitute our people on our national homeland, we need to figure out how to engage in unified struggle, as Palestinians and with our allies.
FQ: Whether I’m speaking to Palestinians in the camp in Jenin, or I’m speaking to Palestinians that live in Bay Ridge, or even Palestinians that live in Bel Air, every Palestinian (except for a very small elite that benefit from the status quo that Oslo created) are aligned on that direction. Now, the main thing I think, for this audience to understand in terms of this question of moving toward that path of liberation, is that, in the history of Palestine, it almost has never happened that our leaders, especially corrupt leaders, have been changed mainly through institutional processes. And this is because, as Noura referenced, any attempt to engage in changing these institutional processes, whether it’s the PLO and how it functions or so forth, there are key actors that put obstacles in that place. So right now, the question that is on, especially the younger generation of Palestinians, is: how do we develop, based on those three unities, a shared strategy where we move in the direction of that liberation struggle? And that liberation struggle has many different pillars, from the economic to the on-the-ground struggle, to building alliances and a lot of the work that’s important in the US. But how do we engage in that work as a symphony, and, by doing that, we de facto create a new leadership that the people trust and the people feel legitimacy around? If I leave you with a main message, it’s that it’s time to build that leadership from the ground up.
FQ: The work happening from the top down is important. There are many initiatives trying to figure out how to unify Palestinians and change the institutional leadership on top. But in this moment of historical crisis, it’s important to realize that, as this genocide accelerates and continues to happen, and it spreads to the West Bank, we cannot wait until the Palestinian current rulers (I don’t want to call them leaders because they’re not really leading, they’re simply ruling), we can’t wait until there’s a process that removes them. But we can create the dynamic on the ground that is supported by all the Palestinian people that de facto imposes a new dynamic in this direction.
AA: I mean, that sounds great. How? I mean, anyone can answer this. You know, anyone can respond.
DEK: I mean, correct me, but in the circles that I’ve been engaged in conversation with, I think at least part of that vision is moving beyond the statehood framework, and rejecting what DC wants us to do and have as part of the plan moving forward. So I think at least in that point, people are agreed that we need to move beyond that statehood framework.
AA: Can you actually elaborate on what you mean when you say move beyond the state?
DEK: I mean, the decoupling, perhaps, the discussion of Palestinian self-determination and sovereignty in the land to this demand of a single Palestinian state separate from an Israeli state. And people can disagree about what those configurations would look like. But I think that, I mean, logistically speaking, and given the moment of atrocity and the genocide, the two-state solution is very dead in the eyes of everyone and in people’s lived realities—but still somehow alive, whether it’s among the PA or DC or any of the diverged leadership that we were talking about.
AA: I mean, I’ll just say since October 7, it seems that the two-state solution really is enjoying a resurgence. I mean, it’s not just the PA, it’s also Hamas that has indicated that that’s something that they would be open to and, in fact, are moving in that direction. And I think that it seems like it’s on the table in a way that it wasn’t before and that there may also be, if on October 6, a lot of people were thinking about one state, there does seem that there’s been some backsliding there. Ahmed.
AM: Yeah, can I jump in? And with full awareness that Amjad hasn’t had a chance to contribute. I mean, first on the leadership question and how, in Palestine, we may as well ask whether the people who are imprisoned now in Rikers Island are going to organize for their own liberation. There are real structural features of this conflict that we have to grapple with. And Israel, the Zionists in Israel, have done a complete job of structurally limiting the ability of Palestinians in Palestine to resist in ways that are successful. Well, we’re not going to get into ethics: ways that are successful. Full stop. On the question of one state versus two states. Is two states having a resurgence? I mean, there’s a real visceral experience I think many of us have now, where we look at the images emerging from Israeli society, the war porn. And you just don’t want to do it. You don’t want to be in the same room, you don’t want to have a conversation, you don’t want to be in the same geographical space. And how we move past that, I don’t know. I’m not able to present answers. But that deep emotional set of traumas, I think that not only we, but I think many people have experienced through this genocide, pose an obstacle which may be insurmountable. And I think that explains some of the resurgence of two states, which is not practical or likely, in any event. And I don’t know how to square those dimensions in the conflict.
AA: Yeah, I’d love to bring you into the conversation on that, Amjad. This question, with the resurgence of two states, the flip side of that is the decline of the coexistence paradigm, the sense that we just can’t live together, which is completely understandable. Obviously, for Palestinian citizens of Israel, this is a question that they are facing in a very real sense. These are neighbors. And there has been a very real move to become, essentially, an informant society. People are calling the police on their neighbors for posts and whatnot. And I wanted to ask you, I mean, how does that question strike you? How does the question of coexistence strike you, as somebody who has been living among Israelis—and I also am going to put you on the spot, which is that you have left in the last year, and are now living in London, from Haifa and that 40% of Palestinian citizens of Israel at this point say that they would like to leave. And so that, in itself, I think, is a real indictment of the question. So I’m curious to hear what you have to say about it.
Amjad Iraqi: Yeah, I guess I’m going to say a few paradoxical, almost contradictory things. I think it’s important to hold these paradoxes because it’s always this complexity, even though we know the main big picture. So, part of what’s at the heart of this is inherently this question, or at least in a lot of the conversations I’ve been having, we’re thinking about the issue of partition, and the issue and the partition of Palestine. And partition as a whole, as a product of colonial movements and colonial thinking that go beyond Palestine—India, Pakistan, and even apartheid South Africa, where partition was very integral to the way the system was designed. So, an unexceptional idea, which is applied very violently in Palestine, one that Palestinians have always rejected. And this cuts to what Fadi was saying, that one of the points of unity and that Noor was saying, that the unity of the land, the unity of the people, and the unity of the struggle of Palestinians is a very real thing. Now, part of the paradox here is that Israelis, most Jewish Israelis, when it comes down to it, have a similar thinking. But there’s an idea that neither Israelis nor Palestinians want to partition the land. They don’t want to partition themselves as Jewish Israelis or themselves as Palestinians, but in some form or another, they want to partition from the other. And what we’ve witnessed over the past century is not only the enforcement of partition as a violent material, physical reality, but the way the partition is used actively as separate and inherently unequal.
AI: And this is what you see not just in the occupied territories, but also inside Israel. And there’s a long history of the way that even the Israeli legal system ensures that Palestinians who remained on the Israeli side of the border and have Israeli citizenship and the blue ID card remain second class at best, and all the degenerations since then. So there’s a paradox here that both Israelis and Palestinians are facing, but this itself is also a massive asymmetry because Israelis have been able to enforce that very, very brutally. And their answer is that if we are to break partition some way, that Palestinians must remain unequal, even if we do absorb them into the system.
AI: Now, in many ways, Palestinians have had these conversations historically, both through the PLO, the Palestinian intellectuals, and to this day; and I think especially both among Palestinian Americans, who think about equality in the radical sense—what does the erasure partition look like—and also Palestinian citizens of Israel, who have a long history of political movements, and because of their proximity and the relationship with Jewish Israelis, of actually thinking about what does a unitary space look like. What does a unitary collective, which isn’t something about assimilation or coexistence in that sense, but is rooted in justice, is rooted in a radical form of equality. Those actually exist, and they’re actively spoken about. And especially here in the United States, it’s been a constant thing. In the occupied territories, it’s much more difficult for Palestinians to envision equality, in some sense, with the settler and the soldier, with the sniper and the jet fighter. So these are conversations which are sometimes difficult, and even more so now in Gaza, under genocide, to even think about what that is. But those conversations are there.
AI: And in the way Palestinian citizens of Israel, who make up 20% of the Israeli citizenry, they have long defied this partition. Again, this irony whereby their blue ID card gives them certain privileges that once Israel conquered basically the land between the river and the sea, up until the siege of Gaza. But to this day in the West Bank, Palestinian citizens are going in and out of the West Bank, across the green line all the time. Not for political activities, social, economic life; it is part of our consciousness in a way that Palestine’s in the territories obviously can’t, for their status and checkpoints and so on and so forth.
But there is a world that’s happening beyond the green line that breaks that. The alternative to that are primarily Jewish Israeli settlers. And here’s the divergence of Jewish Israeli settlers requiring dominance to break partition, versus Palestine citizens saying that actually there’s a more equal, equitable, just way to actually share the space. So there’s a lot of this, and there’s much more to say about it, but I think it was just important to put down the table.
AI: And the second point I want to say, and here again is a bit of a paradox whereby I totally want to echo what Noura said, in the sense that there is the Jewish Israeli question in Palestine discussions about our vision and our future. And on the one hand, Palestinian discussions about that should not be conditioned on that—especially at a time like now. You could have been asking this a bit more on October 6. October 7 is a time whereby, I mean, it still applied before, but like, there is a space for Palestinians to have a conversation about themselves on their terms—what do they need, what do they want?—that doesn’t have to always have an Israeli person on the panel, that doesn’t always have to be asking that question per se. As I say that, it’s a conversation that Palestinians need to have. It’s very difficult, it’s very hard, and it might not be the right time sometimes. And again, there are different spaces and understandings, but I think this, in the end, is always something we have to grapple with. It is being grappled with and that’s much more difficult in this time since October 7; but it is being said, and those conversations will happen more in Arabic than they will in English. So just because you might not always be hearing about it does not necessarily mean it’s not happening. So I just wanted to put those things on the table.
NE: There’s a lot to say here, obviously because so much has changed. I wanted to say earlier that I wanted to displace October 7 as this juncture that changed everything. But we’ve had so many other junctures that have done that. The 1982 expulsion of the PLO from Lebanon and their acceptance of partition, that was really the radical moment where Palestinians even thought that they could have a truncated state. That was 1988. Another juncture was 2002, when the peace process dies in the siege of the presidential compound and the killing of Yasser Arafat. 2008 was another juncture now, where you had an advanced military attacking a besieged population that it occupied—the first time, although not the first attack, but the first large-scale attack. 2018, and the nation-state law, where Israel is basically very clear to everybody, right, and Zionists are very clear to everybody: there is no coexistence in the future. It’s done. And everybody that has tried to respond keeps trying to save Israel from itself. And yet, nobody has been concerned that maybe that’s not the priority; maybe the priority should be the ending of this condition of permanent subjugation that Palestinians have been expected to endure—and expected to endure as good victims, to do it politely. And so, much as I want to displace that, there is something that these last eleven months have done that makes me reflect, and I’m here, I’m reflecting out loud, and I’m gonna take that privilege because I heard some other panelists do this, where I ended the book, Justice for Some, that that came out in 2019, and I end that project really pulling on radical imagination. I pull on indigenous practices—peoples across the world who have survived multiple apocalypses. I pull on Afrofuturism, for people who have no optimal past to return to, but only futures to make, in order to suggest that maybe there is an anti-racist paradigm that we can pivot to, where there is a coexistence practice.
NE: Because Zionism, as Arielle brilliantly put, and as others have done, also oppresses Jewish people. So, what does that co-liberation movement look like? And in that, as Palestinians are thinking about it, that the right of return for—the return of Palestinians, not the right, but the return of Palestinians, then becomes not the culmination of our freedom struggle, but the beginning of it, where we imagine—well, this is not—I’m gonna disagree with myself really quick. But in that iteration, in that iteration in 2019, I was suggesting that: Palestinians imagining our future because there’s no 1947 to return to. Land won’t be redistributed in the same way. Families are so much bigger. We have become different. We’re now multilingual, multicultural. And so what is a future that Palestinians are building for themselves that’s more attractive to Jewish Israelis than the future Israel has offered them—which is this, which is dismal? This is it. This is it. This is the promise.
NE: I can’t say that anymore. I can’t say that anymore to anyone, and certainly not to Palestinians who have survived this genocide, and continue today to survive it. I can’t say it to the parents of children who were collected in rice bags, whose children vaporized. There are now different priorities than thinking about what is this coexistence future. And now thinking about: what is the world that has accepted that genocide is a possible political trajectory to resolve discord? And so I can’t say—maybe someday, I’m not sure. But I think one of the most important things to do is to decouple Palestinian liberation from the Jewish question very clearly, that those are not entwined questions. That beneath Zionism, as Arielle was telling us, is a history to excavate and that’s a decolonization process. But we need to decouple those. Because there is now the question of accountability.
NE: Everybody wants a blueprint from us. My God, what blueprint are you going to give to a child in Gaza who survived, and tell them you’re going to be safe in this future? In an Israeli society that, as far as I’m reading and following, thinks that we owe Israel an apology, and wants a Nuremberg trial from Palestinians for October 7. So, I just want us to begin to think about what might never be the same again. What might never be the same again. And this is a generational shift. I was part of a generation that worked my entire early adult life (I’m in my mid-adult life), dismantling the fallacy of Oslo. And tearing that down, and forwarding the single state as a possibility because Oslo was such a fallacy, and a tool of our permanent captivity.
NE: But now there’s a generation that wants to dismantle the idea of a one-state altogether; that maybe, that’s not what we’ve been set up to do, and not what we’ve been socialized. And here the responsibility also has to go to an international community that has seen all this writing on the wall, and, basically, asked us to endure it. And now we’re paying the highest price. So perhaps then the question, I don’t have answers, but one thing, if people were to ask me in a policy setting: accountability, start with accountability. Let’s start with narrative. Let’s understand this moment as genocide and not counter-insurgency. Let’s just put a lid on that. And I’m sorry that’s controversial, unfortunately. What does accountability look like? What does restoration look like? And if those who have committed harm don’t want to participate in that process, then what do we do? What restorative practices are there in that case, and who do we talk to?
AA: I think all of that makes sense and creates a tactical question as it relates to Jews, both Israeli Jews and American Jews. I think I can say to—let’s just take the American Jewish audience. Let’s leave the Israelis to the side for a second. I can probably say to an American Jewish audience: Are you with me? Do you support Palestine liberation? I think we have about 25% of the community who’s like, sort of there. But I think that, for the vast majority, the question is going to be, how do you ensure our safety? And I think that it’s not, like, a question of Palestinians caring about that question from their core, and it being the same question as the Palestine question. But it is a tactical question. And because this is Jewish Currents, and you have a lot of people in this audience who are trying to do that work on some level, and also facing a lot of, I think, mixed messages about whether that is like work that’s worth doing, whether we should do it as Jews and have this narrative fight, or whether it’s better to just join a broader American community, I’m curious if people on this panel have particular ideas about that. I know, Fadi, you have thought quite a lot about the question of narrative within the Jewish community.
FQ: Thank you. I want to, just before referring to that, go back to the question about the path to liberation and the dynamic toward liberation and how that can be achieved. Of course, that’s a secret that I wouldn’t share in a public session. But sometimes I think we forget, particularly in the US, I think people forget that when we take liberation seriously, when we take struggles seriously, there is a cost. I mean, in Palestine we know, and even if you’re not engaged in armed resistance, in Palestine we know that the moment you decide to engage in a serious effort toward liberation, you are choosing a likelihood of death, that you are entering a path where you may not see that freedom in your lifetime. We hope that that will happen. And I think people don’t realize that. I think people don’t realize the seriousness for Palestinians on the ground. And of course, even Palestinians abroad face a different type of death—a silencing, a censorship. And I want everybody to remember that: in order to choose real life, which is a life of freedom without domination, we have to choose a path that more likely leads to our individual death, to create a future of true dignity and life for the rest of our collective people.
FQ: And I think that’s hard for people to understand because it’s such a bleak image, and it’s out of the, let’s say, the viewpoint of most people. Now, I do want to say, what I can name here, is there are, number one, just to bring some hope in this moment. We are in a moment of what strategists would call punctuated disequilibrium. Online research that we’ve done in a small group shows that over 1 billion individual accounts on social media have repetitively posted in support of Palestine, which indicates that, globally, we have a massive solidarity network that we haven’t tapped. The other point of punctuated disequilibrium is that Zionism, as an ideology that provides some Jewish people with a social contract—which basically says that, if you believe in this ideology, if you serve this ideology, if you send your soldiers to engage in war for this ideology, we can keep you safe and that has collapsed right now. And not just in groups like this: A recent poll by Channel 12 in Israel said that 76% of Jewish Israelis don’t believe that their government can keep them safe anymore. And so we need to understand that, as Gramsci says, moments of historical crisis are moments where something is dying, but it’s refusing to die. And something is trying to be born, but others are refusing to allow it to be born. And the two things that should be dying and haven’t died yet: number one, this social contract of Zionism, which has proved its failure, not just its criminality toward Palestinians, but its failure as a promise for the Jewish people. The other thing is Mahmoud Abbas—I’m just kidding, but the other thing—don’t laugh. That’s not funny. That’s our president.
FQ: The other thing is the Oslo paradigm and the whole partition paradigm. Now, in relation to that narrative and that question that we want to speak to, I think it’s our responsibility, and many Palestinians in the room disagree with me on this, but I think, and it’s unjust and it’s unfair to us as Palestinians, but it’s our responsibility as Palestinians to liberate Jewish people from fear. Although it has not been our fault that the Jewish people for millenniums, for centuries have lived in fear, have been traumatized by fear, have faced pogroms, the Holocaust. I mean, the Jewish religion begins with the exodus from Egypt. It begins with Pharaoh. And so, in an interesting way, after thousands of years, it’s come to us Palestinians, who—when I’ve done my DNA test, I mean, people could argue that Palestinians are, in some part, descendants of the original people of that land who have mixed and so forth. But it’s our responsibility to figure out how to liberate the Jewish people from that fear. And the question is, collectively, for many of you in the room, can you help us figure that out? Because if we can figure that out, it will be the end of this criminal regime that has devastated our lives, and I would argue, ensured that people from the Jewish community are consistently and repetitively traumatized every moment of the day from when they are born into living in that fear; because this can’t survive as a system without that fear. The last point of punctuated disequilibrium that I will speak to is the agency that the Palestinian people are building up. I mean, the college encampments, if you’ve gone to them, they’re mostly led by young Palestinians, who have risked a lot, but who have shown tremendous courage and leadership. If you look at Gaza right now, under the devastation, you just look at young Palestinians across Gaza who have shown steadfastness and resilience, in many different forms, to say that we will remain here, we will survive here, and we will fight for our freedom. And across everywhere: where there are Palestinians, you can find that rebirth of agency that this occupation has tried to kill, by forcing us, through its domination, to try and feel helpless. So, I want to just end by saying that, if you want some glimpses into that liberation strategy (and it’s not rocket science, by the way, other people, some, many would argue in worse circumstances than us, have managed to achieve liberation) I’ll give you five key angles to look at.
AA: You can’t start five key angles.
FQ: Actually, I won’t say them.
AA: We’ll come back to you, Fadi. We’re going to go to Dana and then Ahmed and then Noura.
DEK: I know my co-panelists are really—you guys want to speak—sorry, I’ll keep it very short. So, the premise of the question was: from our position here in the United States, in this room, with Jewish Currents people, what is the strategy question? I will leave the disagreement to my other co-panelists. I will only say that I think the American Jewish population is—and this was said earlier, this is not my original thought necessarily, is that it’s ripe for being weaponized. It’s been weaponized in so many ways. So where, strategically, I think about this conversation possibly leading to better outcomes, is for people in this space to do the work of not having their communities weaponized. Not necessarily we [Palestinians] doing the work of that, but you all doing that work. Given, again, that we are in the global north, I think what we have been able to achieve, to some degree, is mainstreaming Palestine and leveraging that to challenge power. That goes for Palestinians, as well as the broader allies. And I think in this moment, given that we are here, we should be careful not to squander that, not to re-marginalize ourselves in this moment, accepting that this is our position here. Siloing, I feel, is an abdication of responsibility. So, for me, whatever keeps the space open for the discussion of Palestine, that’s what we need to do. Whatever keeps students safe, that’s what we need to do. Whatever work you can do to stop your community from being weaponized, that’s what we need to do. So I’m thinking a little bit more in limited sense, I know that the panel is called Palestine Liberation and all of that, but it’s like this moment has changed.
AA: It’s okay. I don’t think we’re gonna solve it.
DEK: Yeah, we’re not gonna solve it. But the landscape has changed, as the others have said, the landscape has changed. I think they surpassed our wildest imaginations for their capacity for violence. In this moment, it seems like we are triaging, hoping that what comes out of the triage moment can build something better. So, I just want us to accept where we’re all coming from. I’ll leave it there.
AM: I want to, in the friendliest possible way, contest the premise of the question.
AA: By all means.
AM: I don’t perceive, and I haven’t experienced Zionism as being fundamentally about Jewish fear. My experience, the definition that I’ve arrived at, is Jewish supremacy. And so, if I was a Jewish person, I would be deeply afraid of Olaf Scholz. I don’t think I would go to the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally. Palestinians have nothing to do with all of that. Fadi, he did say it’s unfair, and so on, but where I’m engaging, and where I think it’s meaningful to engage—my friend, Rabbi Alissa Wise arrives at the place of anti-Zionism through Jewish tradition and Jewish ethics. And I think that’s wonderful. You can arrive at that point through a humanistic tradition. You can be an atheist and say, all people are created equal, and therefore Zionism is bad. That, to me, is the font. That’s where we start. And I don’t need to palliate anybody else’s fears, their concerns. Your therapist is probably there for that.
AA: There are probably some of them in this room right now.
AM: The bigger question of Palestinian liberation, I’m very sorry to say, I mean, we use pointed language, we’ve got the facts arrayed, and all of that’s important. But I think, at this point of genocide, as well, we need to recognize the insufficiency of all of this effort to meeting the need. And there’s this asynchrony between the pace of the genocide and the speed with which the Israelis are succeeding in this now multi-decade, but really 100-year effort, and the inability of our ordinary modes of activism outside of Palestine—in Palestine, the armed struggle—to meet the need, and the writing’s on the wall. The Israelis probably will succeed in exterminating a large portion of the people in Gaza. And that’s very hard for me to say and acknowledge. And then, what next? That’s the reality that I’m struggling to grapple with.
NE: Yeah, I want to also respond to this because I have a lot of empathy. And it was embodied in the way that I ended my book, thinking from a place of empathy and from a place of who is—if whiteness and European superiority excluded Jews from the category of whiteness, relegated them to a similar outcome, of they just don’t belong exogenous and have to have a final solution. There’s empathy that stems from that. But I don’t think that that translates on the ground in Palestine, where somebody who comes and literally lives on a land that they have. Walking into their homes. We just saw two days ago walking into homes in al-Khalil, in Hebron, and removing the family from their homes and taking over their homes. I can’t liberate you from fear. You should be afraid. You should be afraid. That’s precisely what creates that equilibrium. So, this is just to say to us, and to challenge us to think: that there is a legitimate fear, when there is an ongoing process of land theft and colonization that requires the permanent subjugation of people through carceral and military means. That’s just the outcome. Liberation from that fear is to end those conditions. And that’s a big and daunting question. And frankly, Palestinians have been trying; we study that tradition. They’ve been trying since 1917 to say, we can live here, but we don’t want to split up this land. When they say in 1968, in the PLO charter, there is a secular democratic state where we all fit; they say that in 1988, when they agree and recognize Israel as a political fact and say that “we are here.” How many times is it on the Palestinians to make that assurance when there’s nothing forthcoming? And so now, the responsibility is just—look, we have to take our responsibility in what has created and sustains the structure.
NE: And for people in this room, I speak to you as a fellow American taxpayer. Right? I speak to you as somebody also on stolen lands, where there is an obfuscation of our status here, as settlers. I speak to you as people who are white or white-adjacent, who are benefiting from white supremacy and anti-blackness. I think that the way that we append these structures is the work that we do here. And making sure that we understand that US imperialism and war-making is basically what enriches us all here as well, as beneficiaries of US empire. And so, what do we do? Our role here is to hold this structure to account in all the ways that we can, in all the brilliant ways that we can. And so I’m just going to turn one example, and turn to abolition and what the movement for black lives has made central and unavoidable. Now we’re finally grappling with the racial question as a structural issue, and how it ties with Zionism. And I’m just going to bring up one case study in Durham, North Carolina. Shout out to Durham and the organizers there, who basically create a movement to end Durham Police Department training in Israel. But the way that they do it is in coalition of Black, Palestinian, and anti-Zionist Jewish organizers. And what came up in that campaign—which was the only successful campaign in the US, so give it up to them, they did it right—but what comes up in that campaign is the fracture within the Jewish community itself, where the Jewish Zionist community, in rightful fear of tiki torch marches and a resurgence of antisemitism, very explicit antisemitism, who wanted more police. Who wanted the FBI to surveil people, who wanted more metal to detectors in front of the synagogue, right? Who wanted to do more of the policing and the gating in order to find safety. And the anti-Zionist Jewish contingent, who was responding to this same question, who said, I can’t be safe with more police who target my black comrades; I can’t be safer with greater FBI enforcement and surveillance, who target my Muslim comrades. We have to find a way that makes us all safe. And they captured that in safety and solidarity, and they were successful. So here, answering the question that feels so daunting (especially with our conversation), they were able to localize it. Localized anti-imperialism, but also localized the question of what it means to be accountable to Palestinians, and to one another here.
AA: Thank you. Amjad, I think you’re been itching to get involved. Yeah.
AI: I have two points, which is my attempt to consolidate and synthesize the way I’ve been processing all this. So the first point is basically, I’ve been doing this a lot in like, policy rooms and policy conversations. Even short of the visioning process, which has gotten more funneled over this past month, and thinking back to tactics and strategy, I’m always trying to highlight three main points, and feel free to take it or leave it as you want.
AI: First question is like: What are you doing to restore Palestinian agency and power? And that can mean a million things across many ways. Everything from, are you elevating and sharing a Palestinian writer who writes in this media outlet? Are you bringing a Palestinian panelist? Are you encouraging Palestinian organizations, Palestinian resources, Palestinian witnesses, all the way up to the political process? Do you even have Palestinians in the policy rooms where you’re deciding the fate of Gaza, the occupied territories, et cetera? And also, especially in an issue of fractured and authoritarian leadership, are you bringing those serious strategic thinkers into those rooms? So it could mean many ways, but think about how are you restoring Palestinian agency and power.
AI: The second, and this is what I’ve heard very prominently in this conference, and this could be termed different ways, but how are you curbing and reducing Israeli power? Because at the fundamental core of this is a question of power. And the way that the imbalance and the asymmetry has—it’s never been an equal fight, never been a fair fight, and it’s never been that, even in a case like now, where we’re seeing the most heightened, extreme manifestations of that whereby you could literally displace 2 million people, literally bomb a tiny area, more than any other modern conflict in the 21st century, across all these historical records—and you’re still getting more money, still getting more funds and more privileges and more diplomatic backing, etcetera. And that goes all the way down as well. Not just from what Washington is doing, but also in these, in our grassroots spaces. How are there ways to begin to break Israeli power on the ground? How can we even just create doubt in communities that are still standing by Israel? And this is some of the amazing work that Currents has been doing. I know a lot of activists here have been doing. But it needs to begin to shift that equilibrium into a different tilt in order to set the conditions we’ve been talking about. You don’t have to know where the vision is at, but you need to at least begin to shift those dynamics a little bit, to create a different opening, and certainly not to enable what we’re seeing right now.
AI: And the third part of this is to respect and reinstate international institutions. In many ways, and Noura has done fantastic work on this, it’s a complicated issue because international institutions are weaponized and used against us, but at the same time, Palestinians are, in many ways, one of the last shots for the international institutions that have been built to prove themselves. In the world courts, ICJ, ICC, the United Nations, time and time again, Palestinians have maximized all these mechanisms, unfortunately, almost for futility when it comes to realities on the ground, that even as we’re still shifting it, but it’s also incumbent upon us to make that matter.
AI: And so those three, at least, I would always think about how to apply that in our activism, advocacy. And just the very last point I want to say, about movement building. I want to emphasize, and this is something that we know, but I think needs to be really emphasized, unity is not homogeneity. In unity, and in organizing, and being on the same page, you need to have a culture and understanding of diversity. You need to be able to tolerate someone who, even as they have different points of view, but to entertain that idea. I know the lines for this are very complicated, but to be honest, even among Palestinians, we know there are people we can’t stand, even in our own community; in the Jewish community, I can only imagine. But there needs to be real conversation. We don’t all have to be saying the same things. We don’t always have to be doing the same things. And how can we enable a very large umbrella to allow things, even when we sometimes disagree with them? But is it leading to the effects that we want in that respect? And I just want to say those are core things, and these are tough questions to have in all activism spaces, even beyond Palestine, but especially. In a few days, I’ve been here in the United States, and hearing some of the tensions that exist in that. And they’ve happened before October 7. They’re continuing after. But I think this is a really important value and principle that we need to apply, and we need to take that forward.
AA: Thank you for that. We are almost out of time, so I want to just open up for last, burning things. The question really is, for Americans (let’s leave Jews out of it for a minute, or implicate them as Americans). We know that the electoral project has not been an avenue. The street game, the student movement was really exciting and also has a waxing and waning energy. And the international processes are slow. So right now, as quickly as you can in a few lines, what is the one thing that you feel like strategically, Americans can be doing differently? Dana, want to jump in?
DEK: Yeah, I want to jump into, remind, I’ll try to answer your question, but I want to remind Amjad of something really cool he said in previous panels, about how our nuances are our power, and they have a grand narrative. They have an ethno-nationalist grand narrative. Our nuances refute their grand narrative. And so, I just want to highlight that because it was something Adania Shibli said.
AA: That’s also strategy.
DEK: That’s also strategy, of course. So, I think I understand that under the barrage of genocide, these nuances get flattened. But I really hope that we can leverage our positionalities, and the multiple spaces that we work in, to bring those nuances to light because they are actually a challenge to their grand narrative. The second thing I just wanted to say, really quickly, is that a lot of research on social movements, feminist social movements, black power, all sorts of things (I’m going to be the academic here), is that moderate and radical wings of a movement can accomplish shared tasks. There is a division of labor between those kinds of wings. And turning conflict inward, in a process we call outbidding, is very harmful to a movement. So, I think that I would just caution against that.
AA: Got just a few minutes left if anyone wants to—No, no. Perfect.
AM: Yeah, no, on the electoral thing. I am so sick of the brat, girlboss bullshit. The electoral work is important. The pace, the rate of change is, again, insufficient to the need. But that doesn’t mean that the work is not important. There are more informed people who think about organizing coalition politics and how you achieve that change over time. But the reality is, what has precipitated all of this energy on organizing for Palestine, the crisis, cannot be resolved through electoral politics. And it’s not a nice way to end. It’s not a complete answer, and it’s not a very edifying answer.
AA: Taking things off the list is also way of answering the question. Fadi, are you gonna bring us home here? No? Can we get one?
FQ: Going back to the seriousness of the moment, that we’re trying to stop a genocide, and then we’re trying to recreate a social contract in the holy land that ensures people have freedom, justice, and dignity. So, I think it’s actually worth taking just a few extra minutes to speak to what that may require and what people can do here. And the main thing, what I’ll start with here, and these are, of course, a tidbit of a much larger symphony of strategies, but the first thing I’ll say is: we need to make apartheid on the ground ungovernable. I’m going to give each for each of those points, one example, which is one of the things that people can do here. But one of the core things that people here can do is, and we can speak into this separately, but really figuring out, Aysenur, may she rest in peace, people coming from the US to engage in helping us make apartheid ungovernable in different ways. That’s step number one. This system cannot be allowed to sustain its existence on the ground.
FQ: The second point is taking Israel from start-up nation to shut-down nation. There are many ways to speak to how to do that, and there are many efforts. The one thing I’ll say here is to focus not just on the big companies. Focus on the companies that are just starting up, the Israeli tech companies that are coming off the ground; because they’re the ones that are bringing in billions. And if we can make it harder for the initial phase startups to function, that is going to be a significant hit to the Israeli economy. But anything that takes it from startup nation to shutdown nation is key. The third point is for Palestinians and organizers in the Palestinian space. It’s unity of action we need—leadership now requires us, although there are nuances in our conversations, in our tactics, we need to ensure that we have unity of action on the ground. The fourth point that I will speak to, is the idea of moral isolation. And we saw South Africa speak this morning—beyond the legal benefits of the ICJ case, we need to engage in a moral narrative warfare in every space possible. And that’s one of the key successes of the genocide case, is winning that narrative for us. And everybody here needs to keep pushing in that direction.
FQ: And the last point, and this point is around freedom from fear, which I don’t want it to be misunderstood. This doesn’t mean assuaging racism. This means figuring out an ideology, a new paradigm that, when we have a future, a paradigm that is so compelling that everybody who is a Zionist, at minimum, realizes that Zionism is not worth fighting for. So this is not coming down from a bottom-up, weak voice. This is saying, we have the moral high ground and we’re creating a future that’s better for everyone. And making that convincing, not just rhetorical. So those are the pillars I’ll share with you. And I think if we engage in them well, we can shift ourselves from 100 years of unending Nakba and genocide into the decade of liberation. And that’s the responsibility of our generation.
AA: Cannot ask for a better end than that. Thank you all for being here today. Thank you to these amazing panelists for joining us.