Beirut’s corniche is a terrific place to contemplate the immovable and the ephemeral. The seaside walkway is one of the city’s few remaining public spaces and the only place where servitude doesn’t divide rich and poor. Tourists mingle among locals, many of them Syrian and Palestinian, and on lucky days entertainment will include oddball breakdancers, daredevil divers, and somebody playing an oud plugged into an amplifier. On a nice Sunday, which in the Eastern Mediterranean is usually a weekly occurrence, crowds are so thick (with pedestrians strolling in bike lanes and bikes weaving through pedestrians) that walking briskly is impossible.

On the straightaway in front of American University of Beirut’s sea gate, the visitor is treated to a remarkably varied topography. The magisterial Mount Sannine is visible behind downtown, covered with snow in winter and in the humid months a tawny mound obscured by a haze of pollutants. At dusk, in the opposite direction, the sky casts a tangerine pall across the pulsing city, its cream and concrete apartment blocks climbing the hills behind Beirut’s urban core.

Because of the city’s national diversity, or perhaps because Lebanon is a relatively new state, it’s easy to sense the closeness of other places. Facing the sea, Syria is to the right and Palestine to the left, roughly equidistant. Yet the southern view proffers a complex vista. It’s easy to wish away Israel and celebrate a pre-colonial geography, but its presence is unavoidable. The heavy security in Lebanon’s south illustrates that whatever exists beyond the barbed wire is not a normal neighbor. Palestine is in there somewhere, but finding it requires imagination.

*****

Placelessness and omnipresence define Palestine beyond its northern frontier. Whenever activists or intellectuals gather to discuss racism, ecology, gender, inequality, revolution, police brutality, or foreign policy, Palestine is a subtext, if not an explicit topic. Even though not all elements of Palestinian nationalism are progressive—some are reactionary or collaborationist—Palestine is a critical, perhaps indispensable, aspect of today’s global left.

The relationship between Palestine and global leftism hasn’t always been smooth; at times it featured tension or conflict, especially given Zionism’s mythological origin as a socialist project. But these days visions of a utopian Israel are reserved for dissimulating professors and lazy propagandists. It is difficult anymore to proclaim both socialist and Zionist affinities. Plenty of luminaries have abandoned Zionism or moved rightward, including Alan Dershowitz, an arch liberal who couldn’t maintain adequate devotion to Israel without justifying torture or supporting Donald Trump, and his former student Natalie Portman, now inching in the opposite direction. The Palestine solidarity community can be measured by all kinds of criteria, but one thing is clear: it has been effective in compelling people with political brands to own their deepest affinities.

Whereas forty or even fifteen years ago Palestine was tangential to these conversations, now it is common. And it needn’t be named to assert a presence. Palestine’s footprint expands as its territory shrinks. The expansion transcends symbolism. Material politics govern the idea of Palestine in revolutionary spaces.

Let’s consider the distinction between symbolic landscapes and the actual spaces we inhabit. All humans are in thrall to imaginative geographies, places that assume mythical proportions in political and historical discourses; they are fundamental to community and storytelling (and thus to human consciousness). The phenomenon is powerful vis-à-vis Palestine, a nation possessed of both ancient and modern intrigue. One needn’t walk the seaside in Beirut to feel its presence. Palestine is nonexistent according to Zionist cartographies, but in the world mapped by compassion it’s always nearby.

It changes in relation to human evolution. Hence the inscrutable essence of nations: they have a dialectical relationship with observers and inhabitants. We condition and constitute one another in a dynamic interplay that can’t be quantified by the logic of citizenship. This interplay is evident, albeit with different iterations, in any place we analyze.

Let’s take Beirut as an example. A few decades ago, Beirut was a city of revolutionary fervor. Numerous radical organizations, spanning Oakland to Ireland to Japan, converged on the city. Many locals disliked these organizations, but they enacted a culture that affected the city’s residents. That culture (along with hedonism and Parisian glamor) still influences the image of Beirut as a cosmopolitan oasis in an otherwise primitive region.

By now, though, the place has been banked into a patchwork of privatized cantons, its disparities of class glossed over by expat journalists for more sensational stories about high society and sectarianism. All threats to Beirut’s order (except the one from its south) have been exiled or exist only in dissertations. Now its multinational population strolls the corniche in the shadows of empty multimillion-dollar condos and in shallow pools of organic waste. The sea itself is a limited commodity, accessible only through turnstiles and valet parking.

Every city has a similar story, even if trajectories differ. The point is that dynamism influences not only sense of place, but feelings of rootedness and belonging. When we discuss Palestine, then, it’s rarely as a unified polity or a stable geography, though the speaker may believe either to be the case. We also do it in a spirit of resistance that precedes Israel and exceeds Palestine, calling upon a worldwide community to share the exhausting depth of persecution. Palestine is universal. Its colors fly on six continents. Flattening that territory into charts and graphs only assists Zionism’s mechanical impulses.

Palestine survives in the wild zaatar dotting the West Bank, in the narrow alleyways of ancient cities, in the burning moonscape of the Jordan Valley, in the catacombs beneath its humid coast. The stone foundations of ancient homes dotting the Galilean countryside provide evidence of destruction, but are just as certainly relics of survival. Ownership can change, but memory and desire aren’t legal prescriptions.

I don’t want to confuse anybody. Palestine is real. But it needs to be kept alive as a commitment that transcends geopolitical machinations, so that it can become something more than a discontiguous quasi-state with nominal borders and an economy dependent on foreign extraction. Palestine embodies a vision of equitable nationhood; it isn’t merely a conceit of international law. Conjoining Palestine to struggling communities around the world is a good way to illuminate this vision.

We know Palestine is real because Israeli brutality isn’t make-believe. According to most estimates, the nascent state destroyed 530 Palestinian villages, conducting a series of massacres intended to induce flight from surrounding areas. Since 1967, when Israel assumed control of the West Bank, it has constructed 301 Jewish-only settlements, which require tremendous financial and military support and cause the Indigenous population untold misery. Various studies show that Palestinian refugees from the period of 1947-49 suffered between $180-$275 billion in economic losses, adjusted to today’s dollars; one study puts the number at $294 billion.

Israel gobbles land, having appropriated 4,244,776 acres in 1948 and 730,214 dunums in 1967, and inhales water, apportioning around 600 percent more to settlers than natives and sometimes dumping sewage into nearby Palestinian communities. On February 7, 2017, the Knesset passed a bill roughly translated as the Regularization Law, allowing Jewish settlers to seize titled property, thus legalizing nearly 3,500 settlement units built on privately owned Palestinian land. Israel directly controls 60 percent of the West Bank. Since 1967, it has destroyed around 80,000 olive trees, some of them centuries old.

Israel likes to contrast itself from neighbors by citing its superior concern for the well-being of children, but in the past five years it has killed 551 kids in a single summer, jailed a 16-year-old activist, shot two teenage soccer players in their feet, arrested kindergartners, and barred pediatric cancer patients from public pools. And contrary to the popular narrative that Palestinians teach their children to hate, a trope awash in racism, numerous studies show that the Israeli education system trains pupils to detest Arabs (which will help them later in life when they enter compulsory military service). The effort appears to be working. A 2016 Pew Research poll showed that 48 percent of Israeli Jews support ethnic cleansing.

In 2017, Israel arrested 483 children, approved 3,736 new settlement units, demolished 351 homes, and enacted 7 new discriminatory laws (for a total of 65). It razed an entire village, Al-Araqib, for the 113th time. It also issued a demolition order for the village of Khan al-Ahmar. Another village, Umm al-Hiran, is going under the bulldozer to make way for a new Jewish town, the textbook definition of ethnic cleansing. During the #GreatReturnMarch in April and May of 2018, a series of demonstrations at Gaza’s border fences, Israeli soldiers opened fire on the crowds, murdering dozens of unarmed marchers, including those engaged in prayer or running away from gunfire. On May 14, Israel massacred 62 people and injured thousands more. Since April, 2018, Israel has murdered over 300 Palestinians and injured at least 19,000, many having suffered permanent debilitation.

Native nations also suffer quantifiable hardship. The Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota is one of the poorest regions in the Western Hemisphere, with a male life expectancy of 47 and a teenage suicide rate 150 percent higher than the US average. According to some figures, the high school dropout rate hovers around 70 percent. In nearby Standing Rock, the site of a multinational effort to protect water resources from oil company pollution, the poverty rate is 43.2, a number comparable to many Native reservations (though others are more prosperous). Overall, Natives (including Alaska but excluding Hawaii) have a poverty rate of 29.1 percent, as compared to 11 percent for whites.

Over 90,000 Native families are homeless or underhoused; forty percent of reservation housing is considered substandard. Health conditions in Native communities correspondingly suffer. Natives experience higher rates of heart disease, diabetes, tuberculosis, and cancer than the general US population. They are 82 percent more likely to commit suicide. Infant deaths are 60 percent higher than the national average.

These problems don’t result from primitivism or pathology, but from the iniquities of ongoing settler colonization, which inform the inordinate violence Natives suffer at the hands of state actors. Police kill Natives at a higher clip than any other demographic. In 2016, police killed 22 Natives (including Alaska Natives); as of this writing, statistics for 2017 hadn’t been compiled, but the number increased from 2015 to 2016 and appears likely to continue that trajectory. In Wisconsin, police fatally shot a 14-year-old boy, Jason Pero; the US Department of Justice declined to press charges against the shooter. (Police brutality in Canada similarly affects First Nations.)

In cases like Pero’s, police and their apologists claim self-defense, usually casting aspersions on the victim (he was insane, violent, resistant, unwieldy, threatening, and so forth). But looking at police killings from the perspective of individual behavior (as depicted by the state) is a mistake. We should instead interrogate the probity of a system in which armed entities have license to murder children. Who underwrites the logic of police force? To which economic class is the legal system devoted? We need to get at these questions to better examine distorted transactions between state and subject. It’s important to unpack the narratives that foster notions of rational or commonsensical violence. We shouldn’t accept it as given that the state can forever invoke a right to preserve its own authority.

The consequences of an uncritical populace are deadly and the deadliness isn’t equally apportioned. It overwhelmingly affects those who have long experienced the problem. Natives in Canada, for example, suffer an epidemic of missing and murdered women, memorialized in the hashtag #MMIW (sometimes #MMIWG—to include “girls”). More than a thousand Indigenous women have gone missing since the mid-1990s. Many of their bodies were subsequently discovered; the remainder are presumed dead. The Native Women’s Association of Canada [NWAC] reports that Aboriginal women are 3.5 times more likely to experience violence (state and domestic) than their non-Aboriginal peers and that only half of murder cases involving Aboriginal women have been solved, as compared to 84 percent for the general population.

NWAC attributes these disparities to the negative impacts of ongoing colonization, including decades of white adoption, often forced, which depleted Native family structures, and the continued trauma of residential schools, in which Native children were kidnapped and forced into assimilationist institutions where they suffered ritual abuse. Deeming these policies “cultural genocide,” NWAC explains, “The residential school system and the 60s Scoop disrupted the roles, values and traditions of the Aboriginal family. Many of the lasting effects of these government-mandated actions can still be observed through current trends and issues facing Aboriginal people today.”

Hawaii is often omitted from these conversations, but there too the pain of colonization is visible. Scholar-activist Noenoe Silva emphasizes the need for resurgence: “What I mean by resurgence is our creation of a world in which we speak, write, and compose in our native language; take care of our ‘āina (land) and waters; reinvoke and appreciate our native deities; and live (at least mentally) free from the destructive settler colonialism in which we now find ourselves.” A particular affliction is the privatization of once-communal land (a long and convoluted process), which often ends up in the hands of wealthy tourists or investors. Oprah Winfrey, for instance, owns a 168-acre ranch on the island of Maui, which required construction of an access street unavailable to locals, who have endured decades of inadequate road maintenance and other services.

The justification for Winfrey is that she legally bought the estate. Rich people buy property. What’s the big deal? To begin with, being able to do something doesn’t automatically justify the action. The US legal system, especially in Hawaii, is inseparable from the histories in which it was produced and thus maintains an ethos of conquest. With its emphasis on rights of possession, that system heavily favors propertied classes. Colonial societies have always erected juridical schemes beneficial to the project of statecraft. Winfrey may not have legally done anything wrong, but she embodies the wrongs committed against the Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiians) by making use of a system built to cause them harm. Her agency is less important than the choices afforded to wealthy consumers.

Mark Zuckerberg, another celebrity settler with a 700-acre estate on Kauai, was drawn to the area because he and his wife “fell in love with the community and the cloudy green mountains” and decided to “plant roots and join the community ourselves.” Two days later, he sued hundreds of neighbors in an attempt to clarify his absolute land rights. Beyond the aggressive nature of Zuckerberg’s pursuit, his lawsuit illuminates the juridical impediments to Hawaiian liberation. Whereas Zuckerberg utilizes the esoteric statutes of foreign rule to ensure his dominion, the Kanaka Maoli maintain kinship traditions that have little impact in the colonizer’s judicial consciousness.

As Kapua Sproat, a law professor at the University of Hawaii, puts it, “For us, as Native Hawaiians, the land is an ancestor. It’s a grandparent. You just don’t sell your grandmother.” After heavy criticism, Zuckerberg dropped his suit, but no amount of bad publicity will override the considerable advantages at his disposal. Any kind of resistance that relies on the settler’s magnanimity is doomed to fail. Sproat calls Zuckerberg’s effort “neocolonialism,” but it can just as easily be described as the classical variety.

While individual settlers have caused significant trouble in Hawaii, the most egregious offender is the US military, symbiotic with foreign settlement. Naval bases dot the Pacific like a fungal rash, in many cases occupying the best real estate (and thus preventing locals from enjoying it). These occupations include sites that Indigenous people consider sacred. Okinawa, having already survived brutal Japanese rule, is home to a large US naval presence, which residents have vigorously protested. A military base on tiny Guam pushes development to the nation’s margins.

Oahu, Hawaii’s most populous island, hosts the United States Pacific Command [USPACOM]. 22.2 percent of the island is considered property of the US military, not including the sprawl required to sustain its presence. The US military controls 20.6 percent of land across the state. On the “big island” of Hawaii, Kanaka Maoli have for years fought the construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope, a high-tech marvel that would fundamentally change the landscape. The project is slated for Mauna Kea, a towering volcano long used for worship by the Kanaka Maoli. In April, 2018, the Hawaii Senate temporarily banned construction of the telescope, but the fight will move to the courts. Again, the question of ownership becomes contingent on law rather than ancient rites of stewardship.

Military bases don’t merely devour copious amounts of land; they also produce tremendous pollution. Pu’uloa, currently known as Pearl Harbor, is a hazardous waste site depleted of biodiversity. Before colonization, the lagoon (which the US dredged in order to create a deep-water harbor) teemed with marine life and served as a critical source of food. Now it suffers erosion, neglect, and toxification. A recurrent oil leak has infested twenty acres of water. Around 700 contaminated sites exist throughout the base. In 2007, 360,000 gallons of diesel spilled into the lagoon. This sort of problem also afflicts Puerto Rico, another US possession occupied by force. Decades of practice bombing runs poisoned the island of Vieques and its surroundings. Devastation is the inevitable cost of empire.

The devastation is impossible without a population conditioned to accept it as necessary or even altruistic. Despite the abundance of studies that show it to be a serious problem, one of the hardest tasks in the United States is convincing white people that racism still exists—or, when they acknowledge its existence, that they are its main beneficiary. Black people continue to face the brunt of US racial acrimony. In order to fully understand the problem, we need to think past the traditional Black/white binary. Non-Black groups also suffer varying degrees of white supremacy, just as they variously benefit from and practice anti-Black racism. There’s no algorithm for sorting these phenomena into an accessible rubric. Racism is vitalized through the exercise of power, which can’t be mapped onto graphs or spreadsheets. Nor can we limit ourselves to the conventions of acceptable opinion. Analysis and self-criticism ought to be integrated. It’s the best way to introduce experience into a prescriptive methodology.

Class is a productive, though perhaps incomprehensive, way to measure the afterlife of chattel slavery and the depredations of racial capitalism. Over a quarter of African American households have zero or negative net worth, and median white wealth is twelve times higher than median Black wealth. White wealth accrues through property ownership and inheritance, which, contrary to tired mythologies about merit accounting for success in the United States, illustrates that systemic advantages maintain economic iniquity. Those advantages are disbursed across racial lines. According to a 2016 report by the Institute for Policy Studies and the Corporation for Economic Development, it would take the average Black household 228 years to accumulate the level of wealth enjoyed by the average white household today. For Latinxs, it would take 84 years.

The ravages of generational poverty were manifest during the US housing crisis of 2007-10 (a set of dates that could be extended). During this period, lenders targeted Black homebuyers with subprime mortgages they knew were likely to fail. An ACLU study found that Black families “had been subjected to ‘redlining’—denying or charging more for necessary services—loans to people in historically black neighborhoods, which made the residents of those neighborhoods particularly susceptible to predation by fly-by-night mortgage outfits pushing sub-prime loans so they could turn them around on the then-booming secondary market.”

In the immediate years after 2007, Black people lost approximately 240,000 homes. Employees at Wells Fargo, which targeted Black applicants for subprime lending, referred to the garbage they were selling as “ghetto loans.” In 2010, after the crisis had ostensibly abated, and the banks had been lavished with public funds by the Barack Obama administration, median wealth for white families stood at $124,000, nearly eight times higher than the $16,000 median wealth of Black families.

The predatory lending, which both exploited and exacerbated racial disparities, is a terrific example of how capitalism survives by reproducing inequality. State violence provides the necessary coercion for a docile or intimidated citizenry. Police departments illustrate the role of blunt force in maintaining ruling class interests. Many of those departments possess significant armaments, often military grade, and enjoy considerable influence locally and nationally. Politicians are loath to upset police unions, and corporate media clamber to reify the courage of those who serve. American officers kill civilians in far greater numbers than in any other Western country. They often do so without recrimination.

Along with Natives, Black people are the most likely among US inhabitants to experience police abuse. (Latinxs are also affected in high numbers.) In 2016, police shot and killed at least 233 African Americans; some, like Philando Castile, were gunned down at close range despite presenting no threat. Black people are 150 percent more likely to be murdered by police than whites. According to the Mapping Police Violence database, police killed 282 Black people in 2017, a significant increase from the prior year. The number represents 25 percent of police killings; African Americans constitute 13 percent of the total US population.

Around 30 percent of Black victims of fatal police encounters are unarmed. According to the database, “Levels of crime in US cities do not make it any more or less likely for police to kill people.” This finding suggests that state brutality is neither random nor defensive, but a feature of policing culture in the United States. 99 percent of police killings end up without a conviction; over 90 percent result in no charges. This problem doesn’t originate with the so-called alt-right and its misshapen avatar, Donald Trump. Obama’s justice department repeatedly proved timid, refusing to investigate some of the most notorious offenders for civil rights violations.

The accomplice to police brutality is the prison system, also known (with slight variations of meaning) as the carceral state. In recent decades, an entire field, activist and interdisciplinary, has emerged around issues of carcerality (states of incarceration). One of its main goals is the abolishment of prison. While most Americans consider that goal either unlikely or undesirable, or both at the same time, a wealth of scholarship illustrates that transforming the current prison system, a boondoggle of racist exploitation, is perfectly realistic. In fact, commonsensical views of prison as a deterrent to crime and a guarantor of public safety arise from the same discourses rationalizing the carceral state. Carcerality is a product of its own mythmaking.

It creates devastating consequences for Black people and other classes of the dispossessed. The Sentencing Project reports that “African Americans are incarcerated in state prisons across the country at more than five times the rate of whites, and at least ten times the rate in five states.” Other findings show that “[i]n twelve states, more than half of the prison population is black: Alabama, Delaware, Georgia, Illinois, Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, Mississippi, New Jersey, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia. Maryland, whose prison population is 72% African American, tops the nation.” Some of the numbers are stunning. For example, “In eleven states, at least 1 in 20 adult black males is in prison.” In Oklahoma, the ratio is 1 in 15.

Numerous scholars—Michelle Alexander, Angela Davis, Beth Richie, Eric Stanley and Nat Smith—have shown that carcerality is deliberate and, from the perspective of the ruling class, necessary. It warehouses human surplus and reaps profit for various sectors, transforming negative economic indicators into statistical value. By leveraging iniquity around race, gender, and class into an industry that assuages majoritarian anxiety while bolstering socio-economic disparities, politicians, judges, cops, and businesspeople can ensure a consistent supply of incarcerated human capital. Notions of criminality pretend to be neutral, but inform an enterprise designed to subjugate certain segments of society, themselves not neutrally targeted.

Conventional wisdom about these discrepancies of income and incarceration veers into biological determinism. If we refuse to attribute inequality to structural conditions, then we’re left seeking answers in attenuated notions of culture. Vis-à-vis Black people, the approach produces outpourings of anguish about various pathologies, akin to the elaborate invention of an atavistic barbarism among Muslims and other inhabitants of the Global South. Bromides about Black stupidity and laziness persist through the pseudoscientific discourse of race-baiters like Charles Murray and the narrative devices of politicians seeking to decimate social programs.

The entire composition of the United States can be retrofitted to the preponderance of racism. Everything we take for granted as normal or perceive as natural owes at least some of its architecture to white supremacy: the suburbs, educational funding, automobile culture, electoral politics, judicial practices, foreign policy, school curricula, land use, settlement patterns, town ordinances, the advertising industry, congressional districting. Racism affects every aspect of American life.

Even universities, those beautified institutions supposedly preserving and advancing the superior ideals of the American project, are deeply implicated in racism. Some of the most hallowed names in higher education might not even exist were it not for the slave trade. Georgetown University sold 272 slaves in 1836 to underwrite its budget. The University of Virginia, founded by slaveowner Thomas Jefferson, regularly unearths ugly histories: “In 2012, at the University of Virginia, which had rented enslaved laborers both to construct the first buildings and to make their bricks, archeologists found—or, more precisely, refound—what is most likely a slave cemetery on campus, beneath what had been a plant nursery and two feet of topsoil.”

A long list of elite campuses—Harvard, Yale, Williams, Princeton, Brown, Rutgers, Columbia, William & Mary, the University of North Carolina—have discovered their provenance as beneficiaries of unpaid labor. (Many of those places continue to exploit workers.) Georgetown wasn’t the only university to trade in slavery. In 1766, Samuel Finley, president of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton), held an estate sale among which the items included “[t]wo negro women, a negro man, and three Negro children.” Brown University’s 2006 report, Slavery and Justice, uncovered deep ties between the campus and the slave trade in New England. The report found both institutional and individual culpability: “While no precise accounting is possible, the steering committee was able to identify approximately thirty members of the Brown Corporation who owned or captained slave ships, many of whom were involved in the trade during their years of service to the University.”

Slavery isn’t the only injustice attached to the origin of US academe. Universities also profited from settler colonization and in many cases owe their existence to the displacement and disinheritance of Indigenous peoples. Through conquest and expropriation, the United States accumulated the raw materials to build campuses and develop the research programs necessary for technocratic growth. Universities were integral to westward expansion and helped codify exceptionalism in the national imagination.

So-called land grant institutions, created through the passage of the Morrill Acts of 1862 and 1890, jettisoned Native property into an apparently egalitarian project of public education. The category of “public,” however, excluded Natives (along with various non-white groups, including Jews, and most women); nor were Natives privy to the granting of material or intellectual resources. On the contrary, they provided both with little in return. A platitude of capitalism is that “nothing’s free.” In the case of the great US project of subsidized education (now in its death throes), Natives paid for the largesse with their ancestral lands.

It’s easy to dismiss the phenomena I outline as problems of the past, but their aftereffects are still visible. Natives are underrepresented on campus, as both students and instructors, and in American political life more broadly. Black people continue to face structural barriers to economic mobility. Palestinians are unwelcome at some institutions (Fordham, the University of Illinois, Loyola University-Chicago, The University of California-Irvine). Universities like to bill themselves as the pulse of Americana, but it’s becoming difficult for them to signify the rosy outlook of prior generations. They are lately more adept than the arms industry at illuminating the confluence of state and corporate power.

The United States is a leading manufacturer of pessimism. The American dream no longer portends opportunity; it is a boom or bust arena, with a clear majority falling into the second category. Washington understands the value of surplus but doesn’t know how to manage excess. Corporations enjoy free trade while laws and borders contain human movement to bounded passages. The election of Donald Trump as president in 2016 generated widespread anxiety about massive deportations, but there was plenty of reason to fret under his predecessor.

In 2012, according to Politico, Immigration and Customs Enforcement [ICE] “removed an average of roughly 34,000 people per month.” In Obama’s final year, “ICE removed 240,255 people from the country, a rate of more than 20,000 people per month.” Under Obama, ICE became a terrifying force, separating families and detaining people in filthy, overcrowded facilities. Unburdened by enforceable standards, ICE can perform brutality without consequence. Inmates receive substandard medical care, if any at all. Guards assault detainees and interrupt Muslims attempting to pray. Solitary confinement, seemingly at random, is standard practice. From 2010-12, eight people died in ICE custody, something the agency tried to suppress. ICE would become an even more terrifying force under Trump.

The racialized abuses of US capitalism are practically endless. We haven’t even mentioned extraction of foreign resources, economic sanctions, aerial bombardment (often through drones), ground invasions, coups d’état, and environmental destruction, all conducted with bipartisan cheering. Each week, we read a new (and convincing) prediction that the United States has reached a breaking point, that it can’t continue its current trajectory of deepening inequality and racial acrimony without severe, potentially catastrophic, consequences.

I disagree with these forecasts. It’s impossible to know the formula that would predict a breakdown of the social order, but a system preserved through assiduous militarism can absorb tremendous misery. The goal isn’t to precipitate disaster, but to eliminate the disastrous outcomes currently in progress. We’re past the point of catastrophe. The impetus now is to create a world that isn’t catastrophic.

*****

If it sounds grandiose to say that Palestine is central to the development of a better world, then I humbly submit that it’s not because I’m fanciful, but because Palestine is omnipotent (and practically omnipresent) as a symbol of injustice. From the nonaligned movement in Bandung, Indonesia, to the Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas, the nation is a source of affinity to those fighting oppression. According to the unorthodox metric of desire rather than the cartographic precision of statecraft, Palestine is one of the largest places on earth.

I again emphasize that it’s crucial to guard against transforming Palestine into a mere emblem, something of which I’m apt to be guilty. People have a tendency to romanticize the nation as an unrealized Eden, which happens in part because of its longstanding status as a site of anti-colonial struggle. The same phenomenon was evident with South Africa and Algeria, whose postcolonial lives proved less than enchanted. Millions of people in Palestine endure difficult circumstances. It suffers corruption and inequality; it deals with racism, colorism, and classism; and it is filled with social hierarchies and institutional disparities.

Palestine isn’t an exception to the typical neocolonial quasi-state. But its future is far from fixed and its transit offers a tangible basis for hope, of both the dialectical and romantic varieties. Nevertheless, we must ask how its transactional properties affect its material realities.

The first step is to identify the qualities of Palestine beyond its immediate geography. How have Black activists taken up anti-Zionist discourses? What kind of meaning does imagery associated with the Palestine solidarity movement create in spaces of Black organizing? In what way is Palestine relevant to Native decolonization? Is Palestine merely a symbol that can be raised on a flag or draped across one’s shoulders to denote a certain politics? Or is its display grounded in a distinct practice? Is it forever consigned to a Third World aesthetic? Does Palestine get lost in the pageantry of oppression?

In Ferguson, Standing Rock, Vieques, and Mauna Kea, activists have donned kuffiyehs and sometimes waved the Palestinian flag, its familiar red, green, and black denoting a seriousness of intent and vision. Few objects more clearly announce a radical commitment, a willingness to eschew bastardized Gandhian principles, a desire for subversion, a conscious shunning of respectability. Few objects more readily generate liberal anxiety and repel any but the most marginal politicians. Attending protest in adornments implying intifada is a terrific way to arouse the sanctimony of pundits and professors. (It has also been known to generate internal division.) People seeking corporate sponsorships or cable news airtime don’t bear Palestinian paraphernalia.

Whenever Black and Native activists insist that Palestinians are not terrorists, but victims of Zionist colonization, it alters the dynamics of public displeasure, which are contentious to begin with. In other words, no matter how angry and abusive white supremacists become when they hear professions of anti-racism, adding Palestine to the equation can turn up the heat a few degrees.

In 2017, Russell Rickford, a historian at Cornell University, capped off a speech at a #BlackLivesMatter rally by chanting “free Palestine!” The ensuing uproar largely ignored his radical approach to Black liberation and bemoaned the fateful pairing of Palestinians and freedom. Rickford experienced the typical outpouring of vitriol, including calls for firing and other forms of retribution, some of it from the same liberal quarters that are normally hesitant to condemn people of color, if only for the sake of appearances. Rickford remained unrepentant and would later make a point of including Palestine in his public commentary.

The Rickford controversy, replicated across the country, doesn’t necessarily show that Palestine is more heated than other issues, just that it’s exceptionally nettlesome based on a distinct tradition of Zionist histrionics in the United States. (All controversial issues are uniquely incendiary.) There is no shortage of animosity toward people who diagnose or challenge structural racism. Plenty of professors, particularly Black women, have experienced the abuse of the Fox News set (along with their more genteel doppelgangers, liberal academics).

Anti-Black racism in the US is primordial and comprehensive, so Zionists won’t manage to outdo it with their usual temper-tantrums. But they do introduce a new dynamic into anti-racist spaces and thus generate a different kind of pressure. By demanding fealty to Israel and then savaging those who refuse to provide it, the pro-Israel crowd induces consent through discipline. They care little about Black politics except to the extent that it articulates or encourages anti-Zionism. This attitude played out with Rickford. Anti-Black racists were unhappy with his performance, but Zionists (not mutually exclusive to anti-Black racists) added to the condemnation because Rickford had dared to implicate Israel in oppression. The scolding therefore increased in timbre and dimension. Perturbed Zionists may not be exceptional, but their ability to pitch a fuss is unmatched.

For many working in the Black radical tradition, Palestine is a critical issue, in no way superfluous to their emphasis on US racial capitalism. Affinities between the United States and Israel run deep—economically, politically, and culturally—so it makes sense to consider Zionism in relation to American racial structures. More than a few Black intellectuals have declared that Zionism is central to the problem of white supremacy. Citing Rickford’s “free Palestine!” chant as beyond the pale while ignoring his other comments, as Zionist critics did, delinked forms of oppression he considered reciprocal and suggested that he had suddenly become irrational. Rickford didn’t tack Palestine to his comments about Black liberation as an afterthought or a provocation. It was an important part of his argument. Many of Israel’s apologists don’t like to consider the possibility because they view the state as inherently good.

Liberal Zionists in particular are invested in a whitewashed visage of Israel and have little patience for comparisons that implicate them in anti-Blackness. Rickford didn’t simply offend their geopolitical sensibilities; he informed them that liberal Zionism reproduces the same racism they claim to abhor.

The same is true of Angela Davis and Marc Lamont Hill, prominent activist-intellectuals simultaneously ravaged by the Israel lobby, leading to Hill’s termination from CNN and the revocation of a civil rights award for Davis (since reinstated). As with Rickford, we see a retrenchment into whiteness as a guarantor of Israel’s stability. Black liberation necessarily contravenes Zionist aspirations. Zionism, then, isn’t merely an affront to Palestinians; it is an impediment to Black liberation, to Native decolonization, and to justice for all subjected peoples around the world. Rendering the oppressed fungible in service of power is the truest expression of this rancid ideology.

Insuperable racism is a problem for liberal Zionists to work out. For more inquisitive minds, a critical question remains: where is Palestine beyond its symbolic potency? From the pretentions of the Ivy League to the chaos of the Eastern Mediterranean, Palestine is in abundance. Yet the international community can’t seem to find it.

*****

We do well to embrace the notion of regeneration in communities working to be free. Regeneration differs from redemption, a concept intertwined with US exceptionalism and in most of its iterations a paean to individual triumph. Regenerative politics, devoted to the collective and continuously in transit, is a staple of Black and Native theorization, a category that by its nature includes what Westerners call activism. It describes the process of strengthening one’s understanding of local conditions by engaging other struggles.

At its best, this politics can reenergize one’s sense of devotion. Fred Moten has spoken of how his work in BDS reanimated his investment in Black politics. Robert Warrior’s former teacher Edward Said figures prominently in Warrior’s theories of Native literary nationalism. Palestinian writers have long invoked Black and Native struggles as a source of strength and counsel, along with numerous individuals and groups involved with borderlands, migrancy, displacement, and exile. Each of us is singularly oppressed, but by sharing the burden we generate nourishment for a uniformly arduous effort at liberation.

One lesson from Palestine’s disaggregation is that revolutionary sentiment cannot accommodate civic responsibility. Decolonization is incompatible with patriotism (even the type affixed to Third World pride). The patriotic citizen, or aspirant to citizenship, is obliged to serve mythologies of statehood, which exclude from the polity subjects whom decolonial activism would seek to enfranchise. It’s important, then, to avoid narratives tying prosperity to the realization of American ideals, a conceit that directs our energy toward state power.

We should likewise be wary of rhetoric proclaiming Israel to be bad for the United States, which suggests that Israel somehow compels or forces its sponsor to reluctantly do bad things, a theory that ignores five centuries of behavior to the contrary. For Natives, rejecting the allure of a benighted America is more straightforward: assimilating into their colonizer’s multicultural fabric would amount to a bloodless genocide.

The idea of a fundamentally good United States given to excess or corrupted by outside forces doesn’t merely elide the documentary record, but reifies structural racism. According to a certain ideal, corruption in the US isn’t only due to Israel or Russia or other nefarious outside forces, but also to Black people, Natives, immigrants, and other assorted troublemakers, who, according to parables of whiteness, threaten the values of a civilized majority. The lament “bad for America” is second-rate jingoism (poorly) concealed by the fidelity of civic virtue. It also reinforces the delusion that “America” describes anything beyond the ruling class. The US is organized in such a way that concern for the dispossessed is an act of treason. Besides, anything bad for America is probably good for everyone else.

Too much focus on the West further marginalizes the Global South, site of numerous conflicts meaningful to activists in Europe and North America. Given my background (resident in the United States for all but two years of my life and long interested in matters of global import), I want to accommodate both North and South, which aren’t civilizational anomalies but mutually constitutive regions. Both are defined to some degree by the North’s aggression, but the relationship extends to culture, language, and identity.

I cannot in the end place myself within the framework of Africa, Latin America, or West Asia. My experience of these regions doesn’t include immersion into the norms and eccentricities of daily life. I don’t want my limitations to hinder critical rigor, but they do hinder the range of criticism I can offer. Nevertheless, I disavow approaches that emphasize the North’s primacy or treat it as redemptive, and I brook little concern with the well-being of institutions in the United States.

To put it bluntly, I don’t believe in those institutions. You shouldn’t believe in them, either. One of the worst aspects of inculcation into American mores is the idea that capitalism guarantees the public good, that our survival should be contingent on the munificence of politicians and corporations, that meritocracy can emerge from a system structured around self-interest. These delusions sustain micro-economies that exchange petty rewards for loyalty.

Such micro-economies are common in universities, which expertly convert obedience into professional currency; among corporate media, where mobility is less a matter of talent or dedication than approval of the ruling class; and on the lecture circuit, lucrative for orators who inspire audiences to do everything but revolt. We are conditioned to turn on one another as a matter of practical concern. In many cases, our careers depend upon eschewing basic gestures of humanity.

Even on the left, which hosts its own obsequious economies, brand-building, ass-kissing, glad-handing, and self-promoting generate significant social capital and are therefore normal practice. (A large group of left-signaling but essentially reformist mini-pundits emerged from Bernie Sanders’s 2015-16 presidential campaign.) We have to escape capitalist logic in order to become functional human beings, capable of centering empathy as a default approach, much less purveyors of justice. There’s a reason so many people who exhibit that capability become cynics or drop out of activism altogether. The first condition of structural change is ensuring that our efforts are spent disarming the ruling class rather than enduring in-group mendacity.

Is this even possible? If we understand petty rewards as something into which humans are habituated and not as an inherent feature of human consciousness, freeing ourselves from opportunistic micro-economies is not only possible, but fully realizable. This goal is paramount to the revolutionary imagination. We rightfully spend time exploring how to redistribute wealth and resources, and how to pursue racial and sexual justice, but it’s equally important to devise a society that values our better impulses. Thus have the world’s most imaginative thinkers—found not in the classrooms of the West but in the alleyways and balconies of the Global South—pushed us to operate beyond the mechanics of common sense.

For in the end, revolution, like its counterpart, decolonization, isn’t about reimagining the world as we currently know it, but about nursing visions of the unimagined, just out of view but always there, demanding penury, providing abundance, somewhere to the left.