Abstract
This response aims to develop an understanding of ‘solidarity’ from what I take to be some of the key contributions of D&D. I do this by surveying a selection of “declarations of solidarity” issued from the Global North in the context of Israel's genocide in Gaza. I draw particular attention to Tully's critical reframing of post-war liberal political thought as “neocolonial liberalism”; his use of Edward Said's notion of the “contrapuntal ensemble” of imperialism and resistance; his account of critical dialogue within and across “hegemonic” and “subaltern” traditions, and his emphasis on “always listening to the other side”. In doing so, I hope to highlight the merits of the fundamental premises of the “dialogue tradition of political thought” that this book recovers as a “tradition”.
My aim in this response is to begin developing an understanding of ‘solidarity’ from some of D&D's key contributions. I do this by surveying a selection of “declarations of solidarity” issued primarily from the Global North in the context of Israel's genocide in Gaza. I draw particular attention to Tully's critical reframing of post-war liberal political thought as “neocolonial liberalism”; his use of Edward Said's notion of the “contrapuntal ensemble” of imperialism and resistance; his account of critical dialogue within and across “hegemonic” and “subaltern” traditions, and his emphasis on “always listening to the other side”. In doing so, I hope to highlight the merits of the fundamental premises of the “dialogue tradition of political thought” that this book recovers as a “tradition” – namely, “the working hypothesis that most political concepts are family resemblance concepts and, thus, essentially contestable”. It follows that “political theory” is not best seen as an attempt to formulate “a single definition or theory” of a concept like solidarity but, rather as an attempt to “understand” the variety of ways the concept is used by various language users in the history of political struggles, thereby learning to make political judgments about, with, and through that concept (124, 4). The recent dialogue on solidarity demonstrates the merits of this interpretive orientation, just as Tully's approach helps to clarify the limits and possibilities of this particular dialogue.
On November 16th, 2023, members of the Normative Orders research cluster at the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory published “Principles of Solidarity. A Statement”. The authors proclaimed “solidarity with Israel and Jews in Germany” amidst violence against German Jews after Israel's military response to the October 7th attacks, or Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, led by the military wing of Hamas. Referring to “principles” and “standards of judgment” toward and by which solidarists ought to be oriented, they argued that unconditional solidarity with Israel must be recognized as a fundamental “commitment” of Germany's political culture. This “commitment” requires solidarists flatly to reject any criticism of the Israeli attack on Gaza for what, they claim, it really is – a pretext for the expression of antisemitic views (Deitelhoff et al., 2023).
The statement and its critical reception can be understood as interventions in long-standing public-intellectual controversies in Germany. The Frankfurt authors’ commitment to unwavering solidarity with Israel straightforwardly enacts the norm established by Angela Merkel's famous 2008 declaration before the Knesset that Israel's security is a non-negotiable matter of Germany's reason of state (Staatsräson). That declaration itself emerged from a German memory culture shaped by the so-called ‘historians’ dispute’ of the 1980s and early 2000s debates over the connection between German colonial and Nazi genocide. Since then, the German government's formal (not legally binding) adoption in 2017 of the IHRA definition of antisemitism and the ‘German catechism debate’ in Summer 2021 had acquainted readers with the statement's deeply-contested view of antisemitism as a distinct—and distinctly German—prejudice. That is, the Frankfurt statement relies upon a false understanding of antisemitism as historically invariant across individuals or groups, which grounds the spurious moralising judgment that any criticism of the state of Israel can be attributed to the evil of those individuals or groups. Indeed, the dispute in Germany over the non-violent BDS campaign (see OurTerms, 2020) has demonstrated that, despite strong minoritarian opposition, many in Germany would prefer to see “commitment” to solidarity with Israel as something like a taboo – a belief shielded from the sort of rational scrutiny to which one is normally taken to be appealing when referring to principles and standards of judgment.
D&D can help to clarify yet further criticisms of the statement. Two of its signatories – Rainer Forst and Jürgen Habermas – are representatives of what D&D names “neocolonial liberalism” (144ff.; cf. 170 n.112). With this description, Tully helpfully contextualizes the emergence of liberal political theory in the immediate aftermath of formal decolonization, reframing the development of “procedural” and “deliberative” approaches alike as “indirect” responses to the preceding “demands for recognition and participation” by subaltern political actors globally. Liberalism incorporates the claims of these “critical, multiracial, and multi-traditional dialogues in theory and radical politics in practice” into a vision of politics as a field of free and equal independent states in international law and free and equal independent individuals within states. This response is neo-colonial in that this picture is, for Tully, “partial” and “limited”. Some may be inclined to say that it is simply false, insofar as looking at the world of politics through the lens of neocolonial liberalism generates a basic misunderstanding – it blinds us to or leads us to overlook “the global system of imperialism and the colour line”, on the one hand, and “the racial social system of de facto segregation” (145–147), on the other (cf. Amnesty International, 2022).
The Frankfurt statement can be seen as issuing from the same theoretical presuppositions identified in Tully's critical reframing of postwar liberalism as neocolonial. The authors rely upon a historical understanding that is ‘parochial’ in its myopic focus on (a very particular reading of) German history. This leaves them unable or unwilling to see the conflict in Palestine/Israel as taking place within what Tully, following Edward Said, calls the “contrapuntal ensemble” – the global system of imperialism and the colour line, and anticolonial resistance to both. The Frankfurt authors narrate Israel's military action as a “retaliation” to an “extreme atrocity” or a “response” to a “massacre”. This chronology actively erases both the real political situation in Gaza – with over 2 million residents living in a so-called open-air prison – and the historical trajectory of settler colonialism in Palestine since 1917 (Khalidi, 2020). They also note that such action is “justified in principle”. This is an attempt at legitimation made by appealing to “principles of proportionality” and “prevention of civilian casualties” that should guide the action. The appeal to proportionality reveals the authors’ ignorance of the history and present of a conflict that has always been disproportionate, with a dramatic imbalance in Israel's favour established for decades now legitimated by claims that the use of “human shields” renders everything in Gaza a legitimate military target (Gordon, 2023). Similarly, the appeal to prevent civilian casualties came one month after Israeli President Isaac Herzog explicitly rejected the distinction between combatants and civilians as mere “rhetoric”, designating “an entire nation… responsible” for the violence (Law for Palestine, 2024).
From this perspective, the political and historical ignorance displayed by the Frankfurt authors is staggering. But it is not surprising. A growing number of political theorists are interested in solidarity, most of whom share the view of ‘theory’ against which Tully positions the turn to the situated agency of language users characteristic of the dialogue tradition (124, 4): they see their task as one of specifying solidarity's ‘rational’ principles and offer competing ‘definitions’ of solidarity, which tend to abstraction, overgeneralization, and a disregard of historical context (Holley, 2023). Forst and Habermas take this view in their more formal work on solidarity, where space for dialogue is strictly bound by precisely the sort of universalism about ‘rationality’ that D&D enables us to see as presumptive and parochial. The long-standing ‘neo-Hegelian’ alternative of approaching dialogue in relation to ‘recognition’ corrects the ‘neo-Kantian’ focus on individual rationality. Yet, with important exceptions (Celikates, 2021; Loick, 2023; Redecker, 2021), it can nevertheless retain a presumptively universal view of historical progress that is sometimes extended to theories of solidarity (Jaeggi, 2001). One might see the Frankfurt statement as not a wilful act of “denial” but, rather, the sort of perceptual affliction that Mathias Thaler (2014) called “genocide blindness” – a distinction developed via Wittgenstein, and citing Tully. Whether one prefers to see them as unwilling or unable, both characterizations seem more adequate descriptions of the Frankfurt authors’ evident difficulty to “recognize” the claim that Palestine and Palestinians might also be as much a part of “humanity” as any other places and people (see Hammad, 2024; cf. Shakry, 2025).
A similar point was raised in the immediate and sharply critical response to the Frankfurt statement. In a letter published one week later with over 109 signatures, academics from around the world – including many critical theorists based in Germany – decried the “apparent limits of the solidarity expressed by” the Frankfurt authors. These latter had failed to “adequately extend” their professed concern for human dignity to both “Palestinian civilians in Gaza… facing death and destruction” and “Muslims in Germany experiencing rising Islamophobia”. Thereby, they in fact wrongly understood the very nature of solidarity. For the authors of the Response, “solidarity means that the principle of human dignity must apply to all people. This requires us to recognize and address the suffering of all those affected by an armed conflict” (Tooze et al., 2023).
A central issue in this exchange was the attribution of “genocidal intentions” to the Israeli government. For the Frankfurt authors, such attribution signals the complete slipping of “standards of judgment”: while acknowledging legitimate subjects of “controversial debate”, they insisted that such debate requires foreclosing the question of genocide. The authors of the Response note that they did not all agree that “the legal standards for genocide” had been met in November 2023 but insisted that this was “a matter of legitimate debate”. For the authors of the Response, “showing solidarity” and “respecting human dignity” in fact required that “we not close down the space for debate and reflection about the possibility of genocide”. The political utility of a debate over the threshold of genocide is itself debatable: one effect of a disagreement over whether genocidal intention has been sufficiently demonstrated can be to trivialize forms of mass violence that fall short of a strict legal definition. And if, on Tully's dialogical premises, the search for definitions is a quixotic one, and we should instead attempt to understand the political arguments made about and with the terms in question (124), then legalistic attempts to define terms too clearly look like a kind of anti-political theory and practice – and the implications were as clear in November 2023 as the consequences are now. This is not to deny the importance of agreeing on a definition and application of terms like genocide – the time for debate had long since passed when, in March 2025, Francesca Albanese noted the “wall-to-wall consensus” in the “human rights community” that “Israel is committing genocide” (Channel4, 2025).
I find D&D helpful in understanding this exchange over solidarity and genocide as a critical dialogue within the hegemonic tradition of Western critical theory. With the “language of ‘hegemon-subaltern’ discursive and nondiscursive relations”, we can see the Frankfurt authors as representing a neocolonial liberalism that legitimates imperial hegemon-subaltern relations of power, in large part by disavowing the global contrapuntal ensemble. The authors of the Response can be understood as “critical members” of the same “hegemonic tradition”. By bringing into view precisely the suffering of civilians in Palestine and anti-Muslim Islamophobia in Germany effaced by the Frankfurt statement, they exhibit at least a minimal commitment to the epistemic virtues of “humility” and “receptivity” that D&D identifies as the responsibility of such immanent critics (104, 103). The Frankfurt authors attempted to “foreclose the scope of public reason” to exclude the question of Israel's genocidal intentions. The Response authors contested this foreclosure, insisting on calling that very “prejudgment” into “the space of questions” (148).
D&D also helps us to see the limits of such internal dialogues. In bringing the question of genocide into the space of questions, the authors of the Response argued that “solidarity” should be oriented around the recognition of “all those affected by an armed conflict”. This is an implicit reference to what Tully identifies as “one of the oldest political norms in the western tradition” –
But
This brief comparison demonstrates that the dialogue on solidarity in the context of Israel's genocide in Palestine among Western critical theorists and wider academic circles needs to be decolonized. Tully notes that the “all affected” principle “plays the same role” as another classical humanist maxim –
Of course, barriers to this type of “genuine dialogue” (1–39) are deeply entrenched. While the Frankfurt statement and the Response are important interventions, it is equally important to note that statements by those listening to Palestinians have been systematically denied a hearing in Germany's dominant public sphere. Already in October 2023, the German press refused to publish a statement by hundreds of academics – including a significant number of critical theorists – against the repression of Palestine-solidarity protests and the genocidal assault on Gaza (Abay, 2023). The failures of German universities are especially glaring (see Albanese, 2025). The abrupt cancellation of a panel with Francesca Albanese and Eyal Weizman by the leadership of the Free University of Berlin in February 2025 is a well-known example of the wider “authoritarian turn” across German campuses and civil society (Celikates et al., 2024). Crucially, this repression is being countered by ongoing political organizing – from the
At this point, one might doubt whether “listening” is even an appropriate orientation in this context. As Palestinian performance artist Fargo Tbakhi writes, if “dialogue and listening” are “fetishized”, then they can function as a “colonial tool to obfuscate, suppress, and limit the material demands of colonized and racialized people” (Tbakhi, 2020). Yet even Leila Khaled famously used a dialogical metaphor to explain the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine's “violent” resistance – as attempting “to blow the wax out of the ears of the deaf Western liberals” (in Dean, 2024). It is surely important for those resisting an illegal occupation to be ‘heard’ by those outsiders on whom they ‘call’ for solidarity. And it is also important to recognize that the ‘all’ affected by Germany's reason of state is much more extensive – both locally and globally – than those German politicians and academics who consider themselves designated by the norm. But one may nevertheless wonder – have we not moved beyond ‘listening’ when occupation becomes genocide?
According to the former Head of the Mental Health Unit in the Palestinian Ministry of Health, such doubts are unfounded. In early January 2024, Dr Samah Jabr told would-be solidarists in Edinburgh precisely to “listen to what people say”. For Jabr, “international solidarity” has always been important for Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. Listening is necessary simply because determining what any given act of “international solidarity with Palestine” should consist in is necessarily a matter of contextual judgment. By paying “attention to the language that the ordinary people are using”, solidarists in the Global North are better able to “know and inform” others about the history and present of the occupation and resistance to it. Listening thus allows both a solidarist to avoid being a mere “spectator – one who would watch from a distance” – and Palestinians to connect their local experiences of resistance and trauma to wider communities and struggles for human emancipation. In that sense, Jabr noted, “solidarity is a therapeutic stand”. But the move from spectatorship to solidarity requires a further step. To “watch and listen to what people say”, Jabr insisted, means to “ask, how do they help themselves?” and to “help them with that” (Jabr, 2024; my emphasis).
If listening is not only appropriate but even necessary to solidarity, then what does a solidarity that listens to Palestinians look like in the face of genocide? Like Tully, I think such questions can only be answered through historically informed and empirically grounded contextual judgment. For Jodi Dean, a reinvigorated global “solidarity with Palestine” requires “defending” and “supporting” Hamas (Dean, 2024). On the other hand, Bashir Abu-Manneh emphasizes that “Palestinian voices in Gaza” spoke out against Hamas from the outset of the conflict and have continued “making themselves heard” in growing protests (Abu-Manneh, 2024, 2025). To whom does one listen, then, if one wants to listen to Palestinians? While Dean's attempt at listening seems genuine, her partisan view of solidarity leads her to “hear” only the loudest rallying cries of violent resistance (cf. Bohlman, 2020; Çubukçu, 2024). I hear Jabr's reference to the language of ‘ordinary people’ as implying neither that there is only ‘one’ language, nor that only ‘ordinary’ people – not ‘others’ – should be listened to. Rather, I hear it as a caution against precisely the kind of injunction that would lead one to view solidarity as requiring either celebration or condemnation. A commitment to listen does not tell would-be-solidarists to listen to this or that side of an oppressed group or national liberation movement. An ethical orientation to dialogue cannot replace the difficult task of political judgment.
Rather than engage in this difficult task here, I will conclude by briefly drawing attention to a final declaration from the Global North that offers a useful example of such historically informed political judgment about solidarity. Published just 5 days after the Frankfurt statement, the “declaration of solidarity” by the non-profit migrant research agency Border Forensics provides a counterpoint to the Frankfurt authors’ parochial presumptions about humanity and judgment, exemplifying an alternative politics of solidarity that might follow from the alternative claims about concepts, theory, and history characteristic of Tully's dialogue tradition. If ‘solidarity’ is best understood not as having rational principles in general terms but is, like any other political concept, only ever deployed partially and historically, then specifying its contours will always be a problem of political judgment in context. The Border Forensics declaration adopts the sort of historical perspective that can correct the narrowly German story on which Forst and Habermas rely; and this grounds a different judgment about solidarity, one that recognizes the humanity of Palestine and Palestinians. Thereby, and more generally, it also helps to correct the unreflective parochialism of the dialogue on solidarity surveyed above.
The Declaration is a call for “transnational solidarity across and against all apartheid regimes” by Israeli, Jewish, and Palestinian members “directly affected” by the conflict (Border Forensics, 2023). Historically, it accurately contextualizes Al-Aqsa Flood within the structural violence of “the Israeli occupation” imposed “on the Palestinian people since 1948”. It understands Israel's overwhelming military response to be both continuous with the long history of settler colonial violence and an “unprecedented escalation” of it. Politically, it recognizes the cycle of violence and counter-violence to have been “generated by the occupation of Palestine” and situates the ‘local’ conflict squarely within the contrapuntal ensemble – the global system of imperialism and the colour line, racial segregation and apartheid, and resistance to both. That is, it foregrounds the “deep resonance and continuity” between the violence of the occupation and the violence of the global border and mobility regime. In both geo-political and global-historical terms, this contextualization is notably empirically more accurate than the premises informing the Frankfurt statement. And crucially, this more realistic contextualization grounds a more expansive normative view of solidarity.
Against the Frankfurt attempt to legitimate Israel's military response, the statement explicitly rebuts Israel's claims to be acting in self-defence. It exposes the willed ignorance behind the Frankfurt authors’ appeals to principles: to the appeal for proportionality, it notes that Israel was “attacking disproportionally the population of Gaza”; to the appeal for preventing civilian casualties, it notes that the Israeli Defence Minister had already refused the civilian/combatant distinction by describing the entire population “uniformly” as “human animals”. Crucially, this analysis grounds the Declaration's call for a “solidarity” that is both more realistic and more expansive than that offered by the critical Response. For Border Forensics, there is a duty to solidarity with: “the Palestinian people” and “Palestinian refugees”; Palestinians denied entry at Europe's borders and Palestinians able to cross borders only to become “second-class citizens”. Moreover, this duty of solidarity extends even to those in Europe or the Global North who are subject to violent repression of their “feelings”, “expressions”, “sentiments”, and “experiences” of solidarity with Palestinians. Listening to rather than pre-emptively taking sides, Border Forensics heard many more and manifold voices, grounding their declaration of “solidarity with the Palestinian people and all those who are denied the right to express that solidarity”.
My survey of this dialogue is intended to begin developing an understanding of solidarity from the premises of Tully's dialogue tradition of political thought. If it is helpful in this endeavour, that is partly because the orientation provided by D&D has helped me to hear some old things in new ways and, even more, to hear some new and different things. I hope that other readers might also find the book a non-violent means of removing the wax from their ears. I look forward to hearing again from Tully, and to continuing to learn from our dialogue about solidarity and decolonization.
Footnotes
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.