by | Salvage | September 8, 2025
I cannot pinpoint the exact moment the realisation dawned on me that for many Palestinians, the process that might end the occupation is fraught with anxiety and fear. It is not only a panic that emanates from the brute force of Israel’s military – its capacity to kill, maim, destroy, and imprison – but also at the real potential for liberation itself. Nor can I remember when I first understood that while resistance embodies hope – opening countless possibilities and expanding the horizon of political potential – it simultaneously brings forth a terrible anxiety about the prospect of liberation, especially when it appears visceral and real.
For a people living under the relentless brutality of colonial rule, the notion of freedom itself is exhilarating and charismatic. It draws and mesmerises, reimagining the possibility of a different world, a different life, a different order. It creates the conditions for the heroics of declaring one’s death before its actualisation, for becoming a revolutionary, a martyr, or a prisoner, to enact courageous acts despite the breakdown of metanarratives in the contemporary landscape. It means realising you are doomed yet walking proudly in the stretch of time between this declaration of rebellion and its inevitable realisation in the gallows of Israeli jails and its high-tech machinery of assassinations. The power to radically unthink the world means, at times, allowing the imaginary to invade you, to simultaneously unthink the world and daydream, to be playful with images rather than bound by logical worlds and words. I won’t lie to you; to resist cannot be reduced to a single register, nor can it be encapsulated in one experience or one form. However, resistance is a form of subjective destitution, becoming a slave and servant of the imaginary.
When liberation is invoked, fighters in the West Bank speak of praying freely in the environs of Al-Aqsa Mosque, without the oppressive presence of the Israeli gendarmerie. The nonbelievers dream of the beaches and mountains of Galilee, intact and unblemished. Meanwhile, intellectuals fret over the nature of the political system that might arise if Zionism indeed implodes as a system of Jewish Supremacy across Palestine. They debate endlessly about a new structure, a new relationship between those who will hold power and those who will not. A friend of mine who loves the expansive and solemn quiet of Al-Naqab desert rather than the greenery of Galilee says, ‘Believe me, if Palestine is liberated, all we will get are private and lofty beaches for the haves, and poverty for the have-nots’. Cynicism dominates his thinking, and with his realistic tone, he doubles down, ‘Palestine will be plentiful but only for the few, precisely like everywhere else’.
Some Palestinians, haunted by the spectres and failures of post-colonial regimes, caution against the rise of a new bourgeoisie that might seize power. After all, when we erected a neocolonial but self-governing entity, the Palestinian Authority, we ended up being captive to the whims and interests of a new comprador class invested in capturing the feeble Palestinian economy and perpetuating its monopolisation of key sectors; importation and services. Others entertain the notion of uniting the region under the banner of an ethical and religious state, inspired by Islamic teachings, presenting a counter to the eroding edifice of liberalism and individualism – a state that would formulate a new order grounded on the long historic edifice of Arab and Islamic tradition. Some dream of resurrecting the vision of a unified Arab Nation or Greater Syria, while others worry about the prospects of a democratic and equitable state for all – including our once-settlers – as means to reformulate the relations between Israelis and Palestinian in the stretch of land between the river and sea. A few contemplate liberation as the negation of the state concept itself, asking: why create another feeble state when the world craves something more radical, something that expands the human horizon? They suggest that perhaps Palestine should remain a laboratory for novel ideas and groundbreaking social experiments.
Amid the ceaseless flow of images, desires, whims, and intellectual disputes, there emerges my mother’s simple, almost absurd question: ‘When will they leave us alone?’ It slices through the dense fog of future projections, a question both poignant and frustrated. This question, echoed by countless voices, was even articulated by the current president of the Palestinian Authority, who raised the same question in his speech following the widespread protests of May 2021.
After the breakout of the protests, Abu Mazen was compelled to assert his presence and to prove his relevance as a political voice. To ease the tension surrounding his role as a subcontractor of the occupation, he was forced to give a speech, a performative act he otherwise avoids. He hoped that this symbolic display of empathy with the protestors would prevent the protests from turning against the PA itself. A classic political manoeuvre of his brand of pragmatic authoritarianism. He addressed the Palestinian people and the broader world, uttering a phrase that embodied the impatience of my mother in Arabic: ‘Enough is enough, get off our chests, get off our chests.’ In fact, Abu Mazen used the phrase Tafah al-Keel at the opening of his remarks, which can be translated as ‘enough is enough’, but more literally means ‘the measure has overflowed’.
The speech was met with derision and mockery on Palestinian and Arab social media. Users highlighted the paradox of Abbas’ position: a leader who, through security cooperation with Israel, permits the continuation of the Israeli occupation in the West Bank and its siege on Gaza. In a world where no power or occupation recedes without resistance, his plea rang hollow, and the president was lampooned. As many Israeli experts on Palestinian affairs would confirm, Abu Mazen’s very presence is contingent on the forces that he ostensibly decried in his speech – the US and Israel.
However, the chiasmatic pull of liberation is entangled with an almost opposing yet equally forceful sway, a pull in another direction, especially at the very moment when the world seemed to be changing, and the potential for liberation was not merely a distant musing but enacted, however fleetingly, for dozens of hours beginning on 7 October. For a couple of days in October, it appeared truly possible. The dread and anxiety of liberation were not confined to an intellectual exercise, nor stuck in the domain of fantasy and imagination or only as a matter of intellectual debate. It was real, and like everything real, it was also a test.
Palestinians outside of Gaza woke up on the morning of 7 October to see white Toyota pick-up trucks in the settlements that surround the Gaza Strip carrying Palestinian fighters. At that moment, the words of Lenin struck a chord with me, ‘There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks when decades happen.’ Although in Palestine decades, weeks, minutes and seconds always find a way to collapse on each other. Something radical is always happening somewhere in Palestine. But this was different. It was not the first time Palestinian fighters infiltrated or breached Israeli garrisons and walls, nor the first time Palestinian fighters used paragliders, nor the first time that Palestinians fighters returned to their old villages and the relics of a life that could have been; a long lineage of operations since 1948 did the same. But this time something different was happening, and it is still happening.
In the Palestinian revolutionary tradition, a resistant event holds dual meaning. The word in Arabic for such an event is ʿamaliyya, closely translated into ‘operation’. This word implies both an event and a process. It suggests that each operation carries the potential for its repetition in time, embedding within it the seeds of continuity and an ability to maintain the capacity to resist, one ʿamaliyya bequeaths another in succession. It also insinuates a rupture, a moment where the fabric of colonial power is broken, and assurance of the smooth running of the regime of terror is fractured. An event that also inscribes a long history of stone throwing, spontaneous demonstrations, the excitement of running from soldiers and almost getting caught, the horror of actually getting caught, and the ability to breach walls and jump over the implausible, to win little fights, or throw molotov cocktails at heavily armoured vehicles.
In a class on the modalities of power practised by Israel in Jerusalem, my professor described a scene that perhaps defines the moment when Palestinians come to realise their role as disruptors, as saboteurs, as those who naturally tilt towards the need and role of instigators. In the alleys of the old city, children, with a blend of innocence and audacity, mounted their bicycles and rode through the narrow streets. Like all children, they wanted to make noise. But my professor, a logical explainer of emotions and phenomena, was captivated by their playful teasing of soldiers and policemen. They would ride their bikes, honking and accelerating, almost hitting a policeman, only to stop just before the collision, precisely at that critical moment before zero-distance, where our bodies intimately collide with our heavily armed oppressors and for a moment we are rendered equal – a human colliding with a human.
Perhaps that’s exactly why governments are suspicious of this identitarian category called Palestinian. After all, we were the pirates of the skies in the seventies, the instigators of revolts in various neighbouring countries, the organised voice of the era of Arab nationalism and Marxist politics, the orchestrators of 7 October that is bringing the region to the verge of an all out war. We serve as constant reminders for the Arab masses, either tired and exhausted by their own authoritarian regimes and civil wars or immersed in the bountiful spoils of oil money and life under Pax Americana, that something remains to be done, something is not adding up, that the order they live under is oppressive, no matter what they tell themselves.
The question that haunts us more than any other is not, why do people not rebel?, but, why did the rebellion arrive too early or too late? We assume that rebellion will take place, and when it occurs we only question its timing. Maybe it should have been postponed slightly, as many have proclaimed ‘we were not ready for 7 October’, or maybe it should have happened a long time ago, but the first question is always why now? The rebellion is weaved into the daily rhythms, yet it also survives as a spectre, as an event that will certainly arrive, either arriving too early or too late, but always arriving; after all, something radical is always happening somewhere in Palestine.
Palestinians, haunting the corridors of power, have always possessed the uncanny ability to overturn the very tables from which they’ve been systematically excluded, to unsettle the global order that has persistently sought to discard them. But let’s not indulge in fetishisation of the figure of Palestinian revolutionaries in their different historical variants. 7 October ruptured the timeline of setbacks and defeats – a singular event in more than seventy years that cracked open, if only for a fleeting moment, the (im)possible dream of liberation. And yet, the expected insurrection in the West Bank stutters, hesitates to fully materialise. In the fractured landscapes of 1948, Palestinian villages remain ensnared in an unyielding cycle of fratricidal violence, barely interrupted, as they confront the insidious rise of organised criminal syndicates – networks that have pulled their youth into the dark abyss of crime. Meanwhile, in Jerusalem, silence cloaks the pain, and that pain in turn conceals the laborious work of denial, deflection, and the myriad modes of forgetting that obscure the horrors of Gaza. And yet, daily rhythms persist, under the weight of heavy breaths.
The questions now proliferate, multiplying in the shadow of an eternal presumption of rebellion – always on the verge, arriving either too early or too late, yet inexorably arriving. Palestinians outside Gaza find themselves grappling with a gnawing inquiry: ‘Who are we?’ This question reverberates through collective consciousness and the urgency of the Present. It interweaves with the daily rhythms of a life many cling to, the privilege of an Israeli citizenship that has dismembered some, the consumerist spaces of American-style malls and fast food restaurants in the West Bank that have satisfied some, and the privilege of traveling across all of Palestine, from the river to the sea, by holding a Jerusalem residency permit that have satisfied others. The question looms large: ‘Do we truly want liberation, after all?’
The Fears and Anxieties of Bare Life
Palestinians are caught in a bind, encapsulated in the words of a friend who holds Israeli citizenship. He jokingly asked me, ‘Do you think that my graduate diploma would count if Israel disappears?’ This humorous remark reveals a deeper existential anxiety. At its core, the joke is not merely about the practical concerns of recognition in a post-Israel scenario. It points to a profound unease about the uncertainty that liberation might bring. The diploma, a symbol of personal achievement and societal validation within the existing order, becomes a metaphor for the individual’s and the Palestinian collective place and identity in a potentially new and radically different reality. My friend who worked hard to become a doctor and who devoted much of his life to integrate himself in the Israeli hospital where he works, was worried. What will happen to the world Palestinians habituated themselves to, if this world disappears? What of the plans and personal ambitions of a multitude of Palestinians in their various geographies, the homes and houses that were built in villages and towns across historic Palestine?
These hard choices are made amid the everyday normalisation of the existing order, especially for specific classes and categories; the laborers in Israel’s first world market, the bureaucrats in the corrupt and collaborationist regime of the PA, the CEO’s of international brands boycotted after the eruption of the war such as Coca Cola, KFC and Popeyes. The middle class and upper classes of a Palestinian society that relish in what many friends of mine call the ‘privilege’ of an Israeli passport, or the privilege of VIP treatment at Israeli checkpoints.
7 October reminded all of them that the world they know, the routines they have cultivated, and the daily rhythms of their lives can be fractured, and indeed deformed. But yet this is deeper than simply the loss of material or symbolic privileges, or the possibility of upending their daily rhythms. The possibility of liberation, its real opening on 7 October, cuts through the very world many of us have frustratingly and hesitantly adapted ourselves to.
The land between the river and the sea is saturated with anxieties that traverse its entire breadth, manifesting in both the oppressed and the oppressors. There is the existential anxiety of our enemies – those who, in the name of this very anxiety, claim the right to obliterate us, to erase Palestine and Palestinians from the map. This anxiety has been weaponised, transformed into a political currency that galvanises their society into a perpetual state of war, or readiness for war. This anxiety does not simply move in one direction; it oscillates, creating a feedback loop of dread and materialising in Israel’s yearly strategic conference where threats are on display and Israel’s capabilities are spoken about out in the open. On one side, there is the anxiety to end all wars, an anxiety to achieve peace, especially if peace does not mean total submission to Israel and its hegemony over the entire Middle East supported by American military bases dotted across the region. On the other side, there is the anxiety stemming from the very real prospect of the collapse of the colonial enterprise at the heart of the Arab world. A lingering dread permeates the air in Israel – a fear that all the atrocities, the systematic erasure of a people, the shattered homes, the relentless flow of blood, will one day demand retribution. It’s a fear that trembles at the edges of Israeli consciousness, a fear that refuses to be fully acknowledged, yet it pulses beneath the surface. This fear whispers that the reckoning might come, or is coming, that the crimes committed in the name of power and survival will one day rise from the shadows to exact their due. But the settlers and their fears are not the object of this piece.
The existential fear that grips Palestinians is not an abstract anxiety but a visceral terror, anchored in the stark realities of history and present experiences with our current adversaries. This fear is not a nebulous dread but a concrete response to the ongoing brutality that has defined our existence under Israeli domination. Seventy years after the first widespread ethnic cleansing campaign, the spectre of another, even more intense wave of violence looms large, made palpably real by the daily atrocities and the overarching threat of erasure. The daily massacres, the systematic destruction of Gaza, and the overt declaration of a ‘Nakba 2.0’ on live television are not just warnings but lived experiences, reinforcing the fear that the horrors of the past are not only being repeated but amplified and that they are here once again in their full force. This is a fear with substance, a fear with a history, and a fear that, given the current trajectory, could very well define our future, or lack thereof.
The second, and paradoxical, anxiety is one that eludes tangible grasp, an anxiety not of an identifiable threat but of the potential cessation of life within the precariousness of a terror regime. It’s a dark irony, perhaps a cruel twist, that within Palestinians there festers a fear of losing the very uncertainty that the occupation breeds. This is the anxiety of life without occupation: the unending questions that haunt daily existence. ‘Who will be arrested next? Will today’s passage through the checkpoint end in my death or arrest? Is that checkpoint even open? Or is it closed so the settlers can pass undisturbed with green plated number plates?’ And, perhaps most piercingly, ‘who will they kill today?’ This is a daily reality that empowers a regime that thrives on unpredictability, leaving its victims in a perpetual state of not knowing, yet paradoxically fearing what might happen if this very habituated unpredictability were to cease.
But here’s the rub: if my mother’s desperate pleas materialise, if they truly ‘fuck off’ – who would bear the blame for our inadequacies? Who would we indict for the insidious infiltration of consumerist ideologies, for the stark amplification of material and class fissures? Who would we hold accountable for the surge in criminality, for the rot of political corruption that seems to fester unchallenged? What excuses would my students offer for their tardiness if no checkpoints, no new martyrs obstruct their path? And, more profoundly, what would become of the intricate web of narratives constructed upon the supposed invincibility of Israel, should liberation be achieved? The Palestinian security officer who tortured a fellow fighter, the political figure fattened by the ceaseless flow of CIA funds, the secretary who silently loathed the politician she served – what stories would they craft for themselves, what truths could they possibly speak to us?
The emergence of the Palestinian Authority and the establishment of self-governing mechanisms in the land between the river and the sea provided us with a revealing glimpse into potential futures. Almost immediately following the rise of the PA, the discourse began to shift. Many Palestinian intellectuals urged critical reflection, suggesting that we should no longer use Israel as a hanger for all our problems – an object upon which we project all our issues. The challenges we face, our shortcomings that render us human, the patriarchal structures and social and economic injustices, and the various marginalised groups within our own social fabric are ours to confront and own. Many made the plea; ‘please put the occupation aside’.
The Oslo moment, in its dizzying paradox, was the juncture where we found ourselves given permission to blame ourselves for our flaws – yet without the consolation or reality of liberation. It was an epoch of confusion, where the old questions lost their edge, their ability to cut through the noise, and new questions arrived bearing unfamiliar, sometimes disorienting, answers. The occupation, once the omnipresent shadow over our lives, seemed to recede, relegated to the hilltops, the checkpoints that girdled our villages and towns. It was no longer the spectre in our daily lives but became a distant, albeit still menacing, presence – obscured by the ministries that flew the Palestinian flag in Ramallah. This was the historical moment where self-blame became permissible, even normalised, as the occupation slipped from the foreground of our consciousness, becoming the first thing we deliberately chose to obscure in our answers. In this mood of disorientation, where simple is made complex and complexity is simplified, I clung to my own answer: ‘occupation might not be everything, but its trace is in everything.’
Decisions and Regrets
I know a Palestinian girl from Nazareth who, faced with the unbearable calculus of love and legality, decided to turn away from the ‘love of her life’ because he is marked by the wrong geography – his identity card, that small piece of paper, signifies his origin in the West Bank, and thus, he is expelled from her future. I know another girl who, embroiled in the slow-motion torment of waiting, cuts ties with her beloved, a political prisoner, because she cannot endure the indefinite suspension, the endless deferral of a time when they might actually, physically, be together.
These decisions, fraught with the cruel arithmetic of a political order that scripts the possibilities of intimacy, leaves behind a bitter residue, a sediment of loss and redefinition, of a pragmatism that forces us to betray love, to betray values we thought would endure despite social and daily costs. These are not just choices; but redefinitions of selfhood under duress, where the pragmatic and the heartless coalesce in a stark affirmation of survival at the expense of all that we thought we could be.
These acts, seemingly personal, are deeply political, inscribing on the self the cruel imperatives of a life lived under occupation. They mark a dismemberment – not just of relationships, but of the self from the collective, of love across colonially imposed borders. These choices, forged in the crucible of oppression, resonate with the profound ache of the unchosen, of the possibilities foreclosed, and, in this, they define those who make them in ways that are both brutally real and inescapably political. Liberation would mean an endless stream of regrets, of choices that should have not been taken, of other choices that should have been made. The very frame through which many of the decisions, dreams, life-plans Palestinians made would radically change.
The decision to emigrate, to leave behind a homeland that, once forsaken, might shatter the certainty of ever returning. The choice to declare ourselves a defeated nation and people, a declaration that lingers with heavy political consequences for those who have found solace in the embrace of defeat as a familiar lover and who now attempt to eternalise our defeat. To betray the revolution in the name of the nation as the Palestinian Authority embodies. Or the choice to speak Hebrew more fluently than Arabic, to tether one’s existence to the validation of Ashkenazi approval by professing a hesitant loyalty to a state that, by a mere historical accident, did not banish the lives of you or your family.
There is solemnity that comes with the life we know, as brutal and horrific as it is. Palestinians have much to lose, and a very historic opening. The real and tangible feeling that Israel is defeatable comes with an endless stream of possible regret for choices made under the stress of an existing and seemingly all powerful order. Palestinians have recreated themselves endlessly under the existing order, and in many instances their choices were choices that dismembered and evacuated the real potential for liberation.
Resistance and the Courage to Be
A friend of mine left Palestine, seeking a place more relaxed and quiet and less uncertain. This friend went through his own political breakdown after 7 October and its aftermath, calling me to discuss the catastrophe in Gaza – the endless flow of blood, the visceral return of what he insisted is a new Nakba. I must confess, I was never fond of the overuse of the word. I told him, what happened and is happening in Gaza is indeed a disaster, but it’s not yet a Nakba. He was surprised by my words, ‘What do you mean?’ The Nakba assumes defeat, I explained. As a concept and historic experience, it is intertwined with the notion of defeat. It was both a disaster, leading to the destruction of homes, villages, and worlds, and a defeat, in so far as Israel was able to birth itself on the ruins of our lives. This disaster might become a Nakba, but it’s not a Nakba yet. In fact, the disaster could induce a slow yet irreversible process of Zionist unraveling. By the end of our conversation, he confessed to me ‘I just don’t believe that liberation is possible, after all. I am afraid of liberation. What does this make me!’
At a recent conference held at Birzeit University, a critical perspective was raised regarding the events of 7 October. The argument put forth was that the operation should have been subject to more thorough planning, with a comprehensive political program in place and it should have anticipated the response from Israel, which has since escalated into a full-scale genocidal campaign. To plan out and execute an operation, and to anticipate reactions, and to advance a political program. The burdening of any action with a methodical, calculated scheme that anticipates every possible scenario belies the inherent fragility and fogginess of war. It is always easier to critique in hindsight. This burdening appears more as a manifesto against 7 October itself rather than a critique of its specific edges or execution or the responses of the adversary. The more you impose an overwhelming burden on any policy, act, or action, the more you are implicitly mounting an argument against its viability, demanding from it what it does not necessarily answer.
The slow dismemberment and unbecoming of Palestine, coupled with the emergence of new modes of existence under the sovereignty of Israel or as extension of Pax Americana, marked prior to 7 October, and a similar logic was prevailing in Gaza. Hamas concluded agreements to allow more workers to enter Israel, and the entire possible future looked as if it was centered on material and economic survival. It is paradoxical that at the very nadir of Arab and Palestinian weakness – amid disunity, collaboration, accommodation, the grind of everyday survival, normalisation, and the global indifference – the most significant Palestinian ʿamaliyya materialised. It was a moment that dared to disrupt the script, injecting chaos into the very marrow of stagnation, compelling a re-engagement with the cause by proposing a solution – one that was as incendiary as it was unexpected. The weakest moment, birthing the most potent act; a defiance of history’s deterministic whispers.
The operation was nothing short of a seismic rupture in the geopolitical and psychological landscape, a moment that shattered the carefully constructed perceptions of the imperial managerial class and Israel’s own myth of invincibility. It wasn’t just an act; it was an opening – a door flung wide open to challenge the status quo. This singular event triggered a cascade of shifts: psychic, social, economic, political, and strategic. It was, in essence, a manifestation of the courage to be, a defiant affirmation of existence in spite of all the sacrifices it also demands. Paul Tillich writes that courage is the affirmation of an essential nature. It is not surprising, therefore, that at this critical juncture many in Palestine are asking themselves, ‘who are we?’ And, perhaps also, ‘what has become of us?’
Abdaljawad Omar is a Palestinian scholar and writer who lectures in the Philosophy and Cultural Studies Department at Birzeit University. He writes for Mondoweiss and his recent publications include ‘Shock without Awe: Zionism and its Horror’ in Radical Philosophy, and ‘Bleeding Forms: Beyond the Intifada’ in Critical Times.
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