A Year of Collaborative Study

October 7, 2026 – On the third anniversary of al-Aqsa Flood, the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism announces a year-long project of study of this historic act of Palestinian resistance and its meanings and consequences for our shared worlds and struggles for liberation.

For as long as there has been colonialism, armed resistance has been an ongoing site of discussion, interrogation, and strategic calculation among colonized peoples. Consequently, the unconditional castigation of armed resistance as uniquely savage, uncivilized, or beyond the bounds of humanity and any moral calculus has become a well-worn tactic of colonial counterinsurgency. 

Those who normalize Zionism and imperialism often charge critical analyses of Israeli state violence with “terrorism.” The effect is that resistance—armed or not—is cast outside the boundaries of acceptable discourse or political theorization. This censorship is the foundation of public credibility, intellectual “reasonableness” and objectivity, and whole fields of scholarly research. It is not accidental. It is epistemologically essential to maintain the legibility of Zionism and imperialism as not only “civilized” but, also, the arbiters of “civilization.” The taboo on imagining, theorizing, and analyzing armed resistance, in other words, is purposeful, ideological counterinsurgency meant to maintain Zionist and imperial hegemony. It is a way by which, psychically and affectively, we are made to doubt ourselves, our comrades, and militants, and are made to engage in carceral discipline of ourselves and others in relation to armed resistance.

This colonization of people and ideas calls for our continued resistance.

ICSZ invites critical thinking, reading, writing, and discussion of al-Aqsa Flood in the year to come. We gather to study resistance itself, particularly Palestinian insights from before and after al-Aqsa flood, and ways that global movements have responded to and learned in tandem with Palestinian struggle during these past three years. We study Zionist and global colonial power in the context of al-Aqsa Flood, reckoning with the expanding and apparently bottomless depths of violence, and the cultures of normalized violence, that it produces.

Some questions include: what are the historical pre-conditions that culminated in the al-Aqsa Flood operation? How does al-Aqsa Flood fit into the broader history of anticolonial resistance and armed struggle across the global South? How do debates within Palestinian arenas of resistance respond to, or refuse, the pressures of Zionism? How might we historicize, interrogate, and understand the enormous ideological pressure to couch discussions of resistance in tropes of “terrorism,” moral condemnation, and the sanctification of non-violence? How does the charge of “terrorism” — and the material fear it is designed to engender — function to preclude the possibility of any and all forms of critical inquiry into militant resistance? How can and should anticolonial scholarship engage with questions from within about what resistance should look like?

Following on our study of Zionism as racism and UN Resolution 3379, this year of study of al-Aqsa Flood includes talks, gatherings, reading groups, publications, and teaching resources. ICSZ welcomes suggestions and invites your participation.

For updates and invitations to this project, join ICSZ’s announcement list and note your area of interest.