This conversation informally began in the summer of 2024, ten months after October 7 and nearing a year of a relentless genocide where the people of Gaza have not experienced one second without tons of bombs being dropped on any form of life besieged within their strip of land. The last exchange occurred in March 2025. Since we began, months have passed, a ceasefire in Lebanon was achieved and broken, Israel, with the full support of the US, and backed by its Western allies like Germany, France, and the UK, has, very calculatedly and without any attempt to hide its mathematical and extractive genocidal activity, decimated hospitals, universities, news agencies, refugee camps, and every other social, communal, and political institution. The very integrity and meaning of what these institutions are and who occupies the roles of the educator, journalist, doctor, nurse, and humanitarian worker in the West has been reconfigured in relation to what these occupations mean in Gaza today. Not because Gaza is some sort of historical exception— but quite the contrary— because of the direct material and symbolic complicity that these institutions have in historical global histories and processes of colonization, genocide, settlement and dispossession, labor extraction, incarceration, and arms trade that the Genocide in Gaza and the resistance of the Palestinian people against their exterminator have both revealed in this historical moment of capital’s global crisis. The meaning of images, of testimony, of evidence, of rights, of medical integrity, of journalistic responsibility and the discursive frameworks that govern their production and circulation are foreshadowed by the excessive interiority of Palestinian life we’ve been witnessing for a year and a half, daily, hourly. As we find ourselves at this historical turn that both brings the question of Palestine to the fore, and exposes Zionism as the frontier of imperial dominance today, we must ask ourselves: what does the anticolonial struggle for the liberation of Palestine reveal to us about global understandings of race, property, and capital? What are the political openings and new internationalisms that emerge from within this moment of fascist-liberalism and foreclosure? If crisis [as genocide, and genocide as crisis] is a moment when the sustained violent order of things can no longer resume in the same manner, how do we forge a way forward? What are the considerations and relationships that we have with one another, our professions, and our thinking, our very lives that must be rearranged, given up, and radically reconstructed? The exchanges below attempt at identifying these stagnancies and foreclosures, in order to offer a renewed historical and materialist reading and understanding of how and why we shall overcome the present.
— Adam HajYahia
October 2024
Adam HajYahia (AHY): The last year has materialized a paradoxical revelation. In a way, both the Palestine solidarity movement and the liberation movement outside of Palestine have accomplished unprecedented successes manifesting in sustained organizing to halt ships (from the Red Sea to the Pacific Ocean), disrupt or block commerce (through blocking pathways in and out of Manhattan to sit-ins at ports), shift discursive frameworks in international media, launch cultural and economic boycott campaigns (such as WAWOG’s media campaigns amongst others), expand the base of institutions that endorse PACBI, affect the elections in the US, shut down arms manufacturing campaigns (sustained direct action in the model of Pal Action), escalate demands and expectations from human rights institutions, and cause mayhem in academic and cultural institutions that are materially imbricated in the ongoing genocide in Gaza, and symbolically complicit in producing discursive or symbolic frameworks that justify Israel’s actions. However, we are also faced with the concurrent fact that all political forms have failed to stop the genocide, which is the only urgency and the principal objective behind this deluge of organizational efforts. We are in a time where we seriously have to rethink how we invest and reinvest our organizing (or disorganizing) energies, as we can no longer continue reproducing the same strategies we’ve been enacting over the last 15 months.
Quite simply, if we think of Al Aqsa Flood as a break in time, and of the Israeli escalation of its annihilatory historical campaign against Palestinians as a new political dawn, (you have recently spoken about this extensively at the conference “The Anti-Zionist Idea: History, Theory, and Politics”), what of our political forms? Have we not exhausted them? I’m thinking here of Joshua Clover’s Riot. Strike. Riot: The New Era of Uprisings. There’s something productive in examining what different forms serve in one temporality and what their function can be in another, the relationship between history and political form. For example, if we take the strike versus the riot as political forms of protest used by the working classes of the 18th century, as Clover outlines, striking set the price/conditions (or wage) for labor power, while rioting set the price for market goods (or their availability). With the turn of the 19th century, the strike replaced the pre-capitalist form of the riot. In our contemporary times, both forms are used for very different reasons and to achieve varying objectives. These differences and shifts mirror the social and political realities we are navigating, especially at a time when nothing other than anti-colonial militancy is proving to be efficient and when all previously materially effective tactics are rapidly rendered merely symbolic. There’s something about this kind of pragmatism that is needed right now, at least to understand how we shall move at this historical juncture.
January 2025
Nasser Abourahme (NA): I think there’s something very urgent but also very difficult in what you’ve posed as the relationship between political form, time, and history. And I think you’re right that there is a kind of paradox in the mobilization we’ve seen in the West around Palestine and the genocide.
How does one take stock of this period? On the one hand, as you say, the gains have been impressive and saw possibly the largest-ever mobilization of left internationalism in the imperial core. I’d also point to the turn to direct action in places like the UK which has been formidable. All of this will have long-term effects not just on political consciousness, but on the very fate of the left here. And we should remember the old maxim that there is no wasted demonstration. People much more involved in the daily struggle than myself have often reminded me that demonstrations and protests are first and foremost organizing opportunities. On the other hand, yes, you’re absolutely right, nothing we’ve done has been able to put as much as a dent in the genocide machine. And in a certain sense, the mobilization around Palestine has just accentuated the impasses of the era of uprising, or the long decade of the 2010s–mass mobilization that fails to translate into structural or formal change; revolt without revolution. Is this a weakness in form? In tactics? Is it the relative strength of political regimes in the West that are able to absorb large-scale dissent into the pageantry of electoral cycles? I remember the sense of shock and disappointment in 2003 when a million-strong demonstration in London failed to stop the march to the Iraq War; well, 20 years later, and there have probably been dozens of demonstrations on that scale in London this year alone, and they’ve all failed to stop a live-streamed genocide.
Where does this leave us? Clover, as you say, reminds us that the question of form is always historical. I take this to be twofold. Not just that the form is and has to be historically contingent, but also that it is, at one level, historical itself, in that our struggles are historically cumulative. Clover more recently has made the point that an entire retinue of leftist academics and commentators had only recently declared the 2020 George Floyd Uprising as having achieved nothing and amounted to nothing. But the Student Intifada, the largest student movement in generations, was made possible in part by the education and radicalization the 2020 uprising had engendered. The age of uprising may only lead to more uprisings, but it is cumulative and possibly exponential.
This of course doesn’t answer the question of form. And though many of us, not least Clover, have turned productively to the commune form as a way out of the impasses of the square and the riot, it’s not really clear where that takes us now. In the West, the factory is done, and the state seems beyond capture. The vanguardist party might also be over, and the social democratic electoral alternative is all but closed; take the bankruptcy of the DSA’s electoral strategy and its all but terminal failures on the imperial/colonial question, or the limp denouement of the Bernie moment, or the way the Corbyn-led movement (by contrast a genuinely anti-imperialist social democratic force) was systematically pulverized (though Melenchon remains an interesting prospect in Europe).
So what is the political form to come? The question to me would have to be posed first as: where does our capacity to disrupt come from? What is the socio-technical agency we might marshal in ways that might reproduce the power that sections of labor previously wielded? What are the chokepoints that might be targeted? I don’t have answers to any of this, but my instinct is to parse it globally. There is an older insight from Third Worldism here that I think returns in importance or relevance–how do those in the imperial core support the revolutionary forces of the periphery? And in this, there is a relationship between local activism and global crisis that is acutely historical. One that comes to the fore powerfully today. The persistence of Palestinian resistance, I am certain, has already redrawn parts of the global order. It will take years for these full effects to take shape. But the breaking of the Israeli state’s genocidal wave on the Gazan shore is world-historical. Of this, I have no doubt. The largest empire and one of the most hysterically brutal settler colonies in modern history threw absolutely everything they had at a small besieged strip of land and still couldn’t impose their will on its refugee population. The destruction of the resistance factions failed, the displacement and ethnic cleansing of the northern Gaza Strip failed, and the re-colonization and settlement failed. This trifecta of war-elimination-settlement is the core of any settler colonial conquest, and it failed. A war of obliteration waged with no redlines, no limits, no legal tenets, not a single iota of even symbolic respect for international human law, an entirely limitless total war could not achieve its stated and implicit objectives. Anyone who tells you that they held anything back is just exposing their own callous frustration. Hundreds of thousands of tons of munitions in a frequency and intensity that is in many ways without precedent, and still people refused to die and disappear. In this failed push to break Gaza, the Western-led order has cannibalized the very institutions it built its own post-war imperial order on: international law, human rights discourse, humanitarianism, and so on. And yes, what we might get in this new historical age (the post-humanitarian age? the new exterminatory age?) might be worse, but it will be without the kind of institutional frameworks that might guarantee stable long-term forms of domination. The sense that this could be a chance for the US-led imperial order to burn the house down and then build a new framework atop its ruins has been dashed. There will be no new great legal reordering atop the genocide of the Palestinian people, the way the Holocaust and Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the forms of violence that paved the way for the law that followed. There will be no new nomos of the earth written in the ruins of Gaza. It’s not going to usher in a grand reorganization of the world that might renew US-led empire. If anything the opposite is true: Zionism’s strategic vocation for empire was above all its capacity to wage fast, decisive wars that reordered geographies and vanquished left and anticolonial forces. This is done.
To pivot back to the question of form and activism, what this implies to me (pragmatically as you had it) is twofold: one, that the ideological space between Zionism and its imperial backers might be more vulnerable than before, and two, that imperial war will no longer re-stabilize domestic formations in places like the US. The wages of empire, symbolic and material, that might be garnered in a place like Palestine are declining. That’s the crisis that’s coming “home.” So I don’t really have an answer to the question of form other than to invoke again the Benjaminian imperative: our task is to bring the real state of emergency into being, to initiate the actual crisis. And here I want to ask you, as someone who has spent a lot of time working in both academic and cultural institutions, in which the contradictions of our age seem to be most present, what do you see as the room for maneuvering here? It seems to me like our presence in these institutions, as those of an avowedly anti-imperialist or anti-colonial left, is at a precipice, and what comes next might very well seal the direction of these spaces one way or another. I have a sense of places like universities and museums as both at the heart of everything and at the same time on the edge of irrelevance. Is there still something to fight for here?
January 2025
AHY: There’s something very compelling yet grounding and implicit about your answer. Particularly your point about the genocide in Gaza as an event that will not provide a basis for any post-war imperial order the same way the Holocaust and Hiroshima and Nagasaki were foundations for this one as such, and how this imperial war, unlike previous others, will not re-stabilize domestic formations and unrest in places like the US. I think you’re right to point this out in the current moment as a consequential fact because the Holocaust, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki were at once historicized as outside of history, and formed the basis for contemporary historical formation, while the genocide of the Palestinians people, in my view, has materialized history as an event. This war of extermination is emblematic of world histories of colonization, imperialism, and racial capitalism because of who the Palestinian political subject has come to represent against Zionism as a project so crucial for the formation of contemporary Western liberal subjectivity and order. Zionism, both as an ideology and capital that proliferates political, academic, and cultural institutions in the West, surveillance and arms technological development globally, and a regional military settler-colonial project that takes Palestine as its primary object of conquest and role but extends far beyond it (the occupation of South Lebanon, The Syrian Jolan in 1967 and expanding deeper since the fall of the Assad regime, the neutralizing of Sinai, and Jordan as an offsite military outpost), is crisis as a political form of domination. Zionism reveals the limits of liberalism, the very order that enabled the foundation of Israel as a contemporary and biblical settler colony. It exposes how (neo)liberalism as a “stable,” long-lasting order fails to maintain a global hegemony of capital accumulation and racial-imperial domination in moments of radical disruption; and to that disruption, the only response to maintain its order is an outright fascistic outburst—a fascistic enjoyment of liberalism’s shadow. Zionism, as challenged by the Palestinian anticolonial struggle, reveals the crisis of liberalism as stabilized crisis.
I admit that the question I posed is somehow impossible, it is as if I asked you to come up with a political form that’s fortified but malleable enough to stop genocide, when genocide, no less in this contemporary technological form of acceleration, scale, and brutality should never have the political means to take place to begin with. But to your question about the struggle within universities and museums as spaces that represent the power dynamics of the world we live in through institutional structures, I think there’s something helpful in taking Germany as an example, both for its unique relationship with Israel from within its historical role in Europe, and due to the vulgar clarity its current state offers as a microcosm. I will try to answer this through a recent historical detour that, I confess, is quite brash in how I synthesize (and disintegrate) the always entangled relations between the symbolic and the material. But as an exercise, I believe it can be generative as an entry point:
If we look back at 2010, one of Germany’s most prominent national banking schemes, Deutsche Bank, announced that it was divesting from Elbit System —Israel’s infamous military technology corporation and the primary target of direct action campaigns by Palestine Action, who are doing brilliant work of sustained direct action which accumulates and effectuates clear and tangible results. The decision came as a major win for the BDS movement and its allies at the time after years-long pressure to divest from companies implicated in Israel’s military project. Despite attempts to deny news of divestment under the pretext that there were no Deutsche Bank-owned shares in Elbit Systems, financial data and stock reports ascertained the news and confirmed that 50,000 Deutsche Bank-owned shares (0.1% of Elbit at the time) were, in fact, withdrawn. At the time, there was minimal reporting or outrage on the matter in the German and Hebrew press, despite the seemingly major achievement that in today’s political climate in Germany, something like this would be nearly unthinkable. I bring this case to the fore because I see it as a very explicit example of a leftist political activity operative at the material level—one that manifests through exerting economic pressure based on a presupposed global notion of ethics and morality, with quantifiable results. The case is not at all similar in cultural spaces.
Two years later, in 2012, Judith Butler was announced as the recipient of the Adorno Prize in Frankfurt, and as a result, a scathing attack was initiated in opposition. The Israeli government, its German fanbase, and Zionist international Jewish groups were appalled that an esteemed German award was to be given to someone who had a “virulent anti-Israel agenda.” Such an indignant response came in light of then-recent and also less recent remarks Butler made in support of the BDS movement alongside other statements that called to implore Hizbollah and Hamas as movements part of a “global left.” Butler has since gone back and forth with their internal battle-made public performance regarding their position concerning anti-colonial militant violence and resistance, but at the time, critics pursued mobilizing shame and condemnations directed toward the German city council through media campaigns (that vanguard and disseminate this state ideology into and outside of cultural institutions) to withdraw the prize or prevent granting it to other critics of Israel in the future. This case wasn’t the first of its kind, but I think it is arguably amongst the first to happen to a high-profile cultural figure that caused public outrage. This case was a very straightforward example of political suppression operative at the cultural-symbolic level and within the domain of institutions that govern and monopolize the symbolic and the artistic (perhaps more accurately, the culturally ideological?), manifest through exerting pressure on cultural institutions based on a presupposed European cultural commitment to opposing ‘anti-semitism’. By reading these two incidents side by side, provided that they took place around the same time and within the same political climate in Germany, a material-symbolic dialectic reveals itself. First, political organizing operative through material registers was possible in Germany, while politically symbolic gestures were shrinking and facing prosecution. Second, an organized political movement instrumentalizing economic logic to exert material pressure with a clear objective existed in Germany, while an organized cultural movement (that’s really worth mentioning beyond individual cultural workers, artists, and academics issuing a statement or posting something on social media) continuously failed to form. What becomes evident to me is how the German state’s attempts at the erasure, silencing, and neutralization of the Palestine solidarity movement began within and were cultivated through cultural grounds, long before forming or replicating themselves within other German state structures such as the immigration office, police, and the supreme court, which became much more pronounced since the 7th of October. Said differently, German anti-Palestinian manifestations of symbolic violence (which effectuates violent material responses) exemplified through censorship, erasure, and McCarthyist blackmail (all of which have material consequences) were almost exclusively prevalent within state-funded contemporary art and academic institutions and cultural circuits for almost two decades, themselves laying the foundation for the successive state apparatuses propagating material and political violence materialized through anti-Palestinian bureaucracy, immigration procedures, policing campaigns to surveille, attack and brutalize Arabs and Muslims, and citizenship policies of the last two to three recent years. This also means that the contradictions and therefore negativity that the supposed promised autonomy of contemporary art may allow as a site of critique or negative speculation were diminishing and became more hegemonized and foreclosed within a state-market superstructure. And the way through which art, as it circulates in Germany, became fully subsumed in the fascist-liberal-state project.
I think this is not a simple reckoning: The police raids into the houses of Arab and Muslim immigrants in Neukölln which we have been witnessing after October 7th, alongside the barricades surrounding migrant neighborhoods, and the baton marks that announce their brutalized skin are not detached from a predecessor violent culmination of the rhetorical and symbolic racist anti-Palestinian grandiloquence that plagued the German public discourse within the cultural sphere for over two decades. The banning and blacklisting of artists based on their signatures in support of BDS and the divestment from cultural workers who are vocal on Palestine, which persisted from the previous decade to this one, are policing and surveillance mechanisms that are now used to revoke and reject immigrant visas and citizenship applications of Arabs and Muslims. The saga of Documenta 15 and the bourgeois artistic discourse around it, which primarily operated through symbolic registers where Palestinian cultural workers were demonized and ostracized and other migrants were blamed as foreign antisemitic agitators, explicitly exemplified Germany’s historical xenophobia and racism. It exteriorized the historical-present problem of German anti-semitism (see the rise of the far-right party, AfD, for example) as an outsider threat invading German society through racialized immigration, projecting German racist and anti-semitic ideologies onto the foreign Other—primarily Arabs and Muslims.
Since the beginning of the genocide, we’ve finally seen the formation of an organized movement calling on cultural workers, artists, and academics to “Strike Germany.” We’ve also seen serious and powerful mobilizations in the streets against Germany’s abetting and funding of the genocide abroad and its accelerating state repression against anything and anyone that stands with Palestine internally. But what is really illuminating is how art and academic institutionality (with the needed nuance in attending to the structure of the “welfare state” of Germany where most artistic production is state funded and what that structure engenders) actually served as an infrastructure for tangible, material, and legal state repression. Without a doubt, within these institutions, there is a real suspended struggle that is waiting for cultural workers, the very complicit laborers within these institutions, to organize and mobilize themselves as a movement, although clearly, most have chosen not to go down that path and prioritized alignment with the institution/state/state institution, and therefore the reign of the market.
Maybe to reorient myself in answering your question and perhaps extend it to you as well as a scholar and educator, by way of zooming out from the German context, I want us to look at the student movement in the US in its role in the struggle to stop the genocide. I think of the encampments of 2024 as an extension of the cumulative historical organization and theorization efforts of the anti-war movement, anti-Apartheid international network, and black radical organizing on campuses, either for Black Studies, or the whole educational ethos of the Panthers, amongst others. There’s a clear line here to be drawn in how universities are at once battlefields (because of how we as people on the left labor in such proximity to power) and centers for forming collective consciousness, radicalization, and engagement with anti-colonial/anti-imperialist thought. In this regard, when we think of form, the encampment is even more compelling because it is both symbolic and material disruption. It targets and unsettles the university as the institution that safeguards and produces the rhetorical and discursive framework of liberal democracy and Western values, and exposes how political education can espouse generations of dissidents, while at the same time, it attacks the idea of private property owned by the contemporary university as a corporation—and Brenna Bhandar’s work here is crucial, particularly on property laws and deputization—because property is so foundational for the formation of colonial and imperial American subjectivity. Encampments in over a hundred US campuses, from Ivy Leagues to small public colleges, unsettled the American bourgeoisie because their establishments suddenly felt out of reach and out of control — “trespassed” if you may—and the whole fantasy of campus security crumbled. This fantasy is reflexive of nationalist fantasies where the campus becomes a microcosm for the national body, and anti-Zionist organizers become infiltrators to the campus as nation. You’ve written extensively about the camps, the commune, and the encamped in Palestine, a reality that is obviously drastically different, with far different meanings and stakes, but I’m curious to hear some of the reflections you have in this regard, the university encampment, and the refugee camp, as political forms temporary and not, and as subjectivizing forces. The US encampments after all, primarily functioned as radicalizing spaces for the students (and sometimes though rarely staff and faculty too) — recruiting many to the frontlines through the prism of initiating a radical pedagogical model inside the colonial-corporate-university.
February 2025
NA: One way to think about the historical challenge of the student movement is to parse it through the questions your initial remarks on Germany bring up. What is Zionism’s vocation today for the “West” as a self-ascribed civilizational and moral order? Germany is entirely parodic at this stage. But it’s also a telling pathology because Germany is that fragment of the West that is most ideologically dependent on Zionism for its very self-identity. There’s no real Zionist lobby in Germany, and though Germany sells a fair bit of weaponry to Israel, I’m not sure how much German capital is invested in the Israeli economy and associated circuits. And yet the German state is all but constitutionally Zionist. German politicians have gone to pains from the midst of this genocide, a genocide they’re actively arming, to reaffirm Zionism as part of German “state reason” (staaträson).
The usual explanation is to put this down to some broad sense of guilt and the whitewashing of German history in Palestinian blood. This is not really satisfying because I don’t see guilt at all as some sort of real public sentiment in a German society that has voted in fairly large numbers, as you point out, for an explicitly neo-Nazi (and not just neo-fascist) party in the AfD. To me, this is not a social body grappling with guilt at all, or for that matter, self-reflection of any kind.
Without subscribing to a hard distinction between the symbolic and the material here, I think the example you cite points to both how central Zionism remains as an ideological apparatus in the West (at once symbolic and material), such that it keeps functioning on the symbolic-discursive plane even as things like financial ties might be quietly undone. And at the same time how potentially discordant and unstable this apparatus has become.
And here I think the ideological vocation of Zionism isn’t actually that it allows for some kind of correction of Europe’s discredited past at someone else’s expense (Palestinians paying for Nazi history), but that it allows for an extension of the logic of that past in a form that appears as its disavowal. Elsewhere I’ve written that Zionism is the post-Holocaust and post-colonial west’s ideological alibi. What Zionism allows for here is a displacing of anti-semitism onto the Black and Brown peoples of the (post)colonial world—and principally the Palestinians—since anti-anti-semitism becomes almost entirely reducible to defending Zionism. The racial-colonial structures of 19th and 20th century Europe that were absolutely constitutive of interwar fascism disappear. And with them the lessons of everyone from Césaire to Arendt. Not only is racial white Western civilization absolved, but since the problem is now (and maybe in essence has always been) a problem of the postcolonial world, the reckoning with colonial history is foreclosed at exactly the same time. This is an impressive sleight of hand, maybe the biggest hoodwink in modern human history.
In other words, everything that exceptionalizes the Holocaust and pegs its ongoing redress to Zionism functions at exactly the same time to displace and foreclose any redress of colonial history. It’s a strange kind of hyper-memorialization that is radically presentist. What I’m saying is that there is a connection between the Holocaust, as this entirely singular and aberrant evil without historical precedent that demands its redress only in Zionism, becoming abstracted as a “civic religion” in the West, and things like genocide in Algeria or Namibia or the Americas, let alone in Palestine, being actively forgotten, denied, and refused as part of shared consciousness or common human history. And the connection, indeed the mechanism, that allows for that in one real sense is Zionism.
So, it’s not just that many of the components that went into interwar fascism—racial nationalism, white supremacy, colonial extermination, the cyclical and secular crises of capital, global-scale predatory dispossession and extraction, Europe’s “Jewish question”—remain uninterrogated and the West never has to actually face itself, but that they are extended under the guise of some sort of transition past all of this. This is the ideological vocation of Zionism, and I think this moral absolution, this pristine sense of innocence—which is acutely symbolic—is what the cultural and academic institutions of liberalism cling onto more than anything. And the logical (and absurd) endpoint of this is that Western Zionism will outlive Israel as a state project; it will persist in zombie ideological form long after Israel itself is just a bad footnote in colonial history. Even as the thing itself gets more and more difficult to sustain, the idea—in an entirely deformed and perverse way—will persist.
At the same time, Zionism as an ideological object capable of broad persuasion or ethical subscription seems entirely finished. Liberal Zionism is more dead than it’s ever been. There’s nothing behind the curtain. Zionism has been entirely laid bare—there’s no truth to Zionism today other than the rubble and dismembered children of Gaza. The West, then, has doubled down on Zionism just as Zionism has reached its absolutely highest point of psychotic, narcissistic sadism. And I think in a way that demolishes its old function as the exception that proves the rule of a humanitarian post-war world. And one sign of this is that the Nazi Holocaust—and this tragic in its own right—cannot be thought of or incited today without indexing the Gaza Genocide at exactly the same moment.
For empire, this might all be tolerable if there was something real to show for it. But from the vantage point of US-led imperialism, the real crime here is that Zionism did all of this and still didn’t achieve its strategic goals. The West doubled down on Zionism, at a moment of the imperial order’s own historical weakness in the face of the unstoppable rise of an alternative Chinese model of development, but they got very little in return. They doubled down and effectively lost. Now I don’t think this will mean the ruling classes will relinquish Zionism; it will likely mean the opposite—they’ll continue to double down. We are slated more than ever for extermination. But it will mean both the imperial returns of Zionism diminish and that the contradictions not only come to the surface more clearly but come back home much more forcefully. They might yet kill us all, but imperial war won’t be a stabilizing force for “domestic” politics any time soon. This is where the crisis of the liberal university is located.
Just think about the simultaneity of three images this past week (the first week of February). One: hundreds of thousands of Palestinians returning to a northern Gaza that has been leveled, reversing in a few hours a genocidal plan of removal that was implemented over 16 months of annihilatory war. Two: Trump attempting to counter this image and movement in a televised call for the total ethnic cleansing of Gaza to make way for a racially pure “Riviera of the Middle East”—a speech act that attempts to achieve in discourse what failed in war. Three: the less obviously related image of Palantir’s executives ranting in their quarterly report. Palantir is, of course, a data analytics company set up by Peter Thiel and headed by pseudo-intellectual-cum-tech-bro-maverick Alex Karp (who touts a doctoral dissertation initially advised by Jurgen Habermas, though apparently, even Habermas found Karp too much, which in itself should tell us a lot), and deeply embedded with the US military and security state and involved in AI target acquisition for the Israeli military during the genocide, a fact Karp effectively boasts about in this video—there’s no Western war he tells us in which Palantir doesn’t have a “mission footprint.” The meeting is fundamentally marked by the hysteria over Chinese AI that has completely upended the last bastion of American technological supremacy and in turn Karp and Co’s confidence that their products would prevail because the West remains “a superior way to live”—an acutely limp piece of chauvinism that only confirms the fear.
The juxtaposition of these images alone is, in one sense, the whole story. An imperious but clownish Trump and his smirking genocidaire of a sidekick in Netanyahu holding court in the Oval Office and Karp in his crisp white t-shirt and slick glasses presiding over his gleaming, cold, and palpably anxious meeting room—a sheer untold concentration and entanglement of wealth and mass death in these two images—all juxtaposed against the images of the poorest people on earth, emerging from sixteen months of sheer horror, emaciated from starvation, bedraggled, surrounded by nothing but rubble, their cities turned into graveyards, but still defiant, still smiling, still singing and walking back to their ruined homes against the combined evil of the entire global racial order. This is our world laid bare. A single triptych that contains it all. Israel’s genocide comes into view here as the blunt edge of a dying Western colonial civilization, reduced to parasitic real estate and AI killing machines, that feels internally and externally besieged.
How on earth could the liberal university possibly avoid this moment? It’s impossible. Just think about how many university endowment funds are invested in Palantir alone. I’d wager a whole lot. This is the, perhaps terminal, crisis of the liberal university. The nature of financial accumulation lays bare the nature of the class power of the people who effectively own these institutions through boards of trustees and investments. This class power—capital’s capacity to command—that runs between university and museum boards and the corporate world appears as it is: imperially derived. It might be hidden deep in the financial portfolios of investment consultants and private equity managers, but it’s just as dependent on war and plunder as it always has been. All the obfuscations of financial jargon, all the supposed complexity of financial machinery at one level only operate to displace the blood and sweat, to displace the stack of dead children that is at the end of the value chain.
It gets harder and harder, then, to maintain the dividing fictions, and the university is caught in the bind. The universities want all the trappings of critical knowledge; indeed, this is a large part of how they generate value. But they are also corporate financial machines beholden to the political limits of an imperial world. They can do land acknowledgments, but not land back; they can decolonize curricula, but will have nothing to do with actual decolonization struggles; they can be for anti-racism, but won’t disinvest from state racism and apartheid regimes.
When students, who always represent the vanguard at any university, challenge this state of affairs they are met not only with outright repression but with the full weight of the political order. And here, it’s obligatory Zionism that is the club, both literally and figuratively. Literally in the form of the mobs and cops that come crashing down on student dissent; recall how the UCLA encampment was subject to a full night of all-but-authorized Zionist mob attacks before a full night of police attacks the next day, and from which Clover (again) will surmise that: Zionism merely names the police state in its most fully social sense. Figuratively in the form of lawfare, Title VI investigations, congressional McCarthyism, and witch-hunts organized around a weaponized rhetoric of anti-discrimination. One of the ironies of this moment is that it looks like it’s not the anti-woke rightwing per se that is going to dismantle DEI and civil rights discourse, but American Zionism cannibalizing it from within.
I haven’t really answered your question on encampments, camps, and subjectivity, but I will say this: the communal spaces students created and are still creating on university campuses enact something very important, and that is they temporarily demolish the bordered boundedness of campus property that seals the university off from the wider social terrain. This is why the “outside agitator” trope is so assiduous because it reflects a genuine fear about a real potential point of political synthesis. The minute students use the campus to connect to the broader terrain of social and labor struggles is the minute they exceed the sterile extraterritorial zones of the university, the minute their encampments become sustainable, and the minute they become political subjects acting on the social whole and capable of contesting the complicities of the university in machineries of accumulation and death.
February 2025
AHY: The establishment’s fears of students’ struggles within university campuses connecting with labor and social struggles outside of the “campus” as securitized and isolated political space, shore up an important conundrum of political organization within the cultural and academic institution. This is related to a larger question of organizing according to the specificities of one’s material position within a particular economic structure. Myself and the comrades who I organize with particularly in the context of labor and cultural organizing, observe that liberal institutions such as the university and/or the museum have succeeded in conceptualizing cultural work and academic work as bourgeois occupations, creating further alienation and division between workers within and without these institutions. This is also related to the privatization of education and the ongoing attempts to delineate intellectual property, art, pedagogy, and knowledge as exclusive bourgeois investments. This [de]alienation becomes evermore critical when we account for the terrible working conditions that the majority of university staff and some faculty have to deal with, the precarity of maintaining their jobs, or the unaccounted-for labor of graduate student work. The same goes for cultural workers in museums and cultural institutions, who perform a lot of [feminized] labor for extremely low wages, and by workers, I mean the laborers of these economies, and not the art dealers or the museum directors, or tenured faculty, or head curators, and many others who fit under the title of the Professional Managerial Class—the class of professionalized intellectuals who envision themselves as the distant and detached moderate observers and commentators. Yet, somehow, the people who normally organize within these institutional spaces are mostly not the laborers but are either the consumers of the institution’s cultural/pedagogical production or the public. In the case of the university, the organizers are mostly the students who predominantly pay tuition to seek education. In the case of the museum, it’s more than not the artists and independent cultural workers who organize against repression and complicity of institutions, who are indeed laborers within art economies, but not the ones occupying employee positions within the establishments they are organizing against. And the case is more so in the absence of organized unions in the workplace, especially in a place like the US. Of course, the precarity of the figure of the worker within these institutions is not a reality for everyone and this varies and depends on contracts, whether someone is a staff member or someone with a creative role, the degrees of security of maintaining one’s job (adjunct, associate, tenured, etc., salaried, contractor, freelancer), the gendered dynamics within the institution, the reputation and wealth of the institution, and the job itself as the majority of the employees of these institutions are not performing creative labor or teaching.
This conceptualization of one’s labor position within these institutions as different than labor elsewhere is also more often than not reproduced and regurgitated by cultural and academic workers themselves, further contributing to the fissure in organizing a labor movement/struggle within the university campus or the museum that is synchronized and in relation with the politics of the labor movements outside. This is not to say that creative labor is not different than, for example, manual labor, but to seriously consider and implore how this difference in labor is at once abused by the workplace and a subjectivizing force of differentiation.
I think this becomes more acutely insidious, especially from the perspective of activists, organizers, and laborers more broadly, who do labor organizing and cultural organizing outside of these institutions, when faculty members, curators, and cultural/academic administrators who symbolically represent these institutions and produce books, articles, public programs, exhibitions, biennials, and other mediums of cultural production that gain their significance and reputation for supposedly engaging leftist politics, particularly anti-colonial and anti-capitalist, who then refuse to organize themselves politically in their workplace or even offer symbolic gestures of “solidarity.” More so, there’s an explicit relationship between upward class mobility, compensation, reputation, and status, and this refusal to organize and politicize one’s labor within the institution. Many of the leftists and those on the liberal left —Western Marxists if you may— refuse proletarianization below with the laborers of their institutions and prefer to befriend the administration and play the role of the petty-bourgeois in defanging student/ labor movements within the institutions, emptying their political projects and pushing for pacification and symbolic gestures under the guise of sustainable and safe action, when the only thing that is sustained in this case is the balance of power. And generally speaking, this is the case at best. This kind of professionalized intellectuals believe in the institution and the establishment at large and want to protect the system’s ability and that of power to approve [them] and disapprove [others], and always push for discursive and symbolic agreements, rather than material tension and confrontation, which at the base of this is a self-serving maintenance of the power that favors their labor positions over those below them.
Many feel betrayed by these “workers” and wonder how come the people who audaciously institutionalize and claim an authorial voice over, leftist critiques of political economy, fascism, colonialism, race, gender, class, and so on, refuse to take firm positions against the complicity of their institutions in genocide and arms trade “elsewhere” as structural violence that their theoretical and conceptual abstractions should actually account for, or even against silencing and policing of students and faculty, which are local symptoms and manifestations that reveal the violence of the structure. Not that the struggle was ever dependent on this intellectual strata, nor has it ever been the foundational theoretical and discursive engine behind leftist mobilization, but they are nonetheless a crucial group whose inclusion in political mobilizations must be activated for it sustains both cultural and economic capital.
Over the last two years, we have witnessed the bloodshed and screams of our people accompanied by the silence of many. To our sometimes surprise but mostly disappointment, this many also included the silence of people whom we mistook as our comrades in the struggle for our supposedly common investments in similar political and intellectual projects—a total unmasking of the historical French revolution intellectual figure and its limits, as well as that of the Western Marxist. Many of the academics who teach and engage the political works that critique capital, colonialism, and empire kept these critiques as rhetorical when it came to the genocide in Gaza, and favored fighting each other in the workplace for tenure positions (again, the fantasy of security) instead of unionizing or building a strong collective within the institution. This isn’t merely academic gossip but an actual reality that demonstrates the inability of this intellectually institutionalized left to organize itself as a mass or a force of negation within the institution for the sake of maintaining individual safety and convenience in a time of global crisis while masquerading as an academic of intellectual “community”. Very little on the Western left, and lesser so from the liberals, took firm stances against their administrations in light of the escalating repression of students and the militarization and policing of campuses, even though one would expect that the outright fascization of the campus would be something to care about for the liberal establishment if only it wasn’t for genocide. And obviously the critique here is in the absence of a serious movement rather than the absence of individual efforts by a handful of faculty who are doing some kind of organizing work publicly or behind the scenes. One starts to wonder that if the genocide of the already dehumanized, colonized, dispossessed, and besieged Palestinian wasn’t a mobilizing force within these institutions, perhaps with the threat of losing their individual academic autonomy and whatever little freedoms of expression and political assembly, they might be mobilized in some way to maintain those. I read this as another crisis in form; perhaps it’s more evident within the sphere of these institutions than elsewhere, but it’s emblematic of something larger. We live in a time where a whole lot can signal with their virtues, dabble in Marxist theory and debate order and power, talk about decolonization, and wonder who the revolutionary subject is while doing so on their own, without embeddedness in any social movement or a struggle, without stakes, materiality, or a political commitment to a life lived beyond the gated and militarized walls of the university campus and the collections of human remains stored below the main floors of museums. Content without form. Some release their take into the world, publish a book here, attend a conference there, put up a public program on the “Anthropocene,” or talk about how capitalism is bringing about a total planetary catastrophe, some even go as far to say that “decolonization is not a metaphor” and argue the case for material change and still fail to make their labor position and the symbolic power that it bears to stand against or organize in the face of what this genocide has changed in all of us beyond the fractured walls of Gaza, succumbing to the same forces they supposedly vehemently critique.
You mentioned earlier something about these institutions being at once central and peripheral, and there’s truth to that. We do labor with such an immediacy to power, our jobs are at the mercy of capital’s circulation, and what we represent when we work in such positions has stakes. The lengths to which universities have become implicated in arms manufacturing and trade, gentrification projects, and settlement and dispossession both in Palestine and places like North America, for example, should compel many of us to organize in our workplaces if we truly believe what we preach. However, these institutions are indeed very detached, but it is this detachment that offers a distance that then bestows clarity for those who are embedded in struggles elsewhere. Education, scholarship, and artistic production also offer us a sense of nuance, fluency, alertness, and the ability to read, synthesize, reflect, and see through the aesthetic and mediating maneuvers of capital and empire. This is the logical flank of why there’s now fear that the struggle has reached the campus with this magnitude. Those in power have long used education, art, and aesthetics to construct nationalist and colonial fictions, obedient and ideologically educated labor forces, and to mobilize libidinal energies of the masses into fantasies of unity against the dangers of racialized, sexualized, queered, and demonized “others”, diverting attention from the structures of oppression into those who have been scapegoated by the regime. Critical and radical education and access to various contemporary artistic productions develop our skills and critical abilities in recognizing the structures in place. They allow us to see through the facades and fantasies of the superstructure and, when successful, reroute our attention to the infrastructural basis upon which oppression is predicated. This is the materialist critique of culture that we need: we must ask, does the culture being produced, celebrated, circulated, and consumed function as a diversion of our attention from our lived realities and their contours of violence and material extraction, sedating us, distracting us, alluring us, misleading us, or is it a culture that reroutes our focus to the matters at hand, the abstract structures that rule our lives, igniting new forms of collective consciousness, disalienation, critique, imagination, and mobilization.
March 2025
AHY: Since I began responding to your last remarks, a lot has changed as I was writing to you. We are witnessing an authoritarian advancement and acceleration of this administration of what the Biden administration has already begun in terms of pressure on academic institutions of higher education. Multiple figures in American universities, primarily students, starting with Mahmoud Khalil, have been either kidnapped from their homes, students and faculty expelled from their universities, deported, or banned from entering the US. There’s an escalation and a closing down on Palestinians and Palestine organizing in universities and again these spaces are taking stage as the epicenters of capital’s flow, withdrawal, and disruption, as well as the mirrors of the ideological power structure we live in as a society. And since last night, Israel has broken the ceasefire and resumed its bombing of Gaza. To perhaps conclude this prolonged exchange that took place across a year with many changes and shifts occurring in between each response, what are some of your thoughts on this moment? What is your reading of the current historical juncture we find ourselves in both as an educator and someone who’s been deeply invested in the political, social, and psychic formations that constitute political subjects and forms of resistance/ refusal to regimes of power and subjugation? To read this moment, to indeed read the world as you say “from Palestine.”
NA: Well, we’ve crossed a huge threshold. One we could all see was coming but has somehow been shocking nonetheless. And a lot rests on how we all respond to this. What it indexes most of all is how far the entangled (but far from identical) crises of Zionism and US-led empire are intensifying.
Let’s be clear, with Mahmoud Khalil, we’re talking about the forced disappearance of a permanent legal resident for political speech. All the other details are essentially insignificant. Khalil was raided at his home by unidentified state agents with no warrant, no due process, charged with no crime, handcuffed, bundled into an unmarked car and spirited at least a thousand miles from his home. This has since then been repeated to Leqaa Korda, who allegedly overstayed her visa but has been targeted for her political activity, and Ranjani Srinivasan, another Columbia student who was in effect hounded out of the country under the “self-deportation” option by the state. More recently, Badar Khan Suri, a fellow at Georgetown, was nabbed by masked agents and bundled into an unmarked van under the same pretext. None of these people have been charged with anything; they all face deportation or were effectively deported.
The first thing to remember is that the deportation regime is a violent disciplinary regime that acts on large parts of the social body. Nicholas De Genova taught us a while ago that it’s not deportation per se that is the point of this regime, but deportability itself. Deportation as a productive mechanism of power operates on the majority of people who are not deported but susceptible to deportation. What’s telling about this moment is the extension of deportability from racialized disposable undocumented labor to racialized disposable political dissidents. This doesn’t only mean that even playing by the ostensible migration rules (rigged as they are) is no longer a guarantee of anything. To me, it means that the ruling class is now wielding the deportation regime for crisis management of a different kind.
We’ve understood deportability as a function of the need of US-based capital for an always-at-hand deportable, which is to say disposable, labor force. In this sense deportability is a mechanism of value generation. Border moral panics and so-called refugee crises are fodder for evergreen culture wars, but the unsaid fact beneath them all is that the border is, will always be, and indeed, must be porous. In our current conjuncture, however, the deportation power aims directly at political speech, and indirectly at the legal guarantees of that speech. The issue has explicitly been speech; both Khalil and Suri have been accused of “promoting antisemitism” or “spreading Hamas propaganda.” The state knows none of this reaches any kind of legal threshold even for so-called anti-terror laws so they rely on what is essentially an almost never-used extra-legal power of exception wielded in theory by the secretary of state. And here it should be clear that if history is any kind of guide, citizenship is absolutely no guarantee of safety. De-nationalization and de-naturalization are absolutely on the cards, there’s already been an attempt on birthright citizenship. We’re a whisker away from all this.
What all this tells us is that the ruling class knows just how deep the rot goes. All of this expresses, I think, the desire of this ruling class to be unrestrained in its repression of dissent at a time when both the disposability and the undesirability of ever-growing numbers of people is only going to increase with permanent epochal crises. Of course, that Israel resumed its genocidal onslaught, killing nearly five hundred people, over forty percent of whom were children in a single night, days after the wave of these abductions is no coincidence. The American ruling class is hellbent on both smashing the Palestinian liberation movement in the US and on re-birthing the Zionist state in a long-term sustainable form through the liquidation of the Palestinian question and people. And in this sense this expansion of the deportation regime also reminds us how the question of Palestine now brings together the connections between the disposability of global migrant labor and the broader disposability of racialized human life on a planetary scale.
But the strategic horizon of the abductions is broader still. The ruling class is not unaware that we live in a temporality defined by multiple, simultaneous, intersecting, permanent crises, or what Adam Tooze calls polycrisis, in which there is no horizon of resolution. Crises that are not resolved but indefinitely managed: climate catastrophe, secular crises of capital and reproduction, zoonotic disease mutation, the end of a unipolar world, the collapse of the liberal rules-based order and so on. If any of this is going to be turned into stable regimes of accumulation and rule within the current systemic reality, then it will require huge amounts of repressive force. How do you profitably re-industrialize the US, for example, outside of large public investment, without smashing the labor movement, rolling-back labor law, and squeezing labor? How do you manage climate displacement if you don’t intend on reducing emissions without extreme border violence?
Zionism’s role is again double here; it becomes both tool and model. On the one hand, Zionism becomes a name for the police club, cloaked in the most vulgar of philo-semitism (think Trump tweeting “Shalom Mahmoud” to announce the abduction). It’s in this context that Trump has repeatedly used “Palestinian” not just as a racial slur (using it to describe, of all people, the decrepit genocide-pumping old guard Zionist that is Chuck Schumer), but also, in effect, as a term of banishment from legal protection. Zionism in other words as a key part of the arsenal of a now more extreme racial regime in ways that bring the deportation power more directly in line with the legal architecture of exception inherited from the War on Terror.
But Zionism also functions as a model or paragon. And we shouldn’t underestimate this. Zionism, actually existing Zionism, is possibly the most concentrated distillation of colonial racism and state excess in the contemporary world. Bar none. It’s not just that it’s the inheritor of Europe’s colonial project in its most self-righteous form. It’s also the contemporary vestige of state racism and power in the kind of unrestrained form that elsewhere had to be disavowed. A proud holdover of what everyone else in the West had to pretend not to like anymore. A state racism and power that frees itself from any self-repressive mechanisms, does away with any pretense or even hypocrisy, and wades directly into the unbridled cruelty and sadism that the bourgeois Western political order had to at least pretend it had overcome. Zionism shouts its genocidal intentions from the rooftops; its state ministers openly call for the elimination of everything that stands in their way; its supporters all but explicitly declare that the mass killing of children is necessary for the state’s survival and they will make no apologies. This is the allure of Zionism today. The more it descends into its own suicidal spiral of nihilistic hysterical obliteration, the more it openly celebrates its sadism and will to obliterate, the more it offers a vision of the future for those not interested in co-habiting the planet with what they deem are its subhuman surplus populations. In other words, the allure of Zionism to the fascist new right is that it offers a model of a historical corrective to what they feel has been a long surrender in which Western or white supremacy has been afraid to speak its name. They want to be able to speak its name; they want to throw a “sieg hiel” at a political rally and not have to pretend it’s an autistic gesture of affection. It’s in this sense that Zionism is at once both the past and future of the European racial-colonial project.
At the heart of all this is a kind of historical revisionism prompted by polycrisis. If we take anticolonial liberation to be the core of the global socialist revolution, then in one sense, the entire sweep of postwar Western history can be thought of as one long counter-revolution against the decolonization project. Neoliberalism was one important victory for this counter-revolution, but it was insufficient; and with the collapse of American unipolar global dominance, it becomes in fact a hindrance. The inability of the old tools of free market orthodoxy and liberal internationalism/interventionism to maintain this counter-revolution are transvalued into a series of “surrenders” that need to be overturned—international law, globalization, civil rights, feminism, environmental protection etc.
The historical irony here is, of course, that this will to destruction, this desire to remove the “moral” fetters is a mediation of crisis not strength. The abductions and deportations must be understood then within a historical arc in which both Zionism and the flailing empire for which it serves as an imperial garrison are unraveling and face arguably insurmountable challenges. That they yearn to rule without restraint shouldn’t be confused for strength, but recognized for the dangerous weakness that it is.
Have university-based intellectuals risen to this challenge? On the whole, we have to say that we have failed. There’s a lot of important organizing happening at the faculty level in US universities, but if we’re honest with where we are, we’d have to say it has been wholly inadequate. And I mean inadequate given the stakes, given the active complicity of many university administrations with the assault on higher education (that includes the handing of student names for ICE raids). I don’t think this is an exaggeration. The only conclusion, for example, from Columbia’s actions is not that the administration is submitting involuntarily to state pressure and the new “red scare,” but that they actively want this opportunity to smash faculty power and purge the student body. It’s not passive complicity but active collaboration.
Of course, we all understand that faculty have to fight a two-front battle: both defend the university space (and ally with progressive administrators) and pressure their administrations at the same time. It’s not easy and the bind is real, but we have to admit that the intellectual class has not been able to actively make the kind of stand that would rise to this challenge. It’s hard, for me at least, to figure out exactly why this is the case. The organizational strength doesn’t seem to be there; nor the consciousness. You’re right of course that the hierarchies of the university and the unwillingness of faculty to consider themselves laborers or workers of any kind are a big part of the problem. This adds to a general aversion to contradiction, struggle, division and instead a tendency toward maintaining the status quo under the cover of notions of civility, collegiality, “community” and so on. Behind all this is of course the punishment and the reward. Edward Said once wrote that there is nothing worse than those habits of mind that induce avoidance, that characteristic turning away from a difficult and principled position which you know to be the right one, but which you decide not to take. You don’t want to appear too political or too controversial; you want to keep a reputation for being moderate, objective, balanced. All in the hope, he writes, of being asked back, to consult, to be on a board or prestigious committee, and so to remain within the responsible mainstream. This is how intellectuals are transformed into “experts,” and as Guy Debord once told us, every expert follows their master and the most useful expert is the one who can lie.
The silent inaction of the high priests of critical theory, intersectionality, Western Marxism, and decolonial theory is deafening; and, yes, even those that attempted to teach us that “decolonization is not a metaphor” folded and signed onto statements that demonized Palestinian anticolonial resistance and pledged effective fealty to a global colonial order. This is compounded by tendencies that have always privileged theory (in the West and by faculty) over praxis (in the South and by students and workers). Tendencies that inflate the self-importance of large parts of this social formation. Some faculty really think that their conversations and workshops are ultimately more important, even at this point, than the actions and practice led by students and movements—and I say this as an academic entirely committed to the necessity and urgency of study, reflection, and writing (it’s really the only thing I’m good at).
We have to look far less to the intellectuals and the cultural producers. The silver lining in all of this is that for many, most importantly an entire generation of students, the illusions they had about radical faculty have evaporated. And this disenchantment might be a crucial step in the growth of political movements and forms of study that not only eschew the leadership of intellectuals but disintegrate the current notion of the intellectual. The fantasy of the livable (that is separable) intellectual life is, as Fred Moten and Stefano Harney have repeatedly shown us, what the entire libidinal political economy of the academy is predicated upon. The stakes are just too high and the costs are just too grave for anyone to take cues from career academics. And whatever revolutionary potential the current struggle contains would see not only the checking of the rightwing assault on higher ed but ultimately the abolition of both the university-as-hedge-fund and the abolition of the intellectual-as-professional expert.