A Fanonian Perspective on Israel and Palestine

The perpetual timelessness of repeating historic mistakes can only be combated with timeless, prudent and even prescient logic. Frantz Fanon’s work provides an important perspective to understand the ongoing genocide in Gaza. 

Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth was published shortly before his death in 1961. His experience as a Black man during the Algerian War for independence from France (1954 to 1962) is just one complex manifestation in the infinite historical sea of Black-Arab relations. His contribution is a timeless observation of the fundamentals of political and armed struggle. In Wretched of the Earth and his other writings, he touches upon various topics including national culture and the role of political parties, all within the scope of decolonization. Perhaps most significant to his legacy, however, are his observations about the violence that produces, sustains and is required in the deconstruction of a colonial situation.

The war on Gaza is first and foremost a colonial war. It became a colonial war from the moment Palestinians were displaced in 1948. In his book, The Question of Palestine (1979), Palestinian-American scholar, Edward W. Said, discusses how the West was directly responsible for the creation of the Israeli state through the 1917 Balfour Declaration and in the 1948 partition of Palestine, the physical creation of the Israeli state. During the First World War, the British government with the support of the United States released the Balfour Declaration in support of Jewish settlement in Palestine. Palestine then was part of the Ottoman Empire, Great Britain’s adversary in the war. After the war ended and the Ottomans were defeated, the region of ‘Mandatory Palestine’ was brought under British colonial control until 1948, allowing Great Britain to legislate the division of Palestine and the Israeli state, which the US also endorsed, bringing Israel into national existence and recognition. In that sense, Zionism and the Israeli state has been tethered to the Euro-American imperialist project since the early twentieth century. Indeed, as Said writes, ‘for although it coincided with an era of the most virulent Western anti-Semitism, Zionism also coincided…with the period of unparalleled European territorial acquisition in Africa and Asia.’

Thus, Zionism at its core is quite an archetypal colonial situation. Those from elsewhere have removed a pre-existing community from the land so they can settle there. Like every other colonial situation, it has its peculiarities, some glaring. Yet, there is something very familiar about what we are witnessing in our present moment: the Israel invasion of Gaza. Israel’s use of technologically advanced explosives, guns, melee abuse, blockades and famine against the Palestinians is reminiscent of such bloody scenes of revolution and repression prevalent throughout the twentieth century during two World  Wars and a vast landscape of decolonization movements. The reproduction of such a situation in Palestine, which began in the twentieth but spilled over into the twenty-first century has made us critically aware that even in so called post-colonial world, as Fanon writes in Wretched of the Earth, colonialism persists ‘like the smoking ashes of a burnt-down house after the fire has been put out, which still threaten to burst into flames again.’

Although none of Fanon’s major works written throughout the 1950s directly address the Israel-Palestine debate as they focused on the particular situation in Algeria, there can be little doubt of their transcendence both geographically and temporally. Not only did Fanon integrate the struggles of African peoples across the world in his analyses, he also included those of the Arab, Latin American, Caribbean and Asian communities, amongst others. This is precisely the reason that his works reached the hands and hearts of leaders globally across racial, ethnic and national backgrounds. As such, in discussing Black engagement on the Israel-Palestine question, we find that it is always within the context of the struggle against colonialism and imperialism more broadly...