The Grammar of Resistance: Rethinking Palestine Beyond Pity and Fear

 

Abdaljawad Omar and Pasquale Liguori

It has become increasingly difficult to speak of Palestine without falling into one of the two dominant registers of Western discourse: on one side, a humanitarianism that evokes compassion but leaves structures of domination untouched; on the other, a strategic realism that calculates but cannot imagine. In both cases, Palestinian resistance is hollowed out—reduced to emotional pathology or excluded from the realm of political rationality. When it is not pitied, it is criminalised. And more and more often, this criminalisation bears the familiar marks of Islamophobia: resistance is framed as terrorism, survival as threat, and thought as potential radicalisation.

Yet, as pro-Gaza demonstrations multiply across Europe—often marked by a belated, conditional, and at times self-exculpatory awakening of conscience—there remains a lesson no intermittent outrage can obscure: Palestinian resistance preceded this moment, persists through it, and will endure beyond it not as a desperate reaction, but as a proposition for the world. It is a resistance that thinks, creates, and envisions futures. It seeks no approval from above but calls upon every political conscience unwilling to surrender to the imperial order.

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