Palestine and the Question of Nationalism

Jay: Sharma and Ruckus’ claims — that a Palestinian nation could not solve "the problems" (unlisted) of "people who identify as Palestinian" — are extremely inflammatory. A Palestinian state is one not under Israeli military occupation. It is beyond delusional to believe this does not qualitatively improve the nature of life in Palestine. I find it outrageous to suggest it would not improve life substantially enough to be worth fighting for. The subliminal equation is that a prospective Palestinian bourgeoisie is as detrimental as the Zionist regime. Blasphemy! There is a protracted genocide underway, one predicated upon the denial of Palestinian nationhood. We should not normalize ideas like this.

Zora: I think their take is political reality. The marginal gains from a nationhood will have other unforeseen forms of oppression on its own people. The authoritarian politics of Hamas show that they will kill any opposition, while the Palestinian Authority seek neoliberalism. Both parties are engaged in class warfare against its own population, where luxury vehicles and billionaires exist alongside barren concrete refugee camps. When they speak to a lack of imagination, it is this obvious cycle that would befall the population. I don't think challenging how we seek collective liberation downplays the violence inflicted by Israel. The question is what political outcomes we consider the most liberatory for all, beyond the outdated postcolonial nationalist movements. A harsh take, maybe, but worth exploring if we do consider ourselves antiauthoritarian and antinationalist.

Liqaa: In the spirit of First Intifada, and to paraphrase Palestinian thinker and fighter Munir Fasheh — survivor of '48 — becoming-citizen is the deepening of imperial control, not a liberation from it. The Palestinian Authority, not Hamas, are the example here, in my opinion. Although not a monolithic opinion, they have been criticized as a statist structure by Palestinians since their inception. Hamas, despite being a governing structure more situated in the lived reality of Palestinian communities when compared to Fatah, abandoned statecraft on October 7th because they knew negotiation and related capitulation with Empire was a dead end.

Walin: I think it is detrimental to use the Palestinian Authority as a meaningful example of the character of a Palestinian state. It was never such a thing, and never will be. The establishment of  truly legitimate Palestinian governance would necessitate the dissolution of the PA in its entirety.

A Palestinian nation exists already; it is strong. A Palestinian state, however, does not, nor has it ever existed in the contemporary era — not in Gaza, not in the West Bank, not from the PLO. The very notion of Palestinian nationalism requires, by its very nature, dispelling collaboration with Israel, which is entirely baked into the function of the Palestinian Authority.

Many people in Palestine hold antistate positions. Many more hold Marxist positions on class struggle. Almost all of the people who carry these ideas place them subordinate to the singular unified politic of defeating Israeli power, and thus, nearly all of these thinkers recognize the existence of a state as necessary towards this end. It is this unified politic that gives the resistance in Palestine so much strength — equally so, it is what requires a pragmatic relationship with statehood.

Liqaa: Pragmatism I can understand. A nation forged in a relationship between “the people in community” and around the flag of revolt I understand. The Palestinian Authority being a corrupt betrayal I get. Yet I don’t know if any state is legitimate, that seems to be just not how states work: nation-states are a tool of political control invented after the Treaty of Westphalia to stem the tide of peasant revolts, and have been key to neocolonial rule in Southwest Asia and North Africa. I mention the Palestinian Authority because I believe that’s the level of compromise needed for a Palestinian government to be allowed to form, even if by the people who bear a name synonymous with resistance and officially legally declared statehood. I could be wrong. 

Ansar Allah might be a counterexample here, even for those who were at the time the bearers of the mantle. 

Hamas is popular not because it promises a state, but because it promises resistance. If we’re talking about the fracturing and destruction of Israel, I don’t think many would balk at a similar set up to what was in Gaza, with brigades on one hand and civilian infrastructure on the other, which, as I understand it, remained fairly separate, except for some early political operations by Hamas on university campuses and the like, until these went out of favor. For instance, you don’t need a state for mosaic defense, and the UN Security Council will maintain the same disposition either way, belittling Palestinian sovereignty or self-determination. At the same time, it would be foolish to denounce or disregard the material improvements to quality of life and to movement conditions that state recognition might offer. Moreover, I don’t think I have encountered a sound argument or a bulk of Palestinians who really think a one-state or two-state solution will happen, and certainly not before Israel falls. Of course, I have a self-selection and anecdotal evidence problem here, however, because who we’re discussing are my friends, their families, and random others online that I’m in regular contact with. 

But again, the revolt against the PLO and Israel after the Oslo Accords wasn’t just for a better bureaucracy and a nation-state; it even seemed to run contrary to such things. Of course, it’s ancient history at this point. Still, of the two options, it does seem that Hamas chose the Fanonian approach, namely, to try to push the situation past the point of no return and allow the shared movement of the fighters to generate a new insurgent and political subjectivity, even internationally via “the axis.” Admittedly, this approach does involve pragmatism towards states, but it also displays a certain ambivalence, no?

Adi: Zora, you claim that "the authoritarian politics of Hamas show that they will kill any opposition." This is not true. Hamas has advocated Palestinian unity for decades, including with forces that have tried to repress it since its inception. It has also participated in the formation of a broad, ideologically diverse front (the second largest bloc is communist) that has defined Palestinian resistance over the past decade. 

It is time for us to seriously grapple with the fact that, in a world of great powers, geopolitics abhors a vacuum. To not form state or state-like structures that monopolize violence is to de facto subject a people to foreign domination.

I’ll add that Sharma and Ruckus’s denial of Palestinian nationhood dovetails morbidly with the Zionist assertion that “Palestinians don’t exist.” This has been a core, genocidal feature of Zionism since day one, and I agree with Jay that it deserves no airtime, especially right now.

Liqaa: I just don’t think that’s true. The monopoly of force is not merely about defense from external threats; it’s also about policing. Arguing for the acquisition of a nuclear weapon would make more sense.

Christina: Sharma’s discussion of the history of imperialism in India, the coolie labor system, and how that contributed to the development of border controls and “nationalized state sovereignty” is really valuable. No one has a perfect answer to these questions; we should welcome their discussion. 

However, a major flaw is that Sharma uses the example of British imperialism in India and East Asia to then make a point about Zionist settler-colonialism in Palestine, when in fact these are quite different processes. Thousands of British did move to India — but this was to run the British economic machine there, not to wipe out the existing population (although this does not excuse the famines, mass killings, etc.). 

The Palestinian struggle is foremost about resisting an actual, thorough genocide that is being perpetrated by Israel in the name of Lebensraum. All political questions, including statehood, are downstream from that. 

Sharma expresses grief over seeing the Palestinian flag in international demonstrations. The flag, for most in the West (and probably for most in Palestine), represents the life and existence of people who are resisting extermination. The Zapatistas used the Mexican flag in a similar way: to refuse oblivion.

I hope we will not adopt the author’s puritanical attitude toward the Palestinian flag; I can’t think of anything more insular and highbrow. I think we can use these symbols and support national liberation concepts without perpetuating the nation-state as a Platonic ideal. This is all to say, the place to agitate for a “post-national” world is not during an anti-genocide struggle, in my opinion.

Liqaa: The Palestinian flag is a flag of an historically specific revolt, and doesn’t even represent an extant nation-state. It’s like having a problem with the RBG flag. Seems silly.

Christina: Another thought on the contrast between India and Palestine. Partition was a tragedy — it did not need to happen, and Pakistani and Indian elites undoubtedly sought to benefit from it. Conversely, a singular state of Israel controlling all of the West Bank and Gaza would be a tragedy, and would open the door for even more atrocity.

Macedonio: Three points:

1. Are most people in South Africa better off without Apartheid? Yes. There are meaningful differences between colonial ethnostates and pluralistic democracies, just as there are meaningful differences between neoliberalism and fascism, though there are good reasons to oppose both.

The Israeli colonial project has already inflicted considerably more bloodshed and suffering than the South African Apartheid system did — which says a lot. (South Africa is a better analogue to Israel than India, for reasons described above) So would it be better if Palestinians had "their own" government in a discrete territory? Arguably, yes.

Obviously, it would be much better to abolish the Israeli ethnostate outright than simply to establish another, much weaker Palestinian ethnostate on a fraction of Palestine immediately adjacent to the Israeli ethnostate. But all this being said...

2. On the road from oppression to liberation (let "A" denote the present deplorable conditions, and "Z" represent utopia), there are some strategies that can get us from point A to point B in such a way that we will never get to point C. 

Liberalism, left nationalism, authoritarian socialism, and other statist ideologies exist precisely for the sake of promoting strategies that get us from point A to point B in such a way that we will never get to point C. Proponents of these ideologies generally seek to create emergencies in which the only apparent options are strategies that (at best) will get us from point A to point B in such a way that we will never get to point C.

The Biden presidential campaign offers a simple enough example of this. Presented as a solution for the problems that Donald Trump created or intensified for millions of people, Biden’s presidency temporarily ameliorated some of those problems while quelling the powerful grassroots movements that had arisen in response to them…then pursued policies that made it all but inevitable that Donald Trump would return to power. 

If we never put forward more radical, ambitious strategies, instead limiting ourselves to using whatever strategy seems most pragmatic at the time, not only will we never reach liberation, but, worse, the scope of our ambitions (and consequently, of our opportunities) will continuously contract.

If we look closer at the South African example, we will see that a few indigenous South Africans are much better off since the end of Apartheid, many indigenous South Africans are a bit better off, and many more are hardly better off at all, because capitalism and other forms of colonialism and state violence continue unchecked. South Africans got from point A to point B, and it's good that they did — but the question is how to solve problems in such a way that one can keep moving rather than getting rid of some problems while entrenching others.

This is the argument for centering a critique of nationalism and "national liberation" in our organizing.

The thing about forming state or state-like structures that monopolize violence is that doing so inevitably concentrates power in the hands of an elite that tends to develop reactionary interests and motivations. Revolutionaries have hazarded that experiment over and over since the mid-19th century, always producing some version of the same results.

Case in point, the region surrounding Palestine is full of post-colonial states ruled by governments that have sold out the Palestinian people. This is not a coincidence — these governments have also sold out their own people. The death toll that Assad's government inflicted on Syrian people rivals even the death toll inflicted by the Israeli government, and that says a lot.

The anarchist argument is that forming state structures that monopolize violence is not a solution to the problem of oppression, but a way of reproducing it. At best, sometimes it might get us from point A to point B, but only in a way that traps us at point B.

In the interview, Nandita Sharma speaks very thoughtfully about the problems with nationalism and some of the other strategies that can get us from point A to point B without ever getting us to point C. Though we might disagree with her about the Palestinian flag, I think we should keep her critique in mind. Because, and this is very important…

3. The state of Israel itself illustrates precisely what can go wrong when one takes for granted that any nationalist project is magically immune to the problems that previous nationalist projects have run into. 

Only a hundred years ago, Jews were a stateless people — oppressed, scapegoated, persecuted, and slaughtered all over the world. One Zionist who participated in the Warsaw ghetto uprising recounted that, in Poland in the 1930s and early 1940s, there were Jewish anarchists, Jewish communists, and Jewish Zionists, and of the three, the Zionists were considered to be the ones pursuing the most utopian and outlandish project.

The number of Jewish people murdered in the Holocaust eclipses the total number of casualties in all conflicts in the entire Mideast since the turn of the century. It is a tragedy on a scale that still defies comparison. Imagine how living through it shaped the thinking and priorities of those who witnessed it.

Around that time, there were plenty of well-intentioned liberals who believed that the only pragmatic solution to violence targeting stateless peoples was for them to form state or state-like structures that monopolize violence. We can imagine these good liberals saying to themselves, "If only the Jews had a homeland of their own! But there is a place that they are indigenous to... And some of them are living there already! If only we could move more of them there, and arrange to get them their land back... and perhaps, while they are there, they could help to democratize the region..."

In 1945, immediately on the heels of the Holocaust, if you spoke to people located in Europe and North America, only the most "ideological" anti-nationalists, anti-colonialists, and anarchists would have made the argument that establishing a Jewish state in Palestine was bound to lead to catastrophe. Most liberals and leftists would have regarded such an argument as being in just as poor taste as objecting to the Palestinian flag today. Someone might have made the argument that Jewish people, having spent so much time stateless and oppressed themselves, would not be as likely to reproduce colonialism and state violence. Others surely would have emphasized that “the place to agitate for a ‘post-national’ world is not during an anti-genocide struggle.”

As it turns out, today, not only has Israel failed to address the threat of anti-Semitism — we now have to combat both anti-Semitism and an additional genocidal state. 

Presuming it is established in Palestine, a Palestinian state will not be a settler-colonial state, so it will probably turn out somewhat differently than Israel. It will probably end up somewhere between the South African example and some of the other states in the Mideast. In other words, it might solve some of the problems facing Palestinians, while perpetuating others.

In my opinion, we can fight fiercely against the Israeli genocide and for the lives and autonomy of Palestinians without setting aside our critique of nationalism, "national liberation," and the state. Keeping our critique of the state central to our organizing will protect us against some of the pitfalls that wait for us in the future. On a long enough timeline, the advantages of doing so will become clear. 

By then, of course, many new people will be involved in these conversations, and it will be necessary to discuss this all over again.

Jonah: I find the argument just made compelling, at least in its second half. While I agree that South Africa is a more accurate comparison than India, the differences are still stark. Israel is a settler colonial state yes, but it is also a Spartan Society with a carve out for a religious scribe class,  a lot more nukes, and population wise the European settlers in SA were 10% of the populous while the population of occupied Palestine dominated by the Spartan Society has the Spartans and Scribes at half (because many of the Indigenous have been ethnically cleansed over the past 78 years or have been more recently slaughtered). 

I don't know how to solve this problem of concentrated mass death (barring global revolution) and won't pretend to. But what I do recognize is that in the movement to stop the Palestinian Genocide the objective vanguard is Hamas and those that fight to end the genocide are doing so with that being the case. Right now their proposals and strategic initiatives against the Spartans and Scribes are what matter.

I fear this new piece will not offer an alternative strategy but just encourage disengagement from the fight. An unacceptable option.  The insurrectionary anarchist math problem is still paramount. Does your counter-proposal offer something equally or more intense and conflictual? If not, throw it in the trash.

Isaiah: Zooming out a bit, the linking of self-determination and national sovereignty for revolutionaries is the result of the Stalinist/bolshevik reading of the national question, which deeply shaped subsequent national liberation struggles. At the time, the bolsheviks were articulating their vision of national self determination against competing visions, chiefly the vision of cultural autonomy advanced by the Bund which did not imagine that national liberation was tied to ethnic territorial control. The specific context of the debates about the so-called national question shifted substantially as they moved from within Europe and Russia to struggles against colonization more broadly. As anti-authoritarians, anarchists, and fellow travelers trying to escape the bad loop of history, I think it is deeply worthwhile to be critical of the nation-state form and sovereignty as the telos of struggles for self determination. We have over a century of examples of how this plays out, from Zionism to countless instances of decolonization. Our comrades historically were murdered en masse by nationalists and people who pushed for this particular vision of sovereignty  and we have seen countless revolutions perverted by the political conditions this statist horizon imposes. We can still be in solidarity with people fighting for their own liberation, but I think being honest about how visions of liberation are shaped by the imperial state form and affirming the aspirations and theorizations that think beyond the dead ends of nationalism and statism is a worthy endeavor. I personally feel that an important ideological struggle against Zionism is unearthing the competing political horizons that it conspired with the Nazis and the Bolsheviks to bury, and that would be in part the Bundist vision of liberation for oppressed peoples that doesn’t require the state form.

Jay: "Supporting Palestinian autonomy," if this is a phrase people here are comfortable with, means supporting a Palestinian state. It's a national liberation struggle. That's what millions of Palestinians have fought and died for a century over. If "Palestinian Autonomy" means anything other than how millions of Palestinians understand it, then it's an American fantasy. ([Sarcastically]: if your vision is just for a networked set of communes, there is already such a movement in Palestine: you support kibbutzim.) 

Sharma herself provides no programmatic alternative when asked. She literally says: "What is to be done? We need to begin with political education and a concerted effort that as long as there has been nationalism, there has been anti-nationalism." 

While it's tautological, it's also highly abstracted from the real events on the ground. And it is a completely insulting way for us to participate in the Palestine movement. Have you all read Andreas Malm’s response to Matan Kaminer, “Standing with the Palestinian resistance”? 

Isaiah: You can concretely support material struggles against genocide and the US war machine and be part of popular fronts with nationalists without totally abandoning or conceding your own politics. Being able to be in solidarity critically is what separates anti-authoritarian visions of solidarity from the deference in the statist anti-imperialism of the tankies and clearly articulating anti-nationalist critiques is a worthy endeavor. Opposing nationalism with visions of pluralistic secular co-existence is one such anti-nationalist position. The Zapatistas' vision of un mundo donde quepan muchos mundos (a world in which many worlds fit) or the systems of cultural autonomy present in democratic confederalism provide powerful present day examples of how oppressed peoples fighting liberation struggles articulate anti-nationalist visions. Doing so does not and has not stopped me from materially organizing against the genocide in the United States or being in solidarity with the Palestinian people as they struggle for their survival. 

Furthermore, the particular theoretical debates about the national question and the meaning of national liberation as taken up by Palestinians is much more complex and fraught than claiming that Palestinians are uniformly nationalist would suggest. George Habash, Ghassan Khanafani and Edward Said, e.g., in different ways were all were deeply critical of nationalism as a horizon and spent a lot of time thinking and writing about Palestinian liberation and self determination within larger visions of class struggle and anti-imperial internationalism that rejected certain forms of ethno-nationalism. 

(The kibbutzim were not a vision of cultural autonomy, they were a ethno-nationalist settler project pushed by Zionists in stark ideological competition with people who fought and died to advance their anti-nationalist vision of liberation, most of whom were murdered in the holocaust or executed in Stalinist purges. The Zionist response to Jewish anti-nationalism today sounds a lot like the calls for pragmatism in the face of genocide  you are articulating: “how can you imagine Jewish safety and freedom without a state?” During Mandate Palestine, The Bund’s anti-nationalist analysis led them to be the first people after Palestinians themselves to predict the likely results of Zionism, and their historical foresight is one of many reasons to take the importance of anti-nationalism seriously).

The nationalist vision of homogenous ethnic territorial rule that divides the world up into nation-states produced first the “Jewish question” in Europe in the 19th century and then the “national question” in the 20th. The holocaust and Zionism were both answers to questions.  It feels urgent to think beyond the frame of national sovereignty even as we struggle against ethnostates committing genocides and in solidarity with people resisting their own annihilation. In this context, efforts like those of The Peoples Want to rethink internationalism from below provide an alternative vision of how we might imagine global anti-imperialist solidarity.

Jay: To be clear, I am not abandoning my politics. I am explaining them.

Maurizio: Thank you all for these thoughts and reflections. Although there are many specifics to consider, as you have all brilliantly laid out, i think we may get lost trying to understand the specifics of the struggle against the temporary state of Israel and its significance to the worldwide struggle against US imperialism if we lock in too closely to just what is taking place between the river jordan and the gaza strip.

The “special relationship” between the United States (the global hegemon) and Israel serves to prop up a specific balance of powers within the single planetary division of labor (capitalism). in order to facilitate extractive trade ("unequal exchange" etc but also for the oil) and to maintain comprador monarchical regimes throughout west asia (saudi arabia etc), the core countries have established a military regime (israel) in western asia. 

Struggles which disrupt the links between western asia and the united states should be broadly recognized as system oppositional, since they destabilize the real arrangement of powers on earth. Our civilization is propped up (among other things) by oil. We should not see US domination of western asia as one of many other equivalent factors propping up our society. It is a somewhat uniquely important relationship, something reiterated continuously by the christian nationalists as well. controlling the Panama canal, the suez canal, the bab al-mendeb, the strait of hormuz, the south china sea, and the arctic: many of the world's troubles can be explained when we understand that these places are uniquely important to the world capitalist system. Palestine happens to be close to three of those very important places.  

The global hegemon has has been disrupted in the red sea and also in the strait of hormuz. the regional war suggests that the world system is continuing to fracture and they may not be able to guarantee anything in the long term. the "arab spring" was a significant event for many people, hamas included. the events of the past few years signify, from the perspective of those events, the rolling-back of the balance of forces established as a result of those events, with the exception of Yemen. The dictatorships in egypt and jordan cannot likely survive without israel and the US. for the jihadi regime in syria, this is doubly true. the defeat and destruction of US imperialism in western asia, represented most acutely by its political articulation as zionism, would likely catalyze revolutions in egypt, jordan, syria, lebanon, saudi arabia, qatar, bahrain, "UAE", "Kuwait," and iraq (potentially other places as well). with the principal contradiction in the area transformed, it is possible to imagine additional revolutions taking place around, for instance, class-based challenges in places like iran, pakistan, etc. 

For those of us who still believe that the mass uprising represents our greatest chances to change the world, and for those of us who believe that an international revolution is the only true safeguard against the counterrevolution, it is my view that we should view the struggle in southern Lebanon and in Palestine with unique curiosity. Just as we know that destroying the police will not automatically create an anarchist communist utopia and would, in all likelihood, open up a vortex of competing interests within which no guarantees can be made, we should support the destruction of Israel and the collaborator regimes which support it.

Within that struggle, there are many discourses flying around, just as with struggle against the police. we can put forward our thing (abolish the state) without telling people who want, for instance, to jail the killer cops, that their demand itself is actually part of the problem (although i know many of you have done precisely this).

Jonah: Maybe this is in poor taste but unless I’m mistaken, this thread hasn't addressed this problem yet. This piece can be understood as in junior coalition with the most prominent anti-state, and anti-nationalist commentator on the Palestinian Genocide. An individual who was recently disgraced for having associated heavily with the bourgeoisie's most infamous pedophile sex trafficker. I'm referring ofc to Noam Chomsky and his associations with Jeffrey Epstein. 

If we want to influence the thoughts and actions of those moved to act because of the genocide, best to not have yourself lumped in with that academic. His associations actually tarnish and set back all of us who believe in The Beautiful Idea. 

Chomsky's denunciations of BDS and calling for a "no state solution" fell on deaf ears to those who are actually fighting and dying for freedom in the Levant. 

Going more Global System critique and angel as mentioned above is probably our better option. 

Christina: I want to respond to something Jay said. I think political education is important, especially around the distinct concepts of the nation, the nation-state, and Sharma’s concept of “nationalized state sovereignty.” All of these mean different things, and although they often get somewhat conflated in propaganda, we need to be able to distinguish between them. These three positions are as follows: 

1. First, there is an argument for a “post nation-state world” during the Holocaust, which says something like: “A Jewish state will not solve the problem of genocide, and will ultimately not protect the target of the Holocaust, the Jewish people.”

2. Second, there is an argument for a “post-national” world during the Holocaust, which would say: “There is materially no group(nation) of people connected by language, religion, tradition and custom called the Jewish people, or any ‘people’ for that matter, and we are all just humans at varying degrees of cultural similarity. The nation as a concept should cease to exist as a political framework because it always leads to violent nationalism.” (Maybe we don’t like the word nation, but this is what it means). 

In France, law prohibits the state from processing any demographic data on race or ethnicity, save for very specific localized research projects. There is a similar law in Germany. The essence of these laws is the fear that any state reification of national identity (besides that of “France” or “Germany”) will lead to persecution. This is essentially the argument of the anti-Deutsch movement, also. 

3. And finally, there’s an argument for “nationalized state sovereignty,” which would say: “States should exist and be organized on the basis of nations (groups of people that share some combination of language, religion, custom, and history) controlling the political power.”

These are three discrete arguments, and if we wish to clarify our own politics, we need to be able to distinguish between them. 

In my view, struggling around the second argument during an active genocide is politically absurd — would it make sense to say, right now, that there are actually no Palestinians, and no Jews? This is essentially what Sharma advances when she says “people who identify as Palestinian.”

Zora: I'm finding all these observations interesting and learning a lot! One thing I'm noticing is that a lot hangs on what the implications of a given position could be for struggles and efforts as they are currently playing out. That is, prioritizing an observation's usefulness over its correctness in some absolute sense.

One possible explanation for the difference-that-is-nevertheless-coherent is that we're each considering the situation on different timescales and from different practical positions, and then all drawing conclusions in rather abstract terms. Naturally, it is important, sooner or later, to synthesize our views; but it does make me think about how the urgency to arrive at some position is often misguided. It's very cool to see deliberation in a space without that urgency.

Liqaa: What we have here is another example of silly analysis that basically shoots any argument in the foot. The distinction between nation and nation-state is a basic nuance: in practice, nations are often multi-ethnic groupings of people who share an arbitrary territorial container. Although they were first created by some historical imperial power or modernist project, they nevertheless continue to persist as a distinct group or subjectivity of struggle predicated on the specific vectors of domination they experience, as well as cultural and familial ties. These groupings are not inherently problematic, provided they are not predicated on imperial pursuits (Japaneseness and Germanness pointing to places where the national identity itself is perhaps fundamentally bad, but still extant). 

Palestine, for example, is made of vast, affinity-driven family and kinship networks that reach far back in history to the period before the modernity; some even precede Ottoman rule, although they were certainly further galvanized by it. There’s much I could say about the transition of Ottoman rule resistance, tax and conscription dodging, resistance to the British, direct attack, and resistance to citizenizing.

Haraami: Sharma's work is marked by a striking mix of (i) historical examples and analysis that genuinely challenge and trouble our political attachments, (ii) sweeping statements which, although I may agree on principle, occasionally paper-over contextual and practical questions in frustrating ways (e.g. her remarks about flying the Palestinian flag), and (iii) an academic's lack of imagination (or at least articulation) about practical revolutionary paths forward. I think the challenge she levels is important, and shouldn't be dismissed out of hand as mere  normalization. However, for those of us who have long grappled with that challenge, there’s little new here.

There’s a recent podcast interview where she offers a more interesting angle, in my view. Here she argues that it is the duty of those who've lived through the failures of post-colonial national liberation to share those failures and try to offer a different path forward than these violent, dead-end revolutions. 

As a general trend, postcolonial nation states have extended and deepened the reach of surveillance, control, borders, and policing into the lives of their peoples, at the same time that they have intensified proletarianization and dispossession. In Home Rule, Sharma runs through a number of examples of how national sovereignties are mobilized, and how quickly national liberation produces migrant others: Nigeria's expulsion of Ghanaians, Ghana's deportation of Yoruba people under Kwame Nkrumah, the continuation of migration controls in post-apartheid South Africa, which now feed into xenophobic riots, as well as examples from Fiji, Cameroon, Indonesia, Bengal, and Pakistan. Alongside the Israeli occupation of Palestine, some of the most intense sites of occupation, land theft, and militarized border violence are today located within postcolonial nation-states themselves, often governed by political factions that are themselves direct descendants of revolutionary national liberation movements. In many of these countries, the failures of national liberation then spur reactionary movements, whether ethnonationalist or religious-fundamentalist in character, which now portray themselves as a "revolutionary" alternative to the secular, sometimes left-wing, national movements that brought about the current regimes.

The urgency of the moment, and perhaps our inability to actually imagine a liberated Palestine in our lifetime, must not be used as a cudgel against thinking beyond the nation-state form. As Sharma notes in this piece and elsewhere, and as Arab (including Palestinian) anarchists have long noted, nationalism can turn fascistic pretty quickly. If we genuinely believe in the horizon of seeing a free Palestine "within our lifetimes," I feel also committed to not seeing those gains rapidly reversed by the installment of a new domestic ruling apparatus or its encirclement by the pressures of the international political-economic order, which would have great interest in disciplining any state in Palestine, no matter how revolutionary the faction governing it. 

There can be no excuse for not engaging full-force in the revolutionary struggle for the liberation of Palestine on the basis of political impurity or contradiction (and I don’t think Sharma advocates for this). As revolutionaries, we must cultivate the capacity to remain both troubled and committed at the same time. Sharma's work, and considerations of what would happen were a Palestinian state to be realized, keep me constantly troubled, while remaining committed to the possibilities of insurgent struggles in and with Palestine. 

Any horizon beyond the nation-state, in Palestine and across the world, will emerge through those insurgent struggles, not despite them. If this is to become more than a merely ideological exercise for us, it should spur us to build actual political relationships with peoples in struggle, so that we may push the non-state horizon of possibility (anarchists, autonomous revolutionaries, non-state popular revolutionary forces) while also increasing our own strength and the resources we have to offer to those struggles, both in this current moment and in a future moment where the potential for a Palestinian state is being realized. If we want to see the emergence of something beyond the state, we had best strengthen those forces within the struggle now, and ensure we are positioned to support them in the social and political conflicts that will undoubtedly continue after the establishment of a new state. 

There are and have been avowed anarchists, as well as anarchic and non-state forms of popular organization in Palestine throughout its long history of resistance. One of the problems Sharma points out is that the nationalization of struggles and of peoples frequently leads to a denial of the concrete relations between struggles and peoples. There have long been anarchist and non-state movements across the region spanning Syria, Egypt, Iran, etc., some of which have made substantial advances in building forms of popular organization that extend beyond the nation-state. None are without complication or defeats, but the same is perhaps even more true of the record of postcolonial states. This article offers a helpful place to start.

Sharma’s argument for a “post-national” perspective admittedly feels slightly underdeveloped, and her language of “people who identify as Palestinians” is clunky and lends itself to inflammatory misunderstanding. Still, the idea that a post-national understanding is irrelevant or harmful in the midst of a genocide, and so ought not be developed, is mistaken. Perhaps the more useful “post-national” analytic would be to claim that there is no group of people that, in its essence, in its languages, religions, traditions, and customs, are separated from other peoples. The identification of "nations" does not arise from some inherent fact of their separateness. It emerges, typically, first as a sort of anthropological maneuver, then a state-building one. Often this occurs via an appropriative gesture, as when a national bourgeoisie lays claim to the customs of peasant and working peoples as part of their "national" cultural patrimony. Nation-based forms of domination (i.e., authorizing the domination and exploitation of this or that people by reference to their difference from us) are the lever that produces the people as a separate nation. Such nation-based identity claims always break down at their margins or boundary edges, where you encounter peoples who are claimed by the nation, and themselves lay claim to it, but whose cultures are more mixed, more locally specific, more entwined with their international neighbors. 

Focusing on a “nation" can emphasize abstract ideas of cultural homogeneity at the expense of an attention to the concrete ways of organizing life, kinship, ritual, meaning, resistance in given places and times. The latter often challenge and contest the sweeping and binding claims of nationality: while they may share linguistic and cultural throughlines, peoples in different villages and regions of the same nation may in fact live highly different lives, and may be just as much defined by their relationships with neighbors of other linguistic, cultural, and ethnic lineages. Think, for example, of Jewish communities historically across the diaspora or, for example, villages in different regions of Bengal, where even the "Bengali nation" breaks down along lines of caste, religion, kinship, village organization, relation to place, and so on. These concrete modes of organizing social life also challenge the claim to the separation of nations. In reality, all cultures, places, and "nations" are thoroughly mixed and defined by elements of their external others. The reason for this is obvious: the world has been regionally and globally interconnected for far longer than capitalist modernity, and every people's way of being is shaped by other peoples. This rings particularly true when national projects confront the global organization of production and capital that underlies material subsistence, a reality that has historically demonstrated the limits of attempts to discipline capital within the bounds of the nation, and instead underscores the importance of political organization that outstrips the nation. 

There is no inherent separateness of the people in Palestine from those in Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, and beyond; Palestine itself has long been a multi-ethnic place of many peoples and traditions. Resistance and politics in Palestine has similarly been shaped by the relations between peoples and places, and constrained by the obstacles constructed to these relations. Rather than insisting that there "is no Palestinian people," the political implication should be that there are many peoples of Palestine, stretching across lines of ethnicity, language, race, and religion.  Furthermore, there is no Palestinian people that can be separated from its relations to the many other peoples across the region and world, or at least not without establishing new forms of interethnic competition and conflict. The peoples of Palestine have always been internally diverse, and any resistance and liberatory horizon in the lands of Palestine will have to reflect this fact, if they do not wish simply to set up a new national regime of state domination defined by a racially and ethnically exclusive conception of citizenship.

This debate on the nation parallels that over the state or “state-like” structures in revolutionary struggles, and the so-called “monopoly on violence.” Is this monopoly really what we mean, what we want? Who should that monopoly be exercised by — a particular ethnic, religious, or nationally-defined group? The political body that claims to represent the interests of that group of people? A particular revolutionary organization? A coalition or united front of many groups?  In Palestine, should the monopoly ultimately belong to Hamas, or the Palestinian Joint Operations Room? Who, precisely, is this monopoly to be wielded against?

Clearly, a revolution must possess sufficient force to defend itself and fend off counterrevolution. If it has the means to do so, the latter may, at least superficially, resemble state-like structures. But this problem is not well captured by the notion of the “monopoly on force” — far from being restricted to such revolutionary functions, the latter more often becomes a tool of internal repression and control. Emphasis on securing a monopoly is also likely to engender a separation between the military question and the question of popular power and self-defense, leading to an overemphasis on the development of militarized armed cadres at the expense of the equally complex and vital work of building popular political structures to defend revolutionary gains. 

In view of the recent verdict in the Prairieland case, it might be worth think through what defines a state structure and a monopoly on violence, and why such things may run counter to our aims. In Champagne’s trial and conviction, we see that there can be no legitimate claim to self-defense against the state or its agents, irrespective of the circumstances. One would presume, or hope, that in a revolutionary society defined by institutions of popular power that legislate the usage of its own armed forces, that a member of that society could have a legitimate claim of self-defense against a member of its armed forces, whether the latter assume the form of community patrols, militias, peoples defense forces, or something else. To me, this seems like one of the distinguishing factors in whether we are establishing a new form of domination or something liberatory. 

To return, finally, to the question of how revolutionaries should practically engage with nationalist struggles, I find Kuwasi Balagoon and Ashanti Alston’s older writings on this continuously generative. To quote Balagoon: 

It is beside the point whether Black, Puerto Rican, Native American and Chicano- Mexicano people endorse nationalism as a vehicle for self-determination or agree with anarchism as being the only road to self-determination. As revolutionaries, we must support the will of the masses. It is not only racism but compliance with the enemy to stand outside of the social arena and permit America to continue to practice genocide against the third world captive colonies because although they resist, they don’t agree with us. If we truly know that anarchy is the best way of life for all people, we must promote it, defend it and know that the people who are as smart as we are will accept it. To expect people to accept this, while they are being wiped out as a nation without allies ready to put on the line what they already have on the line, is crazy.

Walin: Not that relevant but the first written evidence of a person calling themselves Palestinian dates back to the 1000s from a Jerusalemite geographer. Pretty cool. 

Maurizio: Wayne Price has a useful article from the Black Flag Anarchist Review on Mikhail Bakunin and "national liberation." According to Price, Bakunin was always strongly invested in national liberation, and the development of the early European anarchist movement is maybe impossible to imagine without that.

Adi: I want to respond to a few things Macedonio said (which I will quote):

“The anarchist argument is that forming state structures that monopolize violence is…” The abstract anarchist argument doesn’t matter; or, it matters inasmuch as it’s been used by Western anarchists — with the exception of Greek anarchists — to justify their lack of decisive action against genocide over the past 2.5+ years. The fact is, even in the few instances where self-professed anarchists did briefly establish control over a territory en masse, they too had to create state-like structures (analogous to militaries and secret police) to monopolize violence.

“The region surrounding Palestine is full of post-colonial states…” This is false. Rather: neocolonial states set in place by Western imperialism with the fall of the Ottoman empire. Algeria would be a better analogy, but it's hardly "the region surrounding."

Concerning Point #3, where to even begin? Jews are not indigenous to Palestine (except for a small minority of Palestinian Jews). Israel is a colonial project that is copacetic with, and dependent upon, antisemitism for its foundational narrative; it is not and never was meant to be an antidote to antisemitism (see Herzl, the founder of Zionism: “The antisemites will become our most dependable friends, the antisemitic countries our allies”). Regardless, no one is saying, "let's create a Palestinian state to solve the problem of anti-Palestinian racism"; we're saying: “let's get this colonial settler state the fuck out of existence as quickly as possible. Jews who wish to stay can become Jewish Palestinian citizens (same as the French Algerians or White South Africans who chose to stay and become citizens in their respective postrevolutionary contexts).” Absent another regional power stepping in, a Palestinian state is just the reality that will follow, given that geopolitics abhors a vacuum.

Richie: I'm reading here (in the third section and maybe also the first) the idea that the role of revolutionaries is to focus primarily on destabilizing existing structures, and that worrying about what comes next is either paralyzing or simply pointless. Would you agree with that interpretation? I'm drawing attention to it because I think it's a key strategic question that I think "we" don't have a unified vision of. 

I agree that anarchists have a history of being unpragmatic and unwilling to deal with actual reality, and that that has made us less effective. I think we should change that. But for me, the powerful thing about anarchism is its capacity to combine the oppositional and the propositional, so that the forms we choose reflect the world we are inviting people into. We can't fully control what comes after the structures holding the existent in place are destabilized, and I don't think we should hesitate out of fear that conditions aren't ripe, or because we can't yet ensure what will come next. Yet neither do I think we should forgo strategizing how we can make things fall so that they might land where we want them. And how we can fight in ways that involve experimentation in the ways we hope to live.

Liqaa: This all seems highly relevant to thinking through the ongoing cascade of global uprisings, all of which seem to revert back to business as usual (or see the emergence of a new junta) after their predecessors are overthrown.

Adi: To respond to Richie’s question: yes, sort of. I'm not saying we shouldn't worry about what comes next. My claim is that if we don't have the theoretical tools to talk about what comes next, this firstly because we refuse to reconcile anarchism with the fact that states will form and continue to exist as long as there's imperialism. Moreover, we lack the ability to impact what comes next, because we haven't created a force capable of bearing on the present.

Maurizio: Concerning what Liqaa just said, this conversation is certainly relevant to it, but I don't think it's relevant to it in the way your message seems to suggest. Overthrowing Zionism, the United States, Russia, and maybe also China would have cascading effects far and above the consequences of essentially any other similar process on the planet, and I think it's probably worth understanding that in some detail. These forces stabilize other countries beyond merely themselves, and as such possess a unique planetary governing strength; a revolution in one of them would be unlike a revolution in any of the others, even if there could obviously be similarities.

Macedonio Fernandez: Just a small side note on Bakunin: much like Errico Malatesta, and many other anarchists from that era (and from around the world), Bakunin began as a revolutionary nationalist, and then, after witnessing the shortfalls of revolutionary nationalism, embraced anarchism as a more ambitious improvement upon it. Anarchism has always existed in dialogue with nationalism — not simply as an abstract rejection of it, but rather as a way to synthesize the lessons of its failures (I’ll keep this brief for now, having written so much already, but there is a very rich history here to draw from).

Liqaa: I am unsure if revolution could happen “in” one superpower today without it happening in other segments of the planetary factory. Robust international networks would likely be required, as well as contagious popular countertheories and practices that can escape national and linguistic containers while aligning insurgents in a shared project (again, like Fanon’s decolonial vision) in a nigh simultaneous effort that outpaces the OODA loops of superpower state forces. Which, again, Algeria and Palestine do take into account.

Images: Luc Chéry