Of Weapons and Words

“What happened on October 7—a moment of resistance that disrupted the normalized colonial structures—is an opening for bigger possibilities in the imagination and practices. It’s a confession that liberation is possible.”Of Weapons and Words presents six essays of contemporary political commentary and analysis produced by the radical left and revolutionary currents to offer a thought-provoking vision of Palestine and the wider region, translated from Arabic into English by the Aotearoa New Zealand-based collective Al-Rifaq Translations. Each essay responds to a key aspect of the Palestinian struggle, together showing that the time is ripe for a renewed internationalist ethos and orientation in political organising, as evidenced by the worldwide Palestine solidarity movement. Moussa Alsadah draws a historical parallel between the Algerian and Palestinian popular struggles for national liberation. Sari Orabi interrogates Israel’s military and occupational strategy, known as the “Iron Wall” doctrine. Abdaljawad Omar draws on psychoanalysis to consider how the Palestinian resistance’s breach of the siege on October 7 ruptured the Zionist unconscious. Nidal Khalaf tracks the history of the idea of the Palestinian State, oft-proposed as a “solution”, which contradicts the core demands of Palestinian liberation. Amer Mohsen looks at the international discourse on resistance methods and practices, and their limits when considering the necessity of armed resistance. And in the final roundtable, Abaher El-Sakka, Lena Meari, and Mudar Kassis discuss the usefulness and limits of the analytic framework of ‘settler colonialism’ and turn to the language of fascism to understand this third wave of the Nakba.