Interview conducted by zyg for the Organisation Communiste Libertaire (OCL) in October–November 2024, following a debate with Emilio Minassian at the Rencontres libertaires du Quercy. In the first part, Minassian discusses the integration of Israel/Palestine into global capitalism and the class composition of Palestine; in the second, he turns to the implications of that composition for proletarian struggles and for the national liberation struggle.
First a word on “where I’m speaking from,” as they say. I’m not Palestinian, though over the past two decades I regularly spent a few months in the West Bank, wearing the usual hats of the left-wing Westerner visiting the Occupied Territories: solidarity activities, short documentaries, academic research that went nowhere. In many places it probably amounted to a form of activist tourism, with a half-baked Marxist flavor.
Fairly soon I tried to dodge the social frameworks into which pro-Palestinian activism projects one, namely hanging out with the “professionals” of the oppression narrative, in pre-arranged encounters. Depending on the period, the context, and the energy I put in, I more or less managed to, mostly among the unemployed and the thugs of the refugee camps rather than among workers (not to mention female workers): the unemployed have spare time, and the thugs often want to share their stories of struggles against armed forces (Israeli but also Palestinian), of imprisonment and torture (practiced in Israeli jails but also Palestinian ones).
Piping up to say “there are social classes in Palestine” may seem out of place when, for a year now, they have been drowning the populations of Gaza under bombs. Probably I wouldn’t do it, or I’d do it differently, if it were in Gaza and not in the West Bank that I had been knocking about. I don’t do it to put the massacre at a distance, but to combat the idea of a radical otherness, of an exteriority, of what is happening in relation to capitalist social relations, there as here. – E.M.
Organisation Communiste Libertaire (OCL): You defend the idea that Israel-Palestine constitutes a unity in the global and regional capitalist space. Can you explain why?
Emilio Minassian: At first, the Zionist project conceived of a separate Jewish society in Palestine. This project led to the ethnic cleansing of 1947–48, which, although not completed, did produce a “Jewish” space, with most of those Jews being of European origin at that time. In 1967, with the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, which had been annexed by Egypt and Jordan respectively, the population managed by the Israeli state ceased to be mainly Jewish. Around the same time, a specifically Palestinian—no longer only “Arab”—nationalism started to emerge. One could get the impression that two “nations” were facing each other on the same land. But, up until today, no separate state entity emerged from this Palestinian nationalism, except for the administration of tiny pockets of land in Gaza and the West Bank. The territory controlled by Israel, on the other hand, is not made up of Jewish zones and Palestinian zones. A lot of majority-Palestinian zones exist within the borders of the state established in 1948, and there is a massive population of Jewish settlers in the West Bank. This territorial entity is a patchwork in which national distinctions, if we renounce subjective affiliations, are themselves subject to multiple subdivisions, which, although ethnicized (including on the “Jewish” side), are social in nature and are today all part of the Israeli economy.
Starting with the “spatial unity” of Israel/Palestine is thus a way to avoid an analysis of the Palestinian question in terms of “a people without a state,” unified by a common sense of belonging and of dispossession. This reading tends to essentialize national categories which are the products of social processes, and to root the violence of the Israeli state in a continuity from 1948 on, which does not take into account its place within global dynamics.
What’s been happening for the past year is not a war, involving two national spaces facing each other, nor a project of conquest aimed at seizing resources and markets. It’s not the “Palestinian people” that is drowned under bombs, in a struggle for existence pitting two nations against each other. The Gaza Strip is not a social entity external to Israel. It has been integrated into the Israeli market, into Israeli capitalism, for nearly sixty years. The Palestinians living there are, for the most part, proletarians without any resources of their own. They consume Israeli commodities paid for with Israeli currency, but are not exploited as workers. They are a surplus population ejected from the labor market by Israeli capital during the nineties, now concentrated into a vast “reserve” only a few dozen kilometers from Tel-Aviv, following the logic of animalization familiar from colonial history.
OCL: Could you detail the history of the integration of this space (and its labor force) into the capitalist market?
Minassian: From the point of view of the market, the “Palestinian” zone emerged from the partition of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War. At the time, feudal structures dominated, though there were seeds of a merchant bourgeoisie. The British Mandate and the Zionist project marked the early stages of the proletarianization of Arab Palestinian peasants, but the real watershed was 1948 and the Nakba. Feudal lords and bourgeois fled the territory now under Israeli control, with all their belongings; while Palestinian peasants, most of them sharecroppers, were expelled from their land and packed into camps.
We can identify three cycles in the course of Israeli colonialism. During the first period (1948–67), we have, vis-à-vis the Palestinian peasantry, a typology close to settler colonialism: ethnic cleansing, land grabbing, “Jewish” labor and capital. There was a corollary to this, as I said earlier, which was the import of Jewish proletarians from the Arab world, ethnicized and caught in a colonial relationship of exploitation/animalization. During this period capital accumulation unfolded under the thumb of an all-powerful planner-state controlled by the Ashkenazi and socialist elites, with a labor unionism integrated into the state.
During the second period (from 1967 to around 1990), starting with the conquest of Gaza and the West Bank, we get to a colonial situation that includes the “exploitation of the native labor force.” Israeli capitalism enters a phase of intensive integration into international capital, also through military industry. During those twenty years, the proletariat of Gaza and the West Bank camps was integrated into wage labor on a massive scale, predominantly in the least qualified sectors: construction, agriculture, etc.
The Oslo Accords opened a new phase, that of a colonial relation structured around the figure of the Palestinian surplus and the subcontracting of its management. Israel kept control of the territories, went on with its offensive to destroy the peasantry and delegated the management of the Palestinian proletariat, penned into closed urban zones, to a national leadership born out of the liberation struggle.
In this context, the merchant bourgeoisies that had escaped the Nakba—those based in Hebron and Nablus, which had found themselves in the territory annexed by Jordan between 1948 and 1967—were integrated with this managing class originating from the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization). This class, embedded in the security apparatus of the PA (Palestinian Authority), has a double origin: there are the cadres from the “outside,” who landed in Arafat’s luggage between 1994 and 1996, and those from the “inside,” born out of the first Intifada and the Israeli jails. It’s a composite class, divided into competing factions. They benefit from an international security rent, but they also control entire sectors of the local economy: construction, infrastructure, telecommunications, and, last but not least, trade with Israel. All of these different sectors are linked to the Israeli market and investments.
OCL: Doesn’t the war in Gaza signal the beginning of a new phase?
Minassian: There are reasons to think that. The post-Oslo period was characterized by the inflation of techniques of control deployed by Israel against this proletariat that had become essentially unproductive: the division of the territory into micro-zones; the introduction of a delirious system of permits that controls access to work, healthcare, and travel; generalized record-keeping; surveillance of social networks; a computerized recognition system, but also the massive use of randomness (in arrests, in the opening or closing of crossing points, in access to permits) in order to “test” behavior patterns. These technologies and this know-how were exported on a massive scale, and therefore produced value. It seems to me that since last year we have entered the military phase of this logic of experimentation. The ongoing practice of mass destruction and massacre not only has no limits: it is meticulous, deliberate, and controlled, and, at the same time, it is hard to imagine what “victory” is being sought. My hypothesis is the following: the massacres in Gaza are a sequence of experimentation, and they have value for global capitalism—as the “stop and go” logic of the global economy during COVID had, in another way, with its strong “biopower” dimension. Mind you, I’m not saying this to play the postmodernist and claim that some logic of domination has become autonomous from capitalist relations. The surplus proletarians in Gaza no longer have any productive function for Israeli capital, but the cutting-edge sector of technologies of control, with its high added value, “needs” them as guinea pigs in order then to enter into international circulation. Thus, bombing and the profiling of individuals by artificial intelligence are being tested, famine is managed with a meticulousness aimed at staying constantly on the edge of malnutrition (until now), and the same is done with epidemics, etc.
The Western powers back this logic of endless military aggression against the surplus proletarians of Gaza to the hilt: all the political gesticulations calling for moderation are theater (you only have to compare the question of arms deliveries to Ukraine to see that no limit is placed on Israel’s war machine by its allies).
OCL: You’re talking about both a bourgeoisie and a proletariat in Palestine. Could you sketch a portrait of the class composition in Gaza and the West Bank and of the conditions of struggle between those two classes? How does their status vis-à-vis Israel determine their class membership?
Minassian: The Palestinian bourgeoisie is not a firmly constituted national class: it remains, in effect, dependent on its subjugation to the Israeli state and capital. As soon as they are free to do so, Palestinian capitalists (in the sense that they are of “Palestinian background”) will spontaneously prefer to realize their capital outside the Palestinian territory—and therefore outside the Israeli national framework. It is undeniable that the Israeli occupation constrained the development of a “territorialized” Palestinian capitalist class. An American scholar, Sara Roy, popularized the notion of “de-development” to describe the way in which Israel prevented the creation of a “free” market economy—i.e. one embedded in the global market—in the occupied territories. The occupation channeled the development of capitalism in Gaza and the West Bank towards an exclusive and subordinated complementarity with the Israeli economy, shaped production along a logic of subcontracting, and Israeli capitalists carved out a captive market for themselves in the territories. The Palestinian entrepreneurial bourgeoisie has every reason in the world to hate the occupation: they are trapped in the sphere of circulation as a comprador bourgeoisie, to borrow a term invented by Trotskyists. Does that mean they share the same struggles as the proletarians from the territories? We must doubt it, unless we believe in trickle-down economics.
Also central to the social dynamics in the territories is the “political” bourgeoisie formed in the context of the Oslo Accords, whose destiny is linked to the management of the Palestinian proletariat. In its sociology, this bourgeoisie itself largely comes from the latter. It imposed itself on the traditional ruling classes (what are called the “big families”), which pledged allegiance to it, and it penetrated their world. The intermediate cadres (Hamas in Gaza and above all Fatah in the West Bank) constitute a force overseeing the surplus proletariat “on the ground.” They stand at the intersection of the world of militancy and that of the rents from international donors. They are simultaneously highly contested (because they do everything to “close the door behind them”) and solicited for access to wages. They have embodied a form of social advancement and class revenge by means of political struggle.
To speak of a surplus proletariat is to say not that these people do not work, but that they are restricted to the very fringes of capitalist exploitation. Many work in a fragmented way, in tiny structures, often commercial, for pittance wages and without contracts (earning around ten dollars a day, while the cost of goods is indexed to those on the Israeli market). Others, in the West Bank, continued to work in Israel, in construction, restaurants, or agriculture, on very precarious terms, either crossing illegally or relying on intermediaries for access to permits that could be rescinded at any time (they have been suspended since October 7). Workers under contract were paid around 1400 euros a month, from which had to be deducted the prohibitive costs of “crossing” and, often, the acquisition of work permits. In the West Bank, a peasant economy also persists, often on a “supplementary” basis and under the pressures of the colonization process. Since the inception of Zionism, there has been a continuous tendency towards proletarianization among the farmers as a direct consequence of land grabs and of making the land profitable.
And then, there’s the world of political rents, emerging out of money poured in by international donors to defend forms of relative stability tied to their interests. These rents support the livelihoods of between a quarter and a third of the population, keeping in mind that forty percent of public-sector employees work for the Palestinian Authority’s security forces. They are paid according to the legal scale of “formal” wages, around 450 euros a month, but the Palestinian Authority’s funding by its donors and by Israel (through a tax retrocession) is under constant threat of cutting, causing the frequent freezing of wages. Moreover, some of this political rent is hijacked by political cadres for their own use, or to support their clientele and develop their investments in the informal sector. A big part of the surplus proletariat survives thanks to these diversions. This is a socially restless population, which had been massively integrated into wage labor in Israel in the seventies and eighties, and which mobilized en masse during the two Intifadas. This population is concentrated in refugee camps, historically and to this day the breeding ground of the Palestinian “dangerous classes.” In Gaza as in the West Bank, from Jabaliya to Jenin, these “suburbs within suburbs” are under constant fire from the Israeli army.
The social structure in the Occupied Territories is therefore highly unstable. The political bourgeoisie and especially its cadres are always under threat of retracing their steps, that is, of being demoted by Israel from the status of collaborator to that of resistance fighter, and therefore of being imprisoned.
OCL: And what about Gaza?
Minassian: In Gaza, during the period of Hamas rule (since 2007), the centrality of the comprador bourgeoisie, integrated into the political circuits, and of political rents, has remained unchanged, but within a context of blockade, meaning with even weaker investments and an exacerbated instability. The rents came from the control of the circulation of commodities and from international handouts from Qatar and Iran. The entrepreneurs who have built up fortunes in recent years (in the tunnel economy, for example) have done so in partnership with the Hamas security apparatus.
Can we even talk of a class structure in the current situation in Gaza? Even in this kind of situation, where every tomorrow is uncertain, there are always groups of individuals (linked to Hamas, to clan-based military organizations, or formed on the basis of gangs) that manage to do business. But this doesn’t constitute a proper class structure—or else it’s the class structure of a concentration camp, that fits into no social reproduction over time.
OCL: Couldn’t the national liberation struggle, interclassist as it may be, help ease the grip of class domination on Palestinian proletarians? Might not the Israeli colonization possibly shield the Palestinian bourgeoisie from any intensification of class contradictions?
Minassian: How is the national liberation struggle doing in Palestine today? Does it even exist? The national liberation struggle involves a certain perspective (a national state freed from the colonizer), and we could say that it remains valid as long as colonialism persists in Palestine. But what about the mobilization process? Historically, this process always unfolded around political formations, impacting the class structure.
In Palestine, national liberation was embodied in the various parties composing the PLO, agents of what we used to call the “Palestinian revolution” after the ’67 War: it’s around those parties (Fatah, PFLP and all the splits) that a social movement regrouped, turning all the traditional hierarchies—inherited from the feudal world—upside down. The “Palestinian revolution” saw the emergence of a managing class out of the intellectual petite bourgeoisie in exile, which, thanks to the circulation of political rents, was able to integrate proletarians from the refugee camps of Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria (and sometimes even non-Palestinian proletarians from those countries) into its organizations for the struggle. The traditional bourgeoisie was not destroyed but challenged: they had to negotiate with those organizations in order to protect themselves from the armed proletarians who carried their colors. This is the typical engine of national liberation movements: a political leadership, aiming at forming a state apparatus, absorbs a proletarian or peasant social movement or, most often—as in Palestine—one embedded in the proletarianization of peasant masses resulting from colonial relations. During the eighties this process reached Gaza and the West Bank, but without the military dimension: the first Intifada started as a revolt of the proletarians of the occupied territories (mostly from the refugee camps), exploited by Israeli capital; this revolt was “recuperated” only later, by the PLO, to turn it into a national political movement.
What happened next? According to the “classical” model, once the political leadership takes over the state, the interests of the social movement and the political formation start to diverge, and the proles are sent back to work by the newly formed nation state, supposedly at the service of the masses. In the specific case of Palestine, this delinking took place before independence was achieved: at the end of the period running from the Oslo accords to the second Intifada (1993–2004), the national cadres renounced the fight for independence, content to reap the rents and markets granted by Israel. Since then, the oppression of proletarians still takes the form of Israeli occupation and colonization, but without any perspective of struggle offered by the political organizations born out of the national liberation struggle, because their leaders are now integrated into this configuration as subcontractors. This is the well-known “double occupation,” widely prevalent in discussions in the West Bank.
OCL: Hasn’t Hamas taken over?
Minassian: In certain respects, Hamas has followed in the footsteps of the PLO. The social composition of its cadres is similar: educated middle class people without capital of their own, coming out of the universities, doing the splits between a proletarian base and the interests of the commercial bourgeoisie. Unlike the PLO, however, Hamas did not rely on any social movement. It constituted a kind of pious counter-society, hierarchical and respectful of the social order. Hamas integrated proletarians through enlistment, never seeking to capture the autonomous activity of the proletariat in the course of its negotiations with the bourgeoisie.
I think we should distinguish, at least methodologically, between “struggle,” which presupposes a form of autonomy of action, material stakes, and social contradictions, and “resistance” as practiced by hierarchical military organizations such as the Al-Qassam brigades in Gaza. Hamas can legitimately pride itself on being part of the resistance (like Hezbollah or other military-political groups in the region), but in a militarized, hierarchical, centralized mode, separating the population from its “troops,” and ready to unleash them to crack down on struggles.
In the mid-2000s, fringes within Hamas pushed it to join the framework of the autonomy agreements by taking part in elections, that is, to position itself, following Fatah, as Israel’s subcontractor in the management of the proletarians of the Territories. That is what it ended up doing by seizing power in Gaza in 2007. Since it did so militarily, and without negotiating with the occupier, it was able to keep its face of intransigence, but it nevertheless became, objectively, a local subcontractor in the management of surplus proletarians.
For sixteen years Hamas administered the Strip, managed relations with Israel (by dint of negotiations and missiles), repressed struggles, and allowed a class of entrepreneurs to get rich under its wing. Until, suddenly, on October 7, 2023, it broke away from this subcontractor role in order, I imagine, to reinvest in its dimension as a transnational military-political organization of the Hezbollah type. In doing so, it sacrificed the class of Gazan entrepreneurs that had developed under its wing. We can surmise that this reorientation did not happen without internal tension, that it reflects the bursting of an old contradiction within Hamas between its military-political branch, with a strong proletarian clientele, and its fringe embedded in the Palestinian business bourgeoisie.
OCL: British domination, then Zionist colonization, the enormous proportion of refugees, the daily exercise of colonial violence, etc., may have materially built a common identification of Palestinians and of their resistance, expressed in the form of the term “people.” Is this construction merely a reflection of the discourse of the Palestinian elites?
Minassian: This identification exists, of course, but we have to ask ourselves what’s happening behind it. I’m not trying to say at all costs that “peoples don’t exist, it’s a mystification by the ruling class aimed at masking its domination;” and still less that “if the mask fell, proletarians would become aware of their class interests.”
The idea of a Palestinian people is not exclusive to the Palestinian elites—it is even sometimes wielded against them. The question is: what struggles are at play inside the category of “people,” openly or discreetly, between the various social segments using it? It’s not because one identifies with a people that one doesn’t fight from one’s social position.
Here we can go back to what I was saying about national liberation and interclassism. From the sixties to the nineties, the PLO needed the proletarian struggles to negotiate its share of the pie with Israel, while the proletarians were using their “national” leadership as a way to legitimate their struggles against the elites. Inside the occupied territories, the first Intifada constituted the climax of this double logic of capture of the social movement by the political leadership, on the one hand, and of use of national struggle by the social movement, on the other. Proletarians and the national leadership struggled together, even if not without conflicts, until the period 2002–2005, when they stopped doing so.
After the debacle of the second Intifada (which in its first months carried on the same interclassist logic, tying rioting or armed proletarians to the political leaders), the national leaderships started applying a logic (in the West Bank but also in Gaza) of repression against struggles, even ones mobilizing the language of national liberation.
Even if that seems counter-intuitive, since the failure of the second Intifada the main adversary of the proletarian struggles in the occupied territories has been a Palestinian national leadership. Simply because it is the one they are in direct contact with, and which plays the role of buffer. Israel freed itself from the burden of reproducing the population, which it palmed off on a Palestinian leadership. Israel intervenes in the towns of the West Bank according to a logic of “raids”—and in Gaza, with pure and simple massacres.
OCL: What about the struggles in the last twenty years, outside/against the political parties?
Minassian: To talk about what I know better (I’ve only been in Gaza once, in 2002), in 2015–2016 there was, in the north of the West Bank, a latent insurrection of the proletariat of the refugee camps against the Palestinian Authority (PA). We talked then of an “internal” Intifada, with the Balata camp (on the outskirts of Nablus) as its epicenter. This social movement made the Palestinian police retreat, leaving room for young people to re-form armed groups on their own bases, outside the hierarchy of the parties, and to assert themselves socially against the notables linked to the PA, in Nablus and Jenin. The clashes of spring 2021 (riots in Jerusalem, in the Palestinian cities of “1948” Israel, a military-political offensive by Hamas, the cancellation of elections by the PA) drove the point home: the PA found itself weakened and somewhat cooled its ambitions for authoritarian rule.
What I’ve found interesting about the cycle of riots of 2015–2016 is that a lot of people shared the idea (only superficially contradictory) that the Palestinian administration simultaneously prevented any physical clash with the occupation and denied access to work in the Israeli economy. There was a sort of nostalgia for a time when “We worked for the Israelis during the day and threw Molotovs at them at night.” That same year, a big strike broke out among the teachers hired by the PA, and the Authority managed to neutralize it, using intimidation, crackdowns, and blackmail, following the lead of “Arab” regimes of the region; nonetheless, it gave rise to a sequence of social protests shaking the foundations of its political control.
OCL: Why is there such silence from our political camp about these struggles?
Minassian: In what people say in the West Bank, the PA and the Palestinian bourgeoisie are omnipresent as a source of oppression. But, of course, we should take into account the context of these interactions: we—the white activists out on a jaunt in the occupied territories—are appropriated with a function: to bear witness against the Israeli propaganda machine. This appropriation is carried out essentially by the middle classes, who in one way or another are part of a logic of gaining access to capital (material or symbolic) from the West. It is a fact that no one expects solidarity in the class struggle against Palestinian exploiters. So the people caught in these “internal” (from a national point of view) relationships of exploitation will talk to you about them, all the time even, but we don’t invest those words with the dimension of a political message—except in moments of extreme tension, like 2015–2016 in the West Bank.
What Palestinian proletarians experience as proletarians barely reaches our ears, and that’s no surprise: this lived experience is not contained in the “national cause” that the political cadres pass on to their relays abroad.
OCL: What perspectives can proletarians of the region, Israeli and Palestinian, expect to have in common?
Minassian: Israel embodies a vision of a nightmarish future: one in which a state belonging to the central bloc of capitalist countries reproduces the global zoning of the labor force on its territory, the same zoning that can be observed at the level of the global division of labor. This social zoning plays out in a quasi-conurbation: the distance between Gaza and Tel-Aviv is barely bigger than that between Paris and Mantes-la-Jolie [Translator’s note: a nearby banlieue]. And this zoning is grounded on ethnicity (a constant feature of Israeli history, as in many other states, even outside the context of national struggle: before the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, the Jewish proletarians “imported” from Arab countries had to pay the price).
But, in the last twenty years, the state has asserted itself as the guarantor not only of the social reproduction of the Jewish proletarians under its control, but of their “physical” existence itself, their very survival. Today we see the enlistment of the “national” proletariat behind its exploiters on a scale never seen before in history, against the surplus population of Gaza trapped in a concentration camp under constant bombardment.
We have to keep in mind that the struggles are taking place in such a nightmarish landscape. It is difficult to imagine those struggles capable of producing power relations strong enough to “break the segmentations.” Until last year, the mere fact that, in the Territories, these struggles continued to exist and to constrain the reproduction of social relations (here, again, I’m speaking of the struggles, not the hierarchical resistance) was in itself something that, personally, shook me and nourished me. Today, the logic of slaughter crushes everything under its weight: the capacity for autonomous action of the Palestinian proletariat is threatened by the carpet of bombs and, as long as the Jewish proletariat remains captive to the Israeli state (a situation that is unlikely to change in the near future), nothing can be negotiated through relations of force. We have indeed entered a new phase, one that hardly gives cause for hope.
OCL: Isn’t denying a material basis of the Palestinian “people” in effect giving some sort of “passive support” to the state that colonizes and represses it?
Minassian: I think it’s possible to develop an analytic framework in which one feels solidarity with the struggles in Palestine without harboring any illusion about the perspectives carried by the “national” socio-political apparatus. That’s what Socialisme ou Barbarie partly managed to do during the Algerian War: develop an internationalist line capable of keeping a critical stance towards the FLN, grounded in a class analysis.
We’re living in times, in Palestine and elsewhere, in which a political incarnation of the proletariat based “on class” is nowhere to be seen. Some cling to an identification with left-wing parties like the PFLP or the DFLP (Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine), or with a hypothetical civil society at a distance from the parties. I understand the approach, and I came to share it in my travels out of “cultural” affinity. But these parties and this civil society are riddled with class contradictions that the cadres wish to portray as secondary compared to national domination. Yet it is with the discourse of these cadres that one (usually) finds oneself in solidarity, without realizing it.
I stick to the idea that social relationships prevail over political ideologies and that in order to understand the struggles that “the” national struggle claims to subsume, it is necessary, emotionally and intellectually all at once, to always try to “start from below,” socially speaking, beyond political identifications.
Distinct logics are perceptible in the identification with Palestine, with the idea of Palestine, depending on class, relationship to politics and capital (either militant, cultural, etc.). This is true over there but also here, in the various expressions of solidarity. These various logics do not cohabit, nor do they converge or coalesce. They are contradictory, they are in struggle, more or less openly or silently.
I don’t have much to say about “what is to be done.” It seems to me that we should be less concerned with the different political stances within the solidarity movement (what one thinks of Hamas, of a bi-national state or whatever), and more with questions about its social composition, and the practices of struggles that result from this composition. We could then position ourselves in it, with the hope of “bringing the war home”—attacking the maintenance of the social order wherever we find ourselves and thus putting an end to the ongoing massacre in Gaza.
In France, the capture and framing of the solidarity demonstrations by the politicians of La France Insoumise and their ilk, who instrumentalize the “Palestinian cause” to serve their own interests, or even by associations that position themselves as interlocutors of the powers that be, points, in my view, to a defeat of the proletarian, non-political component of the movement, which expressed itself more forcefully, for example, during the 2014 war.
Emilio Minassian is part of the publishing collective Niet! and of the blog Les Serpents de la Mer, both engaged in critical social theory. He spent several periods in the West Bank between 2004 and 2023, particularly in refugee camps, running video workshops and carrying out research.
The French original of this interview first appeared in Courant Alternatif (no. 345, December 2024, and no. 346, January 2025). This English translation (by Enzo Bodine and otto dix rivers) first appeared in The Brooklyn Rail (March 2025, with Part II in April 2025). It has been revised by an editor of the Left Renewal Blog against the French original.
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