Palestine: An Intersectional & Transnational Anti-Colonial Struggle

What we try to do in this book is to convey the complexity of liberation struggles and to emphasize the need to view them as protracted struggles against systems of domination, oppression, and exploitation.

And within these struggles, there is always a potential for victory, but victories are not easy, as the Bissau-Guinean leader, Amílcar Cabral, said at some point.

Victories are not guaranteed.

Things can become much worse before they turn to the better.

But then why do we need to view events and dynamics and phenomena in the longue durée perspective? Because viewing such dynamics as only limited in a given time and in a given space may provide a skewed picture and a distorted analysis.

So we feel that it's really important to view such dynamics, however horrible they are, in the longue durée as an accumulation of experiences, lessons, and contradictions that may culminate in overthrowing systems of domination when the right conditions align at the national, regional, and international levels.

And we feel that the long struggle for Palestinian liberation is no exception to these observations.

And honestly, we're not saying anything new.

We just wanted to emphasize that fact during the genocidal times.

But then why do we need to avoid seeing things as event by event? Because if we do that, we fall into the misconceptions or the false narratives of the history started in 7th of October 2023.

Now, you forget about the broader and wider political context of more than a century of colonialism, including British colonialism, Zionist encroachment, settler colonialism, occupation, and apartheid, and you wouldn't understand why Palestinians keep their resistance, why they keep fighting for their liberation, and you don't understand why 7th of October happened in the first place.

And it's really important to see things within that broader context, which tends to be very, very long context in certain junctures.