These memoirs bear witness to the harrowing reality of survival during the devastating war on Gaza. Through vivid personal narratives, they capture the daily struggle for existence—the scarcity of food and water, the constant threat of bombardment, and the profound psychological trauma. Yet, they delve far deeper than mere physical survival, exploring the profound wounds of displacement: the heartbreak of leaving behind a home, a street, a neighborhood, and the irreplaceable fragments of a life forever shattered.
The pages reveal families huddled in schools-turned-shelters, sharing morsels of bread and whispering prayers for a safe dawn. This collection is both a testament and an act of resistance. It refuses to let the world reduce human beings to mere statistics, insisting instead on honoring every story, every face, and every name. It bears witness not only to the destruction but also to the unbroken spirit of a people determined to live, dream, and rise again.
While rooted in immense suffering, these narratives are also profound meditations on dignity, love, and an unshakable will to persevere. At once personal and collective, they amplify the voices of a generation too often silenced by conflict, posing urgent questions about justice, memory, and the future. They ensure these essential stories are never buried beneath rubble or lost to cold statistics.
In the midst of fire and fear, these words declare: “We are still here. We remember.” This act of testimony—to feel, to survive, and to hold onto love when the world offers none—becomes the most honest act of living. Through these pages, the reader is invited not only into a world of unimaginable hardship but also into the profound depths of human endurance, the richness of Arab culture, and the unwavering faith that guides a people forward.
Njoud Ghassan Salem is a Palestinian writer and freelance researcher, born in Saudi Arabia and currently residing in Gaza. She has contributed to various research projects and reports focused on public health, social issues, and human rights.
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Since its first edition in 2005, Global Health Watch (GHW) – the flagship publication of the People’s Health Movement (PHM) – has been critically reporting on the state of the world’s health. Published every three or four years, it comments on developments in global health while focusing on continuities with past popular struggles.
As with previous editions, GHW7 comes to life with contributions from over one hundred activists around the world, sharing experiences and analysis on issues affecting people’s health in the contexts they live in and efforts to progress towards greater health justice. This process was energized by the fifth People’s Health Assembly (PHA5), the global gathering of PHM, that took place in Argentina in April 2024 under the motto “Making ‘Health for All’ our struggle for ‘Buen Vivir”.
Political contributions from Latin America are manifest in the first GHW7 section, dedicated to “The global political and economic architecture”, where an up-to-date analysis of current health crises is followed by contributions that frame them in an eco-feminist perspective, showing how alternatives can be rooted in ancestral wisdoms and the practice of ‘Buen Vivir’. The second section addresses old and new challenges for public and global health systems through the critical lenses of gender justice and decoloniality. The third section, “Beyond Healthcare,” addresses key social and environmental determinants of health, while the “Watching” section critically apprises the state of global governance for health with a focus on several key institutions. The final section, “Resistance, struggles and alternatives,” highlights areas of transformative change by health activists in a global context of increasing repression. The book ends with a chapter on PHA5, highlighting how collective action is the most powerful medicine against ill health and health inequality at the human and planetary levels.
Global Health Watch 7 will include the following chapters
Chapters A2 and A3 have been translated from Spanish by Lila Esther Silgado Villadiego.
Summaries of the chapters that are currently available can be viewed by scrolling down and clicking on the “Description” tab. You can also download the chapters highlighted below.
Introduction: Mobilizing for Health Justice
A1. From a Political Economy of Disease to a Political Economy for Wellbeing
A2. Life at the Center: Ecofeminisms and Ecoterritorial Feminisms in the Struggle for Life
A3. Ancestral and Popular Knowledge for Buen Vivir
B1. Privatization and Financialization of Health Systems: Challenges and Public Alternatives
B2. Artificial Intelligence, Digital Technologies, and Health
B3. Building Equitable Health Systems: A Transformative Proposal from an Intersectional Gender Perspective
B4. Abolition Medicine as a Tool for Health Justice
B5. Decolonizing Global Health
C1. War, Conflict and Displacement
C2. People on the Move
C3. Putting the Right to Health to Work
C4. Tax Justice: A Pathway to Better Health
C5. Commercial/Corporate Determination of Health
D1. WHO’s Compromised Role in Global Health Leadership
D2. Unpacking Our Pandemic Failures for Future Pandemic Prevention, Preparedness, and Response
D3. Financing Pandemic Recovery, Prevention, Preparedness and Response
E1. National Struggles for the Right to Health
E2. Taking Extractives to Court
E3. Fear and Hope in ‘Speaking Truth to Power’: Struggles for Health in Times of Repression and Shrinking Spaces
E4. 5th People’s Health Assembly: Advancing in the Struggle for Liberation and Against Capitalism
We are excited to share a summary of a truly transformative new work, A Manifesto on Palestine: Rethinking Liberation from Below, by Ibraheem Rasras. This manifesto offers a profound and challenging re-evaluation of the Palestinian struggle, urging us to look beyond conventional political and diplomatic frameworks to envision a radically different path to freedom and self-determination.
The Core Diagnosis: Beyond Material Occupation
Rasras argues that the Palestinian crisis is not merely a material one of occupation, dispossession, and statelessness, but also a deep “epistemological crisis”. The very structures intended for liberation, the manifesto asserts, have been “subverted, diverted, or rendered ineffective by the very forces they seek to fight”. This is evident in the recurrence of atrocities, reminiscent of past massacres, seen in Gaza from 2023 onwards. A central critique is leveled against the adoption of hierarchical, statist, and technocratic forms of liberation, which have come to tragically resemble the configuration of the oppressor, shedding their ethical and revolutionary essence. The Oslo Accords are cited as a prime example, transforming the language of liberation into one of “formalized managerial governance” and “conditional sovereignty”. This has contributed to a profound “void in the political contextualization and ethical framework of the political ruling”.
The Problem of “Stylistic” Resistance and Internalized Colonialism
The manifesto identifies how Palestinian resistance has, over decades, shifted from revolutionary, bottom-up rhetoric to institutionalized and compromised modes, particularly after the Oslo Accords. It introduces the concept of “stylistic” liberation, where leaders impose their imagined schemes rather than adapting to the realities on the ground, leading to an “alienus” leadership that lacks genuine popular allegiance. This “stylistic” approach also manifests when liberation is pursued through “tools of trivialization” that are external to the collective’s specific needs, such as placing prolonged peace negotiations *before* achieving liberation. This externalization, mirroring the colonizing process itself, leads to a form of alienation, obstructing collective self-control and, in many cases, resulting in the unconscious participation of the colonized in their own subjugation. Distrust stemming from unfulfilled promises by factions like Hamas and Fatah has further deepened fragmentation and a sense of “strangeness” among Palestinians.
A New Strategy: The Ethics of Resistance and Anarchic Programs
To counter this multifaceted crisis, the manifesto proposes a radical alternative: a “bottom-up resistance” grounded in a unified mode of ethics, a collective understanding of the cause, and consistent practices. This “ethics of resistance” is not a rigid dogma but an “emancipatory code” and a regulatory framework for all aspects of Palestinian daily life, directly confronting neoliberal values like profit-maximization. It is intertwined with the urgent need for a “cultural revolution” that aims to restructure social circumstances and foster a “revolutionary consciousness”. This cultural shift, implemented in successive waves, includes intensive education on human rights and rooting new “networking-elements” within Palestinian social and cultural life. The goal is to establish a “solid reference-point” that can unify Palestinians, whose power has been fragmented by internal divisions and external pressures.
The manifesto champions “anarchic programs” as a strategic framework to dismantle subjugation. This involves collectively disengaging from oppressive laws and creating a vacuum for temporary self-management, thereby strengthening local grassroots power. It envisions an “anarchic rule” based on “organic units” and “free cooperation,” emphasizing self-management, direct worker control, and integrated agriculture and industry. This approach aims to organize Palestinians without the fear of division or surveillance that has plagued traditional political structures.
The Power of the Everyday
Crucially, the manifesto points to the already existing “affirmative, anarchic, and ethical politics” in fragments throughout Palestinian society. These are not found in the monopolies of NGOs or political parties, but in the “spontaneous and often-unrecognized social inventions of ordinary people”. Examples include mutual aid networks in Gaza during siege, informal community schooling, grassroots organizing, and the refusal to cooperate with surveillance. These acts of “everyday resistance”—like a student crossing a checkpoint or a mother going to work despite immense barriers—are seen as foundational for a new paradigm of collective ethics and political orientation.
Toward a Horizon of Liberation
A Manifesto on Palestine is a bold call for “breakage,” arguing that “no gradual reform will bring freedom”. It is an “epistemological” task to unveil and amplify these lifeways and forms of knowledge, leading to an ethical reconstruction for a collective life that rejects domination in all forms. The manifesto asserts that the future of Palestine will not come from foreign beneficence or failed peace talks, but will be “constructed by the long disenfranchised of the political arithmetic: the dispossessed, the alienated, the uncredentialed, the everyday”. It invites all to engage in “a problem to be enjoyed more than an answer to be spewed back,” asserting that “freedom must be written by individuals who are living alternatively”.
We encourage you to delve deeper into this profound manifesto and join the critical conversation about rethinking liberation from below.
Written in December 2022, this text is based on a lecture given earlier at the invitation of the Institute of Palestine Studies. Since then, the relationship between Israel and India has deepened further and atrocities have skyrocketed in both countries. On 5 April 2023, Israeli forces stormed Al Aqsa Mosque compound in occupied East Jerusalem and attacked worshippers inside. At the same time, Israel is facing internal turmoil in a battle between a diverse group, including those who think the current settler colony is a democratic nation and want things to remain as they are, and those who stand even further to the right. Significantly, the BJP, India’s ruling party, supports the latter. This book is about Hindutva, the ideology which drives the Hindu-supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) regime of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and Zionism, the ideology of the Israeli apartheid state. In this era of rising fascism, these two remarkably similar ideologies are crucially important in cementing the economic and military alliance between two of the world’s most repressive right-wing states – while helping to legitimize them in cultural arenas. Israel is, of course, a settler colonial state, but it is also, like India, a fascist state, not only because of ‘the extremist parties that [are] part of the government’ but also because of ‘their enablers – Netanyahu and his chauvinistic Likud party which long strove for a Jewish state dominating both sides of the Jordan River.’ In the words of Marwan Bishara, Netanyahu is ‘the godfather of modern Israeli fascism.’
This essay focuses primarily on Hindutva, discussing Zionism mainly to highlight its similarities, links and increasing alliances with Hindutva.
Written with urgency out of a war-time Beirut, this poetry collection registers the griefs and the heroism of the Lebanese, under siege yet again. Sabbagh lends his lyrical voice here, to give a voice to the voiceless, trying to find some harmonic sense out of catastrophe. This book will compel readers, both Lebanese and those with any kind of human heart. While much of the work was written swiftly, on impulse, and almost like, as one of the poem’s title’s has it, a ‘War Diary,’ in verse, this work aims nonetheless to last in its significance and resonance at a time when the world as a whole (let alone Lebanon herself) has become so unpredictable, so fickle and so perilous. Night Settles Upon The City aims to be a worthwhile addition to the contemporary literature of war and, more specifically, to the literary representations of the modern Lebanese reality and experience.
Omar Sabbagh is a poet who is privileged to write about war and destruction from the relative safety of his study. But this double-edged illusion is insidious — mental and emotional inwardly, and physical for those who are directly under attack. It is visceral, political, heart-wrenching — yet the poet seeks out light and hope through the act of writing, for the sake of ownership and sharing. He may say that “I cannot read minds and nor / will I ever wish to”, but he writes for the importance of record-keeping, seeking solace, both private and public — as the Night Settles Upon The City of Beirut.
— Sudeep Sen, Winner of the Rabindranath Tagore Literary Prize
Omar Sabbagh has long brought us a world in which personal experience stitches a hyphen between the eastern Mediterranean and the northerly British archipelago. Now he makes the tension inherent within that richness explicit, in a love-letter to his family and home city of Beirut. Written while the ‘night’ of war ‘settles upon the city’, his introductory ‘Thoughts’ show us how unthinkable war remains, even when it arrives on the doorstep. This is a book of witness to what cannot happen, and yet does.
– Fiona Sampson, Professor Fiona Sampson MBE FRSL.Two-Way Mirror: The Life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning WW Norton 2022 – Washington Post Book of the Year, New York Times Editors’ Choice, finalist Plutarch Prize, finalist PEN Jacqueline Bograd Award, Sunday Times Paperback of the year.
The poet Omar Sabbagh lives in Beirut. His voice is playful, almost surreal at times. He talks of ‘the hairbrained monocle of war’ and suggests that if you live long enough in a place like Beirut ‘laughter becomes a lover’s distance-giving kiss’. Night Settles Upon the City offers us a poetry that is neither ideological nor partisan, not of the frontline but of a deeply threatened warzone. Its terms are easy-going, sorrowful, humane, formally intelligent and tinged with apprehension. It is humanity being human. Reading it is relief and hope.’
— George Szirtes FRSL, Eliot Prize winner.
—Dr. Pamela Chrabieh, Kulturnest Co-founder & Managing Director
In Night Settles on the City, Omar Sabbagh gives voice to the bewilderment, fear, rage, and despair so many of us in the Middle East are currently feeling. His eloquent, tender poems grapple with the impossibility—yet absolute necessity—of language at a moment when words otherwise fail. Like all the best poems, Sabbagh’s challenge, soothe, haunt, and rehumanize us, ultimately arousing our better selves.
—Mai Al-Nakib, author of An Unlasting Home and The Hidden Light of Objects
Both erudite and demotic, felt through the body and ‘guided by ear’ Omar Sabbagh’s voice powers through the remote attacks on Beirut – the city in which he currently lives – the hourly atrocities and unspeakable suffering to reach us and to speak for us. ‘What’s to understand?’ he asks ‘That murder can be finessed?’ In his seminal new collection, Night Settles Upon the City, night becomes a ‘dark and violent animal’ with its ‘panther’s pelt’ of terror ‘slowly curving round us’ through which we hear the voice of the aggressor reflecting that ‘…each murderous attack/ I order seems to drain this world of innocence.’ Yet Sabbagh’s own voice remains measured, balanced, especially in the portraits he paints of his beloved father…‘It gets worse each day watching him/ ageing’ (‘The Old Man and his Walking Stick’). This poem ends with the lines ‘an old man and his son, fighting a war/ in a warzone we all must visit’. Alongside unimaginable horror we are shown the ordinary griefs and losses that we all suffer – of ageing, of failing, of being human; and it’s the humanity and compassion with which Sabbagh bears witness that will secure this book’s future among the handful of classics that will come to define our era.
— Jenny Lewis, MA Oxon., MPhil., PhD, Tutor for Poetry, Oxford University
Since the start of the unfolding genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, carried out through settler-colonial Israeli violence, higher education institutions have been systematically destroyed. Campuses lie in ruins, academics and students have been killed or forcibly displaced, and what was once a thriving, intellectually vibrant student population now lives under daily threat of bombardment, forced starvation, and death. For nearly two years, students have been cut off not only from their universities, but from their dreams, their futures, and even their most basic sense of safety.
Yet, despite this unimaginable trauma, many are still writing.
We Are Still Here is an anthology of these voices—raw, unfiltered, and courageous. It features short and long stories, poems, essays, and testimonies written by students from Gaza’s universities. These are not retrospective reflections or distant analyses; they are real-time words, emerging from the depths of genocide, displacement, and grief. These writings may be their last hopes to reach the world, a final act of resistance through expression.
Surviving at the darkest extremes of suffering, of destruction and displacement, famine and the constant threat of maiming or death, these young writers speak to us with piercing lucidity. Their resilience is their only form of optimism. Paradoxically, reading them lifts the heart.
– Ian McEwan, author of Atonement and Enduring Love
A moving, painful and yet hopeful collection of the younger generation of the people of Gaza. Sumud, resilience, was never so powerful and clear, as it appears in this must read and urgent collection. —Ilan Pappé, professor, University of Exeter’s College of Social Sciences and International Studies, author, A Very Short History of the Israel-Palestine Conflict
In the heart of suffering, words are born — and from beneath the rubble, creativity rises. This book is more than a collection of written pages; it is the echo of resilient souls and the cries of pens that spoke when voices were silenced. — Professor Dr. Omar Kh. Melad, President of Al-Azhar University– Gaza
We Are Still Here is not a book about war — it is a book about being alive after the world has decided you are already gone, written in rooms that may no longer stand. These pages are dispatches from the thin edge of the present: letters from hunger, fragments of interrupted lives, flashes of hope so unyielding it burns. Here, young people shape the record of their time on earth, knowing that their time may be short. You will not leave this book with the comfort of closure. It will stay with you long after the final page has turned. — Leila Sansour, filmmaker and founder of Open Bethlehem
These Gaza poignant reflections in prose and poetry from the midst of genocide are both heart-rending and full of life and promise. Israel may have physically killed many of their young authors, but will never kill their words, which live on in this powerful collection of their writings. — Ghada Karmi,
Lababidi’s Palestine Wail calls for the simplest, barest humanity, and it reminds us that loss of life, occupation, and genocide take an impossible toll on everyone. Finally, it holds us all accountable to address injustice, to dispel oppression and to work toward collaborative and restorative justice. In our interview, we focused on what he saw as our responsibility to humanity. — How Hope Outlasts Despair: An Interview with Yahia Lababidi — https://www.clereviewofbooks.com/writing/how-hope-outlasts-despair-an-interview-with-yahia-lababidi
…a poignant message of compassion and hope, the kind beautifully expressed by Yahia Lababidi in his #book #Palestine Wail,
@DarajaPress.
“Since purchasing the book, I have read the poem every day—it tends to feed my imagination.” https://boundlessphilanthropy.com/writings/tending-the-imagination-the-practice-of-creativity-care-challenge-compassion #poetry #Gaza
Renowned aphorist Yahia Lababidi’s Palestine Wail writes alongside a catastrophe beyond words, trying to shelter in words what remains of our humanity. To be a Minister of Loneliness and Lightkeeper, tending to the light. — Philip Metres, author of Fugitive/Refuge
Palestine is personal for writer, Yahia Lababidi. His Palestinian grandmother, Rabiha Dajani — educator, activist & social worker — was forced to flee her ancestral home in Jerusalem, at gunpoint, some eighty years ago.
As an Arab-American, Lababidi feels deeply betrayed by the USA’s blind support of Israel’s genocide of Palestinians.
In Palestine Wail, he reminds us that religion is not politics, Judaism is not Zionism, and to criticize the immoral, illegal actions of Israel is not antisemitism — especially since, as an Arab, Lababidi is a Semite, himself.
Using both poetry and prose, Lababidi reflects on how we are neither our corrupt governments, nor our compromised media. Rather, we are partners in humanity, members of one human family. Not in Our Name will the unholy massacres of innocent Palestinians be committed (two-thirds of whom are women and children) nor in the false name of ‘self-defense’.
In turn, Lababidi reminds us that starvation as a weapon of war is both cruel and criminal, as is collective punishment.
Palestine Wail invites us to bear witness to this historical humanitarian crisis, unfolding in real-time, while not allowing ourselves to be deceived, intimidated or silenced. We are made aware of the basic human truths that no lasting peace can be founded upon profound injustice and that the jailor is never Free…
Yahia Lababidi, an Arab-American writer of Palestinian background, has crafted a poignant collection which serves as a heartfelt tribute to the Palestinian people, their struggles, and their resilience in the face of an ongoing genocide and ethnic cleansing.
The collection, described as a love letter to Gaza, draws inspiration from the rich literary tradition of Palestinian resistance literature. Lababidi, known for his critically-acclaimed books of aphorisms, essays, and poetry, brings his unique voice to this personal, political and spiritual work.
Palestine Wail addresses us in a variety of voices: outrage, lamentation and pity, in attempting to honor the pain of the oppressed Palestinian people, while also celebrating their enduring spirit.
Lababidi’s Wail, ultimately, is a prayerful work seeking peace, healing and reconciliation—a testament to the transformative power of literature to keep hope alive in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds.
These are necessary and truthful poems. Yahia Lababidi powerfully illuminates this heartbreaking time and terrible season in the history of our world. This book, like a lantern in darkness, brings to light the truth of lives we must learn to honor and remember. — James Crews, author of Unlocking the Heart: Writing for Mindfulness, Creativity, and Self-Compassion
Yahia Lababidi’s stunning and resonant collection, Palestine Wail, addresses the outrage felt by many of the oppressed Palestinian supporters and more. He also speaks of the lamentations of his people and the show of pity, compassion, and empathy from many members of the human family from all around the world. — The Indefatigable Longing For Peace And Rapprochement In Yahia Lababidi’s Palestine Wail By Michael Parker.
Transcending our Colonial Place: Africa and the dialectics of emancipation
Michael Neocosmos
To begin to think the emancipation of humanity on the African continent, we must start by distancing the thought and practice of politics from state thinking. State thinking has been and continues to be the core subjective aspect of the continuing failure of an emancipatory politics of equality on our continent. State thinking in the present day is no longer simply colonial but neocolonial. This means that state colonial practices have been modified but not to the extent that colonialism has been abolished. It still exists but under modified forms. The only way to think about political emancipation of the whole of humanity is to understand and practice dialectical thought. The dialectic of politics necessarily assumes a process of becoming of a popular political subject and its continued existence vis-à-vis the state. The latter can only think analytically and not dialectically because it is concerned with maintaining a system of socio-political places to which people are allocated according to criteria that ensure the reproduction of relations of domination, themselves underpinned by capitalist relations of exploitation.
This book traces the contradiction between dialectical thought and analytical thought, beginning with the Ancient Egyptians and Asiatic Greeks up to the present day among African people. It reviews the way in which emancipatory politics was thought in practice by classical Marxist thinkers and also the centrality of popular African culture in the thinking of African revolutionaries. It argues that a political dialectic was present to varying degrees in the thought of these thinkers and that they all attempted to confront state analytical thinking and practice with varying degrees of success at different times. The subjective problem they faced was that the dialectic founded on the idea of the universality of movement to which they adhered was in constant conflict with the stasis of analytical thought itself enabled by a belief in the party as representing the people that was ultimately to be realized in the capture of state power.
It is further shown that popular African thought, as expressed in metaphorical proverbs, regularly contains references to a human universal, thus deploying much more than rhetoric in a potential for dialectical thought. Popularly expressed reason frequently operates metaphorically and not within the delimited analytical categories deployed by academics and the state. This political process of the struggle between the dialectic and the analytic in thought-practice is also traced in Haiti whose culture is heavily influenced by Africa. The emancipatory egalitarian politics pursued there after independence in 1804, and their destruction by a neocolonial state predicted the same process in post-colonial African countries. At the same time Africa has witnessed the invention of alternatives to the party form of organization, particularly during the struggle for freedom in South Africa in the 1980s. Finally, the book argues that the anatomy of the neocolonial state on our continent must be understood primarily from the point of those it rules in order to unravel its neocolonial character. The creation and eulogizing of heroic figures during popular struggles for freedom is no substitute for the universal truth that only the oppressed can liberate both themselves and humanity from what is rapidly becoming the living hell of neocolonial capitalism.
Introduction: what is to be thought?
Politics as a Collective Thought-Practice and Human Emancipation as its Essence
The Ancients and the Thought of Politics: arkhē and the ‘dialectic’ of physis and nomos
Sourcing an Emancipatory Politics for Today: reviewing the classics
Thinking Emancipatory Politics through African Popular Culture
Resolving Contradictions and the Dialectical Potential of Proverbial Metaphors
Haiti: from inventive popular sovereignty to neocolonial state
Beyond the Party Form? An alternative organisation and the figure of the heroic liberator
Perverted Freedom and the Anatomy of the African Neocolonial State
Conclusion: silencing as an analytical procedure in political theory and practice
ہندوتواہ
اور صیہونیت کے ساتھ اس کا تعلق
اَمرت وِلسن
اسرائیل پر لیکچرز کا سلسلہ
معاون: لاہورہ آلباسٹ ، ادارہ برائے مطالعہ فلسطین ، یو ایس اے
ثالث: ڈاکٹر وریندر سنگھ کالرا
ایڈیٹر: طارق محمود ، امریکن یونیورسٹی بیروت
دسمبر 2022 میں لکھا گیا، یہ متن انسٹی ٹیوٹ آف فلسطین سٹڈیز کی دعوت پر دیے گئے ایک لیکچر پر مبنی ہے۔ اس کے بعد سے اسرائیل اور بھارت کے تعلقات مزید گہرے ہوئے ہیں اور دونوں ممالک میں مظالم آسمان کو چھونے لگے ہیں۔ 5 اپریل 2023 کو اسرائیلی فورسز نے مقبوضہ مشرقی یروشلم میں مسجد اقصیٰ کے احاطے پر دھاوا بول دیا اور اندر نمازیوں پر حملہ کیا۔ ایک ہی وقت میں، اسرائیل کو ایک متنوع گروہ کے درمیان لڑائی میں اندرونی انتشار کا سامنا ہے، جن میں وہ لوگ بھی شامل ہیں جو یہ سمجھتے ہیں کہ موجودہ آباد کار کالونی ایک جمہوری قوم ہے اور چاہتے ہیں کہ چیزیں جوں کی توں رہیں، اور وہ بھی جو دائیں طرف کھڑے ہیں۔ اہم بات یہ ہے کہ بھارت کی حکمران جماعت بی جے پی مؤخر الذکر کی حمایت کرتی ہے۔ یہ کتاب ہندوتوا کے بارے میں ہے، وہ نظریہ جو وزیر اعظم نریندر مودی کی ہندو بالادستی بھارتیہ جنتا پارٹی (بی جے پی) حکومت کو چلاتا ہے، اور صیہونیت، اسرائیلی نسل پرست ریاست کا نظریہ۔ ابھرتے ہوئے فاشزم کے اس دور میں، یہ دونوں نمایاں طور پر ملتے جلتے نظریے دنیا کی دو سب سے زیادہ جابرانہ دائیں بازو کی ریاستوں کے درمیان اقتصادی اور فوجی اتحاد کو مضبوط بنانے میں انتہائی اہم ہیں – جبکہ ثقافتی میدانوں میں انہیں قانونی حیثیت دینے میں مدد فراہم کرتے ہیں۔ اسرائیل بلاشبہ ایک آبادکار نوآبادیاتی ریاست ہے، لیکن یہ بھارت کی طرح ایک فاشسٹ ریاست بھی ہے، نہ صرف ‘انتہا پسند جماعتوں جو کہ حکومت کا حصہ ہیں’ کی وجہ سے بلکہ ‘ان کے اہل کاروں – نیتن یاہو اور مروان بشارا کے الفاظ میں، نیتن یاہو ‘جدید اسرائیلی فاشزم کا گاڈ فادر’ ہے۔
Written in December 2022, this text is based on a lecture given earlier at the invitation of the Institute of Palestine Studies. Since then, the relationship between Israel and India has deepened further and atrocities have skyrocketed in both countries. On 5 April 2023, Israeli forces stormed Al Aqsa Mosque compound in occupied East Jerusalem and attacked worshippers inside. At the same time, Israel is facing internal turmoil in a battle between a diverse group, including those who think the current settler colony is a democratic nation and want things to remain as they are, and those who stand even further to the right. Significantly, the BJP, India’s ruling party, supports the latter. This book is about Hindutva, the ideology which drives the Hindu-supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) regime of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and Zionism, the ideology of the Israeli apartheid state. In this era of rising fascism, these two remarkably similar ideologies are crucially important in cementing the economic and military alliance between two of the world’s most repressive right-wing states – while helping to legitimize them in cultural arenas. Israel is, of course, a settler colonial state, but it is also, like India, a fascist state, not only because of ‘the extremist parties that [are] part of the government’ but also because of ‘their enablers – Netanyahu and his chauvinistic Likud party which long strove for a Jewish state dominating both sides of the Jordan River.’ In the words of Marwan Bishara, Netanyahu is ‘the godfather of modern Israeli fascism.’
