In the first pages of The Souls of Black Folk, W. E. B. Du Bois famously meditates on the question, “How does it feel to be a problem?”[i] This is the question white liberals think or want to ask Black people but never pose directly. Rather, they dance around it. They make sure to express their admiration for Black achievements and equally register their outrage at anti-Blackness. Obama was a courageous president. Isn’t Trump just awful? George Yancy rightly draws attention to the ontological underpinnings of the question. What is thematized as a problem is being itself. The question is not “‘How does it feel to have problems?’” but “‘How does it feel to be a problem?’”[ii] In what follows, I want to think through the ontological dimensions of the problem of racialized and racializing being, by considering Frantz Fanon’s notion of the zone of nonbeing alongside the Palestinian question, framed as a problem of ontology. Palestinian being suffers the marks of Orientalism and Zionism, with the latter harnessing the epistemic powers of the former to legitimize Israel’s settler-colonial regime. Under Western/settler eyes, Palestinians exist as a problem insofar as their presence represents a demographic threat, an existential menace to a Zionist Israel. The state of Israel—the Zionist settler solution to the Jewish problem—is at stake. I want to argue that Palestinians do exist as a problem, but in a sense other than the one dictated by the petrifying settler gaze. Problematizing the Palestinian question turns it anew into a genuine problem, a true question.[iii] This critical formulation of the Palestinian question insists on the problem’s symptomatic qualities, casting it as an invitation to reckon with the Zionist order of things.

So what does it mean to say that Palestinian being is a problem? It suggests an unfixable problem; the problem is not what Palestinians do but what Palestinians are. Doing is a mere expression of being. There is something wrong or rotten at an ontological level. Their being is lacking, fraught, not fully that of a human being; they fall outside the parameters defining humanity. On this racist account, Palestinians are ontologically degraded, depleted of what makes a human human. When I say “Palestinian being” it really means “Palestinian being” (I’m drawing here on the work of Afropessimists who visualize Black negation by barring key concepts such as subjectivity and being[iv]). Who is responsible for Palestinian negation? For the racist, as in Du Bois’s example, the fact of being a problem is intrinsic to Palestinianness. Edward Said points in a different direction. The origins of ontological demotion lie elsewhere; they are not found in nature or a ready-made ontology but in knowledge production, in the discursive production of otherness. Orientalism, a discipline invested in producing knowledge about the Orient, has played a significant role in the construction of Palestinian being as backward, undesirable, dangerous, and irrational. Inhospitality characterizes the Western world’s attitude toward Palestinians. “To the West,” Said writes, “to be a Palestinian is in political terms to be an outlaw of sorts, or at any rate very much an outsider.”[v] Outlaws and outsiders are by definitions problems. And I should note that Orientalism after 9/11 (which then Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon masterfully exploited, hitching Israel’s unrelenting war on Palestinians to America’s endless war on terror) has only intensified the demonization of Palestinians, turning Palestinians into a bigger problem, reducing them, in the Western cultural imaginary, to religious fanatics and bloodthirsty terrorists.

Against the backdrop of a masterful Orientalist discourse, Said’s critique is far-reaching. It invites us to revisit the question of the human. Rather than asking abstract and timeless questions about the human—what constitutes a human being? what is proper to the human? and so on—a Saidian approach politicizes and historizes the question of the human. Who is asking the question? And how is the answer produced? Said was quite attentive to the fact that identities are never forged or produced in isolation, in a historical vacuum. The fashioning of personal or collective identities is always a relational matter; it necessarily implicates the creation of others. Under an Orientalist framework, Western subjects invent themselves through their invention of the Orient—through their determination of the being of the Orient. As Said puts it, Orientalism “has less to do with the Orient than it does with ‘our’ world.”[vi] Orientalism can be here reconceptualized as a kind of libidinal disposition; it is really about “us,” about the desiring Western world, about our own culturally approved desires, wishes, fears, anxieties, insecurities, and vulnerabilities.

As a style of thinking, Orientalism is about the West’s construction of the Orient as an object of knowledge and mastery, and in this respect, always tells us more about the knower than the known. Orientalism is not so much about knowledge of the Orient, of its culture and history, but is rather, in Said’s words, “a kind of Western projection.”[vii] In making sense of the world, the West invents the East so as to better define itself, its identity, in opposition to its antagonistic Oriental other, to what it is not. Orientalism, then, describes this ideological process in which European identity is defined and elevated at the expense of non-European others—who are both defined and devalorized. The Orientalist subject narrates while the Oriental other is narrated.

To say that the Orient is an Orientalist invention is not only to question Orientalism’s epistemological accuracy, to ask, for instance, Do its knowledge claims match up with reality, the reality of Palestinian lives in Gaza? To say that Orientalism invents is also to challenge its ontological production of Others. Against Orientalism’s will to power, Said insists that the notions of the Orient and the West lack “any ontological stability.”[viii] A ruthless critique of Orientalism exposes how ontology is put in the service of racialization, turning the colonized into things that can be killed, subjugated, or tortured with impunity. This is as true for the West Bank as it is for Gaza. Consider Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz’s recent call for the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank. Writing on social media, Katz feels empowered to air his criminal and apocalyptic vision without any fear of accountability: “We need to deal with the threat exactly as we deal with terror infrastructure in Gaza, including the temporary evacuation of Palestinian civilians and any other step needed. This is a war for everything and we must win it.” In this “war for everything,” displacement and dispossession, ontocide and econocide, take front stage. Israel’s genocidal war aims at the destruction of Palestinian being and all of the socio-economic structures that sustain Palestinian existence.

Orientalism greases the wheels of Israel’s racist system, hardening the will of its nationals. It helps to normalize Katz’s aspiration of a “war for everything”—who are these Arabs wanting equality and freedom, self-determination on the land of Greater Israel? Hamas is guilty of another “breach of civilization”; they are the new Nazis and, we know, there are no innocent people in Gaza. Palestinians are a problem for the world, for humanity. It is not genocide when you’re dealing with evil.[ix] Orientalism paves the way for Israeli society’s indifference to Palestinian devastation (the large protests against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are mostly about his failures to free the hostages and prevent October 7—the Occupation and the genocide are not what’s motivating Israel’s resistance from within), for its prideful state and “moral abyss.” Israeli politicians effectively mobilized fear and hatred of Palestinians—sentiments ingrained in Zionist culture ab initio (Indigenous Palestinian bodies threaten the enjoyment of the holy land and settler Zionists’ way of life). Orientalism in its Zionist permutation, distilled to its racist core, creates and sustains an imperialist ontology, a world where Palestinian lives and Jewish lives are not equally grievable. Or to put it slightly differently, and more polemically, the grievability of Israeli Jews is predicated on the ungrievability of Palestinians. A Zionist Israel follows a colonial script. For me to count, you must not. My selection depends on your dysselection.[x]

To exist as a problem is thus to have been rendered a problem, rendered ungrievable, rendered disposable. It is to have your humanity suspended, erased, or barred. I want to linger a bit on the relation between problematization and the human. Sylvia Wynter captures well the ways in which a problem becomes racialized once the other’s humanity is put in doubt at a libidinal and cultural level. The psychological “wage of whiteness” is the psychological wage of humanity; the gratification of not being a problem.[xi] To illustrate her point, Wynter meditates on the acronym, “N.H.I.,” or “No Humans Involved,” a shorthand used mainly to designate young Black men. Following the 1992 acquittal of the police officers charged with beating Rodney King, a report on the LA Police Department’s practices observed that the police and “public officials of the judicial system of Los Angeles routinely used the acronym N.H.I. to refer to any case involving a breach of the rights of young, jobless, black males living in the inner city ghetto.”[xii] “N.H.I.” is a symptom of an anti-Black world, a world whose “classificatory schema”[xiii] normalizes and naturalizes the violence visited upon the surplus humanity of white America. NHI absolves and comforts; in declaring NHI, you earn libidinal rewards, get to enjoy both your being, because it is not barred, and the fact that being is someone else’s problem.

For Wynter, our current world operates according to the “present conception of the human being” overrepresented as “Man” (white, male, able-bodied).[xiv] Strictly speaking, under the colonial tyranny of Man, you are not born human but become one, and some never do. “Being human,” Wynter explains, “can therefore not pre-exist the cultural systems and institutional mechanisms, including the institution of knowledge, by means of which we are socialized to be human.”[xv] Humanity is ontologically written out of Black being. Overdetermined from the outside, Blackness is thingified, repelled, maligned, and rendered worldless. NHI conveys the currency of anti-Blackness, the self-evident nature of Black nonbeing.

I want to argue that the label NHI applies to Palestinians as well. The Israeli government gives its police and military carte blanche to deal “in any way they please” with those who fall under that world-cancelling classification.[xvi] We can hear an echo of this disregard for Indigenous life closer to home when corporate media report that Palestinians “are killed” or “are dead,” but Israelis are “slaughtered” or “massacred,” overrepresented as liveable/grievable and would-be victims. We hear it as well when coverage of Israeli bombings in Gaza focuses on numbers over names and stories, disputes the numbers themselves (questioning the depth and reality of the decimation inflicted on Palestinians), and omits the cause of death through an agent-less, passive voice. Consider the headline of a CNN report, “About 1 in 100 people in Gaza has been killed since October 7.” As Slavoj Žižek notes, “There is a consistent effort [on the part of mainstream media] to shape and manipulate our perception of what is going on [in Gaza], so as to limit the emotional impact. . . . These forms of ‘soft’ censorship pervade public discourse.” The passive structure directs our affective and cognitive attention; it indexes the nonhumanity of the Palestinians who are made into victims without a victimizer. They are killed, but never murdered; they are dead, but no perpetrator is in sight. Their demise needs no further inquiry; why the Israelis are committing this genocide, how they are allowed to commit the “crime of crimes,” whether there is an end to the Israelis’ “bloodlust,” falls away in this grammar.

NHI casts Blacks and Palestinians as a particular kind of problem, a problem to which human solutions strictly speaking don’t apply. An ideology of NHI pushes Palestinians and Blacks further and further into the Fanonian zone of nonbeing[xvii]:

“There is a zone of nonbeing, an extraordinarily sterile and arid region, an incline stripped bare of every essential[,] from which a genuine new departure can emerge. In most cases, the black man cannot take advantage of this descent into a veritable hell.”[xviii]

This is quite a complex passage that I keep returning to in my classes and writings. The zone of nonbeing describes the ontological dissolution of your identity; who you are is unsettled at the core level. People find themselves in the zone of nonbeing for a variety of reasons. You might find yourself in an existential crisis. What am I doing with my life? Is this who I want to be? Am I going to have my life dictated by family, society, or peer pressure? Presumably, you emerge from the zone of nonbeing once you forge a new project, posit a new identity—this is the person that I want to be, this is this image that I project of my self in the future. Though the zone of nonbeing clearly disables, it also enables. As Fanon tells us, you can take advantage of this descent into a veritable hell. However, he also immediately draws attention to the fact that in most cases Black people are unable to transcend their situation. Why? They live in an anti-Black world that enjoys its ontological apartheid and hierarchical divisions, that finds gratification in distinguishing between those who stand for the human, those deemed nonhuman, and those who inhabit the category of the not-quite-human. The difference between nonhuman and not-quite-human is significant. For the Afropessimist, the nonhuman designates exclusively Black being (on this important point, I deviate from Afropessimists[xix]). Fanon and Wynter are more ambivalent. The difference between not-quite-human and nonhuman arguably lies in the degree to which the wretched are situated in the zone of nonbeing. Both are caught up in the zone of nonbeing in a quasi-permanent way, but the not-quite-human believes, or rather is made to believe, that they are eligible for some ontological upgrade in the future if they play their identity cards right. In contrast, the nonhuman must remain nonhuman insofar as this hollowed-out other is needed to secure the meaning and coherence of the human. There can be no human without this contrasting other. A change in the ontological status of the nonhuman would entail a seismic shift in the social order itself.

Wynter and Fanon help us connect the act of becoming a problem with the erasure of one’s humanity. Those designated by the acronym NHI are in but not of this world.[xx] They are seen as “justly shut out” from a world of being and care.[xxi] A Fanonian formulation of Du Bois’s “How does it feel to be a problem?” might be, “How does it feel to be relegated to the zone of nonbeing?” How do you exit from such a hellish zone? How do you become unproblematic? And what would it all entail? One response, which we might describe as liberalism’s go-to solution, is empathy. For the liberal subject, the Black problem, the Palestinian problem, is often framed as a problem of empathy deficit. Blacks and Palestinians suffer from a lack of empathy, we’re told. Unlike the Right, which promotes a fantasy of postraciality, the liberal Left recognizes the crushing presence of anti-Blackness in the United States (although the politicians that they elect are not ready to do anything about it, beyond taking a knee in solidarity with BLM). On anti-Palestinianness, the liberal Left is on the fence. The liberal elite see a younger generation committed to the Palestinian cause, but their consciousness of the Palestinian problem has been mediated for decades by an aggressively Orientalist and Zionist vision of the Palestinians; their collective unconscious has been shaped by the ideology holding that any critique of Israel puts Jewish life at risk. Still, some liberals, despite the backlash that they are likely to receive, are moved by Palestinian suffering. They want to put an end to it: Ceasefire now!

But here we need to proceed carefully. Empathy is a double-edged sword: it can humanize the marginalized, the abandoned of the world, but it can also eclipse the political situation, the colonial condition of Palestinians in Gaza. Securing empathy for Palestinians seems like a moral victory, especially if we consider what happened, or rather didn’t happen, at the Democratic National Convention this August. After the DNC put on display the usual suspects—the Clintons and the Obamas—along with anti-Trump Republicans and the parents of an American-Israeli hostage taken by Hamas on October 7, the DNC was confronted with a request from the Uncommitted movement to allow a Palestinian to speak at the Convention. One of the names floated was that of Palestinian-American Ruwa Romman, a Georgia State Representative and Democrat; Uncommitted members proposed that her speech be edited and vetted by the Harris campaign. After days of negotiations the request was declined. No Palestinian voices were heard on the DNC stage. Romman shared her speech with the media, describing it herself as “sanitized,” that is, as stripped down to a basic plea to preserve human life, and purged of any broader political policy claims that might prompt disagreement. Her goal was clear: humanizing the Palestinian people so that their slaughter in Gaza may come to an end. There was no reference to Palestinian genocide, no references to Israel’s apartheid regime. No, Romman personalized her story, speaking instead of her close relationship with her grandfather, who had experienced first-hand the hardship of displacement in 1948. Now that he is no longer with her, she wondered what he would have said about the displaced Gazans today, about a suffering that he knew too well. Ruwa Romman’s speech ended with a call for solidarity, praising a Democratic Party. . . that fights for an America that belongs to all of us—Black, Brown, and white, Jews and Palestinians, all of us, like my grandfather taught me, together.

One can speculate that this speech could have been quite popular with the liberal Left, the kind of Left that candidate Harris needs to win back. If you’re part of the liberal elite, this was an incredible opportunity not only to bridge the empathy deficit when it came to Palestinians, but also to co-opt the message that Palestinian lives matter, to affirm that yes, Palestinian lives matter so long as they fit our terms. We can feel for the innocent victims, the children and kindly grandfathers, and understand the need to provide them aid without altering in any fundamental way our commitment to the political status quo (the defense of Israel as a Jewish and settler state). So what could explain this refusal of Palestinian voices, of a Palestinian voice, a tamed Palestinian voice? A crude calculus must have won over Harris’s camp. It is less harmful to Harris’s political success if the DNC displays blatant anti-Palestinianness (and you could score points with the Islamophobes—though Trump seems to have this market cornered) than to appear in any way anti-Semitic, or insufficiently pro-Israel. If there is a one percent chance that a Palestinian seen and heard might unsettle their “narratively condemned status,”[xxii] and thus change the coordinates of the Palestinian-Israeli “conflict” (by introducing, for instance, the idea of Palestine, the idea that Israelis are colonial invaders and occupiers of Palestinian land), then establishment Democrats would have no choice but to nip the phantasmatic threat in the bud and thoroughly de-Palestinianize the DNC. The Democratic Party’s Zionist credentials cannot be subject to debate.[xxiii] Recall Trump’s slur, calling Biden a “weak Palestinian.” Was the fear now that Harris, if she entertained any action that could curtail Israeli military action, would be labelled a “strong Palestinian,” a figurative Palestinian that courageously enabled an actual Palestinian to narrate the heart-wrenching plight of her people?

We are at a political impasse. The Democratic Party is clearly not interested in reckoning with the Palestinian problem. They are willing to live with the hypocrisy. Secretary of State Antony Blinken can, on one hand, commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Geneva Conventions of 1949 with a plea to respect international humanitarian law, and, on the other, be a cheerleader for Israel’s genocidal campaign, which makes a mockery of human rights and international law. American hypocrisy is of course assisted by mainstream media. Shamelessly compliant with state power, mass media don’t dwell on the fractures and violence of American democracy, especially when no humans are involved. They are more eager to manufacture problems, like the global Left’s supposedly rampant Jewish problem, than to discuss how the Biden-Harris administration has a Palestinian problem of its own making. The Biden-Harris administration’s policies are putting America on the side of genocide, on the wrong side of history. Blaming every problem on Hamas has not convinced the Global South (which is all too familiar with the ravages of Western imperial violence), and the Global North, starting with its own internally colonized communities, is growing skeptical about the US’s talking points. Proponents of the Israeli state have convinced the Western world that the Palestinian problem is contagious (though, given the West’s penchant for racialized Islamophobia, it didn’t need much convincing). Not only are Palestinians a problem, but so too are their supporters. Protests and encampments against the genocide turn Palestinian supporters into a problem, stripping them of their privileges (if they had them to begin with), rendering them persona non grata to be punished by doxing, termination, arrest, deportation, suspension, or expulsion. Being Palestinian or standing with/for Palestinians, as many international activists do, puts you in a state of perpetual insecurity.

So what is next for the Global Left? Should it pursue the liberal path of empathy? Again, I have some reservations about following this option. Generating empathy is indispensable and critical for getting bodies on the streets protesting the suffering of society’s marginalized. We’ve witnessed the effects of this appeal in the 2020 protests against anti-Blackness sparked by the murder of George Floyd, and we’re witnessing it again with the Gaza solidarity movement. But we should keep in mind that empathy operates within the limits of humanitarian reason. It works to put an end to the immediate suffering of Palestinians. Yet while it can play a crucial role, empathy is ill-equipped to reckon with Israeli apartheid, with Zionist settler colonialism, and falls well short of answering the “call for a rewriting of our present now globally institutionalized order of knowledge.”[xxiv] Yes, empathy humanizes the wretched of the world, but its pitfalls are significant. It is prone to sentimentalism and narcissistic projections, admittedly unreliable, and all too cruel when it fails to manifest. Moreover, empathy in the hands of humanitarian reason cannot address structural antagonisms or adequately respond to a brutal colonial regime that de-humanizes Palestinians and de-civilizes Israelis day in and day out.[xxv]

Empathy is not a politics. The affectivity of empathy can easily coexist with the coloniality of Man, the existing and overrepresented “genre of the human.”[xxvi] White subjects, caught in liberal ideology, come to enjoy their outrage; with what we might call liberal jouissance, they can feel good and virtuous about their affective response to the victimized Palestinians without having to interrogate or change in any meaningful way the ontological apartheid that separates them from Palestinians. A liberal standpoint or agenda (more empathetic imaginings with society’s excluded) does little to challenge the public political discourse about Palestine/Israel. To echo Said, Israel’s genocide of Gaza cannot be allowed to leave “the consciousness of our time” unaffected.[xxvii] The student encampments for Gaza are making sure of that. The pro-Palestine students adopt a skeptical and “hysterical”[xxviii] pose toward the authority of the master/settler/colonizer. They are not satisfied with the official public discourse; they dispute the predominant regime of truth: Why are we what you are telling us that we are [misguided, supporters of terrorism, self-hating Jews, etc.]? Why are you telling us that no humans are involved in Gaza?

There can be no return to October 6, to business as usual, with the Occupation on the back burner. Gaza discloses an unsuturable gash in the global social fabric, an antagonism that can no longer be contained, denied, or pushed to the side. Only anti-colonial reason, in its unabashed universalist aspirations, offers a transformative political response to the Palestinian question. It returns us to the material socio-economic conditions of Israel’s settler colony, to the conditions underpinning Palestinian abjection. It jams the Zionist/Western gaze. Palestinians are not the “problem”—the settler state is, along with its racist Western enablers. The Palestinian problem is a problem of being. We know that the Zionist solution to the Palestinian problem is ethnic cleansing and genocide, the destruction of Palestinians—forget about the Palestinian question, NHI. For the anti-colonial Left, the problem is settler colonialism and its racial matrix of the human, and the solution to it lies in abolishing Man and reinventing the human.[xxix] Exiting the zone of nonbeing, and thus thinking the unthinkable (humans are involved), means scrambling the settler Zionist order of things or it means nothing at all.[xxx]

Notes:

[i] W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), 3.

[ii] George Yancy, Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2008), 80.

[iii] Michel Foucault, “Polemics, Politics, and Problematizations,” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 389.

[iv] For example, Frank Wilderson writes: “What is a Black? A subject? An object? A former slave? A slave? The relational status, or lack thereof, of Black subjectivity (subjectivity under erasure) haunts Black studies as a field just at it haunts the socius” (Frank B. Wilderson, Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms [Durham: Duke University Press, 2010], ix); and Calvin Warren: “Black being is the evidence of an ontological murder, or onticide” (Calvin L. Warren, Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation [Durham: Duke University Press, 2018], 27).

[v] Edward W. Said, The Question of Palestine (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), xliv.

[vi] Said, Orientalism, 25th anniversary edition (New York: Vintage Books, 2003), 12.

[vii] Said, Orientalism, 95.

[viii] Said, Orientalism, xvii.

[ix] Palestinian resistance must lack any legitimacy in order to legitimize the criminal military campaign in Gaza, and the most effective way to greenlight the genocide is to represent Palestinian fighters as inhuman creatures, evil incarnated, who behead children and engage in systematic rape as a weapon of war. If the Palestinians are that type of being, then they are getting what they deserve.

[x] Sylvia Wynter and David Scott, “The Re-enchantment of Humanism: An Interview with Sylvia Wynter,” Small Axe 8 (2000): 177.

[xi] “The white group of laborers, while they received a low wage, were compensated for by a sort of public and psychological wage. They were given public deference and titles of courtesy because they were white. They were admitted freely with all classes of white people to public functions, public parks, and public schools. The police were drawn from their ranks and the courts, dependent on their votes, treated them with leniency as to encourage lawlessness. Their vote selected public officials, and while this had small effect upon the economic situation, it had great affect upon their personal treatment and the deference shown them” (Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America [New York: The Free Press, 1998], 700–01, emphasis added).

[xii] Sylvia Wynter, “No Humans Involved: An Open Letter to My Colleagues,” Forum N.H.I. Knowledge for the 21st Century 1, no. 1 (1994): 42.

[xiii] Wynter, “No Humans Involved,” 42.

[xiv] Wynter, “A Black Studies Manifesto,” Forum N.H.I. Knowledge for the 21st Century 1, no. 1 (1994): 6.

[xv] Wynter, “A Black Studies Manifesto,” 6.

[xvi] Wynter, “No Humans Involved,” 42.

[xvii] See Fawas Turki, The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile, With an Epilogue 1974 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974), 160.

[xviii] Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2008), xii. Philcox’s translation leaves out a crucial comma after “an incline stripped bare of every essential.” See Geo Maher, Anticolonial Eruptions: Racial Hubris and the Cunning of Resistance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2022), 20.

[xix]In October 2014, during the anti-police protests happening in Ferguson, Missouri, Wilderson, in an interview, flatly rejects any rapprochement between the Palestinian struggle and the Black struggle for justice: “‘So right now, pro-Palestinian people are saying, Ferguson is an example of what is happening in Palestine, and y’all are getting what we’re getting.’ That’s just bullshit. First, there’s no time period in which black police and slave domination have ever ended. Second, the Arabs and the Jews are as much a part of the black slave trade—the creation of blackness as social death—as anyone else. As I told a friend of mine, ‘yeah we’re going to help you get rid of Israel, but the moment that you set up your shit we’re going to be right there to jack you up, because anti-blackness is as important and necessary to the formation of Arab psychic life as it is to the formation of Jewish psychic life’” (Wilderson, “‘We’re Trying to Destroy the World’: Anti-Blackness and Police Violence After Ferguson,” in Shifting Corporealities in Contemporary Performance Danger, Im/mobility and Politics, ed. Marina Gržinić and Aneta Stojnić [New York: Palgrave, 2018], 53, emphasis added). First of all, Wilderson’s language of “Arab psychic life” reeks of Orientalism; it homogenizes the Palestinian population, assuming all Palestinians to be Arabs and all “Arabs” to share the same mind, without any distinctions of power and positionality among them. And the hierarchy of human, not-quite-human, and nonhuman is useful insofar as it allows you to describe an individual or group’s positionality in the zone of nonbeing. But Wilderson and other Afropessimists reify these categories; whites are human, non-Black people of color are not-quite-human, and Blacks are nonhuman. So for Wilderson if you’re not-quite-human, if your humanity is only degraded, you (the Palestinian in this case) are still considered a junior partner in white civil society. Your aspiration is to become human, which makes you complicit with the reproduction of anti-Blackness. Ruling out a priori that Palestinians could be fully invested in dismantling the racial matrix of the human (and thus contribute to the destruction of an anti-Black world) lacks political imagination. Like Wynter, I find it more generative to think of the human other as wretched, the damned (les damnés) in Fanon’s sense of the term.

[xx] See Stuart Hall, “‘In but Not of Europe’: Europe and Its Myths,” in Selected Writings on Race and Difference, ed. Paul Gilroy and Ruth Wilson Gilmore (Durham: Duke University Press, 2021), 305–45.

[xxi] Wynter, “No Humans Involved,” 44.

[xxii] Wynter, “No Humans Involved,” 70.

[xxiii] We should keep in mind President Ronald Reagan’s response to Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin’s indiscriminate bombings of civilians in the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, in its military campaign to eliminate or expel the Palestinian Liberation Organization from Lebanon. Witnesses to Reagan’s phone call to Begin recount the tense exchange: “‘Menachem, this is a holocaust,’ Reagan said. ‘Mr. President, I think I know what a holocaust is,’ Begin replied, in a voice that [National Security Council staffer Geoffrey] Kemp would recall as ‘dripping with sarcasm.’ According to [Deputy Chief-Of-Staff Michael] Deaver, Reagan continued ‘in the plainest of language’ to tell Begin what he thought about the bombing of Beirut, concluding by saying, ‘It has gone too far. You must stop it’” (Lou Cannon, President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime [New York: Public Affairs, 2000], 350). And Begin did stop the bombings. A similar logic is playing out in Operation Iron Swords, except that President Biden and candidate Harris are unwilling to take any significant measures to pressure Israel to halt its carnage in Gaza and now Lebanon, which is undergoing its own Gazafication in the Israeli military’s targeting of Hezbollah leadership.

[xxiv] Sylvia Wynter and Katherine McKittrick, “Unparalleled Catastrophe For Our species? Or, To Give Humanness a Different Future: Conversations,” in Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis, ed. Katherine McKittrick (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 18.

[xxv] Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), 35.

[xxvi] Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (2003): 281.

[xxvii] Said, Orientalism, xxii.

[xxviii] As Žižek notes, following Lacan, “the hysterical subject who incessantly probes the Master’s knowledge is the very model of the emergence of new knowledge” (Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies [New York: Verso, 1997], 138n.25). New knowledge about Palestine/Israel is in dire need.

[xxix] Under Zionist coloniality, Palestinians are “made into the physical referent of the idea of the irrational/subrational Human Other” (Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality,” 266). There is no unsettling of Zionist coloniality “without a redescription of the human” (Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality,” 268).

[xxx] I would like to express my gratitude to Nicole Simek, Daniel Shultz, Adam Stern, Bex Heimbrock, and Nadja Goldberg for all their valuable comments on the essay.