Introduction
What does it mean to produce and engage in liberatory scholarship and teaching pedagogy on Palestine, given the extant forms of policing, surveillance and censorship that continue to target scholars of Palestine within the US academy? Why do these forms of repression appear even within a field of study—ethnic studies—that grew from emancipatory radical student movements seeking to dismantle (settler) colonial and white-supremacist hegemony in scholarship and teaching pedagogy? 1 And how might we, as scholars engaged in the radical work and theory of abolition and decolonization, protect the field of ethnic studies from a mutilation of the pedagogical structure that such repression seeks to accomplish? To be clear about these terms, by abolition, I mean the insurgent praxis of Black rebellion that sought to abolish not only the system of but the foundational logics of racial-chattel-slavery. This insurgent praxis was not only sustained but renewed following the passage of the 13th amendment which abolished slavery except for as a punishment for crime. Since then, abolition continues to forcefully recreate itself as an ethos, school of thought, praxis, and movement, that redefines Blackness, and Black being against white-supremacist state violence codified in multiple liberal and neoliberal reconfigurations. In the contemporary moment abolitionist praxis seeks a dismantlement of the prison-industrial-complex and carceral logic that animates racist-state violence: policing, extrajudicial killing, racial surveillance and captivity of Black bodies ( Browne 2015). But abolition also allows for and invites rebellion among all those whose lives are threatened by the white-being character of the state and its carceral logic and structure as well. This carceral logic extends to structures of regulated exclusion, taking form for example in the erection of carceral borders and border regimes to keep refugees and migrants out or contained, and the counter-insurgent war against knowledge curators, artists, and activists that question the fundamental coloniality and whiteness of the US state. I recognize true decolonization as that which has always been an abolitionist worldview and practice as well. Decolonization seeks not only to undue structures and ideologies of coloniality but to foreground Indigenous ways of being, knowing, and understanding in its place. When I refer to decolonization however, I am not referring only to an epistemic, psychological, or discursive project—I quite literally believe in the rematriation of stolen Indigenous lands to its stewards. By speaking and practising decolonization within, to, and against the academy and university, I am concerned with how our work within this space enables this rematriation.
Within this framework, I offer this review of Sherene Razack’s Nothing Has to Make Sense (2022), Saree Makdisi’s Tolerance is a Wasteland (2022) and Lara Sheehi and Stephen Sheehi’s Psychoanalysis Under Occupation (2022) to explore partial causality for the institutionalized repression and absence of Palestinian studies within the field of ethnic studies as an institutional project. I propose that these three texts, when read in conversation with one another and alongside the rich tradition of decolonial and abolitionist thought and practice, offer important insights relevant to protecting the radical potential of the ethnic studies project from Zionist liberal co-optation.
On Palestinian Space(s) in Ethnic Studies
I approach this line of inquiry from multiple subject positions. I am a Palestinian/Arab exile, a guest in the Indigenous lands of Turtle Island living on occupied Tongva land, a scholar situated within the field of ethnic studies, and an organizer who draws invaluable lessons from transnational youth and feminist movements as the theory, method and everyday “stuff” of Palestinian liberation praxis. Like so many, I arrived to the field of ethnic studies believing in the promise of a different kind of university: one where anti/decolonial scholarship 2 and teaching pedagogy could breathe freely and turn into new life-forms and life-lines. 3 Early on, I thought of ethnic studies as an intellectual site of refuge, where I and other Palestinian thinkers could protect ourselves, defy, and wait out the insidious forms of Zionist discipline and punishment normalized in many other academic fields. Within ethnic studies, we as Arab scholars are invited not only to bear witness and engage, but give in reciprocal practice, toward the generative lessons and living histories of revolutionary Black, Indigenous and Third World liberation struggles: a practice Palestinian revolutionaries have always done (e.g., Abdulhadi 2018). And yet, even as ethnic studies offers me and so many other Arab scholars a reprieve; the breath we take, as Lara and Stephen Sheehi’s work reveals is a central part of our individual and collective selfhood, remains constrained by the liminalities which continue to condition the very place we were promised was a site of liberatory knowledge-making praxis. To be clear, I don’t mean to suggest here that ethnic studies is not a liberatory project. Nor do I mean to suggest that there resides a particular exceptionalism to the Palestinian experience within the field. Free thought and practice permeates within ethnic studies in ways traditionally denied to scholars and students of other fields. After all, it is by way of my own ethnic studies training, alongside grassroots Palestinian organizing, that I learned the philosophies, histories, and freedom strategies and struggles of Indigenous, Black, and Third World peoples. It is from such frameworks that I developed a profound sense of responsibility to uphold and foster a continuity of those liberatory histories while also being reminded that a retrieval and renewal of Palestinian liberatory thought and practice also requires responsibility and intentionality as well.
I bring into question the uneasiness of taking the ethnic studies institutional project as a liberatory given, because I have felt and observed how Zionism, anti-Arab, anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian racism operate even within this space. 4 As Palestinians, we cannot feign surprise when we are denied our truth within the academy when it is precisely, as Edward Said once described it, a permission to narrate that has long been denied to us by the design of Zionist settler-colonialism ( Said 1984). Yet even in preparing to expect punishment, erasure, and discipline within the academy and university, to experience it within the field of ethnic studies is a painful and confusing reckoning. Painful because it is a reproduction of the physiological process of settler-colonial erasure and racial-colonial enclosure and carcerality that transcends the land of historic Palestine, operationalized for those of us in exile through the epistemic vanishment and violence we face in global historic registrars, world maps, classrooms, and discursive regimes. Indeed, such epistemic violence has long been an intrinsic feature of Zionist settler-colonialism, exemplified in the ways settler state violence has targeted Palestinian archives ( Sleiman 2016). Confusing because this kind of authority still holds a capacious power to displace, expunge, and silence us, in our very institutional homes of anti and decolonial thought and praxis: within ethnic studies. It does not make sense, as Sherene Razack attests, and yet it still is.
I open with this reflection to explain a felt-phenomenon that the scholar of Palestine within the US academy navigates on the day-to-day. This phenomenon is shaped by the myriad forms of discipline, erasure, and punishment we are up against intellectually, ontologically, methodologically, politically, and institutionally when teaching, writing, thinking and organizing for Palestinian freedom. Within ethnic studies, this phenomenon is in large part caused by the enduring institutional absence, and as Saree Makdisi summons us to consider, occlusions, of Arab, Muslim and Palestinian studies. Alone, I believe these three books hold the power to explain partial causality for this institutional absence from historical, theoretical, cultural, material, political, psychoanalytic and legal vantage points. But read alongside the critical genealogies of abolitionist and decolonial thought and practice, these texts reveal that the phenomena is not specific to Palestine or the Palestinians alone.
Palestine Is Not an Exception
The field of ethnic studies institutionally functions within and is secured by means of colonial-state-power structures which formed the United States university/academy: sites which have always been co-constitutive of and complicit in projects of settler-colonialism, racial-chattel-slavery, racial-capitalism, imperialism, heteropatriarchy and global white supremacy (e.g., Chatterjee and Maira 2014; Ferguson 2012; Newfield 2018; Wilder 2013). To be conscious of what the Western university and academy have been and continue to be to Indigenous, Black, refugee, migrant, women, working class, queer, trans and Third World peoples and geographies, forces the scholar of Palestine to expect, even as we resist, the ruthless forms of suppression of free thought, expression, and pedagogy we face in our own scholarship and teaching.
As Razack, Makdisi, and Sheehi and Sheehi’s works reveal, occlusions and erasures of Palestine and the Palestinians are instrumentally operationalized through liberal discursive teleologies that lie at the heart of racist and settler-colonial state power. Yet liberal teleologies have always obfuscated, naturalized, and denied the past and present of state violence beyond its application to Palestine/Palestinians. Decolonial and abolitionist practitioners and thinkers have long illuminated how the instrumentalization of liberalism is weaponized to conceal, even as it re-configures to sustain, settler-colonial and racist-state power. Their works demonstrate how both concealment and reconfiguration are generative in that they co-opt and therefore limit liberatory possibility.
The denial of institutional space afforded to Palestinian studies and the stigma cast upon anti-Zionist scholars and teaching practitioners, has led many over the last decade especially, to regard Palestine as an exception to free speech and academic freedom. But if we are to pay close attention to the lessons decolonial and abolitionist thinkers teach us, what is revealed is how the naturalization of settler-colonial and racist-state violence, takes form not only through disavowal but also in the very ways the university, for example, has learned to “outmanoeuvre revolutionary opposition by incorporating it.” (Bogg and Mitchell 2018: 462) Black feminist abolitionist, Julia Oparah warns of the “dangerous complicities” that accompany this incorporation by describing how liberal arts Universities, for example, contribute “moral capital” to material and transnational political economy of carcerality, militarism and capitalist warfare, in part because their association “with progressive values” conceals these complicities. Interrogating what she refers to as “the academic military-prison-industrial complex,” Oparah, among many others, elucidate how abolition within our space of the academy must seek to “dismantle those complicities and liberate the academy from its role as handmaiden to neoliberal globalization, militarism, and empire.” (Oparah 2014: 116) This work, Oparah argues, must extend beyond the production of liberatory scholarship which itself is a commodity and can be co-opted by the academic military-prison-industrial complex. Rather than regard incorporation and representation as the extent of liberatory aims, abolitionist thinkers summon us to consider in praxis, what it might mean to envision and create an otherwise possible university through our praxis and beyond what Nick Mitchell and Abigail Boggs regard as “the normative tug of liberal restoration.” ( Boggs, and Mitchell 2018: 462) They, for example, argue that an “an abolitionist approach would question the imperative to save the university, starting with the question of what is the university to be saved or what parts of it are worth saving.” (ibid.)
The lack of institutionalized space for Palestine as a line of intellectual inquiry within the field of ethnic studies is not a matter of oversight nor an unfulfilled developmental milestone of ethnic studies genealogical field formation. Nor is it a particular deviation from liberalism’s design. Its absence, rather, evidences that colonial-state-power still holds a palpable final say—permitting what is thinkable, speakable and teachable—and omitting or containing by incorporation what dangerously might destabilize the relational structure of that power even in so-called “progressive” circuits of knowledge-making. So that in the end, what is generative by thinking of abolition and decolonization through Palestine, is that it enables a clear calling out of liberalism’s complicity in settler-colonial and racist-state violence by exposing the contradiction; that which abolition and decolonization seeks not only to illuminate but to dismantle. More importantly, in thinking Palestine through abolition and true decolonization—an insurgent stream of Black and Native praxis which renders the promise of liberalism implausible—we as Palestinian scholars might become more aware of the impending risks that reside in the liberal instinctive reflex to institutionally incorporate.
Resisting that liberal reflex also functions as a verification of what Palestinians now know to be true after nearly 30 years of a failed “peace process” in which the Palestinian leadership traded in a liberation movement for the hollow promise of a state we have yet to be endowed with. There is no more evidence of the way liberal paradigms have yielded catastrophic loss of land and life for Palestinians: As I write this piece hard off the heels of the 30th anniversary of the Oslo Accords, otherwise known as the inauguration of the so-called Israeli-Palestinian peace process, Palestinians in the besieged Gaza Strip are enduring one of the most catastrophic genocides they have ever experienced in over a century of colonialization. In thinking Palestine through abolition and decolonization, we are able to build the intellectual muscle and political reflexes to recognize forms of incorporation that mitigate and temper revolutionary dissent and that yield catastrophic consequences to our core understandings of ourselves, lands, histories, movements, worldviews, and aspirations. In other words, resolution to Palestine’s institutional absence in the Western, might not in fact be a movement toward incorporation—but rather—an invitation to join abolitionists and other Indigenous decolonial movements in envisioning and co-creating an otherwise possible scholarly, pedagogical and political praxis, university and world. To borrow from Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, “It cannot be denied that the university is a place of refuge, and it cannot be accepted that the university is a place of enlightenment.” ( Harney and Moten 2013) Reading these texts together and thinking Palestine alongside decolonial and abolitionist thought invites us into a deeper exploration of what we salvage and dismantle in this place of the neoliberal university in the meantime.
I arrive at the exploration of these three books as a student of these thinkers, inspired by their tenacious dedication to revealing how the power of Zionism and anti-Muslim racism operates and is weaponized against its victims, through liberal teleologies and notions of progress, modernity, secularism and democracy. And I think of their works as a reminder of not only the urgency for, but the necessity and possibility, to think Palestine alongside, with, and through decolonization and abolition, because the machinations of settler-colonial and anti-Black racist-state violence and carcerality here within Turtle Island, manifested in our locations within the academic prison-military-industrial complex, operate in a symbiotic relation to the ideological and structural tenants that transformed Zionism from a settler-colonial and carceral ideology into a state power which conceals and naturalizes itself by purporting of its liberal values and character.
The Muslim Racial Other
In Nothing Has to Make Sense, Sherene Razack examines how anti-Muslim racism is obscured as constitutive to the formation of whiteness, white hegemony, and white supremacy here within Turtle Island and globally. As she illustrates, the category Muslim is non-legible as a racial category: a problem that at its core curtails a historically grounded structural analysis of race-making originating in Christendom and imperialism. She beautifully illustrates how anti-Muslim animus holds the power to mobilize actors of both the far right and liberal positions in an intentional dialectical process which re-enforces their positions relative to one another to forge a motley crew of those who can recognize pluralistic difference among one another through negating the humanity of the Muslim other. This, in turn, functions to form and animate the global category of whiteness as oppositional to the figure of the Muslim. Razack’s examination of how the position of the Muslim stands in as ghosts, demons, phantoms, and dream figures in the white imaginary generates an anti-Muslim effect that transcends the cultural or rhetorical domain into the site of law. In law-making space, anti-Muslim racism, spawned from unintelligible emotions, fears, and fantasies, forms an assuming rationality that legitimizes white supremacy and racialized state violence. “A Liberal position,” Razack argues, “lies at the heart of this racial governance where white subjects and white nations appoint themselves as keepers of the universal and authorize who can and cannot gain entry.” (8)
The incoherence is not accidental or even consequential: rather it is a deliberate and intentional, in that it is generative for white race-making and white hegemony. It re-enforces white entitlement in direct contradistinction to the figure of the Muslim. Whiteness is not only constructed but protected through the figure of the Muslim as the antonym to the West: those who are cast as insufficiently modern to legitimize their eviction from the political field as potential rights-bearing citizens and actors. The Muslim activates white fear of the ungovernable other. In the space of law, where the structure of anti-Muslim racism sustains white power, exists a staggering contradiction. Nothing needs to make sense, but there, anti-Muslim racialized subjugation continues unquestioned, precisely because of the lengths to which anti-Muslim actors will go to never relinquish white power.
A striking feature of the text emerges through Razack’s engagement with the ways anti-Muslim animus takes form in liberal discourses, manifesting in circuits of power that operate through structural conceptions of race, which in turn inform policy-making space. From this critique emerges a partial explanation for the harrowing institutional absence of critical Muslim studies within ethnic studies. The denial of institutional space to critical Muslim studies within the field is in part the outcome of the way liberal anxieties about the Muslim, as an antithesis to secular modernity’s construction of the human, are reproduced within a field formed to combat that very same colonial and racial logics and structuring. Razack’s book forces us to contend with this absence: can ethnic studies ever truly understand and deconstruct—historically and in the contemporary moment—whiteness, white supremacy, white entitlement, white masculinity and white femininity, if it continues to absent the figure of the Muslim in our understanding of race-making? As Razack contends;
[e]ach event from imperial wars to the occupation of lands to the global war on terror, further collapses over there (globally) and here (locally), linking all those imagined to be Muslim as enemies and importantly suturing white identities under one global frame as civilized peoples menaced by the Islamic racial other. (27)
This argument forms the basis of how white supremacy is globally manufactured, whereby white nations “envision themselves as a family of nations of superior civilizations, given that these nations close their gates to refugees and to engage in politics in keeping the barbarians out.”
Razack’s book pushes us beyond the US-centricity of our ethnic studies paradigm, not for the purposes of conditional inclusion and incorporation, nor to decentre the importance of the Black and American Indian experience within Turtle Island to privilege another frame, but to reveal core logics, practices and structures from which to understand race-making and whiteness. Her work also reveals that in the absence of a serious engagement with Islam and the figure of the Muslim, studies on race, coloniality and empire, remain constrained—mutilated perhaps—by liberalism’s design. It is at first, an affirmation of decolonial and abolitionist arguments that liberalism is not a secondary contradiction to racist and settler-colonial state violence, but co-constitutive of the primary contradiction. This reckoning thus demands a more intentional accounting for Islam and the figure of the Muslim within Indigenous decolonial and abolitionist thought and praxis even and especially in the absence of its institutionalized incorporation.
Denaturalizing Zionist Denial
When Razack’s interrogation of liberal rhetoric (namely human rights, women’s empowerment, and democracy) is placed into conversation with Saree Makdisi’s Tolerance is a Wasteland, crucial insights into the generative contradiction of liberalism’s design are revealed. Tolerance is a Wasteland summons the scholar of Palestine to contend with Zionist public relations discourse, that which not only denies space to Palestinians (in history, in land, and the attendant claims to history and land), but doubles down to deny that such denial even exists. Makdisi contends that there two-pronged process in which denial takes place: the first form relies on a denial of Palestinian history. It is often expressed through expressions such as there was never a Palestine, or the land was barren and empty. This form is followed by a second which works in such a way that the denial itself is denied. The latter form is consistent with liberalism’s function within the manufacturing of Zionist public perception: to the naked eye, it does not present itself as a denial, but rather an affirmation of Zionism and Israel’s virtues. The double denial, therefore, is in fact a process of naturalizing that which is unquestionable, unthinkable, and unspeakable.
Through this second denial, values such as tolerance, ecological justice, democracy, social pluralism, gendered and sexual justice, and technological development become central to the cultivation of the Zionist imaginary of what Israel is. Yet the frightening coherence these virtues assume within public perception takes place through a denial of—perhaps even the erasure of—Zionism’s condition of possibility: the vanishment of Palestine and the Palestinians. For example, Makdisi proposes his readers consider how Zionists affirm Israel’s eco-friendly virtue through talking points that purport Israel “made the desert bloom” or “greened the desert,” while simultaneously erasing mention of the processes that animate such ecological projects. What falls from view is the afforestation operations that annihilate Palestinian agriculture and topography, uproot Indigenous ecology and supplant it with unsustainable foreign species, and erase Palestinian place and claims to place in that process. Similarly, an affirmation of Israel’s virtues takes place in public discourse through promoting projects that brand Israel as a gay-friendly democracy. Yet Israeli public relations machines emphasized this point at the precise moment that Israel waged a monstrous genocidal campaign on the Gaza Strip (2008–2014). Otherwise known as pink-washing, Makdisi explores how Israeli virtue signalling of gender and sexual diversity and inclusion occlude the violent reproductions of heteronormatively regulated exclusionary citizenship alongside the colonial, masculinist, and militaristic violence against Palestinian women and queer communities.
The book begins and concludes with parallel spatial paradoxes that reveal the co-constitutive relationship between Zionism’s affirmation, the denial of Palestinian presence, and the denial of that denial. Taking us from Yad Vashem: The World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem and its juxtaposition with Deir Yassine, a site of one of the most vicious massacres during the 1948 Nakba and leaving us with the construction of the Museum of Tolerance designed to commemorate the Jewish dead, built atop the corpses of the Palestinian dead in one of the region’s oldest cemeteries, the Mamilla cemetery. When looked at together, Yad Vashem and the Museum of Tolerance tell of the physiological and discursive process which affirms Israeli’s values of “tolerance” with regards to the protection of Jewish life and commemoration of Jewish death. And yet, remembrances of Deir Yassine and the Mamilla expose that affirming tolerance as a quintessential affirmation of Zionism actively requires the desecration of Palestinian graves and sacred space, both a forgetting and erasure of what happened (and continues to happen) to the Palestinians and that even dead Palestinians have been and remain there all along. Indeed, it is this manufactured coherence afforded to Zionism’s contradictions that enables psychic relief when Israel’s proponents proleptically dance upon Palestinian graves, materially and figuratively.
Makdisi illustrates, historically and discursively, why Palestinian presence and claims to Palestine unearth Zionism’s generative, yet preposterous contradiction: “[w]hat is at stake is that the affirmation of the one site is tethered to the denial repression of the other.” (xi) He continues, “One site is covered over and denied; the other, essentially built right on top of it, is loudly affirmed; attention is endlessly called to it.” (xii) If this process of erasure through replacement is as true in the intellectual and discursive realm as the physical, then it is of no surprise that an assertion of Palestinian truth, experience, history, narrative, claims to, and attachments to Palestine, within the US academy and even within ethnic studies, invites ruthless censorship, surveillance, and repression campaigns that remain veiled in a discourse of affirming Israel’s virtue. In ethnic studies classrooms, where the field teaches us to engage theory, ideas, history, and discourse from the vantage point of the oppressed, there exists a flagrant contradiction when we are bullied to affirm Zionism’s virtuous qualities, precisely because it requires a denial and suspension of Palestinian life and narrative. So that in the end, when Palestinian truth is affirmed, its advocates are regularly accused of negating Zionism’s virtue or falsely labelled anti-Semites. While affirmation as denialism reproduces the epistemic erasure of Palestine and Palestinians, its naturalization also recalibrates the pedagogical structure entirely resulting in and reflecting the potentiated erasure of radical possibility that the ethnic studies project seeks to offer. To salvage that potential, thinking Palestine through Indigenous decolonization and abolition is not only possible, but necessary and requires a fervent commitment to Palestinian life, narrative, and truth within scholarly production and teaching pedagogy. This requirement is not because Palestine is an exception, but rather because in writing, teaching, and speaking Palestine, we might de-normalize falsities that forcibly impose themselves as unfettered natural sense and the naturalized order of things.
Palestinian Nafs and Liveability
If one common analytical framing links these three works, it is the appraisal of the generative yet seemingly incoherent contradictions that Zionist-liberal-colonial double-speak naturalizes. Lara and Stephen Sheehi’s Psychoanalysis Under Occupation not only deconstructs but offers a riposte to colonial, liberalist, and universalist ideals that inform psychoanalytic practice in the West and how Zionism upholds a governing regime for Western psychoanalytic practice in Palestine. When applied in Palestine, they show how Western psychoanalytic framing makes it impossible to see, hear, and know Palestinians as full persons with both individual and collective consciousness and psyches. In the tradition of decolonial psychoanalysts, such as Frantz Fanon, Sheehi and Sheehi (2022) foreground explicit Indigenous-Palestinian-decolonial psychoanalytic approaches to challenge the notion of psychoanalytic innocence, that of well-meaning do-good liberal clinicians who believe they can remove themselves from settler-colonial logics, approaches and ideologies ( Sheehi and Sheehi 2022).
Centring the Indigenous psychoanalytic practice guiding Palestinian clinicians and therapists operating (and living as Palestinians) in a context of (racial-colonial and carceral) enclosure and (settler-colonial) erasure, Sheehi and Sheehi’s work brilliantly illustrates a mechanism for which Palestinian pain, grief, and agony becomes legible without absenting their agency, resistance, consciousness, structural conditions, and political and social economy and context. Resistance and national liberation consciousness do not emerge consequentially through an interface with Zionist violence by sheer virtue of suffering. In other words, Palestinians exist as fully complex persons, and actors of resistance, despite, and perhaps in defiance of, the pathologization of psychoanalytic practice entrenched in colonial frameworks.
Sheehi and Sheehi demonstrate that psychological torture is intrinsic, not consequential to Zionist settler-colonial design, without falling into the trap of conducting and producing damage-centred research in order to make Palestinians legible. They create the possibility for Palestinian legibility by changing the frame through which we understand psychoanalysis—both as a potential for a reproduction of settler-colonial power but also as a useful avenue for liberatory possibility. Centring the psychological structure of sumud (stalwartness), Sheehi and Sheehi focus on the cultural, social, and political specificity and practices of defiance and liveability in Palestinian society. They show how sumud, as an everyday life practice, reifies communal bonds central to the therapeutic process in that it works against neoliberal demands of individuality and psychoanalytic theories of developmental autonomy that sever the individual from their collective sociality.
Building upon Nadera Shalhoub Kevorkian’s notion of “psycho-political power emanating from ‘sites of death,’” Sheehi and Sheehi show how conceptions and practices of sumud generate a “collective psycho-social embodiment of everyday resistance” that its core, speaks life.” (77) Through a social practice of sumud, Palestinians speak and make life, forging spaces of liveability through both conscious and unconscious strategies, techniques, and decisions that operate in defiance of the violent strangulation that Zionist enclosure seeks to naturalize. Sheehi and Sheehi contend that clinical practice and “liveability” function themselves as various forms of sumud and, indeed, refusal to be “metabolized by an apolitical and non-structural analysis shored up by international mental health discourse, psychological diagnostics, or Zionist ideological negation.” (77)
At first glance, the value of Psychoanalysis Under Occupation is that it takes us into the psychoanalytic world of Palestinian clients, clinicians, therapists and helps us make sense of the interiorities of asphyxiation and suffocation that Zionist settler-colonialism and its racialized enclosures cause Palestinians. But a closer read reveals the intricacies of Palestinian existence: that Palestinians exist as complex full persons, navigating the everyday struggles of life including patriarchy, suppressed desire, grief and more. These matters in turn intersect with, are shaped by, and revealed in the broader structures of captivity and erasure that the occupation imposes. What Sheehi and Sheehi offer us is a lucid theorization on how even as the occupation enters the room of both the practising clinician and the interiority of the Palestinian psyche, Palestinian conceptions of nafs—breath, psyche, soul and self—are simultaneously shaped by a profound embodied consciousness of Indigenous Palestinian resistance. This resistance challenges the splitting, isolation and alienation of the interior and exterior worlds of Palestinians and their individual and collective belonging to one another and their land. It is a resistance to the intrinsic psychological torture of separation from selfhood and the collective that occupation seeks to sever.
Lara and Stephen Sheehi invite us to consider what an embodied decolonial feministmethodological research approach looks like in practice in Palestine. They reveal that making Palestinians legible—even within liberal circuits of power and influence—does not require a reduction of Palestinians to perfect victims, nor a pathology of the Palestinian psyche ( Arvin, Tuck and Morrill 2013). Rather, it requires a centring of Palestinian nafs (both of the self and communal) and sumud as a social, cultural, and political conception and practice. Taken together, they offer a practice of not only resistance, but also of forging a relationship to the revolutionary self, collective, world, meaning, and future making and understanding. And to be reminded that there is a way—indeed there has always been a way—to teach and write of Palestine for a Western audience without centring Palestinian damage and without individuating Palestinian experiences, restores the project of ethnic studies by centring collective agency and resistance against neoliberal manoeuvres of individuation. This is central to upholding, perhaps even restoring the project of ethnic studies, so as to shift away from the liberal logics that animate Palestine’s occlusions and conditional incorporation within the field itself. Moreover, in centring Palestinian theories and practices of collective sumud and speaking life we practice a defiance to that which the interface of settler-colonial and liberalist violence seeks to accomplish. In other words, if settler-colonial violence affects but does not define the interiority of Palestinian selfhood, then it is incumbent upon us to provincialize its psychoanalytical power in ethnic studies classrooms as well. This has always been the work of Indigenous decolonial and Black abolitionist practitioners and Palestine is no exception to it.
A Faithful Praxis of Abolition, Decolonization and Palestinian Liberation
Moved by the Black Radical Tradition especially, what I have learned through my ethnic studies training is that liberatory scholarship and pedagogy must work vehemently to tear down and abolish oppressive carceral, colonial and white-supremacist ideologies and structures that kill, hold captive and subjugate Black life and all life ( Gilmore 2022).
Black Feminists Abolitionists have taught me that this process must be embraced and excised through cultivating the intellectual and imaginative muscle and praxis necessary for the co-creation and praxis of an otherwise possible life-form and practice. 5 Together these lessons on abolitionist thought and process enable a thinking and praxis of liberation comprehensively, transnationally, unconditionally and against the intersections of multiple disparate—even if interconnected—structures of oppression. Indigenous decolonial feminists affirm this process and remind us to centre our responsibility to place, and the Indigenous stewards of place, who teach us how to practice reciprocity in our relationship with land, time, and all life-forms against the grain of capitalist accumulation and disposability (Betasamosake 2017). Both abolitionist and Indigenous decolonial thinkers summon us to necessarily resist and provincialize—but more importantly dismantle—racist-state-colonial-power as our praxis forges what is alternatively possible.
These theories and practices of abolition and decolonization cannot be achieved through piecemeal, reformist or accommodationist approaches. Nor can the emancipation of one community or geography, absent the liberation of us all, truly ever mean we have fulfilled our calling. Incorporation and representation are not synonymous with freedom because, as my own abolitionist mentor Dylan Rodriguez argues, it serves as a solicitation toward white being: that which holds a capacious genius and boundless fervour to reconstruct itself when met with insurgent and revolutionary opposition that threatens to overturn it in order to restabilize the order of white power. To Rodriguez, the central technologies of this process, which he calls white reconstruction, are “(anti-Black) policing, domestic war (counterinsurgency), and multiculturalist white supremacy.” ( Rodriguez 2021: 38; Rodriguez 2011: 39–60) In this constellation,
The flexible genius of multiculturalist white supremacy is its capacity to sustain, transform, and elaborate the aspirations of ascendancy while claiming the moral-political high ground of diversity, inclusion, and equity—this virulent suppleness indicates white supremacy’s sustainability across institutional mandates while exhibiting the strength of its resistance to cultural and political obsolescence. ( Rodriguez 2021: 56)
Centring the creative genius and revolt of Black radicals, Rodriguez does not only demonstrate a fidelity to expose multiculturalist white-supremacist risks. Among many, he is concerned with an alternative mode of being in the world that is always becoming within abolitionist praxis and the potentiated futures that are not only possible but that such praxis is already securing. Among the many lessons this praxis also yields is that a fidelity to liberation requires a dismantlement of racial-capitalism and the sense of scarcity it produces. And by rooting ourselves and labour within frames of abundance rather than scarcity, decolonial and abolitionist praxis is fundamentally about forging deep and intimate bonds of reciprocity in solidarity—not through transactional encounters—but through the meaningful embrace of differing experiences with subjugation, all the while bonded by shared values and aspirations—a process Robin D. G. Kelley regards “Solidarity as Worldmaking.” ( Kelley 2019)
Thinking Palestine, Indigenous decolonization, and abolition together reveals that there resides no redemption in (neo)liberal, multi-cultural white-supremacist, liberal Zionist, reformist and accommodationist politics of incorporation and representation that solicit or force an ascendancy to white being. Razack, Makdisi, and Sheehi and Sheehi’s books, read together, reveal the ways that (neo)liberalism’s design is both co-constitutive of and instructive to the affirmation and naturalization of Israeli racist state, and settler-colonial violence —however nonsensical such normalization may be—legitimized by law, psychoanalysis and discourses of tolerance. Their interrogation of (neo)liberalism and examination of what has always lived in its shadows tells us that radical knowledge, scholarship, and teaching of Palestine, Arab, and Muslim communities must provincialize (neo)liberalism’s power to occlude, appropriate or conditionally incorporate our peoples’ lives, aspirations and narratives. Razack calls on us to expose the staggering contradictions that present themselves as making sense to make space for something that indeed does. Makdisi summons us to disentangle Zionism’s double denial through an affirmation of Palestinian truth—exploding the barriers that prohibit and deny a faithful engagement with living material history. And Sheehi and Sheehi illustrate that this truth is not a damage-centred narrative, but a social and political practice of sumud, an always recreated defiance—despite all odds—against the naturalized order of Zionist settler-colonialism. This defiance, at its core simultaneously forges and recreates Palestinian nafs and life and offers to abolitionist and decolonial thinkers a Palestinian theory of steadfast defiance and recreation of the self and collective. It is—above all—that which animates our own Palestinian decolonial and abolitionist praxis.
Together these works reveal a foundational prerogative of decolonial and abolitionist thought and practice both within Turtle Island and in Palestine: to explode from within that which is naturalized as the normal order, and to recreate an otherwise world commensurate with our shared values, aspirations, and freedoms. A broken system cannot be repaired but must be abolished. The inevitable free world is not a destination at the end of a linear scale of time. It exists within us, all around us, and is always in becoming through our praxis of abolition, decolonization and for Palestinians in our enactment of sumud. 6 It enables us not just to resist but to redefine ourselves through forging a capacity to continue on unyielding despite all that has meant to destroy us. As such, I read Razack, Makdisi, and Sheehi and Sheehi’s texts, not only as books on Palestinian and Muslim communities, but as invitations to re-embrace decolonial and abolitionist thought and practice, to uphold and pay homage to different modes of being and becoming, Indigenous survivance and Land Back movements, the Black Radical Tradition and Black Feminist Abolition, and to register Palestinian sumud as a theory and praxis of abolition and decolonization relevant for all our communities. Above all, I read these texts together to recognize the creative ways we might practice not just survival, but revolutionary worldmaking in spaces that were never meant for us. And to teach abolition, decolonization, and Palestine together, means that Zionism—ideologically and in its state form—is provincialized in its power to erase and occlude its condition of possibility. In its place, Palestinian nafs (breath, psyche, soul, and self) are freed of the shackles of colonial and carceral restraint making and creating space for Palestinian sumud and liberation praxis not as a destination but as an always evolving form of being and revolutionary becoming and ultimately a culturally and politically specific Palestinian expression of decolonization and abolition.