Summary
Author of Chapter 28 of From the River to the Sea, “Gaza’s imperial boomerang” (14 November 2023), on how colonial violence abroad returns as repression at home (From the River to the Sea: Essays for a Free Palestine, lines 2182-2219).
Details
- Britain nurtured the Zionist movement, issued the 1917 Balfour Declaration, colonised Palestine for nearly thirty years and trained Zionist militias in Orde Wingate’s ‘Special Night Squads’ (lines 2188-2192).
- The Imperial boomerang names the relationship between violence against colonized peoples and the oppression of subaltern subjects in the colonial motherlands; Foucault’s summary is quoted at lines 2198-2202.
- Britain’s Prevent counter-extremism policy, shaped by General Frank Kitson’s counterinsurgency doctrine, has expanded from targeting Muslim communities to anti-war, anti-capitalist and climate justice movements, and is a central tool used to repress Palestine solidarity in Britain today (line 2206).
- France banning solidarity protests, Germany criminalizing “from the river to the sea” and over thirty US states outlawing BDS are not merely free speech issues but a reverberation of the same colonial logic of which Gaza is the epicenter (line 2208).
- The chapter closes by tying that repression to the racial world order: the racism that dehumanises Palestinians is the same racism that lets migrants drown in the Channel and the Mediterranean, and Palestinian liberation — as Barnaby Raine has argued — shakes the foundations of that order; following Kohl Journal, the call is to move from the language of solidarity to collective resistance, standing in unconditional solidarity with the right to return and the unfinished project of decolonisation (lines 2209-2219).
Related pages
From the River to the Sea: Essays for a Free Palestine, Imperial boomerang, Ghassan Abu Sitta, Balfour Declaration, BDS movement