The Colonised Reject Zionism: What have revolutionary figures taught us?
In 1983, the Pan-African socialist and leader of Burkina Faso, Thomas Sankara, gave a defiant speech at the non-aligned movement in New Delhi, India. Ferocious with his vernacular for the establishment of armed resistance against the bloody ‘imperialist bloc’ of America and Britain, Sankara’s speech proves relevant to our contemporary world now more than ever as the media and political class run squeamish at the sight of the colonised refusing to sit passively.
What is striking about the politics of the oppressed in the colonised world? Living under a brutal siege, subjugated to imperial conquests and racialised subjugation, the colonised throughout history have rejected their dehumanisation by whatever means necessary. This rejection stems from the desire to be free, for humanity to see them as equals and not inferiors. Though it would be easy to write about the history of the colonised people and their politics of freedom in isolation, it is important that when it came to the liberation of Palestine, the colonised world remained firm and rejected Zionism, both as a colonial project and an imperialist outpost for the British and American hegemony.
Sankara saw that Zionism was a racialised project conditioned on the expulsion of Palestinians. Yet, he also understood it as a project aiming to destroy the growing Pan-Arab movement that confronted American imperialism.
What do we learn from this rejection? Sankara understood it as one to claim independence and national liberation. It is of no surprise then that the colonised world saw the struggle for Palestinian liberation as a struggle against racialised violence and for total independence. In 1987, when 8,000 Bangladeshi youth joined the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) under Yasser Arafat, they too fervidly rejected the racialised violence of Zionism. The memories of genocide and displacement of many Bengalis who had experienced the violence of the 1971 war perpetuated by the then US-backed West Pakistan became a vehicle that energised a popular youth revolt against Zionist oppressors and has shown an umbilical familiarity with racialised violence of the Israeli regime.
In 1969, after working alongside the then Al-Fateh, exiled Eldridge Cleaver who joined a few Black Panthers in Algeria to set up a Black Panther Party office pressed the party to endorse the faction which recognised the leadership of the PLO and publicly denounced Israel as a US puppet and for ‘Al Fateh’ to win. Whilst the party began to move away from an internationalist position, the 21st-century iteration of the Black Lives Matter movement reenergised the politics of anti-imperialism by attacking Britain's military role in Israel’s colonial violence and marching shoulder to shoulder with Palestinian movements in the diaspora world. The mantle of revolutionary struggle is alive, no longer situated in the peripheral past, but alive today; revolutionary movements continue to share the struggle against imperialism and colonialism and recognise that the liberation struggle is can only be successfully executed through transnational solidarity against racialised violence.
So, what is striking about the politics of the oppressed? The current conjuncture requires us to revisit this struggle. Zionism is not a project designed only to subjugate and alienate Palestinians, though, with 75 years of ongoing catastrophe, it would be mistaken to assume Israel’s existence is not premised on this violence. Zionism's entire project is brought up by America and Britain’s imperial hegemony through its political and economic state repression, maintaining regional control. People across the world have defied their repressive governments and have risen to the call for liberation despite the ongoing state suppression prompted by puppet regimes. In the colonial world, we have witnessed the diaspora stand firm in their commitment against mass genocide. We cannot overlook this obligation that has been laid out, and we owe it to the colonised to prepare and organise amongst each other to put an end to Zionism. As Faiz Ahmed Faiz noted, ‘Your enemies laid waste to one Palestine, in each of my wounds lives another Palestine’. Beyond the ceasefire, the only politics to pursue is the rejection of Zionism.
By Hamza R