A large part of politics can be seen as a search for belonging, which is a fundamental human need.

"Steering people away from fascism—a common response to political and societal dysfunction—requires an answer to the need for belonging. Fascism seeks a bonding network: one that brings together people from a homogeneous group. Its antithesis is the bridging network: one that brings together people from different groups."

Monbiot and Hutchison:

We are also, among mammals, the supreme cooperators, able to work together toward common ends in far more complex and preemptive ways than other mammals can. These are the central, crucial characteristics of humankind: our astonishing altruism and cooperation. But something has gone horribly wrong.

Our good nature has been thwarted by several forces—not least of which is the dominant political narrative of our times, one that motivates us to live in competition with one another. It encourages conflict, drives us to fear and...

“A person is a person through other persons”

"Are those your children?" "Yes."

—Wistawa Szymborska, "Vietnam" (trans. Stanistaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh)

Recognition is to perceive what we have known all along but have yet to confront

The novel A Heart So White, by the Spanish writer Javier Marías, begins with the words “I did not want to know but I have since come to know.” Encased in this “I did not want to know” is an already-knowing. The reversal hastened by recognition functions only on account of an accumulation of knowledge, knowledge that has not been confronted. That’s why it’s re-cognition; ana-gnorisis: knowing again. In an interview, Marías said that while for some the novel “is a way of imparting knowledge,” for him “it is more a way of imparting recognition of things that you didn’t know you knew. You say ‘yes.’ It feels true even though it might be uncomfortable.” To recognize something is, then, to perceive clearly what on some level you have known all along, but that perhaps you did not want to know.

— Isabella Hammad, Recognizing The Stranger (2024)

"Every Bombed Village is my Hometown"

by James Baldwin during the Vietnam war

And every dead child is my child.
Every grieving mother is my mother.
Every crying father is my father.
Every home turned to rubble
is the home I grew up in.
Every brother carrying the remains
of his brother across borders
is my brother.
Every sister waiting for a sister
who will never come home
is my sister.

Every one of these people are ours,
just like we are theirs.
We belong to them
and they belong to us.

"Gaza does not propel people to cool contemplation; rather she propels them to erupt and collide with the truth."

— Mahmoud Darwish

“I no longer see this as a conflict between Arabs and Jews, between Israeli and Palestinian. I have abandoned this duality, this naive oversimplification of the conflict. I have become convinced of Ali Shariati and Frantz Fanon's divisions of the world [into a colonial camp and a liberation camp]… In each of the two camps, you will find people of all religions, languages, races, ethnicities, colours and classes. In this conflict, for example, you will find people of our own skin standing rudely in the other camp, and at the same time you will find Jews standing in our camp."

— Basil Al-A’raj

Ultimately, I argue for a view of the self and of identity that is the opposite of the personal brand: an unstable, shapeshifting thing determined by interactions with others and with different kinds of places.

Beyond race and ethnicity, Palestinian is also a counter-identity available to anyone who participates in the struggle for liberation.

Basil Al-A'raj articulated his own reverse-COIN technology against the narrative machinations of counterinsurgency in the Palestinian context. Himself a martyred resistance fighter killed by israeli soldiers in a shootout in 2017, Basil was heavily influenced by Fanon and adopted his radically inclusive anti-identity politics outlook.

In his "Eight Rules and the Insights on the Nature of War", Basil said:

"Every Palestinian (in the broad sense, meaning anyone who sees Palestine as a part of their struggle, regardless of their secondary identities), every Palestinian is on the front lines of the battle for Palestine, so be careful not to fail in your duty."

This is very reminiscent of Fanon's understanding of Algerian as an inclusive revolutionary subjectivity, one that is available to anyone who chooses to participate in the liberation...

“All of our work dealt with the kind of small particulars of being human that literature generally deals with. But when you live as we have, among a people whose humanity is ever in doubt, even the small and particular—especially the small and particular—becomes political. For you there can be no real distance between writing and politics. And when I saw that in you, I saw myself. A love of language, of course, is the root of this self.”

Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message (2024)

"My daughter was riding her bike the other day. And she fell and skinned up her face pretty bad. We had to go to urgent care. She's crying, I'm carrying her. And all I could think about was parents in Gaza." [...] "Hind Rajab is like... my daughter is 5, so that's my daughter. My son is nonverbal, has some other disabilities. That Muhammad, the boy who was killed by a dog. Like, that's my son." [...] "I don't know if there's a way for America to come back from this in the sense htat our reputation on the international stage. We've completely trashed these institutions, ICC, ICJ, the UN, for the benefit of what? To protect someone like Netanyahu and what is***l is doing it. I hope that Palestinians can have the determination and autonomy to live their lives. I think Palestinians are just like me. They have families, they want to do things with their life. They don't to be messed with by occupying powers. I just see so much clearly how their liberation is bound up in my own."...

Someone once told me she had interviewed an elderly Palestinian woman during the second intifada as part of an oral history project about Palestinians in the diaspora. This particular woman, she said, pointed at another woman wailing in distress on the television screen in her living room in London and cried: “That’s me! That’s me!” I found this story quite moving. Then I was told the woman’s name, and learned that it was my own grandmother. I suddenly laughed, because my grandmother is very dramatic. Reflecting on this now, however, I find myself moved once more. What a pure relation, to see herself in the woman on the television, to experience the distance between them not as numbing but as another component of her pain. The present onslaught leaves no space for mourning, since mourning requires an afterward, but only for repeated shock and the ebb and flow of grief. We who are not there, witnessing from afar, in what ways are we mutilating ourselves when we dissociate to...