Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

The arrogance of colonialists and imperialists never changes. One need only look at the recent “stabilization” plan for Palestine to understand what I mean. The plan, which was approved by a United Nations Security Council (UNSC) unanimous vote (with China and Russia abstaining) is nothing more or less than a twenty-first century version of the western governments’ ongoing refusal to acknowledge the Palestinian right to a sovereign state. What officially began with the 1916 secret agreement to maintain colonial rule over Palestine between colonial France and Britain known as the Sykes-Picot agreement and evolved into the Israeli colonial-settler arrangement currently in place was just reaffirmed with the UNSC vote. If Donald Trump gets his way, this latest plan will bear his name and he will oversee it. Besides this and the moving of some borders, this newest agreement—which was made with little to no Palestinian input—is essentially the same as that 1916 agreement.

That is, essentially the same except for the added one hundred ten more years of Palestinian resistance to colonialism; a history of resistance that matters because of the lessons learned and the people who have carried it on. One of those lessons for the rest of the world, a lesson on which philosopher and author Hamed Dabashi begins his latest book with is that Palestine is a historic community composed of Muslims, Christians and Jews—all Palestinian and not exclusive to any religious or other particular group. In creating Israel, western colonialism has “planted its settler colony on historic Palestine.” Dabashi continues, writing that the idea of a Jewish state is as “untenable and violent as an ‘Islamic Republic of Palestine” or a “Christian Republic of Palestine.” The fact that the west has done this is........

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