we are all palestinians
notes on solidarity and collective resistance
“In our thousands, in our millions, we are all Palestinians.” So goes the chant that has, for the last eight months since the beginning of the Gaza genocide, echoed from the walls of university campuses and the streets of national capitals around the world. It has appeared in nearly every protest I have attended since October 7th, and each time I encounter it, I find myself overwhelmed by the same swell of emotion that I felt the first time I heard it.
It’s easy, and perhaps tempting, to read the words “we are all Palestinians” in a purely metaphorical light—clearly, we aren’t all literally Palestinians, but expressing our support in this way allows us to more clearly convey the message that we stand with them and their struggle. In fact, however, I’d argue that the significance of this chant extends beyond the merely symbolic. What makes the words “we are all Palestinians” so powerful is the fact that to utter them is to evoke an ethos of radical solidarity—a fundamental understanding that the Palestinian cause is not just one that we support from the outside, but rather one that we have collectively adopted as our own. We don’t just ‘stand with’ Palestine—we are Palestine.
But what does it really mean to say, however emphatically, that “we are all Palestinians?” This is precisely the question that the Palestinian poet and journalist Mohammed El-Kurd asks in a March 2024 essay for Mondoweiss. “The rallying cry that we are all Palestinians,” El-Kurd writes, “must abandon the metaphor and manifest materially. Meaning, all of us—Palestinians or otherwise—must embody the Palestinian condition, the condition of resistance and refusal, in the lives we lead and the company we keep.”
The left would, I think, do well to heed El-Kurd’s admonitions. The sentiment that
“we are all Palestinians” is powerful, but so too are the subliminally seductive forces of respectability politics and metaphorization that routinely infect even the most well-intentioned left movements. Without a genuine revolutionary politics that is capable of confronting head-on the myriad structures and logics of empire—including, as El-Kurd points out, “the colonial logic that vilifies the violence of the oppressed and turns a blind eye to the oppressor’s violence”—we run the risk of hollowing out these words’ radical import, reducing their weight to that of mere symbolism and ultimately betraying the Palestinian cause in the process.
But if we are able to overcome this challenge and articulate this solidarity in a way that is substantial rather than merely symbolic—if we are able to truly embody what El-Kurd calls the “Palestinian condition…of resistance and refusal”—the implications of our doing so are monumental. Doing so, however, will require sustained effort on all of our part to reacquaint ourselves with a concrete and disciplined analysis of what radical solidarity really means, and what distinguishes it from weaker, more liberal concepts that have gained increased currency in recent years.
• • •
If there is a single word that can be accurately described as a universal mantra of the global left, uniting radicals across geographic and ideological lines alike, that word must surely be ‘solidarity.’ It appears in just about every left-wing political struggle imaginable, from the labor movement to the fight for racial justice to, of course, the Palestine solidarity movement. And yet it seems to me that many of us, myself included, who invoke ‘solidarity’ as a staple of our political lexicon haven’t necessarily taken the time to consider what the term actually means. Doing so, however, is crucial to understanding why it is so necessary to uphold solidarity as a central pillar of any left politics worth its salt.
The word ‘solidarity’ derives from the French solidarité, meaning “communion of interests and responsibilities, mutual responsibility,” while the French itself comes from the Latin solidum, denoting a unified whole. The word’s original usage in French, writes the Swedish philosopher Sven-Eric Liedman, stems from 16th-century legal traditions of joint liability for debts, based around the principle of “what we in common parlance call ‘all for one and one for all.’” As a concept, ‘solidarity’ was first given the political and ideological dimensions that we associate with it today by the 19th-century utopian socialist Charles Fourier and his contemporaries, who wrote of an ideal society that will eschew narrow individualism in favor of cooperation and mutual aid. The term’s popularity grew across Europe throughout the mid-19th century, and by the 1860s Karl Marx had adopted an understanding of solidarity as the glue that binds together the international working class.
This etymology is important, because it reveals a great deal about what we are really saying when we say we ‘stand in solidarity’ with this or that cause. As I previously mentioned, the term’s Latin root, solidum, refers to an entire and undivided whole. To be ‘in solidarity,’ therefore, is about more than just standing with a given people or struggle—it’s about fundamentally identifying with them, recognizing oneself and the object of one’s solidarity as part of the same unified whole. To invoke solidarity is to express not just an amorphous sense of moral empathy, but rather a concrete and revolutionary analysis of one’s own political positionality in relation to others—and that is precisely what makes it such a radical notion.
It may be useful here to contrast solidarity against the related but fundamentally different framework of ‘allyship’ that has gained currency within liberal social-justice circles in the last decade or so. The key distinction between allyship and solidarity is that whereas the former emphasizes identity, the latter emphasizes struggle. The reason why allyship can never be the basis of a genuinely radical politics is that even as it tries to reach across the boundaries that demarcate one identity from another, its implicit emphasis on differences means that allyship inevitably ends up reinforcing them. By placing its emphasis instead on the unity that derives from a shared fight, solidarity eschews these boundaries altogether. Stated differently: where allyship says “you and I are different, but still I stand with you,” solidarity says, “you and I are one, and so we stand together.”
• • •
More than mere metaphor or empty rhetoric, it is this radical ethos of collective self-identification and resistance that lies at the heart of the slogan “we are all Palestinians.” We on the left frequently find ourselves being asked why our activism places such an emphasis on Palestine rather than other cases of occupation, oppression, and genocide. This question is, of course, almost always posed in bad faith—a ‘gotcha’ intended to illuminate some imagined current of antisemitic hypocrisy that supposedly lurks at the heart of the global movement for Palestinian solidarity.
In fact, however, the answer to this question is simple. At its core, the Palestine solidarity movement is premised on a larger anti-imperialist analysis, which recognizes that the common thread running through every instance of mass violence and injustice around the world—from Gaza to Haiti to Congo to Sudan and beyond—is the inherent violence and inequity of the imperial world system. And bad-faith interrogations notwithstanding, the fact of the matter is that this imperial world system is inextricably tied up with the Zionist colonization of Palestine.
From the Balfour Declaration of 1917, in which the British Empire granted its official nod of approval to the Zionist movement as a way to maintain a foothold in the Middle East, to Joe Biden’s infamous assertion that “were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interests in the region,” the Zionist project has always functioned as the most important outpost of imperialist interests in one of the world’s most hotly-contested and geopolitically-significant regions. So long as this project continues unabated, those who control the levers of empire—whether they be heads of state or defense-contractor executives—can rest easy, secure in the knowledge that their imperial hegemony remains intact. As such, when the victory of the Palestinian liberation struggle comes—and it will inevitably come, of this I am sure—it will sound the death-knell for the entire system of global empire, and all the various forms of injustice and oppression that this system fuels. As the acclaimed Marxist historian Robin D. G. Kelley recently put it in an appearance on the Makdisi Street podcast, “the ground zero of a liberated world is Palestine.”
I should note that the argument I am making here—that the Palestinian liberation struggle is not a struggle for Palestine and Palestinians alone, but is in fact a key front in a larger struggle for collective liberation from imperialist violence and oppression around the world—is not just the naive pontification of an arrogant outsider seeking to co-opt or otherwise misappropriate the unique and particular cause of a colonized people. Rather, it reflects the same position held by none other than the vanguard of the Palestinian resistance itself. In its Strategy for the Liberation of Palestine, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP)—the secular, Marxist-Leninist resistance organization that was founded in 1967 by the physician and revolutionary leader George Habash—makes repeated reference to the crucial point that the ultimate enemy of the Palestinian liberation struggle is not just the Israeli state, nor even the global Zionist movement, but is in fact nothing less than the entire system of world imperialism. “Imperialism,” according to the PFLP, “finds itself in the best position in this part of the world…with Israel becoming the force and the base used by imperialism to protect its presence and defend its interests in our land”—and as such, “the struggle for the liberation of Palestine, like any other liberation struggle in the world, becomes a struggle against world imperialism.”
In other words, what we are really saying when we say we are all Palestinians is that we are all participants in the same larger anti-imperialist struggle. While the most visible battleground of this struggle today may be the fight for a free Palestine, its influence in fact extends much further than Palestine, touching and tying together every movement for justice and liberation around the world. To acknowledge this fact, then, is to honor the true meaning of solidarity—to eschew parochialism and petty division in order to recognize one’s own position, wherever one may find oneself, as part of a united and revolutionary whole.
• • •
Late last month, I flew to Detroit to attend the People’s Conference for Palestine as one of the more than 3,000 activists, organizers, and revolutionaries from around the world who had gathered together to learn, build connections, and orient around a shared strategy for taking the global movement for Palestinian solidarity forward. The three-day conference featured a packed schedule, with back-to-back panels on topics ranging from the role of higher education institutions in the Palestine solidarity movement to the history and strategy of Palestinian armed resistance.
The conference, which repeatedly stressed the paramount importance of political education in any revolutionary struggle, was a profoundly informative experience for me, and I came away from it with my fingers sore from feverish note-taking and my head overflowing with new ideas, theories, and concepts. Among the most significant of these was the notion of the ‘popular cradle,’ introduced to me in detail on the second day of the conference during a panel on “Palestinian Resistance and the Path to Liberation.” I had never heard of this concept before, but learning about it provided a powerful injection of renewed clarity to my understanding of what revolutionary solidarity really means.
As the panelist who introduced the idea described it, the popular cradle—Al-Hadena Al-Sha’biya in Arabic—refers to the relationship between the resistance movement and the masses in whose service the resistance works. In a 2022 essay for The New Arab, a Palestinian organizer writing under the pseudonym Abu-Jildeh explains that “the popular cradle denotes a state of cohesion between the resistance and the masses, leading the resistance to become a general state of being.” The masses rally around the resistance, providing support in any way they can—whether through material contributions, sharing information, or harboring fugitives—and this ‘cradle’ of support in turn nurtures the resistance and enables it to keep fighting for liberation, fueled by the knowledge that the people are behind it every step of the way.
The popular cradle has been a central throughline of the national liberation struggle since the Great Palestinian Revolt of 1936-1939, when Palestinians in urban areas began sporting the keffiyeh—historically worn primarily by the rural villagers and peasants who made up the core of the rebel movement—not just as a symbolic gesture of solidarity, but as a way to make it more difficult for the British authorities and Zionist militias to distinguish rebel fighters from ordinary Palestinians. A more recent example of the popular cradle in action can be found in October 2022, when the Palestinian fighter Udai Tamimi was forced into hiding following an attack by the Lion’s Den resistance organization in East Jerusalem. Zionist police put out a search bulletin for a ‘young bald man,’ and in response, young Palestinian men across Jerusalem shaved their heads in order to confuse the authorities and help Tamimi evade capture.
In many ways, I think, the Palestine solidarity movement—and in particular, its repeated assertion that “we are all Palestinians”—is a clear example of the popular cradle in action on a global scale. At a moment when the forces of imperialist reaction, in Israel and around the world, have embraced wholesale a genocidal project designed to equate the very existence of the Palestinian people with so-called ‘terrorism’—thus rendering every Palestinian a legitimate target for annihilation, and everyone who stands in solidarity with the Palestinians a legitimate target for persecution—the international solidarity movement has taken to the streets to send the message to those in power that the masses of the world stand with the Palestinian resistance, that any attack on the Palestinian people is an attack on all of us.
In particular, we saw the revolutionary idea of the popular cradle manifest during the wave of student protest encampments that swept college campuses across the country and across the world earlier this spring. In the face of extreme hostility and brutal repression from militarized police working in shameful consort with university administrations, who justified their repression by resorting to tired and offensive narratives about ‘outside agitators,’ these encampments were sustained for weeks on end—in some cases, more than a month—by mass support from the larger community, who rallied around the protesters by donating supplies, holding solidarity demonstrations, and showing up to put their bodies on the line when calls went out to defend encampments against intimidation from police and Zionists.
Here in DC, what ultimately prevented the police from moving to clear the George Washington University encampment just a few hours into its first day was the sudden arrival of around 200 students, faculty, and staff from Georgetown, who had marched from their campus to GW to stand in solidarity and provide safety in numbers. A few days later, after the university announced the suspension of several students inside the encampment, the community members who had formed their own solidarity encampment on the street breached the barricades erected by the university and moved their tents onto the grass. The resulting swell of the encampment, which now covered the entire quad and still spilled out onto the street as well, made it all but impossible for the administration and campus police to distinguish between students and ‘outside’ community members—leaving them no choice but to allow people to enter and exit the camp freely.
These are just some of the examples that I witnessed at GW, but similar displays of solidarity and mass popular support occurred at countless encampments across the country and the world. In each case, these protests were sustained by a symbiotic relationship between the students on the frontlines and the larger local community, with the result that non-student community members came to identify so strongly with the encampments that they viewed any attack on the students as an attack on themselves. This is what the popular cradle really means—we nurture the resistance, and in turn, the resistance nurtures us.
• • •
The keynote speaker at the Detroit conference was a Palestinian woman named Sana’ Daqqa. Sana’s husband, the writer and resistance fighter Walid Daqqa, died in a Zionist prison in April after nearly four decades of incarceration, and the Zionist regime continues to hold his body more than two months after his martyrdom. Sana’ had originally been scheduled to speak on Friday, the first day of the conference, but difficulties with obtaining a visa had delayed her arrival in the United States and forced the postponement of her appearance. She arrived in Detroit on Saturday afternoon and came to the venue directly from the airport, and when she took the stage to a standing ovation she was accompanied by her four-year-old daughter Milad, who was conceived via IVF using her father’s sperm that had been secretly smuggled out of the prison.
I had never heard of sperm-smuggling before, but as I learned at the conference, this act of reproductive resistance has been used in recent years to conceive more than 100 babies whose fathers have been imprisoned by the Zionist regime. It is not, I think, an exaggeration to say that the children born from this incredible revolutionary practice are in many ways the living embodiment of Palestinian resistance, in whose existence the hopes, aspirations and the very spirit of the liberation struggle are manifested. As Walid Daqqa himself wrote in a letter to the still-unborn Milad in 2011: “I write to an idea or a dream that unwittingly terrifies the jailor before it even comes to fruition…you are my message to the future.”
As I stood there in the audience, watching little Milad sheepishly bury her face in her mother’s shoulder, I couldn’t help wondering: was this child aware of the weight her very existence carried? Did she know—could she even know—that the mere fact of her birth itself represented the concentrated hopes and dreams of an entire people? That her having been brought into this world in the first place was itself incontrovertible evidence that liberation was, in fact, possible?
I asked myself these questions, and as I did so, the realization occured to me that I was asking them not from a position of ideological abstraction or intellectual detachment, but out of a very real and urgent sense of deep personal significance. This child, born of resistance, didn’t just represent the hopes of others—in her, I saw my own revolutionary hope as well, magnified and reflected back to me. Her struggle was my struggle, her destiny and her future inextricably intertwined with my own.
The same, I think, holds true for all of us. Like the millions of people in Palestine and around the world who are rising up every day for liberation, we are all revolutionaries and foot soldiers in the resistance. We are all Walid, we are all Sana’, we are all Milad. We are, in a word, all Palestinians.
culture shock is a blog by the Indian-American writer Pranay Somayajula. Click the button below to subscribe for free and receive new essays in your inbox:
this is amazing; I love it !! I really like the distinction made between allyship and solidarity especially. thanks for sharing ^.^