Abdaljawad Omar and Ajay Parasram outline postcolonial paths to peace via Palestinian liberation

Abdaljawad Omar is a Lecturer in the Department of Arabic Language and Literature at Birzeit University. He has written some indispensable articles on the assumptions people have about Palestine and Palestinian resistance, on the internal tensions in the Palestinian diaspora, the complicity of the United States with Israel’s genocide, and the ongoing exterminationist attitudes that Western elites have toward Palestinian society.Ajay Parasram has roots in South Asia, the Caribbean and the settler cities of Halifax, Ottawa and Vancouver. He is an associate professor in the Departments of International Development Studies, History and Political Science at Dalhousie University. His research interests focus on the politics of colonialism and structural forms of violence founded and exacerbated by and through imperialism.In this conversation, we talk about how the October 7, 2023 attack by a Hamas-led coalition of Palestinian resistance fighters sought to “decompose” or “deform” the reality of oppression that people in Gaza have been living under for a very long time, and especially the state of siege that Palestinians there had been suffering since 2006. This conversation will likely sound one-sided to anyone who believes the self-justifying fictions of the Israeli state, not only because the three of us believe that Israel’s brutal domination of Palestine is unjustifiable, but because the question of Palestine has been strategically simplified into a winner-take-all binary, where we are forced to pick a side—while knowing that Western elites have created a situation in which siding with Israel is the only acceptable position. Instead of capitulating to the unthinking, racist reductionism of this position, we aim to take a step back and see the settler colonization of indigenous Palestinians in historical perspective and grasp the current state of political subjectivity and discourse within Gaza and the West Bank from a place of empathy and solidarity.The only questions, for the three of us, are how do we name and frame the obviously genocidal acts of the Zionist state, how is Palestine grappling with the decision to rupture the relegation of Gaza to slow death, and the West Bank to subjugation, what did that decision to release a flood of resistance expose about the law and sovereignty and the capitulation of certain parts of the left to censorship and quietism, and what will come after the flood, after the rebirth of the movement to liberate Palestine and restore human rights to Palestinians?#gaza #westbank #zionistregime #israelpalestine #gazagenocide #anticolonialism