Zahi Zalloua, "Fanon, Žižek and the Violence of Resistance" (Bloomsbury, 2025)

Summary

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Podcast Summary: New Books Network

Episode: Zahi Zalloua, Fanon, Žižek and the Violence of Resistance (Bloomsbury, 2025)
Date: September 17, 2025
Host: Morteza Hajizadeh
Guest: Zahi Zalloua (Professor of Philosophy and Literature, Whitman College)

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Overview of the Episode

This episode features a deep dive into Zahi Zalloua's new book, Fanon, Žižek and the Violence of Resistance, exploring the conceptual and practical intersections of resistance, violence, and theory through the lenses of Frantz Fanon and Slavoj Žižek. The conversation contextualizes these debates in current world events—from Palestine to global protest movements—unpacking how violence is understood and experienced both in theory and in practice, particularly within anti-colonial and anti-racist struggles. The episode challenges liberal discourses on violence and recognition, centering the necessity of reckoning and solidarity in emancipatory politics.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Zahi Zalloua’s Research Focus and Purpose for the Book

• Multidisciplinary Background: Zalloua's expertise spans continental philosophy, psychoanalysis, critical Black studies, Palestinian studies, and post-human studies.
• Book’s Origin: The book is a continuation from his previous work, aiming to better articulate "what resistance actually looks like," specifically in the framework of Fanon and Žižek’s ideas about violence.
  [02:17]

  “I wanted to focus more specifically on Fanon and Žižek and how they imagined violence and how resistance is experienced by the colonized.” — Zahi Zalloua

2. Rethinking Violence and Resistance

• Violence as Integral to Resistance: Any genuine resistance is always, in some sense, "violent"—whether physically or by "denaturalizing racist logics," which is experienced as violence by oppressors.
  [04:20]

  “Any genuine resistance will be violent, will be experienced as violence.” — Zahi Zalloua

• Counter-violence vs. Originary Violence: What is often labeled as “violence” is counter-violence in response to the everyday, naturalized violence of the status quo.
  [05:51]

  “When we see an act of violence, we obfuscate the original violence... For many liberals, the latest Gaza war began October 7, 2023. There’s no conception that October 6 was a violent day…” — Zahi Zalloua

3. The Limits of Liberalism and the Myth of Nonviolence

• Liberal Obfuscation: Liberals often separate violence and resistance, displacing attention from systemic/invisible violence.
  [06:58]
• Examples Drawn: Referencing the Gandhi/Mandela comparison, Zalloua articulates how system-changing nonviolence is more “violent” (in its transformative force) than apparent physical violence like Hitler’s, because it dismantles systemic oppression.
  [04:28]

4. Transformative Versus Destructive Violence

• Transformative Change Requires Destruction: Fanon and Žižek argue that new worlds can only emerge by dismantling existing unjust systems—an inherently violent (but not fetishized) process.
  [10:06–11:47]

  “Transformative resistance must entail some kind of dismantling of the Master’s house.” — Zahi Zalloua
  “Violence is intrinsic to the construction of a new world.” — Zahi Zalloua

5. Critique of Liberal Anti-Racism and the Depoliticization of Resistance

• Superficial Gestures: White liberals police language or promote “black faces in high places,” but avoid structural critiques of capitalism and racism.
  [14:11–17:48]

  “The people I find more problematic are not the fascists from the right... It’s the liberals who masquerade as progressives... interested in the status quo.” — Zahi Zalloua

• Failure in Crisis: After George Floyd’s murder and calls to “defund the police,” liberals retreated, refusing real structural change.
  [16:09]

6. Identity Politics and the Splitting of the Left

• Divisive Tool: Identity politics, in liberal hands, is used to split the left and distract from material issues, rather than enable genuine cross-racial/class solidarity.
  [23:13]

  “The way the white liberal elite uses identity politics is to split the left.” — Zahi Zalloua

• Stretching Marxism: Fanon insists on expanding Marxism to account for colonial and racial realities, not reduce everything to class.
  [23:39]

7. Global Capitalism, Surplus Humanity, and “Becoming Black/Palestinian”

• Capitalism’s Mutation: Global north can no longer shield itself; the “becoming black of the world” (Achille Mbembe) and “becoming Palestinian” signal how globalized, racialized violence is expanding.
  [24:43–26:17]

  “Gaza is in many ways a dress rehearsal for all the evils to come.” — Zahi Zalloua

8. Imagination, Fantasy, and the Work of Theory

• Necessity of Imagination: Transformative change relies on new collective fantasies (à la Lacan) that “introduce something new into the world,” unbound from nostalgia and reification of former identities.
  [31:35–33:04]

  “We have to create new fantasies to produce... universalist desires.” — Zahi Zalloua

9. Reckoning, Antagonism, and True Change

• What “Reckoning” Means: True reckoning demands breaking from privileged identities, and a symbolic “violence” or “suicide” of those positions.
  [33:23–35:10]

  “To emancipate yourself from your identity requires a form of violence, self-violence willed violence to break with your whiteness, your privileged Jewishness that Zionism elevates...” — Zahi Zalloua

• Antagonism vs. Conflict: Liberals treat Palestine as a “conflict” rather than an antagonism; addressing antagonism would collapse the system itself.
  [36:47–38:06]

10. Dangers of Romanticizing Pre-Colonial Identities

• Limitations: Nostalgic return to precolonial identities is a “cruel ruse,” unhelpful for addressing global problems like capitalism—which is no longer just Western.
  [38:41–41:33]

  “You have to go through capitalism. There’s no escaping capitalism. Capitalism is never just a Western obsession. It is a crushing reality.” — Zahi Zalloua

11. Psychoanalysis, Alienation, and Resistance

• Need to “World” Psychoanalysis: Psychoanalytic theory, stretched in Fanonian style, is needed to understand both the libidinal and political economy of oppression.
  [45:01–47:24]

  “For him, psychoanalysis is essential for any emancipatory project.” — Zahi Zalloua

• Alienation and Change: True emancipation involves recognizing both political exploitation and existential (Lacanian) alienation.

12. From Recognition to Transformation

• Critique of Humanitarianism: Liberal humanitarian discourse only seeks to “humanize” Palestinians, not liberate them. True transformation needs anti-colonial struggle, not just recognition of suffering.
  [48:32–54:20]

  “What a liberal humanist imperative to humanize the Palestinians doesn’t ultimately work. It may save the Palestinian’s life... but there’s no liberation in the liberal humanist humanitarian framework.” — Zahi Zalloua

13. Zionism, Antisemitism, and Trauma

• Weaponizing Trauma: Israeli state (and some Zionist rhetoric) weaponizes Holocaust trauma to silence critique, but universal politics requires moving beyond monopolizing victimhood.
  [57:55–60:45]

  “Any anti-racist politics cannot ignore antisemitism. ... Nobody can monopolize victimhood. You can't claim to be the ultimate victim and never accept that you could be the victimizers.” — Zahi Zalloua

14. Solidarity as the Path Forward

• Cross-Racial, Universal Solidarity: Real hope lies in solidarities—Black/Palestinian, Jewish/Palestinian, queer, feminist, and beyond—that threaten the system's core logic and foster universal emancipation.
  [62:17–66:33]

  “It is through cross racial solidarity, so Black–Palestinian solidarity, Jewish–Palestinian solidarity, that we can fundamentally unsettle the existing libidinal logic.” — Zahi Zalloua

• Palestine as a Universal Justice Issue: The struggle for Palestine is seen as interlinked with broader liberatory movements—feminist, queer, Black—that challenge global injustice.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On violence and resistance:
  “Any genuine resistance will be violent, will be experienced as violence.” — Zahi Zalloua [04:20]

• On the liberal model:
  “At best, what liberals aspire for is giving more money to departments so they can have police reform, reduce the number of bad apples... this will do nothing.” — Zahi Zalloua [16:08]

• On the need for reckoning:
  “To emancipate yourself from your identity requires a form of violence, self-violence willed violence to break with your whiteness, your privileged Jewishness...” — Zahi Zalloua [34:21]

• On the limits of romanticizing the past:
  “...the pre colonial identity is a ruse, it's a cruel ruse, because it is based on some kind of reality that you want to affirm yourself, but its solutions tend to be reductive and minimal.” — Zahi Zalloua [41:03]

• On solidarity:
  “Solidarity is the response to the multiple traumas happening in the world. This is what the system fears. It fears a united front, right? It fears a universal politics.” — Zahi Zalloua [62:52]

• On weaponizing trauma:
  “Any gesture that transforms you into timeless victim is a recipe for disaster.” — Zahi Zalloua [59:21]

• On Palestine’s centrality:
  “Palestine becomes a feminist issue, becomes a queer issue, becomes a black issue... It becomes an issue for justice, and that's the appeal.” — Zahi Zalloua [65:29]

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Key Timestamps

• 02:17 – Zalloua introduces his academic background and the motivation for the book.
• 04:20 – The inseparability of violence from genuine resistance.
• 10:06–11:47 – Destructive versus transformative violence; necessity of dismantling oppressive systems.
• 14:11–17:48 – Critique of liberal anti-racism and superficial reforms.
• 23:13–24:43 – Identity politics as a tool to split the left; stretching Marxism for colonial contexts.
• 24:43–26:17 – “Becoming black/Palestinian”; capitalism as a global, racialized force.
• 31:35–33:04 – Role of imagination and fantasy in liberation.
• 33:23–35:10 – The meaning and necessity of reckoning.
• 38:41–41:33 – Critique of pre-colonial romanticism; universality of capitalism.
• 45:01–47:24 – Worlding psychoanalysis and linking libidinal and political economies.
• 48:32–54:20 – From politics of recognition to genuine transformation.
• 57:55–60:45 – Trauma, Zionism, and universal justice.
• 62:17–66:33 – The power and necessity of solidarity across lines.

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Conclusion

Through the episode, Zalloua and Hajizadeh mount a sustained critique of liberalism’s limits, the deep structures of violence, the weaponizing of trauma, and the urgent need for universal, cross-sectoral solidarity. The call is to move beyond humanitarian gestures and recognition politics, embracing reckoning, antagonism, and revolutionary imagination as necessary routes to true liberation—for Palestine and for the world.

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Transcript

[Zahi Zalu]

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[New Books Network Announcer]

Welcome to the New Books Network.

[Morteza Hajizadeh]

Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of New Books Network. This is your host, Morteza Hajizadeh from Critical Theory Channel. Today. I'm here with Zahi Zalu to talk about his recent book, which is a very topical and relevant book given the things that have been happening in the past few years and especially in the past few months all over the world, which we'll get to discuss. The book I'm going to discuss is called Fanon Zizek and the Violence of Resistance. Zahi Zalo is a professor of philosophy and literature and at Whitman College in the United States. Zahi, welcome to New Books Network.

[Interviewer/Host]

Thank you.

[Morteza Hajizadeh]

Before we start the book, can you just very briefly introduce yourself, talk about your field of expertise, and also more importantly, why you decided to write a book about violence of resistance?

[Zahi Zalu]

Yeah, absolutely. So my field of research is quite wide, so I work on continental philosophy, psychoanalysis, critical black studies, Palestinian studies, and post human studies. And each time I finish a book, there's always a kind of yearning that I should have said more about something. So this book came out of a continuation of the politics of the wretched, and I wanted to focus more specifically on Fanon and Zizek and how they imagined violence and how resistance is experienced by the colonized. So this book came out of that concern to kind of articulate what resistance actually looks like.

[Morteza Hajizadeh]

Correct. And I really love the title of your book, the Violence of Resistance, because there's a lot of protests going around the world nowadays. Palestine Pro Palestinian Groups, pro Israeli groups. And apart from that, even before that, we had lots of protests. And right now, what's happening in Nepal, what happened in the United States just yesterday, a couple of days ago, with Charlie Kirk being assassinated. And the idea of the, the idea that resistance should or should not be violent has always been discussed. And there are a lot of people who sort of romanticize violence that, you know, it has to be, and it's, I guess, the very liberal idea of resistance, that violence has no place in liberatory movements. I'm keen to. Before we get into the nitty and gritty of the books, I'm keen to know your ideas about resistance. Do you think, do you think, let's say violence is the polar opposite of resistance. It's an integral part of resistance, as liberals would say, that resistance should not really be violent. We should keep up the dialogue. But that's something a lot of anti colonial thinkers have kind of argued against.

[Zahi Zalu]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I would begin by saying any genuine resistance will be violent, will be experienced as violence.

[Interviewer/Host]

Right?

[Zahi Zalu]

So here violence can take multiple forms. It could be armed struggle or the very act of delegitimizing a racist structure, denaturalizing its racist logics, will be experienced as violence by the oppressor, by the master, by the settler. So here violence and resistance are not to be opposed to one another, nor is nonviolence and violence, non violence, meaning not armed struggle, can be very violent in the eyes and experiences of the master. So, you know, Zizek has this, this saying that Gandhi and Mandela in a sense were more violent than Hitler, which at one level seems absurd. How can they be more violent than Hitler who killed 6 million Jews? Hitler still operated within a kind of mark, within a capitalist structure, scapegoated the Jews for disrupting the functioning of the system. Gandhi and Mandela brought down a system, right, a racist system to its knees. It halted its operation. So this kind of violence was greater. So in this book I'm interested in figuring out how violence is imagined, how violence is narrated. So often, you know, when we say, you know, this is a manifestation of violence, what we're doing here, we're ignoring that this is not actual violence. This is a counter violence, the violence that is fully naturalized, the violence experienced by the colonized by the oppressed on a daily basis is invisible to most people, definitely to liberals. So when we see an act of violence, we obfuscate the original violence. So for many liberals, you know, the latest Gaza war began October 7, 2023. There's no conception that October 6 was a violent day, as all the other days for Palestinians. So we have to challenge a narrative that begins with Palestinian violence and try to see this as a counter violence to an original violence that has been fully naturalized.

[Morteza Hajizadeh]

And dude, you're absolutely right. And it kind of reminds me of Paul Frears, if I'm pronouncing, because I always mispronounce the names. Famous quote in his book, the Pedagogy of the Oppressed. And I found it before, you know, starting this interview, and I do like to read it. The book, it says that with the establishment of a relationship of oppression, violence has already begun. Never in the history has violence been initiated by the oppressed. How could they be the initiators if they themselves are the result of violence? How could they be the sponsors of something whose objective inauguration called forth their existence as oppressed? There could be no oppressed land. There would be no oppressed had there been no prior situation of violence to establish their subjugation. Which I guess is a kind of a summary of what you just said.

[Zahi Zalu]

And this multiplied a settled colonial framework. It could be capitalism, it could be a form of anti blackness that has been fully naturalized. So when there is black protests, oh, they're committing violence, they're burning cars, they're being unruly. What is missed is the baseline anti blackness that is baked in America's white civil society. So this is why we have to be kind of attentive to this originary violence.

[Morteza Hajizadeh]

Yeah, And I spoke with someone a couple of years ago, and it was about. We were talking about praxis and theory, and he had a section in his book called. It was about the liberal idea of violence that a lot of liberals would think of violence as only something physical. But poverty is a form of violence. Homelessness is a form of violence. It's already affecting people, as you mentioned, and I'm originating myself from Iran. So three years ago, as you, I'm sure you know, three years ago, there was this massive uprising in Iran for a couple of months. Woman, Life, Freedom. And when the protests were sort of begun without really any violence, then the government resorted to violence, shooting at the protesters. And protesters, of course, would kick back. There were videos of protesters setting fire to police cars or even beating a few police officers badly. And a friend of mine was saying that the moment I saw people resorting to violence, I switched off. But then I said, but you're not really winding the clock. Back even before the protests began, there was a lot of violence. And I don't want to even stop by saying the government resorted to shooting. But as you mentioned, the violence that is that invisible violence that people don't see, as if something that is not physical violence is not really interpreted as violence. Let me get back to your book. What I really liked about your book is that you bring Fanon and Zizek together and you compare them in this. Yeah. And so you argue that both Fanon and Ziggues advocate for a form of counter violence. Yeah, let me talk about that. And tell us you'd also distinguish between destructive violence and also transformative resistance in their work. So tell us about that. What does that mean?

[Zahi Zalu]

So for me, the two are not to be opposed to one another necessarily. So transformative resistance must entail some kind of dismantling of the Master's house. I mean, Audre Lorde's vision of transformative resistance is a dismantling of the master's house.

[Interviewer/Host]

Right.

[Zahi Zalu]

You don't use the tools of the Master. That's reform.

[Interviewer/Host]

Right.

[Zahi Zalu]

That's the liberal model. That's liberal. Anti racism. Reform, reform, reform. For actual change to take place, there has to be a destructive violence, not for its own sake.

[Interviewer/Host]

Right.

[Zahi Zalu]

One has to be careful not fetishize violence for violence's sake. But violence is intrinsic to the construction of a new world. And if folks are fighting, struggling for a new world to be introduced, violence is going to be part of it. It's not a violence that's going to satisfy me or reinforce my identity. It's a violence that's going to liberate all of us. I think this is what Zizek and Fenu are deeply invested in, this universal politics which has to go through a dismantling of existing identities. I mean, what else does Feno mean by right? By decolonizing the mind. It's decolonizing the mind of the colonized and the colonizer. There's no retreat to an earlier identity that can be somehow recaptured.

[Interviewer/Host]

Right.

[Zahi Zalu]

It has to be forward oriented. It has to be an act of invention for Fanon.

[Interviewer/Host]

Right.

[Zahi Zalu]

That's what the work of theory has to lay the grounds for how something new can enter the world. And I think Zizek shares that sentiment.

[Morteza Hajizadeh]

You're right. Yeah. It's a very interesting conversation. I feel like I'm talking to some of my friends. We have a book group. Every Sunday evening we get together on Zoom, and we talk about different books. And this usually comes up. And I normally. And I'm with you there because some of them say, well, no, we shouldn't really resort to violence. And then I said, well, look at the history of the world the past 2000 years. I personally cannot think of any new world, as you put it, any progressive success that was won without resorting to some form of violence. And it's not, as you said, fetishizing violence. It's that the violence is already there. You're resisting that violence. And that resistance does have this element of. Yes. Violence in it. And like I said, with peasants revolting in Europe, French Revolution, all those transformative. Even the establishment of unions, all the little wins that unions had. Progress. Oh yeah. Labor movements, they failed labor laws.

[Zahi Zalu]

You're right.

[Morteza Hajizadeh]

They fried labor laws, you're right.

[Interviewer/Host]

Yeah.

[Zahi Zalu]

We're not given will of the capitalists.

[Morteza Hajizadeh]

They had to be felt environmentalized.

[Zahi Zalu]

Yeah, absolutely.

[Interviewer/Host]

Yeah.

[Morteza Hajizadeh]

And there was another report came out a few years ago, I guess two or three years ago, it was about environmental activism and it said that in the past 15 years about a thousand environmental activists over the world have been killed. And most of them were in Latin America, Amazon, and nobody knows even about them. And that just goes to show you how to create a new world. You do need to resort to that. And you mentioned something about liberal anti racism, which I'm sure you and I have a lot of sympathy with them. But I do have some strong criticism as well, which I'm sure, as you do, and you mention it in the book, that their anti racism or liberal anti. The type that you see for example, in Canada, in America, with the democrats in Europe, France, Macron, they all constantly criticize Israel. And it's a good example here, I guess. But it's sort of, I think, defanging resistance from Palestinians. And you mentioned that they are averse to antagonism which depoliticizes resistance. Then you ask yourself what's the point if you depoliticize resistance? Can you establish, expand on that?

[Zahi Zalu]

Yeah, yeah. I mean often in my books, you know, the people I find more problematic are not the fascists from the right.

[Interviewer/Host]

Right.

[Zahi Zalu]

In a sense, you know where they stand. You know, their, their vision is clear. It's the liberal who masquerade as progressives.

[Interviewer/Host]

Right.

[Zahi Zalu]

And in fact they're very much invested in the status quo.

[Interviewer/Host]

Right.

[Zahi Zalu]

This is what a white liberal in the US is deeply invested in the status quo. So at some level they may say we're anti racist, but their anti racism remains very much basic. What they're interested in is not struggling against structural anti blackness, against the political anthology that gave us anti blackness. They're more happy policing speech, telling people please Check your privilege, right? Don't say this word. Don't say that word. They don't want to reckon with a racist system. They actually don't believe America is a racist project. And not unlike the right wingers, they're very much invested in a law and order narrative, Right? I mean, that's the secret of liberals. They enjoy law and order as much as the right. And you know, we saw this after the murder of George Floyd, right? There was a movement among protesters, right, to defund the police. And there was a tipping point. The Democratic Party could have stood behind that gesture. What did they do? They went the opposite way. Biden addressed the nation by saying, what is this talk about defunding the police? We have to fund the police. We have to fund them more. So there at best, what liberals aspire for is giving more money to departments so they can have police reform, reduce the number of bad apples, more training, more body camps, and this will do nothing.

[Interviewer/Host]

Right?

[Zahi Zalu]

So defunding the police was an attempt to reconfigure the system, right? The system of incarceration, the school to the prison pipeline. There was a desire to disrupt that. Liberals stood in the way, right? So that's, you know, and you know, the other thing about liberals, they love to decouple race from class, right? So for them, it is very problematic to imagine racial capitalism because this would compel them to face up to how capitalism is at the core of a certain kind of racist discourse existing today. So the idea of racial capitalism terrifies them, right? They don't want to talk about an anti black libidinal economy. They don't want to admit that, that they feel better by not being black.

[Interviewer/Host]

Right.

[Zahi Zalu]

All of that is unacceptable for them. And they don't want to talk about any kind of class exploitation along racial lines. They don't want to talk about class struggle. They want to keep race separate. They want to keep race isolated. They want to keep reforming race.

[Interviewer/Host]

Right.

[Zahi Zalu]

And tokenizing certain figures that make them feel good, right? So you have this phenomenon that you know, you know very well of black faces in high places. This make white liberals happy, right? They can project a vision of moral virtue, right? Virtue signaling while doing nothing to the system.

[Morteza Hajizadeh]

It's I think Iran. That's why they get this reputation. The liberals, especially the white liberals, get this reputation for being hypocrites. They do have progressive ideas and rabbis.

[Zahi Zalu]

Absolutely, absolutely. And you know what? Palestine shows that on Palestine it actually even worse. Liberals are worse because at least with anti blackness, they make gestures. They say, oh, we have to stop, you know, police brutality. It's unacceptable. You know, Pelosi takes a knee in support of George Floyd and his cause. But on Palestine they do nothing.

[Interviewer/Host]

Right.

[Zahi Zalu]

So sure, they may say we don't want to see Palestinian civilians dying of hunger.

[Interviewer/Host]

Right.

[Zahi Zalu]

They can say that. They'll even say, yes, you know, I'm for a two state solution, but they refuse. They're unable to see Israel as a Zionist settled colonial state, that they refuse to engage anything related to colonialism. White liberals are out.

[Morteza Hajizadeh]

And I think part of it is also because they are highly, as you mentioned, they have these progressive values and it is at the same time they're highly committed to capital accumulation. And if these two come into conflict, they always take the side of the capital. And that's why when in the history of not liking 19. I don't know, I'm not sure about knocking theories, but generally that kind of depoliticized liberalism is the perfect ground for the rise of fascism. I directly blame, for example, Democrats would have rise of and in the past as well. Yeah. And I do directly blame people like, you know, in France, Macron, in Canada or in America or even in Australia that I live in. These liberals have been the reason that you have the rise of these fascists or new Nazis.

[Zahi Zalu]

Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, you know, Benjamin said this where the rise of fascism points to the failure of the left to actually articulate the plights of the oppressed.

[Morteza Hajizadeh]

That's right.

[Zahi Zalu]

And here the left is the hegemonic liberal center. That's, that's today's sadly, the left.

[Morteza Hajizadeh]

Yeah.

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[Morteza Hajizadeh]

You mentioned some of, you know, black faces in high places. And when liberals, you know, when there are. Again, I'm going to ask a question again about the idea of resistance that you're concerned with. So when liberals, you know, have these economic failures because economically speaking, you know, the right or left and most of the left, let's say parties in the world, they're more or less neutral market center organizations or parties. But I guess their feather in the cap is that identity politics. And they play that identity politics which they use as a way to masquerade their incompetency to address real issues. So do you think that this rise of identity politics which has again the culture wars west in the United States is a huge thing and again with the association of Charlie Kirk because that's going to even make it a little bit worse. Because I mean I have no sympathy. I mean I don't think anybody should be killed for his political ideas. Doesn't matter. And that's what in the democracy you have right wing, left wing those who in the middle of the political spectrum part. But he was one of those culture warriors who masked the real issues, which is this dividing gap between the rich and the poor, the racial issues in the United States. And he just went down that line and he was just a symptom like that line of all its own Marxist. And he's only one of the many who did that. And the liberals, in order to counter effect that they go down the path of identity politics, as you mentioned, Nancy Peloncy are, you know, kneeling to black people, which is just a meaningless gesture and it's not going to do anything for them or having or in the United States previous administration you had forgot his name. You had this first black minister of defense and he had shares in a lot of defense, I mean security companies and he increased his wealth. War increases wealth as a. Yeah, yeah.

[Zahi Zalu]

I mean, absolutely. I mean, where to begin? I mean identity politics names a problem. There are people suffering, right? There are racial discrimination. Trans folks are targeted. It tries to articulate a problem around your identity. Yes, but the way, the way the white liberal elite uses identity politics is to split the left.

[Interviewer/Host]

Right.

[Zahi Zalu]

And what I'm equally critical of is a leftist vision that devalorizes race, that reduces everything to class, and treats anti blackness as an epiphenomenal problem that I refuse to see, I refuse to acknowledge it's a distortion. This is where people like Fanon reminds us that we have to stretch Marxism to account for the colonial situation. And same thing with capitalism today. We have to stretch Marxism to account for the way anti blackness and other racialization contributes the suffering of the world. And here, this is the very nature of capitalism. Capitalism is mutating. In the past, capitalism has been able to shelter. Our political leaders have been able to shelter white folks from the devastating impacts of capitalism. So the global south can be its victim, but the global north, in a sense, is protected. But capitalism is not obeying this anymore.

[Interviewer/Host]

Right.

[Zahi Zalu]

It's not spreading democracy in the West. Right now we have this phenomena that Achille Membe talks about, the becoming black of the world. This is capitalism unleashed. Now it's hitting France, which created the GD Joan movement. What are you talking about? Why are we being targeted by capitalism? And the rights comes in. It's the migrant. The migrant is the problem, or global globalization is the problem. So we need a capitalism that is French. You know, we need a capitalism that is German. We need capitalism that is US based. And this is what Trump is doing here. It's not recognizing that capitalism does not obey borders.

[Interviewer/Host]

Right.

[Zahi Zalu]

It's a voracious machine capitalism, and it produces surplus humanity.

[Interviewer/Host]

Right.

[Zahi Zalu]

And it says, it gives us a model of people who are reducible to pure commodities.

[Interviewer/Host]

Right.

[Zahi Zalu]

Not unlike the model that Membe traces, how Africans became black by being reduced to pure commodities. You know, we have this becoming black of the world. We're seeing the becoming Palestinian of the world because Gaza is in many ways a dress rehearsal for all the evils to come.

[Interviewer/Host]

Right?

[Morteza Hajizadeh]

Absolutely.

[Zahi Zalu]

Where Western powers will be dealing with these catastrophes to come. And they're looking at Israel says, hmm, Israel is doing it in plain sight and they're getting away with it.

[Interviewer/Host]

Right.

[Zahi Zalu]

I mean, there's something deeply disturbing. And, you know, people across the world are saying no to this. They're saying no to their government.

[Interviewer/Host]

Right.

[Zahi Zalu]

So I think this, you know, the side of resistance here also lies with a new generation of students. You can see the encampment, you can see the protests. And this is where the struggle lies. Right. Are the world's leaders, especially in the west, going to succeed in making people forget about Palestine? Are they going to threaten them, criminalize any action in support of Palestine? Or is there going to be a tipping point where Israel becomes a pariah state?

[Interviewer/Host]

Right.

[Zahi Zalu]

Where its legitimacy, its narrative is no longer credible? It is losing a lot of credibility among a younger generation, among my students, I see it. But it still has the full backing of political leaders and the liberal elite.

[Interviewer/Host]

Right.

[Zahi Zalu]

So we're this time where this is a tipping moment and we have a very much reactionary government.

[Interviewer/Host]

Right.

[Zahi Zalu]

We're experiencing this new McCarthyism in the U.S. yeah, yeah. So this is a struggle. This is the battle. It's a battle of ideas.

[Morteza Hajizadeh]

Yeah, yeah. Like I said, I live in Australia myself, so fortunately, this country is doing way better than England, France or America. But that doesn't mean that we can get complacent. The heartwarming news to me was we had an election three or four months ago. We had a Liberal government. And when I say Liberal, liberals in Australia are actually the Conservative. They're not really liberals. And the labor is actually the Liberals. I don't know why, but anyhow. So the Liberals went down the same path of playing identity politics, pitching migrants against white Australians or playing Trump's book. Didn't work out. It was a massive defeat for them. And it was really heartwarming because it's a parliamentary election. So there was heartwarming, but at the same time. So you have a Labor government here, pretty much like Labor. When I say labor, it's a little bit, maybe better than British labor, but still free market oriented. Yeah. But they are also changing some of the regulations that have to. One of them came out a couple of days ago. I haven't been able to read more deeply about it, which is it's kind of going to make government documents or party documents more secret. So it makes it more difficult for the public to have access to them, which is not what you want. You want to know what they're actually doing. So this thing is happening, unfortunately, all over the world. But the good thing is, a heartwarming thing is that ordinary people, students, as you mentioned, ordinary people in the street are seeing the rise of authoritative governments. Like you said, I think Israel is being looked upon by government as a lab. If they can do that and if they can kind of brainwash the population into believing what they're doing is legitimate, how can. How come we can't?

[Zahi Zalu]

And we have to point out that this was taking place under also Democratic leadership. I mean, Biden.

[Interviewer/Host]

Right.

[Zahi Zalu]

Initially, Biden ran against Trump and people used to say, oh, Here is Uncle Joe versus Predator Trump right now. He became Genocide Joe.

[Interviewer/Host]

Right.

[Zahi Zalu]

So this kind of liberal fascism creates the conditions for today's fascism. Right, fascism. But liberals have to be held into account here. They created this mess.

[Morteza Hajizadeh]

And, you know, the U.S. i think it was the U.S. marine who set himself on fire, forgot his name, and, you know, he shouted, this is the vision that the elite have. This is the word that the elite has created for us. To a lot of people, it might have sounded as something simple, ordinary, but it was a visionary statement, which was true. And I mean, things that happened after his unfortunate death proved him wrong. That even the world leaders are looking at what's happening around the world as maybe as a horrible future for all of us. But the good thing is that, like you said, people are rising up. It's in Asia, it's in America as well. I have another question.

[Zahi Zalu]

You.

[Morteza Hajizadeh]

I think earlier in this interview, you talked about imagining a different world. And I really love that idea because I'm a huge, huge fan of David Graeber and his visionary politics. Did this kind of anarchist vision of fantasy, the world of fantasy, imagination. And I want to. And you talk about it in your book, a lot of people might want to just get down into immediate practical possibilities, but I think without imagination, without lots of things that we take for granted these days, where fantasies, a century ago, we was going to school, or people working eight hours a day, that was like a fantasy maybe a century ago, but it became a reality. So I'm thinking of the role of fantasy that you discuss in the book. How could we use that as a tool for liberation?

[Zahi Zalu]

Absolutely.

[Morteza Hajizadeh]

Rather than oppression.

[Zahi Zalu]

Yeah, yeah. And I mean, here my influence, my understanding of fantasies follows a kind of Lacanian framework, because for Lacan psychoanalysis more generally, there is no fantasy free world.

[Interviewer/Host]

Right.

[Zahi Zalu]

Fantasies, in a sense, are crucial for the way we learn what to desire, who to desire, what to hate, what to love. So fantasies are very much with us. The fantasies work at a personal level. But the more interesting fantasies for our discussion are collective fantasies, right? And collective fantasies have a huge hold on our psyche. So if there's no escape from fantasy, the question here, the political question, becomes, what can we do to weaken its hold on us? That's the challenge. Because if we ever want to produce new desires, right? New ideas, new ideals that would unsettle rather than reify our existing identities, we have to reckon with the existing fantasies. We have to replace them. But what do we replace them with? It can't be a fantasy imbued with Nostalgia either.

[Interviewer/Host]

Right.

[Zahi Zalu]

And so we have to create new fantasies to produce the kind of desires that are universalist.

[Interviewer/Host]

Right.

[Zahi Zalu]

And that again, to go back to Fanon, that introduce something new into the world.

[Interviewer/Host]

Right.

[Zahi Zalu]

They have to be inventive and generative.

[Morteza Hajizadeh]

I think it's also relevant to the next one that I have, that you actually have in the book, which is my question. And that's the idea of reckoning, true reckoning. First of all, what do you mean by true reckoning and how can we bring it about?

[Zahi Zalu]

Yeah, so reckoning is a failure. I can answer it negatively. What is not reckoning is a failure to engage with reality, with a system of oppression. It's a dance around it. So the failure of liberals to reckon with anti blackness perpetuates anti blackness in a less visible fashion. Reckoning with Zionism is reckoning with settled colonialism is reckoning with a collective fantasy that has been genocidal in its orientation, with itself fully being manifested in front of our eyes. So reckoning here is difficult. And here the reckoning also applies for the colonizer, the settler, the master. Right to fully reckon with your past involves, you know, a form of symbolic violence. Sorry, A form of symbolic suicide.

[Interviewer/Host]

Right.

[Zahi Zalu]

And says to emancipate yourself from your identity requires a form of violence.

[Interviewer/Host]

Right.

[Zahi Zalu]

Self violence willed violence to break with your whiteness, your privileged Jewishness that Zionism elevates, makes you, in a sense, more important, count more than Palestinians and your Palestinian neighbor. So reckoning here involves a refusal to use the master's tools since you want to actually dismantle the house. And there's no change without reckoning.

[Interviewer/Host]

Right.

[Zahi Zalu]

There's no change.

[Interviewer/Host]

Right.

[Zahi Zalu]

There's no moral arc of history that things will naturally get better.

[Interviewer/Host]

Right.

[Zahi Zalu]

That has to be shattered. I mean, this is what, this is the cruel optimism that we, that liberals traffic in.

[Morteza Hajizadeh]

And in this vision, antagonism and violence is a part of it, as you mentioned. It's constructive, it's creative, it brings about. And that's where the role of fantasy all comes in. Brings about a new world, as you might say. It's impossible without a moment of reckoning. Look, I may be taking it to a different direction, but when I was reading your book and now that you were discussing this idea of reckoning, I was just reminded of Frederick Douglass autobiography, because in that, like I said, it might be a stretch, but that's what I was reminded of. So he was talking about the time that he was a slave. He had this slave owner and he names this slave owner. I forgot his name that he used to beat everyone. But Fredy Doukos was this broad shouldered slave there. And he beats him. But there is one moment that he doesn't surrender. He takes the whip, I guess from him, if I remember correctly. But he stands up to his master. And he said that at that moment his authority broke down for me. And he knew, and the slave owner knew that he couldn't confront him. And he asked other slaves to help him, but to help the slave owner, but they refused. And he said, from that moment on, I recognize that I'm human. I recognize that I have this agency and humanity. And his whole authority of that slaveholder and his power broke down not only for me, but also for that moment of reckoning, that moment of confronting.

[Zahi Zalu]

Because freedom here is never given.

[Morteza Hajizadeh]

Yes, it's taken, right?

[Zahi Zalu]

It's taken by. No, I mean for me, antagonism and reckoning go hand in hand. And it allows us actually to. To read what a leftist in an anti colonial leftist approach looks like versus a liberal approach. And here we can go back to Palestine, right? So liberals love to see Palestine as a conflict, a conflict between kind of equal parties over territory. And the thing with a conflict, a system can deal with conflicts. You know, liberals love conflicts, you know, conflict management, you can resolve a conflict within the system in antagonism. If you actually attend to the antagonism, in this case the settler and the native, if you deal with that antagonism, the system cannot survive. Settler colonialism will collapse if you actually deal with that antagonism. So a system changing versus conflict is a distraction, allows you to reinforce the system, that the system is inherently healthy, the system can absorb conflicts and resolve them. So if we start, you know, distinguishing conflicts, conflicts still can happen. But when we're dealing with Palestine, it's not a conflict, it's an antagonism.

[Morteza Hajizadeh]

I have another question which is. So we've been talking about the idea of liberation, resistance, violence. There's also this. There's this tendency to romanticize a pre colonial identity in decolonial discourses. You know, everything goes hunky dory, which is obviously not the case. But what do you think are the risks associated with this romantic vision of what a pre colonial identity was? And I'm also interested to know how Fanon looks at that phenomenon. How does he approach this a bit differently?

[Interviewer/Host]

Yeah, yeah.

[Zahi Zalu]

It's a crucial question and something the Afro pessimists have really stressed.

[Interviewer/Host]

Right.

[Zahi Zalu]

They always talk about the time before the settler encounter. So there is a kind of time of plenitude that was destroyed by the settler. Hence the indigenous, unlike the enslaved, has recourse to this earlier temporality. So for me, if I want to give at first a generous reading of what a pre colonial identity can do and why it might be attractive, right? So at some level, a pre colonial identity stresses the truth that existence is a form of resistance, right? It helps to combat a Zionist discourse that basically claimed you never existed in the first place, that your very existence as a Palestinian is the fact that Arabs had to confront a Zionist movement, that there is no identity to Palestinians, right? This is where the linguistic erasure begins. So a pre colonial identity is almost a natural temptation to evoke. What is problematic about it is it suggests withdrawal into this pre colonial identity. It suggests that the problem with the world is our attachment, the non Western attachment to the world. So you find this in Walter Mignolo's vision of decoloniality. This is about delinking from the west, which has been obsessed with capitalism, for instance. And for me, I can't imagine, and Fanon could not imagine capitalism being a Western thing. Capitalism was already a global phenomenon, so you can't just escape it. So because capitalism is a global problem, it requires a global solution, a global intervention. So with pre colonial identities, you're also always prone to fetishize your identity, your wholeness, as if all the things that are wrong in the world is a byproduct of the settler encounter, that there is no antagonism in your culture, in your society, which Fanon and Zizek rejected. So for me, the pre colonial identity is a ruse, it's a cruel ruse, because it is based on some kind of reality that you want to affirm yourself, but its solutions tend to be reductive and minimal. So for me, as for Fanon and Iek, you have to go through capitalism. There's no escaping capitalism. Capitalism is never just a Western obsession. It is a crushing reality.

[Morteza Hajizadeh]

And I think this is a very important point that unfortunately, even among a lot of the leftists, they tend to think of capitalism as a Western thing. And the east needs to liberate itself from all those Western things. And that that big divide between east and the west, which I personally don't really believe that much in it. I mean, yeah, there are, there are fundamental differences, but when it comes to issues such as capitalism, I personally think that authoritative neoliberalism is the worst kind, and I think it was. Even Noam Chomsky once said that if you want to see a true capitalism, how a true capitalist society Works. Look at countries in Southeast Asia, look at all those authoritative countries. Because still in the west you have all those. The legacies of those progressive movements which tries to contain that ruthless capitalism to some extent have been successful and it's shrinking. You're right. It is unfortunately shrinking. And that's why they need to reorganize. You're absolutely right. But again, in a lot of those authoritative countries, I mean, the good example was Qatar, which attracted a lot of criticism when they hosted the World cup in 2002, 2022. But because migrants and laborers there, especially if you're not from Qatar and vast majority of people living them are not from Qatar, they are not Qataris, they absolutely have no right. And the way they are treated is absolutely brutal. That is the true face of capitalism. And if in the west it somehow has been contained, but as you said, it is also shrinking, it's because of the legacy of those progressive movements. Yeah, yeah. And again, I can go back multiple system. Yeah, you're right. I can't just. If I want to give an example of. In my country, because right now the president of Iran is trying to negotiate with the west, with America, England, France, Germany, for that nuclear deal to be reinstated. And again, it was just last week that I was talking to my friends and I said, even if it's reinstated under sanctions are lifted, which is a great thing, of course, if the sanctions are lifted. But then the most pressing challenge starts because then you have all these Western countries coming to Iran wanting to establish the capital at the factories and Iran turns into another sweatshop. And then we'll see what the left has to do. How the left and Iran's government, current government, it's a reformist government, but it's a very. It's an authoritative neoliberal government at the same time. So all those checks and balances that you may be able to find in some other country, you won't be able to find anyone. It's not that these unions are highly crucial. Crash there, union leaders end up in jail most of the time, which is that I think I really enjoyed that when I was reading your book. The idea of romanticizing a pre colonial identity. Let me go back to another part of the book. Fanon was a psychoanalyst and Zizek is also here, highly interested in Lacan and psychoanalysis. So are you. You can see in the. From some of the questions and the arguments in the book, I'm interested to know about the role of psychoanalysis. You talk about. You have this kind of effective Term reworld or worlded. How can psychoanalysis be worlded to address the realities, political and also psychic realities? And to me the important thing is also that psychic realities of communities under occupation, under global capitalism.

[Interviewer/Host]

Yeah.

[Zahi Zalu]

Now these are crucial questions and for me, psychoanalysis just Marxism has to be stretched, right? And use Fanon's formulation for Marxism. We have to stretch psychoanalysis to account for the colonial situation.

[Interviewer/Host]

Right.

[Zahi Zalu]

And so the model, you know, the way psychoanalysis developed in Europe is not going to work.

[Interviewer/Host]

Right.

[Zahi Zalu]

But somebody like Minola will say, ah, we don't need psychoanalysis. We're not trying to cure the bourgeois family. Yeah, we're not trying to cure the bourgeois family. Was not trying to cure the bourgeois family on psychoanalysis to understand, you know, how does the black imago functions, how is our collective unconscious colonized by the system? How do we resist that, how we engage in this alienation? For him, psychoanalysis is essential for any emancipatory project. So for me, I continue with that, with that stress. And also you may have some tensions here between an anti colonial model of resistance which see alienation as a byproduct of settler colonialism or colonialism, period, and psychoanalysis in a Slicamian wing is very skeptical about an alienation free existence.

[Interviewer/Host]

Right?

[Zahi Zalu]

So the sub alienation that could be reduced, Right. Your exploitation as a worker can be reduced, but your entry into language is the source of a fundamental constitutive alienation that can be ignored. And that has to factor in. You have to factor that in. You have to factor in the death drive in your analysis. And I've tried to link the death drive to the zone of non being with others like Derek Hook, who tried to, to show that the death drive also moves against the pleasure principle, which basically secures identity politics. Identity politics runs on the pleasure principle. It's about reproducing itself. The death drive is what pushes us towards something radically different.

[Interviewer/Host]

Right.

[Zahi Zalu]

It's an ontological reset. So I'm invested in that. For me, worlding psychoanalysis is also an attempt to sync libidinal economies with political economies.

[Interviewer/Host]

Right.

[Zahi Zalu]

Unlike the Afro pessimists who want to see the libidinal economy as displacing the political economy, I want to see them as entangled.

[Morteza Hajizadeh]

They're both very important points. I have another question which is about recognition and transformation. You use these two terms, politics of recognition and politics of transformation, which I guess is relevant to the point we had earlier about true reckoning, how true reckoning can comes about a lot of people, I may not be able to say a lot of them. But there are people who do recognize the situation, as you mentioned, there are that psychic world that has been created, they do recognize that. So that's politics of recognition. But how can we transform that? How can we move? Especially in countries that are very much politicized, or in the west, maybe still a lot of people, not a lot of. There are people who are depoliticized because more or less things are working not as well as they used to 40 or 50 years ago, but it's still working. And I guess they are complacent. But how can we move from the political recognition to transformation? Making a change?

[Zahi Zalu]

Yeah, yeah, no, a great question. And again, for me, I think Palestine allows us to see both lines. What does it mean to argue for politics of recognition? What does it mean to argue for kind of a humanitarian framework? So shortly after October 7, when Israel was retaliating with his full military weight, I kept insisting it's not a question about fighting for a ceasefire. Of course you're fighting for a ceasefire, but you have fighting for Palestinians, Palestinian liberation. I think what a liberal humanist imperative to humanize the Palestinians doesn't ultimately work. It may save the Palestinian's life, right? It may allow it to sustain an existence of bare life, but there's no liberation in the liberal humanist humanitarian framework, right? So this is where I draw a strong opposition between humanitarian reason and anti colonial reason. Humanitarian reason wants to put an end to Palestinian suffering by opening up channels for food to come in, to put an end to genocide, to put an end to starvation, which is of course essential. And you have to do this before people are liberated. You have to be able to survive, but you can't end there. And humanitarian reason gives you the illusion that this is what politics looks like, saving lives from dying. We want to see Palestinians flourish, live as human beings where your humanity has been reconfigured. So your humanity now is not merely resembling white humanity, which is the norm. And you're always an imperfect copy of white humanity. We need to explode the racial matrix of the human. And for Palestinians to live, we need an anti colonial reason to take us to the next step. So right now Palestinians have support of liberals on the street protesting. They're not anti colonial theorists on the street or activists. Many of them are liberals. But we have to make them shift to start thinking that Palestinians are the victims of the Israelis. But they're also fighting for their freedom. What I mention in my book is the distinction between how liberals relate to Ukrainians resisting Russian invasion and how they relate to Palestinians. Liberals can get behind Ukrainians as both victims of Russian aggression and as freedom fighters, as people pushing back against the belligerent Putin. When it comes to Palestinians, they can only imagine the Palestinians dead or dying. They can't imagine them acting as agents of their resistance. It doesn't compute in their mind. A good Palestinian has to be a dead Palestinian, right? Has to be a child or mother. So I think there is this fundamental problem here in the politics of recognition. What are you recognizing? That I shouldn't suffer. Yes, that's good. It's an improvement to not caring at all about the suffering of Palestinians. But it's not good enough to see them as victims of victims. We have to see Palestinians as fighting for the liberation and we have to encourage Palestinian liberation. And this is where politics of recognition has to become transformative. You have to transform the settler colonial framework. You have to change the material conditions. So now you hear about France, the uk, Belgium, Canada want to recognize Palestine, which will most likely be another symbolic, empty gesture.

[Interviewer/Host]

Right.

[Zahi Zalu]

I was telling this to a student earlier today. You want to do a change. You want Europe to have an impact, contest Israel's weaponization of the charge of anti Semitism, say anti Zionism is not antisemitism, Say this very legitimate to raise objections about Israel's colonial history, colonial practice. Today, if you have European leaders say this, that could change a general opinion about how we understand how the average person imagines, perceives Israel. You want to do damage right to Israel. You hit it at that symbolic level about how it is perceived by others making empty statements of, you know, we'll recognize Palestine if Israel doesn't leave Gaza. What kind of condition is that? I mean, that was the UK's. It's like the punishment of Israel if it occupies illegally Palestinian land. So that's my vision of politics of recognition. I don't think we can do away with the politics of recognition. Recognition is still part of our very fabric. It's like human rights as we see human rights is necessary. Human rights has its limits. A politics. Recognition has its limits. It has to be framed in a certain way for it to gain back its teeth. And the same with human rights discourse. It used to have teeth. Now it's just a moralizing gesture. Now it's just exhausted by humanitarian reason.

[Interviewer/Host]

Right.

[Zahi Zalu]

You can have like, you know, the Haitian revolution was about human rights, but it was political.

[Morteza Hajizadeh]

Yeah. And we have. And it's quite interesting to me that in this we quite freely come back to Palestine. And I Think to, to. To a lot of people it's just symbolic, but what's happening there, it's a symbolic manifestation of what will be happening in the west if people are standing up for Palestine, that they have recognized. It's that politics of recognition. I guess they have recognized that this could soon be the situation in their own country, their own societies, it could be their own future. So that's why the liberation of Palestine is also a symbolic liberation of themselves. And there have been lots of activists, artists. One of them mentioned, I think there was this artist, don't remember his name, and I think the video went viral. It was, there was a music festival in England, I guess that he said that you want to liberate Palestine, you all want to liberate Asia, but liberate Europe. To me it was a very meaningful concept. Yes, liberate Europe, liberate yourself from all become politicized again because we have all become too complacent. That there's a liberal democracy that is working. But we're actually seeing how those liberties are being taken away from us little by little and we'll end up, you know, it will set us back a hundred years. And I guess through Palestine people are also trying to liberate themselves. People in Australia, people in America, Europe, England, who are. Yeah, go ahead please.

[Zahi Zalu]

Yeah, I mean the thing is most Europeans, folks in the west, the global north, they see all the involvement of Western powers in making Israel happen in green lighting the genocide. They see how guilty their governments are. There's no ambiguity. They see the bombs dropping, they see the politicians. I don't know if you remember early on they used to sign the bombs dropping.

[Morteza Hajizadeh]

Absolutely.

[Zahi Zalu]

Being dropped on Palestine. I mean it's incredible. And they're saying, no, we don't want this.

[Interviewer/Host]

Right.

[Zahi Zalu]

People are silk to a just world. And how do you bring that just world into being is the challenge.

[Morteza Hajizadeh]

Yeah. And again, I guess this question that I want to ask is sort of relevant also to what you mentioned about Zionism, Judaism, this weaponizing of anti Semitism. As you rightly mentioned, anti Zionism is not anti Semitism and unfortunately Israel is doing a lot of damage to Judaism in general. The rise of anti Semitism. Part of it, not all. Part of it is also because what people are seeing happening in Israel and there have always been some racist anti Semites all over the world throughout and they're using this as an excuse. They have no sympathy for Palestinians, but they see as the best chance to give expression to their anti Semitism. And the question I have Is, yeah, I asked the question. And I'm happy for you to address both. Maybe because in the book you talk about the idea of trauma and universal justice. And the reason, I guess, that a lot of Western politicians are still hesitant to criticize Israel is because of that trauma, that guilt they have because of the Holocaust. But can you talk about what I just said, that weaponization of antisemitism and how it relates to the idea of trauma and universal justice that you discuss in your book?

[Zahi Zalu]

Absolutely. I think the suffering of Jews, the constant threat of Jews has to be acknowledged and one has to make it a principal stance. Any anti racist politics cannot ignore antisemitism. You lose your credibility, you lose your commitment to universal politics.

[Interviewer/Host]

Right.

[Zahi Zalu]

Anti racism has to be universal politics. It can be another way of channeling, I care about this identity and not that identity. What pro Palestinian supporters are saying is nobody can monopolize victimhood. You can't claim to be the ultimate victim and never accept that you could be the victimizers.

[Interviewer/Host]

Right?

[Zahi Zalu]

So when Zionists like Netanyahu takes the Shoah, takes the horrendous event of the Shoah and uses it as a weapon to discredit any critics of Israel is horrible, is astonishing.

[Interviewer/Host]

Right.

[Zahi Zalu]

And a lot of Jewish activists, Jewish intellectuals have denounced this use. Holocaust survivors have denounced this strategy by the Israeli government to shield itself from any critique. So, you know, I draw from both Fanon and Zizek against any gesture to exceptionalize your own trauma.

[Interviewer/Host]

Right.

[Zahi Zalu]

Any gesture that transforms you into timeless victim is a recipe for disaster.

[Interviewer/Host]

Right.

[Zahi Zalu]

So the singularity or uniqueness of any given trauma cannot result in a way that ontologizes the victim, that the victim will always remain a victim. That's why even the very idea of the idf, the Israeli Defense Forces, is an illogical formulation. They're not defense forces, they're not engaged in defensive strategies. They're an occupation force. So the victimhood is already baked in the very way they refer to their military. So we have to get rid of the defensive forces model and stress how they are an occupation force in practice, not in theory. This is what they've been doing since 67 at the very least. So for me, we have to avoid fetishizing any form of trauma. The traumatize can become the agent of honor of another person's trauma.

[Interviewer/Host]

Right.

[Zahi Zalu]

It's a fact of history and we have to recognize that. And a universal politics has to be very worldly.

[Interviewer/Host]

Right.

[Zahi Zalu]

I mean, in a Saadian sense, that things are historically contingent, nobody can claim historical Ahistorical victim, eternal victimhood. Again, it's a recipe for disaster.

[Morteza Hajizadeh]

You're right. Yeah. There's a lot to take from your book and it's. I think our listeners and viewers have noticed how related it is to contemporary politics and the status quo, not only in Panzera Palestine, all over the world. And what I like about books like this is that idea of praxis and theory and praxis, because you can. It's not pure theory. You're actually talking about how it can change and how students or people can pressure their politicians to make a change. There's some governments. Yeah. As you just one final question before we come to the end of this interview. I wanted to bring it all together. How do you think, given all the conflicts, all the plights on the issues around the world, economics, political issues, decolonizing movements here and there, how do you think the left and also ordinary people, you know, your university professor students, how can they engage with the broader community to bring about a positive change, to bring about change, maybe small changes in their community, in their city council, in their government. How can the left reorganize and claim back what it used to be 50 years ago?

[Zahi Zalu]

Yeah, I mean, this is a great question. This is what, you know, this is what my writing has been trying to answer. So at some level, my wager is that it is through cross racial solidarity, so black Palestinian solidarity, Jewish Palestinian solidarity, that we can fundamentally unsettle the existing libidinal logic, that we can unsettle the racial matrix of the human. So that there is a possibility, right, a slim possibility to bring into the world something more just.

[Interviewer/Host]

Right.

[Zahi Zalu]

So for me, solidarity is the response to the multiple traumas happening in the world. This is what the system fears. It fears a united front, right? It fears a universal politics, elects to divide the left elects to bribe the left with identity politics and some libidinal, limited rewards. But people are refusing those rewards. People are aligning with those who've been marginalized. So for me, the world is becoming wretched and we're seeing how the world is becoming wretched. By the way, the world is becoming black and the world is becoming Palestinian. I think this has to be the anti colonial vision of universal politics.

[Morteza Hajizadeh]

If I may just add to what you just said, the idea of solidarity is quite important. You're absolutely right. Because all humans, their suffering is from the same. And I've been to a couple of pro Palestinian demonstrations. I wish I could be more. But one thing I really, really enjoy about those communities is that you see Australians here In Australia, you see immigrants, you see Arabs, you see LGBTQI plus communities, you see Jews there, you see Mormons there. These are all these little groups that they know that they may know nothing about Palestine, but they know that there's a system, and they're also the victims or maybe the future victims of this system. So that idea of solidarity beyond the lines of class and gender and ethnicity and religion, it's the most important thing which you can see that is happening around the world, which is a highly. And, you know, moving beyond identity. Not that it's not important, but not reducing everything to identity. But I think we need to reclaim back that 1960s or 70s idea of liberation, that idea of fantasy and imagination. Yes, thank you very much. Yeah, please go ahead. If you have another point.

[Zahi Zalu]

I've been returning to the poetry essays of June Jordan.

[Interviewer/Host]

Right.

[Zahi Zalu]

I mean, there you had a beautiful kind of black Palestinian solidarity that had been reignited with Black Lives Matter. And I think we can draw our strength from these movements and even from the way queer theorists, feminists, have objected to the way Israel manipulates their gay rights.

[Interviewer/Host]

Right.

[Zahi Zalu]

That's, you know, the pink washing of the Israeli government.

[Interviewer/Host]

Right.

[Zahi Zalu]

And they insist there's no pride genocide. I mean, it's a true statement.

[Interviewer/Host]

Right?

[Zahi Zalu]

Palestine becomes a feminist issue, becomes a queer issue, becomes a black issue.

[Interviewer/Host]

Right.

[Zahi Zalu]

It becomes an issue for justice, and that's the appeal. And the same thing relates back to Black Lives Matter, and it's multiple chapters. So one of the things that fascinated me is after October 7th, when the whole world, when mainstream media politicians were signing the order for the genocide to take place, who stood up for the Palestinians? It was Black Lives Matter chapters. It was indigenous communities recognizing the ritual violence that has been effaced. That what you're offering us is an incomplete picture.

[Interviewer/Host]

Right?

[Zahi Zalu]

And I think that incomplete picture is still incomplete. The struggle is to challenge dominant frameworks and dominant narratives.

[Morteza Hajizadeh]

Thank you very much. I really, really enjoyed talking to you, Zahid. The book we just discussed was Panel Zizek and the Violence of Resistance. And I highly encourage our listeners to pick up and read the book, as I'm sure if you've listened to this podcast, you've enjoyed it as much as I have. There's a lot more in the book. Introduce the book to your friends, Talk to your friends, Build your communities, build solidarities. Thank you very much, Zay, for this wonderful conversation.

[Zahi Zalu]

Thank you so much.