“I come bearing an olive branch in one hand, and the freedom fighter’s gun in the other. Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand.” — Yasser Arafat, 1974

IT has been almost 50 years since the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) delivered a speech on the floor of the UN General Assembly imploring the world to end the Israeli occupation and deliver peace to all of the region’s people.

It was a different world then. Colonised peoples in Asia and Africa were being admitted into the ‘international community’ after centuries of enslavement. The same UN in which Arafat made his plea also featured emergent Third World countries calling for a New International Economic Order to undo what Ghana’s first president Kwame Nkrumah called economic neo-colonialism.

Until the early 1990s, the oppressed peoples of the world were still relatively unified and hopeful. In 1994, South Africa’s brutal apartheid regime was tossed into the dustbin of history, Nelson Mandela — once branded a ‘terrorist’ in the ‘civilised world’ — made the leader of a new multiracial polity.

But the 1990s also marked the end of 20th-century socialism and the onset of ‘culture wars’ afflicting almost every part of the world today. Put simply, ideas of liberation and emancipation have become increasingly limited to the concerns of one’s own specific identity groups rather than the cause of all oppressed peoples.

Violence by the state can’t solve political conflict.

The Palestinians are amongst the biggest victims of this rightward shift. Today, they are subject to an ever more genocidal policy of apartheid, while the narrative of the intellectual and political mainstream is framed almost exclusively around Israeli ‘victims’ and Palestinian ‘terrorists’.

The ‘war on terror’ is a big reason for why such framing is commonplace. While such binaries have animated the logic of empires throughout history, the ‘us versus them’ story that was widely propagated after 9/11 has shaped an entire generation of people everywhere. This is the same generation that has come of age through globalised, digital networks and the entirely distinct modes of political communication and ideological contestation that such networks have ushered in.

In effect, then, many ordinary young people have become foot soldiers for the dominant narrative around ‘terrorism’. Indeed, notwithstanding the announcement made that the so-called war on terror ended in August 2021 when American troops pulled out of Afghanistan, the truth is that wars of terror led by contemporary states are endless.

The language is always the same: the scourge of terrorism will be eliminated at all costs. The forces of evil will never be allowed to overwhelm us. The rhetoric is timeless by design so as to suppress inconvenient historical truths about state terror.

What we should have learned from the ‘war on terror’ is that violence perpetrated by the state — it can be Israeli, American, Pakistani, Indian, Russian, Ukrainian, French, Saudi Arabian, Iranian, Turkish or any other contemporary nation-state — cannot solve political conflict.

In fact, what has happened due to the deadly culture wars and the relative retreat of the progressive left is the rise of hate-mongering right-wing forces that ostensibly target one another.

The prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, for instance, has more than once made clear that he prefers the continued influence of Islamist groups like Hamas than to give an inch to progressives of any stripe. The PLO has lost all the legitimacy it once had because it surrendered so many fundamental demands of the Palestinian movement.

There is an an­alogy in how many who would call themselves progressive in our part of the world were either supportive of or silent about the 20-year US occupation of Afghanistan, and ultimately this benefited the militant right wing (whether the Taliban or IS or whoever else).

Ultimately, if there is ever to be peace and justice for Palestine, and an end to the cycle of hate that engulfs all identity groups, it will require us to rejuvenate a wider, universal anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist politics.

It is the same in Pakistan — the Baloch and other ethnic peripheries, feminists and those who speak for oppressed genders, religious groups and all others who decry majoritarianism, must do so together around a left-progressive political-economic project. Crucially, they must try and win over as many who presently support majoritarian tyranny to their side.

Remember that successful national liberation projects all over Asia and Africa took decades to win over even those brown and black subjects of empires that were more loyal than the king.

The challenge for the Palestinians is to preserve their own humanity, and, indeed, that of their oppressors, and thereby transcend deadly culture wars.

The writer teaches at Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad.

Published in Dawn, October 13th, 2023