Resistance, Scholasticide, and Counterinsurgency

Excerpt from the book I'm currently writing

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Anticolonial insurgencies in Palestine have a long history that could be traced before the founding of the state of Israel (e.g., the Great Palestinian Rebellion of 1936-1939). Modern/colonial forms of counterinsurgency, too, have a long history that can be traced to 1492 when conquistadores recruited Indigenous peoples for military purposes (e.g., through knowledge of geography, history, languages, and existing conflicts between Indigenous nations, not to mention agricultural technology to maintain armies).

If we fast forward to the present, we know that within and beyond academia insurgent and counterinsurgent thought shapes the discourses and practices supporting Palestinian resistance and Israel’s genocidal settler colonial project respectively. In this book, I will not only trace the coloniality of counterinsurgent thought by showing how counterinsurgent thought and practice emerges from colonial contexts, but also how the university functions as a counterinsurgent machine (Dylan Rodriguez) that captures even the most radical intellectual traditions, including decolonial thought.

For now, I want to focus my attention on what we saw on October 7, 2023, when the Palestinian Resistance led an unexpected offensive, Operation Al-Aqsa Flood after years of economic blockades, decades of settler colonial displacement, dispossession, ethnic cleansing, and several military campaigns resulting in incalculable suffering, death, and destruction in Gaza. The Palestinian Resistance, primarily led by Hamas, shattered the illusion of safety Israel’s US-funded technologies of colonial violence and surveillance had provided it for far too long. As Siddiqui^⁠1 writes, “Resistance to these structures pierces the illusion of projected inviolability and transcendental power, which are exposed as not just resistable, but indeed, even fragile. The Palestinian resistance, when they broke through their apartheid wall, also toppled the Zionist projection that the world must always be this way”. Breaking the seemingly indestructible physical wall of Zionist settler colonialism, however, would also create fissures in Israel’s dehumanizing racial discourse, unmasking what Palestinians have known for decades: that Israel is predicated on violence, territorial expansion, and racism (Sayegh, 1965).

At the time of writing these words, Israel’s genocide in Gaza had already killed over 50,000 Palestinians, injured over 100,000, and displaced over two million. These numbers are not accurate since countless people are still buried under the rubble or have died because of starvation, dehydration, and preventable diseases. After the ceasefire announced on January 19, families returning to northern Gaza witnessed the level of destruction of their homes, farms, and educational and religious institutions. They returned to the horror of decapitated and decaying bodies strewn in the streets. The videos and images coming out of Gaza are nothing short of an apocalypse. The end of the world. Or as Colombian president Gustavo Petro stated at the UN, “What we see in Gaza is the rehearsal of the future.” This is what awaits us all if we dare to resist. A collective punishment for Palestinians and a collective disciplining of those who dare question the genocidal reconfiguration of the modern/colonial world order, marking the end of the world as we know it, one that no longer pretends to defend the superficiality of “western values” and instead unabashedly supports the incalculable violence we’ve seen live-streamed on our phones.

The level of destruction and the numbers listed above do not account for Israel’s epistemicidal objective to destroy all of the universities, libraries, mosques, arable land, and infrastructure. Indeed, Israel has systematically destroyed Palestinians’ ability to sustain life in addition to deliberately aiming to destroy their history, collective memories, and archives. While it is certainly a “textbook case of genocide,” as Raz Segal put in the first week of Israel’s indiscriminate bombing of Gaza and its civilian population, we know that the systematic destruction of knowledge has historically walked hand in hand with genocide. The genocide and epistemide currently taking place is not beyond the imagination of those who have a shared past and present of colonial violence and dispossession, yet the images circulating on social media are horrifying nonetheless, at least for those who still have a sense of humanity left in them.

Karma Nabulsi coined Israel’s epistemicidal project as scholasticide, the concrete destruction and systemic obliteration of educational, social, cultural, and religious institutions and the knowledge keepers, storytellers, spiritual leaders, poets, and artists who make up said institutions. When we take a closer look at the long history of scholasticide beyond Palestine, we see how the “Reconquista” in Spain also resulted in the destruction of hundreds of thousands of books in Al-Andalus. We also find the destruction of codices that caused so much pain for Indigenous peoples who watched their stories, histories, and knowledges burned to ashes, which they relentlessly and insurgently held on to until today, against all odds stacked against them. Similarly, in 1948, Israel destroyed tens of thousands of books that were deemed ‘inappropriate’ for containing ‘material against the state’ (Maya Wind).

Colonization undeniably involves genocide, yet it is the destruction and distortion of the history of the colonized that serves as a means to erase the past and thus to minimize resistance in the present. That is to say, scholasticide is a means to permanently foreclose the possibility of building another future. It is a close companion of genocide, a violent process that not only destroys other modes of knowing but also alternative approaches to life or other ways of being and relating to the world. Ultimately, it aims to destroy a colonized peoples’ ability to live on their own land. To forget who they are. To forget where they came from. To forget what was stolen from them. To aspire to be what they are not and what they will never be. To side with those who’ve destroyed their lifeworld. To side with the colonizer responsible for the genocide of their people and erasure of their history. These are certainly the aims but we know that colonial powers, despite how much they have tried to impose their philosophy and pedagogy of domination, they have never got rid of the ideas of resistance and dreams of liberation.

Scholasticide is central to Israel’s zionist settler colonial project. Access to radical texts is perceived as a threat to Israel’s dominant narrative. It is for this reason that books and other rare texts are targeted. As Samar Saeed and Juman Abujbara note, access to radical texts has formed part of the collective resistance in Palestine. The fedayeen, for instance, read texts that “expanded their horizons and connected them with other revolutionaries, thinkers, and philosophers, while also arming them with historical facts and theories that informed their revolutionary work and strengthened their commitment to returning to Palestine”. Ghassan Kanafani recognized this revolutionary act of reading and learning from the social reality of other contexts, such as Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean. As Patrick Higgins writes, Kanafani “encouraged readers to hold up a wide-angle lens to these events and view them as connected, not as random or isolated happenings in countries far-flung from one another.” Reading here becomes a revolutionary act aimed not solely at reinterpreting social reality but, more importantly, finding ways to collectively act upon the world to change it, while making connections between struggles for liberation across geographies. It is a radical practice when directed at unsettling the distorted worldview upheld by racist, dehumanizing colonial discourses that justify colonial violence. Zionist settler colonialism seeks to not only annihilate Palestinian existence but also to permanently disappear sites of knowledge production (e.g., libraries, museums, and archives), while creating “facts on the ground” that try to legitimize the permanence and presence of Israel and, conversely, the disappearance of all that which is Palestinian, both past and present, as well as a denial of the material conditions that could enable Palestinian life in the future.

Chapter 5 discusses scholasticide in concrete terms and in relation to (counter)insurgency by situating it in the long history of Palestinian resistance under Zionist occupation. For now it will suffice to say that this term refocuses the material conditions in direct relation to epistemological concerns. Epistemicide thus becomes more concrete and less abstracted from the reality of the people on the receiving end of colonial domination, including the way they resist erasure against seemingly insurmountable odds. Saeed and Abujbara further specify how scholasticide has, even before the founding of Israel in 1948, formed a central pillar of the zionist project, which is predicated on violently doing away with the presence and existence of Palestine and Palestinians:

Since its emergence in Palestine in the early twentieth century, the Zionist project has been acutely aware of the transformative power inherent to knowledge and the spaces that safeguard it, such as libraries, archives, and community centers—and has consistently marked these spaces as a threat. Consequently, the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) have systematically targeted these spaces, either by bombing and destroying them, looting them, or by falsely depicting them as sites that foster ‘hate.’ This cultural genocide has been well documented by scholars, including Daud Abdullah, whose work charts the intentional and systematic approach adopted by Zionists to erase and destroy Palestinian culture through the theft or outright destruction of books over the past century.”

Saeed and Abujbara document the specific archives, libraries, universities, and everyday sites of knowledge production (e.g., homes that contain family recipes, stories, maps, and agricultural knowledge) that Israel has destroyed since the Nakba and during the genocidal campaign in Gaza. But numbers alone cannot account for the loss of life-sustaining knowledge. Numbers alone cannot account for the suffering and the “irreparable loss” Palestinians have endured. Yet the systemic obliteration, as Saeed and Abujbara admit, enables one to pose some important questions. “Why would an entity claiming to be “civilized and modern,” juxtaposing itself against the “barbaric and backwards” natives, commit such barbaric and egregious crimes? What is it about Palestinian knowledge production that poses such a threat?”

To answer these questions, one has to point to the zionist narrative that obfuscates Israel’s foundational colonial violence. This modern/colonial narrative depends on the notion of terra nullius used also against Indigenous peoples in the Americas, Australia, Africa, and the Pacific Islands. The narrative, discourse, and rhetorical use of “a land without a people for a people without a land” creates a myth or metaphysical sense of belonging to a particular place, despite lacking a relationship with the land, unlike Palestinians who’ve established deep and lasting relationships with it. This myth can either hide, justify, or downplay the displacement and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their lands, simultaneously shielding Israel from any criticism since, as the argument goes, Jews cannot possibly commit genocide when it was committed to them. Said pointed to something similar when he stated that “You cannot continue to victimize someone else just because you yourself were a victim once—there has to be a limit.” Said’s quote only tells part of the story since the zionists that founded and led this settler colonial project were atheists (e.g., Theodor Herzl) who developed a colonial and racist ideology at the height of western imperialism in the late 19th century, before the rise of Nazi Germany. This means that zionists did not necessarily have to be victims of Nazi Germany’s genocide against Jews to commit similar acts against Palestinians. Of course Jews who escaped or were liberated from the extermination camps at the end of World War II later became settlers in Palestine and in fact committed acts similar to those committed against them.

This is not to conflate Zionism with Judaism yet it is still a historical fact that religions and colonial-racist ideologies aren't mutually exclusive. What I mean is that those who claim to practice Judaism are not somehow immune to upholding a colonial-racist ideology, however contradictory it may be. Colonial ideologies seem to easily embed themselves socially, structurally, and institutionally through religion.

None of this is unique since there are numerous example in (neo)colonial contexts where religion, namely Christianity, played a central role in colonization (and continues to play a role in neocolonization). There are also numerous examples of a selected few or dominant groups of the colonized who perpetuate internal colonial domination within newly created and apparently independent modern/colonial nation states. Only an essentialist perspective would claim that a people are inherently innocent and perpetual victims because of the crimes committed against their people in the past, despite the atrocities they themselves commit in the present.

To be continued…

¹ Khirad Siddiqui: in Fúnez-Flores et al. eds in Decolonial Entanglements. Routledge