In a newly released book, Banging on the Walls of the Tank, Haidar Eid’s many dispatches from Gaza from 2009 to the current genocidal operation reveal a disturbing but irrefutable reality: the world order and system of nation-states have abandoned the Palestinian people, to be massacred and annihilated as a people in the most calculated and brutal fashion conceivable.
BANGING ON THE WALLS OF THE TANK Dispatches from Gaza
By Haidar Eid
220 pps, Between the Lines, $29.95
From the siege of Gaza that began in 2007 which was essentially an incremental genocide, to the genocidal wars in 2008, 2012, 2014, 2021, to the most recent, ruthless, and intense genocidal operation, Israel has followed a singular path towards a singular goal: the total and final elimination of the Palestinian struggle for liberation and the official establishment of exclusive Israeli Jewish sovereignty on all the lands of historic Palestine, from the river to the sea.
Reading Eid’s book is a journey through a very long “Save Our Souls” distress message emanating from Gaza to the world – a message that continues to go unanswered. Though Eid’s pieces fall under the heading of “opinion articles” and “commentaries,” they cannot be that; not when you’re a Palestinian academic writing from Gaza. They are dispatches from a concentration camp, a death zone, relaying a merciless reality to audiences across the world, and asking them for urgent help and support. Defiant, clear, unwavering, without qualification on Palestinian rightful and just demands for liberation (the “full menu of rights” as he puts it), illuminating the core of the struggle, Eid’s dispatches are an illustration of a larger archive that Palestinians have produced, spanning decades, for anyone willing to listen.
From the complexity of historical, political, cultural, and social structures emerges the simple core of the struggle: Palestinians are a sovereign people, whose relationship with all the land of historic Palestine is unbreakable, unshakable, and which we, as a people, will never surrender. It is only because we refuse to surrender our basic right to live freely on our lands that the Zionist project unleashes this uninhibited genocidal violence in the hope that they can eradicate us and steal all of our lands, claiming it as exclusively theirs.
Echoing Ghassan Kanafani’s Men in the Sun, Eid emphasizes that Palestinians have refused to die in silence, to get on their knees and accept the fate that Israeli settler colonialism and Western imperialism has determined should be theirs, which is annihilation. Instead, Palestinians have moved and shouted from inside the tank, as he puts it,
banging on the walls of the Gaza concentration camp since 1948.
A 21st century genocide
Prior to the genocidal war that began in October 2023, many people believed that in this age of mass communication, democratic nation-states, and liberal mores and rules about universal human rights, a genocide like this would not be possible in the 21st century. The assertion being, that we now inhabit a world where moral enlightenment has reached its height, and that our civilized norms, values, and legal institutions would generate a strong push to prevent or halt such horrific forms of violence. The sad reality, however, is that such a worldview operates on a major flaw in that it does not see (willfully or not), or properly centralize, the colonial and racist foundations of the modern world.
One of the critical elements of this foundation is the racialized dehumanization of Brown and Black bodies. In conventional versions of the story, we are told that “Western civilization” introduced the idea that all human beings are born equal, and inaugurated social, economic, and political institutions designed to secure universal human rights, freedom, and prosperity for all (or at least, to the majority of people, to more people than ever before during pre-modern history). We are further told that against the “savage” nations they encountered during the “age of discovery” – a “savagery” and “barbarity” that is allegedly still the major cause of intolerance, desolation, and unfreedom today – Western civilization is situated at the vanguard of the struggle for universal human rights for all.
Historically, this story, or rather infantile fantasy, is not only baseless, it served a specific function in the advancement of the colonial project. Namely, it allowed colonizers who methodically butchered, enslaved, and exploited human beings everywhere around the world to convince themselves that their unjustifiable acts of violence were indeed being done for a greater good: the advancement of a free human life for all. To make this fantasy workable and coherent, to be able to say “all human beings are equal” while simultaneously colonizing, killing, enslaving, and exploiting massive numbers of people, they had to add:
well, these particular people are not really human, and therefore great violence is required to save humanity from them.
What the age of colonial modernity advanced over the last five centuries is not the idea that all human beings are equal, but rather the institutionalization of the idea that certain human beings are not human. What this meant is not just that universal human rights will not apply to people who are constituted as non-human human beings; but rather, that universal human rights can be saved and advanced only if these non-human human beings are subdued and eradicated from the face of the earth. Understood from within this context, we can see that the Western liberal framework of universal human rights was never designed to protect human beings across the world. It was simply a way in which colonizers humanized themselves, made themselves feel human, while conducting acts of violence that turned them into monsters.
This and nothing more is what the liberal discourse of universal human rights continues to stand for today. During the last 1.5 years especially, we have seen how this liberal fantasy works, denying that what is happening in Gaza is a genocide, that Palestinians are themselves to blame for their own destruction, that the fault lies in the inhumanity and savagery of Palestinians who are “human animals,” that Israel is defending Western civilization against the barbarity of the East, and so on.
Against this violent fantasy, Palestinians have been banging on the walls of the tank for decades, revealing the true face of colonial modernity in their very messaging and in the world’s reaction to their banging on the wall. From institutions within states (media, education, governments, etc.), to nation-states, to international institutions such as the United Nations, we find institutions that are either directly or indirectly participating in the genocide, and institutions that are choosing to not do what is required to stop the genocide of the Palestinian people.
Even if this genocidal operation stops today, nothing is being done to stop the incremental genocide that is guaranteed to follow any so-called ceasefire. The question I think we should all be asking now is not, why does the world continue to refuse to answer the banging on the walls of the tank. Rather, we should be asking: what kind of world do we live in that hears such a desperate bang, an enduring SOS, and in response, does not just simply shrug its shoulders and moves on, but actually begins to flock towards the tank, as so many vultures, trying to profit from the suffering and death of those inside the tank. What kind of world is that?!
Human sacrifice for profit
In a newly released report, “From Economy of Occupation to Economy of Genocide,” Francesca Albanese, the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, shows that the genocide continues “because it is lucrative for many.” The arms industry, the tech sector, construction companies, academic and financial institutions, among others are raking in the profits from the destruction of Palestinians as a people.
It is critical to underscore that none of this is new. Scholars have developed a concept of colonial racial capitalism to speak to the ways in which wealth is generated through the violences of colonialism and settler colonialism. The West today is not rich because they “worked hard,” followed a “Judeo-Christian value system that is superior to others,” “discovered science and technology,” or whatever other feeble arguments you’ve heard about the West’s “prosperity.” The West today is rich because it systematically and efficiently killed, maimed, lied, cheated, and robbed the majority of the world blind over the last 500 years or so of the age of colonial modernity. Nothing has been or is a red line when it comes to generating wealth and capital, including genocide.
The many people who financially benefit from the genocide of Palestinians will justify their actions as a “defense of the beleaguered Jewish people,” “siding with civilization against barbarism,” “it’s tragic, but necessary and if I don’t benefit from this, then someone else will,” “this is the natural way of the world,” and so on. It is not relevant whether they believe what they say, what is important for those of us who are the political adversaries of genocidaires, colonizers, and imperialists, is that their vision of the world is currently the dominant vision, and upon which the material conditions of life are being experienced. What they say is the basic structure of our world – a world in which the annihilation of human beings is seen as not only necessary, but righteous. In other words, the annihilation of an entire society comes to be seen as something that is necessary and righteous because it supposedly staves off the destruction of humanity itself; no different from a sacrifice made to the gods in order to supposedly protect the community from destruction.
This analysis does not stem from an impassioned positionality but rather a sober look at the age of colonial modernity. And a sober positionality reveals that human sacrifice, far from being an ancient, backward, uncivilized relic of the savage past, indeed lies at the core of the project of colonial modernity. Not only that, it is much more brutal, intense, greater in scope, and vicious than any form of human sacrifice practiced in earlier societies. It is not satisfied with sacrificing individuals, but entire peoples; it is not interested in blood-letting, but torrential blood-shedding.
The effort to completely annihilate entire societies and peoples has been a staple of colonial modernity: it has occurred across virtually all the colonies and settler colonies, which did span the entire globe. Human beings were continuously sacrificed in this era in the name of “progress,” “civilization,” and “enlightenment,” but really they were and are still being sacrificed for the sake of wealth and power. Today, Palestinians are the people being targeted in a calculated and efficient manner as human sacrifice for the same reasons: wealth and power.
We should aspire to being better, to follow great ideals, to develop our moral thinking and ethical practices, yes, but we will never become better if we keep hiding from ourselves the reality of our institutions. This is not a time to “save the international liberal order” that never in fact existed; this is not a time to defend “the liberal framework of universal human rights” that has never been practiced; this is a time to look straight into the mirror and admit: this world is an ugly manifestation of a structure that is rotten to the core.
Everything else we tell ourselves about “who we really are,” “the age of enlightenment,” “adherence to superior modern moral values,” “international law and the respect for universal human rights,” all of this and more is a big lie we keep telling ourselves about our institutions. We most assuredly live in a world of “might makes right.” If that makes you uncomfortable, good, now do something about the reality of our collective plight.
Withdrawal of participation
In a powerful dispatch from 2009, Eid, recounts the unbearably horrific stories of Palestinians in Gaza, and asks the reader to give these Palestinians answers to what are unanswerable questions. What do you say to Muhammad Samouni, a ten year old boy who was “found lying next to the bodies of his mother and siblings, five days after they were killed.” Muhammad told everyone since then that “his brother woke suddenly after being asleep for a long time,”
told him that he was hungry, asked for a tomato to eat and then died.
There is of course nothing that people from around the world can say to Muhammad and the hundreds of thousands who have lived through the same hell, and continue to do so today – words of apology and condolence are not enough. But Eid also doesn’t leave the reader without guidance. His dispatches clearly show that there is only one way to answer the call from Palestine: become a participant in the liberation of Palestine from Zionism. This wretched ideology, born of and for colonial modernity, can only lead to unfathomable death and destruction, and no peace, justice, decolonization, anti-racism, equality, freedom, or anything that is decent and good in this world will be possible with Zionism.
When I read this dispatch, I kept thinking about where Muhammad is today. If he is still alive, he would be 26, facing a brutal genocidal machine that wants to “finish the job,” which means the final and total destruction of what has already been destroyed. Nothing else better describes the core of the Zionist project than this sort of layered unfathomable violence upon unfathomable violence. Like the project of colonial modernity to which it belongs and which it advances and reproduces, Zionism can only continue to wreak havoc and destruction on the dehumanized Palestinians.
The world system has made it choice: Palestinians are going to be sacrificed at the altar of colonial modernity. When are the people of the world going to rise up and revolutionize this world order and commence a movement out of this wretched age? People also have a choice: they either move along with the steamroller until it rolls over them or their descendants (if you think the Palestinians are the first or the last, you are a fool), or they say enough and fight back with the most important weapon they have: withdrawal of participation.
Eid, a BDS activist, emphasizes continuously throughout all of his dispatches, that only people power can support Palestinians. Withdrawal of participation can feel like a daunting and impossible task. Certainly, to accomplish mass withdrawal of participation from all the institutions of colonial modernity today is probably not plausible. But people power can focus their withdrawal of participation on Israel. This is not just plausible, it is achievable. And by doing that, people power is not only supporting Palestinians but indeed everyone. Today, Israel, as a settler colonial project and imperial outpost, is central to US imperialism and the age of colonial modernity. If Palestine is decolonized, this will deal a major blow to US imperialism, and can lead to massive transformations not just in Palestine, but to the world order itself, and consequently within state and societies across the world. A decolonized Palestine, in short, can help usher the end of the age of colonial modernity. It is not an exaggeration to say that our collective aspirations for freedom and liberation for all, rests on a decolonized Palestine.
Muhannad Ayyash was born and raised in Silwan, Al-Quds, before immigrating to Canada where he is Professor of Sociology at Mount Royal University. He is also a policy analyst at Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network. He is the author of Lordship and Liberation in Palestine-Israel and A Hermeneutics of Violence, has co-edited two books, and is the author of multiple journal articles, book chapters, and opinion pieces.