Anarchist Studies Conference: Pro-Palestinian Anarchism, Far From an Oxymoron

Anarchist Studies Conference 7
Anarchist Futures
August 2022
FAR FROM AN OXYMORON
Sarah Fathallah
PRO-PALESTINIAN ANARCHISM
FAR FROM AN OXYMORON

—
Christopher, B., Robinson, J., Turner, P., & Sansom, P.
(1991). The Relevance of Anarchism. In The State is your
enemy: Selections from the Anarchist Journal Freedom
1965-1986. essay, Freedom Press.
“Anarcho-syndicalists who advocate the abolition of the wage
system support workers on strike for higher wages;
individualists who are opposed to the State see no reason why
they should not avail themselves of the social services when
they are unemployed; anti-parliamentarians support the
abolition of a law (hanging, abortion, homosexuality) which
can only be done through Parliament; … and so on.”

—
Price, W. (2009, May 16). The Palestinian struggle and the
anarchist dilemma. Anarkismo RSS. Retrieved August 24,
2022, from https://www.anarkismo.net/article/12856
"We defend people's legal right to vote, even though we
are anti-electoralists. [...] Anarchists have often made
demands on the state, such as to stop waging speciﬁc
wars or to release prisoners. [...] Refusing to make
demands on the state [...] may sound very radical but it
is a reformist cop-out, an abdication of the struggle."

—
Milstein, C. (2010). Anarchism and its aspirations.
AK Press.
“An anarchist might ﬁrmly believe that the Palestinian people
deserve to be liberated from occupation, even if that means that
they set up their own state. That same anarchist might also ﬁrmly
believe that a Palestinian state, like all states, should be opposed
in favor of nonstatist institution. A complete sense of freedom
would always include both the negative and positive senses–in
this case, liberation from occupation and simultaneously the
freedom to self-determine.”

Being pro-Palestinian
and anarchist is an
oxymoronic statement.

01 Anarchism values the abolition
of the state above all else.
02 Anarchism is not compatible
with anti-colonial struggle.
03 Palestinian liberation can
only be achieved through the
formation of a nation-state.

01 Anarchism values the abolition of the state above all else.
.
"The ﬁrst step, always, is to stand with the oppressed
as they ﬁght for their freedom."
– Price, W. (2009, May 16). The Palestinian struggle and the anarchist dilemma.
Anarkismo RSS. Retrieved August 24, 2022, from https://www.anarkismo.net/article/12856
"Support for self-determination is quite different. It implies that
out of solidarity we defend Palestinians getting the solution they want,
because they want it, even though we anarchists would not make that
choice. [...] Anarchists should defend oppressed people's freedom to
make choices, without having to agree with the choices they pick."

01 Anarchism values the abolition of the state above all else.
.
“The fact remains that they’re forced to operate within a world of states. The
reason anticolonial resistance struggles feel the need to institute sovereignty is
because, at any scale, a “liberated” area [...] is still embedded in a nonliberated
space. It has boundaries inside of which [...] its right to set the terms of how things
will go is recognized and enforceable, where another law or power can’t interfere.
An area that has fought off colonial rule still exists within the interstate system. If
a newly decolonizing area doesn’t gain recognition by that system, it has to fear
reconquest or incorporation into someone else’s nation-state or empire.”
– Ramnath, M. (2012). Decolonizing anarchism: An anti-authoritarian
history of India's liberation struggle. AK Press.

02 Anarchism is not compatible with anti-colonial struggle.
.
“Anarchy must make itself wholly incompatible with colonialism,
either a colonialism that continues to the present day in new forms,
or a historical legacy which we try to ignore. Thus an anarchist revolution
must also base itself in the struggles against colonialism. [...] Those who
have been privileged by colonialism–white people and everyone living in
Europe or a European settler state (the US, Canada, Australia)–should
support these other struggles politically, culturally, and materially.”
– Gelderloos, P. (2010). Anarchy Works: Examples
of Anarchist Ideas in Practice. Ardent Press.

.
“In the parts of the world under semi-imperial, imperial, and colonial rule,
calls for a more just society based on greater equality between different
classes very often merged with anti-colonial struggles. These various radical
networks–anarchist, anticolonial, revolutionist–often intersected and were
entangled, both in terms of people and ideas, though this would probably no
longer be possible a few decades later, with the subsequent hardening of
communism, nationalism, and other ideologies, which made these radical
movements’ eclectic bricolage impossible–or at least much more diﬃcult.”
– Khuri-Makdisi, I. (2010). The eastern mediterranean and the making
of global radicalism, 1860-1914. University of California Press.

.
1 – Aragorn! (2005). Locating an indigenous anarchism. The Anarchist Library. Retrieved August
24, 2022, from https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/aragorn-locating-an-indigenous-anarchism
2 – Hassan, B. (2013, July 24). The Colour Brown: De-colonising anarchism and challenging White
hegemony. Random Shelling ‫ﻋﺸﻮاﺋﻲ‬ ‫ﻗﺼﻒ‬. Retrieved August 24, 2022, from
https://budourhassan.wordpress.com/2013/07/24/the-colour-brown-de-colonising-anarchism-and-chal
lenging-white-hegemony/
"Anarchism is part of a European tradition so far
outside of the mainstream that it isn't generally
interesting (or accessible) to non-westerners."1
"Anarchism has not gone through the complete
process of decolonization."2

.
“The unﬁnished decolonization of anarchism has led the
anarchist canon to ignore non-Western anti-authoritarian and
anarchist narratives, which are not always and not only
enunciated as a self-declared strategy. Hence, the
anti-authoritarian and decentralized emancipation projects that
arise in the Arab societies of the South of the Mediterranean
have not been integrated into most histories of anarchism,
despite sharing many similarities with the political philosophy.”
– Galián, L. (2020). Colonialism, transnationalism, and anarchism in
the south of the Mediterranean. Springer International Publishing.

.
"The ﬁght for decolonization inevitably entails the articulation of
a discourse about nation and nationalism."1
1 – Galián, L. (2020). Colonialism, transnationalism, and anarchism
in the south of the Mediterranean. Springer International Publishing.
2 – Ramnath, M. (2012). Decolonizing anarchism: An anti-authoritarian
history of India's liberation struggle. AK Press.
“This is precisely why an anarchist approach to anticolonialism is
needed: to sketch out a more comprehensive emancipatory alternative
to the limited nationalist version of liberation.”2

03 Palestinian liberation can only be achieved through the formation of a nation-state.
.
“Tariq Mukhimer [traced] the reluctance of
Palestinians to accept state structures in the 1920s
and 1930s insofar as such structures were taken as
colonial impositions and as the central means by
which to consolidate colonial control.”
– Butler, J. (2013). Palestine, State Politics and the Anarchist
Impasse. In The Anarchist Turn (pp. 203–223). essay, Pluto Press.

.
"In the modern history of Palestine, Palestinians have
organized themselves in a horizontal way at an economic
and social level. In the revolutionary period of 1936-1939,
Palestinian revolutionaries were organized in brigades
without leaders. Many of them armed themselves selling
their personal property. However, there are hardly any
studies on this period of Palestinian history."
– Galián, L. (2020). Colonialism, transnationalism, and anarchism in
the south of the Mediterranean. Springer International Publishing.

.
"In Palestine, elements of popular struggle have historically often been
self-organized. Even if not explicitly identiﬁed as "anarchism" as such,
"People have already done horizontal, or non-hierarchical, organizing all
their lives. [...] During the First Intifada, for instance, when someone's
home was demolished, people would organize to rebuild it, almost
spontaneously. [...] The landscape of largely horizontal self-organization in
the First Intifada was displaced in 1993 with the signing of the Oslo
Accords and the top-down Palestinian Authority they created."
– Stephens, J. (2013, July 19). Palestinian anarchists in conversation:
Recalibrating anarchism in a colonized country. The Institute for Anarchist Studies.
Retrieved August 24, 2022, from https://anarchiststudies.org/palestinian-anarchists/

.
“The process by which informal workers stepped in and “organized” the
checkpoint [...] was not through collective direct action but through everyday
tactics of survival that were mostly individual, spontaneous and without clear
leadership or ideology. [...] Through daily tactics of survival they crept into the
spaces of opportunity that existed between the whims and violence of the
military and the various needs of the community. They could not overthrow the
checkpoint but they could ‘poach’ it back from being a space of pure brutality and
oppression to one in which their own dispossession could be redressed.”
– Hammami, R. (2010). Qalandiya: Jerusalem’s Tora Bora and the
Frontiers of Global Inequality. Jerusalem Quarterly, (Spring), 29–51.

.
"Nationalism also represents a signiﬁcant problem. People need nationalism
in times of struggles. But it sometimes becomes an obstacle."
– Stephens, J. (2013, July 19). Palestinian anarchists in conversation:
Recalibrating anarchism in a colonized country. The Institute for Anarchist Studies.
Retrieved August 24, 2022, from https://anarchiststudies.org/palestinian-anarchists/

.
“The bid for Palesinian statehood [...] is at best controversial within
Palestine itself. For some, the bid for statehood ratiﬁes, rather than
reverses, the occupation, and would require the ceding of both sovereignty
and self-determination to continuing Israeli military and economic power.
Another concern is that the West Bank will sever itself from the political and
legal claims of all Palestinians who were dispossessed of land and
citizenship, invalidating the one-state solution, the right of return, and the
legitimacy of the Palestinian Liberation Organization.”

.
“The question [...] is not whether the UN should recognize the right of the
Palestinian people to a state in accordance with the 1947 UN Partition Plan,
which would grant them 45% of historic Palestine, nor of a Palestinian state
within the June 5, 1967 borders along the Green Line, which would grant them
22% of historic Palestine. A UN recognition ultimately means the negation of the
rights of the majority of the Palestinian people in Israel, in the diaspora, in East
Jerusalem, and even in Gaza, and the recognition of the rights of some West
Bank Palestinians to [...] a fraction of West Bank territory amounting to less than
10% of historic Palestine. Israel will be celebrating either outcome.”
– Massad, J. (2011, September 15). State of recognition. Al Jazeera. Retrieved August 24, 2022,
from https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2011/9/15/state-of-recognition

.
"I suggest an alternate approach based on defending national
self-determination while opposing nationalism."
– Price, W. (2009, May 16). The Palestinian struggle and the anarchist dilemma.
Anarkismo RSS. Retrieved August 24, 2022, from https://www.anarkismo.net/article/12856

.
“The nationalism that supports the nation-state is not the same as the
nationalism that brings together those who are stateless, or who are
maintained in subordination or in forced exile. And so we might ask
whether what is called nationalism in this instance is a form of
citizenship that precedes and exceeds state formation.”

.
“Non-white anarchist have been told to choose between our
nation (or people) and our social philosophy.”
– White, R. (2005). Post-colonial Anarchism: Essays on Race, Repression and Culture in
Communities of Color 1999-2004. The Anarchist Library. Retrieved August 24, 2022, from
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/roger-white-post-colonial-anarchism-book

.
“In an anarchist political milieu, with regard to Indigenous peoples and politics,
there are often tensions over the concepts of peoplehood, sovereignty,
nationalism, and territorial governance. [...] For Indigenous peoples the assertion
of nationhood is about survival as peoples, given the endurance of colonial
domination, rather than a bid for state power [...]. Anarchists (who are
non-Indigenous) may understand “sovereignty” as always already a form of
domination through a state monopoly on the use of violence against its citizens.
Rather, [Indigenous individuals] are often referring to their collective inherent
authority to govern and assert their self-determination as polities.”
– Kauanui, J. K. (2021). The Politics of Indigeneity, Anarchist Praxis,
and Decolonization. Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies, 2021(1), 9-42.

01 A plural and solidaristic
understanding of anarchism
02 A more decolonial understanding
of anarchism
03 a nuanced understanding of
Palestinian resistance,
sovereignty, and liberation

How do a stateless people engage
in anarchism, a term implying
opposition to some form of
state, in a settler colonial
context with no state?

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Anarchist Studies Conference: Pro-Palestinian Anarchism, Far From an Oxymoron

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