What do we call this condition? How do we name this collective existence under a system of forced fragmentation and cruel domination? The human rights community has largely adopted a combination of occupation and apartheid to understand the situation in Palestine. Apartheid is a crime. It is a legal framework. It is committed in Palestine. And even though there is a consensus among the human rights community that Israel is perpetrating apartheid, the refusal of Western governments to come to terms with this material reality of Palestinians is revealing

Once again, Palestine brings a special uncovering force to the discourse. It reveals how otherwise credible institutions, such as Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch, are no longer to be trusted. It shows how facts become disputable in a Trumpist fashion by liberals such as President Biden. Palestine allows us to see the line that bifurcates the binaries (e.g. trusted/untrusted) as much as it underscores the collapse of dichotomies (e.g. democrat/republican or fact/claim). It is in this liminal space that Palestine exists and continues to defy the distinction itself. It is the exception that reveals the rule and the subtext that is, in fact, the text: Palestine is the most vivid manifestation of the colonial condition upheld in the 21st century

The police waited for the Algerians to come up out of the metro stations, made them stand still with their hands above their heads, then hit them with truncheons....Corpses were found hanging in the Bois de Boulogne, and others, disfigured and mutilated, in the Seine... Ten thousand Algerians had been herded into the Vel'd'Hiv' [stadium], like the Jews in Drancy once before. Again I loathed it all -- this country, myself, the whole world.

For centuries the capitalists have behaved like real war criminals in the underdeveloped world. Deportation, massacres, forced labor, [genocide,] and slavery were the primary methods used by capitalism to increase its gold and diamond reserves, and establish its wealth and power.

Not so long ago, Nazism transformed the whole of Europe into a genuine colony.

The colonized subject discovers reality and transforms it through his praxis, his deployment of violence and his agenda for liberation.

During a particularly brutal offensive in July 1959 named Operation Binoculars, General René Challe’s troops sought to root out the insurgents of the Armée de Liberation Nationale (ALN) hiding in the high Kabylia mountains by annihilating local villages that offered support to the nationalists. The policy of regroupement, or resettlement, moved the rural population to barbed-wire compounds resembling concentration camps —fifteen thousand people sequestered in a space meant for three thousand and surrounded by bleak torched fields “without water, without sewage or sanitation of any kind, without land to cultivate and for the most part without work..."