Preface

Editorial Collective

These essays were collated over the course of the past year, prior to the U.S.-Israeli attacks on Iran and Lebanon, which began on February 28, 2026. We publish this cluster on Palestinian Land Day, March 30, 2026, to honor the history, presence, and resonance of anti-colonial struggles and resistance in Palestine, the SWANA region, and across the world. We honor the fighters, martyrs, rebels, and laborers for liberation, decolonization, and justice.

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Thawra ثورة  is the affiliated blog of the Journal for the Critical Study of Zionism (JCSZ) and a platform for political and intellectual interventions that resist and undermine the “compulsory Zionism” of mainstream media and academic publishing.¹ Ummayah Cable writes that “in the contemporary context of the United States, compulsory Zionism manifests as a hegemonic discourse—the unwavering support for Israel and unwillingness to critique Zionism that have dominated U.S. culture and politics for decades.” Further, compulsory Zionism is a “racial project” that renders “Palestinian existence invisible and impossible.” Mandating that Zionism as a movement and political project be immune to criticism or interrogation, compulsory Zionism is a discursive project that manufactures material reality, while simultaneously “displacing actual Palestinians from the field of their own representation.”

Thawra (ثورة), meaning “revolution,” draws on a long tradition within Arab–Islamic civilization—one that is deeply embedded in its literature, historical memory, political practices, and episodes of rebellion over centuries. This tradition is closely connected to an ethical dimension within Islamic thought that encourages resistance against oppression and injustice. Since the late nineteenth century, thawra has also come to signify a series of anti-colonial Arab revolutions that unfolded in multiple waves across the region—from North Africa to al-Sham and the Arabian Peninsula. In this sense, the Arab world became a landscape of thawra, marked by recurring uprisings against colonial regimes and imperial powers.

Critical Zionism Studies is an intervention into and active refusal of compulsory Zionism. It is thus not accidental that we have named our blog Thawra ثورة  which, in Arabic, means “revolution.” Rather than simply offering a translation of the term, the blog launches with a collection of writings by four Palestinian thinkers—scholars, artists, and organizers—who responded to our invitation to consider the meaning and significance of thawra to Critical Zionism Studies and Palestinian liberation. This cluster of writing provides a model for future Thawra ثورة publications that will stage productive, timely, and relevant interventions in Critical Zionism Studies without, however, attempting to provide a comprehensive programme or account of revolution.

This inaugural cluster of blog posts insists on the urgency of thawra at the present moment, during which the genocide in Gaza and the extreme violence being meted out against the entire Palestinian population are not only unfolding in real time but being justified, normalized, and publicly ignored or denied within institutions of international law, media, and academia. Globally, we are witnessing worsening genocides, ascendant fascism, and imperial brutality at every corner. We are also witnessing collective mobilizations and resistance to this violence everywhere: from Gaza to Minneapolis, from labor unions to university campuses, and across the globe in various forms that are growing and persisting in their refusals. 

A constellation of terminology attaches to our invocation of thawra, including notions like muqawama مقاومة (resistance) and intifada انتفاضة (uprising). In Palestine’s revolutionary history, thawra is a form of prolonged muqawama that oscillates between grand acts of defiance marking primary junctures, and everyday acts of refusing colonization, affirming life, and asserting practices of care, love, and community. Intifada, in its literal definition as a visceral reaction to an external force, dictates this trajectory and accentuates its key moments. In its immediacy and inevitability, that is, intifada illuminates a continuous return to revolution as the only and most credible response to colonial violence. By naming this blog Thawra ثورة, we are inspired by the term’s multiple meanings and complex genealogy, both of which demand that we study it, contribute to it, and honor it through our own material and scholarly practices toward liberation.

The first cluster of blog posts are united by anti-Zionist commitments, enabling them to build upon and expand ICSZ’s points of unity and JCSZ’s mission. Nida Liftawiya’s poetic essay centers revolutionary love as a material practice that sustains resistance and life itself. “My mother would give us pots of food to hide on street corners for freedom fighters—this was an act of revolutionary love,” she writes. Love is not an alternative to struggle; it is one of its infrastructures. Liftawiya’s account, collapsing the false divide between love and resistance, resonates with revolutionary writer Walid Daqqa’s words from prison, where he spent thirty-eight years until his death in 2024 from medical neglect. In 2005, after two decades in prison, in one of his most famous letters, Daqqa wrote: “I confess that I am still a person holding on to love as if it were embers. I will remain steadfast in this love. I will continue to love you, for love is my humble and only victory over my jailer.” Love, here, is not a consolation—it is a refusal. 

Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish offers yet another vision of love. In one of his later interviews, he reflects on how love within the Palestinian family often appears in subtle and quiet gestures. He recalled that when he was imprisoned in the early 1960s under Israeli military rule, his mother would prepare food for him and send it to the prison. It was in those moments that he fully realized the depth of her love. Darwish used this memory to suggest that, in the Palestinian context, love is rarely expressed directly; rather, it is conveyed through small, often hidden acts of care that are neither explicit nor intentionally demonstrative.² The same love emerges in Palestinian feminist writings, in the embraces of freed prisoners, in the everyday resistance of parents and children, and in the acts and chants of loving solidarity across the world. Against propagandist and corruptive forces that have wanted to paint Palestinians and those who love Palestine as unhuman, hateful, and rejectful of life, asserting love as revolutionary matters immensely. 

This is where Eman Ghanayem proposes sacrifice as an anchoring principle for revolutions and movement-building, emanating equally from land-oriented love and direct acts of resistance. In contexts of extreme oppression, like the one where Palestinians are dispossessed from their homes, families, and the right to live and live freely, sacrifice is the expression of dignified muqawama in the afterlife of loss. Sacrifice is a loud demand and an embodiment of self-preservation and self-determination. The path to Palestinian liberation has been paved by those who have lost so much, and so many, yet who remain steadfast in their fight for freedom and their people’s survival. Sacrifice counters colonialism’s possessive impulse, eradicating selfish individualism and putting into question capitalism’s creations of comfort and abiding silence in the face of atrocity. As Ghanayem puts it, “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.” Sacrifice, as a promise we must make to fight for what matters, must be the refrain of all revolutions—like love, it is a decolonial commitment and, and in the words of psychologist Lara Sheehi, an essential act of “hopeful militancy.”³

Thawra ثورة , as Jennifer Mogannam proposes, “is an ongoing process… More and other than a slogan, ثورة حتى النصر thawra hatta al-nasr is a proposition. It is a way of moving in the world knowing that the struggle for liberation persists. It is a call to concerted action for Palestinian freedom. And it is a way of revolutionary becoming, persistent and always in motion.” Mogannam’s theorization recalls the militant documentary film, We Are the Palestinian People: Revolution Until Victory (Newsreel, US, 1973), produced by Third World liberationist filmmakers who sought to challenge the silence on Palestine within most U.S. left filmmaking circles. The film’s common subtitle adopts her exact proposition, for which thawra is an ongoing process from whose iterations we may continuously learn. 

Revolution requires movement-building, but it also requires conceptual clarity: shared vocabularies, political education, and resistance to the dilution of the meaning. As Mogannam cautions, “we must also resist the cooptation of the term ‘revolution’ that serves to de-radicalize its power in the face of the rise of identity politics as a political platform, wherein the growing challenge of individualism and superstardom is further compounded by new media, facilitating the commodification of revolutionary symbols and slogans.” Thawra ثورة intervenes precisely against this hollowing out, insisting on revolution as collective process rather than consumable identity.

Last but not least, Nimer Sultany’s encyclopedia entry on revolution offers a critical intellectual history of the concept itself. Regardless of its origins, Sultany reminds us that revolution is fundamentally animated by a belief in human agency—“revolutionaries celebrate human agency in making history and consider persons as conscious actors who seek to transform their conditions and control their destiny”—and that revolutions “carry an emancipatory potential because they aspire to create the conditions that would enable human flourishing.” While the intellectual history of revolution is itself comprised of colonial assumptions regarding which people and places are capable of “real” revolution, Sultany’s critical discussion makes clear that “revolution” is not and has never been the province of imperial powers. His historical and theoretical survey of “revolution” reveals the politics of intellectual history itself, and the revolutionary praxis that centers the theories, narratives, and articulations of thawra offered by the alleged “periphery.” This is one aspiration of this inaugural cluster of texts on thawra. By collating a group of Palestinian writings on revolution, we hope to undertake an intellectual and historiographical practice of thawra itself. 

Taken together, these four pieces propose thawra as an invitation and intervention, a praxis and a commitment. We observe thawra as rising consciousness, particularly with respect to its multifaceted and global nature, in ongoing conversations ⁴ We are especially inspired by the reverberations of thawra across student-led movements on U.S. campuses and around the world—to be featured in future posts. These movements and discourses are part and parcel of thawra in their resistance to and disruption of compulsory Zionism. The reactionary repression with which they have been met is evidence of just how powerful an institution compulsory Zionism is and how much ideological and material force is required to sustain it. Critical Zionism Studies, therefore, offers a template for one part of revolutionary struggle and its practice is, quite literally, praxis in solidarity with Palestine, Palestinians, and the anti-fascist and anti-genocide protests reverberating around the world.