October 15, 2023 - 1:30pm
Frantz Fanon is a thinker who is worshipped but seldom read. Known for his provocative meditations on political violence, he is frequently dredged up in the argument over the Israel-Palestine conflict, which for many Leftists is the ne plus ultra of settler colonialism in the 21st century. In the aftermath of Hamas’s homicidal assault on civilian communities in Southern Israel, alongside mantras of “decolonisation is not a metaphor”, there was an enthusiasm among some sectors of the Left for what they misconceived as an act of anti-colonial “resistance”.
For instance, Rivkah Brown of Novara Media tweeted (later deleted and apologised for after a backlash): “The struggle for freedom is rarely bloodless and we shouldn’t apologise for it.” The president of Sussex University’s feminist society, Hanin Barghouti, declared the onslaught as “acts of resistance” that should be “celebrated”. The Black Lives Matter chapter of Chicago published an image of a man on a glider (one of the methods Hamas militants used to get into Israel from Gaza) with the caption: “I stand with Palestine.” Similar images could be seen among pro-Palestine protesters in London this weekend.
Such reactions call to mind Fanon’s infamous chapter “On Violence” in his book The Wretched of the Earth, and the descriptions of “collective catharsis” and the “cleansing” effect violence can have on the colonised in their struggle for liberation. “Colonialism is not a thinking machine,” observed Fanon, “it is violence in its natural state, and it will only yield when confronted with greater violence.”
Yet Fanon’s view of violence is more subtle than either his supporters or detractors give him credit for. His basic point was that because colonial rule is inherently violent and can only be maintained through repression, it therefore creates the conditions for violence against it. He certainly wasn’t in favour of gratuitous brutality. True, he believed violence “frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect”. But he warned that violence as an end in itself, disconnected from any wider political and social goal and vision, is a trapdoor:
Applying this to Palestine, Hamas — being a reactionary, exclusivist outfit — has a “post-Israel” vision that will produce an ethnically cleansed theocratic dictatorship, in other words “building up yet another system of exploitation”. More, their pogromist violence against Jewish civilians is not “cathartic”, or restoring Palestinian self-respect, but instead full-on racist sadism.
While one can reasonably analyse Israel as a settler-colonial state and society, albeit a very peculiar one (as Arnon Degani has done), much of the talk of “Zionist settlers” on the Left is purely polemical, identitarian and uber-moralist. “Decolonisation” in this sense quickly becomes a cloak for deranged ethnonationalism, not a vision for a free society.
Further, Palestine in 2023 is not Algeria in 1956, which was Fanon’s main point of reference. Nor can we put Israelis in the same category as the pieds-noirs. The latter had a “mother country” to which they could return; Israelis do not. Demographically, the pieds-noirs were a small minority who ruled over the Algerian majority; in Palestine, Jews and Arabs are roughly of equal number.
There will be no long-fought war of independence resulting in Jews being evicted from a reconquered Palestine. Indeed, if a group were to be driven out it would be the Palestinians, as called for by Israeli politicians, due to the sheer disparity in military power.
The horror show that has occurred in Southern Israel and Gaza is less a reenactment of Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers, more Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salo. It is not something over which Fanon would have rejoiced.
Ralph Leonard is a British-Nigerian writer on international politics, religion, culture and humanism.
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SubscribeIt appears to me that the biggest oppressors of Palestinians is Hamas. I see they have now blocked a road to prevent people from fleeing to the north.
The job of ‘cannon fodder’ is to be fodder for the cannons. That’s why they’re called ‘cannon fodder’. Trying to escape their destiny of dying for the cameras is clear dereliction of duty.
Israel is nothing like a colonial state. Previous colonisers like ourselves and many other peoples in history, went wherever they could and took over. The Jews didn’t just pick Israel off the map, but precisely because they had lived there originally and themselves been driven out by other ‘colonisers ‘.
It would hardly have been a good choice in any case, being mostly desert with very little going for it in terms of livability or natural resources. It’s purely as a result (admittedly helped by early inputs of foreign cash) that they have built it up to a first world country. The Arabs in Israel are better off than in virtually any other Arab country except those sat on vast oil reserves.
Bit like us here in the UK then
The idea that Jews suddenly turned up in Palestine after having been absent for two thousand years is as nonsensical as the idea that Palestinians’ oppressors are Jews and not Islamic fundamentalists.
‘They’ weren’t “driven out” but many left of their own volition to take advantage of the economic opportunities offered by various Hellenistic states and later by the Pax Romana.
However plenty remained to rebel against Rome in 63BC, 66-70 AD, 117 AD, 132-3 AD, 352-3 AD, & 613-4 AD.
After the Arab Conquest of 636 AD many may have converted to Islam. There were a number of advantages, too numerous to mention here.
Colonisation as per Hannah Arendt refers to any expansionist national project that aims to further apolitical state interests (acquisition of capital as an end for example; crypto-mystical ideologies about race or volkish thinking etc) in lieu of the political — the realisation of the values of justice, equality, liberty and so on. While I haven’t read her work on Zionism yet, on the above definition, I don’t think that the democratic state of Israel can be understood as a foundationally colonial state — given that it is ultimately the latter that drove the demands for Israeli statehood. There’s also plenty of evidence surrounding the acquisition of land and so on prior to post-independence military activities. However, I would say that it’s hard to say that the democratic state of Israel isn’t a colonial force today, seeing the problems surrounding what is now referred to as “settler colonialism”, especially with regard to current practices surrounding residence and settlement both within the West Bank, and in the desert regions where one finds kibbutzim. This seems to me to qualify as an expansionist project whose aims stand in opposition to the political, as per Arendt, which would qualify these recent incursions supported by the Israeli government as something that comes quite close to her definition of “Colonisation “.
However, even if the modern Israeli state is a colonial state, on what grounds does the use of violence justify one’s political aims? I can see no particular reason in Fanon, apart from a kind of nihilism, that while justified in its anguish, presents no fruitful answer to the problem posed by inequality and injustice. If we go back to Arendt, she would argue that Fanon’s justification of the use of violence reflects a fundamental ideological corruption of the conception of the human will, whose uncritical adoption by Fanon and his decolonising acolytes reflects a willed, ideological corruption of the human being on an organised level in history. I think she’s right when I think of the infants and autistic children kidnapped and murdered by Hamas, the bases for which are, as the writer’s noted, based on a nihilistic intellectual stance advocated by the shrill and empty voices of ideologues who have lots to say but give little by way of thought. What’s worse is that these perversions are being celebrated and championed as “truth” by most progressives. Questions of who corrupted who and when it happened are one thing, but the fact is very much that corrupt choices are being made now, not just by Hamas, not just by Fanon, but by Corbyn, by Brown and so on.
Why have we uncritically concluded that a successful anti-colonial project can only be won through violence when there’s plenty of historical evidence to prove that it is non-violence that brought about the few anti-colonial projects that didn’t historically degrade into utter banal forms of democracy. Let us recall that the Gandhian anti-colonial movement critiqued the both conditions of the colonial regime and the colonial notion of the human being through non-violence — by ideologically and politically formulating a distinct ethical notion of the human being through non-violent action. So I want to ask why some of our most educated decolonisers are intent on justifying and framing violence as the only successful means of critiquing colonisation? Seems odd to me to champion a human being submerged in her own filth rather than tell her that she stinks.
No, I’m pretty sure they’re understanding Fanon as he intended.
All we’re looking at here is Third-world Liberation Theology through a lens of Marxist Conflict Theory.
Per Liberation Theology, those identifying as “oppressed” can never be on “the wrong side of history.”
If Jewish people have a presence in the region going back thousands of years, a history of persecution from the surrounding Arab world (hence needing the protection of their own state), and no alternative ‘home’ state as mentioned in the article, then how can the Jewish state be simply ‘settler colonialist’?
Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth has been described as the Mein Kampf of anti-colonialism. Reading that linked extract On Violence you can see why. Rambling revolutionary fervour on every page.
It was compulsory reading on some of my courses in the early 70s. No wonder that generation of Boomers proved so destructive.
Fanon would surely have recognised the naz1 roots of the current regime in Gaza. Their scorched earth retreat resembles nothing so much as H1tler’s insistence that Germany and its children should die with him and is driven by the same narcissism.
Very timely article, thanks! Fanon has been hijacked by Hamas supporters.
Who is in the right here? The most powerful military is in the right, as always.
“God is not on the side of the big battalions, but on the side of those who shoot best.”*
(*V.)