Spaces of Exception and the Struggle for Native American and Palestinian Autonomy

For episode 162, host Ayman Makarem is joined by two guests, Malek Rasamny and Matt Peterson, to talk about their 10-year long multi-media project The Native and the Refugee. The three talk about the project, its many manifestations, its focus on settler colonialism as a framework, as well as the current genocidal situation unfolded in Gaza. They also talk about their film ‘Spaces of Exception’ (2018), which is currently being screened across the globe.


Malek Rasamny is a documentary filmmaker, researcher and writer. He is currently working on a doctoral research project at Paris Nanterre University concerning the social phenomenon of reincarnation within the Druze community of Lebanon.


Matt Peterson is an organizer at Woodbine, an experimental space in New York City. He previously directed the documentary feature Scenes from a Revolt Sustained (2015), and co-edited the books In the Name of the People (2018) and The Reservoir (2022).

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Episode Credits:

Transcript prepared by Shirley Yin and Antidote Zine:

Palestinians view themselves as, and indeed are, the Indigenous people of the land. They’re Indigenous precisely because they’re facing settler colonialism. Settler colonialism creates indigeneity.

Ayman Makarem: I’m joined by two guests, Malek Rasamny and Matt Peterson, to talk about their ten-year-long multimedia project called The Native and the Refugee. The project, in a nutshell, is a juxtaposition of Indigenous communities in the Americas with Palestinian communities in the Middle East. Over the last ten years it has taken many forms, has brought new conversations to new communities, and all in all is a very interesting project that is more relevant now than ever, especially as the framework of settler colonialism becomes more and more apparent. 

We talk about their project, the framework of settler colonialism, the current genocide that is taking place in Gaza, the implications and the movements and solidarity in trying to stop this current genocide, and how they’ve seen these discourses change over the ten years that they’ve worked on this project together.

Malek Rasamny: It’s great to be on The Fire of These Times here with you, Ayman. My name is Malek Rasamny, I’m a filmmaker and also a writer to some degree. In 2014, Matt and I started a multimedia research project together called The Native and the Refugee, which consists of short videos, presentations, workshops, a book that came out last year called The Mohawk Warrior Society, and a feature film called Spaces of Exception, which is currently having a world tour. 

The essence of the project has been framed around a juxtaposition of Palestinian refugee camps in the Middle East and Native reservations in the United States, and that is the subject of the film, which profiles several reservations in the US and four different Palestinian refugee camps—two in Lebanon and two in the West Bank. 

Ayman and I met at the world premiere of the film back in 2019 at the Sharjah Film Platform, so it’s nice to be here years later talking about the work on this podcast.

Matt Peterson: I’m Matt Peterson, and I’m based in New York. We started the project back in 2014, and it’s been interesting to see since then the different waves of interest in both Native struggles and resistance here in the US, but also Palestinian movements and struggles in the Middle East, and how those things come in and out of focus and visibility globally. 

As of recording, yesterday was the six-month anniversary of October 7th; in the last six months there’s obviously been an immense amount of interest and support for Palestine, which has meant a lot of people digging deeper into the history of how we got to this current dynamic within Gaza, but also thinking more broadly about settler colonialism and different histories and places where that’s happened. For us, it’s brought a lot more interest into our project and specifically the feature film Spaces of Exception—we’ve been showing it all over the world, and we’ve been invited to speak about it in different kinds of contexts: universities, community centers, art spaces, and so on.

It’s interesting to think about and see how the work we started ten years ago relates to the current moment and how even for us, we learn new things about the films that we made, and the relevance and meaning and how to find ways to understand what’s happening. Gaza is under siege, so in a lot of ways, there’s not much people feel like they can do to enter into that blockade, and information and news, and history, analysis, and research, is one of the forms of solidarity that can happen outside of that siege and blockade. And then thinking about, What is the future vision for these colonial projects and their undoing?

AM: I find it very interesting that it’s been five years since we both screened our films. I had a film called Al Hmar, which was a satire, at Sharjah. One thing that is interesting is that it’s hard to recognize now how relatively new the framework is of understanding Zionism as a form of colonialism. When I was growing up, there wasn’t much of that out there. Now it seems to be slightly more in the mainstream. 

How have you seen that shift over the last ten years through your project? That’s a very specific angle, and an important one in the juxtaposition of the experience and the dispossession of Indigenous peoples in the Americas and in Australia and New Zealand and in other contexts, and of Palestinians.

MR: With the Palestinian conflict, how its history has looked or how it’s been understood has morphed and changed over time. Going back to the very beginning, it was understood as an Arab-Israeli conflict, and then after ’67 it became a Palestinian-Israeli conflict. 

Different words were used too: growing up in the nineties, the framework was “occupation,” because it seemed, at that time, the primary issue was the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. After Jimmy Carter’s book Palestine: Peace, Not Apartheid, the idea of “apartheid,” which had existed before, became popular, partially due to that book. Now, the term “genocide” is coming into play as a way of understanding what’s going on in Gaza. 

But if you want to make sense of the broad history, there’s this question of temporality. One of the main critiques of the film has been that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict feels quite different, and that’s because, even though it’s not true, they don’t “feel” contemporary to people in the same way. One of our interventions was to show that Native American struggles are very contemporary, but even understanding that while it is true that there is a long breadth of history in the colonization of the Americas over the past four hundred years, because we have this vantage point and the benefit of history, we can see that what unites all the different treaties, broken treaties, wars, epidemics, attempts at assimilation versus attempts at extermination—what unites all these disparate phases has been an overriding dynamic of settler colonialism.

As Zionism has reached over a century old and as the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, at least mapping since the Nakba, is now almost seventy years old, and seeing now that we’re entering a new phase of the conflict and occupation since October 7th, settler colonialism does become a useful map in order to create an overwhelming and overriding logic that can help us understand ’67, ’48, 2023, the Oslo Accords, and so on. 

A lot of times when we use terms like “apartheid,” people start getting into, Okay, this is not technically apartheid because apartheid as a term comes out of what we understand from South Africa, just like our ideas of genocide are intimately linked to the Holocaust. But in terms of trying to understand what’s going on with Palestine, settler colonialism is a key framework that can unite everything.

Linked to the idea of settler colonialism is also the idea of Palestinians as Indigenous people. That’s also becoming clearer and clearer now. There was a time where we had discussion about, Do we understand Palestinians as being Arabs, as being part of an Arab resistance to Zionism? Are the Palestinians a competing nation that is in competition, or in conflict with the state of Israel? What exactly is the root of Palestinian resistance to or reaction against the Zionist project? 

There are many different lenses, but I do think the key lens is the lens of indigeneity, in the sense that Palestinians view themselves as, and indeed are, the Indigenous people of the land. They’re Indigenous precisely because they’re facing settler colonialism. Settler colonialism creates indigeneity. More than any kind of nationalism or Arab-ism or question of religion, that’s the bedrock of trying to understand all the phases of Palestinian resistance to the settler colonial project of Zionism. 

It’s becoming more and more clear now. There’s also way more solidarity between Native people and Palestinians. It’s been one of the more heartening things, to see that growing since we started the project, to see more and more of those explicit ties or connections being made on an activist level.

MP: The last six months have been interesting, as well as last ten years of the project, because there are these different historical shifts, as Malek was saying. In some ways they’re semantic debates, but then they become conceptual debates about how we understand history, politics, or how these things are narrated. In the last six months, there have been particular semantic debates about what qualifies as a genocide and why, and how that’s determined. In some ways it’s quite bizarre that there would need to be such minute debates about it when what we’re seeing is so horrific, and then still having to think through whether this particular word applies to this particular moment. 

It’s kind of apocalyptic when you take a step back and think about that. But then there’s also been debates in The Atlantic and other popular American publications about settler colonialism itself, whether it exists at all. There were some think pieces saying, This was just made up on college campuses and it’s not a real thing. But even if it is a real thing, it doesn’t apply to Israel! Or it doesn’t apply to the United States! These mental gymnastics have been going on the last six months to contest these terms.

In the context of our project, there is even a discussion about refugeehood itself, because part of the right of return, which is supposedly recognized by the United Nations, is that there were all these Palestinian refugees produced by the formation of Israel. But Israel denies that they’re even refugees: A Palestinian living in Jordan, Lebanon, or Syria is just an Arab living in an Arab country, so what’s the problem? And likewise now in Gaza, they very much want them to leave and go into Egypt or Jordan or wherever, because their logic is that they would not be refugees. 

What that means is another contested semantic on one level, but also deeply political question. Even with indigeneity—Jews claim indigeneity to Israel; what does that mean as a political maneuver? On one level, there’s a kind of cynicism within which these semantic debates happen, but then on another level, there’s a deep strategic investment in winning these narrative battles. In some ways, Israel, up until now, has somehow managed to win in England, Europe, the US, and the UN, and Palestine has been marginalized, made Other, and been framed as “terrorist.” 

That’s another semantic thing we can think about: who has the legitimate use of violence, the legitimate use of death, the deaths that took place on October 7th versus the thirty thousand-plus that have happened since? What counts as terrorism versus what counts as self-defense is another interesting conceptual, semantic, discursive framework. In a lot of ways, the historical process of the last hundred years in the Middle East or the last few hundred years in North America has been the ability to conceptually frame what words get used in thinking about nation building in the US or Israel, how that’s happened, and what forms of legitimization it was able to use.

With genocide or settler colonialism or indigeneity or refugeehood, that’s what we were starting to think about in our project ten years ago. In some ways, we were very green and we didn’t quite realize the scale or scope or stakes of what we were getting into. There’s our film itself and all the interviews we did, and the travels and collaborations with people on reservations or camps, but the film screenings are just an excuse to have these conversations and think through these things together in real time. The last six months have raised the stakes quite a bit—not just for our film, but to think through and get a handle on how we relate to these terms, how we understand them, and how and when and why they’re applicable in different contexts.

AM: There is an intense confluence between the conceptual, the narrative, and the discursive in this moment. What strikes me as really important is that if we use the framework of apartheid or occupation, essentially we are pinpointing the problem at 1967, with the annexation of the West Bank and Gaza. But if we frame it as settler colonialism, we allow for the understanding of the crimes and the dispossession of Palestinians in 1948, and even beyond that, the 1936 Arab revolt. Palestinians knew. There are harrowing photos from the 1930s of Palestinians protesting, saying things like We are against the Zionist colonization of our land that’s supported by British imperialism. 

These connections aren’t new, but the mainstream popular understandings and recognition of them are.

MR: It also helps us make sense of what Israel is doing. There is this idea of the occupation, but the occupation rests on the idea that Israel seeks to merely occupy the West Bank and Gaza. But it’s not only that it helps us think before 1967, it’s also helping us think after 2023 in terms of this renewed westward expansion into the West Bank (though it’s been going on since Oslo and before), the destruction of Palestinian villages, and Israel’s obvious desire to ethnically cleanse Gaza and and push them into Egypt.

That’s another reason why settler films are helpful, because it helps us understand Israel as an expansionist entity, and also the ways in which it uses self-defense as a means to expand further, which is quite similar to what happened with a lot of American settlers, who would enter into conflict with Native people and then use “self-defense” as a method to further expand the borders of the United States.

Who really gets to decide what the historic starting point of the discussion is, is just who has more weapons and planes and bombs—and that’s undeniably Israel right now. We’re debating historic terms and concepts on one level, while the debate is really happening through bombs.

AM: Even the term genocide—now it’s just very vivid and explicit, and it’s taken the most brutal and horrific forms, but the term “incremental genocide” has been used for decades. Ilan Pappé, the Israeli historian, uses it, especially in terms of Gaza, where it has been the policy for the last twenty years to make Gaza uninhabitable, aside from the bombings and the destruction, and now just the complete razing of the entire strip, of all these cities. If we’re able to understand the crimes and the dispossession of ’48, we see it now. Palestinians use this term: not just the Nakba, but the “continuous Nakba.” And indeed, sixty percent of the residents of the Gaza Strip are refugees from other parts of Palestine, and now made double, triple, quadruple refugees.

I find it interesting when you discuss the solidarities, because there are two conflicting solidarities that are going on. Aside from the popular movements that are rising, there are solidarities between communities who are victims of settler colonialism, but then there’s also the solidarities of settler colonial nations. The US is the main backer of the state of Israel for many reasons, but also Australia. Part of it is that: if we recognize this as settler colonialism, and therefore settler colonialism as a thing that’s bad, that creates victims that deserve reparations and return, then you acknowledge Indigenous Americans’ demands for land back and their own reparations.

I wonder if you could talk more about these solidarities and the desire to not identify with “the Other” or with one another. At Sharjah, I remember you talked about how you filmed on a reservation in the US and brought it back to a camp in Lebanon and showed it to them, and they didn’t want to identify and be in comparison with Indigenous people because they had seen them as a defeated people.

MP: I was just thinking about this dynamic of the occupation since ’67 and these internationally recognized borders—that framework gets talked about a lot. A big part of the narrative recently also is: Who gets to control the temporal logic of it? There’s this dynamic where it’s like, Hamas started the war on October 7th, and that’s the beginning of the historical frame that we can think about. Or, Oh, well, in ’67 we worked all this out, and that’s the basis of discussion. These borders. But who gets to decide what’s the historical point? There’s a corollary with colonization in the Americas, because there’s a whole series of treaties that get written and then abrogated and broken and renegotiated.

We saw this at Standing Rock. There’s a whole series of treaties around land rights, land usage, and sovereignty around those lands, waters, rivers, and hunting grounds. A big part of it is about who gets to decide which treaty is the historic referent for the decision, and a big part of that, unfortunately, just comes down to military force. Despite whatever sophisticated geopolitical international affairs we might want to imagine we’re currently operating in, who really gets to decide what the historic starting point of the discussion is, is just who has more military weapons and planes and bombs—and that’s undeniably Israel right now (and because of the United States).

On the one hand, we’re debating historic terms and concepts on one level, while the debate is really happening through bombs. The debate is really a military question, but you can’t respond militarily either—both because you don’t have the same weaponry, but also because the positionality makes you such that you’re the “violent terrorist Other.” Same with Standing Rock: if they tried to physically block the pipeline rather than discursively block the pipeline, there’s criminal charges, conspiracy charges, investigations, and infiltration. 

When we first started the project and started visiting people and shooting, a lot of Native Americans were curious about the juxtaposition, because Palestine is one of the most mediatized colonial struggles in the world, and for quite a long time. It’s not a large territory or a huge amount of people compared to other colonized peoples, but for better or worse, they have a huge amount of media attention and gaze. So Native Americans, who do not, and who have been largely invisibilized even within American society (never mind globally), were open to thinking about the parallels, the solidarities, the exchange, the discussion; whereas in Palestine and in Lebanon, there was a skepticism because they had themselves seen American Indians as being defeated, erased, annihilated, and totally assimilated, and thought it wasn’t a living movement or a living struggle.

But there was a contradiction where on one hand they were an annihilated people, but on the other hand they were “just Americans,” so they were fine. They had gained access to American citizenship, American infrastructure, economies, and so on, so they were like, What’s the problem? So there were these two things that didn’t make sense with each other. Only in the process of us showing some of our films and talking about it did they see that there were these things called reservations, of which there’s more than five hundred in the United States, which includes many Native peoples and communities and tribal nations. They just didn’t know—which is legitimate, because lots of Americans don’t know, never mind Palestinians living in camps.

Within settler colonialism, there are different frameworks of solidarity. The ideal one would be Algeria, where the French were defeated and had to leave—that’s the pinnacle of success of overcoming settler colonialism. South Africa is maybe the second, where they came to some kind of agreement and reconciliation where they decided to figure out a new way to cohabitate that land. That’s something that has been spoken about more frequently in the apartheid framework of discussion since the eighties, nineties, and 2000s. 

But because of the United States’ specific role in the Israel-Palestine question, bringing it back to American colonization opens up different temporalities to think about this process. Israel has been a state for more than seventy-five years, and the Zionist project is more than a century old. Thinking about that temporality versus the many-centuries-long colonial process in North America, there’s also a fear of thinking about what’s happened and how that’s looked. 

Talking openly about that fear has been an interesting part of the project. If there isn’t a path to Palestinian statehood, either in the West Bank or Gaza or otherwise, what will that mean? In the context of our project, what we call the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza—do they become something like reservations, rather than a potential Palestinian state? Do they become something like Palestinian reservations within Israeli sovereignty or statehood, which is effectively what they are now? We could think about it as apartheid, or we could think of Palestinians as an internally oppressed Indigenous population that lives on reservations or in Bantustans. What does it mean or look like to use these different conceptual semantic framings for the conflict as a way to understand it?

If we look into the histories in the United States, and I imagine similarly in Australia and New Zealand, there are instances of a decade of slow sickness and disease, and then there will be a few years of intense violent military conflict, and it alternates. It’s not just one thing; it takes place over decades, if not centuries. So there are a lot of parallels, unfortunately, with the process of colonization in the United States, where there are these flare-ups of militarized conflict. 

The difference with Palestine is that there’s a lot of international attention; in the process of colonization in the United States, no one gave a shit. There was no United Nations agency, no global media that was monitoring it and debating genocide, for example. So on the one hand, there’s an advantage, because globally the media and people are paying attention, and other nations nominally have some stake or investment in what’s going on. 

But the darker reality is: is it just up to Israel itself and the United States? It’s been unclear if other nation states have the wherewithal or backbone to intervene—aside from just discursively, writing some statement or something. Up until now, the answer has been no. No one’s meaningfully intervened. That’s the question of sovereignty itself on a global scale. We see these conflicts all over the world: Russia-Ukraine, the Kurdish populations in Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran. Is any foreign nation going to intervene in how a people colonizes its “Others” within its borders? Up until now, the answer is no, if we’re honest.

AM: It is very interesting and heartwarming that there is a case against Israel at the ICJ on charges of genocide, and not brought forth by any Arab nations, but by South Africa. That act in itself demonstrates the understanding of these similar trajectories and processes. 

There’s a lot of differences between South Africa and Palestine—namely, the Zionists are very happy to just wipe out the Palestinians completely, whereas that wasn’t the case in South Africa. It was a minority ruling over the population, and they needed the labor power, so it wasn’t this, Let’s get rid of them all. But nonetheless, the settler colonial framework helps understand where those solidarities are coming from.

Also, since this is something that is so aligned to Western imperialism and the Global North, we do see many states, nations, and peoples from the Global South rising and using whatever limited means they have in terms of international law. Now Nicaragua is calling in Germany for complicity and aiding and abetting the genocide.

I’m interested in talking about the ways in which your project has manifested as multimedia over the course of ten years. Malek, can you talk about some of the physical manifestations? I remember you were arrested in one of the films.

I told them I was American, and I had my passport in the back of my pants. Immediately, their whole behavior changed—they became much more friendly, and were even apologetic. It was quite surreal to go from being a Palestinian refugee being beaten and manhandled, to an American citizen worthy of respect and human dignity.

MR: That’s correct. I was detained when we were in a camp outside of Bethlehem called Aida. There are these series of ritualistic demonstrations that have different tenors. There’s the daily one with younger people, and if there’s some occasion, there will be one with youth and teenagers that’s a bit more intense. But the drum beat is a daily demonstration by young kids, not older than twelve or thirteen, right in front of the wall. The Aida refugee camp is pretty surreal, because it’s right on the wall. The wall has a blue door; on one side there is a refugee camp, and on the other side there are settlements. We would ask people, Is there going to be a demonstration today? and they’d say, Yeah, probably. We’d ask, Is the Israeli army going to come into the camp today? and they’d say, Yeah, probably around 3:30. It was like clockwork.

So they would come out at 3:30 from their blue door. I was there, and I didn’t have a press pass, and I wasn’t carrying a camera. Because I was the oldest, they assumed I was the ringleader of the whole thing. The demonstration was dispersed, and I ran inside. I noticed they were chasing behind me, and I didn’t want to continue running because they might shoot me, so I went limp and allowed myself to be arrested. I didn’t fight back at all. I was dragged inside the wall, where there were mainly military people. I told them I was American, and I actually had my passport in the back of my pants. Immediately, their whole behavior changed—they became much more friendly, and were even apologetic. 

It was quite surreal to go from being a Palestinian refugee who was being beaten and manhandled, to being a American citizen who was worthy of respect and human dignity. Because I was American they let me go with a warning, and then I exited through the wall and found myself back in something that looked like Lebanon, like a working-class neighborhood in Beirut. I grew up in Westchester County in New York, nice suburbs, and I also lived in Beirut. So it was surreal—both places in one geography, where you go from an idyllic American-style suburb into a popular quarter in Beirut. 

We have footage of that in one of our segments, called “Walls of Bethlehem,” which is about the ritualistic nature of these demonstrations. This was not something we had planned for, they simply happened when we were in Palestine, in the camps surrounding Bethlehem.

As far as the multimedia approach goes, Matt and I were very interested in doing research, but also doing something where we try to analyze politics, the world we’re in, and the state we’re in. Matt and I were involved in activist work in New York, in Occupy Wall Street. I wasn’t directly involved in the Arab Spring, but I was very touched by it and followed it closely. After coming out of these political movements that were very defined by moments, like Occupy Wall Street or the Arab Spring, when we were taking a break or in a moment of retreat, there was this idea of: What are permanent states or spaces of exception? How do we enter into these spaces and try to speak to people there, both to learn more about those spaces and the people who live in them and their histories, but also to understand the world we all live in collectively, from the point of view of intelligent, militant, organized people? Film was just one mechanism for us to enter into these spaces and see if we can have these conversations with people on reservations and in refugee camps. 

Another aspect was that you accumulate so much footage in the course of filmmaking, it’s a shame to discard it all and put it just in a feature film. That was the impetus for us to have these short films. Also, the short films allowed us to make work in reservations, show them in refugee camps and have conversations; and also make them in refugee camps and show them in reservations and have those conversations; and accumulate short films along the way that could circulate and foster interesting discussions as we moved towards the completion of the feature film. It also allowed us to experiment with different genres. Some of the short films are more experimental, others are more journalistic, some are more propagandistic.

Finally, it also allowed us to be able to respond to current events. There can be an element that is away from current events—that was intentional, to be about space and not in response to whatever is happening now. But because it’s a multimedia project, there was a certain flexibility where we could also respond to things going on. For example, when the movement at Standing Rock happened, we were able to travel there twice, and we made two short films and wrote two articles, but stuff from Standing Rock is not in the feature film (except for the final shot). 

We did different things. We did presentations, workshops, short films. It’s a bit like a “universe”—sometimes it can be very general; for example, we could write something about indigeneity or refugeehood writ large. But other times, it can be super specific; for example, we, along with Philip Blouin and Kahentinetha Rotiskarewake, co-edited this book called The Mohawk Warrior Society, which is a deep dive into the history of one particular group we worked with in Ahkwesáhsne, which we didn’t have time to go into depth in the feature film. 

So the multimedia aspect has allowed us to work in different formats and at different levels, adopting a historical approach when necessary and adopting a more contemporary organizing approach when necessary as well.

AM: I remember I was watching your short films and exclaimed, Oh my god, that’s Malek! Oh my god, that’s Matt! Matt was yelling in the background, He’s American, he’s a journalist, he’s American! but they didn’t give a shit, they’re just taking you away.

Some of these juxtapositions are very interesting and telling. For instance, I’m from Lebanon, so I’m very far removed from the experience and history and the current context of Indigenous peoples in the US and the Americas. But I remember one of the films was about the chiefs, the more political members and the Indigenous police, and that reminded me so much of the PA. It’s like, these guys are from us, but they are specifically created and given power such that they manage us and benefit in some material way. Now we’re seeing it again in discussions in Gaza and the “day after,” where the Israelis are openly talking about: We’ll get the PA to come and administer it, like we have them administering the West Bank. Ultimately that stems from Oslo and that whole disaster. 

I find those juxtapositions interesting and illuminating, and they also reify the thesis of settler colonialism. Some of these things feel common knowledge or intuitive nowadays, but even a few decades ago, there was not much of a popular understanding of each individual context of settler colonialism, let alone these connections. I remember there was a documentary Al Jazeera made a few years ago where they do an “Indigenous swap”: an Indigenous community in Australia and America swap places, and they’re like, Holy shit, this is exactly the same.

MP: The common denominator in a lot of this is just England, England importing these structures and governmental and administrative bodies into different parts of the world, from the United States to Australia to Palestine, and the culture of efficiency and rational process, and how to manage peoples and resources and lands. That’s one thread that can be looked at more deeply. 

Thinking about the PA, that’s where these different temporalities come in. There’s this thing in the United States called the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which was initially under the Department of War, and then gets transferred to the Department of Interior, where it’s managed almost as a land question or something. Initially, it’s European-descended peoples, and then it slowly becomes populated by Native Americans who are participating in the US project, which gives it a different look because it’s Native Americans running this agency, but for the benefit of the United States. 

So there is this colonial experience, but each individual tribal nation and reservation has its own administration; first it’s managed by the US military, and then gradually it’s handed over to “sympathetic” Native Americans who can liaise and interface. That’s this dynamic of struggle where you could think, Are they trying to advocate for their peoples and act as middle-managers, or are they just conciliatory sellouts who abandon liberation? Those debates have been happening for a hundred and fifty years (if not longer), in the United States, whereas in the Palestinian context, it’s just since Oslo. 

People have already been perceiving this similar dynamic of how the PA functions within the West Bank. Part of this debate since October 7th about Hamas and the PA is: people don’t like the PA and want the dissolution of the PA, but the Hamas alternative is also horrific in a different way. In both contexts, you have the undermining of different kinds of Indigenous leadership and organizational forms, precisely because they pose the threat to the colonial project. It wasn’t just the aerial bombardment, or the denial of food services, or the razing of cities and towns and villages, it’s also the organizational undermining of certain leadership to prevent “legitimate” leaders from emerging who could actually manage a separate Palestinian or Native existence on that land. 

So you get stuck. That’s part of the fear; not just the annihilation happening in Gaza, but the lack of a coherent, legitimate organizational form—nevermind the mass imprisonment and incarceration of Palestinians within the occupied territories. Or the diaspora: the fact that so many people were forced to flee and live outside of the region and aren’t allowed to come back. All of this amounts to the same thing, where it becomes a management question of: How do we deal with this unruly population within these lands? We want these lands without these people.

In the West Bank, they’re breaking apart the lands, not giving land permits, not giving sovereignty, and Gaza has been under siege and blockade for close to twenty years. It’s two different strategies; both have pros and cons in terms of sovereignty (I’m speaking before October 7th), and now, there is this new phase of unprecedented violence—it’s still unclear what’s going to happen. Some of the Arab Gulf nations are negotiating, but it’s unclear what their vision or motivation is. But thinking about the PA and the Bureau of Indian Affairs is a fascinating comparison, and how and why they both emerge, what their function is, whether they represent self-determination and liberation, or whether they just represent quieting down the populations. 

It’s a fascinating thing that we’ve been trying to work on in more writing projects, and that’s something that we will certainly explore more in that context.

MR: I want to just add to what Matt was saying about Israel’s undermining of independent Palestinian leadership. The construction of the PA was rooted in the Intifada; it’s precisely because not only did Israel fear parties outside of the PA/Hamas framework, but they also feared grassroots democratic leadership. As the Intifada took off in the late eighties, it started in refugee camps in the occupied territories by a new generation, and it mobilized Palestinian society outside of the organizational networks of the PLO. Israel feared a democratically grassroots civilian Palestinian leadership. That’s precisely why they did the unthinkable at the time, which is recognize the PLO as the legitimate spokesperson of Palestine, and gave them this state without sovereignty. So rather than a people with sovereignty and no state, they became a state with no sovereignty, and turned the PLO into the PA as a subcontractor for the occupation—basically the worst aspects of quasi-statehood, without any of the benefits of sovereignty and dignity.

That was a direct way of countering the potential democratic political forces that could have been and indeed were being unleashed by the first Intifada in the eighties; that’s how the PA came into being. It’s not only a question of fragmenting territory, it’s also a question of destroying any unified democratic Palestinian leadership. That’s part of what makes it genuinely so difficult to imagine a future. It’s true that there isn’t a good Palestinian leadership, but we have to understand why that is. That has been a big part of Israel’s strategy.

AM: History is very important here in framing things as settler colonialism. When understanding the Zionist project as a settler colonial movement that started in the late nineteenth century, one of the key moments of defeat of the Palestinian resistance to that colonialism and to British imperialism was 1936, ’39, the Great Revolt. Because in that period, the leadership that existed was expelled, killed, fragmented, pushed into Jordan and Lebanon by the British, and with assistance from early Jewish paramilitary thugs (some of them were literally just terrorist organizations). So when ’48 comes around, there is no political leadership or military leadership, there’s no one who actually has an understanding of the situation on the ground. And then all this bullshit about the Arab armies—none of it is true.

Bringing up the first Intifada is very important, because it’s when Hamas comes into being, because it started in a neighborhood in Gaza, and there was this need and desire for organizing and armed resistance. I remember once sitting in a cafe in Beirut, and overhearing this obnoxious American person saying something like, Where’s the Palestinian Nelson Mandela? (I’ve heard that a thousand times).

MR: He’s in jail.

AM: He’s in jail, but also he’s dead, he’s buried, he’s been killed. And then also, who is this whitewashed Nelson Mandela in your mind? Because for thirty years, he was in jail, and he was considered a terrorist. It’s so frustrating, it’s bullshit. 

For me, settler colonialism cuts through so many of the myths and so much of the propaganda. There’s a great book by Ilan Pappé, 10 Myths About Israel, which feels of its time (2015). I can’t plug myself into how I or other people were thinking ten years ago, but I’ll pose that question to you, since you’ve been doing this project for ten years, and since so much of the project has been talking to these communities but also to broader audiences. How have you seen those discussions shift and change?

I’ll bring up one tiny example as well since you brought up the Gulf states, Matt. Your initial world premiere was in Sharjah in 2019, but that was well before the Abraham Accords. This is before the UAE’s normalization campaign. I don’t know if that film would be allowed to be screened today in the UAE—things have shifted at a macro scale, but they’ve also shifted at the grassroots level in terms of what is discussable and where the conversations are going. These discussions can no longer be shut down by just being called antisemitic—that used to be a thing, but now it’s untenable.

So how have these discussions changed over the course of the ten years you’ve been working on this project?

MP: If you’re in Germany, they could still shut it down, but maybe not elsewhere.

In terms of the Abraham Accords, it’s interesting. I don’t normally like to think of it in these terms, but during the Trump administration with Jared Kushner, there was a huge push to normalize Israel with as many Arab and Gulf countries as possible, which was largely successful. They made a huge stride. And it seemed as if Saudi was the next piece to fall. It seemed as if the Hamas attack was somehow meant to undermine that being possible, and if we can think of it like that, it worked.

We’re in an election year in the United States. It seemed as if Trump was this horrific figure for many reasons, but specifically for the Israel-Palestine question: moving the capital to Jerusalem, acknowledging the Golan Heights, and so on. But seeing Biden and the Democratic Party oversee this genocide, if we accept calling it that, has been a major shock, and is fracturing the Democratic Party, especially generationally. A lot of Millennials and Generation Z are much less sympathetic to Israel, and that generational shift is quite potent. It’s also been the largest mobilization of Jewish anti-Zionists in the United States, maybe since the formation of Israel. At least in my lifetime, I never imagined such a large mobilization of Jews against the occupation and against the genocide.

In this election year, it’s unclear who is worse. We see what Trump did, and we see what Biden’s doing; it’s unclear what someone might want and then geopolitically how people are angling for this. Jared Kushner recently made some comments in the Middle East talking about how Gaza could be really nice beachfront property, and it could be really valuable! Thinking about the Zionist project for the last hundred years, it’s interesting to think that people were quite clear—there’s all kinds of documents and writings where they spelled out exactly what their plan was for Palestine, far before ’48, and incrementally they achieved it through different mechanisms, allies, and partnerships. Knowing when to shift away from the UK towards the United States was one pivotal shift. Now, it’s a question of who will be the allies for this current Zionist imaginary for the next few decades.

What does it mean for Gaza when the West stops paying attention or stops rallying? That’s also part of the colonial process—there’s an initial moment of outrage, but the colonial project has a different temporality where it can continue its thing for years and not weeks. It has a strategic vision.

There was a movement in 2013 called Idle No More, largely taking place in Canada, which was an Indigenous movement about protesting against environmental issues and violence against women. It did seep into the United States a bit, right around the time we were starting our project. There was opposition during the Obama administration to the Keystone pipeline and different pipelines through Lakota and Dakota territories, but it was much less known. With the Standing Rock movement in 2016, these questions around settler colonialism, Indigenous rights, and even the term “BIPOC,” were things that emerged over the ten years of our project.

In the Palestine case, there’s unfortunately almost annual waves of horrific bombing campaigns or massacres. Malek’s been outside of New York for a few years, but we happened to be together during October 7th. At first, it was shocking, but it was still unclear what it meant and what it was going to mean. It seems it may be the biggest event in our lifetimes, and I’m still thinking about and unpacking it. One thing I’ve been thinking about since November is the moment at which it ceases to be on the front page of the New York Times or on CNN, and what that means and looks like. It’s obviously going to take decades to rebuild whatever existed in Gaza, just physically, never mind socially, mentally, psychologically, and organizationally. But are people going to be paying attention consistently through that time? That’s what I’m worried about.

We can think about the six month anniversary since October, but I’ve noticed in the last month or so there’s already been less visibility, and an exhaustion. It’s understandable in terms of international solidarity, but what’s going to happen when people stop paying attention? You can see that a bit in Ukraine now; people are not thinking or talking as much about what’s going on there. What does it mean for Gaza or any of these international conflicts when the West stops paying attention or stops caring, stops rallying? That’s also part of the colonial process—there’s an initial moment of outrage, and then the colonial project has a different temporality where it can continue its thing for years and not weeks. It has a strategic vision.

The Zionist project has had a strategic vision for the entirety of that land for a hundred years. In some ways, this fits within that. But in terms of international solidarity, it’s hard for individuals to have that same duration. In ideological, institutional structures, individuals can change, but it’s still the same project. It’s not Sharon anymore, it’s a different set of characters. Even now there’s this move to pin the blame on Netanyahu; it’s like, Let’s just get rid of Netanyahu, and then it’ll be fine; we’ll just renegotiate. But in some ways, he doesn’t matter, and Biden doesn’t matter. These individual characters are secondary to the structure of settler colonialism, of that technique of land domination. But as individuals, how do we match that structural dynamic?

That gets back to these questions of leadership and organizational forms. If you can just wipe out individuals, or wipe out 30,000 people, there’s different scales of activity we’re talking about. Even if Netanyahu does step down or gets voted out, even if it feels as if that’s some kind of healing moment, clearly it’s not. These last six months were in the imagination of the Zionist project for decades.

AM: I hate this pinpointing onto Netanyahu. As though he’s not surrounded by fanatics but also by the structure of the entire state from the very beginning! This is why settler colonialism is a valuable concept, because it helps with understanding what the foundation of the state itself is built on. It’s not as though there was a state, and then they did this bad thing twenty years later in 1967. The state itself is founded on the dispossession of Palestinians. Every Israeli town or city is the ruins of a Palestinian village, is the site of a massacre. When looking at that history, you do see terrifying parallels with what they’re doing in Gaza. It is the same tactic sometimes, except now with horrifically superior and advanced technology.

I agree with the juxtaposition as well in terms of the US, with these leaders who are unremarkable people acting out the United States military and imperial interests, and against any political expediency! This is an election year. Joe Biden is going to lose. The minute that Donald Trump—again, fuck him, hate him, fascist piece of shit, there’s no saying he’s better—tells Joe Biden in one of these debates, You know what they’re calling you, Joe? Genocide Joe! They wouldn’t say that to me! The minute he says that, it’s over. Genuinely, Joe Biden has dug himself into a genocide trench. 

But again, it’s beyond him. Because it’s taken six months and only now are people like Nancy Pelosi shuffling their feet. In the United States, there is a parallel to the 2020 moment when Trump was voted out, and there was this movement, and Black Lives Matter, and all these things, and then once Biden was elected, so many people dropped out. So many people were like, We’ve done our bit, now we can go back to brunch.

So I agree with you, Matt. I am nervous about what happens when it stops being news, and they are trying to censor it. Meta and Twitter are censoring it, and now they want to ban TikTok in the United States. Obviously, a big part of that is because The Kids Are Alright. The kids are seeing stuff and saying stuff that no one’s ever said before—not because of the algorithm, but because they can cut through the bullshit much easier. They’re seeing it directly. They’re not raised with this New York Times narrative, so they’re not propagandized from the beginning. For example, even in Lebanon, I went to a private school, so I did grow up with some Zionist myths that I then had to deconstruct, which is much harder than if you never heard those to begin with, and just start off seeing things and thinking, Wait, what have they been doing for the last sixty years? What is this project?

We should start wrapping up slowly. Do you have any last reflections or anything you would like to plug?

MR: There’s a screening in Troy in upstate New York, where one of the people who was in our film, a guy named Roger from Ahkwesáhsne is going to be there. It’s always good when someone from the film is able to be there. When we were in Malmö, a friend from Bourj el-Barajneh happened to be there. He’s a refugee from Palestine who lived in Lebanon and now is a refugee in Sweden. There’s going to be more screenings in New York and hopefully more screenings all over the world.

I’m glad that we’ve able to center a discussion of settler colonialism in this episode. What’s interesting about settler colonialism and Netanyahu is that it allows for critique within it, because it’s this big process where you can always blame something on a particular person. You can say Netanyahu is this, or this party is that, or this American general in the nineteenth century was particularly brutal, so it allows for criticism while the bigger machine can still grind on—that’s one of its powers.

Another thing about settler colonialism is the way that it uses nationalism or nationhood of its enemies, and it can give and deny it depending on what it needs to do. At a certain point, it became useful in the first Intifada for Israel to nominally recognize a possibility of Palestinian statehood, because it distracted from the actual apartheid that was going on. Because at the time of the first Intifada, Palestinians were basically living in one state, just a deeply apartheid state. So it became more useful for Israel to think of the Palestinians as a state separate from them in order to reframe the conflict.

Now we’re exiting that phase. Before, Israel would cling to the idea of a two-state solution like a lifeboat as a way of normalizing the occupation, but now we’re in a new phase where they’re disinterested in the two-state solution and they’re openly rejecting it. So now we’ve moved past a time where it was useful to think of the Palestinians as a country within the settler colonial project. What kind of language is the Zionist project going to use to describe Palestinians if they’re explicitly rejecting letting them have a state? That’s going to be something interesting to watch. Are we going back into a Nazi-like mentality where they are sub-humans? What kind of rhetoric can be used to describe the status of these human beings who are explicitly not going to have a country and are explicitly not going to be citizens of Israel?

There’s also been a similar phenomenon in America, where at certain times America has considered individual tribes to be nations and other times not. At times America has moved from destruction towards assimilation; for example, when America granted Native people American citizenship, it was to dissolve the Indigenous nations. America has also gone back and forth between giving nominal nationhood-ish status to tribes, and taking it away when it was convenient. So settler colonialism can mobilize different conceptions at times where it works.

AM: For the Zionists, the collapse of that language is part and parcel of the collapse of a certain phase of the settler colonial project. Now you just see this mess of ideological straw, like the way Netanyahu calls Palestinians or Hamas “Nazi ISIS.” It doesn’t make sense. It’s not actually a coherent construct, but it’s an ideological thing that you can identify. You know that if they’re ISIS, you can just kill them all—and that’s how they’re talking about Palestinians as a whole. If they’re all just terrorists, someone who by choice has rescinded their “right to life,” it completely dehumanizes and depoliticizes them. It is a return to a form of “unpeople.” 

In the context of the War on Terror, this is the language they’ve been using, but instead of a group or an ideology or a movement, it’s an entire population. That’s scary, but there are cracks. This is the silver lining: even though things are more brutal than they’ve ever been, many people point to this brutality as a sign of the collapse; as it’s collapsing, it becomes much more violent. But it’s terrifying, because are they going to bring us all down with it?

MR: The collapse of the Zionist project is conditioned on what kind of world is existing outside of it. The collapse of the Zionist project only makes sense in a context where there’s certain norms, or if the world is moving in a certain direction. Because if we’re living in a world where fascism is rampant everywhere, then it just becomes one more cog in a machine that’s moving the world in a whole other direction. Whether or not this is the death throes of the project, or if it is merely a transition to a new and more awful phase is dependent on what kind of world we’re moving into in general, as a globe.

MP: It’s interesting ending on that dark note, because I was thinking that we didn’t touch on Lebanon at all, specifically when you mentioned “bringing us all down with them “and what that means. We won’t get into it now, but it is fascinating seeing the ways in which Israel has tried to expand the conflict to Syria, Lebanon, and Iran as a way of deflecting or making it seem like it’s under some kind of existential threat when clearly it’s not.

In terms of juxtaposition, two books that mirror each other are Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, and then the American counterpart to that, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s An Indigenous People’s History of the United States, where she traces American colonization from the beginning of European arrival to the US. It’s short, but it’s a good historical overview.

Patrick Wolfe also has a grounding text, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native” in the Journal of Genocide Research, where he touches on both Palestine and colonization in the Americas. And of course, on our website we have our own writings and our book and our short videos. If people want to organize screenings of the film, please get in touch.

In terms of the multimedia practice, a big part of that has been the screenings. It’s not just showing the film, but discussions like we’ve had in this podcast open up the project and the research more than just the film itself. We’re grateful for these opportunities.

MR: I would add, in terms of the canonical works, Neither Settler Nor Native by Mahmoud Mamdani, which is a book that takes case studies from around the world, including apartheid South Africa, the United States, Palestine, and the Holocaust. Another book I’d recommend is No Spiritual Surrender: Indigenous Anarchy in Defense of the Sacred. The reason I bring up that book is because it was written by Klee Benally, who is an activist and a musician from the Navajo Nation, who is a central figure in the Navajo Nation segment of the film, and he has a lot of incredible insights and comments in that section. He recently, unfortunately, passed away, as have a lot of the people in the film.

I also recommend any of the writings of Walid Daqqa, who passed away today [at the time of recording] in an Israeli jail. I don’t know how much of his work is translated into English, but he has some interesting writings on the right of return, where he speaks about the right of return as an anti-nostalgic project, where there shouldn’t be a folkloric turning back of the clock to 1947, but ways of creatively thinking of the right of return as a future-oriented project.

I would plug our book, The Mohawk Warrior Society, which contains interviews with people from Ahkwesáhsne, and it also features the work of Louis Hall, who’s a key thinker in terms of Mohawk sovereignty. He doesn’t just assert sovereignty but tries to map out what a particularly Iroquois or Haudenosaunee sovereignty could look like. It’s a universalist project, but it’s rooted in Haudenosaunee conceptions of nature and land and place and people and society, so it goes beyond merely claiming sovereignty, but trying to reimagine sovereignty outside of a Western framework.

AM: Thank you for sharing those and thank you for joining us today. Good luck with all future screenings and with everything else.

MR and MP: Thanks a lot, Ayman.

Ayman Makarem

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