Beyond and Against White Settler Colonialism in Palestine

Introduction

Knowledge of freedom is (in) the invention of escape, stealing away in the confines, in the form, of a break.

Amir Nizar Zuabi’s (2014) 900-word short story, titled “The Underground Ghetto City of Gaza,” begins with an exodus of biblical proportions: “Ten years and seven operations later . . . Upper Gaza is totally abandoned. All of Gaza has moved underground. Men, women and children, a great mass of people.” For the readers of a leading Israeli news site, Haaretz, where the story was published, the word image of “a great mass of people” moving—fleeing—strikes a chord of familiarity, echoing the biblical exodus of the Jewish people fleeing their slavery and death in Egypt. For Palestinian readers, it would also bring to mind a different exodus, that of the 1948 Nakba, when more than 700,000 Palestinians fled their homes in the face of the unrelenting settler colonial violence of the newly forming Israeli state. Nizar Zuabi’s story mobilizes both of these images to begin his story with a similar, yet different, sort of exodus, a futuristic and fugitive exodus of the Palestinian people into the depths of the earth to flee the relentless exploding bombs and stomping boots of the Israeli army. Deftly drawing from both of these mentioned narratives of exodus, the exodus of this story is both a fleeing of colonial violence and displacement, and also a return to a homeland. Nizar Zuabi (2014) writes,

We dug entire neighborhoods, streets, highways, schools, theaters, hospitals. We dug mirror images of the land above that we abandoned. We gave up on the dream of getting out of the Gaza Strip. On the promises to lift the blockade, to find a solution to the crowdedness and the hunger, and we took action.

That action, to “bury ourselves alive,” to keep digging “all the way to the core,” and “perforate the land like a honeycomb” is what will bring about the change that wasn’t possible for the Palestinians on the surface. In this way, the Palestinian fugitives of the story become the gravediggers of empire, digging until the world “will suddenly collapse in on itself,” digging their way through the land into new decolonial futures.

This article closely examines Amir Nizar Zuabi’s short story, published on August 4, 2014, in Haaretz, during the fourth week of the most recent (2014) military invasion of Israel into Gaza, called “Operation Protection Edge” by Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). I analyze Nizar Zuabi’s story as an example of the fugitive futurity of decolonization, movements that refuse colonial forms of inclusion within the state, evacuate Eurocentric definitions of humanity and being as a site of contestation, and, “in perpetual flight from genocide” moves “toward healthy intimacies” (James, 2013). In the story, Nizar Zuabi centers land and fugitive movements within it, in the hopes of decolonial futures beyond the current colonial constructs of being offered to Palestinians. In the invention of escape, in tunneling through the land, decolonial and Palestinian futures are realized in Gaza. In the midst of profound violence, Nizar Zuabi is creatively activating decolonial futures.

Furthermore, this story engages with modes of refusal that are both disruptive of colonial violence and generative of Palestinian futures. I discuss these generative refusals as instigating fugitive futurities to contribute to the larger theorizing of decolonization, of what decolonization will require, and Palestine’s connections within decolonization. Decolonization demands more than understanding the predatory modes of settler colonialism for resistance to them (as is often the stated goal within settler colonial studies), but also the resurgence of alternative modes of being, alternative futures. It is not enough to merely disrupt or “de-link” from coloniality (Mignolo, 2007); decolonization further demands the resurgence of Indigenous, Black, and non-White life, knowledges and ways of being. This resurgence positions these ways of being as propositions and pathways for/to the future, rather than merely as a stasis to be recovered, or as that which stands immobile in resistance to the colonial flux. Decolonial futurities are able to imagine and perform and, in so doing create, “otherwise worlds” and worlds beyond the limits of colonial imagination (Crawley, 2015). Decolonial futures are the result of the generative reinvigoration of what colonialism has cast as degenerate.

Part of my motivation for this article is also to situate Palestine and Palestinian writing within the discourses of decolonial futurity (as seen in Indigenous futurism, and the more established Afrofuturism) and decolonization, placing it in conversation with these resistance and resurgence movements in other geographic contexts. Not only will I connect the Palestinian struggle to other Indigenous struggles against settler colonialism but I will also draw from a robust history of Black radical studies, particularly in relation to fugitivity, to highlight the intersecting and concomitant ways in which decolonization demands we work across race and indigeneity. Often race, and particularly forms of anti-Black racism, have been under attended in conceptions of settler colonialism, broadly, and Palestinian studies more specifically; as Junaid Rana (2014) has recently argued in regard to racism in Palestine, “racism is more often seen to be epiphenomenal, a tangent, a hindrance to be overcome, rather than an integral part of the design [of settler colonial occupation].” In truth, even a superficial glance demonstrates the intense anti-Black racism and state violence that is an integral part of the daily settler occupation of the state of Israel, typically meted out against Black immigrants in the form of mass detention (Tait, 2014), forced sterilization (David, 2014), and frequent, violent demonstrations where White Jewish Israelis chant, “Blacks out!” (Greenwood, 2012). Jemima Pierre (2015) does important work in connecting these incidents to argue that Zionism and the occupation of Palestine are explicitly anti-Black projects. In light of these examples, as well as the global design of anti-Blackness as central to the project of colonialism (Wynter, 2003), this essay, despite examining settler colonialism within the Palestinian context, intentionally centers traditions of Black radical thought and critical Indigenous sovereignty alongside Palestinian scholarship. I do this alongside similar scholarship that sees the forms of anti-Black racism and settler colonialism as co-constitutive and/or inextricably intertwined (Jackson, 2014; King, 2014; Tuck, Guess, & Sultan, 2014).

In this way, I hope to illustrate the complex and nuanced ways in which fugitive futurities are an important framework for understanding decolonization, particularly in relation to imagining alternative modes of being and relating, both to one another and to the land, beyond the settler state. Discussing Israel and Palestine within settler colonial and decolonization frameworks is not new (Abdo & Yuval-Davis, 1995) and, as Bandar and Ziadah (2016) remind us, there is a robust history of scholarship that situates Palestine within the colonial project and creates a foundation for current scholarship around settler colonialism in Palestine. In recent years, there has been a marked rise of settler colonialism as a term of reference and field of inquiry within the academy, and subsequently a more recent reinvigoration of writing about the settler colonial nature of the Israeli state and its occupation of Palestinian territory, beginning with those such as Salaita (2006) who connect settler colonialism in the United States to settler colonialism in Palestine, and continuing through into an even more recent and ongoing explosion in past years (Jabary Salamanca, Qato, Rabie, & Samour, 2012; Krebs & Olwan, 2012; Mikdashi, 2013; Perugini, 2014; Saranillio, 2014; Veracini, 2013). Along with comparisons with state imposed apartheid (particularly in South Africa), Israel has been commonly compared with other White settler colonial nations such as Canada, the United States, and Australia, which occupy the territories of Indigenous peoples, displacing and killing them to settle and make a new home in which to stay. This article builds on these histories of settler colonial scholarship, but also actively works to unsettle the boundaries of settler colonialism, embracing the slippages and interplay within colonialism and settler colonialism; King (2013) reminds us of the productive “elasticity” between these terms when theorized through Black and Indigenous feminist lenses, a necessary elasticity that is echoed by Bhandar and Ziadah (2016) in regard to Palestine. This productive slippage between colonialism and settler colonialism allows different forms of solidarity to be opened, and also allows the recognition of the anti-Black settler colonial nature of Israeli occupation and how Palestinian futurities breach these many forms of occupation and colonial violence in transformative ways.

The Politics of Refusal in Nizar Zuabi’s Underground Gaza

We, who were attacked from the sky, from the sea, from the fields, who had one-ton bombs dropped on our heads in pointless rounds of killing, have turned our back on life. We, whom the world forgot, decided to pay it back in kind, and forgot it right back. (Nizar Zuabi, 2014)

We kept digging, more and more, with bare hands, with cracked fingernails. We dug so deep, so far, that we cancelled out the blockade and the borders and the definitions of the upper world. (Nizar Zuabi, 2014)

The politics of refusal, particularly in refusing the various modes of enclosure offered by the colonial state, have been taken up in both Indigenous and radical Black scholarship. Coulthard’s (2007, 2014) influential work on the politics of Indigenous recognition argues, through a Fanonian lens, that recognition and inclusion through the state, rather than leading to sovereignty, reproduce the very colonial power that Indigenous peoples hope to transcend. It is a refusal to settle for a seat at the colonial table when the table itself could be overturned. Audra Simpson’s (2007, 2014) equally important work on ethnographic refusal similarly demonstrates how colonial recognition works to establish “the terms of even being seen” (p. 69), how the colonial frame of reference “sieves” Indigenous futures “in ways that are not their own” (p. 70). Instead, and in response to these colonial impositions, she positions refusal as generative, as re-opening space for Indigenous sovereignties and futures. Tuck and Yang (2014) take up refusal in similar ways, as both, setting the limits of what can be known and also as a generative anticolonial counterknowledge. In productive relationship to the above works, writers such as Joy James (2013) have taken up Black refusal through discussions of fugitivity and maroon philosophy, building on the work of scholars such as Hartman & Wilderson (2003), Wynter (2003), and other Black radical scholars, in arguing for the need to resist inclusion into the “perpetual genocide” of democracy, arguing instead for work and theory based on the Black maroons who “in perpetual flight from genocide and towards health intimacy . . . crossed the borders of colonies and democracies” (p. 127).

Nizar Zuabi’s Palestinian fugitives embody these strands of refusal, in both the destructive and generative senses of the term. Their work of building alternative futures begins with refusal: “We gave up on the dream . . . and we took action” (Nizar Zuabi, 2014). Often those who advocate for an emphasis on futurity are levied with the charge of abdicating the now for a utopic future but, as Anderson (2010) demands, the future must be both imagined and built in the now. This is what the Palestinian fugitives of Nizar Zuabi’s story do; they refuse the present situation, and the death it entails, and set to work to build a better alternative. The future for the fugitive, then, is not a utopic dream in the face of a stubborn, destructive reality. As Gaza is “totally abandoned,” the fugitives abandon even hope: “We gave up on the dream of getting out of the Gaza Strip. On the promises to lift the blockade, to find a solution to the crowdedness and the hunger.”

Instead of paralyzing the fugitives, their abandonment of hope energizes them to dig, to build an entirely new city under the ground, to build an entirely new existence beyond the continual violence of the world above. What the abandonment of hope illustrates is that, within the colonial context of Israel, there never was any hope to begin with for the Palestinians. Deleuze wrote in 1978 that, “Palestinians were never given any choice other than unconditional surrender. All they were offered was death” (Deleuze, 2006, p. 165). Two weeks before Nizar Zuabi’s story was published in Hareetz, the Jerusalem Post published an opinion column by Martin Sherman (2014), which was titled and which argued, “Gaza Must Go.” It was a violent, settler colonial piece of rhetoric that argued, in light of the ongoing resistance in Gaza, “The grass needs to be uprooted—once and for all . . . The only durable solution requires dismantling Gaza . . . and extension of Israeli sovereignty over the region . . .”

Nizar Zuabi’s story and its dismissal of hope flips the idea of “Gaza Must Go” and looks at what it might mean to intentionally evacuate the Israeli state, and their vacuous promises of solutions, for other possibilities. In refusal, the fugitives realize the opportunity to invest in other places and other worlds—they choose to focus on building elsewhere. Within the parameters of Gaza’s walls and the state violence that contains Palestinians within them, there is no hope to find; the search is futile. The physical blockade and the ongoing Israeli occupation of Gaza are both literally sieving the possibilities and options of Palestinians living there, and also sieving the futures available to them through the demand for the continuance of settler occupation. There is no hope that Israel will liberate Gaza; the normalcy and legitimacy of the settler state demands the negation of Palestinian claims to land and sovereignty. But, in Nizar Zuabi’s story, refusing the hope of possible rescue leads to a collective, mass movement into the ground. In the story, refusal is a fugitive move that generatively builds a new, alternative future within the land. As Halberstam (2013) succinctly reminds us, “The path to the wild beyond is paved with refusal” (p. 8).

What, exactly, is being refused, though by the fugitive? Here, I want to lay out three interconnected and mutually reinforcing modes of colonialism that are being refused in Nizar Zuabi’s story. I will focus briefly on the first two (the state and definitions of the human), and more extensively on the third (property relationships); though, there is much more to be explored and said about each of these, especially in regard to how they are connected and co-constitutive of one another, which can only be gestured at in this brief space.

First, the Palestinian fugitives refuse the recognition of the Israeli state as the mode of liberation and freedom. The fugitive politics of decolonization in Nizar Zuabi’s story refuse binaristic solutions, such as a “one-state solution” or a “two state solution,” that are so often called for in Palestine; instead choosing, as Palestinian scholar Sophia Azeb (2014) calls it, a “no-state solution,” opening up new possibilities that allow “moving beyond the imaginary of the state” (Azeb, 2014). Rana (2014) similarly demands that decolonization in Palestine is not simply the fight for a nation-state but “also a struggle of liberation from the nation-state.” Both Azeb and Rana connect Indigenous movements, particularly in Turtle Island (North America), to the struggle for Palestinian futures, stating that the power of Indigenous movements—such as the recent Idle No More movement, for example—for Palestinians is assisting in “imagining a sovereignty that goes beyond the nation state, that is land based” (Azeb, 2014). In refusing the solutions of the state, Nazir Zuabi, like Azeb, looks outside the current frames of inclusion and possibility, beyond “the promises to lift the blockade, to find a solution for the crowdedness and hunger” (Nizar Zuabi, 2014). As Azeb (2014) argues, Palestinians have been fighting for a nation-state because, to be recognized within international frameworks, one must be a nation. Instead, in Nazir Zuabi’s story, inclusion and, subsequently, state-based solutions necessary for inclusion, are abandoned for a politics of fugitivity and land-based futurity.

Second, in “The Underground Ghetto City of Gaza,” there is a refusal of being “human” as understood through colonial sense-making mechanisms and the legal apparatuses that enshrine these particular definitions of humanness and belonging. Harney and Moten (2013), building on Fanon, demonstrate the decolonization is not only the end of colonialism but “the end of the standpoint from which colonialism makes sense” (Halberstam, 2013, p. 8). Sylvia Wynter’s (2003) work underpins how Western reason and sense making have been the bulwarks of the coloniality of Man, centering the heteronormative, White, rational male subject. Wynter demonstrates the historical and ideological roots of the colonial construct of Man and its central role not only in global anti-Black violence but also in the project of empire and genocide in the so-called “new world,” a project that Weheliye (2014) takes up and furthers in his recent work. They demonstrate how conceptions of humanity (and who might be included in this category) have always been racialized, gendered, colonial, etc. in ways that structure the ideal rational and universal Man in contrast to and negation of “Others.” Weheliye (2014) argues that this refusal of Man (as a category of being) has been the central work of critical Black studies, which “works towards the abolition of Man, and advocates the radical reconstruction and decolonization of what it means to be human” (p. 4).

In Nizar Zuabi’s story, the Palestinian fugitives have “turned their back on life” because Palestinian life within the White, settler colonial nation of Israel has been constructed through these frameworks of racism and colonialism as non-human. Within Gaza, Palestinians live at the mercy of an occupier that seeks their perpetual (into the future) death. The settler colonial state, built through the connected structures of anti-Black racism and Indigenous genocide, seeks the perpetual death of Palestinian life. As a past Prime Minister of Israel, Ben Guirion, sums up: “We must expel the Arabs and take their places and if we have to, use force, to guarantee our own right to settle in those places” (n.p., in Martin, 2005). There is no possibility for Palestinian futures within occupied Gaza.

In “turning our back on life,” the Palestinian fugitives abdicate both the pursuit of inclusion into the solutions of the colonial nation-state and what this inclusion demands, which is the “acceptance of categories [of the human] based on white supremacy and colonialism” (Weheliye, 2014, p. 77). When one has been forgotten, relegated to the zone of non-being and perpetual death, the only action left besides waiting for death, is refusal—“We, whom the world forgot, decided to pay it back in kind, and forgot it right back” (Nizar Zuabi, 2014). The colonial logic of life, as existing into perpetuity alongside the perpetual death of the racialized and Indigenous other, is illustrated in Nizar Zuabi’s story by the chants shouted alongside the “military march” of boots: They shout, “Death to Gaza . . . Death to life!” The logic of White settler colonialism has marked Palestinians for death; they are made murderable and, in fact, must be murdered for settler colonialism to be normalized and legitimated. They are the non-human by which, and through, whose death, the occupation and its definitions of who belongs, who is human, are made normal. And, it is these logics, of inclusion and of who is made human, that are blocked—in fact, the very shouts of “Death to life!” are blocked in the story—by the land. The fugitives “return to [the land]” and, in the process of return and in the process of fleeing, of digging through it, cancel out the rules and definitions of settler colonialism.

Settler Colonialism and the Futuristic Politics of Land

Decolonization necessarily involves an interruption of the settler colonial nation-state, and of settler relations to land. Decolonization must mean attending to ghosts. (Tuck & Ree, 2013, p. 647)

For Nizar Zuabi’s fugitives, “the only refuge left to us was the earth. We buried ourselves.” Within the earth they are safe from the death above them and there they can build a different future, a different world that is both a refuge and a site of possibility. This emphasis of the importance of the land, and the call to “return” to it echoes the multitude of Indigenous writers who demand the centering of the land—of earth, water, and territory—in decolonization movements (Corntassel, 2012; Tuck & Yang, 2012; Watts, 2013). Too often the emphasis on land and earth has rendered Indigenous politics as static, as rooted and unable to adapt (Goeman, 2013; Martineau & Ritskes, 2014). King (2013) emphasizes this “fixing” as part of the settler colonial discourse, where Indigenous peoples’ connection and relationship to land is stuck in the particular:

Settlement is the subjugation and sinking/fixing of others into a state of flux (death, fungibility) in order for the Settler to transcend into a state of humanness. As the ultimate self actualizing human, the Settler can actually overcome the particularity of place (body, gender, race, abject sexuality) and launch into the universal and abstract space. (p. 98)

Indigenous conceptions of land refuse these colonial fixations and are instead mnemonic, alive, and ever changing; land is what roots Indigenous routes of flight against and beyond colonialism (Goeman, 2013; Martineau & Ritskes, 2014; Vizenor, 1998). Nizar Zuabi’s piece beautifully illustrates how Indigenous land roots paths of flight, affirmatively answering questions such as the one Mishuana Goeman (2013) asks about Indigenous peoples in relation to their lands, “Are we free to roam?” (p. 11). Indigenous land itself resists stasis; it is alive and in motion.

Nizar Zuabi’s futurity rejects state inclusion, and its colonial definitions of the human, and plunges into the earth, digging. He both re-roots while re-routing through the land, toward a future where colonial definitions of humanity no longer make sense. In this, he embraces the land as both particular and mobile, re-rooting/routing the Palestinian fugitives in and through spaces that reconfigure their very beings. It is in this move to the land that the third mode of colonial being is refused. In centering both survival and future within conceptions of Indigenous and Palestinian land, the logic and relationality of property ownership is refused. I want to further examine how Indigenous land challenges this colonial mode of being and demonstrate how, by reorienting the spatial through Indigenous understandings of land, we might also reorganize the temporal logics of belonging to include past, present, and future as sites of contestation. Decolonization demands attention to, and struggle for, not only the past and present, but also the future. As Nizar Zuabi (2014) declares in his story, recognizing the connections between the colonial definitions of humanity and temporality, in digging the fugitives dig “beyond life, and far beyond time.”

In digging through the earth, the Palestinian fugitives of Nizar Zuabi’s story are reconnected and rooted to their history; as Indigenous Hawaiian scholar and activist Huanani Kay Trask (1999) states, “To know my history, I had to put away my books and return to the land” (p. 118). Indigenous “land is mnemonic, it has its own set of memories” (Wheeler, 2010, p. 55) and, as these fugitives dig, they dig “down into the soil of Gaza, through the layers of time” (Nizar Zuabi, 2014). In the ground, tunneling and perforating time, the Palestinian fugitives find ghosts of the past, of their history: They find Samson’s long braid, Delilah’s thighbone, and broken pillars from an ancient temple; remnants from a tale of past revenge when Samson brought Palestinian buildings tumbling, killing thousands of people. An etching on one of the pillars leaves no way to miss the message of this story: “Remember me, please, that I may be avenged of my two eyes.” Zuabi’s use of this particular story speaks of vengeance against the occupying oppressor; Samson, who had his eyes gouged out, his strength removed, and his dignity stolen and, yet, in the midst of a seeming never-ending captivity, was able to rise up one last time and exact revenge on his captors.

It is in the land that these stories are unearthed and re-animated alongside the tunneling fugitives. Keshet (2011) argues that the Palestinian refugee is the ghost that haunts the state of Israel because of the state’s denial of the Palestinian’s right to return to their homeland; in Nizar Zuabi’s story, it is in the land that the refugee finds both these ghosts and also a “subterranean right of return” (Nizar Zuabi, 2014). This “right of return” which is found within the soil confounds inclusion within the settler colonial state: “Haunting . . . is the relentless remembering and reminding that will not be appeased by settler society’s assurances of innocence and reconciliation” (Tuck & Ree, 2013, p. 642). The return of the Palestinian body to Palestinian land is a re-rooting, a reclaiming of place, and an assertion of relationships that exist before, beneath, and beyond settler colonial imposition. Byrd (2014) argues that for Indigenous bodies, their return “haunts the nation-state” formation and, subsequently, is always deferred and dispersed. Here, these Palestinian histories, the ghosts of belonging in this place, haunt the Israeli state. Coming face to face with a history that represents Palestinian life and history, there is a direct challenge to Israeli settler colonialism, which demands the emptying of Palestinian life and history to claim sole historical legitimacy to occupy the land. These ghosts, dug up by the fugitives, are once again made visible and, in the process, demonstrate the potential to disrupt the past, present, and future of Israeli settler colonialism.

This temporal reconstruction and remixing is central to the fugitive futurism of this story, where past, present, and future are (re)constructed within (and, in motion through) the land. This is done through refusing colonial intrusion; as the fugitives dig Nizar Zuabi notes the sounds of the occupation are blocked by the land, “we don’t hear anything anymore.” Nizar Zuabi’s Palestinian fugitives dig, and then they keep digging: “we kept digging—beyond life and beyond time.” The “beyond” is a fugitive, futuristic move that seeks escape from colonial “life” and “time.” This remixing of the temporal in the “beyond” gestures to what Fanon (1967) argues, that without a Black past and a Black future, he is unable to live out his Black identity in the present. It is the same for the Palestinian fugitives. In the earth, their past (Delilah’s braid, the temple pillars) is reconnected to the present struggles, while digging in a move to secure the future. The land holds the past; as Goeman (2013) demonstrates, the land is storied land and the holder of memories and knowledge. The land also holds decolonial futurities that exist beyond settler futures (Tuck & Yang, 2012).

The land in Nizar Zuabi’s story does more than remix colonial understandings of time in relation to place, it also confounds colonial sense making, more broadly. As the Palestinians build and entrust themselves to the land, the world above them is canceled out and destroyed. Both the physical and material manifestations of occupation are canceled out—the noise of the bombs, the limits of the wall—but also the very definitions of the occupation are canceled: “We dug so deep, so far, that we cancelled out the blockade and the borders and the definitions of the upper world” (Nizar Zuabi, 2014). The definitions that are canceled are the terms of colonial understanding, of being, and of relating—of who belongs, whose life matters, and who has a future.

Zuabi’s descriptions of going underground and of the digging emphasize the land as material and agentic—the land is layered by time, it cracks fingernails, it is the ally of despair and the despairing. Understanding land as agentic, as escaping the definitional confines of colonial sense making in itself, confounds colonial sense making. Discussing Indigenous epistemologies and land, Watts (2013) insists that Indigenous ways of knowing and relating to land directly counter and disrupt colonial sense making. Her writing itself deconstructs “reason,” science and history look like by working from the premise that the story of Sky Woman, as part of the Haudenosaunee creation story of the land is, “not imagined or fantasized. This is not lore, myth or legend . . . This is what happened” (p. 21). Indigenous conceptions of the earth see it as agentic, as “alive and thinking”; human (and non-human) agency is derivative of and concomitant with the agentic, speaking, stor(y)ing land. It is this agentic, mnemonic, Indigenous land that the fugitives return to, to tunnel and build in; it is this land that holds them and protects them; and, it is this land that “perforates” the world and causes its violent destruction (Nizar Zuabi, 2014).

In the fugitive’s continual tunneling into the land,

We start to hope that if we keep on digging . . . if we don’t stop . . . maybe it will suddenly collapse in on itself . . . The upper part and lower part will blend. And the rules will change. (Nizar Zuabi, 2014)

This is the destructive and violent possibility of decolonization: that the rules will change when the current world collapses.

Decolonization, which sets out to change the order of the world, is, obviously, a program of complete disorder . . . In decolonization, there is therefore the need of a complete calling in question of the colonial situation . . . “The last shall be first and the first last.” Decolonization is the putting into practice of this sentence. (Fanon, 1961, pp. 35-36)

In the story, when the upper world is destroyed, definitions of the nation and of the human are also destroyed, as is the colonial mode of being/relationality: property. Critical Black studies has articulated how Black bodies and Blackness challenge racialized logics of property and ownership constructed within colonial frames; similarly, Indigenous land challenges conceptions of property and ownership, presenting alternatives and “relationships otherwise.” Property is a settler colonial mode of being in relationship, a mode of power based on conquest and exploitation that subverts Indigenous modes of relationship to land, seeking to destroy them to claim ownership of the land (Tuck & Yang, 2012). Indigenous conceptions of land refuse the logics of property and ownership and “this radical relationality to the land, that is birthed from and in the alterity of indigeneity, is a lived critique of settler modes of knowing and sensing that are cognitively ordered through property and ownership” (Martineau & Ritskes, 2014).

The fugitive’s move into the land, returning and re-rooting/re-routing to and through the refuge of the earth, is a move irrecupable to colonial ways of knowing and being. King (2013), who in her work links Black studies and Indigenous studies, demonstrates through her examination of the plantation and Black female bodies how property is a “concept of unending possibility that cognitively orders the mind of the Settler and master and enables their surveying eyes to see the potential yield of both bodies and land as commodities” (pp. 23-24). In moving through the land and in seeing within the land a mode of belonging that goes beyond the confines and definitions of settler colonialism, the fugitives refuse not only definitions of the human but the relationships of property ownership that defines who is human through colonial constructions of Man. Weheliye (2014) demonstrates how colonialism demands the death of the Indigenous body as the “fee” in which to access personhood, to “save the world of Man” (p. 79). Settler colonialism demands Indigenous death (genocide), to maintain and normalize property ownership over land; property ownership is also the mode of relating to Black flesh within an anti-Black world (slavery), making Black peoples property to be owned. As Kawash (1999) argues, “The purpose of the [settler colonial] state begins with the irreducible principle: the principle of property” (p. 238). The settler colonial state is founded on these modes of being and relationship oriented through property.

Instead of personhood and inclusion founded on relationships of property, the Palestinian fugitives turn in/to the land and the possibilities of new decolonial relationalities found within it. Not only does the land resist definitions of personhood connected to relationships of property—as Kawash (1999) writes, “The modern idea of property and the modern idea of the subject are indissociable” (p. 238)—but it re-links to relationalities and modes of being found in the land; as Trask (1999) argues, for Indigenous peoples, “[Our story and being] rests within the culture, which is inseparable from the land. To know this is to know our history. To write this is to write of the land and the people who are born from her” (p. 121). The Palestinian people are born from the land, the loamy soil of Gaza, and, in their desire to escape occupation, they return to it. Nazir Zuabi refuses the world of colonial sense making and, in digging—in fugitive movements through the land—perforates the world and willingly brings about its complete destruction. Digging, in this story, is the fugitive action bringing about decolonial futures:

And we start to hope that if we keep on digging, all the way to the core, if we don’t stop . . . maybe it will suddenly collapse in on itself. And then, like a tray piled with cups of coffee and cookies that crashes to the floor in a mess of crumbs and glass, it will all mix together.

This fugitive action is birthed of a politics of refusal, the refusal of the intimately connected colonial cognitive orders of the state, of humanity, and of property. Digging perforates the world constructed by colonization and gives possible Palestinian futures beyond occupation. Tunneling digs the grave of empire and births new futures, and—in Nizar Zuabi’s story—new people who emerge from the earth.

Conclusion

In Zuabi’s fugitive futurity, it is in the soil that Palestinians experience a “right to return”; it is the land that welcomes them home and gives them what the state of Israel refuses to do. It is a reminder that it is not the colonial state that is home; it is the land, the literal earth, that is both home and also brings them home. It is in the land that the Palestinian fugitive is re-rooted and re-routed beyond settler colonialism. This futuristic “right of return” is a repopulating of Palestinian life and future on and in the land. The ending of Nizar Zuabi’s story sees the Palestinian people re-emerge from the ground into the light, onto the surface of the land. Upon re-emerging, fear creeps into their hearts that “while we were finding refuge in subterranean Gaza, the land above took its own life, was left behind and emptied out.” This uncertain ending does two things. One, it refutes a popular Israeli argument, that the Palestinians wish to see the Jewish people exterminated and driven into the sea; thus, because of this murderous drive, any violence that Israel metes out is merely self-defense against an enemy that wishes to see it exterminated. It also speaks back against the narrative that emanated from the most recent siege, both from Israeli commentators and soldiers. Editorials emerged from leading Israeli news sites, such as one in the Jerusalem Post (Sherman, July 24, 2014), titled “Why Gaza Must Go,” that advocated for “uprooting” Gaza and displacing the Palestinians living there as the only approach acceptable, and one in The Times of Israel (Gordon, August 1, 2014), titled “When Genocide is Permissible,” that advocated for “permissible” genocide of the Palestinian peoples. These “final solutions” demand the removal and extermination of the Palestinian people, an emptying out of the land for Israeli sovereignty to flourish. And that, according to IDF soldiers involved in the ground incursion, is what happened. In an online article, IDF soldiers were quoted saying that, “When we [pulled out of Gaza] we made sure there was nothing left standing, no resistance” and that their unit had “wiped clean” the area they had been fighting in (Frenkel, 2014). Instead, in the story, the Palestinians do not disappear and refuse to disappear, the Palestinians emerge to repopulate the land and to claim their rightful place in Gaza.

Settler colonialism demands an emptying of the land, a genocidal removal of anyone and anything that challenges the normativity and legitimacy of the settler’s existence and right to rule as sovereign. The land becomes free to claim in the violent absence of life. As the Jerusalem Post (2014) article argues, Gaza and its people must be dismantled and removed to extend “Israeli sovereignty over the area.” This is the logic of settler colonialism that Zuabi refuses once again in his ending. He refuses death, including the death of the Jewish people, as the basis for the future. The decolonial future is not the emergence of one people at the expense of another, but a future where everyone’s right to be is affirmed and the challenges of working together to build with and on the land beyond the limits and definitions of settler colonialism are embraced.

The future that awaits the re-emergent Palestinian people cannot be rendered easily imaginable—their fugitive tunneling through Indigenous land is both world making and world shattering; this is the power fugitive futurities (Halberstam, 2013). Through refusal, a tunnel, a passage way, a break, is opened up for the work of imagining, enacting, and building new relationalities, relationalities that are “beyond” the limits of colonial sense making. The vision written out in Nizar Zuabi’s “The Underground Ghetto City of Gaza” is not a utopia; it is a fugitive future. It recognizes that the work of building new decolonial relationalities has much to accomplish even after the destruction of the “world above.” Decolonization must be both world shattering and world building. But we do not yet know exactly where that building, that rooting/routing, that creative force will take us. Despite this unknown that the fugitives are confronted with upon emergence onto the surface, they know the conditions of possibility lie within the land and the reconfiguring of relationships through the land. To be able to make a break, to puncture the definitions of the world that colonialism has created, there must be a fugitive futurity that refuses recognition and integration, that remains irrecupable to colonial being, sensing and knowing, and that creatively imagines and builds futures beyond the limits of colonial forms of knowing, relating, and being.