Replacement and/as Resistance: On Sacrifice as Qadiyya and Thawra

    Eman Ghanayem

One will have to visualize scenes from the First Intifada to truly grasp how profound they were. It began in 1987, a few days before the turn of the year. Forty years had passed, four decades of lethal oppression, massacres, displacements, heartbreak, and annihilation. The icons of the Intifada were the children, the fourth generation of Palestine’s people whose families experienced one of the worst events in their history, the Nakba of 1948. The children who were born from the burdens of catastrophe picked up stones from the earth, covered their faces, gathered their friends and cousins, and with all the might their small bodies could muster, hurled themselves against the wind, the giants of tanks and shells facing them, and the loud uncertainty that their short lives could survive this. They were fearless.

The First Intifada encapsulates the revolutionary politics of Palestinian defiance and survival. But beyond its political and anti-colonial meaning, the event itself invokes a longer history of resistance, an extended metaphor about children and stones, and how the people and the land have always come together in symbiotic acts of refusal. Before, during, and beyond the First Intifada—and intifada itself as a signifier of historic and continuous thawra—Palestine’s children have always modeled for us the necessity of courage and the interventions of visceral resistance. At the heart of their actions is their uninhibited willingness to put their bodies on the line, just as their grandparents have done before them, to fight for what they perceive, even at their young age, as the just cause for liberation and the selflessness of collective struggle.

At the center of Palestine’s trajectory of thawra as a historical and social practice are material, psychic, and cultural acts of sacrifice. Sacrifice is a unifying principle for the Palestinian people, and it connotes a mindset, a discipline, and their singular cause. The persistent chant, with our soul, with our blood, we sacrifice for you, Palestine (bel rouh bel dam nafdiki ya falasteen), echoing across Palestinian history and populations at home and in the diaspora, represents among other verbal expressions the existential depth and cost of Palestinian aspirations. As extreme as it may sound, sacrifice, which in the Palestinian context transcends any particular creed or faction, is necessarily adopted by those who orient themselves toward Palestine and decolonization everywhere. While colonizers destroy and kill in cruel perpetuity, Palestinians arm themselves fearlessly in the face of loss and death and in the name of liberation. This is what Palestine represents and must teach us in our revolutionary acts.

David, Goliath, and Replacement Logics

In the Zionist version of the story of David and Goliath, David is a shepherd boy of humble roots who, during the “Israelites” war with the “Philistines,” defeated the giant Goliath and secured their win. A rock shot from David’s sling into the Philistine’s forehead, disarming him long enough for David to sever Goliath’s head with his own sword.² David eventually becomes the king of the Israelites, now the “victors” of the land and a self-proclaimed front under which the first Kingdom of Israel can become and rule.

The story of David and Goliath is one of the tales, or metaphors, most invoked and immortalized by contemporary Zionists. Zionist leaders and educators have commonly and continuously invoked it.³ It is meant to captivate its target audience, a settler population that demands a unifying mythology, by detailing a heroic triumph in the face of “brutality.” Its influence informs the Israeli narrative, a sort of self-fashioned, epical transformation fabulated to guarantee the realization of the Zionist “promise”: an ultimate Israeli “victory” over its purported enemies, and an “exceptional” narrative and identity that justify it.

More than a parable of Israeli victoriousness, of winning against-the-odds and fulfilling a certain grandiose political and military triumph, the story of David and Goliath through its endless repetition and deployment has subsequently become for Zionism what Choctaw writer LeAnne Howe calls “a national creation story,”⁴ a founding myth that creates and sustains a settler colony’s self-conceptualization as a modern national entity. Next to this story’s utility in mythologizing a past to propel future outcomes, it sanctifies in perpetuity the colony’s intentions and practices, including dispossession, expropriation, and genocide. In this version of the story, Palestinians, or “the Arabs”—an estranged people likened to the Philistines—are reenvisioned as transplants, invaders, and enemies: a threat that must be eliminated and overcome victoriously.

Seemingly archaic, this story and its reiteration matters greatly to contemporary Zionists and influences their actions today. Like its founding myths, Zionism is a narrative told and retold continuously, oftentimes blurring the lines between politics and the imagination, history and mythology, among other corruptions wrought by the prejudiced entitlement of the “nation-state.” In other words, the story serves a purpose, and it entirely relies on mastering  a narrative that could foreclose Israel’s paradoxical actualization of itself—like how it can be an “underdog” like David while simultaneously being an aggressive war machine that could never need, nor has ever needed, to use the humble stone or the wooden sling.

In ironic contrast, time and history have proved that it was eventually the Palestinians who resorted to stones and similar means in their attempt to withstand the devastating encroachment of colonizing forces on their lands and communities. If Goliath represents a mammoth-like injustice or cruelty akin to today’s tanks and bulldozers, and the gunfire, drones, and missiles ploughing through crowds and homes with careful imprecision, then that story aptly describes Zionism in its intent and actions. 

There are replacement logics at work here. The inversion of power and positionality characterizing the Goliath story confirms and exemplifies the major argument, in settler-colonial studies and elsewhere, that “settler colonialism destroys to replace.”⁵ Replacement undoubtedly occurred through the violent process that brought about and cultivated a settler colony in Palestine, but equally, and very often, it occurs in many other forms of colonial narrativization. That the Zionists are David in their telling of the story and the Palestinians are Goliath is one instance. Zionists become the “original” people of Palestine. Palestine is renamed Israel. Yafa becomes Tel Aviv. The emptied Palestinian houses become Israeli homes, and Palestinian practices, food, and idioms become fodder for the delusive making of an “exceptional” Israeli people and culture.

Not only are these replacements material, verbal, historical, and cultural, but, more so, they indicate an instrumental switching of narratives: offense becomes defense, genocide becomes an affirmation of Jewish life, Nakba becomes Israel’s “Independence Day,” and so on. Take, for instance, what a Zionist said in a 1967 forum published in Haolam Hazeh [This World] when asked about the Palestinian population:

I believe that the national entity is above all considerations, including ethical ones. The existence of an Arab majority in [this country] is its biggest threat. If not now or in the future, certainly in the distant one. To prevent this from happening, we must commit acts without causing global uproar. We must provide a suitable cover and beautiful phrases. And if we must, we should ignore public opinion. 

We must shorten their steps, take their lands, and any Arab who obtains secondary or university education, must be denied jobs for three or four or five years, eventually losing hope and deciding to leave. We must convince the Arab not to listen to Arab radio. We must sever them from Arab culture and place them under Jewish influence.

—What happens if they decide to listen to Egyptian radio? Or if they don’t get the hint and leave? What do we do?

—They will get it, and they will leave.

—What if they reject giving up their cultural and national identity and refuse to leave?

—No, they will leave!

—Be honest and say it plainly: we must build an Auschwitz!⁶

Discussing replacement as a logic does not justify genocide, which, as this passage shows, has always been a process that accompanied the Zionist project for statehood much after and well before these remarks were made. Terming it as such, however, indicates a patterned narrativization, behavior, and unraveling that should prompt us always to read these moments as inversions. Whatever Zionism claims must be deconstructed and recognized for its oppositional incongruence with the real equation: Zionism is and always has been a settler colonial project. The biggest harm in replacement logic’s paradigmatic switching is, as such, its fracturing and corrupting of Palestinian stories and perspectives in order to justify violence ideologically, whereupon the substance of the original narrative—like the story of a child defeating tyranny with a stone—and the essence that makes it meaningful, and often beautiful, is lost. 

Fida’, Qadiyya, and the Sun

Perhaps ironically, in view of settler colonialism’s relation to replacement as a foundational trait, the term reverberates, though much differently, in the Arabic word for sacrifice: fida’. In its Arabic definition, to sacrifice means to replace something lost with something similar in your possession. The lost something could be a stolen item, a material lack or gap in a basic human need, or life itself. To sacrifice yourself for another means to give up your life for a life that was stolen. You sacrifice your home for someone else who needs one, your money for someone who lacks any, and your time for someone whose struggle has deprived them of all things, including pause and breath. It is no wonder, then, that when the Palestinians rebelled against their Zionist oppressors during the 1960s, they called themselves fedayeen, the subjects who give sacrifice.⁷ They emerged from humble roots and rural backgrounds, refashioning their keffiyehs, which had previously been used to soak the sweat from their skin when working the fields, into sheltering masks to hide their identities once they became fighters. They were givers of sacrifice, including their veil of anonymity and their choice of namelessness.

In his 1968 book, Palestinian Resistance Literature under Occupation, the renowned revolutionary Ghassan Kanafani foregrounded resistance as the definitive response to Zionism, which proclaimed itself an ethnonationalist project steering in the direction of reproducing another Auschwitz. The term resistance literature, which later came into popular usage outside of Palestine, was originally Kanafani’s coinage and one of his primary and lasting legacies. As a writer and critic, an exile and rebel, and a leading member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) before his assassination in 1972, Kanafani encapsulated an articulate stance and a material enactment of the “Palestinian Cause,” or Qadiyya, which he repeatedly described as at once grassroots and rooted—and as natural, popular, and only effective through anti-colonial means. In his words: “If liberation streams from the mouth of the barrel, then the barrel itself streams from the will to liberate, and this will is not but the natural, logical, and definite outcome of resistance in its general meaning: resistance through refusal, and at the level of hanging on fiercely to the roots and to the stance.”⁸

The poignancy of resistance as refusal, akin to barrels and roots, appears most creatively in Kanafani’s literary writings as they literarily portrayed the interlocking of qadiyya and fida’ and warned against the dangers of inversions. The best example is Kanafani’s well-known 1962 novella Men in the Sun. In the story, three Palestinian refugees in Iraq who wish to pursue livable conditions in Kuwait. Each of the men has a backstory and an economic or family situation that prohibits him from securing a safe migration—until all three, serendipitously, find a man who is willing to smuggle them across the border for the lowest price possible. They agree to hide in the empty water tank he is transporting with his truck until he reaches Kuwait. Due to the blasting heat, the driver makes a few stops along the way so that they may all cool off and take a break. But eventually, and tragically, when they reach the Iraqi-Kuwaiti border, the driver keeps them in the tank for too long, and upon finally opening it, finds all three of them dead. “Why didn’t you knock on the sides of the tank?”—he exclaims at no one as he abandons their bodies and resumes his drive, and there the story ends.

Kanafani artfully crafted this story, with great apprehension and anticipation, delicate but sharp imagery, and a gripping irony that sheltered much of his own opinion on the unfolding of its events. One could say, then, that it is quite telling to find in later documentation that Men in the Sun was inspired by true stories Kanafani had learned at the time about Palestinian men who immigrated to Kuwait for better lives—except, in the real stories, the men did not tragically die. Kanafani chose death for these men as the story’s conclusion, a choice reflective of his philosophy, root and stance, on matters related to Palestinian resistance.

In his literary worlds, in Men in the Sun and elsewhere, Kanafani portrayed departures from Palestine—circumstantial as they may have been in relation to the designs of a violent colonization—as symptoms of a diasporic distancing from al-qadiyya that, in his view, inevitably leads to tragic ends such as death, isolation, and despair, among other hopeless conclusions. For Kanafani, the struggle away from Palestine has eclipsed, even betrayed, the imperative of struggle for Palestine. As severe as this position may sound, Kanafani’s writings, theories, and actions unequivocally represent a radical and popular Palestinian voice regarding the incessant need for resistance, steadfastness, and sacrifice to service Palestine’s liberation. What he deemed a betrayal in this and other contexts was any action that blocked the path back to Palestine, or moved in the opposite direction, farther away from these collective obligations to the cause.

We must ask: what sacrifices are we willing to make in pursuit of freedom, justice, and decolonization? The hundreds of thousands of Palestinians killed and displaced since 1948 gave up their lives and livelihoods—often brutally, suddenly, and against their determination for life and staying-in-place. Death was not their choice; it was the punitive outcome of colonization. Displacement was not their desire; it was a curse. Yet sacrifice remains an essential mindset, a liberatory value that rejects meaninglessness and despair. The aspiration that we give up all that we can in the service of freedom because of our love for land, life, and others beyond ourselves opens onto numerous possibilities. It has already resonated in different ways for the many laborers for justice and a Free Palestine. Many have used their bodies, words, voices, time, and might in this long fight, in the hundreds, thousands, and millions. There is continuous work, veils of anonymity, and the intrinsic faith that acts of resistance, no matter their degree, matter immensely.

Qadiyya necessitates fida’, and fida’ here is the qadiyya. The fedayeen, in their historical time and their continuum, are one epitome of the refusals that Kanafani essentialized as a visceral, and most impactful, resistance. Like uprisings and reactions to injustice, or immediately grabbing stones to break through the march of steel and gun, sacrifice is the refrain of Palestinian life. Though the original meaning of David, or Dawoud, is evidently lost to Zionists, whereupon it is continuously displaced and replaced, Palestine limns the truthfulness of this parable. David’s “victory” and the establishment of new world orders are but a footnote to his selfless courage and the infallible act of serving others. It is what severs the path of violence and defeats the behemoths of injustice.

Muqawama, Intifada, and a Visceral Resistance

Through repetition, the proof presents itself. During the First Intifada, Palestinian youth carried and threw stones at large army tanks, often resulting in their being shot dead on the spot. Historical archives are filled with images of this symbolic moment in which Palestinians from every corner of Palestine, and at many encounters, stood up against war machines seen as colonizing beasts that must be outdone. The stone, in its comparative minuteness and presence as earth itself, was for them the obvious tool. The generation born during that time was dubbed the children of the stones in honor of this historic moment, and they carried with them this time-worn practice through literal and figurative means. Decades later, activists in colonized territories, like those recently in Los Angeles, faced goliaths of their own—ICE agents, police cars, and armored officers—and they stood their ground, wearing Palestinian keffiyehs and other fabric to cover their faces, throwing rocks with all their strength to make their refusals loud and known. And yet again, the colonial state has continued, in all these instances, to proclaim itself the hero and victim of the tale. It is nonetheless remarkable how these symbols of thawra have reverberated and traveled, or, more accurately, have persisted in manifesting as a cyclical revolution.

In Kanafani’s writings, reflective as they often were of sha’bi (i.e. popular) perspectives, resistance, or muqawama, is both material and figurative, and its politicization against its nature as visceral and human obscures how many of us can resist, should resist, and have resisted. Muqawama, qadiyya, and fida’ are the primary iterations of thawra and its refusals: refusing colonialism and defying oppression for the purpose of maintaining dignity and rejecting all cowardly acceptance. The sun that defines this compass is that of liberation, a cause that many who emerged from colonial settings have insisted is the only resolution to the cruelty of the colonizers. Though revolutions may multiply and erupt in all places and along every timeline, they must remain revolutionary in their intention. The most revolutionary intention is the will to sacrifice one’s self for the sake of others, without hesitation or dilution of the avowed belief that life itself is both a reward and the stake in the outcome of the story. These are the but the ringing words of the stone, and of the earth that has carried it since the beginning of our time.