…system of presiding over, torturing, incarcerating Palestinians but also, instituted a planetary process which would insure that the murder of millions of Jewish people, Roma, Communists and others considered degenerate or unworthy of inclusion in the Aryan race, would not be linked to the imperial, colonial, racial, supremacist crimes of the past. By delinking the Holocaust from the longer line and precedents of imperial, colonial, racial mass violence, including Germany’s own historic role in the genocide perpetrated against Armenians in the First World War as well as the genocide of the Ovaherero and Nama peoples a decade before; the imperial and colonial powers, made sure that this calamity and mass crime against humanity would be exceptionalized in such a way as to deny and maintain their own genocidal-denialist states.

We want to propose to think Nakba as also the name of a process which falsifies the colonial, racial, supremacist and anti-communist origins of fascism, Nazism, in order to make sure that those regimes built on colonial, racial, patriarchal, capitalist, supremacist brutality can continue to extract, expropriate, expel, govern, rule over earth. Thus, Palestinians, whose dispossession and relegation to oblivion has been at the heart of constructing this post Second World War legal and cultural architecture, do not merely represent a case of hypocrisy, historical irony or emblematic of the continuation of colonial, racial rule by new/old means: they certainly evoke all of those. But much more critically, in the light of our analysis, Palestine is also the lynchpin, the rule which holds together the entire matrix and ordering of this world which we see today coming to an end, unraveling before our eyes. Palestine reveals the colonial racial underbelly of the enlightened liberal law and order, with its allowances of free speech and free thought. It is where all that which was patched up after the Second World War to keep the colonial crime wave going comes crashing into its always immanent colonial, fascist alter-ego, its plan B.

Today, Palestine must be sacrificed and this ongoing genocide must be denied, normalized, falsified, excused, because the entire legal and cultural structures erected after the Second World War rested on eliminating it and its people, of pretending they did not and do not exist. And in some ways worse, if they insist to exist, then it shall be in order to perpetually do the time, pay for German and European crimes.

If truth has any connection to reality. Than this regime and order of fabrications, deceptions, lies, denials cannot hold for ever, especially in the face of a resistance, like that of Palestinians, that has never given up on ‘return’ as the only possible horizon of future. Palestinian resistance, par excellence, has not only been an anti-colonial one, but in the face of systematic denial, crucially an anti-denialist one.

If genocidal violence, that is, historically recognized processes which have attempted to eliminate and destroy entire peoples, is premised on denying the existence of a peoples as peoples, the Nakba is not only the name of this genocidal process and its instituted forms of denial, including the recognition of a state of Israel on top of Palestine in 1948, directed against Palestinians, but also names the construction of a world after the Holocaust, which insures that all the occluded histories of such grave, mass acts of racialized, colonial crimes, brutalities will also be denied. And if this order, which was erected after the Second World War speaks or has spoken in the language of ‘never again’ we realize today that it has always been with the caveat that those who govern that post-war world, that is the ongoing beneficiaries of racial, colonial, imperial brutality and theft, will be the arbiters and determiners of how, when and to whom that principle and its associated laws apply.

As some friends in the Anti-Denialist Coalition say, genocidal violence is preceded with acts of denial, it is fueled by denial (as we see today throughout all the states and institutions supporting this genocide) and its future is secured by instituting that denial in the form of life, of law, of culture the perpetrators produce, enjoin, compell their ‘citizen-beneficiaries’ to reproduce. Without an active struggle against the forces of oblivion, the future we look at today, dictated by the terms of order of those who remain inheritors and beneficiaries of genocidal supremacist violence, is and will remain denialist.

One of the central questions confronting the movements who struggle against the unfolding genocide in Palestine and fight against all forms of colonial, racial capitalist violence today is how and whether we can imagine our way out, a way to stop the rationalization and systemic blindness to racial colonial violence without wrestling our way out of the straight-jacket of the denialist cultural forms, institutions, legal frameworks these perpetrator-inheritor states have produced. If forms of denial have been sewn up in the institutional forms, in the forms of life, in the cultural and educational forms of late-genocidal states, then how to think a politics of exiting those states of denial? Can we imagine freedom, justice, liberation outside the terms of those genocidal-denialist states? We see the struggle for freedom and justice not only in Palestine but also across the planet as inextricably linked to such questions.

If Nakba names the catastrophic violence directed against Palestinians as a process of justifying and unseeing the structural genocide of the settler colonization of Palestine; then in its planetary reverberations it also names the process of a world order erected after the Second World War which would continue to justify and unsee that racial, colonial violence throughout the planet, both historically and into a future. Nakba, then, as a planetary process of institutionalizing a genocidal-denialist world order, absolving, securing and guaranteeing a future for states founded on genocidal violence and institutionalized denial. The profiteers of this world ordering are entities who have amassed and concentrated tremendous amounts of wealth and power through racial, colonial, supremacist, in the last instance, fascist forms of violence. The concentrations of wealth bestowed to such historic processes require that even the acknowledgment of such crimes remains untethered from any consequence or meaningful process of reparation of what we know to be irreparable. In this way, the insistence of the Palestinian struggle on return threatens the politics of irreversibility which the colonial imperial genocidal powers hoped to institute after the Second World War.

If Eghbariah’s attempt to construct a legal framework for including the Nakba into international law is one possibility of integrating and salvaging the Palestinian experience as a remedy for a clearly racist and imperially, colonially mandated international legal framework. Our proposal to think the Nakba as a planetary process, takes up that dimension of the Palestinian struggle which has resisted incorporating or integrating Palestine into the existing order of things or state of affairs. Rather, it sees our struggle at this conjuncture as a call to radically part from that post Second World War order and its foundation on forms of violence its architects wished to deny and continue to perpetrate. It is a call to question all the forms of politics and culture that were instituted as remedies, forms of memorializing or even responding to the camps and the atrocities of Fascism and Nazism. That architecture of denial and ongoing violence was constructed on the backs of Palestinians and processes of unseeing the crimes of the Nazis as integrally part of longer histories of colonial, racial, capitalist and supremacist violence. The struggle against all the cultures and institutions of denial today, is a call to invent cultural and political discourses, practices which not only remake a sense of this near history, opening up the deeper wounds that were meant to be buried and relegated to oblivion; it is also a call to divest, delink, depart from, decompose, disintegrate, destitute and abolish the legal and cultural fundaments of a world which has never stopped extending its theaters of theft, of land grabs, of erasure of communities and life forms, of genocidal violence and its denialist forms of futuring. For those of us who have been racialized, dehumanized, colonized, that world “order” has never meant anything but the destruction of our worlds.

Bios

Ayreen Anastas, a body in search of gestures, words, phrases, sentences to disactivate and destitute the impositions, forms, including the form of biography this form of self, to bring about some forces which give potency to life to bodies with and around them. How to not separate one ‘self?’ from a common that helps shape life and gives it intensity and meaning. How to become unintelligible, incomprehensible, opaque to the fabricated machines of subjectivation and self-making. How to write in a language that only friends-to-come receive, a language that wrestles with language to keep the relations to all the palestines and to their forms of life alive.

Rene Gabri is another name for that process of recovering stolen life. The name is not gendered, though it has engendered enough confusion to assign to it all sorts of pronouns and prescriptions. It is a non-native name calling forth a native life, a life constantly pushed to the margins of oblivion. It recalls sites of previous and ongoing battles. It remains steadfastly associated with the wind, which is the closest kin or resembling a homeland. In this searching, a question which re-emerges: is wind origin, destiny or the unforeseen push toward a dissemination of the seeds of whatever could become recovery.

Houria Bouteldja, writer and activist of Algerian origin, was a founder and former member of the Parti des Indigènes de la République (PIR), a decolonial political party based in France, which fights against colonialist and neo-colonialist ideologies and practices, racism and Islamophobia. She participated in the founding of the Les Blédardes collective. She has written numerous strategic theoretical articles on decolonial feminism, racism, autonomy and political alliances, as well as articles on Zionism and state philosemitism.
She is the author with Sadri Khiari, of Nous sommes les indigènes de la République (Editions Amsterdam, 2012). Her most recent book Beaufs et Barbares: Le pari du nous (Éditions La Fabrique, 2023) was translated into Spanish, Italian and German, and is released this November by Pluto as Rednecks and Barbarians – Uniting the White and Racialized Working Class. Whites, Jews and Us, towards a politics of revolutionary love is her first book translated into Portuguese, English, Spanish, Italian, Greek and Dutch and so far the most recognized of her work, originally published in 2016 by La Fabrique, Les Blancs, les Juifs et nous: Vers une politique de l’amour révolutionnaire. Houria is currently a member of the QG Decolonial.

Françoise Vergès is an antiracist feminist activist, a public educator, an independent curator, and the cofounder of the collective Decolonize the Arts and of the free and open university Decolonizing the Arts. She received her political education from her anticolonial communist parents and the people in Réunion Island, an education she pursued in Algeria, Mexico, England, the UAE, the USA, and France, received her Ph.D in Political Theory (University of Berkeley, 1995).

She is the author of A Decolonial Feminism (Pluto), The Wombs of Women: Race, Capital, Feminism (Duke), Monsters and Revolutionaries: Colonial Family Romance and Metissage (Duke), and numerous books in French. Her last book “ Une théorie feministe de la violence: pour une politique antiraciste de la protection” published in France at the end of 2020, sheds light on state-supported institutions such as the justice system and prisons, which paradoxically, by aiming to decrease violence, contribute to enhancing it.

Amirah Silmi teaches and writes in the fields of anticolonial and revolutionary writing, as well as in the history of women’s and feminist movements.