Pasquale Liguori: In the dominant media portrayal of Palestine in the West, Palestinians are often reduced to the figure of the eternal, ideal victim. Even in allegedly pro-Palestinian media, this representation serves to elicit a shallow, sentimental sympathy that offers little real support to those living under siege, in prison, or in exile. When Palestinians resist, they are instantly branded as terrorists. These same media outlets reduce the right—and duty—to fight oppression, apartheid, and the theft of land to a vague abstraction. This was evident in the blanket condemnation of the Al-Aqsa Flood on October 7, which lacked any consideration of historical and geopolitical context. This narrative arrogates the power to grant or deny subjectivity to a people who have been resisting for nearly a century. What are the origins of this dominant Western narrative of Palestine, and how does it contribute, directly or indirectly, to the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people? Mainstream Western discourse continues to trap Palestine between the poles of “human rights” and “terrorism.” How can we break this dichotomy, which sterilizes the colonial reality of the conflict?
Abdaljawad Omar: I used to answer this question in the most straightforward of ways: that the oppressed—Palestinians, in this case—are permitted to cry out, to name their wounds, to become recognizable within the prefabricated scripts of “human rights,” that last charitable fold of liberal modernity. But what they are systematically denied, both by their enemies and, crucially, by their sympathizers, is the right to understand their own resistance. Not just to feel it, not merely to survive it, but to think it.
There is a deep structure at work here, one that insists the Palestinian must always remain the sufferer, the testifier, the exhibit. Even those who claim solidarity often do so on the condition that we remain suspended in that role: the bearer of pain, not the producer of thought. Resistance, when it is acknowledged at all, is quarantined—rendered as reactive, as blind, as ultimately unworthy of conceptual dignity.
But something has shifted. The past two years of uninterrupted massacre of death, met not with silence but with a new and furious clarity, have begun to trouble that arrangement. I no longer believe the refusal to allow Palestinians the capacity to theorize their resistance is merely about Palestine. It is, more dangerously, about the world. What is feared is not our liberation per se, but that resistance might become thinkable again. That it might circulate. That it might take root in other zones of abandonment. That the Palestinian, no longer the mute emblem of suffering, might become the figure through which the question of emancipation reenters the political imagination.
What we are witnessing is not merely a colonial relation between Israel and Palestine, but the enforcement of a structure—one whose operations exceed the geographic or juridical boundaries of the so-called space of the conflict, places like Gaza or the West Bank. There is a conditional sympathy that circulates widely, often cloaked in the language of humanitarian concern. But this sympathy functions, quite precisely, to salvage Zionism from its own contradictions. It offers a moral alibi while safeguarding the permanence of Israel not simply as a state, but as a form: a hinge in the architecture of the global order.
This is an order that requires the Eastern Mediterranean—historically the cradle of anti-imperial dreaming—to remain fractured, administrated, and violently unwhole. Zionism, in this configuration, is not a historical anomaly but a necessary instrument. Its continuance is essential to a geopolitical trinity that has governed the region since the colonial partitioning: the circulation of oil, the logic of capital accumulation, and the strategic dismemberment of Arab political possibility. In this sense, Israel is not just protected; it is structurally indispensable. To resist Israel, then, is not merely to engage a settler colony. It is to pierce through a wider imperial grammar, a grammar that depends on the unmaking of Arab futurity, the perpetual decomposition of political sovereignty, and the translation of every act of resistance into terror, every uprising into pathology.
This is why Palestinian resistance, when it dares to speak in its own name and not through the ventriloquism of legality or pity, becomes intolerable. It is not the violence that terrifies—it is the lucidity. The refusal to be disciplined into victimhood. The insistence on meaning, on strategy, on the political imagination as something other than mourning.
But more than that—what renders it dangerous, what animates the fevered attempts to suffocate it—is the charisma of the idea itself. Muqawama (resistance) not as reaction, but as proposition: as contagious force; as a grammar that might traverse borders and languages, that might be taken up in lands far from Palestine, wherever people confront the architecture of managed life and slow death.
It is this potential—the portability of resistance—that must be buried under rubble, that must be reduced to criminality or madness, that must be managed through rituals of condemnation and exceptionalism. Because once resistance becomes thinkable, speakable, nameable on its own terms, it ceases to be local. It ceases to be containable. It becomes a mantle. It becomes a question.
PL: Palestinian resistance should not be understood solely through the lens of military effectiveness or immediate results, but as a form of rupture with the colonial order, symbolically and temporally. In your view, how does resistance disrupt the linear, progressive time imposed by colonialism? Can we interpret the Palestinian struggle as a form of insurgency that produces new political temporalities?
AO: Indeed, when we disentangle Palestinian resistance from the reductionist metrics of military success or strategic calculus, we begin to see it for what it is: a metaphysical rupture, a disordering force in the colonial grammar of time itself. Colonialism does not simply occupy land—it occupies temporality. It imposes a linear, progressive notion of time in which the colonized are always behind, always catching up, always not-yet-ready for freedom. Under this regime, resistance is either framed as premature (irrational, emotional) or obsolete (futile, archaic). Both frames work to foreclose the political imagination.
But Palestinian resistance, particularly in its most raw and unassimilable forms, refuses this logic. It does not seek permission from the future promised by Oslo, nor does it await recognition from the vanishing horizon of international legitimacy. Instead, it interrupts. It insists on the now—not as a point on a timeline, but as a site of confrontation, of meaning-making, of sovereign utterance. It breaks open colonial time not only by asserting the presence of the colonized but by refusing the roles assigned to them in the script of history.
Resistance here is not merely reactive—it is ontological. It stages a kind of insurgency against time itself, producing what we might call counter-temporalities: moments where the colonized become contemporaries of themselves, where history folds, and where the dead walk with the living. Think of the martyr not as a tragic figure, but as one who collapses the distinction between the past sacrificed and the future retrieved. Think of the refugee who returns without return. These are not metaphorical acts; they are temporal revolts.
In this sense, the Palestinian struggle is not only about land, though it remains deeply embedded in the soil—it is also about time. It is a refusal to inhabit the world as structured by the colonial timeline: from nakba to negotiation, from intifada to normalization. It is the irruption of another kind of time: dense, recursive, haunted, and alive with the presence of that which the world insists must be buried.
So yes, we must learn to see resistance not as failure when it does not “win,” but as an event—events that scatter the colonial order, that make visible the cracks in its presumed inevitability, and that gesture toward a different horizon altogether.
Having said that, it is no less important to also view it in the lens of calculus, of end and means, of its rational and declared aims.
PL: At this moment in history—Gaza in ruins and the West Bank under suffocating siege—where, how, and when do the cracks in Israel’s hegemonic discourse emerge and widen? There is no doubt that the Al-Aqsa Flood exacerbated internal tensions within Israel, exposing its structural and sociocultural fragility. It seems that ongoing violence is the only mechanism the regime uses to justify its existence. This fascism has become the glue holding together a profoundly fragile society. What are your thoughts on this?
AO: Yes, we are no longer speaking of a “glue” that holds together the fragments of Israeli society—we are speaking of a spearhead. The distinction matters. While glue conceals a desperate cohesion, a reactive stitching-together of a crumbling order, the spearhead signals directionality, aggression, the transformation of crisis into force. It is not about repair; it is about forward thrust. Israeli society, fractured along ethnic, ideological, and class lines, now finds in violence not a temporary escape but a mode of political becoming.
This is why we must be cautious with how we name fascism. To reduce it to its most garish symptoms—settler messianism, open calls for ethnic cleansing, theocratic mobilization—is to miss its deeper atmospheric hold. Fascism in Israel today does not reside solely in the kippah of [Itmar] Ben-Gvir or the uniform of the hilltop youth; it pulses, more dangerously, through the so-called center, through the liberal secularism that frames Palestinian life as a problem to be managed, controlled, and excised.
There is a profound complicity embedded in the Israeli liberal: the one who mourns the “loss of democracy” while cheering for wars that can never be won, the one who decries “extremism” while believing—down to their core—that Jewish sovereignty demands Palestinian disappearance. This is fascism without messianism, fascism without the performance of zeal. It is fascism by consensus, by bureaucracy, by managerial reason.
We must be even more careful when we restrict the term fascism to its most flamboyant exponents, allowing its quieter forms to pass unmarked. The liberal Zionist who calls for a “sane” end to the war, but whose red lines never include the restoration of Palestinian life; the intellectual who calls for coexistence, but only within the ethnonational hierarchy—all of these are not outside fascism, they are its rational face.
What makes this moment so dangerous is not simply the violence of Israeli fascism in form, but its diffusion in substance across the political spectrum. This is a society that does not just tolerate fascism; it requires it, though with different dialects and dress codes. It is, to borrow [Walter] Benjamin’s phrase, the aestheticization of politics dressed as pragmatism—and Gaza is its canvas.
To understand this is not only to name the regime as it is—but to prepare for the world it seeks to build.
PL: The long and brutal genocide in Gaza is, albeit belatedly, drawing unprecedented international solidarity. Yet, media repression remains widespread. Even those media outlets that have shifted from overtly supporting Israel’s so-called “right to self-defense” to a more hypocritical condemnation of [Benjamin] Netanyahu alone still stop short of addressing the colonial system as a whole. Institutional repression also remains strong across Europe and the United States. In this context, what does “epistemological resistance” mean today?
AO: To speak of epistemological resistance today is not to invoke abstraction. It is to name a front of struggle no less decisive than the material one. For what we are witnessing in the wake of Gaza’s ongoing genocide is not only the annihilation of bodies and homes, but the attempted foreclosure of meaning. The repression we see in Western media and institutions—however sophisticated its choreography—is not merely about silence, but about framing, about scripting the visible and the sayable in advance.
Even where cracks appear—where Netanyahu is vilified, where concern for Palestinian “civilians” is mouthed—the colonial order remains intact in thought. Israel’s war is still treated as a deviation from liberal norms, rather than the logical consequence of a settler-colonial project sustained by imperial consent. The violence is decried, but the architecture that necessitates it is never named. This is the work of ideology: to displace causes with symptoms, to isolate figures from systems, to moralize instead of historicize.
Epistemological resistance, then, begins with disobedience to this order of knowledge. It is the insistence on speaking from within Palestinian historical experience, not as a supplement to dominant discourse, but as a disruption of it. It means refusing the grammar that renders us visible only as victims, refusing the moral frames that distinguish between the “good Arab” and the “militant,” and refusing the temporal deferral that asks Palestinians to wait, to be calm, to negotiate, while the ground beneath them is consumed.
It also means confronting the complicity of institutions that claim neutrality. Western universities, think tanks, NGOs, and media outlets that repress speech on Palestine are not failing their ideals—they are enacting their function. They are epistemic state apparatuses that work to filter, manage, and domesticate dissent. To resist epistemologically is not only to assert different content; it is to fracture the very forms through which knowledge circulates.
It is in this moment, when the horror of Gaza has ruptured the affective compact between empire and its spectators, that a different knowledge begins to pulse. The image of Palestine is no longer simply that of a humanitarian catastrophe; it is becoming the site of a global reorientation, where the West is being compelled to confront the lie at the heart of its universalism. That confrontation—painful, destabilizing, and unresolvable within liberal parameters—is itself a form of epistemological insurgency.
What is feared most is not just Palestinian speech, but the thought it carries. A thought that decolonizes not only land, but sense. A thought that dares to say: the world must be otherwise.
PL: Destruction, bloodshed, and terror in Palestine continue unchecked, led by an Israel that faces no consequences. Since October 7, the impotence of the international legal and institutional system has become even more evident. Despite proceedings launched by the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court, Israel—with U.S. backing—continues to act with impunity, even within the United Nations. Netanyahu’s call for the assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, made during a speech at the UN General Assembly, symbolized this disregard for legal norms. We appear to be dealing with a hypocritical superstructure riddled with double and triple standards. Could you offer an overview of critical thinking on this issue?
AO: Critical thought must abandon the premise that international law is a neutral terrain. Scholars from the Third World Approaches to International Law tradition, such as Makau Mutua and Antony Anghie, have long argued that international legal structures emerged in tandem with colonial conquest, designed not to restrain power but to structure its legitimacy. The very categories of “sovereignty,” “security,” and “self-defense” are not universal—they are coded, racialized, and deeply hierarchical. Israel’s invocation of “self-defense” after October 7—while Palestinians are denied even the language of resistance—exemplifies this colonial asymmetry embedded in law itself.
Moreover, as thinkers such as Walter Mignolo and Achille Mbembe have shown, the so-called “international community” is not a community at all, but a cartel of power arranged along civilizational lines. The universal is always claimed by the West, while particularity—and therefore dispensability—is imposed on the rest. Palestinians do not suffer simply from a lack of legal standing, but from a juridical order that was never meant to see them.
Yet, something is shifting. The growing disillusionment with international institutions is not only a crisis—it is an opening. It allows us to speak of law not as salvation, but as terrain. The erosion of liberal legitimacy gives rise to a new political language—one grounded not in appeal, but in assertion. Not in begging for recognition, but in building solidarities that see through the mask of neutrality.
PL: After the assassination of many resistance leaders, the destruction of Hamas infrastructure, and the extension of Israeli occupation in Gaza, can we still speak of an organized resistance movement? Or are we now entering a more diffused, spontaneous, and molecular phase of struggle?
AO: To speak of resistance today—after the assassination of cadres, the decimation of infrastructure, and the expanded occupation of Gaza—is to speak not of disappearance, but of transformation. We must be careful not to confuse the visible architecture of resistance with its existential capacity. Yes, there has been unprecedented loss: organizational disruption, the erasure of command structures, the targeted destruction of the social and logistical tissue that made coordinated armed struggle possible. But resistance, as Palestine has taught us again and again, is not reducible to its institutions. However, the idea that Palestinian resistance is more molecular is to some extent true as a tendency—but also not exact. Palestinian resistance in Gaza retains much of its cadre, its infrastructure, and its capacity to resist. The idea at this point is to sustain resistance for the long term, in order to ensure a costly Israeli occupation, and a struggle of wills that does not end in one blow or another.
PL: In your work, you have often highlighted the distance between the Palestinian elites and the people. After months of total war on Gaza and institutional erosion, do you see signs of political recomposition, or does this structural fracture persist?
AO: The distance between the Palestinian political elite and the people is not new. It is a structural condition born of Oslo, deepened by the Palestinian Authority’s (PA) securitized dependency on occupation, and cemented through the twin logics of international funding and authoritarian consolidation. What we have seen in recent months—amid the ruins of Gaza, the paralysis of the West Bank, and the moral collapse of the PA—is not the overcoming of this fracture, but its exposure. The mask has fallen, but the regime remains. There is no political recomposition in the formal sense—not yet. The existing institutions are hollowed out, bankrupt both financially and ethically. They continue to function not because of legitimacy, but because of inertia, fear, and the absence of immediate alternatives. The PA today is not a national project. It is a ghost institution, propped up to contain social unrest and absorb international pressure. Its survival is not an index of political vitality, but of colonial necessity.
Yet, beneath this decay, something is stirring—not in Ramallah’s ministries or in factional headquarters, but in the streets, where the question of what is to be done remains intact.
PL: A growing tension in critical Palestinian thought exists between national liberation and a post-state horizon. What future do you envision for the Palestinian political subject: a state, a confederation, or something else?
AO: This tension between national liberation and a post-state horizon is not merely theoretical. It is the echo of a lived contradiction. On the one hand, the longing for sovereignty, for a flag, for international recognition, and for the dignity of statehood remains powerful, especially in a world where statelessness has meant erasure, fragmentation, and endless subjugation. On the other hand, the state—as it exists in the postcolonial world, as a form inherited from colonial cartographies and sustained by imperial institutions—has become a site of management, not liberation.
To ask what future awaits the Palestinian political subject is to ask whether this subject can ever be free within the state form—or whether freedom now lies beyond it.
The PA, the Oslo Accords, and the model of two-state partition have all revealed the limitations of statehood as currently configured. They have produced not sovereignty, but subcontracted occupation. The map promised to us was carved with the logic of containment. The state was offered not as an achievement of liberation, but as a reward for obedience. In that offer, the political subject was domesticated, bureaucratized, and fragmented.
Yet, we cannot dismiss the state outright. For many, the desire for a state is not about diplomacy or borders—it is about historical redress, about undoing the violence of dispossession, and about being seen. The post-state horizon must not mock this desire. It must metabolize it.
What we may be approaching, then, is not the simple choice between statehood and statelessness, but a more complex articulation of non-sovereign sovereignty—a form of collective political life that is neither tethered to the Westphalian nation-state nor reduced to NGO fictions of governance. Call it a federated imaginary, a confederated fugitive politics, or even a decolonial jurisdiction without statehood—but it must be built from below, through practices of solidarity, land stewardship, return, and refusal. It must draw from Indigenous struggles, Black radical traditions, and Arab antistatist thought, without idealizing their outcomes.
Such a political form would not seek recognition from the United Nations, but from history. It would not police borders, but dismantle the very metaphysics of partition. It would center return—not just as physical repatriation, but as a reassertion of political presence where we were meant to disappear.
The future of the Palestinian political subject cannot be one dictated by diplomatic pragmatism or donor logic. It must emerge from the ashes of Oslo and the ruins of Gaza as something unthinkable to the colonial present—something we do not yet have the language for, but which we may already be practicing.
Perhaps this is what frightens our enemies most: that the Palestinian is no longer asking to enter history, but to rewrite it.
PL: There is an undeniable correlation between the material devastation in the region and the weakening of resistance on the ground. Hamas has been severely hit, Hezbollah faces limitations in Lebanon, Syria has shifted geopolitically, and Iran appears paralyzed. The so-called Axis of Resistance seems challenged in its coordination, despite having prevented Israel from achieving some objectives. What has been achieved, and what future scenarios do you foresee in the struggle against Zionist occupation?
AO: What we are seeing is not the collapse of the Axis of Resistance, but its moment of reckoning. Yes, the material devastation across Gaza has severely affected Hamas as an organized military force; Hezbollah is constrained by Lebanon’s internal collapse and by a regional cold war logic that imposes restraint and by the heavy blows it suffered in the war; Syria is entangled in its own postwar reconfiguration; and Iran, while rhetorically defiant, acts with increasing caution, aware of its geopolitical vulnerabilities and internal unrest.
But let us be clear: the Axis of Resistance was never a single, cohesive command structure—it was a loose, tactical constellation of forces that shared antagonism toward U.S.-Israeli hegemony. Its effectiveness has always been uneven. What has shifted is the terrain itself. While Israel can claim successes, also these successes, like the case of Syria, is not the product of its own, but also based on a constellation of factors and convergences, including the persistence of Idlib, Turkish, and other regional and international actors’ support. This narrative of Israeli success should be challenged on these terms; it is, to say the least, overexaggerated.
Moreover, Israel’s failure to achieve total victory in Gaza, despite overwhelming force, is not a mark of Axis cohesion, but of settler-colonial limits. If there is an achievement in this moment, it is the exposure of Zionism’s strategic ceiling. Israel has shown that it can destroy, but not govern. It can displace, but not eliminate. It can bombard, but not resolve. In that failure lies a new horizon for struggle—not one centered on regional coordination alone, but on dispersed, decentralized, and transnational forms of confrontation. The future may belong less to state actors and more to multipolar insurgencies, driven by new solidarities from below.
PL: [Donald] Trump’s so-called “plan for Gaza,” though it may seem absurd, carries a virulent danger—it seeks to normalize the idea of an ethnically “pure” society, where non-conforming groups are systematically excluded. This vision revives racist policies and proposes an authoritarian project rooted in fascist ideologies and white supremacy. What are your thoughts on this?
AO: Trump’s so-called “plan for Gaza” is not a deviation—it is the logical extension of a global authoritarian impulse that fuses racial purity with territorial domination. Its absurdity should not distract us from its violence. What it envisions is not peace, but clearance: the final transformation of Gaza into a zone empty of political density, memory, or people.
This is not just Zionism unmasked—it is white supremacy globalized. What Trump proposes is a fascist fantasy of spatial purification: a Gaza without Gazans, a Palestine without Palestinians. It resurrects the oldest colonial myths—terra nullius, civilizational uplift, the barbarian other—and dresses them in post-9/11 security discourse.
More dangerously, it is an invitation to the world: to normalize ethnic cleansing as policy, to legitimize genocidal thinking as development planning. In this, Trump is not alone. He is merely louder. The quiet technocrats who speak of “resettlement,” “buffer zones,” and “post-conflict stabilization” participate in the same ideological project. What we are witnessing is not the exception—it is the fascist kernel of the global present.
PL: How do you interpret the response of the Arab world to the humanitarian catastrophe in Palestine? Is there a new grassroots pan-Arabism emerging, or are state logics and national interests still dominant?
AO: The official Arab response to the catastrophe in Gaza has been marked, unsurprisingly, by cowardice, complicity, and cold calculation. States remain bound by national interest, regime security, and fear of popular revolt. They mouth concern while maintaining normalization; they send aid while policing speech.
But beneath this stagnation, something else moves. Across the Arab world—from Amman to Rabat, from Cairo to Tunis—we are witnessing the stirrings of a new grassroots pan-Arabism: not the old Nasserist project of inter-state unity, but a popular affective reconstitution of Arab identity forged through shared outrage, shared mourning, and shared refusal.
This is not yet a program. It is not organized. But it is felt. It is spoken in the chants of protesters, in the subversive solidarities online, and in the intimate gestures of everyday people refusing the silence of their rulers. This new Arabism is less about flags and more about affiliation: an identification with Palestine as a wound that cannot be nationalized, as a mirror of their own oppression, as a symbol of what has yet to be overcome in their own states.
If this affect hardens into organization—if it refuses to dissipate once the bombings end—it may become the most potent legacy of this moment: a reawakening of Arab political consciousness not from above, but from the ground. But there are many ifs here, and it obfuscates the power of disidentification and reidentifications that are also a force in the Arab world: more narrow forms of identities, less revolutionary, and wedded to daily life without futurity. For now, this affect is felt, not really exhibited.
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