Abstract
Solidarity and the Palestinian Cause enters a growing field of comparative Black and Indigenous thought, pioneered by Critical Black and Indigenous/Native Studies scholars in North America. While it builds on recent work such as Tiffany Lethabo King’s The Black Shoals (2019), Mark Rifkin’s Fictions of Land and Flesh (2020) and the edited collection Otherwise Worlds (2020), this book is the first of its kind to apply the analytics of Blackness and Indigeneity to the Palestinian context. It engages with two questions that strike at the heart of this field: (how) can solidarity movements honour the incommensurability of Black and Indigenous oppression and liberation? and to what extent can liberal humanist concepts – humanity, sovereignty, universality – be made to serve anti-racist, anti-colonial struggles? In deliberating these questions, Zalloua makes a powerful case for a cross-racial solidarity movement that neither succumbs to separatist temptation (the over-particularity of Indigeneity/race) nor attempts to eliminate difference (the analogising pressure of universalism).
This case is made in well-paced, energetic prose, with greater aesthetic appeal than one would expect from such a text. As a philosopher concerned with race and humanism, Zalloua writes for an academic audience well-versed in critical theory. Nonetheless, he introduces concepts in an intuitive order, clearly outlining their relevance to the Palestine context before delving into critique. Leaning on this sound theoretical framework, the author weaves a compelling case for Palestinian binationalism and universal solidarity among those ascribed ‘the part of no part’ under colonial racial capitalism.
The book begins by establishing a clear link between the ontology, epistemology and material politics of Palestinian occupation. Building on Nietzsche, the author presents a ‘Critique of Indigenous reason’, in which he examines the conceptual ground laid down by Palestinian claims to Indigeneity, and interrogates the risks, possibilities and limitations such claims impose on imagining liberated futures. This line of inquiry strikes at the core of contemporary debates concerning the value of Indigenous identity to anti-colonial struggles worldwide. The author argues that, unlike Zionist perspectives, Palestinian ideas of Palestinian Indigeneity harness Indigenous reason as a discourse, practice and hermeneutic for resisting settler colonialism rather than as an essential identity category. Zalloua introduces critical interventions from Black Feminist and Afropessimist scholarship to complicate the uses of Indigenous reason. Drawing from Sylvia Wynter, Achille Mbembe, Alex Weheliye, Jasbir Puar and Saidiya Hartman, he contends that the disciplinary, biopolitical and necropolitical power used to reduce Black life to a state of ‘non-being’ and ‘un-mattering’ structures the same matrix of racialisation that renders Palestinian life disposable. The notion that liberal humanist identity claims are inherently anti-Black sets up the imperative that the rest of the book elaborates: ‘Palestinian Indigeneity must be both defended . . . and reinvented by infusing it with a diasporic and transnational sensibility.’
In each chapter that follows, Zalloua examines objects ranging from legal case studies and academic debates to contemporary cinema, activist art and autobiographical writing, which serve an illustrative purpose as the author unravels and reconstructs theoretical arguments. While some readers may find this bias toward abstraction less appealing, it remains clear what is at stake in the text: the conceptual foundations of (de)colonisation, not its cultural outputs, comprise Zalloua’s object of study. As a philosopher, his contribution is to the philosophical framing of solidarity movements. This contribution is still embedded in political praxis, as it provokes the Palestinian liberation movement to reflect on its ideological premises and visions of liberation. At a moment where capacity for and interest in transnational, transracial coalition continues to grow worldwide, this book’s thorough, engaging and ethically rigorous treatment of solidarity as an organising principle adds enormous value to our movements.
The body of Solidarity and the Palestinian Cause works through four analytic approaches to unpacking Palestinian occupation and liberation. The first concerns the ontological status of Palestinian Indigeneity, refashioning Fanon’s appellation – ‘Look, a Negro!’ – to detail how Palestinian (non)being is produced through the gaze of Zionist settler-colonialism. Zalloua argues that Palestinian claims to Indigeneity disrupt the libidinal economy of occupation, which is invested in objectifying the ‘other’. Rather than work to ‘re-humanise’ the Palestinian, such claims assert that ‘the human’ is a colonial construct and disidentify with its reified status. This argument unfolds through a critical reading of Frank Wilderson’s Afropessimist rejection of non-Black people’s attempts at anti-racist solidarity. Though at times ungenerous, Zalloua’s critique pushes against the exceptionalisation of Blackness, contending that although the conditions of settler-colonial and anti-Black oppression may not be commensurable, Black and Palestinian non-being are products of the same racial order, which both causes must join forces to destroy.
In Chapter Two, Zalloua considers the epistemic conditions of coloniality and discusses how states of Indigeneity and exile provide Palestinians with complementary positions for critiquing occupation. Borrowing Said’s reflections on ‘contrapuntal’ ways of reading and relating, ‘Thinking under occupation’ presents exile as a stance from which desires for rootedness and national belonging are called into question. Indigeneity, on the other hand, provides the vantage point from which the bourgeois drive to transcend particularity is challenged. The author then presents ‘epistemic disobedience’ – in Palestinian writing, pedagogy, and enduring social/cultural (re)production – as a strategy for moving between these positions and so imagining the kind of liberated futures that occupation otherwise makes unthinkable.
Building on his discussion of colonial (non)being and (un)thought, Zalloua turns in Chapter Three to the affective life of Palestinians living under occupation to argue against the essentialisation of paranoia and for the instrumentalisation of Nietzschean ressentiment. ‘Ressentiment/paranoia’ analyses the scandal surrounding Jasbir Puar in 2015, where the scholar was accused of perpetuating antisemitic ‘blood libel’ narratives in a recounting of Gazan women’s anxieties about Israeli military organ-harvesting. This section of the book showcases a sensitive but principled treatment of a morally charged case study. The author provides clear points of reference for Gazans’ fear of bodily violation, giving substance and reason to the paranoid affect otherwise seen as an innate Palestinian pathology. More importantly, however, he demonstrates how this negative affect can become a source of political energy when it is properly harnessed. ‘The public use of ressentiment’, Zalloua writes, involves a ‘shift from ressentiment as a personal, impotent expression of frustration to ressentiment as a collective response to the evils of settler colonialism’. The persistence of negative feeling, or the refusal to normalise injustice, forms the foundation of emancipatory politics, from the Palestinian cause to Black Lives Matter.
The first three chapters’ analysis culminates powerfully in Zalloua’s explication of ‘Sovereignty’ – or ‘sovereignty under erasure’ – as the philosophical basis for the political project of binationalism. This section shows a commitment to the principles of abolition that underpin radical Black politics. The author draws parallels between the Palestinian cause and the project of abolition, in which ‘another end of the world is possible’, without discrediting the absolute necessity of global Indigenous peoples’ claims to sovereignty. Chapter Four thus undertakes the difficult but necessary task of delinking Palestinian liberation from traditional concepts of sovereignty that traffic in anti-Black notions of the sovereign self and nation-state forms of necropolitical power. Zalloua also points to the risks of striving for the kind of Palestinian sovereignty that would grant its people access to neoliberal markets, which would continue and entrench the anti-Black functions of racial capitalism. Binationalism, in his view, must be an ‘incomplete, ever-renewed’ project, rooted in a proletarian position, if it is to divest from libidinal and political economies of anti-Blackness.
Solidarity and the Palestinian Cause insists that Palestinian liberation must grapple with elements of anti-Blackness inherent to humanist philosophy. In doing so, the author shows how, by taking the contributions of Critical Black Studies seriously, the Palestinian cause can imagine and fight for universally anti-racist, anti-colonial futures. By contrast, Zalloua’s engagement with Critical Indigenous/Native Studies is less profound. Concepts like Indigeneity, sovereignty and genocide have been theorised and problematised for decades across the settler-colonial world; and the author deftly applies these analytics – via theorists including Glen Coulthard, Leanne Simpson, Audra Simpson, Eve Tuck and Wayne Yang – to the Palestinian context. There is little discussion, however, of how the Palestinian context speaks back to other settler-colonised peoples, places and movements, other than to call for solidarity. The question of how diasporic/exilic positions would counterbalance Indigenous particularity in locations where neither are commonplace remains unanswered. Indeed, the question of whether such a counterbalance – an appeal to the universal – is either ethically desirable or politically necessary to other decolonial movements is hardly explored. Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s work on ‘strategic essentialism’, 1 for instance, would make for a valuable interlocutor on Zalloua’s ‘public uses of ressentiment’ and wider denunciation of Indigenous particularity.
This lack is nonetheless minor, and does not detract from the value of Zalloua’s original and timely intervention. The real weakness of the book is its prohibitive price-tag; though inaccessible to individual readers, its interdisciplinary scope would make it a great addition to university departments and syllabi ranging from political science to film studies. For those without institutional access, the author’s discussion of the book on the Jadaliyya ‘Connections’ series provides an alternate, more conversational introduction to his ideas. 2 Overall, Solidarity and the Palestinian Cause succeeds at combining the generative tension between desires for rootedness and transcendence, reconciliation and revenge with the abolitionist impulse to ‘refuse the options as given’. The result is a politics-in-motion, cut loose from the promise of both pre-colonial restoration and neoliberal ascension alike, and vividly depicted in this book.