Palestine in a World of Struggle with Wael Omar

[gentle music] Wael, your essay opens with a scene from a documentary in which Mahmoud Darwish, the Palestinian poet, is being asked by an Israeli journalist how Palestinians have entered the world's consciousness.

What's your answer to that question, and how does the history of the Palestinian struggle for liberation illuminate this?

To start with, I chose to open with the scene because it was circulating a lot since the genocide began on, like, uh, social media platforms, and there's something about the circulation in itself that tells us something about the present.

So for the listeners who haven't watched the video, um, or the clip from the documentary, um, Darwish says something very sharp and true, "Palestinians," or partially true, "Palestinians are famous because of who their enemy is, Israel." And so, like, the world cares more about Israel, and by extension, the Jewish question, than it cares about Palestinians.

So in a way, Israel becomes in this ironic phrase, um, that, uh, um, the interviewer, uh, says, almost like the public relations ministry for Palestinians.

And as uncomfortable I felt while watching the video, there's a lot of truth in that, and Palestine's entry into the world's consciousness cannot be separated from Israel's position, um, in the imperial world.

But also, there are, like, other dimensions like the re- religious and historical weight attached to Palestine itself.

But the question of Israel is not secondary.

Um, it is part of the structure through which Palestine comes to occupy such a large place in world politics.

But the reason, the reason I begin with Darwish is also because his answer, or the answer someone might arrive to just from that scene, um, would feel incomplete.

It risks leaving us with a picture in which Palestinians enter the world's consciousness mainly through their enemy or through sympathy from those more proximate to power, and that is precisely what I was trying to complicate in the paper or in the essay.

Darwish refuses recognition on terms set elsewhere.

He insists on the right of the vanquished or the colonized to narrate themselves.

And through that, I push kind of the interaction between him and Lerner further to question not only whether Palestinians can enter an already constituted world, um, on their own terms, but it is whether Palestinians have also acted as one of the forces that shape the world.

So my answer to that [laughs] long introduction is that Palestine entered the world's consciousness through structure, but also through self-activity.

Israel's position matters, empire matters, religion matter, history matters, but they do not explain everything on their own, and the missing piece here is Palestinian political labor.

The work of, uh, students, workers, fedayeen, the intellectuals of the PLO who made the struggle travel.

They built institutions, cultivated alliances, built relationships, really, entered revolutionary infrastructures, and turned internationalism into a historically produced field of political practice.

But, like, and this is something I was asked about when, uh, a few people read the paper, this is not a question of representation or just making Palestinian labor appear in the historical record.

Of course, that matter, but it also serves an analytical point, um, which is if we only think in terms of attention, sympathy, or circulation, we misunderstand how history moves and develops.

And I think this was the main point.

So the centrality of Palestine was not simply bestowed from outside, nor did it arise from suffering alone, but it was made through political practice, through organization, through infrastructure, through accumulation that allowed moments of mobilization to become a durable political force.

So from a broader historical view, what we are seeing today is not an a- absolute beginning.

It's a resurgence, I would say.

Palestine returns to the world's political consciousness because the question was never really settled.