What is the colonial situation? Fanon writes that the first encounter between ‘native’ and settler’ is ‘marked by violence and their existence together—that is to say the exploitation of the native by the settler—was carried on by a dint of a great array of bayonets and cannons.’ As a result, a fundamental opposition is baked into the colonial world. ‘The dividing line,’ and ‘the frontiers,’ Fanon writes, ‘are shown by barracks and police stations. In the colonies it is the policeman and the soldier who are the official, instituted go-betweens, the spokesmen of the settler and his rule of oppression.’ He continues:

It is obvious here that the agents of government speak the language of pure force. The intermediary does not lighten the oppression, nor seek to hide the domination; he shows them up and puts them into practice with the clear conscience of an upholder of the peace; yet he is the bringer of violence into the home and into the mind of the native.

However, the policeman and the soldier are part of a wider scene of oppression that has been historically normalized and justified, Fanon writes, with ‘a reference to divine right.’ The misuse of Abrahamic literature to justify slavery during both the trans-Saharan and trans-Atlantic slave trades; the scheme of Manifest Destiny in the United States against the indigenous people; or Zionism as it has been practised today has all assumed the same position: Forceful acquisition of land and labour through divine right. 

‘Zionism’ a religio-politico philosophy, on one hand, is theoretically underpinned by the Old Testament prophecy in which the Jewish people would be taken to the Promised Land, or Zion, where ‘Israel’ would come to fruition. On the other hand, it emerged in its modern form during the end of the nineteenth century, among Jewish intellectuals in Europe. As the Old Testament tradition identifies the Promised Land as Canaan, where Palestine stood along with parts of Syria and Lebanon, the majority of European Jewish intellectuals designate such land as the target for migration. Said writes that, ‘Zionism, for all its political tribulations and the struggles on its behalf, is at bottom a constant idea that expresses the yearning for Jewish political and religious self-determination–for Jewish national selfhood–to be exercised on the promised land.’ 

However, Said also explains that between notable early Zionist philosophers, Moses Hess and Mary Ann Evans, better known under her pen name, George Eliot, the guiding theories were that, present-day Palestine was in need of cultivation, civilization, reconstitution; ‘that Zionism would finally bring enlightenment and progress where at present there was neither.’ Thus, at the beginning and in our present moment, the Palestinians were already placed into a space of non-being both physically and ideologically. However, in the necessity of contending with their physical existence, we have seen a demonization of Middle Eastern culture more broadly and Islam in particular, a reinvention of Orientalist thinking which Said spent the entirety of his career deconstructing. 

Thus, the West and the State of Israel are tasked with ideologically and physically circumventing the supposed threat by maintaining the colonial situation. The irony, however, is that it is not the Western values per se which are rebuffed by Muslims, Palestinians, or the Middle East more broadly. It is the ‘violence’ and ‘aggressiveness’ which has ‘permeated the victory of these values over the ways of life and thought’ of a colonized people. As a result, Fanon tells us, those who struggle for liberation will ‘mock at these very values, insult them, and vomit them up.’ But it is less of a repulsion of such values as it is a rebuke of the hypocrisy of the situation. So, while the obscuring of reality and the militarized aggression or the threat thereof is meant to repress the Palestinians, 

 The symbols of social order—the police the bugle calls in the barracks, military parades and the waving flags—are at once and the same time inhibitory and stimulating: for they do not convey the message ‘do not dare to budge,’ rather, they cry out ‘get ready to attack.’ 

The inhibition caused by the presence of overwhelming force gives way to stimulation at some point, some skirmish, minor or major. Fanon writes that ‘it is the settler who has brought the native into existence and who perpetuates his existence.’ This certainly happened with the riots after the 1991 police beating of Rodney King in the United States, the 1976 Soweto Uprising in South Africa, and the First Intifada in Palestine in 1987, from which the current Hamas emerged. Violence in oppression, violence in liberation, Fanon made little distinction: ‘colonialism is not a thinking ma­chine, nor a body endowed with reasoning faculties. It is violence in its natural state, and it will only yield when confronted with greater violence.’ So, ‘that same violence,’ with which the colonizer arrived and sustains their presence, ‘will be claimed and taken over by the native at the moment when, deciding to embody history in his own person, he surges into the forbidden quarters.’ 

The rebellion of the colonized will in many ways be unexpected yet it is the most logical outcome: The native ‘whom they have never stopped saying that the only language he understands is that of force, decides to give utterance by force.’ ‘In fact, the settler has shown him the way he should take if he is to become free,’ Fanon writes, ‘The argument the native chooses has been furnished by the settler, and by an ironic turning of the tables it is the native who now affirms that the colonialist understands nothing but force.’

Once a colonized people have decided to consciously imbibe the violence of the colonial situation, it is only logical they unleash it upon the system that has compromised their freedom. Fanon contends that ‘the “thing” which has been colonized becomes [human] during the same process by which it frees itself.’ In other words, it is in that very moment of consciously choosing to redirect colonial violence in the pursuit of liberation that the colonized automatically become free. From then on, Fanon argues ‘to break up the colonial world does not mean that after the frontiers have been abolished lines of communication will be set up between the two zones.’ Rather, ‘the destruction of the colonial world is no more and no less than the abolition of one zone, its burial in the depths of the earth or its expulsion from the country.’

This is perhaps one of the most fearful points. Throughout the three-quarters of a century that Gaza has been occupied, well-meaning politicians and scholars across the globe, but typically educated in the West, have advocated for a two-state system between Israel and Palestine. Fanon writes that, ‘the intellectual who for his part has followed the colonialist with regard to the universal abstract will fight in order that the settler and the native may live together in peace in a new world.’ However, because ‘decolonization is the meeting of two forces, opposed to each other by their very nature,’ what the intellectual fails to realize is that ‘the settler, from the moment that the colonial context disappears, has no longer any interest in remaining or in co-existing.’ Moreover, neither does the colonized person wish for coexistence, while ‘he has seen every day in his country that they can freely arrest him, beat him, starve him: and no professor of ethics, no priest has ever come to be beaten in his place, nor to share their bread with him.’