Basel did not call on us to be resistance fighters. Nor did he call on us to be revolutionaries. Basel told us to be true, that is all. If you are true, you will be revolutionaries and resistance fighters.
— Khaled Oudatallah in a eulogy for Basel al-Araj in al-Walajah, March 8, 2017 (Basel al-Araj, I Have Found My Answers)
In the preface to Notes to a Native Son, James Baldwin writes, My inheritance was particular, specifically limited and limiting: my birthright was vast, connecting me to all that lives, and to everyone, forever. But one cannot claim the birthright without accepting the inheritance.
I have often thought about inheritance since reading this passage many years ago. An Arab child of a (stage of) capitalism late enough to have already revealed itself as nothing but rot, I was born into a world defined by crisis, a world constantly on the verge of catching fire. My generation was told that society was progressing, becoming fairer, more diverse, more transparent, and more interconnected. But most of us knew this to be false. We could feel our lives become narrower, smaller, and less human. We could sense an alienation, a separation from those around us and from ourselves. This was our inheritance. We were the heirs to the strange paralysis of knowing but never acting. We knew the truth of facts, reports, and liberal dialogue but were incapable of being true. With this inheritance, there seemed to be no birthright.
When students, teachers, workers, and people across the world flooded onto streets and university lawns after months of being drowned in a harrowing stream of images depicting genocide, it was not just that we could ‘no longer breathe,’ as Fanon once wrote. After all, a sense of being unable to breathe seems to have always been a part of our reality. It was, rather, the opposite. Something in those images had pierced through our walls of apathy, reminding us that it was still possible to act—to fight for the right to breathe once again.
When those who are enclosed between an electric fence and the sea, rained upon by deathly fire, humiliated and starved, when those who are most impossibly confined, most totally surrounded, when they stand up and still demand justice after being beaten down and abused time after time, when they break through the barriers of their prison, soar above its walls and create a rupture, declaring a new subject of emancipation, how can we remain passive and separate?
Our response to events like those of October 7, Jodi Dean writes in a recent essay, ‘is indicative of the subject effect’ that actions unleash. Something in the world changes, ‘because a subject has inscribed a gap in the given… we see that the action was caused by a subject, thus producing that subject as a retroactive effect of the action that caused it.’ ‘Imperialism,’ she continues, ‘tries to shut these feelings down before they spread too far. It condemns them and declares them off limits.’ Such feelings transform the objects of imperialism into the subjects driving its demise. They break the illusion of an overdetermined reality or inevitable defeat, reminding us that who we are and the positions we occupy in the world are not fixed or absolute but always in a dialectic with our actions.
Our actions not only have the power to open up gaps in the world’s objective realities but also to reshape and recreate our very subjective experiences of this reality and—as they echo out into the world—the subjective experiences of others. Emancipatory action can teach us, beyond the theoretical, about the commonality of our interests, the futility of individualist retreat, and the necessity of fighting for a truly universal justice. Resistance births subjects who resist. The seeds for this year’s global movement of protest were planted in the soil enriched by over 76 years of struggle for freedom by millions of Palestinians. They were planted by those, from every generation, whose actions—even if those actions did not have immediate material effects—recreated subjectivities of resistance; by those whose commitment to liberation inspired faith in those around them; by those heroic figures who fused vast knowledge with vigorous action such as Izz ad-Din al-Qassam, Ghassan Kanafani, Leila Khaled, and Basel Al-Araj.
Basel was a scholar, educator, and militant whose face—thoughtful eyes behind signature black-rimmed glasses atop a red and white keffiyeh—today adorns walls all across Palestine. He was a passionate reader who seamlessly navigated through political and social theory, philosophy, history, and anthropology and a prolific writer whose work resonated deeply with Palestinian youth. He was a teacher at the Popular University in the West Bank and a pharmacist who quit his first job at the Shu’fat refugee camp in Jerusalem because the pharmacy sold Israeli products when Palestinian alternatives existed. At 31 years of age, Basel was assassinated by the Israeli military in an extra-judicial killing filmed and proudly shared on the Israeli Occupation Forces’ official Twitter. After months in hiding, he was surrounded by an IOF force in an apartment in al-Bireh and, having no military training, fought back fiercely for two hours until he ran out of ammunition. In a brief final letter Basel left when he knew he was nearing martyrdom, he wrote: ‘Now I walk to my fate, satisfied that I have found my answers. How stupid I am; is there anything more eloquent than the actions of a martyr? I should have written this months ago, but what kept me was that this question is for you, the living. Why should I answer for you? You should search for it.’
As we return to classrooms this fall, let us begin our search for our role in liberatory struggle by becoming students of Palestinian resistance. Let us work to internalize the logic of non-serviam, and as we demand our institutions divest from the Zionist entity; let us learn to divest ourselves from the social and libidinal chains that paralyze and isolate us. Let us allow our knowledge to move us into action and our actions to inspire new subjectivities that break through the shackles of self-interest, atomisation, and fear. Only then might we rediscover what it is to be true and, perhaps, begin to recognize our birthright.