The Object of Resistance

A recent podcast of Deep Dive Perspective, moderated by Mohsin Abbas, articulates a debate within the context of Palestinian liberation, about the prerogative of the resistance to reach its own goal, that is, without the mediation of its provisional allies or, more importantly, without the receptivity of the dissenting factions of its current enemy, namely the coalition of anti-Zionist Jews. Many organizations defend the Palestinian cause according to their own terms and ideological persuasion, actually burdening Palestinian self-determination. Thus arises the critique of symbolic solidarity, which, according to Gilad Atzmon—an Israeli-born British saxophonist and novelist—has to do with "how Jewish identity is constructed in the modern age." The "Jewish question," he says, is defined by post-Enlightenment dialectics in its negative inflection. By contrast, Rabbi Hayem Sofra, a member of Neturei Karta who is very well informed about the Nakba, traces the genocide of Palestinians back to 1921. He is an ardent advocate of the right of return and, in short, shows admirable support and commitment to the Palestinian cause—enough, in any case, to get him expelled from Israel to live in the UK. Laith Marouf, an on-the-ground journalist and inveterate freedom fighter, responds that the Rabbi is not doing this for the Palestinians but for himself; thus, Marouf does not owe him thanks, because in the Rabbi's name, millions of Jews are systematically eradicating Palestinians. Since no Jew is actually willing to die for a Palestinian, Laith is willing to settle for a lesser compromise: the equivalent of a Schindler among them. Atzmon seconds the critique, adding that Jews are willing to die for their beliefs except when it comes to Palestinians—a stance that has come to be known as PEP (Progressive Except Palestine), the attitude of the progressive liberal or left-wing advocate that does not extend those values to Palestinians. The Rabbi insists otherwise, citing numerous examples of genuine involvement, while stressing that he is also in favor of an Islamic Caliphate to replace the Arab-Zionist coalition. This stands in contrast to Atzmon's dismissive remarks, which suggest that all of this amounts to no more than a minor incident and is not representative of any serious commitment. Laith adds that, for instance, even the Zionists who fought Franco in Spain have Palestine written on their graves, while those of Palestinian militants are nowhere to be found. The Rabbi counters that many Jews are willing to join an armed revolt and that the freeing of Palestine from a Jewish perspective is not a recent idea; it was pioneered by Rabbi Vasserman, who was murdered during the Second World War. The plea not to flatten the genuine effort and commitment of anti-Zionist Jews upsets Gilad, who retorts that Neturei Karta is merely kosherizing the Palestinians by using the discourse of the oppressed to further entrench the hegemony of Jews within the solidarity movement. Laith follows up with uncomfortable questions, glad a historical precedent exists, but perplexed by its lack in the present. This leads to Atzmon's conclusion that the oppressed are the only ones capable of liberating themselves, despite the good intentions of anti-Zionists who remain an obstacle. Laith—who is usually more extreme but sounds mild in comparison to Gilad—summarizes that while Palestinian liberation does not need forked-tongue representation, it would be right for Jews to rise against their own fascism, making room among themselves for Palestinian self-determination to happen of its own accord.

This brief exposé reveals sensitive tensions begging to be examined within the problematic of Jewish subjectivity. The Zionist psyche is emblematic of the Hegelian dialectical subject of history, for whom the institution of the Jewish self is predicated upon Zionist identity, causing an intersubjective redundancy that interferes with and completely overlooks the object. It is a negative dialectic in the sense that it substitutes the other with an extension of itself. So if the Hegelian movement is from self to other, it is, in this case, from Jewish to Zionist identity, in a closed circuit that obliterates the Palestinian other. Thus, the Aufhebung retrieves what one hand gives out with the other and is responsible for the Oslo syndrome of conditioned deliberation. In the dialectical structure of the Hegelian subject of history that constitutes the Zionist psyche, the thesis leaps directly to the synthesis, casting out its antithesis upon the demonized other. It is inherently a dialectics of exclusion because it rests on the banishment of the object for the sake of an identitarian embrace. It is pertinent to note at this point that someone like Miko Peled—considered by many to be one of the clearest voices against Zionism—is a living example of what Laith Marouf and Gilad Atzmon deem to be lacking in effective, results-driven activism. Although it is unlikely that Miko would bear arms and occupy a synagogue, he nevertheless incarnates the entire struggle by making his own life a rite of passage to the other. A torturous path he describes in his memoir “The General’s Son”, tracing his transformation from a proud product of the Israeli military elite into an outspoken advocate of Palestinian rights. As he turns personal loss into a catalyst for change, his gradual awakening leads from questioning the beliefs instilled in him since childhood to shedding misconceptions and prejudice, opening the door to the partnership implied in a one-state solution. Next to Miko Peled’s life-changing journey, we may recall Edward Said stating in a 1993 interview that it has been very important for him to understand that, given his own "experience of politics in the long battle against Israel, in (his) lifetime and several to come, there's no hope that an essentially military or military-based kind of battle with the Israelis can be won, because it's not in the cards, any more than their winning is." "They're not going to go away; we're not going to go away," he adds, bringing home to roost the problematic of the very structure of dialectical thought—a structure not scrutinized enough for its obliteration of the Palestinian object of resistance—and hanging a question on whether its suspension in equanimity is not essentially a trap.

Although Edward Said’s contrapuntal method and Hegelian dialectics share a concern with relationality, mediation, and the historical process, his approach remains a sustained refusal of dialectical closure. His distrust of totalizing systems of thought is evidenced by his belief that “all representation is misrepresentation of one sort or another.” However, his writings consistently balance two commitments that may seem incompatible today: an unwavering critique of Zionism as a colonial project and an equally firm refusal to essentialize Jews or Israelis as permanent enemies. Said criticized systems of representation that turn Palestinians into abstractions while also resisting the idea of treating Jewish identity as a unified political entity. For him, Zionism was a historical and political formation, not the essence of Judaism—a distinction that allowed him to collaborate with several sympathetic Jewish intellectuals. Moreover, the very existence of anti-Zionists challenged the idea that Judaism and Zionism are the same. His distrust of representation, such as his strong opposition to the Oslo process, stemmed from the fact that it could easily replace the represented, not because it is inherently illegitimate. In today's context, he would likely support Anti-Zionist solidarity if it enhances Palestinian political agency, but he wouldn’t hesitate to criticize it if it did not. Given that Said’s idea of coexistence was very demanding, his main criterion was whether a political alliance could help dismantle systems of domination while also maintaining the equal dignity and agency of all involved. But might it be that safeguarding subjectivity from the Zionist objective, in the constricted form of both the individual and the collective, ultimately smuggles in the structure that will invariably turn it against itself!?

The idea that anything can happen independently—without being influenced by anything else—and affect its otherwise passive environment or an unsuspecting contiguous entity stems from a particular understanding of autonomy. Based on this assumption, the self-made individual becomes a model of the free agent in control of their surroundings and destiny. Taking direct communication for granted, such a subject requires that the other remain still for the sake of the unadulterated determination of the self. Whether expressed in the mythology of the entrepreneur, the artist-genius, or the military commander, this conception assumes that agency originates from an interior source relatively insulated from the conditions surrounding it. There is, on one hand, enormous merit to overcoming obstacles and opposition, to being one's own boss, and to integrating the help of others into an arsenal of personal resources. On the other hand, the eventuality of others' involvement—as instruments rather than obstacles—raises issues of representation, in which the scale risks tipping in favor of the mediator. Although intention is less an origin than a node within a much broader circulation, the autopoiesis of the privileged subject occurs in an existential vacuum. The self-made individual represents an ostracization of the collective dimension, funneled into its constitutive unit and set against a neutered socius. It is the perfect logic of capital to consider entities as silos of stockpiled resources and, like the state, to deploy the same playbook of denigration every time the possibility of their democratization begins to gain traction.

The object of resistance is a volcano in a lunar landscape, a smoldering chimney in the dead of winter, and the smiling gaze of Subcomandante Marcos through the billowing volutes of his pipe. The leader of the Zapatista movement sends faciality up in smoke by placing his individuality at the service of a collective struggle and turning popularity into a vehicle of communal solidarity. He represents an indigenous object steeped in magical realism, given a subjective form to channel a revolutionary mode of operation. His black ski mask is both a refusal of the imperial gaze and a champion of the Zapatistas' visibility. It is rare for a celebrity to be directed to a collective constituency instead of remaining the center of gravity. And while being the target of attention does not preclude a certain enjoyment, the aim is to strip away the ego while also exposing state violence and exploitation. The cultural or revolutionary hero, as a model of emulation, can thus aggrandize the individual in a cult of personality or relay to the collective, conjuring the integration of personhood in the social body. Returning to the Palestinian struggle for self-determination, if we were to consider Edward Said’s approach, two distinct strategies for escaping the yoke of domination would emerge. Whereas Said attempts to overcome colonization from within the tradition of critical humanism, Marcos does so through a politics of material embeddedness, sidestepping the European foundation of subjectivity. The Subcomandante is less interested in the contribution of subjects than in the emergence of relationships among heterogeneous beings. His mask is not merely anonymity but actively dissolves the individual author into a network consisting of indigenous communities, forests, mountains, rivers, histories, and autonomous municipalities. In an inversion of charismatic politics, the spokesperson insists that he is replaceable, that the movement precedes him, and that the community speaks through him rather than the other way around. Here, the leader is directed to the collective assemblage, reflected in his writing, which is populated with accounts of beetles, old trees, rain, dirt roads, legends, and animated objects that participate in the political world as actors possessing their own trajectories and agencies. Said's predicament, on the other hand, is that he inherited a philosophical vocabulary whose principal concern was the relation between subjects and their subsequent worlds. Even when relentlessly criticizing Orientalism as a regime of representation, his own analytical language remains bound by representations confronting one another: the Orientalist imagination, Palestinian self-governance, Zionist historical narratives, colonial discourse, and contrapuntal readings of competing histories. Therefore, the Palestinian question often appears as a struggle between symbolic worlds that attempt to monopolize reality. Yet Said repeatedly gestures toward something more resistant than discourse itself. Geography is never merely symbolic terrain but a stubborn material condition. Exile is not simply an existential metaphor but the concrete severance from a place that continues to exist independently of memory. Philology disciplines interpretation by insisting upon the recalcitrance of texts that exceed the reader's intentions. His contrapuntal method, borrowed from music, asks that histories be read simultaneously precisely because no single narrative exhausts the object under consideration. His thought nonetheless unfolded in a framework that remains predominantly epistemological, and within a discourse still largely preoccupied with the contest among competing forms of representations. As a Palestinian intellectual writing in the late twentieth century, the available critical vocabularies available to him were largely those of European humanism, Marxism, post-structuralism, and anti-colonial discourse. These traditions may offer powerful tools for dismantling imperial ideology. Still, they remain in the service of the universal subject of history, a framework Said stretches to its breaking point without entirely abandoning it. By contrast, Subcomandante Marcos, in effacing his own individuality before the collective life of indigenous communities and the landscapes they inhabit, suspends the primacy of representation itself, allowing territory, memory, and the dense fabric of human and nonhuman relations to assume precedence over the singular voice that speaks in their name. Given their differences, there is no unbridgeable schism between these two approaches, and it is not so much what each can bring to the other than what they disclose by their proximity to the object of resistance. Despite the asymmetry that the colonized and oppressed are subjected to, they are in a privileged position to strip down the language of empire and invent a new rapport with the object. And because no subject can ever entirely absorb its resistance, every attempt at territorial appropriation, colonial possession, or civilizational exceptionalism is metaphysically misguided before it is ethically objectionable. In other words, ontology ceases to be merely descriptive to enter a politics in which sovereignty gives way to custodianship, representation yields to rapport, and coexistence is grounded in the irreducibility of the world itself.

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