What does it mean to win?
Definitions of victory, revolution and gains should and do transform with the evolution of our material conditions
I published my first OpEd in Al Jazeera last year entitled, “German memory culture, anti-Semitic Zionists and Palestinian liberation.” I look back with tenderness and gratitude for who I was when I wrote it, brimming with palpable indignation at the hypocrisy of governments and media, seething with fresh incredulity at the horrors and injustice. It was a few months into the genocide in Gaza, which had already resulted in an intensifyingly static death toll as more and more journalists, healthcare workers and government officials were targeted and assassinated.
I was organizing with a socialist group, deep in baby-Marxist revelations around the headline necessity and role of “revolutionary organizations” in relationship with movement praxis (read: distributing flyers). The state hurled increasingly absurd repressive measures at the movement, designed to cripple action, paralyze momentum and silence dissent. Meanwhile, while our collective expectation for a potential outcome was fixed at a ceasefire, our ambition solidified. Driven by the curdled, righteous adrenaline in our veins, grimacing with resolve through the throb of bruised limbs from police stampedes, we believed that over the very next horizon would be liberation.
I am struck by how dramatically my politics, the channels for my rage and my organizing approach have evolved in response to the urgency, repression and escalations of the 14 or so months since then. How perfectly close and impossibly far that moment is to where we are now, a blazing temporal capsule of now and then, separated by planets of bombs and seas of blood. But a movement moves. If we are paying attention and grounding in humility, we move with it.
I look at the words and that time and think about the conception of “victory” I held. World revolution! Uprising, overthrow by the resistance, dismantlement of empire. Fantastical. Hopeful (in the necessary way?), but dated. It isn’t 1917 anymore. As the abject failures of the beleaguered German memory culture teach us (“Never again!” as “again” spits volcanoes in front of their eyes), we must look to the past; not in mere commemoration, but to draw forth critical, macro applications that inform our action. Unrecognizable as the immediate trajectory of political developments may be in comparison to historical parallels without the benefit of hindsight—it is the determinant for the very future of our planet that we recognize them nonetheless.
The last line of my article was, “We will repeat it again and again until the rhythm of our words becomes the heartbeat of a society that attempts to snuff out our resistance but will ultimately fail at doing so: Never again means never again for anybody.” I stand by the responsibility of the pulse of ‘never again for anyone,’ not in spite of but very much in light of its co-opting and watering down by the various forces of fascism, capitalism, centrism and neoliberalism. In its original form, it was an International Jewish Antizionist Network (IJAN) campaign slogan for antizionist Auschwitz survivor Hajo Meyer’s speaking tour around Europe, 15+ years ago. That is a tradition—that of Hajo, IJAN, antizionist Jewish organizing, and joint struggle—in which I stand proudly and to which I aspire daily.
But “never again” is a duty. And in committing ourselves to it, we call into question the responsibility of a second, resounding, reverberating heartbeat: what does it mean to win? And how can we see our progress as winning when the cost is so astronomical, measured in lakes of the blood of our siblings, mountains of colonial terror and desert expanses of exterminatory ambition of the enemy? What is victory if not the absolute cessation of hostilities, the opportunity for our siblings to finally rest to the sounds of birds rather than airstrikes? Do we win before we see the eruption of a global mass strike or the undeniable fire of revolution?
I believe the answer lies in again looking to history: not just in the interest of precaution and warning, but rather also for deep, embodied, imaginative empowerment. New variations of ‘never again’ render our previous answer to it null and void, perhaps manifestly so. But we have arrived in the history of today with the inevitability of a different kind of answer, our own answer. The smaller, less immediately self-evident triumphs which will, in months, years or decades, comprise our roadmap of hope as to how the settler colonial entity collapsed, how the ideology of Zionism was dismantled, and how the people rose to material gain through successful divestment, visible solidarity, bonds forged over geographies, generations, classes, odds.
The masses are angry. Our power is swelling. Our ability to counter propaganda and demand truth is sharpening. Our movement is rising ever more decisively and with ever crystallizing clarity around our demands and the path to achieving them. Our consciousness and strength as a class, as the movement, is bolstered with every shout, every chant, every rejection of othering and every insistence on challenging systemic violence with the people’s justice.
And so we will win because we are winning, even when and if we do not yet see it. Because we have been awoken to it and will not sleep again. Because as our fury boils ever hotter, the promise of liberation glows ever brighter.