"Fanon would not have supported Hamas"

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The world-renowned philosopher, Lewis Gordon, who is known for his work on Frantz Fanon and contributions to decolonial thought tweeted this shortly after October 7, 2023. Not only does he claim that Fanon supported the existence of Israel but also that he would not have supported Hamas, that is, anticolonial resistance. From Adam Shatz’s co-optation of Fanon’s position on anticolonial violence to Gordon’s liberal zionist perspective on the Palestinian resistance, we learn that counterinsurgency is in full swing when scholars we’ve previously admired show their true colors when it comes down to Palestinian liberation.

Gordon, the “Fanonian scholar,” forgets a few things when it comes to Fanon’s so-called support of Israel. First, he forgets that biographers have already debunked the accusations of Fanon being a Zionist. In 1985, Hussein Abdilahi Bulhan wrote an intellectual biography of Frantz Fanon where these accusations are given more context:

When Fanon won the endorsement of the Tunisian Minister of Health, the director accused Fanon of being a Zionist and a spy of Israel, using as evidence his earlier writings against anti- Semitism and his association with Jewish doctors. The accusations however failed to discredit Fanon even in the charged climate of war and suspicion.

David Macey also writes about the same incident:

Ever since the days when, at Saint-Alban, he had persuaded the bursar's wife to lend him her precious piano, Fanon had displayed a talent for getting his own way and obtaining the unobtainable. He had done it again, but he had also made a potentially dangerous enemy who did not easily forget old scores. Unable to rid himself of Fanon by administrative methods, Ben Soltan turned to politicking. In 1959, he began to accuse Fanon and Geronimi, who reached Tunis in June 1958, of being undercover agents for Israel, and even of maltreating Algerian and Tunisian patients on Israeli orders. 'Zionism' was a potentially damning accusation in the Arab world of the late 1950s, but when Ben Soltan formally took his case to Minister Ben Salah and demanded the expulsion of the Zionists, he was simply laughed out of court. He had, however, made Fanon's position at the Manouba so uncomfortable that the family moved out to live in premises owned by the FLN, which had bought and rented properties throughout Tunis (and which had no scruples about requisitioning houses belonging to individual Algerians when the need arose).

Second, Gordon omits the tensions that arose between Josie Fanon and Jean Paul Sartre. Though Sartre changed his position on Israel in the 1970s, after the 1967 Naksa, Sartre signed a letter of support for Israel’s conquest. For being a signatory, Josie Fanon requested that Sartre’s preface be removed from Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth. For Josie, as Jessica Breakey writes, anyone who had read this book and “did not show unwavering solidarity to the Palestinian cause had simply not understood the text.”

Third, Gordon ignores what Fanon himself observed in Algeria’s counterinsurgency operations vis-à-vis Jewish communities in Algeria. There seems to be a romanticized perspective of Fanon’s views on Jewish people given that he was a soldier in World War II. Fanon did not have a monolithic view of Jews as solely being on the receiving end of domination, though he did recognize the importance of the shared history of racism and dehumanization. During the Algerian Revolution, Fanon wrote the article Disappoints and Illusions of French Colonialism, which was featured in his book Toward the African Revolution.

To hold on to colonial domination, Fanon argues that the first counterinsurgent tactic employed is to use collaborators, that is, colonized intellectuals. These comprador intellectuals are the first to condemn subversion, insurgency, and revolutionary action. It is they who are amplified to delegitimize the revolution from within—those who so easily portray insurgency as a "seditious movement" disturbing the socalled peaceful coexistence between the colonizer and the colonized. These condemnations are amplified to the population, in this case, using the media the French dominated in Algeria. The radio served this purpose, but not for long since the FLN quickly made use of the radio as well, using it as tool for political education to inform the population not only of the FLN’s anticolonial project but also to counter the colonial power’s counterinsurgency efforts, whether through reformist policies or ideological or rhetoric (Fanon discusses this at length in A Dying Colonialism). Since the FLN created alternative radio stations, these tactics did not serve France's broader counterinsurgent strategy. In fact, Fanon claims that more and more loyalists declined invitations to read scripted condemnations of the resistance. As we’ve seen since October 7, condemnations proliferated Left and Right, especially within so-called decolonial and radical academic circles. Gordon is perhaps one of the best examples. To condemn the Palestinian Resistance is, first and foremost, a counterinsurgent act. After twenty months of a live-streamed genocide in Gaza, news reporters are still asking intellectuals to first condemn Hamas, to denounce armed resistance, to discredit the right to self-determination by any means necessary.

The second tactic is to create tensions between historically racialized groups. Gordon ignores that Fanon wrote about Jewish counterinsurgency in Algeria as well as the FLN's letters appealing to Jews's oppression from the inquisition to the Holocaust. The FLN showed a deep understanding of the history of Jewish presence in Algeria since the 15th century, suggesting also that they, too, are integral part of Algeria, especially when considering their cultural and intellectual contributions after being expelled from Spain during the Reconquista. These letters were aimed at countering the fears French officials stoked in Jewish communities (“what would become of them if the Muslims took power”). Using the Holocaust, as it is used today by Israel and the mainstream media, created a hypothetical sequel to the genocide Jews experienced in Germany, whereby the unpredictable future of Jews (Arab Jews in this case) was more important than the actual systematic killing of Algerians. These tactics simultaneously absolve the West from its crimes against Jews and places the blame on those who are on the receiving end of incredible violence. Similarly, Palestinian resistance and the mere fact of existing on their land is always-already genocidal in the eyes of those actually committing genocide. As so many people have made clear, “Every accusation is a confession.” Palestinian presence is thus a threat to the zionist settler colonial project.

Despite the scare tactics used in Algeria, a small percentage of Jews joined the struggle. The majority, however, aspired to be French—i.e., white¹. The latter participated in the counterinsurgency operations against the resistance, consisting of raids, massacres, and rapes. For Fanon, the Jewish counterinsurgency efforts in Algeria clearly had a racist character, pointing to those who aspired to be signatories to what Charles Mills would later conceptualize as the racial contract.

Today, we’re seeing how tensions are blown out of proposition on social media to fragment the radical coalition politics established between Indigenous, Black, Latinx, and Palestinian struggles. The debates surrounding Kamala Harris and her support and participation in genocide heightened these tensions. Liberal influencers quickly capitalized (in the literal sense) on these tensions, which obfuscated the deep and enduring coalitions, making them seem as nonexistent to those unfamiliar with the history. After all, Muslims and Arabs made Trump win. Then Latinx were at fault. But these liberal influencers—white, brown, or Black—never placed the blame on Biden or Harris. Liberals, including Mehdi Hasan, showed their anti-immigrant tendencies when Trump won, suggesting that Latinx people deserved to be deported for voting the way they did. With the LA uprisings resisting ICE raids, we’re seeing the same racist and dehumanizing discourse recycled once again. Others are always to blame.

As we can observe, the means of counterinsurgency may very well change but the ends remain the same. From intellectuals condemning resistance to the use of the means of communication—from the radio to social media algorithms—determining what can or cannot be said in support of liberation and decolonization in material terms, one realizes that counterinsurgency is at the heart of it all. What’s different is that some of the counterinsurgents of today don’t even know they’re counterinsurgents. Neoliberalism’s possessive individualism has produced counterinsurgent dispositions even in those who claim to be radical, particularly the intellectuals who allow themselves to be seduced and captured by the little power given to them in academia. From what I can gather from the 1960s, it seems that counterinsurgents at least knew what they were up to. I may very well be wrong. But there is little doubt that possessive individualism leads to self-surveillance and the surveillance of others, which entails disciplining those of us who refuse to be co-opted by the meager rewards racial capitalism has to offer.

Academics whose actions have counterinsurgent consequences, whether they recognize them as such or not, must be critiqued, despite the academic capital that may be lost in the process, especially when considering the politics of citation and the currency that one acquires when aligned to particular intellectuals or schools of thought.

Gordon, among other intellectuals, form part of the broker intellectual class Cedric Robinson admonished us about. It is for this reason that we should debunk their baseless claims whenever we have the chance. Ultimately, discourse is a matter of life and death.

FLN Letter

The National Liberation Front, which has led the anti-colonialist revolution for the past two years, feels that the moment has arrived when every Algerian of Israelite origin, in light of his own experience, must without any ambiguity choose sides in this great historic battle. The FLN, authentic and exclusive representative of the Algerian people, considers it its obligation to directly address the Israelite community and to ask it to solemnly affirm its membership in the Algerian nation. This choice clearly affirmed, it will dissipate all misunderstandings and extirpate the seeds of hatred maintained by French colonialism. It will also contribute to recreating Algerian fraternity, broken by the arrival of French colonialism.

Since the revolution of November 1, 1954 the Israelite community of Algeria, worried about its fate and its future, has been subject to various political fluctuations. At the last meeting of the World Jewish Congress the Algerian delegates, contrary to their fellows from Tunisia and Morocco, pronounced themselves, to our great regret, for French citizenship. It was only after the colonialist-fascist troubles of February 6, in the course of which anti-Jewish slogans re-appeared, that the Israelite community took a neutralist attitude. Following this, a group of Israelites of all conditions, most notably from Algiers, had the courage to undertake a clearly anti-colonialist action in affirming its reasoned and definitive choice for Algerian nationality. These people have not forgotten the colonialist-fascist anti-Jewish pogroms which sporadically occurred, leading up to the infamous Vichy regime.

Without going too far back in history, it seems useful to us to recall the time when the Jews, held in less consideration than animals, didn’t even have the right to inter their dead, the latter being secretly buried during the night wherever this could be done, due to the absolute prohibition against the Jews having any cemeteries. At precisely this period Algeria was the refuge and land of freedom for the Israelites who fled the inhuman persecutions of the Inquisition. Precisely during this period the Israelite community was proud to offer its Algerian fatherland not only poets, but consuls and ministers.

It is because the FLN considers the Algerian Israelites the sons of our Fatherland that it hopes that the leaders of the Jewish community will have the wisdom to contribute to the building of a free and truly fraternal Algeria. The FLN is convinced that the leaders will understand that it is their duty and in the interest of the whole Israelite community to no longer remain above the fray, to uncompromisingly condemn the dying French colonialist regime, and to proclaim their opting for Algerian citizenship.

Patriotic greetings. Somewhere in Algeria. October 1, 1956

1. After writing and posting this, the Academics for Palestine WA shared additional context: Ariella Aisha Azoulay claims that the French first 'offered' French citizenship to Jewish Algerians (1865) if they wanted it. It wasn't taken up by many Jewish Algerian Jews, so the French proceeded to force Algerian Jews to become French citizens in their own country (1870 Crémieux Decree). She frames it as an act of colonial violence that destroyed the shared world that existed and which the FLN letter also points to. Further, to be considered "worthy," Algerian Jews were compelled to discard their customs, languages (like Arabic), and traditional ways of life to prove they were French. This, in her view, was a process of violent estrangement that "deracinated" them from their own history and world. In enrolling Algerian Jews into the colonial project, the French alienated Algerian Jews from their own roots, culture and identity.

Highlighting this, as the FLN letter does, is never over done. Everyone loses from the colonial logic, including oppressors.