BS: You’ve noted recently that Israeli military aggression, when viewed in its longue durée, seems to have migrated from a kind of operation that aims to impress and evoke the sublime in its precision and ingenuity, to the type of genocidal operation we see at present, where the IOF effectively fears no reproach upon killing 300 people in one fell swoop in order to assassinate one resistance leader. The Zionist entity’s brute military capabilities, its internal fascisisation, and the hegemonic cover granted to it by Western elites have intensified exponentially over the lifetime of the entity. Elsewhere, you've noted that currently, while Hamas, Hezbollah, and other armed resistance factions seem to have sustained more harm than ever, they are also more energised and have gained considerable popular credibility and legitimacy as anti-colonial actors. These simultaneous movements, in addition to the scale of the current genocide, remind me of the pithy axiom by Marx which proclaims that history progresses through its bad side. But they also force us to recognise that the trajectory which colonialism attempts to enforce is constantly refuted and diverted by the colonised. 

Without asking you for a kind of teleological weather forecast, I want to ask if you are able to glean in the trajectories of all of these movements, an ascension onto a novel and qualitatively different phase—if not a higher stage—of struggle? 

AO: I feared that your question would point towards the future. The past, after all, is a more merciful landscape—yielding to our analytic impulses, offering some sense of coherence. We often insist that the past holds keys to possible futures, yet this insistence falters in the face of war. Wars, in their very essence, are enigmas, moments of rupture that tear through time’s fabric, unraveling the common sense we thought secure. In war, the fog of violence obscures not only the future but the past as well, rendering it indecipherable, untrustworthy. What was once legible becomes suddenly foreign. War defies prediction and with it, the illusion of narrative continuity. We are forced to confront the limits of our knowledge.

Second, Israel’s dependency on imperial patrons is laid bare, exposing the fragile infrastructure of its diplomatic and military power—a power sustained by an uninterrupted flow of arms, legal shielding, and political cover. This is an ideological defeat to Zionism, and its pretenses, one that will haunt Israelis even if they come out of this war triumphant. Third, Israel has deformed its own historical narrative, distorting the very mythologies it has relied on. In doing so, it reveals what we, as Palestinians, have long known: that the ground beneath their narrative has always been unstable, contingent, and subject to collapse, and to be brute about it, built on a complex hotpodge of lies.  What remains for Israel is the ability to inflict pain, to confuse power with force. I think these three truths will remain pertinent despite the outcomes of the war. 

As for the resistance movements—most of which were forged nearly four decades ago—one truth now crystallises after a year of war. These resistances, while perhaps unable to deliver a decisive “blow” to Israel, have shown something far more profound: they are, in a very real sense, “impossible to defeat.” What we are witnessing is not merely military endurance but an irreducible resilience—a resilience that persists, almost defiantly, in the face of the harshest and most punishing conditions. Their ability to endure, to exhibit what can only be described as an inexhaustible will to resist, speaks to a continuity that transcends mere tactical skirmishes and short-term victories. These resistance movements, forged from the lessons of past experiments like the PLO, have emerged with a dialectical relationship to history. They have learned from, and corrected, the mistakes of their predecessors. In doing so, they have recognized two fundamental truths: first, the armed "element" of resistance must be taken seriously, cultivated through the development of appropriate organisational forms, technologies and ideological consistency. Having said this, as they struggle to survive, to prolong their existence, and to shape the conditions for an end to the war that does not simultaneously mark their own, the central and perhaps most daunting struggle they face is the struggle to endure. It is not simply about outlasting the enemy, but about outlasting the very forces that threaten to undo them from within and without—the exhaustion of resources, the attrition of morale, the inevitable fragmentation that accompanies prolonged war, among various other problematics they will have to deal with. In this sense, an enduring capacity of resistance will operate to synthesise these new lessons, to assess and evaluate failures and success, propelling new energies and perhaps shifts that retain the necessity of resistance, but materialise in new novel forms, organisational modalities and perhaps more technologies. 

In many ways, Israel is yearning for a war that brings an end to the duel—a war that breaks the cycle of tit-for-tat, the dialectic of escalation, of lessons learned and counter-learned. For Israel, this is the very meaning of “total victory,” as its leaders so often proclaim. It is not merely about defeating an enemy on the battlefield but extinguishing the conditions for any future contestation, erasing the very dialectic that sustains resistance. To proclaim "total victory" is, after all, to imagine a horizon where there is no longer an "other," no longer the persistent return of the adversary, no longer the necessity to contend with an unresolved history. Yet, in this quest for a final resolution, one might ask: Can a victory be total when it is predicated on the silencing of the very forces that gave rise to it? Or does such a victory, in its attempt to end the dialectic, only intensify it?

I suspect the answer will be in its intensification. 

BS: The Palestinian writer and poet Abdul-Rahim Al-Shaikh suggests an interesting historiographic heuristic and analogy to describe the period of time stretching from the signing of the Oslo Accords and into our present moment. Al-Shaikh writes of a “Palestinian years of lead,” echoing similarly named periods of time in Morocco, Italy, and other contexts (both post-colonial and in the imperial core) marked by severe state repression following moments of heightened protest or right after liberation from direct colonial rule. The Palestinian case is of course exceptional in that the formation of the State of Palestine did not even achieve formal emancipation by ending colonial rule and marking a transition to indirect forms of neo-colonialism, but rather merely delegated counter-revolutionary policing to the Palestinians themselves in certain areas of the West Bank while continuing to defile any presumed territorial integrity and contiguity of the presumed State. If we were to adopt this heuristic of the “years of lead,” what might we say is starting to replace it? Are there historical analogies from other colonial contexts perhaps that may prove enlightening in this long upcoming moment since the start of the genocide? 

AO: I am pleased, first of all, that you have integrated the thought of Abdal Rahim al-Shaikh—one of my teachers and a profound influence—into this discussion. By invoking his notion of the "years of lead" or "years of bullets," you have provided a crucial inroad for conceptualiding the Palestinian condition in the post-Oslo epoch. Al-Shaikh’s historiographic lens allows us to trace the contours of an era marked not by a purported promise to end colonialism, but by its mutation into new forms of repression, mediated through Palestinian hands. This metaphor of the “years of lead” does not just capture the violence inflicted from without, but the tragic internalisation of counter-revolutionary forces within Palestinian society itself.

I would perhaps qualify this slightly by pointing out the glaringly obvious: even the promise of a state was, in many ways, a feeble one. It was never truly a promise of liberation for Palestinians, but rather an offering of a more sizable chunk of land that, even then, would remain subservient to Israeli dominion and control. The illusion of statehood, crafted within the frameworks of Oslo, was less about self-determination and more about the continuation of occupation through different means—territorial management disguised as sovereignty, population control wrested to Palestinian hands but with strict oversight of a complex military apparatus. In this light, the “years of lead” become not just a metaphor for violence but a symbol of the deferred and compromised aspirations of a people still bound by colonial chains, now with the trappings of statehood as their fetters.

What is perhaps truly unique in Palestine, compared to other colonial contexts, is the visibility of this contradiction. While we speak of neocolonialism in structural terms, in Palestine it remains visibly clear.

At times, it is even wrested from the hands of protesters by Palestinian security agents in our small square, Al-Manra. This is the dual violence we endure: the colonisation of our land and the internalisation of its mechanisms, a process of internalisation that also materialised in the build-up of the Palestinian Authority and its security apparatus. 

What I would perhaps distinguish from other contexts where the term “years of lead” was used—whether in Morocco, Italy, or elsewhere—is that, in the Palestinian case, the conceptualisation is inseparable from the ongoing material presence of colonialism. Despite the existence of intra-Palestinian struggles, civil conflict, the internalisation of repression, the replication of colonial relations, and the role of bourgeois classes—factors that mirror the post-colonial dynamics of other contexts—the term here is belied by the undeniable, proximate reality of settler-colonialism. It is not just a metaphor for repression or internal fragmentation, but also a recognition that the colonial apparatus remains palpably near.

This proximity provisioned Palestinians a unique mechanism: their internal struggles and infighting, while painful and destabilising, have always had a direction, a point of convergence—the colonial structure itself. In this way, the nearness of the coloniser forces a redirection of energies, grounding these conflicts in a material struggle against colonial occupation. This dynamic was starkly evident in the eruption of the Second Intifada, where internal friction, often marked by competition and lack of coordination, mutated into an open confrontation with Zionist settler-colonialism. The struggle against colonialism provided a unifying force, even as elements of in-fighting persisted. In the Intifada unfolding, we see how the presence of the coloniser acts as both a catalyst and a condition for the transformation of internal conflict into broader resistance, without ever fully erasing the fractures within.

Palestinians have never embarked on the transition from colonial to post-colonial; they remain suspended in an unresolved in-between, trapped in a liminal state. On one hand, they exhibit the malaise of post-colonial state-making—the fractured institutions, the internal divisions, the bureaucratic entanglements of a people seemingly on the verge of sovereignty. Yet, on the other hand, they continue to live under the relentless, violent condition of settler-colonialism, with its unceasing drive to eliminate the native. This double bind creates a paradox in which Palestinians are forced to navigate the unfinished remnants of a failed decolonisation, all while enduring the ongoing processes of colonisation that have never ceased. It is a condition that is neither fully colonial nor post-colonial, but one in which the very terms of existence are continually shaped by the colonial logic of elimination, even as the trappings of statehood are dangled before them.

BS: The Tufan al-Aqsa, as a collective exercise of the oppressed’s agency, and the genocide in response to it, have determined radically new (worse or better) conditions for thought and political praxis. To use theory terms, we may say that in its novelty and rupture, October 7th perhaps constitutes what Ernst Bloch may have referred to as a novum, or what Badiou may refer to as an Event. Of course, this is not to imply that anti-colonial struggle is at all readily legible to theorists working academically in the dialectical tradition or in Critical Theory, as evidenced recently by the shameful political and moral failure of Jurgen Habermas in his a priori condemnation of the resistance and his fiat refusal to think of the atrocities committed by Israel as a genocide. 

But these inherent shortcomings in the tradition of course do not begin with Habermas. As a passing example, we may return to Horkheimer’s foundational text Traditional and Critical Theory, where he writes that the intellectual, when looking onto the social totality, sees in it two faces. The first face is one where the intellectual recognises the world as “their own,” conceiving it as “will and reason.” The second face is one where the intellectual sees the totality as “not their own,” understanding it as similar to an unconscious natural mechanism, not driven by any “unified, self-conscious, will.” 

We might challenge the descriptions of both “faces” from the standpoint of the colonised, first by asking: does the Palestinian, or the colonised, ever fully identify themselves with the totality—or, does the Palestinian ever witness the world as their own? Echoing Kanafani, we would insist that the overwhelming sentiment or perception is that the world is “not ours.” On the other face, when the colonised understands the world as not their own, they view it as the opposite of a natural mechanism, and very much as the result of a “unified, self-conscious will”—that of the (Zionist) coloniser. 

In light of all of this, and without overly inflating the role of the intellectual in the current moment, how can we as thinkers and writers remain loyal to the resistance practiced daily by Palestinians, before and after and on October 7? How can thought be not only “critical” but also agential, aiding and furthering the work of resistance? 

AO: I must confess something to you, Bassem. There are moments when I feel that, in engaging with what passes as “critical theory”—with its abstractions of the "world," the "Event," the "novum"—I am somehow betraying an authentic sense of self. These grand philosophical systems, despite their universalist claims or radical intentions, often seem to obscure more than they reveal. One could accuse many of the writers behind these works of a profound failure in their encounter with Palestine. This failure is evident not only in their silence or outright opposition to the Palestinian struggle, but also in their inability to think beyond the issuance of moral condemnations and adjudications. But I believe the failure runs deeper—it is a failure to imagine the possibility of liberation, not only for Palestinians, but for the world itself.

This tells me that, for many in this domain, the idea of radical change remains an abstract exercise, a rhetorical gesture rather than a real, lived commitment. There is something deeply unsettling about this tendency. It suggests that for these thinkers, the practices of liberation are more theoretical than urgent, a kind of intellectual performance divorced from the stakes of life and death. Perhaps this is the malaise of leftist and critical thinking in the West, a thinking that shadows the empire itself and acts more like a ‘punishing superego”, merely as a way to gesture the existence of some moral compass, while exerting some influence on the empire. From the moment the Event, if we want to take Badiou’s articulation of an expected rupture as a marker through which to think October 7th, emerged it was apparent that the initial reaction to the Event was one of “moral adjudication”. 

While morality is, of course, central, what many of these thinkers and philosophers have perhaps neglected is the political: what does this Event mean for the world? Does it signal, or even gesture toward, a radical possibility of reconfiguring the relations between the West and the Middle East? More profoundly, does it hold the potential to unmask, to reveal, to uncover truths—not just about Palestine, that distant and seemingly faraway place, but about the very nature and character of Western institutions? The media, the political system, the lobbies, the academy—do they not all stand exposed at this moment, laid bare in ways that their own frameworks of discourse cannot contain, let alone explain?

These are the questions that remain unanswered—or perhaps they are answered, in a sense, by the vast majority who insist on viewing Palestinians as morally profane subjects, guilty simply for daring to challenge the conditions of their oppression. The act of resistance, rather than being recognised for its political and existential stakes, is recast as an affront, a transgression. In this reversal, the moral burden is displaced, and Palestinians are rendered culpable not for their subjugation, but for refusing to remain silent within it. To me it seems critical theorists are wedded to what Édouard Glissant would call the “the West as a Project”. This is truly why it is simply easy to stay silent, or utter shy words with many qualifications on how horrific Palestinians are, while moving on to criticising Israel. 

We must remind everyone that Palestine is not only about Palestinians. It is, fundamentally, about the kind of world we wish to inhabit, the kinds of relations we aspire to build between peoples, the kinds of universalisms that might emerge from such a struggle. Palestine is not significant merely because of land or the question of ownership; it matters because it is entangled with so many psychic, libidinal, political, religious, moral, and institutional frames of reference. It holds a mirror to the world, reflecting not only the conflict within its borders but the broader structures of power, domination, and possibility that define our time. 

I think it is precisely for this reason—alongside the traces and archives of colonial thinking, intertwined with the living memory of European atrocities during the Second World War—that Palestine resonates so profoundly that it shuts those that have long been critical. These histories are not dead; they remain alive, shaping the present and framing the ways in which the West engages with Palestine. 

Colonial legacies, Holocaust memory, and the unresolved aftermath of European violence converge here, making it impossible to isolate Palestine from the larger historical and moral burdens that continue to define our era. But what Palestine also proposes—radically, for those who subscribe to the belief that institutions, consciousness, and politics have progressively evolved—is that, in many ways, they have not. We still witness the persistent power of fascisms, of genocide, of racism, and ethno-nationalist fantasies. The hierarchies in human lives remain intact, as do the lies and their intimate cohabitation with politics. The silences—those complicit, unspoken truths—reveal much about the celebrated moral and intellectual figures of our time. And identities, still, hold sway, exerting their power over the possibility of genuine relationality and transformation, or outright positions taken by many of these theorists and thinkers. It speaks to the persistent legacy of orientalism, and the process of Othering the Other, not only among rightwing political formations and ideologies but also within the Left and the critical tradition.

Palestinians, as agents of history, as makers of their own destiny, as a people who stand on the horizon of annihilation and revulsion by the world, are perhaps the best equipped to reveal and unravel the truths that others have long obscured. In their very struggle—against erasure, against the forces that seek to deny their existence—they embody the capacity to expose the violence, the lies, and the silences that structure our world. This is their radical gesture. And it is no surprise—though it remains deeply painful—that this radical gesture is met with silence, with condemnation.

BS: I have been compelled by your work on mourning in Palestine to think deeper about the salience and political meaning of martyrdom. In my own work, I have tried to show how a human rights-based framework, dominant in Western progressive and even leftist cultures, fails to understand that martyrdom, as a structure of feeling in Palestinian  society, is rooted in the concrete social relations of the colonial context. I think that there is still much more to be said about martyrdom as a universal value that is too often construed as both anachronistic and atavistic–where in fact it is both realist and hyper-contemporary, so long as we do not center the West as our starting point of analysis and so long as colonialism and imperialism continue to exist. 

AO: To speak of martyrdom is, indeed, a difficult and arduous task, especially when addressing readers who may mistakenly conflate it with a “cult of death” or with political nihilism. The concept of martyrdom carries deep, complex meanings that stand far removed from the superficial interpretations often imposed by external observers. One approach to clarifying this concept might be to highlight the existential choices Palestinians face in their everyday lives, where death is ever-present—not as an abstract notion, but as a tangible force woven into the fabric of existence.

Death manifests both in Israel’s unrelenting demand for Palestinian self-effacement, for a kind of political and national suicide, and through the pervasive violence of the necropolitical machine—a machine that arbitrarily decides who will live and who will die. In this sense, martyrdom is not simply an act of defiance or resistance, but an existential choice made in the face of a political order that demands the erasure of Palestinian existence, both physically and symbolically. Martyrdom, in this light, is a refusal to surrender to the machinery of dehumanisation and annihilation, a defiant reclamation of agency when all else is stripped away.

On another level, martyrdom is akin to the process of revelation or an unmasking of truth. In Arabic, the word Shaheed is laden with the meaning of bearing witness to injustice. It becomes, in many ways, a stand-in for truth itself. A martyr is not merely a figure of resistance but one who exposes the deeper conditions of oppression. Through their sacrifice, they reveal the authenticity of their convictions, aligning words with actions in a way that transcends mere rhetoric. Martyrdom brings together two affective registers—love and sincerity—offering a moment of profound revelation where the body, in its death, speaks a truth that resonates beyond its own finitude. It is the ultimate convergence of speech and act, where the witnessing of injustice becomes both an embodied truth and a living testament against erasure.

Here, I speak of love not as a singular condition that binds two bodies together, as in romantic or erotic forms of love. Rather, this is love as the social itself—a love that is tied to great collectivities. It is a love that transcends individual desire and enters the realm of collective struggle, a love for community, liberation, and justice. This love is expansive, enfolding the social body in a shared commitment to resistance and survival, rooted in a deep sincerity that pushes beyond the personal toward the political and the existential. 

However, it is important to note that despite the necessity of self-sacrifice for the continuation of struggle,  revelation of truths, and the exposure of contradictions and hypocrisies, the ultimate aim of martyrdom, in the collective sense, is the abolition of the very conditions that require it.

While this might appear self-contradictory, this is the true struggle of Palestinian martyrs, to  efface the need of becoming a  martyr. 

This is also the hope today—the radical hope for the region, and for Palestine—that a new order may emerge, one that no longer necessitates such choices, where the need for martyrdom is no longer the tragic reality. Until that day, however, resistance and the sacrifices of martyrs will remain a defining feature of our world.