Preface: What would Fanon say?

The original impetus behind writing Frantz Fanon: Combat Breathing was the Black Lives Matter movement that exploded across the world after the 2020 police murder of George Floyd. Although the book was already at the publisher when the horrific Hamas attacks on Israeli citizens (as well as on military occupation facilities) took place, followed by Israel's immediate catastrophic response (a collective punishment resulting in a genocide of Palestinians in Gaza), I felt compelled to add a short preface to this book as another global movement is emerging in support of Palestinian national self-determination.

There is a remarkable staying power and urgency to Fanon's thought. Just short of one hundred years after his birth, he always seems to have something to say that connects with our contemporary moment. In the critique of orientalism expressed in one of his first articles, "The 'North African Syndrome,'" he lays out the thesis that when North Africans (i.e. Arabs) come "on the scene," they enter "into a pre-existing framework." This pre-existing orientalist framework extending beyond North Africa is seen every day in the commentaries about the Arabs' constitutional inferiority, violence, fanaticism, and lies. This ideology reemerged unmistakably after October 7, 2023 when Hamas fighters stormed into villages in southern Israel and killed civilians, young and old, many of whom were opposed to Netanyahu and the settlers. The prevailing orientalist discourse emanated not only from the Israeli state, but also became the dominant narrative across the Western media: Hamas came to represent the generic Arab. Of course, the violence and daily brutality required to police Israel's Manichean world of colonizer and colonized was normalized, and remained so even after October 7, as the world began to watch a genocide unfold.

Israel's European "brightly lit" cities with their vibrant nightlife, on the one hand, and the high-tech border fences and military guards of the occupied territories, on the other, "a world without spaciousness" (Fanon 1968: 39), harkens back to the Manichean geography of the colonial world described by Fanon. It is a juridical world of compartments, divided by the police and the military. However, after October 7, the survival of Gaza - already an "open-air prison" - itself came into doubt as daily atrocities and massacres were unleashed against Palestinian civilians there who have nowhere to escape to. This obliteration is justified in the indisputable moral name of "never again."

This reference to the Holocaust takes us back to Fanon's first book, Black Skin, White Masks, in which, in connecting anti-Semitism with negrophobia, he is reminded of his philosophy teacher from the Antilles saying, "'When you hear someone insulting the Jews, pay attention; he is talking about you.' And I believed at the time he was universally right, meaning that I was responsible in my body and soul for the fate reserved for my brother." It was around that time that Fanon left Martinique to join the Free French Army, which was committed to the anti-Nazi fight. "Since then," he added, "I have understood that what he meant quite simply was that the anti-Semite is inevitably a negrophobe" (2008: 100). Back in Martinique in late 1945, Fanon heard a speech from Aimé Césaire's political campaign: "When I switch on my radio and hear that Black men are being lynched in America, I say that they have lied to us: Hitler isn't dead. When I switch on my radio and hear that Jews are being insulted, persecuted, and massacred, I say that they have lied to us: Hitler isn't dead" (2008: 70). Just a few years later, Césaire would argue that Nazism is the product of a "boomerang effect" of European colonialism, where the exclusive savagery, violence, and brutality - the racism - toward non-European people rebounds with the largest holocaust in history, the systematic elimination of 6 million Jews. "At the end of formal humanism," Césaire adds, "there is Hitler" (2000: 37), making it clear that Hitler was not dead but would continue to appear in new forms.

After October 7, mention of the Holocaust in Israel became weaponized as a justification for the removal (and, indeed, the wished-for annihilation) of Palestinians. It is true that the idea of self-determination for Jews after the Holocaust contained contradictory tendencies, including liberal and socialist. More importantly, there is also a direct line of Zionism in power - from the fascist-terrorist Irgun, through Menachem Begin, to Benjamin Netanyahu - that from its inception cared more about consolidating land and power than adhering to the principle of the self-determination of nations that declares no nation can be free if it oppresses another.

In Les Damnés de la terre, Fanon describes the colonial world as Manichean (going back to the Persian religion of Mani, which viewed the creators of the world, God and the Devil, as still fighting it out). From the colonizer's standpoint, the colonized do not lack values but are simply evil. Thus, the police and army play the role of containing the colonized and keeping them in place (and, as Fanon critically points out, they play the same role in the post-independence neocolonial national regime).

To return to Fanon's conception of colonial Manicheanism, its relevance now is borne out by the use of the term "apartheid" to describe conditions of life for Palestinians. Introduced after World War II in South Africa with genuinely fascist connections, apartheid was about "population control" (i.e. labor control) of South Africa's Africans, including pass laws and the forced removal of people. The creation of Homelands or "Bantustans" for 87 percent of the population on 13 percent of the land was an attempt by late settler colonialism to develop a system of indirect rule based on apartheid state-sanctioned and supported "tribal" rule outside "White South Africa." In apartheid Israel, the "Bantustans" of Gaza and the West Bank are not primarily about labor control - though the pass laws work in a similar way - but about keeping the Palestinian population fixed in their exiled place, as in Gaza, where this surplus population is essentially locked down. Fanon's writings, focused as they are on the lived experience of being denied freedom of movement, hemmed into "this narrow world, strewn with prohibitions" (1968: 37), have an immediate resonance. In Les Damnés de la terre, for example, he writes of a million Algerian hostages behind barbed wire and 300,000 refugees on the Moroccan and Tunisian frontiers forced there by the French. The unheard-of levels of brutality, terror, and vengeance unleashed on the populace created a continuous "apocalyptic atmosphere" that, Fanon concludes, is "the sole message [of] French democracy" (1965: 26). In extreme poverty and precarious living conditions, Fanon continues, the colonized live in a state of permanent insecurity; in flight from endless aerial bombardments, families are broken up and there is hardly anyone who does not suffer from mental disorders. This "shameless colonialism" is only matched by apartheid South Africa (1965: 26). Palestinians live under similar conditions and are also expected to express an emotional and affective control of the self that is situationally impossible. As Hamas's bloody murders of Israeli civilians on October 7 dominated the news, it was quickly forgotten that those breaching the fences and breaking into "forbidden quarters" (1968: 40) were experiencing a physical moment of liberation. As a psychiatrist and political theorist, Fanon engaged with these contradictory and dehumanized realities. While recognizing the role that the October 7 attacks have played in putting the Palestinian question back on a global stage, Fanon would also be critical of Hamas's ideology and authoritarianism. Concerned about the difficult question of how to rebuild a resistance that is democratic, his warning in 1959 could very much be directed at Hamas:

Because we want a democratic and a renovated Algeria, because we believe one cannot rise and liberate oneself in one area and sink in another, we condemn, with pain in our hearts, those brothers who have flung themselves into revolutionary action with the almost physiological brutality that centuries of oppression give rise to and feed. (1965: 25)

In Fanon's schematic mapping of anticolonial activity, he argues that resistance is determined by the colonizer. He appreciated the power of this militant and Manichean anticolonial inversion, proclaiming that the colonized respond "to the living lie of the colonial situation by an equal falsehood" and adding that, in this colonist context, "there is no truthful behavior: and the good is quite simply that which is evil for 'them'" (1968: 50). While recognizing the logic of this inversion of colonial Manicheanism, Fanon also considered it incredibly problematic, warning that, along with the "brutality of thought and a mistrust of subtlety which are typical of revolutions . there exists another kind of brutality which . is typically antirevolutionary, hazardous and...