Culture

Together imagining, greater than the sum of our parts

Nada Elia’s new book transports us across the globe to center women and queer peoples’ position in joint struggle and imagines a new future for Palestinian resistance.

GREATER THAN THE SUM OF OUR PARTS
Feminism, Inter/Nationalism, and Palestine
by Nada Elia
192 pp. Pluto Press, $19.95

January 2023 was the deadliest month for Palestinians in the West Bank since 2015, with thirty-five Palestinians killed, including one woman and six children. Air raids continue in the Gaza Strip, and raids in towns and refugee camps are almost daily. The violence continuing from Operation Break the Wave in 2022 demonstrates the fear that Zionist settler colonialism holds against Palestinian popular resistance. Despite this violence, this resistance continues, foregrounding the imagination for a free Palestine. As Lana Tatour reminds us, the Unity Intifada, the 2021 movement of Palestinian resistance between the West Bank, ’48 Palestine, and the diaspora, is a moment of decolonial future(s). [1] These future(s) reject liberal politics to envision a new way to understand citizenship, statehood, and freedom, employing a decolonial way of understanding or praxis.

Viewing Palestine through a decolonial praxis shines a new light on Palestinian resistance and advocacy. It centers the youth, women, queer, and lower classes as imperative to Palestinian liberation and as the backbone of historical and contemporary resistance. In Greater than the Sum of Our Parts: Feminism, Inter/Nationalism, and Palestine, a book about community, resistance, and hope, Nada Elia articulates the need for a decolonial praxis to investigate Zionism and other instances of settler colonialism’s intersection with gender and queer oppression of Indigenous and racialized peoples. This book, written with hope and love, felt like sitting across from Nada with a cup of coffee as I hear about Palestine, South Africa, and Indigenous and Black marginalization across Turtle Island. As she details in the preface, “my intent is to express, not to impress. To invite, to welcome, rather than intimidate.” This invitation is to learn, connect, and reflect in the direction of revolutionary change and joint struggle. Divided into five chapters, this book addresses Zionist and settler colonial myths, women and queer resistive responses, and a global uprise in the joint struggle against settler colonialism. In each chapter, Nada meticulously weaves the Black, Indigenous, and Palestinian experience within, across, and together to demonstrate that Palestine is not an exceptional issue but, instead, experiences similar situations as co-strugglers globally, whether it be South Africa, Turtle Island, or Hawaii. 

Greater than the Sum of Our Parts begins with rightly proclaiming that the “Palestinian struggle is an anticolonial struggle.” This anticolonial struggle joins a decolonial liberatory praxis and vision that is feminist, intersectional, abolitionist, beyond binaries, and transformative. By laying this groundwork, this book denotes that Palestinian and global liberation must include a feminist and queer analytical frame to debunk Zionist myths and contest liberal, white politics. Chapter one begins in May 2021, recounting Muna el-Kurd and the illegal sieges of homes in Sheikh Jarrah. This moment is reminiscent of many land thefts in Palestinian ancestral history, reminding us that Zionism is a historically driven settler colonial project. Although the apartheid framework is deployed nowadays to understand modern Israel (discussed more in chapter two), Elia traces the Zionist project historically to demonstrate Zionism’s need to imitate and reinvigorate the European, Western, imperial, and colonialist project. 

In chapter two, Elia answers the Zionist denouncement of apartheid, as compared with South Africa. She provides a cautionary tale about apartheid and rights-based frameworks; it must accompany advocacy for full sovereignty and land restitution. By exposing labor, citizenship, and voting laws within Israel, chapter two tackles legal discrimination and how it compounds upon women of color and Palestinians to justify their exclusion. Without discussing these fallacies, settler colonialism’s intersections with patriarchy continue:

gendered violence is so much part and parcel of colonialism that it permeates all societies… history has taught us again and again that other oppressions do not end after national liberation unless they are addressed as part of the liberation struggle.

In response to the shifting Zionist narrative and settler denial, focusing on the impact on and voices of marginalized communities informs the direction of joint struggle and how an eye to the future breaks us out of old habits. 

Chapter three continues the discussion, detailing that the oppression of women and queer folx are part of settler colonialism, necessitating their inclusion. “No free homeland without free women and queers.” Denouncing the “savior” complex of colonial powers about women, Elia establishes that colonialism, Zionist or otherwise, increases the vulnerability of women and assists other systems of oppression. The layers of targeting by a Zionist government, in addition to a regressive masculinist society, place women and queer people in precarious positions that lead to extortion, increased surveillance, and femicide. Additionally, Zionist pinkwashing, or weaponization of queer-friendliness to overshadow crimes, is a tool of settler colonialism, erasing queer Palestinians and pro-Palestinian discourse. 

Returning to land, chapter four addresses food sovereignty’s position in achieving national sovereignty. The land nourishes its people, whether Indigenous peoples on Turtle Island to Palestine, but they are also criminally indicted for collecting food in cultural ways. The environmental degradation accompanied by Zionist settler colonialism, such as calculating limits of food that can reach Gaza, spraying cancerous pesticides to prevent native plant growth, draining swamps and lakes, stealing water, foreclosing space to fish, planting non-native trees, and destroying olive trees, are strategies of weaponizing food and targeting women as breadwinners and agents of cultural preservation. Although there is much death and violence, Elia ends the chapter highlighting Indigenous reclamations of ingredients and recipes, shining the path forward to reimagine food and nourishment.

Reading each chapter is heart-wrenching but inspirational; It details the conscientious calculations of (Zionist) settler colonialism but centers the resistance of Palestinians, Black, and Indigenous peoples globally. “We are greater than the sum of our parts,” Elia reminds us. A global intifada is ahead, and through joint struggle, we will all reach new future(s). In chapter five, A Global Intifada, Elia conceptualizes the anticolonial boomerang effect, or “a coming together of communities against a common oppressor” amongst Indigenous, Black American, and queer communities. Rather than just expressing solidarity, joint struggle is the response to intertwined, structural oppression because our communities are one. 

“We have been through the same harrowing experiences of state violence, patriarchy, dispossession, incarceration; we have met in the belly of the beast and we are surfacing from its horrors together.”

Overall, Greater than the Sum of Our Parts weaves Palestine into the narratives of settler colonialism and structural oppression. Centering women and queer participation in the liberation struggle for Palestine enunciate the need for a twin focus on anticolonial and decolonial analysis. Our struggle is one, our intifada is here, our liberation is on the horizon. As Nada instructs me as I read the final page: 

Let us sustain ourselves with olives from trees as ancient as Palestine itself, and corn lovingly picked by hands the color of soil… the land is ours to care for, as it cares for us. We are coming together, beyond boundaries, and together. 

Notes

  1. ’48 Palestine is a term that refers to the borders of Palestine before the Nakba in 1948 and is utilized by activists and scholars.
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“This invitation is to learn, connect, and reflect in the direction of revolutionary change and joint struggle.”
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Very encouraging, and poetic.

We certainly do need a “Global Intifada”. I presume it must not embrace rifles.

A lot of fashionable buzz-words and blether.

(This bit hits a real point, though: “strategies of weaponizing food and targeting women as breadwinners and agents of cultural preservation.”)

Still, if it help the Palestinians a little bit, it might be worth the paper.