The left’s view of Palestine’s future often reduces to vague terms like “one-state solution” or “equal rights for all” but few address the tough questions they raise, especially: how can Palestinians live with those who carried out the Gaza genocide?

No discussion of decolonization can be complete without understanding the importance of Vietnam and Algeria, and how their liberation struggles inspire oppressed people all over the world, including the Palestinians.

The question we have to ask ourselves is not whether we condemn Hamas, but whether we condemn a settler colonial regime that makes armed struggle necessary for survival.

Palestinian resistance is a decolonial struggle against Israeli settler colonialism and U.S. imperialism. This resistance is also confronting the brutal nature of colonial modernity, which is exemplified in Zionism.

Some of Palestine’s allies seem more comfortable with Palestinians as victims of Israel’s colonial rule than agents of their own liberation. Palestinians need support when they fight, not only when they die.

The Inter-University Coalition on Palestine is mobilizing students and workers at hundreds of universities worldwide who refuse to accept the rules of the colonial university. We demand a Free Palestine. This is the horizon of our collective freedom. 

We are in an era of academic metaphors where critical recognition is divorced from recognized reality. Many academics write on decolonization but hardly engage with actual forms of undoing injustice.

Decolonizing movements decimate the physical and ideological barriers standing in the way of the new world the oppressed know is on the horizon. After the ‘Al Aqsa Flood,’ Palestinians know more than ever that they will reach this world too.

Mitri Raheb’s latest book is a provocative examination of how the Bible has been used to support Israeli settler colonialism. “The land of Palestine is colonized by the use of military hardware that is justified by theological software,” he writes.

The Palestinian call for BDS is a challenge to colonial infrastructures of knowledge and an invitation to help remake them. This challenge is central to our work as anthropologists in moving past colonial social science.