ON COLONIAL VIOLENCE
AND ANTICOLONIAL RESISTANCE
May 27, 2021
Nadine El-Enany is a writer, poet, and teacher. She is Professor of Law at the University of Kent. Her book (B)ordering Britain: Law, Race and Empire (Manchester University Press, 2020) rethinks what Britain is, arguing it is an imperial and colonial space produced through violent and extractive economies of empire and maintained through immigration law. This reframing troubles racial capitalist structures, challenges mythological narratives about Britain’s colonial history, rejects a liberal politics of recognition, develops a methodology for anticolonial research in law, and paves the way for an empowering and radical politics of racial justice and migrant solidarity. (B)ordering Britain was awarded the 2021 Socio-Legal Theory and History Book Prize. El-Enany is coauthor of Empire’s Endgame: Racism and the British State (Pluto Press, 2021) and coeditor of After Grenfell: Violence, Resistance and Response (Pluto Press, 2019). She is winner of a 2020 Philip Leverhulme Prize. She has written for the Guardian, LRB blog, Verso blog, New Humanist, MAP Magazine, Open Democracy, and Critical Legal Thinking. Her poetry has appeared in magazines including Butcher’s Dog, Magma, Propel Magazine, 14 Magazine, fourteen poems, Gutter Magazine, Black Iris, Poetry Wales, Under the Radar, And Other Poems, and the Rialto. She is winner of the Chancellor’s Poetry Prize 2024, was shortlisted for the 2023 Poetry London Pamphlet Prize and longlisted for the 2023 and 2024 Rialto Nature and Place Poetry competitions and the 2022 Fish Poetry Prize.
ILAN PAPPÉ: Let us begin with a reference to the brutal Israeli attack on Gaza and other parts of historical Palestine,1 seeing these events through the prism of your work and analysis. The recent assault highlighted the relevance of your work, also for the situation in Palestine.
I would like to offer two insights and hear your opinion. The first is the need for any solidarity movement to look first at the injustices in its own society, as a way of its solidarity with others. The second is the novel and crucial approach your work offers us to challenge the myths of Israel as a democratic state—a framing that is accepted by many people and immunizes Israel from condemnation for the brutality we have witnessed on the ground.
With the help of your book, (B)ordering Britain: Law, Race and Empire, let us look at how Israel and Britain are still, today, colonial spaces. And let us consider how solidarity in Britain, with the struggle of decolonization in historical Palestine, can be closely associated with decolonizing Britain.
Deconstructing what colonialism and decolonization means for the struggle for justice in Britain should be an integral part of the activism and solidarity movements against the settler-colonial project of Zionism and Israel in historical Palestine. So, my first question to you is: Do you see such a dialectical relationship? And does this account in some way for your clear support for the Palestinian liberation struggle?
NADINE EL-ENANY: I do see the dialectical relationship between the different anticolonial projects, including those in Britain and Palestine. But I want to start with what accounts for my clear support of the Palestinian struggle for freedom. Of course it is in part a result of my understanding of historical events and the structures and processes of colonization. The fact that they are ongoing in so many contexts helps me to frame and articulate the urgency of the struggle for Palestinian liberation.
But your question really made me think about it from a personal perspective. I know that I was a clear supporter of the Palestinian struggle from a very young age—certainly before the age when I would have had the level of understanding that I do now about colonialism, its structures, and the role of law in perpetuating colonial violence.
I think I had a clear support for Palestinian struggle from the age at which we all will become aware, if we take an interest in what is happening around us and in the news—when we begin to see and feel in some ways, viscerally and painfully, the pain of others and the injustice that people are experiencing. I felt this at an early age. The local pro-Palestinian rallies in Exeter, organized by the local Stop the War branch, were the first demonstrations I went on, including alone, as a teenager.
And ironically, it was this outrage, deep sadness, and empathy that actually drove me to set aside various other passions I had as a young person and choose to study law. Because I felt that law held this power to do something about injustice. That we could rely on law, that we could invoke law to do something in a humanitarian way. Naively, I thought that if I studied law this would help the situation.
Now, so much of my work is about critiquing the potential of law to radically change situations of oppression, which I’m sure we will speak about and I discuss in my book at length. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to bring histories of colonialism to bear on our understanding of contemporary violence and injustice.
I also want to say something about the myth of Israel as a democratic state. As you say, in my work I tried to dispel the myth that Britain is a postimperial, legitimately bordered, sovereign nationstate. Challenging this myth is the first step toward a project of practically dismantling the violent border regime. The myth that Israel is a democratic state has a similar kind of cataclysmic power in how we begin to understand, or not understand, particular situations. And I know your own efforts in busting these myths in your work around Israel in particular. It is important to dwell on the status and power of these kinds of myths because they are actually what obstruct the very kind of solidarity that Palestinians are calling for, and that we are calling for—the kind that supports the Palestinian struggle for liberation.
To my mind, then, the question is: What is this liberation from, precisely? We can only call for liberation of a people if first we recognize that people are oppressed. On hearing an allegation of oppression targeted at a state that is assumed to be democratic, progressive, or even world-leading on human rights, I can see how some people might struggle to make sense of this kind of accusation.
I suppose this is how myths work, because Israel cannot be a democratic state and be an apartheid state—it cannot be a democratic state and a settler-colonial power at the same time. Britain cannot be a domestic space of colonialism and also a postimperial, legitimately bordered, sovereign nation-state. Because there are certain principles that underlie a democratic state, like the rule of law and equality before the law.
These principles cannot be sustained in a context in which a section of the population is oppressed, regarded and treated as nonhuman, subject to targeted state violence and murder daily. Where state laws and policies are specifically designed to promote and propagate the supremacy of one section of the population. These laws and policies are also designed to cleanse the land of another section of the population through police and military violence, evictions, the destruction and occupation of property, allowing violent groups to torment people and act with impunity, controlling the economy to ensure a specific part cannot survive, thrive, or flourish. And through legal judgments, which replicate and legitimize that violence.
We can clearly see how powerful and harmful these kinds of myths are, how they distort reality. As you say, for more than ten days Israel has been carrying out airstrikes, dropping bombs in a densely populated area in which people—families—are under siege or trapped with nowhere to go. They are traumatizing and killing an already traumatized population. To my mind, it was as though people elsewhere seemed to notice this violence. Suddenly, in this so-called exchange of fire, children are dying disproportionately—people felt that this is bad, it should stop. And it seemed so sudden in some people’s minds because media coverage suddenly begins or expands, and there is a momentariness to the attention.
This kind of momentary response is a symptom of the myth that you’re speaking about—that Israel is a democratic, progressive state. Because the reality is that violence is the status quo, violence is everyday. It is normalized. The prevention of movement, the random arrests, the refusal to release people and bodies to families, the raids on people’s homes, the killings, the evictions—these happen every day and not a single word is spoken about them.
So the airstrikes aren’t actually an aberration, even though they come to be understood that way in people’s minds. We see similar things happening here, like when the Grenfell Tower fire happens, when the Windrush scandal happens—people see these as an aberration when really the norm is a long history of colonial violence. And so the way in which this conflictual nature gets attached to Israel/Palestine is also a symptom of this myth that surrounds the situation. To speak of “conflict” and “unrest” suggests that there is rest and peace outside of that situation, which we know has not been the case in Israel since 1948 and before. Unless we recognize the reality and reject the myth, I don’t think we can move toward a situation of solidarity. Where we don’t understand the Palestinian struggle for liberation as a humanitarian one alone, as one that deserves our charity, our pity, and our compassion. But one which foregrounds the fact that this is a people struggling against apartheid, against settler colonialism—and recognizes Palestinians as empowered, purposive peoples with desires and goals of their own, and as being completely invested and engaged in the project of their own liberation in that context.
ILAN PAPPÉ: Yes, I totally agree. I find your book helpful because an important layer in the Israeli propaganda shield is creating a distinction between the occupied West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and Israel proper. In which Israel says, “We have Palestinians, but they are equal citizens—they can vote and elect the Palestinian minority in Israel.” This alleged equal citizenship offered to the ’48 Arabs, the Palestinian minority in Israel, shields Israel from international condemnation as a rogue and apartheid state.
I am also reminded of the way that Palestinian citizens of Israel are treated as and compared to immigrants, while Israel actually immigrated into their lives and homeland. Both the former subjects of the British Empire who immigrated to Britain (who are citizens by right) and the Palestinians to whose country Israel immigrated are not easily recognized as victims of colonization—because allegedly they are equal before the law. What emerges from your work is that, contrary to the liberal Zionist claim that the law in Israel protects Palestinian citizens from abusive and violent policies, in truth the law itself is an important part of the violence directed toward non-Jews. Or in the case of Britain, nonwhites. We must unpack the liberal language of equality in both contexts.
Let us move to a more general theme. (B)ordering Britain begins with reference to our beautiful city of Exeter, and your family history is connected to our Institute. Your parents arrived in Exeter in 1978 and, like all of us, were taken by the serenity of this city and the beauty of its surroundings. And yet there was a twist in the plot, which reminded me of what many Black students and people of color in the city experienced once the Leave campaign became active.
Your parents lived in the same suburb for forty years and when your father retired, his neighbor asked him if he would be going back to Egypt. You argue that the Leave campaign was not just a call to leave the EU, but also the old racist call for nonwhites to leave Britain. Later we will discuss how this kind of topology is maintained through discourse, law, and policies on the ground. But first let us speak in general terms, especially after the Windrush scandal2 and the powerful appearance of Black Lives Matter impacted the discussion of Black Britain.
Unfortunately, the brave struggle of Black Britain and its brutal suppression in the 1970s and ’80s was left out of that conversation.3 Did these recent events and campaigns of awareness or recognition make you more sanguine about the way Britain, as a political system and as a society, is dealing with its imperial and colonial past and present? In particular, regarding the institutional racism and racialization embedded within Britain’s legal system and immigration policies?
NADINE EL-ENANY: Of course the Black Lives Matter uprisings of 2020 gave me hope about the possibilities for a resistance movement in this country. I differentiate that from giving me hope about any kind of official response. It definitely lifted our spirits at a time when we were witnessing one of the most horrific impacts of a structurally and institutionally racist country like Britain. We were seeing and feeling that horror of the disproportionate deaths of racialized people as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and the refusal of the government to do anything about this—to acknowledge that institutional racism in any way played a part. Instead they preferred to focus on underlying health conditions and comorbidities, taking a victim-blaming approach. But also they chose not to look at why health inequalities exist and why people working in certain sectors are disproportionately racialized and therefore disproportionately more exposed to the virus. We also saw the government adopting a situation of exceptionalism and a colonial logic of “surplus populations” who can be simply left to die.
So, yes, to see people rise up to be part of that movement gave me hope. I think it gave a lot of people hope and courage because we saw some amazing instances of solidarity and empowerment to speak about institutional racism. One of the things that stays with me is an action by the survivors and bereaved of the Grenfell Tower fire. I was so moved and so filled with hope to see them project the words “We can’t breathe” onto Grenfell Tower. This was so powerful because it broke the silence about racism in relation to the Grenfell Tower fire, which has been at the core of the official response. The inquiry into the fire excludes the question of racism as being an issue in what happened. The fear among Grenfell residents of speaking out about this was really broken in that Black Lives Matter moment in the summer of 2020.
What also lifted me about that particular action is the way it allowed the issue of Black Lives Matter to gather an anti-imperialist global dimension in the message. It became a call that necessitated joining up of those who struggle against state and imperial racial oppression in all its forms, by projecting a call to justice being used in relation to the killings of Black people in the US onto a building in this domestic space of colonialism that is Britain. This can only make the movement stronger. In fact, I think it’s the only way that the movement can succeed. So, in terms of the societal response, I would definitely say that especially after COVID-19 and the EU Referendum, with its effect of amplifying anti-migrant hysteria and racist hate, Black Lives Matter was an amazingly powerful moment.
But does it make me more sanguine about Britain as a political system dealing with its imperial and colonial past? I can’t say that it does. There have been slight shifts in official discourse in the immediate aftermath, a kind of willingness to maybe take down a statue or two, but actually reneging on that as we’ve seen with Oxford and Rhodes recently.4 Since then, we can look at examples of how the state responds in a very typically harsh way toward these protests. One is the Police Crime, Sentencing, and Courts bill, which provoked the amazing Kill the Bill demonstrations.5 But we know that this bill was introduced in response to the strength of the street movements we are talking about. It has been the target of this amazing resistance in cities across the country. It also seems to have seen the emergence of what is relatively unprecedented in recent decades: a coalitional resistance by all the communities targeted by the bill, like those campaigning against violence against women, migrant organizations, gypsy and traveller groups, those affected by school suspensions, people campaigning against police brutality, stop and search. They are all coming together to resist this bill. Black Lives Matter of the summer of 2020 will also have made those demonstrations against the bill possible.
But the bill is also clearly a nod to the Tory, white, propertied voting base, reassuring them not to worry about civil unrest: “We’ve got your backs, we’re going to protect your interests.” The other example that makes me less hopeful about the official response is the Sewell report—the government’s appointed Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities.6 This comes during a time when we have seen some of the most horrific effects of structural racism, and the intersection between race and class in this country with the disproportionate deaths resulting from the pandemic. Also, on the heels of the BLM [Black Lives Matter] uprisings, the report makes the claim that there is no institutional racism in Britain—a complete denial that institutional racism exists. The Sewell report presents institutional racism as a figment of the “warped mentality” of Black and Brown people. It states that calls to address racism are part of “youthful idealism” and actually work to obscure the urgent needs of a left-behind white working class, who are neglected by these elite multiculturalists.
In that sense, I don’t have hope in this kind of official response. But what gives me hope is the movements emerging in response to state racism in terms of Kill the Bill. But also the amazing solidarity with Palestine—these are the biggest demonstrations in support of Palestine in the history of this country. They have been absolutely amazing. This movement is growing and of course it is causing consternation—and there are attempts to suppress it.
The irony of the Sewell report is that it criticized a really maligned “BAME” label—Black, Asian, and minority ethnic. The report claims that the label holds together a group that in truth is not a community, and that this is somehow insulting to racialized people. But this is ironic because the report tries to deny a solidarity that we actually see as existing in the form of Kill the Bill, the Free Palestine movement, and the demonstrations we’ve seen. It is precisely a coalitional solidaristic movement—people recognizing their bonds with each other, resisting attempts to divide us along lines of identity, and realizing our connectedness. And the connectedness of the struggles against state violence.
ILAN PAPPÉ: Let’s talk about the potential of human rights work that lawyers are doing in this country, which you refer to in your work. A few days ago, I met a lawyer representing one of the families evicted from the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in Jerusalem. He said to me, “This is some of the most depressing work I’m doing.” When I asked why, he replied, “Even if we succeed, which I doubt, I am helping this family to stay in an oppressed apartheid neighborhood and to continue living with the danger of a future ethnic cleansing. It’s not as if I am going to court and if we succeed, it will dramatically transform the life of my clients.”
An important part of your work is an engagement with the politics of recognition, with particular interest in how it affects the defense work done by lawyers on behalf of those defined as refugees, aliens, and immigrants. While you believe that a critical approach to the politics of recognition in settler-colonial studies, which many of our students work with, is progressing and having an impact, you cannot say the same for those who practice and teach human rights law in Britain. This means that while it may be important to fight for the rights of Black, Brown, and so-called nonwhite people, who are former subjects or citizens of the Empire, to receive the status of citizenship or any statutory rights, the contemporary racial and colonial nature of Britain “does not alter the way in which racialized people are cast in white spaces as undeserving guests, outsiders, or intruders.” I quote your book directly here. This is something that “nonwhite” students in our university— and really all universities—are fully aware of, for instance, when exposed to racist abuse in the city and on campus. To demonstrate this deficiency, you pointed to the struggle of those victimized by the Windrush scandal, and their legal representatives, when it was clear that public discourse did not acknowledge that Britain owes its affluence to the spoils of colonialism—which were then denied to former citizens and subjects, among them those who arrived during the 1940s.
To counter this, you offer an alternative—a “counter-pedagogy” that is absent from the work of human rights lawyers striving to help their clients achieve recognition. Can you explain what you mean by this?
NADINE EL-ENANY: It comes back to myths and the need to challenge them. I speak of a counter-pedagogy specifically against the hegemonic reading that law gives us. Laws passed in the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s constructed Britain as a postimperial space through the use of an invented legal concept called “patriality.” This essentially said that in 1971, unless you were a person born in Britain or had a parent born in Britain, you did not have the right to enter and remain in Britain. In 1971, a person born in Britain was 98 percent likely to be white. It’s very clear what was being written into the law.
The effect was essentially racial exclusion—the severing of connections to Britain, the right to enter and remain for former colonial and Commonwealth citizens. This had a powerful material effect, but also a powerful symbolic effect in constructing Britain as a postimperial, legitimately bordered, sovereign nation-state. What I say is that working with the law is obviously important for lawyers like the person representing the Sheikh Jarrah families. We need law in those urgent moments! But law won’t help us to achieve our longterm radical goals for transformation and justice. We need to be aware that every time we use the colonial state’s law as legal practitioners and legal scholars, we also reinforce its authority to determine who has access to Britain and the spoils of empire, who has the right to ownership of land in Palestine.
There are many parallels to draw, but what’s happening is a reinforcing of power and an erasure of colonial history. It is so important to contextualize these laws in a way that demonstrates why they are unjust, why they should be seen as instances of colonial violence. The laws are not some neutral thing that does the work of “justice” by dividing the deserving from the undeserving on the basis of what are neutral categories.
The book is an attempt to provide a counter-pedagogy and a counternarrative, which places laws in their proper historical context. But I also make the argument that if we look at the laws themselves in their proper historical context and then understand them as racial violence, then we also should understand an irregularized migrant—activity that is criminalized—as being something else. As being anticolonial resistance because the laws that are being breached or obstructed are themselves instances of colonial violence. It’s a whole reframing of how we think about law and how we think about resistance and breakages of the law.
I am careful that when I say “irregularized migration is anticolonial resistance,” I’m not promoting it—for the reason that it’s such a dangerous thing to do. The hostile environments that people are subjected to pre-and post-arrival are murderous. But what I am saying is that it is precisely the illegality in the activity—the forcible defiance of the laws that are designed to obstruct the restoration of colonial property, the relationship of illegality and forced redistribution—that actually gives irregularized migration its anticolonial dimension. So it’s a counternarrative that insists on a recognition that the story of Britain’s making is fiction. But it also has an important psychic dimension. Because what happens is that, rather than understanding themselves as rightfully at the mercy of law and legal status recognition processes, racialized people living within a colonial space see themselves as collectively entitled to resist their oppression. To reclaim their wealth, their land, what was stolen from them. As entitled to presence, freedom of movement, equality, and justice.
ILAN PAPPÉ: Those who are familiar with (B)ordering Britain know that it is also about ordering Britain. In your activism and writing, you engage with identifying how the state frames public order and disorder through a depoliticized criminalization of political dissent, which is motivated by a clear political agenda. I was amazed to learn how rulings, acts, and policies of kettling, charging through a body of demonstrators with horses, and other brutal means were all historically legitimized. And they continue to be legitimized with more or less the same reasoning from the late nineteenth century onward.
Am I going too far if I include the Prevent program as another illumination of ordering Britain? Is it part of the same methodology? And how can we challenge these unacceptable restrictions on our freedoms?
NADINE EL-ENANY: Well, it’s not just a program. Prevent is also a legal duty placed on public bodies to prevent people from being drawn into terrorism.7 And it does come with a whole program, including requirements for training people. But this legal duty has had serious effects in relation to academic freedom, as you mention. I don’t think it is going too far to include Prevent and a long history of suppression and criminalization of dissent in ordering Britain. Controlling racially and economically oppressed populations has always required a system of surveillance, alongside brutal forms of policing on the street. These systems have also often included drawing socalled ordinary citizens, employers, teachers into this surveillance system, which is the work of the state. By law, the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act of 2015 introduced the duty of universities to take action to prevent people being drawn into terrorism.8
We know the political context—the Islamophobic context, the anti-Muslim racist context—in which these laws are introduced. And so we know the people who are targeted as a result of laws like this, which might masquerade as pertaining to all forms of extremism. The very vague guidance issued alongside this law leaves a lot of scope for misuse of this duty. We see it in our own workplaces, in universities for example. It’s not just the law that is applied—they often have very overzealous interpretations of the law, which make us all complicit in state racism. In recent weeks here in the UK we’ve seen Prevent used to target school students who are speaking out in support of Palestine or just wearing Palestine badges. Trying to raise awareness at school, they face the full force of the school’s disciplinary mechanisms—all under the guise of Prevent.
Teachers are misinformed about the Palestinian struggle because they are taught in training programs that demonstrating any kind of support for Palestine is a sign of being drawn into extremism. The Prevent program also allows preexisting prejudices to then be enacted against Muslim students. And we’ve seen that in our own institutions. It’s not just the Prevent program, it’s also how international students are treated. They are hounded by university administrations who are terrified of falling foul of the Home Office, which again brings in the bordering aspect. We have discriminatory registration requirements and universities going above and beyond in their differential treatment of international students. And we are all complicit in this! I never expected to be a border guard, considering the kind of work that I do. But I absolutely am, in the kind of registration that I have to subject my students to.
I worry about Prevent in the ways we are talking about because of how it legitimizes control, punishment, and criminalization. But it also has a self-policing effect as people become afraid to do the kind of research that they want, or speak out in public forums in case they are accused of breaching legal duties—falling foul of the Prevent program. If the state doesn’t succeed in silencing you, you end up silencing yourself.
In terms of how we challenge these things, we need to try to not be complicit as much as we possibly can. The place to start is our workplaces and our own departments—and making sure that we refuse, as far as possible, everything that comes with the Prevent duty. We need to make our colleagues aware of the harms that result from these kinds of obligations. We need to support our students in still having their pro-Palestine events and their ability to speak out in class. There is also work being done within our unions in terms of training people in how to resist Prevent.
ILAN PAPPÉ: As an activist and scholar, you were also very much involved in the aftermath of the Grenfell Tower fire, in which seventy-two people lost their lives on June 14, 2017. You edited a book with Dan Bulley and Jenny Edkins titled After Grenfell: Violence, Resistance and Response. This book exposes the fire as a criminal act born of neoliberal economics, the racialization of subjects, and the denial of basic rights to those who either do not have the status of citizens, or those who have citizenship but are excluded from receiving adequate housing. This reality was accentuated by the inadequate responses from the government and local council to the fire and the loss of life and property. No less important, we are left with knowledge that oppressive economic policies coupled with immigration and citizenship laws leave many more towers as potential infernos in the future.
The book also talks about resistance. Is this a resistance based on future solidarity between the groups that are the focus of your work? People who are racialized as “nonwhite” in Britain organizing with whites (the working class) who are seemingly not affected by citizenship or immigration laws, but by austerity, neoliberalism, and the legacies of a class-based society. You frame the trajectory of a pillage of spoils, highlighting the affluence built on it and the denial of access to it. This raises the question: Where are the whites who are also denied access to this affluence? In a way, they belong to the community of robbers but do not have a share in the spoils.
I’m intrigued by this because it reminds me of how Arab Jews, the Mizrahi Jews, still struggle today to get a larger share of the land robbed from the Palestinians in 1948. It is a question of social justice. They deserve more land, but this land was dispossessed from the Palestinians who inhabited it or were made refugees. In the case of the Arab Jews, this is a marginalized social and ethnic group within the settler society, which despite its attempts to de-Arabize itself is not treated as equal to the European Jews.
Are you interested in such an alliance in Britain, politically? How do you value its importance and prospects?
NADINE EL-ENANY: Yes, I absolutely see the resistance that we urgently need now as being coalitional. As bringing together all those dispossessed by intersecting oppressive forces, whether colonialism, racism, or neoliberalism. To my mind, this is the only kind of resistance that has a chance of righting some of history’s wrongs— of seeing a redistribution of wealth and resources, of seeing that everyone has a chance to flourish and to thrive, not just survive. But I sometimes fear that we are far from this kind of coalitional form of solidarity.
We can find ourselves embroiled in arguments within resistance movements about who can use a slogan or who can use a particular term. We saw this in the wake of BLM in 2020. Can we say Brown Lives Matter? Or can we only say that Black Lives Matter? Can we say Palestinian Lives Matter? This hoarding of words can be quite unhelpful. It can be an attachment to victimhood, and a failure to envision and then fight for a future in which attachments to identity begin to fall away. What we’re striving for is an equal society in which people are not mistreated or dehumanized on account of their differences. A world in which these kinds of differences and the way they matter now actually cease to matter. So we cannot say that the person can only be part of a movement if they are racialized.
What we want is a movement that works toward a place in time where it doesn’t matter if one is racialized or not for the chance to live, to thrive in society. I would want a kind of solidarity in which material, social, cultural, racial, and other differences do not prohibit coalition. They are acknowledged as important in placing us and our experiences, and the differential way in which oppression affects us in terms of how we’re racialized through material conditions. But this can nevertheless be a solidaristic movement where we reach across these differences and divides toward meeting. I always come back to this quote from Hélène Cixous: we search for “people who are like [us] in their rebellion and in their hope.”9 Because, for me, this is the most important thing. If we have that in common then we can come together. Then we can embrace.
It requires embracing the complex, messy work of organizing. It’s never going to be clean and easy to organize and struggle together. It’s always going to be an embracing of complexity—the pain of that, the confusion of that, the challenging of our own assumptions, our own entitlement, our own guilt, our own shame. All of the messiness of what it means to be human. And then you confront that— you embrace it and you wade through that messiness. That’s how you build this truly solidaristic kind of movement. And I also think that I am no more fit for the struggle because I am a racialized person, because I have experienced racism. I really believe I’m no more fit for this struggle in lots of ways than the child of the colonizer who witnesses the injustices around them and joins their brothers and sisters in the struggle against oppression. I really think that. And that’s what makes the movement stronger, in recognizing that. And finding each other in how we are like each other “in our rebellion and in our hope.”
ILAN PAPPÉ: Thank you, Nadine. This was so important for all of us. In my last question, I want to go back to Palestine, the politics of recognition, and international law. When you write about the problems of the politics of recognition, you also extend your discussion to other parts of the world—in particular to the struggles of Indigenous people in places such as Canada and Australia. The questions you tap into are very relevant to the discussion among Palestinians and those who support their struggle. You raise questions about the relevance of international law, including international human rights law, to the struggle for freedom and justice. Britain is a colonial space, and so is Israel. What does it tell us about the relevance or irrelevance of international law to Palestine?
Some scholars, such as Noura Erakat, go even further and warn us that international law provides a liberal global shield that helps to perpetuate colonization rather than challenging it. Can engaging with international law be done within what you called “counterpedagogy,” which you explained to us as a new framing? Would it require us to understand the historical context in which international law was born? As you remind us again and again, laws are not born out of the blue. The historical context here is the way that settler-colonial societies and states were able to shield themselves from being judged by international law, by not allowing the law in the ’60s to define settler colonialism as colonialism.
I was very surprised to read about how Canada, the United States, and other countries were making sure that while colonialism would be condemned by international law, settler colonialism would not be part of that discussion. This historical exclusion later generated the poignant critique directed by Indigenous movements toward international law. If I can conclude and summarize this point, how do you see the relevance of international law for the struggle for justice in Palestine and other settler-colonial settings where Indigenous people are not recognized in international law?
NADINE EL-ENANY: I’m not an expert on international law, but there are many excellent, critical international law scholars who have shown through careful historical excavation and analysis how international law serves to enshrine the colonial order and global racial hierarchy in myriad ways and fields over the past decades. I’ll just take, for example, international human rights law, which I write about in the book. Human rights are enshrined in so many international and regional treaties and domestic legal systems. The problem is, are we even sure that we agree on who or what constitutes a human being? Can we say for certain that we’re talking about the same thing when we say “human”? I don’t think so. If we agreed on what the term “human” meant, I don’t think that we would see the mass racial violence and murder and corresponding impunity—its total lack of registration, of even computing, as violence in so many minds.
I’m thinking, of course, of Palestine. I’m thinking of the invasion in Iraq. I’m thinking of the Grenfell Tower fire. All of the things we’ve been talking about today. We know that colonialism and white supremacy necessitate the dehumanization of people. And they’ve long done the work of shaping psyches, so that many people are unable to register as violence something that happens to a Brown person, a Black person, a Muslim person. I often ask myself this question in relation to Iraq: How can millions die due to this invasion, and it does not register as unacceptable?
And then we see the Grenfell Tower fire. We see the images of the victims, the vast majority of whom are Muslim. People have become so accustomed to seeing people in headscarves and with brown faces as being the victims of violence. The violence that they experience is so normalized it doesn’t register as being in any way remarkable. When you say that this cladding remains on so many buildings—had the fire happened in a building with predominantly white people, it’s possible that that would have registered as violence. And that something would have happened to at least take the cladding off a similar building.
Human rights law also plays a role in obscuring state racism. And by obscuring state racism, we don’t see what it is that we actually need to tackle. If we think about human rights and antidiscrimination law, they’re kind of soft signifiers for racism. Racism becomes constructed as an aberration from legal norms as perpetuated by an individual, rather than something structurally produced and sustained through law. But of course, human rights law is both useful and useless in urgent situations. People facing the violence of the law—being deported, having their home under threat—go to the law because it’s the last resort. But if we think about migration law for a moment, individuals only come within the protection of human rights law when they fall within the jurisdiction of the state. And that’s why we see so many people dying at sea. Because the state does everything it possibly can to ensure that people never make it into the jurisdiction of the state, and lose their lives in the process of trying.
Looking for hope in international human rights is understandable and it can sometimes be found—but it’s always going to be in the form of incremental change. We won’t be talking in terms of abolition, liberation, or transformation if we are looking to international law. I think it does make a difference because of course it matters which government is in power and which laws are in place for individuals seeking family reunification, asylum, naturalization. The specific laws in place matter. Therefore a more reformist struggle is necessary alongside, keeping in mind our radical goals.
We can look at it in the context of Palestine and the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) declaration that it will investigate Israel for war crimes.10 At the time, lawyers hoped that this was going to make a difference because individual Israeli soldiers might fear prosecution, might fear traveling abroad—they might think twice about their actions. But then we see the status quo and the recent military action in spite of this recent declaration. I don’t think there are any reports from Palestinians on the ground that this declaration has somehow changed the everyday brutality they face, including shoot-to-kill and shoot-to-blind policies. There is no report that these kinds of international legal machinations actually make a difference in their daily lives.
What they might do is contribute to the sense of a shift, a sea change in a growing unwillingness on the ground—in movements of people coming together who reject this total impunity on the part of the Israeli government and the military—and reinforce a grassroots resistance. If we’re talking about radical change, that’s the kind of campaign we need. A campaign where people, including those within institutions who bring their institutions on board, make the situation in Palestine and its system of policies too costly to be sustained. That’s the kind of pressure that is needed.
We’ve been here before with histories of movements against colonialism and we can learn from these histories—how to organize and how to bring people together. For me, there is some necessity in paying attention to the law and using it when necessary. But also always focusing on how to build movements and connections with each other. One of the things I always take hope from, whilst the state is always trying to break bonds, to divide, to oppress, to exert its rule, its violence, is that in moments of crisis, we see people coming together.
And one of the things I particularly take hope from is the way in which mutual aid groups were formed in Britain, for example, in the midst of the pandemic. The state moved quickly to try to co-opt these groups, but it didn’t work. It was a failed attempt. What actually happened is that people who lived on the same streets, who lived in neighborhoods, who may have never spoken before, came together and practically supported each other. These are bonds of care, bonds of love, bonds of defiance against the state’s willful neglect and failure. And these are the bonds that can’t be broken.