This was the preface I have written for Race and the Question of Palestine (Lana Tatour and Ronit Lentin, eds. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2025) but was prevented by my co editor from publishing as it was deemed ‘too risky’.
“National liberation, national renaissance, the restoration of nationhood to the people, commonwealth: whatever may be the headings used or the new formulas introduced, decolonisation is always a violent phenomenon”
(Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, Penguin Books, 2001 [1961]).
The Zionist entity, a.k.a. the racial colony of israel, responded to the October 7 2023 unprecedented guerrilla act of resistance by the Gaza-based Islamic Resistance Movement – Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiya, Hamas – and its partners in the Popular Resistance Committees by launching a massive air bombardment of the besieged Gaza enclave, followed by a ground offensive that caused near total destruction, huge loss of lives, famine and disease throughout the colonised and besieged Gaza Strip.
There is no point in re-rehearsing the extent of the Zionist destruction of Gaza, and anyway things change on a daily basis. At the time of writing, twenty months since the onset of the genocide, the official number of Gazans murdered by the Zionist entity between October 2023 and June 2025 stands at 61,700, including 17,490 children. Since The Zionist entity broke the ceasefire agreement with Hamas in March 2025, intense Israeli military activities escalated, resulting in tens of thousands of civilians reportedly killed and injured, further damage and destruction to civilian infrastructure, and new waves of forced displacement. According to OCHA, people are confined to ever-shrinking spaces, with 82 per cent of the Gaza Strip now within the Israeli-militarized zone, under displacement orders. The UN estimates that over 640,000 people have been displaced yet again since the breakdown of the ceasefire, including over 200,000 between 15 May and 3 June.
Due to the Israeli blockade and the severe shortage of food, potable water and fuel, the Gaza population is severely malnourished. More than 2,700 children below the age of five in Gaza have been diagnosed with acute malnutrition, marking a steep increase in the number of children suffering from malnutrition, the United Nations reports. Of almost 47,000 under-fives screened for malnutrition in the second half of May 2025, 5.8 percent (or 2,733 children) were found to be suffering from acute malnutrition, “almost triple the proportion of children diagnosed with malnutrition” three months earlier, the UN said.
In the guise of distributing food to the starving population of Gaza, the Israeli Genocide Forces (IGF) has been shooting at people queueing for food, so much so that UN Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories Occupied since 1967 Francesca Albanese has branded the US-backed food distribution system “humanitarian camouflage” and a “tactic of this genocide.”
In addition, according to OCHA, between 7 October 2023 and 2 June 2025, 942 Palestinians – among them at least 200 children – were murdered by the IGF in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem. Of those, 136 Palestinians, among them at least 27 children, were murdered only between January and June 2025 and Jewish settlers have continued to harass Palestinian civilians, demolish their inhabitations and expel them under the watch of the IGF, while the construction of illegal Jewish settlements has substantively expanded, and the situation of Palestinian civilians in occupied Al Quds has been the worst it has been in the past forty years.
The Israeli assault of the Gaza Strip was termed by genocide scholar Raz Segal “a textbook case of genocide.” This was echoed by other genocide scholars, by Palestinians and millions of their supporters throughout the world, and by international bodies, including UN rapporteur Francesca Albanese. The Zionist genocide in Gaza, vehemently denied by the Zionist entity and its supporters across the political divide, continues the ongoing Zionist settler colonial resolve to eliminate the Palestinian natives, in line with their racialisation by the Zionist movement that, since its inception in the late nineteenth century, has construced white European Jews as a superior race and Palestinians as well as non-European and Arab Jews as an inferior race, and conducted a perpetual war against the Palestinian people.
In the midst of the death, starvation, destruction and chaos caused by the Gaza genocide, it is truly remarkable that the Palestinian insurgents, despite their relatively small numbers and lack of advanced military hardware, and the impossibly difficult conditions from which they launched their insurgency on southern israel, have nonetheless succeeded, at the time of writing for twenty months, to hold on and prevent the numerically superior, better equipped and western-funded IGF from achieving victory. Among many Palestinian analyses, Toufic Haddad’s thorough analysis of the 7 October act of insurgency reminds us that “Hamas did its homework and Israel was assumptive and arrogant, believing it had gotten to the stage of omnipotence, omnipresence and omniscience at the same time” (Toufic Haddad, “Palestinian resistance and the war in Gaza,” New Politics, XIX(4), 2024, https://newpol.org/issue_post/palestinian-resistance-and-the-war-in-gaza/).
Calling the act of guerrilla resistance Gaza’s “Warsaw uprising moment,” Gaza academic Haidar Eid wrote already on October 10, 2023: “Instead of waiting for Israel’s ‘generosity’ when it decides, through mediators, to open one of the seven gates of the largest open-air prisons on earth, the inmates – having learned from the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 – decided to bring it down themselves… The resistance movements in Gaza, right and left, have decided to turn the table upside down. They have given the Palestinian struggle a new impetus, a clear direction towards liberation and decolonisation” (Haidar Eid, “Gaza 2023: Our Warsaw uprising moment,” Al Jazeera, 10 October 2024, https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/10/10/gaza-2023-our-warsaw-uprising-moment)
Beside the refusal to admit that the Zionist decimation of Gaza constitutes genocide and to contextualise the Palestinian insurgency in the history of the colonisation of Palestine, the Nakba, and the 1967 occupation, the Zionist entity and its imperial western backers, as well as many liberals, not merely liberal Zionists, rushed to condemn Hamas of committing a “crime against humanity” and to accuse supporters of Palestine of promoting terrorism and of antisemitism. Responding to the criticism of Hamas and its resistance partners by various Western bodies, including left wing commentators, Ramallah-based political analyst Abdaljawad Omar wrote that “the space for Palestinians to articulate their struggle is confined within legal constructs and liberal narratives of victimhood, which offer only a superficial treatment of agency, civil resistance and nonviolene, ignoring the harsh realities Palestinians face and the conditions that breed Palestinian liberation organisations.” This reminds us that our antiracist analysis must be rescued from liberal cooptation, ensuring it keeps anticolonial resistance to the fore.
Omar’s and Haddad’s analyses reiterate the nature of the Palestinian military strategy as guerrilla tactic “aimed not just to thwart Israeli efforts to retake land but also to hold areas for negotiation, complicating and impeding an easy Israeli counterattack” (Louis Allday, “An interview with Abdaljawad Omar on October 7th and the Palestinian resistance,” Ebb, Issue 1, January 2024: 9), a tactic that resulted in the Gaza genocide, but that also managed to continue to engage the IGF, ranked 18th in the world’s mightiest armed forces.
When speaking about Gaza we must acknowledge that Toufan Al Aqsa was a major military offensive against the holistic regime and apparatus of control that has continuously contained, starved, and repressed Gaza militarily, politically, and in terms of social and civilian life. “The operation was a strategic gambit in an effort to change the rules of the game, both in the long term as well as the short,” as Haddad writes.
We must also bear in mind that all the relentless ongoing solidarity work by millions of supporters, encompassing many Jewish pro-Palestine activists throughout the world – including me, a Palestine-born Jewish former settler (settler being a material and social relation, since I had left Palestine for good in 1973) turned pro-Palestine activist immediately after the 1967 Naksa – pales into insignificance by comparison with the powerful Palestinian resistance, courage and steadfastness in the face of the appalling genocide inflicted upon Gaza and its people by the Zionist racial colony and its imperial capitalist sponsors.
11 June 2025
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