Palestine today is perhaps the single most important spot on earth where the fictional battle between “Islam” and “the West” is waged. Palestine has always been home to Jews, and should always remain home to Palestinian Jews, in the company of their Christian and Muslim neighbors, in the framework of a free, equal, and democratic state. What has that simple fact to do with a colonial project of European settlers that has called itself “Zionism” and catapulted its colonial conquest of Palestine into the false binary of “Islam and the West”?
Palestine has always belonged to Palestinians: Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike. Zionism was always a colonial sideshow distracting from this simple fact.
In this context, singling out Hamas [or Palestinian Islamic Jihad] to define Palestinian resistance to occupation of their homelands is a deliberately false and falsifying synecdoche—making one militant group stand for the entirety of the Palestinian national liberation movement—a cause that has been overwhelmingly peaceful in decidedly cultural and apolitical terms.
A systematic Islamophobia first informs what the world understands by the term “Hamas,” or [“PIJ”] and then this very “Hamas”/“PIJ” stands like a firm but false synecdoche for the entirety of Palestine—so that all Palestinians are identified with this “Islam” that stands in diametrical opposition to “the West,” which now Israel represents. Any people subjected to enduring military occupation by a foreign force is entitled to any form of resistance available to them—no matter how feeble and pathetic. But if we dismantle that false synecdoche between Hamas and Palestine and do not allow it to stand for the entirety of the nation, then something extraordinary happens. The cosmopolitan disposition of Palestine emerges as the single most potent metaphor of our world dreaming of its own liberation in nonsectarian, nondenominational, and entirely life-affirming and worldly terms.
To be sure, there is no moral equivalency between the colonizer and the colonized, between the oppressor and the oppressed, between the occupier and the occupied, between a massive, astronomical military industry that tests its newest weapons on Palestinian targets before selling them around the world and a few flimsy rockets Palestinians throw at it. Israel’s moral failure as a settler colony is of a different rank and order than Hamas’s miserable military failures. Hamas’s military failures however are symbolic of its ideological exhaustion—of its irrelevance to the future of Palestine. Representing an entirely depleted ideological site of militant Islamism, Hamas can never represent the totality of the Palestinian struggles for self-determination, but nor can the PLO or PA or any other fake state blueprints feigning authority under occupation. An “Islamic Republic of Palestine” is a nightmare mirror image of “the Jewish State” it opposes. The “Islam” of the “Islamic Republic” and the Zionism that lays a false claim on Judaism at the heart of the “Jewish State” are both the products of the “West” they either oppose or seek to appease, respectively.
Instead of thinking of Hamas [or PIJ] as synecdoche for Palestine, we should think of Gaza as a metaphor for the world at large—as a floating signifier for liberation from wanton cruelty and colonial conquest everywhere… The false identification of Hamas with the entirety of the Palestinian cause is a by-product of the belated order of “Islam and the West… The murder of George Floyd and the guilty verdict of his murderer should change the way Americans viewed Palestinians under brutal Israeli occupation.
Palestine too has saved the Black Lives Matter movement from its potential provincialization and domestication inside the systemic corruption of American politics—where the election of a Barack Obama might seriously derail. The proposition that no one is free until African Americans are free is also true the other way around: no one is free unless Palestinians are free.
The infamous statement of former US president Barack Obama that “the Middle East is going through a transformation that will play out for a generation, rooted in conflicts that date back millennia” is typical of the ahistorical assessments that manufactured hostility between Islam and Judaism, and perforce between Jews and Muslims. There is far more historical credence in the validity of a Judeo-Islamic heritage than in a “Judeo-Christian” one—with its history of pogroms leading to the Holocaust.
The link between militant Islamism, triumphalist Zionism, and Christian imperialism in the context of European colonialism is the main frame of reference here… Militant Islamism, fanatical Zionism, and Christian imperialism are the triangulated foregrounding of fear and fanaticism that has wreaked havoc in our world and systematically and consistently distorted the clarity of our historical visions…
Fanatical Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia, militant Shi’ism in Iran, secular zeal of Kemalism in Turkey, and triumphalist Zionism in historic Palestine have all been the identical ideological by-products of European colonialism.
Excerpt From The End of Two Illusions by Hamid Dabashi, 2022 (ebook version)
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