Frantz Fanon and the Colonial Project
In the Palestinian drive for freedom, Fanon provides the best insight into the psychology of colonized and colonizer.
This will be a longer post soon. I have in my drafts several posts devoted to particular thinkers, Frantz Fanon one of them. However, the bloodshed in Gaza has made his work all the more urgent. Much like James Baldwin was the shining voice of how Black and white Americans related to each other through history and feelings of masculinity, cruelty, and structural misery, Fanon did this for the innumerable struggles against colonialism that defined the post-World War II mid-century. In many places, Gaza among them, there is still a formal colonial structure; Gaza reminds me of the Bantustans of South Africa during apartheid. An area where people have no rights, they have no sovereignty (the fence around Gaza is not a border, this is established through case law).
Hannah Arendt, in the The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951, 1955)1, talks about how in order for a universal standard of human rights to apply to a person or community, they must have “the right to have rights.” Arendt talks about the aftermath of World War I, in which border changes and migrations of soldiers and civilians during the war created large pockets of people who did not have a nation-state to provide them with protection. Ultimately, rights have to have some kind of power behind them- this doesn’t need to necessarily need to be a formal nation-state; Rojava, an area that is primarily Kurdish, does have an ability to demand safety and empower people due to its strong structure from grassroots and action and social movements. The Palestinians are an archetype of a group that does not have this basic standard. They have no institutions which the Israeli regime is “bound to respect” as Chief Justice Taney said in the Dred Scott decision that reinforced that Black Americans were property, and could not gain what humans were given in the supposed American democracy.2
So, to Frantz Fanon, whose modern edition of Wretched of the Earth in yellow and purple is instantly recognizable:
I just wanted to write here that any instructors or people wanting to learn more about colonial structure and the mind of the colonized individual should read Fanon’s work.3 In terms of sentences and paragraphs to chew on for days and weeks, The Wretched of the Earth has a higher density than any other work I have read. Fanon, who supported the Algerian liberation movement in their bitter fight with France known for bombings of civilian areas, massacres of villages, and the widespread use of torture against Algerian fighters. This process, vividly captured in The Battle of Algiers (1966)4 showed how a war of no limits to the infliction of suffering . It also shows the quagmire, that the application of more force creates resistance rather than surrender. Fanon talked about the colonized mind and its drive for dignity, that the colonized and colonizer are a dialectic in tension that must be resolved. Sometimes this is through negotiation, but violence is often a key component of this resolution.
I will speak of Fanon more soon, once I locate my copy (I have taken it off the shelves but then put it down somewhere). But sixty years later, Fanon is the go-to for understanding colonialism and the drive for liberation. It explains resistance in the face of total destruction. Western political elites are cynical yes, but they also do not understand what it means to be colonized and have every shred of dignity and freedom stripped away through laws and arbitrary form.
Ettingermentum has written three excellent essays on the conflict, and how Israel faces a great deal of uncertainty. Ettinger, correctly I think, puts the current situation as the immediate aftermath of the Tet Offensive- a failure in a tactical sense, but creating long-term strategic, political, and narrative issues for the colonial power (“Israel’s Tet Moment”). The other in vogue comparison is the weeks after September 11th, 2001. I agree with Ettinger though that this works better, both in terms of a one-to-one comparison, and also that Gaza (and now the West Bank and Southern Lebanon) are physical places that can be bombed into oblivion like North Vietnam and the rest of Indochina.
9/11 was about trying to find something solid enough to bomb when you’re at war against an idea or ideology. Though it should be said that an attack against “Hamas” and a carpet bombing of Gaza don’t actually connect intuitively. Many high-ranking Hamas leaders don’t live in Gaza. If they want to kill Ismail Haniyeh, they’re going to have to attack Qatar. This thus is tangled up in the ongoing process of trying to normalize Gulf relations with Israel’s regime, and that though the United States backs Israel to the hilt, they also back most of the Gulf States as well. This contributes to the contradictions within diplomatic and military ties of local powers and larger imperialist ones- not just the US but Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Russia, and China. At some point, major players will have to rank-order their priorities in terms of money and diplomatic currency.
Additionally is the long term political situation. Benjamin Netanyahu, who has been a dominant force in right-wing Israeli politics for almost forty years, will eventually no longer be a figure of authority (“Life After Netanyahu”). The question who, if not Netanyahu, has no answer much like what an invasion of Gaza will accomplish beyond collective punishment. There are no contingencies.
His most recent, “The Height of the Flames”5 talks about the military strategy towards Gaza. Nobody has talked about a plan, there is nothing but destruction. Observers have pointed out that Israel has become much like the US- good at inflicting civilian casualties through air power, but lacks experienced troops and none of them have ever engaged in urban warfare. There is a good chance that the IDF upon invading northern Gaza will enter a quagmire that all imperialist powers will find familiar.
The conflict is a dialectic in tension- on one hand, complete Palestinian liberation and self-determination, on the other total Israeli control and perhaps, Gazans becoming Egypt’s problem. Is that the agenda? I don’t know, there is no plan beyond “defeat Hamas.” One looks back on statements between September 12-16, 2011 to feel that sort of situation when a power knows they are entering an unwinnable situation. But they are buoyed by nationalism and also an underestimation of their opposition.
Communities bound in blood rarely break even beyond all pressure and violence.
Arendt, H. (1973). The origins of totalitarianism (Vol. 244). Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Judgment in the U.S. Supreme Court Case Dred Scott v. John F. A. Sandford; 3/6/1857; Dred Scott, Plaintiff in Error, v. John F. A. Sandford; Appellate Jurisdiction Case Files, 1792 - 2010; Records of the Supreme Court of the United States, Record Group 267; National Archives Building, Washington, DC.
Fanon, F., Sartre, J. P., & Farrington, C. (1963). The wretched of the earth (Vol. 36). New York: Grove press.
Pontecorvo, G. (1966). The Battle of Algiers. Rizzoli.
ettingermentum. (2023, October 22). The Height of the Flames. Ettingermentum.news; Ettingermentum Newsletter. https://www.ettingermentum.news/p/the-height-of-the-flames