We live in a world where crisis is here and now for some but elsewhere and not yet for others. Diasporic reality lives somewhere in between, suspended in a state of mourning and a state of survivor’s guilt all at once. This piece grapples with what it means to inhabit these contradictions and carry histories of dispossession in a time of overlapping catastrophes.
Our homelands seem to be trapped in a loop of perpetual crisis, each feeding the next, each shaped by the last. Yet, to diagnose our homelands with chronic crisis is to recognize that, as suggested by its etymology, crisis signifies a turning point. It is laden with the potential for transformation, embodying one of the contradictions the Arab body—at least my Arab body—holds daily: fear for what’s to come and hope for what could be.
It is from this premise that the diaspora is charged with the responsibility to educate both itself and the societies into which it dis/integrates. It is a responsibility already marked by the burden of navigating a maze with endless dead ends: ensuring legal status, finding employment, affording housing, and seeking community amidst the alienation endemic to capitalism. Never mind the xenophobic paranoia fast approaching its years-in-the-making climax, manifest in campaigns for mass deportation all over the so-called free world.
This position, despite its dystopian coordinates, offers a vantage point from which we can make sense of the emergent global right and its intimate relationship to zionist expansion, while also imagining new coordinates to step into. That process will be long and tenuous, and I do not claim to hold its blueprint alone. But I am certain of one thing: it must begin with a (re)framing of our histories, our struggles, and our solidarities—not as isolated tragedies, but as interwoven terrains of resistance.
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For over 14 months, we bore witness to one of the most brutal genocides in modern history. Yet the genocide in Gaza is but the latest iteration in a long history of settler-colonial violence, which should not feel unfamiliar to those of us here on Turtle Island1, where I have found refuge. For centuries here, Indigenous peoples have been dispossessed to make way for the roads and rails, mines and pipelines, cities and farmlands, the collection of which is so cleverly named civilization. For those of us who refuse to be sedated and distracted by the spectacle of civilization, who refuse the comforts of complicity, we see the parallels between Indigenous struggles everywhere on this planet, while of course, respecting and learning from their differences.
Carrying this truth across borders transforms the diaspora from a body in exile to a body in struggle and solidarity. We learn to build spaces of warmth and togetherness wherever we are, to find each other, and to tell the truth even when it is costly. For silence is even costlier—not only because it betrays Palestine, but also because it undermines every effort against fascism globally. When our labor becomes a currency pegged to blood, fueling the insatiable monster that is the military-industrial complex, it becomes our responsibility to fight back.
As I write this, Palestinians in Gaza returning to their destroyed homes face a mounting threat of mass displacement. Biden paved Gaza with rubble, and now Trump, ever the real estate tycoon, wants to flip it into a luxury colonial outpost where occupation meets oceanfront property. Meanwhile, the West Bank endures relentless military operations, intensifying raids and creating new waves of mass displacement and murder. While in Lebanon and Syria, continued strikes and occupation have served as constant reminders that our sovereignties are conditioned by Israel’s wills and desires.
Yet Israel’s war on Palestine does not end at its borders. The technologies of domination perfected in Gaza and the West Bank have long contributed to a global infrastructure of repression. The EU uses Israeli Heron drones—battle-tested in Gaza—to militarize its borders and track refugees in the Mediterranean, turning tools of occupation into instruments of racialized policing. Italy has deployed Paragon spyware to surveil journalists and migrant activists, while Morocco has used Pegasus to target dissidents, crushing political opposition. In Serbia, Cellebrite has been leveraged to unlock and monitor the phones of journalists and activists, tightening the grip of state repression. The examples are far too numerous. The takeaway is that tools of occupation perfected on Palestinians are repurposed by states everywhere, normalizing a future where mass surveillance, militarized borders, and digital repression are the default. That is why “Globalize the Intifada” is not merely a poetic call, but rather a response to the very globalized form of apartheid and domination that zionism pioneers.
Since October 7, 2023, the so-called free world has witnessed a sharp resurgence of McCarthyist repression, particularly in response to the global Palestine solidarity movement. Universities have cracked down on student activists, workers have been fired for expressing support for Palestine, and even calls for a ceasefire (the bare minimum) were smeared as extremist. This climate of fear and censorship is not new; it mirrors the long history of silencing anti-colonial struggles, from the criminalization of Black and Indigenous resistance in North America to the persecution of those who challenged US imperialism from Vietnam to Nicaragua and to Iraq and beyond. The silencing, smearing, and outright disenfranchisement of those who dare speak out against Israel reflects how deeply Western states echo Netanyahu’s claim that Israel’s war is “a battle of civilization against barbarism.” It is a testament to the enduring colonial project of constructing civilization with barbarian bones; the colonial present persists, from the lands where I was born and raised to the lands where I now seek refuge.
What we confront is a capitalist world-system in which dehumanization and dispossession are the background conditions of possibility, in which institutions designed to uphold justice are undermined, and in which political education is subdued by cultural hegemony. We must safeguard our histories and narratives from those who seek to distort them for their own ends, and for this, we must also confront the contradictions within our own political spaces, where resistance is sometimes co-opted into new forms of domination. I refer to those who have monopolized anti-imperialism and morphed it into an agenda so rigid that to challenge it could cost a life2.
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The past few months have brought a mix of emotions that have thrown many of us in the diaspora for a loop: we look to the reconstruction of Syria and political economic transformation of Lebanon as fragile possibilities; yet, without a free Palestine what do these possibilities point to? Israel’s weaponization of sectarian divide in both Lebanon and Syria is case in point. Time and again we have learned that our sovereignties are conditional. The choice is clear: normalize or die.
Normalization is not simply an agreement between states—it is the ideological submission to a world order that renders our histories, struggles, and futures disposable. What is being truly normalized is a fascist, expansionist entity whose very existence depends on the exclusion and expulsion of a people with whom we share not only language and culture, religion and history, but also and more importantly a universal desire to live in dignity and community. To normalize is to abandon Palestinians and adopt the very logic that has long justified their ethnic cleansing. To normalize is to inscribe our institutions and social relations deeper into the global circuits of capital. But history is not a closed script; if the present is shaped by imperial mandates, it is also a site where ruptures become possible.
In this moment of crisis, I take inspiration from Walter Benjamin’s conception of Jetztzeit—the rupturing of linear time’s illusion of progress—to expose modern civilization for what it truly is: a document of barbarism3. To break from the catastrophe disguised as continuity, we must seize the present as a site of interruption, where the past’s unredeemed struggles can be reactivated, and history wrenched from those who wield it to justify domination. This demands the consolidation of struggles—both in our homelands and across the diaspora—into a movement committed to subverting settler-colonial and capitalist logics everywhere. It means foregrounding the epistemologies of the South everywhere, the very ways of knowing that colonialism has sought, and still seeks, to erase. This new phase of US empire, coupled with zionism’s unabashed desire to perpetuate expansion, calls for a new phase of resistance.
In doing so, we must keep in mind that it is only by holding all forms of oppression accountable—from Israeli apartheid to homegrown tyranny—that we can begin to imagine a politics grounded in genuine liberation, solidarity, and justice. Liberation cannot hinge on selective outrage. It cannot be dictated by partisan allegiances. It must be rooted in an uncompromising commitment to collective freedom. This means rejecting binaries, refusing opportunistic alliances, and imagining a justice that transcends borders, sects, and silos.
- Anti-colonial term used by several Indigenous peoples to refer particularly to North America. ↩︎
- I am referring to the Mahdi Amels and Samir Kassirs of our homelands. ↩︎
- Read here Walter Benjamin’s beautiful essay, Theses on the Philosophy of History (1940) ↩︎
