Book Review: Haidar Eid’s literary ode to resisting the settler colonial genocide in Gaza

BANGING ON THE WALLS OF THE TANK
Dispatches from Gaza
By Haidar Eid
240 pps. Between the Lines, $29.95.

“This book is both personal and political, my testimony of being a Palestinian refugee residing in what has been called the largest open-air prison on earth, but also a voice from within offering a way out of the manufactured quagmire in Palestine.” So begins Palestinian-South African literary scholar Haidar Eid’s Banging on the Walls of the Tank : Dispatches from Gaza, a startingly defiant work of intellectual rebellion written over a decade of consistent and creative resistance to Israeli settler colonialism, genocide, war, and siege on Gaza in the the ongoing Nakba in Palestine. 

In a rhythmic call and response, the book matches the urgency of Palestinian writer and Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) revolutionary Ghassan Kanafani’s question in Men in the Sun – “why didn’t you bang on the walls of the tank?” – from which it takes its title. It responds with steadfast resistance as Palestinian poet and critic Abdul-Rahim al-Shaikh clarifies, “we are banging on the walls of the tank.” 

This grounded spirit of writerly refusal inheres in daring and imaginative forms throughout the book. In a 2009 essay entitled “Culture of Resistance vs. Defeat,” Eid draws on Frantz Fanon to interrogate the role of the intellectual in struggle with a scathing critique of assimilated intellectuals and a prescient warning about the neoliberalisation and acquiescence to surrender of the ‘NGOized left’ and ‘Oslo defeatists.’ These activists are defeated “because they want to fight the battle on Israel’s terms.” In this sense, Eid mirrors Palestinian intellectual and critic Edward Said who wrote that criticism, “is most itself … in its suspicion of totalizing concepts, in its discontent with reified objects, in its impatience with guilds… and orthodox habits of mind.” 

In Eid’s words, “resistance…is not only the ability to fight back against a militarily more powerful enemy, but the ability to creatively resist the occupation of one’s land.” He emphatically rejects the colonial placation and Bantustanisation of what he refers to as a “two prison solution.” Eid reminds his reader of the inevitability through struggle of a free Palestine constituted of one state from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. 

If resistance in its multiple forms is an anchoring thread of the book so too is an anti-colonial sensibility about the presence of history, where the long and wide struggle against Israeli settler colonialism, hasbara, and genocidal war is written in defiance of the domination of the erasure of history. He writes, “d]ecolonising cultural resistance insists on the right to view Palestinian history as a holistic entity, both coherent and integral.” This recourse to history appears both in the contextualisation of contemporary genocide and resistance in the enduring spirit of sumud in the Palestinian historical present, and in the deployment of urgent trans-boundary comparisons, foils, and inflections to Palestinian struggle and Israeli belligerence. 

Eid draws on the experiences of genocidal subjugation and struggle against racial capitalist structures of apartheid in South Africa, Nazi Germany, and Jim Crow United States among others to situate the Palestinian struggle. Eid’s pen is both sharp and subtle as he avoids the compulsion of easy comparison while drawing into relief the barbaric incoherence of maligning of the Palestinian (and universal) right to resistance to colonial domination and to the inalienable right to self-determination. While Zionist propaganda paints Palestinian resistance as wanton, emerging in a vacuum, Eid leaves no avenue open for this mendacious fiction. 

By contrast, the Palestinian resistance is squarely situated in the context, on the one hand, of global trajectories of resistance to colonial racist oppression, and on the other hand, of the longue durée of Palestinian resistance to the structure of Israeli and Western genocidal settler colonialism in place since before the settler siege on Gaza since 2007, the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, the entrenchment of apartheid in 1967, the betrayal of Oslo in the 1990s, harking back to the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and the structuring of the Nakba which haunts the rubble of Gaza and the deathmaking dispossession in the West Bank and the diaspora. 

Eid makes clear that neither annihilatory Israeli violence nor Palestinian resistance to it began on October 7 2023, an imperative clarification against the rendering of Palestinian resistance movements and Israel, a nuclear power as possessing an equality of arms in what he characterizes as “the decontextualised analysis of the mainstream media which happens to be white and colonial and which tends to fully endorse the Israeli narrative.” 

Against this newsroom effacement which consolidates the cultural arsenal of genocide, Eid writes October 7 2023 as a prison break in conversation with histories of anti-carceral and anti-colonial resistance. He writes, “[i]nstead of waiting for Israel’s ‘generosity’ when it decides, through mediators, to open one of the seven gates of the largest open-air prison on earth, the inmates – having learned from the Warsaw Uprisings of 1944 – decided to bring it down themselves.” 

The resistance movements, writes Eid “have given the Palestinian struggle a new impetus, a clear direction towards liberation and decolonization.” As the grandchild of Jewish women of the Warsaw Ghetto who were raised on rations and rebellion, I cannot but see the threads between both the Shoah and the concentration camp under the occupation of Zionist lebensraum and the suppression of anti-colonial resistance common to both the Nazi Holocaust in Europe and the Zionist Holocaust in Palestine. As I read Eid’s words, I am reminded of the lyrics of Zog Niet Keyn Mol, the song of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising that my grandmother used to sing to me in Yiddish: “The hour for which we long will certainly appear // The earth shall thunder ‘neath our tread that we are here!”

Amid devastating personal accounts of this Holocaust honoring a decimated Gaza and its people including his martyred family members, friends, and comrades, Eid delivers a message of hope in defiance. He tells stories of the power of escalating global quotidian popular protest and the force amidst despair these carry. Eid writes of resistance fighters, grandsons of refugees from Huj which, ethnically cleansed by Zionist militias in 1948 and renamed Sderot, who managed enter the settlement, returning, “not as visitors granted permission by the colonizer, but as liberators upholding their right to their ancestral land.” Eid celebrates as he calls on us to intensify the economic strangulation of the Zionist genocidal war machine through the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) Movement. 

Eid reminds us that these cumulative efforts predominantly inside but also outside of Palestine have seen the day on which “Israel is on the verge of collapse.”  Its longevity is not only in doubt in the West, but in Israel itself. At this time of revolution and doubt, in a Gramscian interregnum globally, Eid’s profound work provides both clarity and clarion call. And invites us all to join millions in banging on the walls of the tank. 

Banging on the Walls of the Tank is a powerful testimony to Eid’s brave humanity and searing analysis. The words emanate a call to action under girding their lyricism. Ultimately, I read them in conversation– again – with Kanafani who writes “[e]verything in this world can be robbed and stolen, except one thing; this one thing is the love that emanates from a human being towards a solid commitment to a conviction or cause.” With all he has lost and found, Eid reminds us to resist in ever more daring ways that embody the enduring love of a conviction.