Resistance at the Borders of Power: Reflections on the Zapatista and Palestinian Experiences

Personal Reflexive Statement

The inquietudes that motivated this article stem from my participation in a two-week April/May 2019 faculty seminar trip to East Jerusalem and the West Bank in occupied Palestine. My observations reflect my perspective as a Latin Americanist who worked in Nicaragua during the Sandinista era, and I am engaged more recently in research and solidarity related to the Zapatista movement in Chiapas, Mexico, and other indigenous autonomy movements in Latin America as well as immigrant rights activism. These experiences shaped my interest in the social bases of popular resistance. I am indebted to Dr. Amal Eqeiq for her pioneering work on the Palestinian/Zapatista parallels and for generously sharing her insights through a conversation at the 2019 Latin American Studies Association conference and the panels she organized there (with Linda Quiquivix as discussant) on “Palestine, Latin America, and the Caribbean.” I was grateful to travel with a group of U.S. scholars to Palestine in the spring of 2019. I also thank this journal’s anonymous reviewer for valuable comments.

Introduction to an Inquiry

Resistance to injustice and oppression may simmer for long periods, then erupt in unexpected uprisings. The era of Latin American revolutions and vanguard movements seemed to be waning as the Cold War came to an end. On January 1, 1994, the day the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) took effect, the world was shocked by an uprising by indigenous rebels in the poor state of Chiapas in Mexico’s remote southeast region bordering Guatemala. The Zapatista rebellion that went public in 1994—which had actually been brewing in clandestinity since 1983—held out promise of a fresh approach to radical change, focusing on the transformation of society from below rather than the seizure of state power from above (Stahler-Sholk 2010). The resistance to the constituted powers by “constituent power” (Negri 2009), created through the everyday resistance of these Mayan rebels, proved inspirational for numerous alter-globalization movements (Dellacioppa 2009; Stahler-Sholk 2017). Palestinian resistance, too, is not just about altering borders to create a new space of sovereignty in which to replicate the constituted colonial model of governance but rather to build on an “anti-colonial imaginary” (Seidel 2019:742-43) based on the constituent power of a sustainable and autonomous way of living. These movements are rising to the challenge of building a new architecture of popular organizing that transcends the borders of states, in an era when local movements find themselves confronting the forces of global neoliberal capitalism.

Since all knowledge production is situated (Haraway 1988), I will begin by briefly locating some of the experiences that shaped my comparative perspective. During the era of the Central American revolutions, I lived in Nicaragua from 1984 to 1989. Since the 1994 Zapatista rebellion in the southeastern Mexican state of Chiapas, I have been studying that movement and engaging in human rights accompaniment and solidarity. In April–May 2019, I had the opportunity to participate in a two-week faculty seminar in Palestine, an experience that sparked these comparative reflections. Obviously, such a short trip to Palestine offers only limited observation points, but a comparative framework will provide the basis for some inductive reflections on what the Palestinian and Zapatista struggles may tell us about concepts such as borders and resistance.

This comparison highlights some of the commonalities of experience of indigenous peoples facing various forms of colonial oppression. It also suggests ways in which borders, which represent the constituted power imposed by governing authorities, can be creatively subverted and resisted through the constituent power constructed in an ongoing way through everyday practices that reclaim collective identity and agency.

Borders in Time and Space

Borders are expressions of power, defining differential spatial existence for those living in their midst, demarcating power and claims of authority while imposing otherness, marginality, and liminality. They are at once material and immaterial, lines that can be simultaneously fixed but porous and shifting. In Anzaldúa’s (1987) well-known formulation of the concept of borderlands, she notes that

A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition. The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants. (P. 3)

States founded in paroxysms of colonial expansion and collapse can make borders porous or solid at the whim of the powerful, shifting the frontiers of their claimed authority and redefining the privileges of crossing (or of existence on either side) of different categories of people, goods, and capital in relation to imaginary lines on the ground. Grandin (2019) traces the shifting U.S. ideological and physical constructions of frontiers and borders, from the westward expansion to the southern border wall, as one and another group of people were pushed into otherness and displaced, slaughtered, criminalized, or harnessed to strip their labor power from their humanity. Today, the U.S. empire has in effect extended its borders around the world, through a global apparatus of surveillance and interdiction, a major component of which is the Israeli security industry (Miller 2019).

Twenty-first-century U.S.-dominant discourse about immigrants (at least of Latinx identity) as dangerous invaders is less about actually stopping immigration—the net flow from Mexico to the United States, for example, has already turned negative since 2012 (Zong and Batalova 2018)—than creating fear in order to maintain an exploitable and vulnerable workforce of the undocumented. Racialized scapegoating in times of economic uncertainty also builds a political base among downwardly mobile sectors of the native-born white population, while media images of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids and border deployments, like the stereotype of the “Middle Eastern terrorist,” perpetuate fears of the dangerous other. The “Programa Frontera Sur” imposed by the U.S. government in 2014, subcontracting border enforcement to the Mexican government to stop Central American migrants at its southern border in Chiapas (Washington Office on Latin America 2017), in effect shifted the U.S. border some 2,000 km southward.

The United States invoked border control rationale in 2019 in pressuring the new administration of Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador to send in his militarized new national guard. Yet, most of the 27,000 troops and 8 of their 12 bases were deployed in the southern state of Chiapas in a ring surrounding the Zapatista rebel communities, which U.S. President Trump revealingly described in his address to the United Nations (UN) General Assembly opening session on September 24, 2019, as “our southern border” (“Agradece Trump” 2019; Camacho 2019). Once again, this attempt to throw an extended border lasso around those who defied the state’s claim to the monopoly of the legitimate use of violence in a territory was thwarted by the Zapatista rebels who resisted those legitimacy claims. In a reprise of their December 1994 announcement of new autonomous municipalities (MAREZ) and their August 2003 creation of Good Governance Councils (JBG) in five regional self-governance centers (Caracoles), the Zapatistas in August 2019 popped up outside the encirclement in 11 new Centers of Autonomous Zapatista Rebellion and Resistance (CRAREZ), adding to the existing 5 Caracoles and 27 original autonomous municipalities for a total of 43 resistance centers, announcing:

We broke their siege by travelling paths and routes that do not appear on any maps and cannot be detected on any satellites because they can only be found in the thought of our ancestors. The word, history, and example of our peoples, of our children, elders, men, and women also travelled with us as we carried all of them along in our hearts…. That is how we left this siege behind, and all the while the Big Boss was convinced that we were trapped inside. From afar we could see the backs of the National Guard, soldiers, police, government projects, handouts, and lies. We came and went, back and forth, 10, 100, 1000 times as the overseer watched without seeing us, so sure of the fear that his fear would instill. Those who tried to encircle us are nothing but a dirty stain that is itself encircled by an even larger territory of rebellion. (Zapatista Army of National Liberation [EZLN] 2019)

Borders that are erected selectively for people, but not for capital or for the controlled extraction of labor power and commodities, represent a continuation of colonial practices of domination. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), in which governing elites and capital imposed rules of “free” trade, was the proximate detonator of the Zapatista rebellion on the day NAFTA took effect, January 1, 1994. With the trade pact, ancestral and communal lands became overnight commodities and subsistence cultivators suddenly “bordered” and competed commercially with transnational agribusiness corporations, echoing the arrival 500 years earlier of armed Europeans planting flags and seeking gold. The Zapatistas, after proclaiming de facto autonomy in 1994 (Stahler-Sholk 2007), thus rejecting the legitimacy of the state’s claimed right to enforce its rule in their indigenous territories, in 1996 convened another of their border-defying assemblies, dubbed the Intergalactic Encounter against Neoliberalism and for Humanity. This alternative image is of a borderless world—“A world in which many worlds may fit,” as the Zapatistas imagine it—in which people define from below the parameters of their own governance. This rich pluridiversity that transgresses borders can be contrasted with the multinational coercive project that followed on the heels of NAFTA. The latter project was reflected in the Security and Prosperity Partnership, launched in 2007 in what the U.S. assistant secretary of state at the time candidly described as “armoring NAFTA” (Carlsen 2008), bringing the three government together in militarized policing of a tristate territory, in which borders were erased for capital and merchandise but hardened for people.

The Zapatista project has been met with continuous state efforts to capture and imprison presumed leaders, crisscross the territory with military bases, and fragment the population through the use of paramilitary violence, combined with state largess to coopt the compliant. This constant drawing of lines of division to atomize the population resembles the complex system of classification and differentiated permits used by the Israeli state to atomize the Palestinians (Tawil-Souri 2012), erecting barriers both in terms of geography and impediments to the formation of a collective social subject. Whether people are physically divided by settler roads, checkpoints, and separation barriers in Palestine or by the invisible line that demarcates the “permitted Indian” (Hale 2004) in Mesoamerica, the colonial state claims the authority to place the “other” into a category of illegality, denying their rights and their very existence under what Agamben (2005) calls a “state of exception.”

In the Palestinian variant of the state of exception, the post-Oslo apparatus of enclaves, surveillance, and spatial control is overlaid by the complex legal–juridical devices of control that pervade every aspect of daily life (Abujidi 2009). For both the Zapatistas and the Palestinians, the law as defined and interpreted by the oppressor becomes a tool of oppression and marginalization (Quiquivix 2014), while self-determination/autonomy represents the aspiration of drawing one’s own boundaries of authority. The 1993 Oslo Accords, ostensibly intended to provide a path to defining borders of two sovereign states, instead further partitioned the occupied territories into zones of distinct levels of illusory self-administration, in what Pappé (2016) describes as “a modern Panopticon.” Our 2019 seminar group got a palpable sense of this when we visited the Aida refugee camp in the West Bank, surrounded by walls punctuated with high cylindrical concrete guard towers from which the occupying forces periodically fire tear gas or live ammunition. In symbolic resistance, the residents have painted defiant images such as the slingshot and the house key representing the right of return. At the Lajee Center established in 2000 by young people from the camp, a youth group playing traditional musical instruments creates tunes that soar over walls, and refugees plant rooftop gardens defying the territorial displacement and economic strangulation of the occupation.

As Quiquivix (2013) has shown, Palestinians have been resisting the external imposition of borders and the mapping of lines of authority since the days of the British Mandate, asserting the autonomous right to “‘figure out’ for themselves how to collectively make a life without the need for colonial mediation” (p. 10). Quiquivix argues that the Palestinian defense of the traditional musha’ collective land management system was not only a rejection of the land schemes of the British Mandate and settler colonialists but also an assertion of indigenous identity and agency, in resistance against colonial claims of authority to draw lines on maps to denote political legitimacy. Our seminar group in Palestine learned about the work of The Applied Research Institute–Jerusalem, dedicated to resisting the occupation by promoting sustainable resource use in the face of encroaching settlements, settler-only roads, water diversion, and a slew of other measures aimed at slicing up the West Bank and choking off Palestinian life. Other such initiatives include Vivien Sansour’s Palestine Heirloom Seed Library, and Mazin Qumsiyeh’s Palestine Institute for Biodiversity and Sustainability. Similarly in Chiapas, after the government in 1992 undermined the collective ejido system of land tenancy that was a legacy of the Mexican Revolution to pave the way for NAFTA, the Zapatistas carried out their own de facto agrarian reform. They established their own internal mechanisms for allocating the use of land and resources, including designating lands for community cultivation and management, which reinforced their autonomy project through the process of communal decision-making about the use of shared resources (Stahler-Sholk 2017:20-21). In doing so, they resisted the authority of the government to send in its surveyors to impose individual parceling and “territorial reordering.”

Colonial and neocolonial hierarchies have established the borders and imposed racialized identities and places on Palestinian and indigenous Maya/Mexican peoples. The imposed colonial subjectivities of inferiority become mechanisms of self-repression, like the Palestinian Authority post-Oslo or the assimilationist “indigenist” institutions in Mexico. Resistance, then, requires a shaking-off (the literal meaning of intifada) of the coloniality of power (Quijano 2000) by thinking from the borders (Mignolo 2002; Mignolo and Tlostanova 2006) or a decentering shift to what Santos (2007) called epistemologies of the South. The coloniality of power is maintained by eliding colonial history through what Santos calls “presentism,” seen, for example, in the Israeli state’s frequent invocation of “facts on the ground” to reify their borders. Conversely, then, those in resistance must wage what the Zapatistas frequently refer to as the “war against oblivion” (EZLN 2018b). Palestinian scholar-activist of nonviolent resistance Qumsiyeh (2011) founded the Palestine Museum of Natural History for precisely this reason (Palestine Institute for Biodiversity and Sustainability of Bethlehem University, n. d.). The internal colonialism of occupied Palestine builds on prior colonial usurpations, on the British Mandate that was constructed on the ambiguous terrain of the waning Ottoman Empire amid locally emerging Arab identities.

The settler state makes this history disappear by uprooting millennial olive trees, rolling out new settlements, and repeating the ahistorical mantras of “A land without a people for a people without a land” and “Making the desert bloom.” By uprooting the olive tree, the symbol of Palestinian national identity and a mainstay of the economy, and replacing it with a more “European” landscape through massive planting of fast-growing pines dropping acidic pine needles that destroy surrounding plants and ruin the livelihood of Palestinian shepherds (Braverman 2009; Eqeiq 2018b; Lorber 2012), the settler state seeks to symbolically and territorially erase Palestinian existence and memory. In the face of such erasure, oral history and literature become tools for recentering the narrative around indigenous subjectivity and agency (Eqeiq 2018a). In our faculty seminar in the West Bank, we visited the museum of political prisoners at the Abu Dis campus of Al-Quds University, where we were greeted by the director, a short smiling man with a booming voice who we learned had been an illiterate shepherd. He had learned to read and write in Israeli prisons in order to communicate with his family and then went on to become an historian, resisting the occupation through the preservation of collective memory.

Similarly, the state of Chiapas where the Zapatista rebellion broke out was “Mexico’s Mississippi” (Womack 1999)—that is, before the civil rights struggle touched that benighted state—a forgotten place buried in layers of internal colonialism, a Chiapas/Palestine parallel noted by Eqeiq (2017:3), in which indigenous people were relegated to a subordinate status within the hegemonic construction of the nation-state. The Zapatistas with their 1994 uprising invented their own narrative, centered on the core concept of human dignity that is rooted in shared colonial experiences and struggles (Mignolo 2002). The “dignified rage” (Henck 2018) of the Zapatista struggle comes from the deep place of 500 years of oppression and humiliation.

To Exist Is to Resist: Parallel Struggles

As Eqeiq (2018b) has documented and analyzed, the slogan “To exist is to resist” was painted by Mexican artist Gustavo Chávez Pavón in 2004 in a mural on the “separation wall” at the entrance to Bethlehem (which he later replicated in the Zapatista Caracol of Oventic), bringing together the Zapatista and Palestinian struggles through this concept of resistance as well as through visual representation of parallel symbols such as corn (maize)/olive trees and the pasamontaña (ski mask)/kuffiyeh. The colonial border walls are thus breached by shared experiences of indigenous resistance.

Resistance takes the form of challenges from below to a wide variety of forms of oppression and domination. The growing field of resistance studies (Baaz, Lilja, and Vinthagen 2018) offers new insights into relations of power that may be invisible as they are embedded in the structures of states, societies, and the global system. Scott’s (1985) classic anthropological work highlighted the “hidden transcripts” through which the subaltern communicate their shared grievances, an important corrective to the illusion of negative peace. Yet, it is important to remember that resistance only exists in the context of oppression, and therefore, the concept is useful as a diagnostic of power, not a condition to be romanticized (Abu-Lughod 1990). Both the Zapatistas and the Palestinians under occupation engage in both public acts of resistance and less visible practices of everyday resistance (Vinthagen and Johansson 2013).

The act of resistance is interactive with the oppressor, and in these processes of interaction, the resistance draws on and continually invents its collective subjectivity. Negri (2009) distinguishes between the conventional institutional concept of constituted power, the powers that be, wielded from an elevated position in an established hierarchy, and constituent power, forged in an ongoing process by the active participation and agency of those in resistance. For example, those Palestinians who accepted positions of administration allocated by Israel to the Palestinian Authority are attempting to gain a share of constituted power. On the other hand, the multiple ongoing forms of what Qumsiyeh (2011) labels “popular resistance,” or empowerment (power to, rather than power over, to borrow the feminist insight), contribute to the formation of a collective identity that make up constituent power. Creative resistance becomes a source of pride and identity. In studying this process of identity formation, Dana (2018) finds a close correlation between survey respondents who report a strong sense of Palestinian identity and support for nonviolent resistance. One nonviolent activist our group met who works with Youth Against Settlements in Hebron recounted being arrested multiple times by the Israeli authorities but also by the Palestinian Authority for criticizing their human rights record, “trapped between two oppressors,” as he put it, resisting the constituted powers on both sides of the border lines that they had colluded in drawing through the Oslo Accords.

The Zapatistas have consistently rejected the idea of seeking a place in the constituted structures of power. Instead, they have concentrated their efforts on building de facto autonomy in their communities, without waiting for government permission (Baronnet, Mora Bayo, and Stahler-Sholk 2011; Stahler-Sholk 2019). As they explain it,

…[T]here is official autonomy, and there is real autonomy. Official autonomy is recognized by law, and this is its logic: ‘If you have an autonomous system and I legally recognize it, then your autonomy begins to depend on my law and not on your actual autonomous practices. When election season rolls around, you’ll have to support us, voting and promoting the vote for our party, because if another party takes office they’ll undo that law that protects you.’ In that logic, we become political party peons, just as has happened to social movements all over the world. The actual function and defense of autonomy ceases to matter; the only thing that matters is what is recognized by the law. The struggle for freedom is in effect transformed into a struggle for the legal recognition of struggle. (EZLN 2018a)

The self-governing structures being created by the Zapatistas draw on indigenous traditions such as decision-making by assembly, and the Zapatistas have deliberately developed governance norms of inclusive, horizontal, participatory democracy to reinvent their collective identity as a movement (González Casanova 2005; Starr, Martínez-Torres, and Rosset 2011). Through frequent rotation of positions of responsibility at the level of the community, autonomous municipality, and regional Caracol, the Zapatistas have avoided developing a professionalized/bureaucratic leadership and instead socialized the learning experience of participation in the movement. All positions (including education and health promoters chosen by the communities when they expelled the official government employees) are unpaid, so the entire village must assemble and discuss a rotating labor system to tend the cornfields of those who travel for trainings or other tasks related to their positions in service to the community. These practices create intimate bonds and a sense of complicity among members of the support base communities as well as accountability of leadership as a check against reproducing new oppressive hierarchies. Zapatista governance draws on indigenous traditions of rotating volunteer labor in service to the community, referring to the model of leadership as mandar obedeciendo, leading by obeying (the collective).

Getting beyond the romanticized notion of resistance requires an understanding that resistance is not an end in itself. Active nonviolence (ANV) is a concept of resistance that entails sacrifice and risk in confronting an unjust order, with the goal of transforming the wider society from an illusory state of negative peace to the desired state of positive peace with social justice. It eschews the ends/means dichotomy by focusing on the ongoing practices and processes of everyday resistance, “being the change you want to see in the world” as Gandhi suggested. This prefigurative politics, which Dinerstein (2015) calls “the art of organizing hope” and Khasnabish (2008) sees as developing and implementing a new “political imaginary,” involves a conscious and organized effort to create the transformative social subject simultaneously with the effort to transform the society. The Zapatistas refer to this process as caminar preguntando, to walk while asking questions along the way.

For this reason, some students of the innovative contentious repertoire of the Zapatista movement (Stahler-Sholk 2010) and the Palestinian struggle have added specific adjectives to the term “resistance,” such as “popular” resistance in Palestine (Qumsiyeh 2011), or “critical” resistance (Ambrosi de la Cadena 2018) or “rebel” resistance (Rico Montoya 2018) in the case of the Zapatistas. Both movements are continually inventing a new language and practice of resistance rather than attempting to use the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house (Lorde 1984). To be sure, the creative tactics of ANV in the case of both movements have been accompanied in parallel by armed expressions of resistance, as is true of virtually all such movements, since there is rarely a “pure” nonviolent movement that exists in a vacuum. Yet, the core of each of these struggles lies not in an armed wing but in the construction of alternative models of society that are autonomous from external forces of domination, and therefore, their very existence blends the form and substance of resistance in a critique of the status quo.

In the case of the Zapatistas, critical resistance has encompassed a critique of the coloniality of power that stretches back 500 years (Mignolo 2000; Quijano 2000) and of the specific variant represented by the neoliberal globalization of the last quarter century (Ambrosi de la Cadena 2018). Rootedness in the land, in the traditions of sustainable subsistence agriculture, and in the indigenous practice of cultivating the milpa (the cornfield with related activities of production and social reproduction) is an essential component of this resistance. When the Mexican government, responding to the exigencies of NAFTA and the forces of the global market that were unchained beginning in the 1980s, modified the historic Article 27 of the Revolutionary Constitution of 1917—the legacy of Zapata’s struggle—to remove protections for peasant communal agriculture in 1992, the latter-day Zapatistas proclaimed this to be a death sentence for their right to define their own way of life. They saw their struggle not just as a defense of land in a strictly bordered geographic sense but as the defense of territory (Aubry 2007), which includes the right to define one’s own cultural, social, and economic relations on that land. In this sense, autonomous existence in their territories is resistance to models imposed by the powerful. That claim is akin to the Palestinians’ olive tree that embodies rootedness and the house key that symbolizes the right of return. For the Zapatistas, when negotiations with the government broke down and the rebels simply continued to exercise the rights they felt they always had in the form of de facto autonomy, it was because the language of resistance did not intersect with the language of domination (Aubry 2003). As the implementation of the 1996 San Andrés Accords dragged on, the final government reneging came in the 2001 indigenous law, which instead of the originally negotiated recognition of indigenous peoples as “subjects of rights” changed that language to “objects of public interest.” Perhaps the Mexican government had hoped to create some kind of subcontracted layer of subordinate government akin to the Palestinian Authority. However, the Zapatistas had already resignified the rules and borders of authority claimed by the federal government, drawing their own lines of newly created autonomous municipalities and engaging in their own practices of resistance in all facets of daily life, without waiting for permission to be free.

As part of their critical resistance, in which alternative/autonomous existence itself becomes an act of rebellion, the Zapatistas in 1996 hosted an “Encounter against Neoliberalism and for Humanity” in their autonomous territories. This underscored the ways in which the Zapatistas conceived of their everyday local practices as a critique of the global structures of neoliberal capitalism. When the government attempted to push these practices to the margins by reinterpreting the San Andrés Accords from the vertical heights of constituted power with legislation that reasserted the hegemonic model and subordinated local self-governance to the authority of the central state, the Zapatistas once again turned to civil society and constituent power. The resistant rebels launched their 2001 “March of the Color of the Earth,” a caravan across half the country from Chiapas to Mexico City, where they planted themselves in the zócalo (erstwhile center of the Aztecs in their resistance to the Spanish invasion), until the Congress had to make space for Comandante Esther to speak their truth to power and address the legislature. Once that body passed its 2001 “Indigenous Law” despite overwhelming rejection by indigenous peoples, the Zapatistas redoubled their focus on inward development of their autonomous communities, including self-governance, administration of justice, health, education, agroecology, and projects of production and exchange that opened alternatives to the capitalist model (Baronnet et al. 2011). When the government seized on this turn toward internal movement-building as an opportunity to proclaim that the Zapatistas had disappeared, the rebels bided their time and then staged a silent march in December 2012 of 40,000 ski-masked Zapatistas through the towns of Chiapas, after which they issued a communiqué asking,

Did you hear?

That is the sound of your world falling apart.

It is the sound of our resurgence.

The day that was the day, was night.

And night will be the day that will be the day.

Democracy!

Liberty!

Justice! (Russo 2012)

The Zapatistas see their autonomous communities as schools of resistance, teaching and learning and practicing the arts of governing themselves free of occupation and domination, in a kind of political pedagogy (Baronnet and Stahler-Sholk 2019). They share what they learn with other movements, not in the old vanguard sense of dictating a single revolutionary line but rather in an open-ended invitation to others to struggle against oppression in their own spheres and manners. Thus, they launched the Zapatista “Little School of Freedom” from 2013 to 2015, compiling narratives from the daily experience of community members in resistance as texts (Escuelita Textbooks 2014), and inviting anyone who shared their principles to spend a week of experiential learning while living with a Zapatista family. Like the Palestinians, the Zapatista communities live under ever-present military occupation. Learning to resist begins at an early age, with the socialization of children in Zapatista families facing “low intensity warfare” or the “integral war of attrition” (Rico Montoya 2013, 2014, 2018). This learning by doing continues through the autonomous schools that are also spaces of education for resistance (Baronnet 2008), into the rotating tasks of voluntary service to the autonomous project as promoters of education and health and participants in the councils of the autonomous municipalities (MAREZ) and Good Governance Boards (JBG), all shaping a new identity of collective resistance. From family and gender roles to community resilience and self-governance, the Zapatistas in their autonomous territories are practicing everyday resistance through what Mora (2017) calls kuxlejal politics using the Maya Tseltal term for everyday life. This decolonizing epistemology of the South, rejecting the hegemonic definition of politics as an atomizing liberal-representative activity that takes place among professional practitioners in a rarified public sphere, has parallels in what other indigenous peoples in the Andean region refer to as sumak kawsay (Kichwa for good living) or buen vivir (the Spanish equivalent).

The subjective element of reinforcement of collective identity, dignity, and empowerment in this process of everyday life is a commonality with the Palestinian struggle. The Palestinian concept of sumud, usually translated as steadfastness, captures a similar idea of everyday existence (in a conscious, critical way) as a form of resistance (Rijke and van Teeffelen 2014). The term sumud and its practice date back at least to the colonial era and Palestinian-defiant noncooperation even during imprisonment (Meari 2014), and the philosophy continues to imbue the spirit of resistance among the populations living in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) since 1967. More than a specific moment in time, such as the intifadas (“shaking-off”) of 1987–1993 and 2000–2005, the concept of sumud implies Palestinian resistance as a structure or process, ongoing throughout the history of colonialism (Svirsky 2017). Central to this process of resistance in the face of unrelenting oppression is the development and maintenance of collective identity and pride, elements of constituent power in both the Palestinian (Dana 2018; Gould 2014) and Zapatista (Stahler-Sholk 2017) resistance.

It is not accidental that the Israeli occupation has created a system of color-coded identity cards to draw distinctions among Palestinians and fragment their identity (Tawil-Souri 2012), like the passbook system of apartheid South Africa or the Hutu/Tutsi distinctions reinforced by divide-and-conquer hierarchies imposed by the Belgian colonizers in Rwanda. The BADIL Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights told our group that there are over 60 Israeli laws aimed at enforcing the separation of rights and status of distinct groups (not to mention the de facto discrimination between Jews of different racial and national origins). BADIL’s strategy of resisting these borders within borders is to combine both national and international legal challenges (e.g., through consultative status with the UN) with education and advocacy work aimed at empowerment of Palestinian civil society. Thus, forging collective identity that breaks down these internal borders is the key to resistance.

Politically, the heirs to colonial government in both Chiapas and Palestine have tried to divide through cooptation. The 2001 Indigenous Law that followed the San Andrés Accords in Chiapas, like the 1993 Oslo Accords in Palestine, pretended to “allow” a measure of recognition by the powerful to those who would subordinate their own autonomous authority. The illusion of negative peace and conditionally delegated quotas of authority and resources to the “permitted Indian” (Hale 2004) may win temporary adherents, but those in resistance at the grassroots derive a unifying pride from their refusal to accept the crumbs and from their steadfastness (sumud) in insisting on real autonomy (EZLN 2018a). In Zapatista-influenced indigenous regions of Chiapas, the central government since the 1994 uprising has released a clientelistic flood of resources to give handouts (despensas, a word that literally comes from the term for pantry or larder), ranging from sacks of corn and beans to construction materials to indigenous people who do not join the Zapatista movement. Interestingly, the Zapatistas use the word “resistance” and the phrase “we are in resistance” to specifically mean refusal to accept government aid or programs, which they see as tools of cooptation and division. The Zapatistas do not pay their members who serve (short terms) in their structures of self-governance, in part to avoid a division of labor that would separate community members from the milpa that is key to their identity as indigenous peasants. They view with a mix of envy and pity their non-Zapatista counterparts, who have become dependent on these government handouts and lost their identity connection to corn and the land.

Journeys across Borders

I first went to Chiapas in December 1994, just before the first anniversary of the uprising. The Mexican army was encircling the area of the rebellion to cut off humanitarian supplies to the Zapatista support base communities. Yet, that artificial border could not stop the networks of national and international solidarity that had sprouted up from civil society, motivating caravans of relief supplies and human rights observers (in effect, globalizing resistance). Then, the siege sprung leaks everywhere, as the Zapatistas announced the creation of 38 Autonomous Rebel Municipalities, many popping up outside the area of encirclement. Again and again, the Zapatistas would transgress the borders of state authority through creative resistance. In August 1994, they had convened a National Democratic Convention in the Lacandón Jungle, building bleachers and inviting civil society to come to an open encounter to envision a democratic society. They named the site Aguascalientes, in historical reference to the location of the 1917 constitutional convention in the midst of the Mexican Revolution (Stephen 1995), symbolically reconnecting with an earlier period across historical time and resignifying the colonial nation-state. When the government later destroyed the site and sent in the army in violation of a ceasefire, attempting unsuccessfully to capture the rebel leadership, the Zapatistas announced the creation of five regional centers that would all be called Aguascalientes, constituting the seeds of an evolving structure of self-governance that would defy both territorial confinement and conventional top-down assumptions about leadership.

At the start of our faculty group’s trip to Palestine, our passport privilege allowed us to traverse one border crossing not available to non-Israeli-citizen Palestinians by flying into Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport, but in order to do so and hopscotch from there to the West Bank, we had to omit any reference to Palestine in the airport security interview about our itinerary. The Israel/Palestine border is erased in the discourse of the settler colonial state that does not even recognize the existence of Palestinians, while the latter return the favor by referring to the territory of Israel outside the OPT simply as “‘48,” the year celebrated by Israelis as marking the declaration of statehood and mourned by Palestinians as the Nakba or catastrophe.

Subsequently throughout the trip, we got a tiny glimpse of the way borders are constructed and imposed on our daily journey between Palestinian East Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank, as armed soldiers boarded our bus to inspect papers while long lines of Palestinians waited on foot in the hot sun for their much more arduous crossing ordeal. One evening, we missed the last direct bus back to Jerusalem and had to take a local public bus to the border to walk across and catch another bus on the other side. In the traffic jam before the border, a couple of people dressed in clown suits were prancing in the road handing out advertising flyers. Adding to the surreal scene, several animated Palestinian teenagers got off our bus to dance in the middle of the street with the clowns, to the smiles of all the passengers, opening a space of youthful joy in the midst of border grimness. Arriving at the border, everyone had to get off and wait in the long Palestinian line, except for those of us with privileged passports who could head for the expedited line. But it was dark, the signs were not clear, and we headed toward a building that we wrongly assumed was the passport checkpoint. We were quickly disabused of that error by a group of Israeli soldiers who came running out waving their rifles, shouting at us in Hebrew. Startled, we hastily turned back to look for the correct place, and someone in the long line of Palestinian would-be crossers watching the scene called out to us, “Welcome to Palestine!”

As Rijke and Minca (2019) point out, border checkpoints are intended not so much for the official rationale of security but as performative spaces of humiliation and the arbitrary exercise of authority. In our group’s conversations with colleagues at Palestinian universities, we heard narratives of the everyday experiences of faculty and students who have to cross borders routinely between home and campus, never knowing whether they will be subjected to hours of delay or public strip searches. One human rights worker in East Jerusalem described the precariousness of daily life for noncitizen Palestinians who could only maintain the coveted Jerusalem residency permit if they constantly submitted elaborate proof that the city was their “center of life,” subject to invasive inspections and revocation if they worked or studied elsewhere and not automatically extended to spouses or even to children unless both parents had residency. Palestinians resist these constant microbarriers not only by lining up to cross checkpoints and carry on with their lives but also by doing so with dignity, ignoring provocations, ignoring the beep of the metal detector unless specifically ordered to turn back, refusing to play the role of suffering victims (Hammami 2015; Rijke and Minca 2019).

The relentless drawing of new borders within borders can be seen clearly in Hebron, a city that is a hub of West Bank trade, divided since 1997 into the H1 sector administered by the Palestinian Authority and the H2 sector by Israel. There the most zealous of religious nationalists build settlements including houses right on top of Palestinian homes and above the marketplace, hurling bags of human waste at the Palestinian merchants and shoppers below. As our group walked around the area with a local activist, a jeep roared up full of settlers shouting abuse at us. One of our Palestinian local hosts, who at the time was facing an impending prison term for nonviolent activism, responded with a wave and a cheerful toda, Hebrew for thank-you. These nonviolent resistance tactics were evidenced again as we left the marketplace and saw an Israeli military patrol detaining and frisking a young Palestinian man. Our hosts stopped to film the scene and ask why they stopped him, to the obvious irritation of the soldiers, but perhaps serving a dissuasive accompaniment function, rooted in a concept of universal human rights that transcend borders.

Solidarity in Resistance

The parallels between the Palestinian and Zapatista struggles have generated some direct solidarity ties. Activists who have made direct contact with both movements have noted and sought to reinforce the connections, for example, through the language of art (Eqeiq 2019). The Zapatista efforts to break down borders by hosting global “encounters” in Chiapas included a 2014 gathering of indigenous peoples that brought the two groups together, producing an explicit Zapatista declaration of solidarity with the Palestinian people (EZLN 2014). The Zapatistas’ Sixth Declaration of the Lacandón Jungle (EZLN 2005) represented an earlier step toward breaking out of geographically bordered confinement, by creating networks of solidarity with national and international subscribers who shared their principles and were invited to become “Adherents to the Sixth”:

This is our simple word which seeks to touch the hearts of humble and simple people like ourselves, but people who are also, like ourselves, dignified and rebel. This is our simple word for recounting what our path has been and where we are now, in order to explain how we see the world and our country, in order to say what we are thinking of doing and how we are thinking of doing it, and in order to invite other persons to walk with us in something very great which is called Mexico and something greater which is called the world. (EZLN 2005)

These outreach initiatives are another way of transcending borders, globalizing resistance, and “breaking the siege” (EZLN 2019). Through their exercise of de facto autonomy that pierces borders, the Zapatistas in effect sidestep the state to forge links directly with the wider civil society (Gilbreth and Otero 2001). This goes beyond the “boomerang effect” of transnational advocacy networks described by Keck and Sikkink (1998) as a tactic for social movements to “scale up” by finding international allies who can put pressure on the state from the outside. Instead, these global networks of solidarity simply build their own horizontal connections rather than trying to negotiate quotas of power with the state. This approach is akin to what Palestinians under occupation do when they reject the legitimacy of the settler-colonial state that imposes a welter of laws to atomize them and deny their unified identity (Quiquivix 2014). Meari (2014:548) points out that the Arabic word for “confession,” which is what the Israeli state authorities try to wring out of imprisoned Palestinians, has the double meaning of “to acknowledge/recognize the other,” which is exactly what the Palestinians in resistance (both in literal prisons and in the occupied territories) refuse to do. In our visit to Palestinian universities on the West Bank, we learned about the multitude of ways in which universities and the borderless sharing of ideas are hemmed in through visa restrictions, interference with the shipment of books, and the movement of students and faculty, frequent military incursions on campus, and “administrative detentions.”

These many borders are all resisted by the Palestinian determination to prioritize education, both within the occupied territory and in the borderless space of the global campus, building ties with a wider intellectual and activist community. As an example of international solidarity aimed at piercing border isolation, the Middle East Studies Association’s Committee on Academic Freedom in July 2019 joined the call by Palestinian civil society groups to organize denunciations of the visa restrictions on foreign nationals teaching at Palestinian universities in the West Bank and Gaza. ¹ Academics also found ways to maintain scholarly collaboration and electronic exchange of materials across borders while joining in cross-border solidarity against the infringement of academic freedom.

The Zapatista openness to “a world in which many worlds may fit,” embodied, for example, in their famously creative use of the Internet to transgress borders, has globalized their resistance and infused resistance practices into a kind of international Zapatismo (Olesen 2004). The seeds and roots they have planted as a kind of rhizomatic movement have led to far-flung outbreaks of rebel resistance as far away as Mexico City, Los Angeles, and beyond, inspired by—but not imitating—Zapatista resistance as part of an alter-globalization movement of movements (Dellacioppa 2009). The Zapatistas build solidarity on their own autonomous terms, avoiding the non-govermental organization (NGO)-ization and bureaucratization of negotiated alliance-building that can reinforce North/South power dynamics and open the door to cooptation, a dilemma that Palestinians also face in the post-Oslo era (Meari 2014:556). Thus, when the Zapatistas in 2003 reorganized their governing structures to create regional Good Governance Boards, requiring all solidarity groups to vet their “aid” proposals through these bodies that included representation from the rebel communities in the region, they were consciously trying to regulate contact with civil society in order to maintain control of their own process (van der Haar 2004:105). Olesen (2004) calls this alternative model mutual solidarity in contrast to the more conventional (one-way) altruistic solidarity. Such struggles for true autonomy, based on developing a global language of resistance that establishes horizontal solidarity from below, represent a continuation of the historical process of decolonization (Forbis 2016). This form of resistance is not a quest for autarky or isolation. On the contrary, it reclaims the agency of oppressed people to build solidarity, a process through which the collective subjects of resistance empower themselves.

Alongside the currently fashionable concept of resilience, which can be an individual strategy for surviving oppression, resistance is by its very nature collective, constructing a rebellious identity that is larger than the sum of its individual parts. Individuals and communities can develop adaptations to the harshness of oppression and occupation that give them resilience—the “infrapolitics of resistance” (Ryan 2015)—while simultaneously participating strategically in a wider movement to change those conditions. In a roundtable discussion with Palestinian psychologists during our 2019 trip, one clinical psychologist criticized the wholesale importation of “trauma studies” as pathologizing Palestinians from a Western gaze, ignoring the context of colonialism and assuming people were “victims” of post-traumatic stress disorder rather than seeing struggle as a conscious way of coping with the adversary. Another commented that “resilience is a trap; we expect people to individually absorb the cost of social injustice.” ² In their view, the exclusive focus on individual trauma, even coming from well-intentioned practitioners of “humanitarian psychiatry,” was not a decolonizing and empowering form of solidarity.

Some Concluding Reflections

The Palestinians, and the Maya communities that make up the heart of the Zapatista rebellion, both occupy liminal spaces within the existing structures of states and borders. Both continue to struggle, in the twenty-first century, with colonial processes that have marginalized them. Both have incorporated into their struggles against oppression, various forms of resistance that draw on traditions of ANV. Both draw strength in their resistance from rootedness not just in the land but more broadly in the territory, through the olive tree and the milpa, the spaces and millennial processes through which their respective cultural, social, and historical memory bonds have developed. Faced with the imposition of forcible, ugly, and humiliating occupation, dignity and art (Eqeiq 2019; Gould 2014) as well as joy (Rijke and van Teeffelen 2014) become expressions of resistance.

One lesson that these two experiences reveals is that the process of resistance itself and the formation of collective identity are mutually reinforcing. Another lesson is that resistance can proceed on the parallel tracks represented by both the dramatic moments of uprising and the silent moments of everyday existence. Another is that state policies that divide and draw borders between and through people are only effective to the extent that they are internalized. The Zapatista insistence that their non-Zapatista indigenous counterparts are their sisters and brothers, and their imaginary of “a world in which many world will fit,” like the Palestinian historical memory of a land shared in mutual respect by diverse peoples, is subversive of the hegemonic colonial project. In both post-1994 rebel Chiapas and post-1993 (Oslo) Palestine, a key element of resistance is the implementation of de facto rather than negotiated autonomy, not waiting for permission from an illegitimate authority to exercise agency and affirm rights through everyday existence. Finally, an important resource for resistance movements is solidarity, which in its essence transcends the borders that divide people by joining them together in a community of shared struggle.