Israel’s brutal occupation of Palestine has unveiled and deepened ideological divides in debates about state power and the use of violence; ethnonationalism and the ‘right to exist’; mass mobilization and solidarities across difference. At the heart of these debates is a growing awareness of the limits of Western liberal democracy and a call for new vocabularies and frameworks for political action that echo and extend Black internationalist and Third-Worldism movements of the twentieth century.
‘Everything now, we must assume, is in our hands; we have no right to assume otherwise.’
— James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time, 1963.
In March 2002, a delegation from the International Parliament of Writers visited the Gaza Strip, among other parts of the Occupied Palestinian Territories. The delegation, invited by the Palestinian poet, Mahmoud Darwish, and under the aegis of the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, included writers such as Portugal’s José Saramago, the American writer, Russell Banks, Italy’s Vicenzo Conselo, and the Nigerian writer and playwright, Wole Soyinka.
Deeply troubled by the experience, in particular the worsening plight of Palestinians since the Nakba (Arabic word for catastrophe) of 1948 in which thousands of Palestinians were forcefully exiled from their lands by Zionist militia (making way for the creation of the State of Israel), Soyinka would reflect on the visit in a 2002 essay titled ‘The Isle of Polyphemus’. In the essay, Soyinka likened the ‘blind fury’ with which the state of Israel maintained its military occupation to that of Polyphemus, the giant cyclops in Homer’s Odyssey...
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