The privilege of anxiety

Anna-Esther Younes is a Palestinian German scholar of race critical theories, psychoanalytic approaches, and de/post-/colonial theory. Her research on the ‘War on antisemitism’, race and settler-colonialism provides piercing insights into how the censorship and repression of Palestinians manifest today, in Germany, Europe and beyond.

For more than a decade, Younes has experienced (research and academic) job losses and media misinformation campaigns. In 2019, a secret dossier compiled by the antisemitism and neo-Nazi watchdogs RIAS Berlin and MBR, misrepresenting her and her work as antisemitic, sympathetic to terrorism and sexism, was leaked to a politician (and others) of Die Linke. This resulted in Younes being disinvited from an anti-racism panel being organised by the Berlin chapter of the party.

Opening a series in Eurozine on the censorship of Palestinians in the European public sphere, Vienna-based organisers Salma Shaka and Mars Zaslavsky spoke with Dr Younes about the mechanisms of repression and their histories; about intergenerational knowledge transfer amidst an increasingly isolating political climate; and about fostering solidarity between struggles.

Anna Younes (AY): Rather than an interview, I’d prefer the three of us to have an exchange. I’m more interested in being in conversation with the younger generation than talking about myself. So, having said that, I understand that these days many people in their twenties, especially non-Palestinians, and including anti-Zionist Jews, are becoming witnesses to the severity of a globalised repression of Palestine. So why should we only talk about Germany’s particularities, and why about just one case, when there are so many others? Between where you two were born, where you grew up, where you live now, you both bring your own experience to the table that would de-centre this German particularity. Otherwise, we remain trapped in a German-centric and Eurocentric political understanding of what is happening. Having a conversation means taking you seriously as thinkers and people on the ground contributing to this struggle. So let’s talk instead about what it means for you to be a politicised young person these days. If that’s ok?

Read also:

Offending colonial sensibilities

In 2022, Shahd Abusalama, a Palestinian academic working the UK, was suspended from her teaching position on antisemitism charges. Here she recalls the defamation campaign against her and discusses how her case reveals the structural vulnerability of Palestinians in the West.

 

Censuré! The crackdown on pro-Palestinian voices in France

In France, the censorship of pro-Palestinian positions is particularly severe, with antisemitism accusations increasingly being used by the far right. But behind the current wave of repression lies a set of attitudes that are neither new, nor exclusively rightwing. Opposing them requires confronting France’s colonial and authoritarian history.

Mars Zaslavsky (MZ): Let’s do it, although I feel apprehensive, which illustrates how censorship and repression work. For instance, I only let a fraction of my politics enter the workplace. There’s a tension between raising critiques or giving my honest political opinion, and the boundaries I institute due to internal censorship. That’s an immediate anxiety – and I use that word intentionally – that arises, which I think is very telling.

AY: Why do you use the word anxiety? Why is it anxiety-inducing for you to think of politics and labour together?

MZ: There exists an unfounded and outsized fear which I’ve been trying to think about psychoanalytically. It’s not necessarily grounded in a material reality. On the other hand, repression is an extremely real political and material process, as demonstrated by your surveillance case. Yet, I sometimes think that the people who fear repression the most are actually those who are not living it in the most explicit ways. Because it’s something that has not yet come to pass for most people. That fear therefore exists most for those who have more to lose in terms of financial, social and cultural capital, paradoxically because it’s an intangible, not yet materialised fear.

For instance, I have never actually experienced a ban or limitations on speech in the workplace. Yet before entering political discussions at work, I work myself up into a state, not understanding where the anxiety comes from. I struggle to say what I know to be true for fear of crossing an unspoken boundary, as if, perversely, the violence of the speech act outweighs the violence of reality: namely, that Zionism is a modern settler-colonial political project that has brought about genocide.

Salma Shaka (SS): In my case, I and the entire Feminist Office of the University of Vienna’s Students Union (ÖH), which was comprised of Black, Indigenous and people of colour, with mostly precarious visa conditions, were kicked out of the university for expressing our concerns regarding its position on the genocide happening in Gaza. The Zionist Austrian Union of Jewish Students (JÖH) has had the biggest monopoly on defining pro-Palestinian politics on campus, with those critical of Israel facing a variety of forms of repression.

My past experiences of censorship led to the question: how much do I have to negotiate whether what’s happening in Gaza is a genocide? Knowing full well that others in the workplace will not share the same opinion, nor use a specific language to describe the situation, I wonder how much energy we should be spending on this? I think that there is a type of self-censorship we’re exercising, perhaps for the sake of acknowledging that, institutionally, there’s not much that can be done. For many in Europe, the use of the term genocide is something they can choose to agree or disagree with. Genocide and settler colonialism are treated as mere opinions.

MZ: On this question of: ‘what is the point?’ – I’d love to hear your thoughts on this, Anna, because it’s a question of organising: where do you put resources? How do you choose targets? I wonder if it’s a strategic justification, or if it’s one of avoidance, to say: the neoliberal workplace is one in which radical politics go to die, no matter how politicised or ‘leftist’ a place of work positions itself to be. It cannot be a place of actualising one’s politics. So then, what is the point? It’s a question that, within student organising, we ask ourselves constantly: what is the site of struggle? Is the academic sphere a site where we act? How much is possible, and how much is still within a reformist frame?

AY: Well, first of all, academia and the workplace are sites for decolonial struggle – and always have been. But I want to come back to what you said at the beginning, when you brought up psychoanalysis. You said: ‘I don’t know where that anxiety comes from’. In psychoanalysis, anxiety and fear are two different spheres. Anxiety is fear that has been repressed into the unconscious, and we therefore no longer know where it comes from or what it is about – all that’s left of that ‘knowledge’ shows itself as anxiety. Fear, on the other hand, is something that we do know: there’s the person with the gun in front of us, or the boss threatening us directly with redundancy. That’s very palpable, understandable, immediate fear. So, anxiety – a fear repressed into the unconscious – is really what we talk about when we speak about what you called ‘self-censorship’.

And when we then link anxiety and fear to a colonial capitalist political economy, what you are talking about is people’s very deeply rooted, immanent understanding that the capitalist economy that we are living in is immanently political. So, no matter what we say, whether that is about Palestine, the genocide in Sudan, or the war on Yemen, we understand that the one thing we’re not allowed to talk about is the actual production and maintenance of the workings of colonial capitalism and the wars it brings with it. We may be able to talk about workers’ rights in Europe, but that is usually separated in analysis and discourse from genocide and workers’ rights in the Middle East, today’s South Africa, Namibia or Palestine – or how that colonial and warring capitalism relates to the maintenance of ‘the West’. In that sense, European anxiety almost forecloses a global political conversation and traps you in this moment of ‘phantasmatic angst’, and you don’t know what to do with it. Eventually, this anxiety becomes persecutory – you feel somebody is out there to hunt and hurt you – for a good reason in some cases. But not if we understand our power in numbers.

That’s why it’s crucial to understand the difference between anxiety and fear these days. What we’re dealing with predominantly is anxiety, especially in the western world. Which is why you said that people who fear repression the most are actually those who are not living it, which I think is quite poignant. In the post-colonial moment, those living under colonial repression, getting killed or fighting to survive don’t have the luxury to have ‘phantasmatic anxieties’. Their fears are very real and material. To be caught up in anxiety and rendered ‘inactive’ really is a predicament of privilege. In a crude sense, European anxiety still profits from other people’s fear: the real-life fear of those colonised becomes our phantasmatic anxiety.

The point you both raised in relation to various sites of political and social struggles – such as academia, journalism or activism – and how much time and energy we invest in debating whether or not what is happening is genocide, settler colonialism and so on, is an important one. Maybe another question could be whether liberty and freedom over the past five hundred years of settler colonialism and colonialism have ever been a question of debate with those colonised, enslaved and dispossessed, or whether they were actually fought for in struggles?

This idea of ‘negotiating’ freedom or for one’s recognition as human strikes me as a concept that is very much a part of the liberal consensus that arose in a colonial timeframe, and that today is fuelling and sanitising the further dispossession of the colonised. To my mind, there is no rational debate to be had or won, not even within the legal framework, that can actually liberate us – whatever liberation means. It seems to me that each generation tries to understand what ‘liberty’ they need to fight for and for what end. As Angela Davis said, ‘freedom is a constant struggle’.

So, while the question of liberty and freedom needs to constantly be thought anew, another question might be: to what extent may liberal law be able – perhaps! – to prevent our political destruction? I wouldn’t say that most atrocities were legal from the get-go; in fact, most were legalised as they unfolded. That is why we need to stop negotiating the understanding of an ‘event’ and start negotiating futures. We need to invest more into theories and arguments about ‘breaking with the present and past that hurt us’, rather than attempting to repair or negotiate those pasts.

However, what repressive social organisation does is to interrupt intergenerational knowledge transfer. As members of a younger generation, how are you experiencing what is happening today? Not only regarding Palestine, but other anti-colonial and anti-policing struggles in North America, Europe, the Middle East and elsewhere? What do you think and feel has changed, and how does it come to the fore in your activism and politics? For instance, anti-colonial armed struggle was common sense in the immediate post-WWII decades – whether endorsed or not. Today, however, we think more about not getting fired than about armed resistance, as you mentioned. What does all of that mean for you?

MZ: I’m 28, raised in a secular post-Soviet/Russian Jewish family that immigrated during the big waves of Soviet Jewish immigration in the 1970s and 1980s. I started organising within the Palestine solidarity movement in Canada, mostly within antizionist Jewish collectives. When I came to Vienna, I felt politically defanged because I wasn’t getting organised (although I did join the Judeobolschewiener*innen, an antizionist, anti-capitalist Jewish collective). Part of it was the language barrier. But one of the biggest shocks – though it shouldn’t have been – was that much of the so-called left was unabashedly Zionist. This is in part due to the influence of the Antideutsche ideology, a unique and paradoxical political segment within the German-speaking ‘radical Left’ that promotes unconditional support for Israel and Zionism. There is a small but vociferous strand within the German left – Antideutsche – that considers Germans to be inherently nationalist and antisemitic, and regards any critique of the Israeli government by the German left, including by left-wing Jews, as antisemitic. It was shocking to see self-proclaimed ‘antifascist’ and ‘anarchist’ collectives viciously attack pro-Palestine protests; and it was shocking to be told to my face, sometimes even by descendants of Nazis, that I am an antisemite for organising as an antizionist Jew.

Based on my perceptions, a re-invigorated, more focused and organised anti-colonial movement is emerging. Much of the ‘younger generation’ involved in anti-colonial and antizionist collective organising are migrants, people of colour, students on precarious visas – which is something to note when we discuss censorship and repression. There is a fear of losing one’s legal status in the EU. We see this threat in speeches, official announcements by high-ranking politicians: we have to deport. This illustrates the politics of securitisation at play. You also have many people who have not organised before and are being politicised by the genocide in Palestine. The bonds forged in solidarity are powerful, but intergenerational transfer and organising can be difficult.

Something that stands out to me is that the younger generation organising for Palestine is often queer and trans. I don’t think this is incidental, nor is it actually that new – our struggles are shared, and a commitment to queer politics necessarily means having to confront the colonial, capitalist structures that produce the cis-heteronormative world we live in. Where I was organising in Canada, we sometimes ran into intergenerational conflict over the fact that the ‘old guard’ was not as attentive to queer politics. This kind of conflict was sometimes amplified to make a facile, and in my opinion incorrect, argument about a more ‘Marxist’ old guard and a younger generation that focuses more on ‘culture’ or ‘discourse’ … We have to learn from the ‘old guard’s’ decades of struggle, but it must be a mutually reinforcing circle.

SS: I’m 24, born and raised in the UAE, and have lived between there, Cyprus and Jordan. At the age of 11, my parents decided to move to Nablus, where I grew up until I graduated from high school and moved to Vienna. I have an Austrian grandmother, which is why I ended up here – she and my grandfather met in the 1960s due to his own migration from Palestine. He pursued his studies in Europe after completing his high school diploma in a Jordanian prison, because he was a communist. It’s funny how that changed following the ‘oil boom’ in the Gulf and his moving to the UAE, which became home for a long time and where he made money.

To me, armed resistance was very normal by the age of 12. I was deeply influenced by a social studies teacher of mine who had been kicked out of university in Nablus because of her militant ideas. She ended up as a schoolteacher rather than a university professor because of being ‘too radical’. At least that was what was said about her – and there was my radicalisation.

I grew up in an upper-middle-class family from Nablus that didn’t want to talk about politics all that much, nor about them being active back in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s … Reflecting on this history, and how I perceive myself as part of this ongoing generational struggle, I continue to navigate what I was (not) told growing up, as well as what I and my family have been exposed to. For example, having an Austrian grandmother who lived in Nablus for fifteen years, learned the language, learned the accent, and was part of the fight for Palestinian liberation, I nowadays find myself thinking about the European antisemitism she inherited. Being in the UAE, too, was an entirely different experience. I experienced very different socio-political and racial structures, and these shaped my understanding about the types of discrimination that exist there, as opposed to in Palestine; and about the way in which, through its normalisation with Israel, the UAE is directly complicit in the Palestinians’ repression.

When I moved to Austria at the age of 18, BDS was the first movement I joined – it was the only Palestine movement that I knew about, as I had some Palestinian friends who recommended it. Those three years of being part of the BDS movement shaped how I organised politically. Because the movement kept being attacked, some BDS activists expressed forms of entitlement or self-righteousness in relation to other pro-Palestinian groups, convinced that they were the ones who were going to save Palestine from the Austrian state. When I realised that I was being treated differently from the white activists, or allies in general, and got a better understanding how saviourism worked, I left BDS.

A year ago, I moved to Athens for six months and found myself in anarchist spaces, organising with Palestinian refugee men coming from Syria and Lebanon. I was pushed into having conversations within the Palestinian community on what it takes to engage in, let’s say, feminist and abolitionist structures within our movements. The careerists, saviours, opportunists that a lot of us seem so grateful to have on our side – how much we can allow them in, and how much are we also willing to reflect on our own internalised racism – our racism and discrimination towards others?

In October 2023, the pro-Palestinian movement in Austria saw a new start, something that may perhaps challenge the structures that have existed for the past decade or so. Students started organising, and new people started to mobilise. Most come from outside Austria, including immigrants on student visas, and most also are from a US-specific context, meaning that they had a language and understanding of how to have this conversation. I saw potential in this intergenerational organising, involving those with a background in organising and those with none. Yet, as a Palestinian, I still do not feel that I am centred in any of this, and I have realised how for the past four years I was operating from feelings of guilt and shame.

Now I find myself watching from afar, seeing how everyone is trying to liberate Palestine on their own terms. But I no longer feel I have the agency in these spaces to come and talk about it, because there is a constant negotiation about who is Palestinian enough to decide things. What means of liberation are we using? What is the vision, really? There has been a lot of effort to implement care structures within movements, because, without them, every single one is doomed to fail. That is a very difficult task, but we are still trying to push for what we believe in and to hold ourselves and our communities accountable. I’m interested in hearing how this all relates to anxiety and shame, and how much I can learn to compromise in order not to be put in this constant position of attacking and being attacked. When do I say: I would rather remove myself from a situation and build my own thing, rather than trying to merge with something that I do not necessarily agree with?

AY: Wow! I asked about intergenerational differences in struggle and how you perceive them, and the first thing both of you did was relate to your family background. Interesting. In many ways, your responses circumscribe a social structure in which speaking about ‘systems’ already becomes too abstract for many. The individualised biography becomes the prime way through which we can narrate and convey the history of violence, while anchoring our reality as ‘true’ in a political culture that often disavows or downplays these very histories of colonial violence.

I agree with what you said about your respective communities and the old versus the new guards, although you didn’t put it like this. I think that is where the more Marxist ‘Old Guard’ has issues with what they call ‘identity politics’. Others would say that colonial capitalism is the ultimate ‘identity politics’.

But when thinking about these ‘intergenerational clashes’, maybe we can salvage more spaces of radical politics by focusing on what repression does to us, instead of whom it necessarily is about. In those debates, people often focus more on the bodies that are repressed and the struggles they face, versus the structures that generate the repression. These structures repress transgender women the same way they do a hyper masculine fighter from Palestine, right? The ways of attack might look different, but both risk death at the end of the day. The new generation understands that better than the old guard, and I think the strong queer and feminist impetus in the current Palestine solidarity movement is testimony to that. Again, we need to focus on the bodies afflicted by violence just as much as on the structure generating it.

I think the generation that was active in the 1980s had way more space to have these conversations than you have today, and even more than I had ten or fifteen years ago. So, on the one hand, we are battling a structure that doesn’t give us the space to have these interpersonal, intergenerational and transnational conversations, and then we are trapped as the people who were born within the system, with our own often unconscious neoliberal agendas. It’s not easy to organise amidst all that while having conversations with the ‘old guard’.

When you were telling me about these biases that are thrown at you from your own communities, from men, from white people, from everyone essentially, it’s very painful. What I hear predominantly is that nobody takes the time to listen to the other and what happened to them, regardless of what your social identity is per se. I don’t want to romanticise anything – it has never been easy. Power is always there, even in the most anarchist space. The white dudes dominate, whether it’s through their mere physical presence or the act of going to war, whilst those who are socialised as women or feminised do the so-called reproductive labour of care work.

I was born in the GDR to a Palestinian father and a white German mother – my mother’s side also had a Jewish side that branched off from my grandmother and her father. Most of them were killed in Theresienstadt, others survived in Switzerland and Russia, and some of them live in Israel today. In the GDR I grew up knowing I could not speak freely to anybody about anything, especially not about politics or what we ‘think at home’. To my frustration as a child that just wanted to belong, I was not allowed to become a ‘Young Pioneer’, which to a large extent excluded me from class and school life. I was first interrogated by the GDR intelligence when I was around seven, which might have meant prison for my mother. All of that fundamentally shaped me and gave me an understanding of a political system that is predatory and dangerous. On the political level of state violence and what the ‘state’ means, I learned to act and lie to the sovereign for the survival of the family. They would often interrogate the children first – kids talk, because they don’t know, or so they thought.

When I read the secret file compiled on me in 2019, I was reminded of what I knew from my mother and the files the Stasi had kept on her. That was the tipping point for me: seeing how extensive the surveillance was and how brazenly it was being carried out. Normally, I wouldn’t have taken legal action because I lack the funds to go to court and fight for my rights. But then the ELSC, which had just started its work, offered help. With them I felt I could fight this in the courts.

These mechanisms – how the state keeps records to intimidate or even kill – really riled me. I know how the GDR functioned, and I learned what fear was – or at least the beginnings of it, after all I was very young still. But that is essentially why later on I couldn’t understand people around me in West Germany, who would constantly be so scared of everything. At the end of the day, I thought: ‘the only thing that happens to you here is you lose your job’. You don’t disappear like in the GDR, you don’t get incarcerated, tortured or killed. What are you scared of?

It comes back to what Mars said at the beginning. Those who are the most scared are the ones who have not experienced immediate violence on their bodies, and instead want to believe in this white, western, colonial lie that we can reform and repair: that we are living in a Rechtsstaat that guarantees the rule of law. No postcolonial or racialised subject believes in going to the police and asking for their rights; and those who do believe in it don’t know what repression means. In Europe, people don’t want to talk about that violence for fear of parting with that ‘fantasy’, while in other parts of the world people often don’t want to talk about that violence because it’s all around them and never stopped.

If I were to peddle my family history, I would use it not to claim a certain identity, but to show the recurring techniques and methods used across generations, which though not identical (they never are), are similar. Then it becomes easier to have conversations across generations, groups and people that think they are the ‘first’ victims. I’ve also heard similar things to you two: ‘you’re too white, you’re too western, you’re too this and that’. You’re only ‘playing Palestinian’, because the real Palestinian is the one who lives in poverty under repression in Palestine, and so on. But you need to rise above it, because that reaction is part of the wider structure that keeps us in place. Colonialism is a structure that acts on us and through us: sexism, racism and classism are inherent to it.

Something I have noticed about the younger generation of activists is that people are anxious about being attacked, or of not finding care structures. There is nothing wrong with that, but, once you understand that colonial capitalism is always violent, and that it’s just a matter of degree, you understand that not being attacked is already a privilege. The question then becomes not how to escape attack and save myself, but rather: to what extent can I continue struggling without breaking? What am I willing to pay? Palestinians in Palestine are teaching the world about struggle in this respect. Even when you get hurt, you persist. This is not about you personally, it’s about the next generations and the world we are building for them now. It’s not about escaping violence; it’s about ensuring the next generations know what’s coming and preparing them accordingly, and hopefully creating a better world from there.

Kurdish comrades have done this for decades: they keep records and interview the women and men in struggle, in order to pass it on to the next generations. To move away from violence, we need to look violence in the face, understand it. Most importantly, we need to maintain our own archives of struggle.

MZ: You touched on a set of questions I had about fighting repression. First, I want to comment on this point about space: on the one hand, there are discursive spaces, and on the other hand, physical spaces, which are crucial for political organising. I have this romanticised mental image of the leftist bar in which everyone congregates; but those are in fact real and necessary spaces, and they are disappearing as a result of repressive tactics. In Vienna, spaces and collectives of discussion and organisation are repeatedly defamed and threatened with closures and attempts to criminalise them. In Berlin, we’ve seen closures due to bogus accusations of antisemitism. This is intentional and works to fracture political communities.

On the point of repression being an individualising force – this is key, especially for the ways we strategise against it. Differing subject positions entail varying levels of risk – people understandably seek to minimise the violence they may face. But we remain in the legal dance. Here I want to mention the Innsbruck anti-repression group antirep_ibk, which is doing important work, because their framework is not about how to legally protect individuals; rather, it is about making political cases out of political repression. It is about observing the tactics of the state, unveiling the structures animating repression, and supporting people so they can continue their political work. It’s also ultimately about creating an archive of state repression. There’s also the European Legal Support Centre that Anna has already mentioned, which supported her in her struggle in the courts. There’s now an ELSC monitoring group in Vienna that documents cases of repression and criminalisation of Palestine solidarity. We’re seeing a network starting to build.

AY: The ELSC is doing incredibly important work and is of great help to many students, migrants, activists, artists and academics. In terms of how we fight: to my mind, organised anti-repression work is often a bit too late. We’re plodding along behind the system to minimise its violence. We missed the time where we could have prevented the worst. But that’s a general problem in political organising, I suppose.

When I began organising for Palestine in my twenties, ‘Antideutsche’ ideology was a state ideology in the making (see note 3). Over one, maybe two, generations, its proponents have taken up key positions in politics, journalism, intellectual venues such as schools, universities and cultural centres. They function as militarised counterinsurgent intellectual elites perpetuating a white supremacist colonial discourse under the guise of a left-wing, ‘anti-authoritarian’ but not anti-colonial rhetoric.1

Back then, as these people gained prominence, organised, wrote policy papers, and received state funding, there was no effective oppositional front seriously engaging with their nonsense. And those that countered them were not connected to the Palestinian movements or other feminist or queer movements – it was in many ways what we called the ‘Old Guard’ that saw their dangerous rise, but they weren’t capable of stopping them. During the financial crisis in 2008–2009, the Antideutsche argued that protesting against banks was inherently antisemitic. As though all ‘banks’ are ‘Jews’ – such statements were themselves antisemitic, but seemed to go unchallenged. Palestinians and antizionist Jews often moved in very different spheres, with very different political objectives, and they often didn’t care that much about the German state and what I call ‘the new German ideology’ – they were more busy with the Middle East.

Of course, antisemitism has taken on many different forms throughout history. To make Nazism the paradigm of antisemitism is convenient for a certain mainstream politics that is still mainly illiterate in the histories of race, racism and colonialism. At the same time, Nazism also becomes the main definition of fascism. That position forecloses any other understanding of how fascism has unfolded differently in history, or how antisemitism has changed in time and space.

Making Nazi fascism and antisemitism the paradigmatic instances in their own right stops us from understanding an essential truth: namely that race and racism are always shapeshifting, as Alana Lentin writes.2 And it also stops us from understanding the relationship between colonialism and anti-Palestinian racism in today’s world, where every opponent of Israeli policy is called an antisemite and terrorist. Today, definitions of antisemitism should include the statement that ‘Jewish opposition to antizionism is not antisemitism’ – in other words, being against a racially exclusive state is not racist but anti-racist. That we even need to say this shows the trouble we are in. By the way, I prefer the term anti-Jewish racism over antisemitism, to mark anti-Jewish racism as one of the many racisms in the world, not as a special category.

MZ: Those narrow definitions of European fascism and Nazism allow them to remain as aberrations rather than reflecting the logical unfolding of the structures of colonial capitalism – the unleashing of European colonial violence onto its own – as Aimé Césaire wrote. Conceiving of Nazism as the aberration conveniently absolves Europe and Europeans of the responsibility to reckon with the fact that its annihilatory roots were laid in western philosophical, political and economic thought and practice.

AY: Exactly. People were neither interested in nor able to critically oppose these new racial formations that were appearing in a post-socialist but not postcolonial Europe – which positioned the Muslim Other and the Palestinian as the direct opposite to the figure of the Jew. We had a white, German-centric discourse on what antisemitism and fascism supposedly were and are. People who didn’t agree with this consensus weren’t allowed to take part in the discussion. So there is that!

On the one hand, we need more racial literacy and historical knowledge, and on the other hand, it’s too late. Ever since the advent of colonialism people have been killed as surplus populations. What we see happening right now is precisely that: a surplus population in the settler colonial state that is not needed for capital to function. The western world doesn’t need Palestinians in Gaza or the West Bank. Palestinians don’t produce anything of value for the workings of global capital; their resources can be stolen by the Israeli state or individual groups of settlers, and there’s almost no political consequence for killing them. What I am saying is bleak, but that’s how a sovereign thinks and sees. But it will all come home to roost in the end, as Césaire already said.

MZ: The imperial boomerang.

AY: Indeed. And if people don’t understand that, we’re doomed. I mean, they’ve been throwing more bombs on Gaza than they did on Germany against the Nazis. Can you imagine that?

MZ: I can’t. The horror of the world that we live in is that this is outside of my/our imaginaries. This is how imperialist terror is spatialised: it exists elsewhere.

AY: The neoliberal moment is one of individualisation and isolation – unless we understand that everything is connected and related. Survival in capitalism is ultimately conditional, and usually comes at the expense of others. That’s a question that anti-colonial thinkers have been debating for a long time: How can we turn spaces in a capitalist system that is immanently anti-relational into a radical space to organise for more relationality and solidarity? In that sense, modern-day state education has never been radical: it’s political organising that has been the radical space of and for education connected to politicisation. But how do we make connections possible if we are cut off from each other?

MZ: Wasn’t it Thomas Sankara that wrote that ‘we can never stop explaining’? Education is often a tool of indoctrination, of very intentional ideological erasures – but it can be a weapon.

AY: Palestinian journalists and other individuals are educating the world and radicalising younger generations through reporting on Al Jazeera as well as on social media. But what about all those who live in even more destitute situations than Palestinians in Gaza, who don’t even have mobile phones and Internet access to report their own genocide and killing? What about past genocides that have been obscured, not taught: the Tamil genocide, the mass killings of communists in Indonesia? Genocide can never be understood through the optics of single-issue narratives.

We’re coming back to the question of what genocide is versus what it does; who is being affected versus what is being done. The genocide in Congo is an important example. Witnessing the genocide in Palestine as an ‘event’ is easier than understanding the capitalist supply chain that produces mass murder. Congo is rich in coltan, the mineral inside our phone and AI technologies – and it is mined by slave and child labour. In other words, recognising the genocide in Congo makes the witnessing of other genocides possible. Understanding capitalism means understanding war, supply chains and the technologies they fuel, and the way they keep people suppressed and subservient. Here, genocide is the outcome, and not the starting point, from which we would need to organise. By now it should be clear that genocide is not a single-issue problem!

SS: I would like to stress this point: how does this process of radicalisation not stop at Palestine but continue, develop? We consume so many images of violence every day, but they are mainly coming from one specific part of the world. As we speak, genocides are happening in the dark.

There is an often-repeated sentence: Palestine is the moral compass. Well, yes and no – but it has to be woven into a broader, global, struggle for liberation. Such a statement also places many expectations on Palestinians – to do certain things if they are to be worthy enough to struggle for. I don’t see this conversation being had right now, because of the sense of urgency under which activists are operating.