[News] My Heart Makes My Head Swim

[Anti-Imperialist News]

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*My Heart Makes My Head Swim: The Twentieth Newsletter (2024)*


Malak Mattar (Palestine), /Hind’s Hall/, 2024.

Dear friend,

Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research 
<https://thetricontinental.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=b52ace2dde&e=d206d0a40d>.

The title of this newsletter, ‘My heart makes my head swim’, comes from 
Frantz Fanon’s /Black Skin, White Masks/ 
<https://thetricontinental.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=b85852a219&e=d206d0a40d> 
(1952). In a chapter called ‘The Fact of Blackness’, Fanon writes about 
the despair that racism produces, the immense anxiety about living in a 
world that has decided that certain people are simply not human or not 
sufficiently human. The lives of these people, children of a lesser god, 
are assigned less worth than the lives of the powerful and the 
propertied. An international division of humanity tears the world into 
pieces, throwing masses of people into the fires of anguish and oblivion.

What is happening in Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost city, is ghastly. Since 
October 2023, Israel has ordered 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza to 
move southwards as the Israeli armed forces have steadily moved their 
gunsights across the Wadi Gaza wetlands down to the edge of Rafah. 
Kilometre by kilometre, as the Israeli military advances, the so-called 
safe zone moves further and further south. In December, the Israeli 
government claimed, with great cruelty, that the tent city of al-Mawasi 
(west of Rafah, along the Mediterranean Sea) was the new designated safe 
area. A mere 6.5 square kilometres (half the size of London’s Heathrow 
airport), the supposed safe zone within al-Mawasi is nowhere near large 
enough to house the more than one million Palestinians who are in Rafah. 
Not only was it absurd for Israel to say that al-Mawasi would be a 
refuge, but – according to the laws of war – a safe zone must be agreed 
upon by all parties.

Ismail Shammout (Palestine), /Odyssey of a People/, 1980.

‘How can a zone be safe in a war zone if it is only unilaterally decided 
by one part of the conflict?’, asked 
<https://thetricontinental.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=765ee0d1a4&e=d206d0a40d> 
Philippe Lazzarini, the commissioner-general of the UN agency for 
Palestinian refugees (UNRWA); ‘It can only promote the false feeling 
that it will be safe’. Furthermore, on several occasions, Israel has 
bombed al-Mawasi, the area it says is safe. On 20 February, Israel 
attacked a shelter operated by Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans 
Frontières, killing two family members of the organisation’s staff. This 
week, on 13 May, an international UN staff member was killed 
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after the Israeli army opened fire on a UN vehicle, one of the nearly 
200 UN workers killed 
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in Gaza in addition to the targeted assassination 
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of aid workers.

Aref El-Rayyes (Lebanon), /Untitled/, 1963.

Not only has Israel begun to bomb Rafah, but it hastily sent in tanks to 
seize the only border crossing through which aid dribbled in on the few 
trucks a day that were allowed to enter. After Israel seized the Rafah 
border, it prevented the entry of aid into Gaza altogether. Starving 
Palestinians has long been Israeli policy 
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which is of course a war crime. Preventing aid from entering Gaza is 
part of the international division of humanity that has defined not only 
this genocide, but the occupation of Palestinian land in East Jerusalem, 
Gaza, and the West Bank since 1967 and the system of apartheid within 
the borders defined by Israel following the 1948 /Nakba/ (‘Catastrophe’).

Three words in this sentence are fundamentally contested by Israel: 
apartheid, occupation, and genocide. Israel and its Global North allies 
want to claim that the use of these words to describe Israeli policies, 
Zionism, or the oppression of Palestinians is tantamount to 
anti-Semitism. But, as the United Nations and numerous respected human 
rights groups note, these are legal descriptions of the reality on the 
ground and not moral judgments that are made either in haste or out of 
anti-Semitism. A short primer on the accuracy of these three concepts is 
necessary to counter this denial.

Nelson Makamo (South Africa), /Decoration of the Youth/, 2019.

*Apartheid*. The Israeli government treats the Palestinian minority 
population within the borders defined in 1948 (21%) as second-class 
citizens. There are at least sixty-five 
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Israeli laws that discriminate 
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against Palestinian citizens of Israel. One of them, passed 
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in 2018, declares the country a ‘nation state of the Jewish people’. As 
the Israeli philosopher Omri Boehm wrote 
<https://thetricontinental.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=b2e0dfa472&e=d206d0a40d>, 
through this new law, the Israeli government ‘formally endorses’ the use 
of ‘apartheid methods within Israel’s recognised borders’. The United 
Nations 
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and Human Rights Watch 
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have both said that Israel’s treatment of Palestinians falls under the 
definition of apartheid. The use of this term is entirely factual.

Laila Shawa (Palestine), /The Hands of Fatima/, 2013.

*Occupation*. In 1967, Israel occupied 
<https://thetricontinental.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=5383b77299&e=d206d0a40d> 
the three Palestinian territories of East Jerusalem, Gaza, and the West 
Bank. From 1967 to 1999, these three areas were referred to as part of 
the Occupied Arab Territories (which at different times also included 
Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, Syria’s Golan region, and southern Lebanon). 
Since 1999, they have been termed the Occupied Palestinian Territory 
(OPT). In UN documents 
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and at the International Court of Justice 
<https://thetricontinental.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=54fbbc7ba1&e=d206d0a40d>, 
Israel is referred to as the ‘occupying power’, which is a term of art 
that requires certain obligations from Israel toward those whom it 
occupies. Although the 1993 Oslo Accords set up the Palestinian 
Authority, Israel remains the occupying power of the OPT, a designation 
that has not been revised. An occupation is identical to colonial rule: 
it is when a foreign power dominates a people in their homeland and 
denies them sovereignty and rights. Despite Israel’s military withdrawal 
from Gaza in 2005 (which included the dismantling of twenty-one illegal 
settlements), Israel continues to occupy Gaza by building a perimeter 
fence around the Gaza Strip and by policing the Mediterranean waters of 
Gaza. Annexation of parts of East Jerusalem and the West Bank as well as 
the punctual bombing of Gaza are violations of Israel’s obligation as 
the occupying power.

An occupation imposes a structural condition of violence upon the 
occupied. That is why international law recognises that those who are 
occupied have the right to resist. In 1965, in the midst of Guinea 
Bissau’s struggle against Portuguese colonialism, the United Nations 
General Assembly passed 
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Resolution 2105 (‘Implementation of the Declaration on the Granting of 
Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples’). Paragraph 10 of this 
resolution is worth reading carefully: ‘The General Assembly… 
/[r]ecognises/ the legitimacy of the struggle by the peoples under 
colonial rule to exercise their right to self-determination and 
independence and invites all States to provide material and moral 
assistance to the national liberation movements in colonial 
Territories’. There is no ambiguity here. Those who are occupied have 
the right to resist, and, in fact, all member states of the United 
Nations are bound by this treaty to assist them. Rather than sell arms 
to the occupying power, who is the aggressor in the ongoing genocide, 
the members states of the United Nations – particularly from the Global 
North – should aid the Palestinians.

Abdulqader al-Rais (United Arab Emirates), /Waiting/, c. 1970.

*Genocide*. In its order 
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published on 26 January, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) found 
that there was ‘plausible’ evidence of Israel committing genocide 
against Palestinians. In March, the UN special rapporteur on the 
situation of human rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, 
Francesca Albanese, published a monumental report 
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called /Anatomy of a Genocide/. In this report, Albanese wrote that 
‘there are reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating 
Israel’s commission of genocide is met’. ‘More broadly’, she wrote, 
‘they also indicate that Israel’s actions have been driven by a 
genocidal logic integral to its settler-colonial project in Palestine, 
signalling a tragedy foretold’.

Intent to commit genocide is easily proved in the context of Israel’s 
bombardment. In October 2023, Israel’s President Isaac Herzog said 
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that ‘an entire nation out there is responsible’ for the attacks on 7 
October, and it was not true that ‘civilians [were] not… aware, not 
involved’. The ICJ pointed to this statement, among others, since it 
expresses Israel’s intent and use of ‘collective punishment’, a 
genocidal war crime 
<https://thetricontinental.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=25c5756536&e=d206d0a40d>. 
The following month, Israel’s Jerusalem Affairs and Heritage Minister 
Amichai Eliyahu said 
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that dropping a nuclear bomb on Gaza was ‘an option’ since ‘there are no 
non-combatants in Gaza’. Before the ICJ ruling was published, Moshe 
Saada, a member of the Israeli parliament from Prime Minister Benjamin 
Netanyahu’s Likud party, said 
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that ‘all Gazans must be destroyed’. These sentiments, by any 
international standard, demonstrate an intent to commit genocide. As 
with ‘apartheid’ and ‘occupation’, the use of the term ‘genocide’ is 
entirely accurate.

Vijay Prashad presents Frantz Fanon’s daughter, Mireille Fanon 
Mendès-France, with a poster of the cover of the new isiZulu edition of 
her father’s classic, /The Wretched of the Earth/, in Paris, France, 2024.

Earlier this year, Inkani Books, a Tricontinental: Institute for Social 
Research project based in South Africa, published the isiZulu 
translation of Fanon’s /Wretched of the Earth/, /Izimpabanga Zomhlaba/ 
<https://thetricontinental.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=4f643b7ba3&e=d206d0a40d>, 
translated by Makhosazana Xaba. We are so proud of this accomplishment, 
bringing the work of Fanon into another African language (it has already 
been translated into Arabic and Swahili).

When I was last in Palestine, I spoke with young children about their 
aspirations. What they told me reminded me of a section from /The 
Wretched of the Earth/ 
<https://thetricontinental.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=1bea772cab&e=d206d0a40d>: 
‘At twelve or thirteen years of age the village children know the names 
of the old men who were in the last rising, and the dreams they dream in 
the /douars/ [camps] or in the villages are not those of money or of 
getting through their exams like the children of the towns, but dreams 
of identification with some rebel or another, the story of whose heroic 
death still today moves them to tears’.

Children in Gaza will remember this genocide with at least the same 
intensity as their ancestors remembered 1948 and as their parents 
remembered the occupation that has loomed over this narrow piece of land 
since their own childhood. Children in South Africa will read these 
lines from Fanon in isiZulu and remember those who fell to inaugurate a 
new South Africa thirty years ago.

Warmly,

Vijay

Website <www.eltricontinental.org>

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Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research · Shadipur · New Delhi, 
NCT 110008 · India
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