Beyond the Master's Tools for Palestine

- By Nada Elia

Graffiti for Palestine at the Teacher-Student Centre, University of Dhaka. Photo by Frameofashik, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Beyond Politicians
      As Israel’s war on the Palestinian people escalated, in the aftermath of Hamas’ October 7 attack on a rave and two kibbutzim in southern Israel, protests erupted around the globe. Educators and grassroots activists organized teach-ins. Everyone who had ever signed a petition calling for justice in Palestine received dozens of emails asking them to call their representatives and sign yet more petitions. By early 2024, a number of cities across the USA, as well as some professional associations and trade unions, had issued resolutions calling for a ceasefire, and demanding that the United States stop funding the genocide.

Audre Lorde taught us that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.”[1] Specifically, Lorde urges us to consider “What does it mean when the tools of a racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy? It means that only the most narrow parameters of change are possible and allowable.”[2]

Our so-called representatives are fully aware of the groundswell of horrified opposition to Israel’s savagery. The liberation of Palestine, however, will not come from them. Politicians at the service of empire in Europe and North America—even as they have renamed empire “democracy”—are in no position to disempower empire’s spawn. Nor are they capable of relating to, or comprehending, the needs and aspirations of the Indigenous peoples of the world. Even progressive politicians in the U.S. system can only act within the “most narrow parameters of change.”
 

Beyond Nation-States
     Israel did not morph into a violent, racist, occupying juggernaut gradually, haphazardly, after decades of innocence. Rather, it was birthed as such. Europe’s imperial politicians deemed it perfectly acceptable (to them) that a new nation-state, populated by European colonizers, be built on the Eastern coast of the Mediterranean, upon the ethnic cleansing of an Indigenous people. In their minds, since the Indigenous Palestinians did not have an independent “nation-state”; they could not be dispossessed. This is the basis of the colonizer’s slogan “a land without a people for a people without a land.”

Yet indigeneity precedes nation-states, which themselves are a relatively recent European concept. France after the French Revolution of 1787-1799 is widely cited as the world’s first nation-state. Imposing a nineteenth-century European concept upon a people who had identified with their land for thousands of years did not change that people’s attachment to their home. The creation of Israel was acknowledged by all involved to be an act of settler colonialism.[3]

The Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island did not have independent “nation-states” with recognizable political borders, yet there is general recognition that they were dispossessed by the creation of the United States of America. Why then deny that the Palestinian people were similarly dispossessed? Even under Ottoman rule prior to the British Mandate, the land of Palestine was certainly recognized as Palestine. The Palestinian people, in their plentiful diversity, belonged to the land, even if they did not “own” it. Indigeneity is stewardship, identity, not real-estate transactions. 

The politicians and diplomats to which we appeal continue to be invested in the two-state formula. This so-called solution imposes a newly created Israel atop most of historic Palestine, a scenario irreconcilable with justice.

Beyond the UN
      The stated mission of the United Nations is to maintain international peace. However, five member states—the United States, United Kingdom, China, Russia, and France—known as the  “Permanent Five,” each hold veto power over any Security Council resolution. Their permanent status on the Security Council, with the irrevocable veto prerogative, was their non-negotiable condition for joining the United Nations. The United States has used its veto power over 50 times to block resolutions that are critical of Israel. The United Nations is the intergovernmental organization that facilitated the birth of Israel. The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which offers a crucial lifeline to millions of Palestinian refugees, repeatedly finds itself embroiled in, and incapacitated by, imperial politics. In January 2024, following Israeli allegations that 12 employees of this agency were involved in the October 7 attacks, nine countries suspended their aid to UNRWA, thus inflicting collective punishment on a population already deeply in the throes of a manufactured humanitarian catastrophe. This action was taken despite the fact that the allegations have yet to be substantiated, and that the UN immediately terminated the contracts of ten of the twelve employees who allegedly were involved in the attack. The remaining two have been killed. Israel has long sought to disband UNRWA, as the agency’s director, Philipe Lazzarrini, explains: “It is a long-term political goal because it is believed that if the aid agency is abolished, the status of the Palestinian refugees will be resolved once and for all—and with it, the right of return. There is a much larger political goal behind this.”[4]
 

Beyond Oslo
      Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, is an example of a Palestinian who has risen to the highest possible ranks of “global acceptability” within the magisterial discourse. The Palestinian Authority was set up in 1994, pursuant to the 1993 Oslo Accords. A majority of Palestinians staunchly opposed the Oslo Accords, denouncing the agreement as a globally orchestrated plan to strip Palestinian sovereignty in the guise of a peace treaty. Rather than serve the Palestinian people, the Palestinian Authority has brutally repressed protests against Israel, evidence of the embattled Abbas’ subservient desire to retain his position and delusionary prestige. But even the slavish Abbas cannot satisfy Israel. His authoritarian suppression of his own people’s desire to be free has earned him their scorn, while failing to secure him any respect from the United States and Israel.

The United Nations, having created the modern nation-state of Israel and institutionalized the permanent privileging of the United States, cannot undo the harm it has unleashed. Respectability politics, the colonized mind’s aspiration to emulate and endear oneself to the master, cannot help dispossessed communities. Seeking to ingratiate oneself to the oppressor is inevitably self-defeating. “President Abbas,” with his limited power of governance in the internationally designated “Areas A and B” of a fragmented, amputated homeland, was never in a position to liberate Palestine.[5]
 

Beyond Representation
      Within the United States, and on a much smaller scale, we have an example of attempting “change from within.” In July 2021, Filastine Srour,[6] a Palestinian American lieutenant in the New York Police Department (NYPD), was promoted to the rank of captain. This distinction made the Bronx-born Srour the highest-ranking Arab American woman in the NYPD, and the first Arab American woman to reach the rank of Captain.

“Captain Filastine” was widely celebrated by Arab, Muslim, and Arab American organizations and communities. Yet her elevation did not alleviate the profiling and repression of Muslim and Arab Americans. Instead, it committed her to leadership within a masculinist police force with a long-tarnished record of surveilling and brutalizing people of color. This record includes a decades-long “stop and frisk” program and a program that spied on Muslims and Arab Americans for nearly ten years.

The NYPD, like many other metropolitan U.S. police forces, maintains active exchange programs with counterparts in Israel. Activists for justice for Palestine have long organized to end these joint trainings, which include sessions with the Israeli Border Police, the force charged with preventing breaches in Israel’s illegal Apartheid Wall. As an expansionist colonial power, Israel itself does not recognize historical borders. Israel illegally occupies Palestinian, Syrian, and Lebanese land, while blocking the Palestinian people’s right of return to the homes they were expelled from in 1947-48. As a high-ranking officer in the NYPD, “Captain Filastine” may even have trained with the Israeli Border Police, who enforce illegitimate state violence against her own people.

“Captain Filastine” was rapidly embroiled in accusations of improper behavior. A successful law suit by a former NYPD police officer claims she was aware of specific instances of rape and persistent sexual harassment and violence amongst her officers that she failed to address, blaming instead the woman who came forward with the accusations.[7] Srour’s  rise within the ranks of a sexist, racist, anti-Arab, and deeply Islamophobic police force came to an end in August 2023, when she was removed from her post, and she moved from commanding a precinct to working inside an office.
 

Beyond Reform
      The need for a radically different approach to ending Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people can be understood through the analytical framework of abolition. Abolition seeks to eliminate an oppressive system completely, rather than reform it, because the latter endeavor suggests that the “system,” whether it be slavery, policing, or incarceration, is not inherently wrong but has merely gone astray. As such, reforms would restore the system to its original form.

The inadequacy of reform is most obvious in the case of slavery, which had to be abolished, not improved; it is understood that there can be no “gentler, kinder” form of enslavement. Reforming a system, on the other hand, is tantamount to believing in it and seeking to make it function even better. Thus a “reformed” police force would police us more effectively, even though policing at its very origin serves to protect wealth and its owners. Prison reform would expand the prison industrial complex, to avoid overcrowding, but does not concern itself with the criminalization of poverty, addiction, and mental illnesses that creates the need for more prison cells. Reforming the police invariably entails increasing the budget for policing (the number of officers, their equipment, their “diversity training”), a fiscal measure that takes even more support away from the social services that are needed to prevent the criminalization of the poor and mentally ill, who make up the majority of the incarcerated. Hence the most basic criticism of “reform”: it validates the institution it is trying to improve.

Appeals for justice in Palestine made to members of the U.S. Congress are appeals to representatives of a settler-colonial state to “reform” another settler-colonial state. When in 1987 then-Senator Biden justified to Congress his support for Israel, he explained: “Were there was not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel, to protect her interests in the region.”[8] The American two-party system has consistently forced us to choose the “lesser evil” of two candidates vying for the leadership of the world’s hypermilitarized imperial superpower. The outcome is our current crisis, where Biden—the “Not Trump President”—is endorsing an amply documented genocide, financing this genocide, and offering political immunity to the country whose foot soldiers are carrying out this genocide.

Zionism is the ideology behind the creation of the modern nation-state of Israel, and it sought to create an ethno-nationalist, exclusivist, supremacist country on the ruins of the land’s Indigenous people. What would a “reformed” colonial ethno-supremacist country look like? We Palestinians are not looking to achieve a gentler, kinder Zionism. Zionism hinges on and has always necessitated our dispossession, our ethnic cleansing, and the violation of our human and collective rights.
 

Beyond the Two-State Delusion
      Looking for a solution that follows the outline of the oppressive system we are seeking to abolish is delusionary, and counterproductive. No configuration of the two-state solution can bring justice to the Palestinians displaced from Yaffa, Haifa, or Acca—to name but a few of Israel’s most popular cities and resorts. Even securing greater rights for Palestinians in present-day Israel would not restore Palestinian sovereignty within that country, which simply cannot accommodate Indigenous rights.

At best, the proposed Israel-Palestine two-state “solution” would replace the one current apartheid state with two apartheid states. Looking for the possibility of “reform” also distracts us from recognizing that the alternative is already in place—and gaining ground. With our civil disobedience, our shutting down of business as usual, our disruption of colonial events, our speaking truth to power, we are already practicing radical change. We Palestinians may be the “wretched of the earth” whose suffering is most televised and debated today, but other criminalized, marginalized, dispossessed, displaced communities recognize their circumstances in ours, as we do ours in theirs.

This understanding has always been central to decolonial, Indigenous feminisms. And today, it is the leadership of decolonial, Palestinian, and other Indigenous feminists, and feminists of color generally, that is shaping the moment, with its defiant refusal to settle for the master’s carrot. Indigenous feminists such as Winona LaDuke are the ones who told us we should not aspire to a bigger piece of the pie, we should nourish ourselves from a different pie altogether. Black feminists such as Andrea Ritchie and Mariame Kaba have been instrumental in explaining that policing is brutality, is violence, and thus ending violence against women and trans people of color necessitates abolishing the police.[9] Feminists in Palestine have told us there can be no free homeland without free women, arguing for the necessity of organizing for social and political liberation simultaneously, as neither of these alone can result in freedom for all members of any community.[10] And Palestinian feminists in the Far Diaspora are shutting down colonial feminism, exposing “Western and colonial discourses and policies that deploy the language of liberating women to justify invasions, genocides, military occupations, resource extractions, and labor exploitations.”[11]

We must also, however, be careful in planning the future, reunified state, from the river to the sea. We must look at post-apartheid South Africa not only as a model of (and inspiration for) a dispossessed people rising up against their oppressor, but also, importantly, as a cautionary tale.

In South Africa, the Freedom Charter adopted in 1955 would have allowed for land restitution, nationalization of natural resources as well as capital, equitable housing, education, and other measures to redress the harm of decades of settler colonialism and racial capitalism. These necessary correctives, however, were later abandoned to appease the Western powers and white capital. Concessions were made to the “master,” resulting in a continuation of Black South Africans’ woes after the abolition of apartheid. It is not the duty of the oppressed to cater to the comfort level of the oppressor—that demand is one of the master’s tools and must be rejected.

But the struggle is not all about Palestine, of course. Because Palestine is a feminist issue, a queer issue, an immigrant issue, a refugee issue, an incarceration issue, an anti-racism issue, a decolonial issue, and so much more. This understanding will guide us till we reach our destination, from which we will then look around, and uphold other oppressed communities, because we are all connected.

We may not be sufficiently represented in the so-called “halls of power,” in Congress or on the boards of financial institutions, media conglomerates, and universities. But we have the growing numbers at the grassroots. And while politicians and administrators follow what is convenient or profitable at any given moment, frequently shifting allegiances and priorities, our determination to be free, and live in dignity, is a constant, a North Star that does not shift. We cherish life, teach life, and are determined to preserve life. Our sumud—our steadfastness, perserverance, and defiance against the forces of death and destruction are proud indications that the Palestinian psyche is free.

It has not been, and never will be, tamed by the master’s discourse.
 

NADA ELIA teaches in the American Cultural Studies program at Western Washington University, where she is affiliated with the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program. She is the author of Greater Than the Sum of Our Parts: Feminism, Inter/Nationalism, and Palestine.

Notes