The Responsibility of Resistance
Hanan Sabea says there is an Israeli campaign of extermination, not only of Palestinians but the region as a whole.
The Caravan sat down with Associate Professor and Sociology-Anthropology Graduate Program Advisor Hanan Sabea to discuss the right of resistance and its future, barriers to the global understanding of the situation in Palestine, and the gendered experiences in Gaza.
The Caravan: So, let’s kick off with your research on decolonization and resistance. How do you define the right to resist in the context of the ongoing conflict in Gaza?
Sabea: First of all, I would like to– I’m a little bit picky, but I would like to rephrase something. It’s not a conflict. It’s an occupation. If we resort to the concept of the conflict, we are diluting the main issue behind this, and then October 7th becomes the beginning of [the] narrative. Or any one particular moment the mainstream narrative wants to present it as such. This is an occupation, settler colonialism that has been going on for more than 100 years. It’s not only even with 1948, the Nakba. It actually preceded that. If we have been talking about the killing of a number of resistance movement leaders, this has been going on since, for instance, 1936 – Al-Qassam. So, this is not a novelty. The right to resist occupation is enshrined also in the UN in the declaration of our rights. How can we, in the 21st Century, still have a settler colonial state that is waging genocide against the people and another sovereign state, and say that people have no right to resist this?
I think part of what we are witnessing right now is not only about exterminating all Palestinians but even in the region at large. Literally doing away with any form of resistance possible to a very hegemonic colonial capitalist order… and that’s where we can see the different pieces coming together. So, it’s not only a right; it’s our responsibility as people who ever dreamt about a free world to actually take stock of that and to be able to say,
This is totally insane. It’s unconscionable… morally, ethically, politically that we can witness this a year on with an expansion into another sovereign country .. and people are still wondering about Israel’s right to defend itself.
Against whom? Seriously, against whom? Against people who are militarily in a very different place. Against people who are dispossessed and starved. Against people who have been under a blockade for 17 years in Gaza before. Against right-wing settlers who are getting into villages, destroying all the olive trees, and taking people’s homes. Who’s– who’s going to defend?
It is the right of the colonized to defend themselves, and it is our right and responsibility and moral obligation as people, as humans – if we still can call ourselves humans – to be able to take a stand against this. That also explains what we have witnessed over the year. Which countries actually took on the job of making a claim and filing against Israel and the United States and the UK in the International Court of Justice? It’s South Africa… and the other countries who came in support are also part of the colonized world, whether the early or the modern 16th, 17th century, or 19th century. So, it’s no wonder then, that even our imagination about the world today, which we used to call East and West, doesn’t hold like that.
Look at the U.S. and what’s happening there. Students, Black Lives Matter, people have been struggling for liberation. Palestine became a very important part of the imaginary of liberation that cannot happen without actually being able to say this is genocidal. It is a human crime. I mean, this is devas– I still cannot believe it’s here… and it’s not receding. It’s increasing. What other way can we think about it? So, definitely, this is an essential part for all of us, not only the Palestinians. Anybody who ever dreamed about the free world. That’s part of it. And this is not a novelty. In Egypt, we did it. In South Africa, they did it. In all the colonized world. It’s part of the struggle and it’s not something that happens in one day. In Palestine, I’ve been seeing this for a very long time, and it ebbs and goes down because the violence that they are exposed to is just unbelievable… and it forces us– Sorry, I can go on about this forever… and if we are serious as social scientists and scholars and academicians, we need to take full stock of this moment to figure out some of the very basic concepts that we have been working with.
You use the term “decolonization.” Very interesting. “Democracy.” Totally useless category. Whose democracy? If Israel is presenting itself as the democratic teeny little nutshell in an area of autocracy and authoritarianism, which democracy kills people without even thinking about [it] twice? Dispossesses destroys academic institutions, destroys churches. Today [9th of Oct], while I was waiting for you, we witnessed live– they attempted to kill a journalist live on TV. But it forces us to really think “what do we mean by education?” If we’re saying we want to actually educate and be global citizens, as we claim at AUC, what’s a global citizenship at this particular moment? That we witness and turn our heads around or say we’re exhausted after the year? What do you mean by decolonize? Unless we are capable actually of unpacking all the different layers that made it possible for a place like Egypt and Jordan and Emirates and Saudi and Iran, all the different players in the region. How are they connected? What’s holding it together? Why is the U.S. so adamant about supporting Israel? What gave Israel this power to do this and to do away with anything that relates to international legality and order? If it ever held. Is it meaningful? And I think that’s one of your questions; is international law still a viable option? We’ve seen it completely thrown away.
So, what does it mean? Were we part of the imaginary of an international law as third world people; colonized people? Or that was done for some other purpose? Although history tells us otherwise. But today, we were all put to the test and all these categories were put to the test that actually they become totally meaningless. ‘East and West’ doesn’t hold. What do I do with a country like? Next to Germany or next to Denmark or next to the Netherlands, who arrested 300 people yesterday [Oct 8, 2024] for supporting Palestine. I mean, it’s madness. So, how is the world cut? How is it reorganized? Not only in terms of what they are saying, but we’re witnessing is very serious, serious collapse… revealing all that has been disguised under very nice rhetoric, that all of us wanted to believe in at one moment in time in order to be able to live. “Peace.” What does “peace” mean? Seriously, what do all these categories mean? “State” … and people [are] still talking the language of two-state solution […] This is not a conflict, and to talk about it as a conflict is a serious, serious underwatering of the problem. In order to let it go, but it will not go away… and what we have seen happen in all settler colonial countries before the colonies, whether it’s the U.S. or Australia or you name it, South Africa– These were very murderous moments in history […] I was thinking about it the other day because when I was teaching in the U.S., I used to teach about U.S. history, plantations, and slavery. The slavery wars. What were they? They are no different in seeking their humanity and liberation than what we are witnessing today… and they were managed as these racialized, violent creatures, not even humans… and that’s more or less what we are witnessing happening in front of us.
So, it’s not as if things actually fundamentally and structurally have changed. The metaphors that we’re using, the language that we’re using has, in order to accommodate for a very neoliberal order that actually wants to whitewash everything, but if we go for structural analysis of what is happening, this is not October 7th. No way.
This is a right to say, “I do exist and you have taken my land away. You have starved me. You have killed me.”
And it’s not only Gaza because if we turn the question into a Gaza story, the whole story- the whole of historic Palestine has been taken away. What has been happening in the West Bank is just mind-boggling – that people can enter people’s homes and destroy them and kill them with impunity, and to arm them. I mean, it’s, like, what are you doing? So, yes, that would be my answer. It’s beyond the right. It’s a responsibility not only for the colonized but for anybody who ever dreamt about living in a world that is any facade of freedom or liberation.
The Caravan: We really appreciate you commenting on the phrasing of the question. We’re here to learn and we have.
Sabea: We’re all learning. We’re learning what we have learned over the last year and what we had to unlearn because we wanted to. We desire to believe that we could do things differently. I mean, to the extent that sometimes I think ‘Why am I being so evil and wicked witch from the east when I think that I want revenge now?’ What we’ve lived through is just unbelievable and we’re living this from the comfort– This is my home [shows The Caravan her home with the Zoom camera]. This is my study and bedroom. Not living constantly under the zanana. The zanana is a very particular name for the drones. They call it in Palestine the zanana, which [is] constantly zooming like zzzz above you. Intensified bombing during the night when you have to take whatever little possessions that you have in order to be forced to be moved. Losing whole families, having no water, no food… We are doing all of this and watching from our homes, from our comfort zone. So, yes, it is a responsibility for all of us to fight this back.
The Caravan: You mentioned a little bit in what you were saying and it’s a good segue to the next question, which is, in your opinion, why do you think no one is putting a stop to Israel and what do you think are the obstacles facing the resistance movements in Palestine? And beyond in the region as a whole.
Sabea: I think there are several things here. It will be too simplistic to say it’s one thing because what is happening is making it possible for any other narrative of seeking to liberate ourselves from autocracies, from violence to be done away with… in the sense that when you make it impossible for people to actually even say what is happening is fundamentally brutal– like what we’ve witnessed, for instance, in U.S. campuses or what we’ve witnessed in Egypt or what we’ve witnessed in Europe with regard to students who are at the forefront of this movement; of trying to create a coalition and coordination and alliances across borders as a generation that is refusing to succumb to this level of of violence… and to accept this– that we can witness and be complicit by our silence.
Part of this is to be able to destroy any form of resistance to any kind of power and paradigm of power and hegemony that is being established. A key player in this is the United States, of course, and it’s not only because AIPAC and the Jewish lobby are very strong. Of course, that’s part of it… and of course, the right-wing, increasing right-wing in the U.S. is part of it. But there is also a desire to maintain a very particular form of order that only knows capital violence, technology, AI. I mean, think about what happened in Lebanon with the pagers killing. I mean, it’s unbelievable.
If I had watched that in a sci-fi movie, I would have said, “Oh, they have gone a little bit far.” This was not a sci-fi movie. This happened.
So, we’re talking about a level of military, industrial complex that is not only controlling the U.S. and making profits for it, but global. So, it’s in the interest of the U.S., much as in the interest of Netanyahu, for this to continue because that’s how you make money. That’s how you sell your weapons. That’s how you circulate capital around the world at the cost of people dying. Let them die. It’s OK, they are cockroaches anyway. Remember Iraq? “Cockroaches of the world.” So, that’s one level. What kind of order is being actually sedimented and established?
Part of that order also– I mean, can you believe what’s happening in the UAE and the support that they are giving Israel? Maybe we don’t read much about it, but it is a continuous support… financially, exports. Who would ever have believed that during and after a year of genocide that exports to Israel from the Emirates and from Egypt would increase rather than decrease? So, there is another layer to this about precisely who’s gaining from a) undermining any possibility of people speaking up or challenging what is happening, whether in Palestine, in Jordan, in Egypt, in the Emirates, in Saudi, in the whole region.
It is the responsibility of the militants, or other movements who are not so militant, no matter what happens, are take on the responsibility of fighting till the end; of saying “we’re not gonna go away.” We’re not going away. We’re here after a year. If until today you’re finding that people are still capable of hurting even one merkava [battle tanks used by the IDF] or one shelling of Israel, that’s a statement that even a year after the most militarily brutal campaign of destruction, that still is going on, and it will not go away. Anybody who thinks that this will go away, with all the repression that is taking place and all the violence that is taking place, is dreaming because historically, we learned it does not go well. It will find other ways to come up and it would always come up because this violence is not sustainable. No matter how much glee of glory we’ll see in Netanyahu’s face after killing, for instance, Hassan Nasrallah, or destroying a camp, or the magzara [massacre] in Tulkarem [in the West Bank] two days ago [October 3, 2024]… There is glee, there is happiness about this; that we are coming finally out as victorious. We were able to defeat them… There is no defeat. In the final analysis, history tells us, no matter how long it takes, that it actually will continue. You will always find ways to come back. No system has no cracks and no power is without its weakness, and that’s where the possibilities lie.
Nobody imagined– everybody knew that the resistance were coming back, but nobody imagined October 7th, Tufan Al Aqsa [Operation Al Aqsa Flood], to be like what it did. We were watching it in awe that they were able to do this, but also with a tremendous fear because everybody knew it’s going to be a bloody war afterward. But there is always a cost to liberation. Mandela was imprisoned for 27 years. How many South Africans- black South Africans and Indian South Africans died? How many indigenous American groups died in order to be liberated? Same for Australia. Same in Latin America. Same in Algeria. We’re not going far. In Egypt. That’s what it takes. Will it happen? I’m positive as I’m talking to you. Whether it’s going to be our lifetime or not, it doesn’t matter, but it will happen. Cannot, cannot not happen… and that’s why we need to continue and figure out any possibility of cracking this up, even if it’s a scratch… even if it’s saying we’ll continue to– I mean, last year on campus, I used to go around alone with the flag saying, “I will be in your face to remind you that this is not going to go away, even if it’s only one person.” So, never give up. Violence, intimidation, repression… All of this has to be faced with the cost and everybody is aware of the cost, but it will.
The Caravan: Thank you so much for that insight. Moving on, in your view, and often being framed under– all types of resistance as terrorists by some governments and media outlets, how does this complicate the global understanding of such conflicts? Or how can we kind of push back that idea in a successful way in your opinion?
Sabea: Again, I would argue that all of these arguments – labeling any resistance that is militant and it’s defending the right to exist, to be liberated – will always find ways of dehumanizing it. So, when we were talking about earlier moments in history – I teach anthropology, but I love history. All my work is soaked in history because I think that’s where we actually get to see lots of continuities and structures, but also changes. Natives who were resisting were “the primitives,” “the uncivilized,” “the riotous lot.” We changed” the uncivilized.” We don’t talk about them like that. We talk about them from savages- they became the terrorists and the terrorist was inhabited by many. The body of the figure of the terrorist was inhabited by many, many images. So, that’s the production of a category in order to be able to constantly devalue and dehumanize many of the things. Are there violent acts? Of course. Are there things that we need to condemn about that? Of course. I’m not opposed to any critique of such organizations like Hamas or Hezbollah. We can never forget what happened in Syria from Hezbollah. That’s as clear, as evident as anything. But at this particular moment, with what is going on after a year of genocide, how can we actually account for Hezbollah being able to prevent, literally up till today [October 9, 2024] two hours ago, any kind of ground forces moving into Lebanon? So, we need to be able to understand the context and the historicity of the category of the terrorist that has been deployed, and what preceded it in terms of other categories in order to be able to see how militant resistance gets to be codified in order to empty it of its meaning.
I’ll give you a very different example. It was not necessarily about decoloniality. During the January 25th revolution, what did we use to call the regime and people who wanted el istikrar… the stability? And this is a bad thing – Baltageyet el tahrir [Thugs of Tahrir]. It means you’re a hooligan; you cannot belong to the “good citizen” at that time. Very similar category. So, our role as academicians, as people who try to dig deeper behind the surface, is to be able to see what is at stake in those categories. How are they deployed over different kinds of bodies? Who gets to define it, and what do I do with a state and its forces that uses AI in another sovereign country to murder, through pagers, 5000 people in a minute? Is that terrorist or not? Because if we go to the definition of terrorism, [it] is the intention to inflict violence on a large group of people immediately. So, how they are deployed, in what context, with what histories, on what bodies becomes the critical question that we need to use, and on the basis of the formulation of that category and its production, making it a common sense category – the familiar that people are using even without thinking, ordinary people – we deployed a range of laws, which also are coming to haunt those who deploy them. So, there is a whole apparatus of governance around the category of the terrorists about policing people and policing cities and policing any form of challenge. Order and power in very particular ways.
The Caravan: On a note that I don’t think a lot of people talk about from the gender perspective, how do you think–
Sabea: I have stories.
The Caravan: We wanna hear them.
Sabea: I wouldn’t want to hear it.
I have a lot of people that I know in Gaza and the West Bank from many parts of my life. The stories that we hear… Okay, I’ll ask you a very stupid question. If you want to pee, what do you do?
The Caravan: Go to the bathroom.
Sabea: Does your bathroom have a door?
The Caravan: Yes.
Sabea: Okay, when that condition is not a possibility, and you’re constantly being forced to move from one tent to the other with no belongings… and whatever we’re talking about to the bathroom is at best the pit latrine where there is nothing of a privacy around it and you have to stand in line. Think about what it takes and if a gender body that distinguishes your gender, your sexuality, your age is at stake. Taking a shower. The shower was brutally hot. Brutally hot.
Is it a possibility? Almost all women get their menstrual cycles. Where do you get your tampons? Of course, this will be completely beyond. What do you do? If you’re pregnant? What do you do? If you have a miscarriage. If you see your child murdered in front of your eyes.
So, every experience that we go through is already a gendered experience because we do not enter it as flat bodies without any identifiers or marks. We’re marked all the time. So, the experience of genocide is also an experience of a gender genocide… whether to pee, God forbid you have diarrhea or constipation– I mean, the very, very routine quotidian things of life that we do every five minutes without even thinking. When you have to stop to think about it and how you perform them, that’s a gendered experience. When your body is violated because you are a man or a woman, that’s a gendered experience. When you’re raped– and we know that women in the West Bank have been raped when they are taken to Israeli prisons and men have been raped and the raping here happens in very different words because of the gender. When families get to be completely dispersed because people cannot move as families anymore. So, it has forced a complete living at what we talk about is “bare life”; bare life in its most fundamental ways, and that’s a gendered experience that is also layered by all sorts of things.
Those who were able to have a few pennies left to them when the genocide happened were the first to move through the border to come to Egypt. It’s becoming much more difficult because there is no border anymore that is open. So, that’s another layer. If you want to nurse your child, baby born, what do you do? Every detail of your life in the range of the 24/7 is a gendered part of it, layered, as I said, by age, by religion, by how you’re positioned, by your network, by everything. So, we’re constantly moving in this world as bodies that are marked. Sometimes those markers become completely erased when I make no distinction in killing you, for instance, or they are highlighted in order to be able to rape you in a very particular way and to rape a male body in a very different way. So, of course, gender is a very important part, […]. One of my colleagues- she was a student. I worked with her. She’s now working as a journalist in Gaza and she describes what it is like to live through this. It’s- it’s- it’s- it’s mind-boggling. She’s a young woman in her late 30s, had a family, had two kids, had to let her kids leave because she was damn worried about them… and what it means to send your kids away to live and you don’t know whether you’re gonna be seeing them again or not. So, all these sets of relationships and effects and emotions and experiences are very much part of this larger scene of the violence that is deployed on bodies in massive ways.
The Caravan: Hopefully, looking forward as you said, no one should give up and this should always be a consistent thing. So, how do you envision the future of resistance movements? In the Middle East as a whole and particularly–
Sabea: Continue. We will be repressed. We will confront violence because people would want to see this end at whatever cost, and we need to be very creative in figuring out ways of not repeating what we used to do, but actually thinking all the time about how to do it differently. One of the basic things about being able to continue is not to go to the familiar. Try the unfamiliar. The unfamiliar opens up this space that the person in front of you, who’s ready to shoot at you in a second or to arrest you or to make you vanish from the scene, is not familiar with. By the way, again historically from all that we’ve learned, regimes of power get acclimated and accustomed to very particular ways of reading the situation and somehow predict or want to presume that they can predict what comes next in the sense that people will follow what they had done before. I’ll give you a very concrete example, in Egypt every year, come January 25th, you will find like 10 million police cars in Tahrir. Seriously, we gave up. The fact that we gave up on Tahrir, that’s not the end of the world.
There are other things that can be done, but there is this sense of repetition. But we also know that repetition never happens as a repetition. Repetition always happens, and it is about learning how you actually work around this. How– that’s the very important thing. Not necessarily to repeat in the same way because nothing is repeated. Second, to be very creative. We have tools that are amazing in front of us all the time. All the time. It’s just sometimes we need to open our eyes to see where the strength lies and how we can actually do this, from the smallest to the most radical. Third, being able to constitute collectives, no matter how different they are.
I don’t get scared of differences. Difference is good. Difference is not bad. Build on that. Create coalitions, create collectives that will always move to think together, to be able to be there for each other because being able to continue is being able to fall down and to find somebody to be with you and to lift you up.
That’s part of being able to continue over a longer span of time. It’s not an individual. One of the worst things of the neoliberal order and modernity that we have lived through is to convince you that the individual is the most important and the center. It’s exactly the opposite. It’s the collective that you create that believes in a particular project, and it’s this– it’s the responsibility and the dreams about the world, that is… and then many things can become possibilities and you will never repeat what you had done before. It will always be something.
The system’s power always has its weaknesses. The weakness of power is precisely to be able to figure it out, and we are very ill-equipped of figuring those out and then moving around it. I don’t want to be in your thing. I want to constantly move around it. To come- you know why, like the person that keeps coming up everywhere unexpectedly. That’s how it should be… and we’re ready. Don’t give up, don’t feel exhausted, don’t turn your face away. Yassin al-Haj Saleh is a writer. He said, “How do we look in the face of the horrible and not turn around?” Because that’s what we’re doing right now. Many people are so terrified of watching what is happening because a) they are emotionally exhausted – rightly so – and b) it’s frightening to actually watch what’s happening. To not even have a corpse, but body parts that are left of people. Don’t look away. Look it in the face and see how can you deal with this. Continue, continue, continue. It will never stop. When we actually are capable of doing otherwise and the otherwise is always possible.
The Caravan: Thank you so much for your time and the way you phrase it with simplicity and in a way that’s easy to understand. Seriously, thank you.
Sabea: This is my conviction about the world. Never give up. Never feel tired. When you do, let somebody else hold you by the hand and say, “It’s okay, you rest for a while. I’ll continue.” This is how it goes.
