Gaza as norm

The Gaza Strip and its governing authority—Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya (Hamas)—are often relegated to a space of exceptionality in global politics broadly and in the politics of Palestine/Israel in particular. This exceptionality manifests in multiple ways. It can be seen on the one hand, through the scripting of Gaza as a site of spectacular suffering and despair, as often the case in humanitarian discourse, or as a ‘terrorist haven’ on the other. In this latter framing, Hamas is most often figured as ‘exceptionally contemptable’ in its conduct affording it, in turn, hypervisiblity as ‘the problem hindering a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict’ (Somdeep 2020: 32, emphasis added). Gaza, put differently, is rendered either an exceptional threat or an exceptional crisis. Sen, however, situates Gaza in the center of ‘normal’ politics insofar it is an expected outcome of historical processes of settler colonial dispossession as a result of originary violence on the one hand (the majority of Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip are refugees) and in terms of the ongoing violence required to maintain settler domination on the other (i.e., Israel’s imposed siege and its routine bombardments of this territory—the production of a ‘humanitarian catastrophe’). So too does Sen situate Gaza squarely in the center of the history of Palestinian popular resistance and anticolonial politics: Gaza is the birthplace of the first intifada, a mass grassroots uprising that ultimately compelled Israel into negotiations with the Palestinians in hopes of curbing the popular movement. In line with this tradition, Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have continued to engage in mass politics as seen in regularized Friday popular protests as part of the Great March of Return. Not only does Decolonzing Palestine de-exceptionalze Hamas, the Gaza Strip and Palestine more broadly, but importantly asks how the case of Palestine might complicate linear narratives of liberation. Decolonizing Palestine argues that the Gaza Strip under Hamas rule constitutes a microcosm of the Palestinian ‘long moment of liberation’ with Hamas assuming a dual role as an anticolonial force and postcolonial government. It is in this mix of the colonial and putatively postcolonial that this book treads.

On postcolonial confusion and long liberation

Postcoloniality, Sen notes ‘can be a confusing affair’ as the formerly colonized attempt to reconstitute their indigeneity while having been radically transformed by the colonial project (p. 53). Indeed the ‘postcolonial’ is less usefully tied to a particular historical time period or temporal demarcation and arguably more accurately linked to an accounting of how colonial modernity leaves an indelible imprint on subaltern subjectivity, modes of knowledge, and language well after the formal end of colonial domination, what Aníbal Quijano termed ‘coloniality’ (Chatterjee 1993; Fanon 2004 [1963]; Quijano 2000). In this way, cohabitation, or a messy mixing of the colonial and postcolonial is nothing new. Formal independence for many colonized peoples, as seen throughout the global south, did not equal liberation. However, postcoloniality in the Palestinian context, Sen argues, is ‘confusing in a different way’ (p. 33). Locating much of this confusion in the 1990s, the Oslo Peace Accords, Sen contends, compelled Palestinian political factions to posture as if the era of Israeli settler colonial rule had ended though their conditions of colonial subjugation had hardly changed. On this point, Sen recalls the experience crossing the border from Gaza into Egypt wherein a number of state-like rituals were performed, including mandatory registration with the internal protection unit (IPU), an extension of the Palestinian Authority’s security apparatus, to enter and leave Gaza. He recounts the experience here:

At the offices of the IPU the officials examined my passport and the itinerary of my return journey. One of them asked, ‘How did you enter Gaza? Tunnel or border crossing?’ I answered, ‘border crossing.’ He continued examining my documents. Made uncomfortable by his silence, I impatiently explained, ‘I was supposed to leave next week, but there are problems in Egypt, so I’m scared the border will close.’ In a reassuring tone the official said, ‘Don’t worry. It will be fine.’ Feeling encouraged, I responded, ‘Yes. I know. A friend of mine assured me that they couldn’t keep the border closed for too long.’ Suddenly, the reassuring tone of his voice changed, and the official retorted, ‘Who said so? Who is your friend? We don’t have any information on the border crossing. We don’t know what will happen.’

The uncertainty exemplified by the official regarding when the border would be open or closed for Sen, indexes the postcolonial confusion introduced by the Oslo Accords (1993–2001).

A series of agreements brokered between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, Oslo introduced the political-administrative system of a pseudo-state administrated by the Palestinian Authority (PA); yet this state-like authority ultimately lacked sovereignty and resources to operate like a ‘real state’ (p. 11). Even as the promise of statehood was perpetually deferred, the Accords nonetheless produced a ‘realm of official Palestinian politics’ encapsulated by the PA and into which those Palestinian factions that formally denounced armed struggle and recognized Israel were granted access (p. 48).Footnote 1 Accordingly, the Oslo Accords, famously described by Edward Said (1993) as a ‘Palestinian Versailles’ (p. 48), incentivized political factions to orient their conduct toward state-building and state-like governance and away from fighting and popular mobilization—a role into which the West Bank Palestinian Authority fully integrated. It is in this way, Sen suggests, that Oslo compelled Palestinians to operate in an inchoate space as if the postcolonial era had arrived. Indeed, even as the conditions for Palestinian statehood receded further from view, Sen rightly points out that we need to ‘take the materiality of the imagined state seriously’ (p. 18). At the same time, key differences exist between the fractured Palestinian leadership. (Kurd 2019). The West Bank PA, often referred to by Palestinians as Israel’s subcontractor and propped up by Western aid, fulfilled the role of Israel’s counterinsurgency force. Meanwhile, Hamas refused to take on this counterinsurgency function, continuing instead to play a key role as an administrator of anticolonial violence while also engaging in rituals of statecraft in the Gaza Strip. Put differently, Hamas, as Sen argues, wages anticolonial struggle from the framework of the pseudo-state that Oslo established, thus complicating any linear expectation of liberation as that which occurs after the devolution or withdrawal of colonial power. Every instance of Hamas’s postcolonial governance, Sen argues, becomes ‘socialized in the settler colonial condition … each bureaucratic mechanism evokes the existence of Palestinian government’ (p. 13, emphasis in original). Here Sen offers an accounting of liberation as a protracted process that traverses any formal distinction between colonized/liberated, subjugated/free (p. 126). Indeed, as Sen asks, ‘Can the lives of the colonized be so sharply divided between the era of being unliberated and the age of liberation?’ (p. 14). For sure, the dismantling of the British Raj hardly meant that India would suddenly ‘step out from the old to the new’ as Jawaharlal Nehru opined on the eve of India’s independence (quoted in Sen p. 14). The dual character of Hamas as ‘both anticolonial and post-colonial in its conduct’ demonstrates, as Sen argues, ‘that, in the era of colonial rule, a faction can indeed adopt a mode of conduct from the other side of this moment of liberation’ (p. 14). The Gaza Strip, a territory without a permanent, physical Israeli presence (settlements and checkpoints) under a nominally autonomous Palestinian government is, a la Sen, a material manifestation of ‘the Palestinian long moment of liberation’ already begun (p. 126). Here Sen turns our attention to how the postcolonial and the anticolonial coexist irrespective of the presence or absence of the colonizer and irrespective of any formal designator. This conceptualization of liberation displaces colonial power as a totalizing, all determining force. Liberation, in this view, does not wait for colonial authorization—for Sen, it is happening in and through Hamas’s anticolonial warfare and within the framework birthed by Oslo despite all its faults. In turning our attention to the ‘long moment of liberation’ already begun in Palestine, Sen’s intervention is a welcome one, especially as processes of settler colonial dispossession continue unabated, and ever-evolving technologies and strategies of settler colonial rule appear to push Palestinian liberation further and further from view.

Sen’s project to de-exceptionalize Palestinians and the Palestinian struggle contains within it another thematic link to anticolonial struggles elsewhere, from North Africa to South Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean and beyond. Finding utility in a Fanonian analysis of revolutionary and anticolonial politics, Sen theorizes the productive nature of anticolonial violence—violence against subjection—as both a force that is productive and destabilizing (for colonial power)—that is, it makes and unmakes. It is not that Hamas’ violence, Sen contends, will ‘destroy the materiality of the colonial endeavor’ (p. 17). Rather, ‘violence unmakes’ by nominally challenging Israel’s settler colonial rule over the Palestinians ‘rendering it a difficult venture to maintain’ (p. 17). Just as Hamas’s violence unmakes Israel’s absolute control over the Palestinians, Sen argues, it also makes, in the sense that it constitutes decolonized subjects who, through violence, come to understand themselves as part of a national collectivity (Fanon 2004 [1963]). Hamas’s violence against subjection, Sen contends, ‘makes by allowing each act of resistance to be called an act of Palestinian resistance, thus enabling the subsequent suffering to be labeled instances of Palestinian suffering. In this way, the “new” decolonized persons emerge from instances of armed struggle, and as a consequence, Palestine and the Palestinian-ness of the colonized are rendered tangible and recognizable’ (p. 17, emphasis in original). Hamas’s violence against subjection, for Sen, constitutes a productive force that transforms the colonized self. However, at the same time in Decolonizing Palestine, Hamas occupies a kind of primary authorship of Palestinian liberation—it sits at the center of the anticolonial struggle and liberatory politics in Palestine, which raises some interesting questions. Informed by the decolonial and feminist geographic framework that shapes my own engagements and research with/on Palestine, I focus the remainder of my comments on these questions.

Expanding ‘long liberation’

Among the many compelling interventions made in this book is that of its crucial unbracketing of liberation as a unitary or singular event and its untethering to any formal declaration of such, to show instead how instantiations of the postcolonial and the anticolonial comingle irrespective of the presence or absence of the colonizer. Equally I wonder what we both gain and lose by tethering an analysis of anticolonial or liberatory politics to a governing (here quasi-state) authority, whether Hamas or any other official/state body. This is not to say that such movements and forces do not play crucial roles within the panoply of anticolonial actors necessary for liberation, but to focus singularly or primarily on Hamas and ascribe it a kind of primary agency in the ‘long moment’ of Palestinian liberation, does raise some questions. Indeed the ‘unity intifada’ in May 2021 indexed a different kind of politics that cannot be contained within Hamas. Here I want to think with the productive thesis Sen offers us: if indeed liberation is messy, temporally unbounded, and iterative then how might the anticolonial—or perhaps decolonial—find itself articulating well beyond Hamas’s anticolonial warfare and postcolonial statecraft? Here recent events in Palestine present to us material for consideration.

Between April and June 2021, Palestine saw a massive upswell of grassroots organizing and coordinated protest across the fragmented geography of Palestine and beyond. What began as a response to Israeli police restrictions to the Damascus Gate in Jerusalem during Ramadan spread to cities and villages inside Israel, to West Bank villages and Gaza’s refugee camps. Known as the ‘Unity Intifada,’ Palestinians physically disconnected from one another across the fragmented landscape of Palestine—from Silwan to Haifa, Lydd to Ramallah, Sheikh Jarrah to the Gaza Strip—organized across territorial divisions and largely outside of traditional political structures to demand collective freedom for all Palestinians. The unity protests sustained despite crackdowns, mass arrests, and state/settler violence, culminating in a mass general strike ‘adhered to in almost every Palestinian community, including the refugee camps in neighboring countries where Palestinian refugees made for the nearest border, seeking to return home’ (Salhab and al-Ghoul 2021). The ‘Unity Intifada’ was not about a singular faction claiming power—it far transcended any formal political Palestinian leadership. It was not only about settler-led and state-facilitated evictions of Palestinians from Sheikh Jarrah and Silwan or the inability of Palestinians to pray unmolested in Al Aqsa Mosque, or about bombs routinely dropping on Gaza, the ongoing violence of border guards or settler encroachment throughout the West Bank—it was about all of these things. It was a call for liberation for all Palestinians from ongoing processes of erasure, containment, and dispossession as these were manifesting across different, disparate sites. It was a collective defiance, a refusal to remain trapped in a colonial geography. At the same time the vision of liberation espoused by the movement’s mostly youth leadership was even more expansive. As Essi Lehto and Rami Ayyub, two activists involved in the popular mobilization contend, ‘Youth were responding to Israeli oppression as well as to a crisis of representation within Palestinian politics’ (Salhab and al-Ghoul 2021). The ‘Manifesto for Dignity and Hope,’ which articulates the goals and vision of the unity intifada, states: ‘The brave generations to come will have been raised, once again, on the fundamental principle of our unity. It will stand in the face of all the elites working to deepen and entrench the divisions in and between our communities.’ The manifesto moreover contends that a new generation of Palestinians is writing a new chapter, one of a ‘united Intifada that seeks our one and only goal: reuniting Palestinian society in all of its different parts; reuniting our political will, and our means of struggle.’ The ‘long moment of liberation’ Sen so usefully employs throughout this book is, of course, here too—in the streets of Sheikh Jarrah, in the Twitter feeds of the Al-Kurd twins, and in manifestos penned by young revolutionaries—and which, of course, has its roots in earlier moments of revolutionary political activity and popular mobilization, such as the first intifada (1987–1993) or Land Day in 1976, or more recently in Gaza’s Great March of Return, or in visions articulated by the Palestinian Feminist Collective (2021) for ‘life-affirming’ responses to settler colonialism, war, imperial violence, capitalism, and empire. These visions of liberation do not hinge on postcolonial statehood nor anticolonial warfare. What might we gain by expanding Sen’s invaluable ‘long moment of liberation’ to include this panoply of forces, visions, and instantiations of decoloniality in practice? What might we gain by turning our attention to the myriad of ways that Palestine’s decolonial futures are actively being made beyond formal parties and structures? It is perhaps here that Sen’s thesis finds its liberatory potential.