Hashem Abushama (University of Oxford)
A crisis occurs, sometimes lasting for decades. This exceptional duration means that incurable structural contradictions have revealed themselves (reached maturity), and that, despite this, the political forces which are struggling to conserve and defend the existing structure itself are making every effort to cure them, within certain limits, and to overcome them. These incessant and persistent efforts (since no social formation will ever admit that it has been superseded) form the terrain of the “conjunctural”, and it is upon this terrain that the forces of opposition organise. (Gramsci 1971: 178)
It is neither victory nor defeat, yet. While Zionism surely seems to be encountering an impasse, we should be careful so as not to proclaim victories or defeats prematurely; as a matter of fact, these binaries do much damage in foreclosing contestations and possibilities within formations of resistance and blurring them out of sight. The contradiction underpinning Zionism as an ideology has been its posturing as a progressive movement (supposedly against antisemitism, and for the realisation of Jewish liberation), on the one hand, and its foregrounding of colonial dispossession, racialisation, and violence as its modes of realisation for this project in Palestine, on the other. Zionism posited itself on the global stage as a victim whose reparation can only be an ethnonationalist settler colonial state. As an ideology, it is shrouded in a politics of victimhood. This can be seen most clearly in its ideological instrumentalisation of antisemitism. For example, somehow, Israel becomes a victim in its own bombardment of Palestinian hospitals with 2,000-pound bombs. Zionism has become so deft in erasing entire geographies and communities only then to strangely emerge as the victim. We should not underestimate the power of this organic contradiction, for it has had distinct manifestations across different historical conjunctures. By organic contradiction, I mean the colonial theft of more land to advance an ethnonationalist project with a pretence of liberation. The conjunctural, on the other hand, refers to this project’s temporal contingency and its vulnerability to contemporary global and local conditions, not least the Palestinian resistance. Our assessment of victory and defeat lies in the dialectical nexus between this organic movement of Israeli settler colonialism and the conjunctural movement that is at stake in our political analysis here.[1]
In this sense, Israel’s genocidal response to al-Aqsa Flood (Tawafan al-Aqsa) of October 7th is symptomatic of two things. The first is what Nasser Abourahme (2024) terms its “foundational impasse”, which relies on a perpetually incomplete conquest, owing to complex and contradictory Palestinian and regional resistance formations in Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq, and Iran. But these past two decades have shown that relying on authoritarian regimes is contrapuntal to any anticolonial revolutionary programme as evidenced for example in Hezbollah’s violent constitutive role in suppressing the Syrian revolution. The second is its foundational, ideological justification as a victim that has been wronged and whose justice lies in more Palestinian blood. In this current conjuncture, the Palestinian resistance has given Israel a surprising and painful blow that has sent the latter into existential angst, revealing its “incurable structural contradictions”, as Gramsci might put it. The current genocide in Palestine is a more exact re-elaboration of Israel’s originary moment of accumulation by dispossession in 1948. That does not mean that the Nakba (as a structure of dispossession) has been continuous in content and form since 1948, but that it has since had multiple, contingent manifestations that rely on the historical conditions that make up each conjuncture.[2] The economic and political conditions under which previous rounds of major colonial frontiering had occurred (such as in 1948 and 1967) differ greatly from those that underpin the current colonial annexation of lands in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, southern Lebanon, and, importantly, the Syrian Golan Heights.
This formulation, I think, offers a much more realistic and politically-sound explanation that gives justice to the kind of crisis that the Palestinian resistance has intensified within Zionism while recognising the immense loss of human life and land in Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria. It also allows us to understand the unfolding genocide in Gaza as a manifestation of a much longer history of Zionist settler colonialism in Palestine. True, Zionism is encountering an impasse but there is no guarantee that that will constitute a victory for us. We “have not yet been defeated”[3] but we also have not won yet. Announcing victories or defeats based on an impasse does, indeed, feel like an irresponsible thing to do in the face of immense suffering and extremely calculated colonial violence that is yet to be stopped. We have been ideologically deprived of assessing the successes, limitations, and contradictions of the prison break on October 7th. Owing to this, there has emerged a binaristic view that frames it either as a teleological victory by virtue of its mere reveal of the “incurable structural contradictions” underpinning the Zionist project, or as an imminent defeat owing to the Palestinian resistance’s miscalculations and idealisms.
Both explanations are insufficient. While the former explanation (let’s call it voluntarist) posits a teleological understanding of history that anticipates the reveal of “incurable structural contradictions” to almost automatically generate a transformation of social reality, the latter (defeatist) explanation insists on a rationalistic calculus that remains too wedded to the immediate. The former views history as unfolding in anticipation of the fall of Zionism; the latter negates history for the sake of the conjunctural. Both distract us from the question of what is to be done? What is our historical responsibility in the face of such immense injustice and suffering? What are the emancipatory and progressive social tendencies and forces at play and how might we enhance, amplify, and better organise them? How do we sketch a critical and materialist analysis of the current formations of Palestinian resistance, ranging from civil dissent to armed resistance and everything in-between and beyond? What are the relations of force that govern the different social groups within Israel (Ashkenazi, Mizrahi, and Black Jews; refugees, migrant workers; the working classes and the bourgeoisie; religious Zionist, liberal Zionist, and leftist Zionist)? How is it that these social groups remain generally wedded to a logic of conquest and genocide? Yes, the abolition of Zionism is the only solution. But what are the cracks and fissures in this Zionist project that we may exploit with an eye to its abolition?
These are the questions that we are deprived of asking by the ideological machinery of Zionism that plagues our universities, arts collectives, media organisations, newspapers, and labour unions. It bullies us into consent for our own coercion, abandonment and dehumanisation of our own kin, and layers of condemnations that leave nothing to be said of the Palestinian resistance and everything to be said of a “perfect victim” (El-Kurd 2025) that is yet to be found. As Zionism sharpens its vampire teeth and bites into piles of our flesh and lands, the liberals of this world expect Palestinians to usher in exemplary, otherworldly formations of pacifism when their very own societies are organised around imperialist militaries. It is a matter of historical fact that colonial conditions of structural and direct violence—what Fanon termed Manichaeism—produces anticolonial violence. Our task remains to critically assess this dialectical nexus and to work towards a world where anticolonial violence is unnecessary: where colonialism ceases to exist.
What we are witnessing in this intensified anticolonial war at multiple fronts is neither a defeat nor a victory. We continue to lose too many precious lives in Palestine. More and more of our olive trees are pillaged. More and more of our heritage is erased. Much of our land is being stolen. We watch human convoys from Algeria and Tunisia travel thousands of miles only then to be blocked by the counter-revolutionary regime in Egypt—a regime that is subservient to the demands of US imperialism and circulations of capital from the Arab Gulf. The Madleen flotilla offers a dot of hope in a dark, blue sea only then to be detained and called a “media stunt”. The regime’s fall in Syria has generated waves of hope and tears across the region only to be replaced by an Islamist regime keen to be in alliance with US imperialism and the Arab Gulf states and their counterrevolutionary project. Israel routinely invades and bombs the rural environs of Damascus and has effectively seized more lands of the Syrian Golan Heights. The anticolonial resistance in Lebanon has suffered a major blow from the Zionist war machine, and a new government of bureaucrats, technocrats, and military generals with an eagerness to accumulate capital and “monopolise violence” is installed. Israel routinely bombs southern Lebanon. It is impossible to read these as signs of hope, or as mere obstacles towards an imminent victory that is just awaiting us down the path of intensified, internal crisis for Zionism. In this case, as Gramsci (1971: 179) would put it, “the snake bites the snake-charmer—in other words, the demagogue is the first victim of his own demagogy”. One’s immediate desires and passions cultivate a self-deception that replaces, or even alleviates, our guilt and our very own, existential need to stimulate action and organise so that we are in a better place of defending ourselves and our communities.
Yet, it is certainly not an overstatement to say that in this current conjuncture, Zionism, and its powerful arm of the settler state, have lost the ability to even pretend to be anything but a blood-thirsty, violent, and unjustifiable project of colonialism that feeds into and is fed by reactionary forces around the world. The organic contradictions underpinning Zionism are in full view: more violence and more territorial annexation in the face of more organised anticolonial resistance. Currently, it is important to assess how Palestinian anticolonial resistance around the world has significantly intensified the decaying of Zionism as an ideological formation. Not merely through its arrogance but also through the relentless organising of different movements around the world across the last few decades, Zionism is losing much in the ideological battlefield to the point of being indefensible by even the disgraceful Piers Morgan (a genocidaire himself). Morgan can be taken as a stand-in for a certain liberal tendency that has run out of its arsenal of ideological justifications for Zionism. It is indicative of this tendency’s moral bankruptcy that it has taken hundreds of thousands of precious Palestinian lives, and obliterated land, for it to reach the conclusion that certain actions of Zionism “might be indefensible”. It is a known liberal move to indict too late only as a moralist gesture that may preserve what remains of its decayed vestiges. We, therefore, are compelled to note the shift only in its political signification of the increasing dispensability of liberal tools in the face of intensified right-wing, fascist, and colonial violence, which Zionism not only resembles but also feeds on, historically and conjuncturally.
Zionism is in an existential crisis. Its military might is not protecting it from this crisis, and this is one explanation for its current unquenched thirst for Palestinian blood. Zionism has learned to alleviate its own internal contradictions by constantly activating its war machine (the many, many wars on Gaza, and an unstoppable, slower war across historic Palestine), but it simply cannot have enough of it in the current moment. To the region’s counterrevolutionary regimes serving as visible hands of US imperialism,[4] especially Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, Israel is close to accomplishing a historical task they have been praying for: the weakening, if not the obliteration, of the military capacities of the Iranian regime as the critical node that has provided economic and military infrastructure for many of the region’s resistance groups. US imperialism and the Arab Gulf states surely meet in their aspiration for further smoothening the region’s pathways of capitalist accumulation: the parsing of new markets and the furnishing of lucrative economic relations that relies on the suppression of anticolonial dissent. This is why it is important not to have unwarranted guarantees that Zionism will fall due to its own contradictions. The enhancement of these counter-revolutionary forces in the region might, indeed, be one of this conjuncture’s outcomes. But so might be the increased regional popular dissent, which has never been clearer in its support for Palestine; it is the counter-revolutionary regimes that are stifling its translation into genuine political praxis. Indeed, Zionism is a checkpoint for the region’s popular and genuine democracies. It remains to be seen whether this conjuncture will be the beginning of a realignment between US imperialism, the Zionist project, and Arab reactionary regimes, or a gradual recomposition of the Zionist project under global pressure and resistance that necessitates riddance of its racial and colonial character (even in a performative, limited manner akin to the so-called post-apartheid arrangement in South Africa).[5]
What is very clear is that the struggle continues, and that the movement for Palestine has won a great base of popular support that reaches across so many different social groups around the world, becoming the leading edge of a leftist internationalism that we so desperately need. It is neither the voluntarist wait for an eventual victory generated by an internal crisis, nor the totalising admission of defeat, that can enhance this internationalism. It is the strategic organising with this newly clarified popular base of leftist internationalism, in its different locations—dealing with its contradictions, contending with its limitations, clarifying its emancipatory possibilities, and critiquing its reactionary elements—that will ensure we are a step closer to Zionism’s impending defeat and the eventual return to Palestine.
Notes
[1] Stuart Hall (1988) offers a succinct explanation and application of Gramsci’s notions of organic and conjunctural crisis in his essay “Gramsci and Us”.
[2] I develop this argument in greater length elsewhere (Abushama 2024).
[3] This is a powerful formulation from the Egyptian political prisoner, Alaa Abd el-Fattah (2021), who is still in captivity in Egyptian prisons.
[4] Adam Hanieh (2024a) has offered us critical analysis into Israel as a critical node of US imperialism in the region. Hanieh’s (2024b) book, Crude Capitalism: Oil, Corporate Power, and the Making of the World Market, offers a more extended description of the political-economic contradictions underpinning this articulation between imperialism and Zionism.
[5] Gillian Hart’s work is indispensable in understanding the determinantal political and socioeconomic effects of the dominant post-apartheid arrangements in South Africa that have kept intact the inequalities generated under apartheid. Her work is so necessary in thinking about Palestine within a global conjunctural framework that refuses to teleologically see post-apartheid South Africa as the only awaited future for Palestine (see Hart 2024).
References
Abd el-Fattah A (2021) You Have Not Yet Been Defeated: Selected Writings 2011-2021. London: Fitzcarraldo Editions
Abourahme N (2024) In tune with their time. Radical Philosophy 216:13-20
Abushama H (2024) Culture and the city: Articulations of settler colonialism from Haifa to Ramallah and back. Annals of the American Association of Geographers 114(10):2317-2333
El-Kurd M (2025) Perfect Victims and the Politics of Appeal. Chicago: Haymarket Books
Gramsci A (1971) Selections from the Prison Notebooks (eds and trans Q Hoare and G Nowell Smith). New York: International Publishers
Hall S (1988) Gramsci and us. In The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left (pp161-173). London: Verso
Hanieh A (2024a) Why the fight for Palestine is the fight against US imperialism in the region. Mondoweiss 14 June https://mondoweiss.net/2024/06/why-the-fight-for-palestine-is-the-fight-against-u-s-imperialism-in-the-region/ (last accessed 20 June 2025)
Hanieh A (2024b) Crude Capitalism: Oil, Corporate Power, and the Making of the World Market. London: Verso
Hart G (2024) Progeny of empire: Defining moments of nation formation in South Africa and Palestine/Israel. Antipode Online 1 March https://antipodeonline.org/2024/03/01/progeny-of-empire/ (last accessed 20 June 2025)
Featured image: “Madleen”, oil and bandage on fabric, by Palestinian artist, Al Aziz ‘Aatef. Al Azeez ‘Aatef is a Palestinian visual artist and calligrapher based in Palestine. His works play with multiple visual mediums, including Arabic calligraphy, to address issues of carcerality, protest, and solidarity. This artwork is part of a wider, developing collection that primarily uses “bandages” to address contemporary political issues in Palestine and beyond. You can find his work on Instagram @alaziz_atef