The Free

Palestine speaks for everyone /Radical Universal Emancipation

thefreeonline on 17th April ’24 by Jodi Dean at Verso Blog

_{In defence of the Radical Universal Emancipation Embodied in the Palestinian Cause.}

The images from October 7 of paragliders evading Israeli air defenses were for many of us exhilarating. Here were moments of freedom, that defeated Zionist expectations of submission to occupation and siege.

In them, we witnessed seemingly impossible acts of bravery and defiance in the face of the certain knowledge of the devastation that would follow (that Israel practices asymmetric warfare and responds with disproportionate force is no secret).

Who could not feel energized seeing oppressed people bulldozing the fences enclosing them, taking to the skies in escape, and flying freely through the air? The shattering of the collective sense of the possible made it seem as if anyone could be free, as if imperialism, occupation, and oppression can and will be overthrown.

As the Palestinian militant Leila Khaled wrote of a successful hijacking in her memoir, My People Shall Live, “it seemed the more spectacular the action the better the morale of our people.” Such actions puncture expectations and create a new sense of possibility, liberating people from hopelessness and despair.

When we witness such actions many of us also feel this sense of openness. Our response is indicative of the subject effect the actions unleash: something in the world has changed because a subject has inscribed a gap in the given.

Intifada or not, something powerful is going on | Palestine | Al Jazeera

To use an idea from Alain Badiou, we see that the action was caused by a subject, thus producing that subject as a retroactive effect of the action that caused it. Imperialism tries to shut these feelings down before they spread too far. It condemns them and declares them off limits.