The Flood of Consciousness: Analyzing Defeatist Discourse Regarding Palestine

By Musa al-Sada – Jan 27, 2025

“Exporting defeatist discourse is itself defeat, and based on this understanding, we must resist it.” – Journalist Yousef Fares, Northern Gaza

The current of Arab defeatist discourse should be understood as a political position rather than an objective analysis of events or a historical comparison to peoples’ experiences of struggle against colonialism. An observer of this discourse notices a deliberate removal of the Palestinian cause from its historical context of national liberation struggles against Western colonialism. Today, during the genocide, defeatist intellectuals search for historical references that are far removed from anti-colonial histories and the immense violence inflicted by the colonial powers against the forces of anti-colonialism, for example, France in Algeria, Britain in India, and the United States in Vietnam. Instead, they seek references appropriate to the massive scale of Zionist criminal violence, but only those that do not fall under models of accumulated and continuous resistance until liberation. They ignore historical models where the oppressed maintained political agency and remained in the position of “resistor” in favor of histories that position the oppressed as a helpless object in the position of “victim.”

Paradoxically, the implicit historical model being invoked is that of the European Nazi Holocaust and transferring Arabs to the position of European Jews (victims)—the defeated Jewish character that came to justify Zionism messianically. This occurred through transferring the “Jewish Question” outside Europe by incorporating European Jews into European colonial projects through their own special program. Just as each European nation had its share of Global South countries (Belgium: Congo, Netherlands: Indonesia, etc.), the “Jewish nation” also got its share.

على حركة حماس ان تتحلى بالشجاعة الأدبية وتعترف بأخطاءها الشنيعة وتتحمل مسؤولياتها الأخلاقية والسياسية وتخجل من تهربها تجاه الطامة الكبرى التي حلت على 2.1 مليون فلسطيني في غزة وتتوقف عن حديث الانتصار الموجع وعلى قياداتها الميدانية والسياسية تقديم استقالتهم فورا وترك غزة لاهل غزة. pic.twitter.com/F3ihhe6WJF
— Abdulkhaleq Abdulla (@Abdulkhaleq_UAE) January 22, 2025

What defeatist intellectuals are doing is borrowing the Nazi Holocaust model from the European perspective and projecting it onto the Zionist genocide in Gaza as a “catastrophe” and “disaster” rather than a crime. This projects a Palestinian character that has been crushed and defeated, stripping away the concept of military and social steadfastness, negating Palestinian and Arab agency and subjectivity. In their narrative, they reduce the entire historical situation to just the genocide itself, presenting it as the only significant factor and treating its very existence as proof that victory is impossible. They insist on recording it as a holocaust committed against a passive, defeated population (even though during the actual Nazi Holocaust, European Jews did mount resistance). Palestinians then must pay the price of a historical “sin”—resistance and October 7—and repent for their political choice of resistance and armed struggle. All this aims to prevent the Zionist genocide from being classified among Western colonial genocides and instead places it within the “exceptional” experience of Nazi criminality, which is portrayed as deviant from the true, “enlightened” values of the “democratic” West which is the flagbearer of universal human rights.

The issue of passing off this event as an aberration is important for two political positions in defeatist discourse. “Arab defeatist culture” is not simply a recent phenomenon, but rather is an Arab political school of thought with liberal ideological roots. Using structural analysis, we can see that this defeatist discourse comes almost exclusively from those who occupy specific positions of power within long-established Arab political and economic institutions. Their other connection is to Western enlightenment and liberal political concepts, which they defend as a supreme political and moral structure. They now attempt to salvage these concepts after the Al Aqsa Flood exposed and stripped bare this structure and its official organizations, as Abu Obeida describes them.

This discourse opens the door to diagnose the post-genocide Palestinian as a “victim” to blame them and blame their political choices. Here blame represents a political tool, which means its purpose is to achieve political goals. From the Zionist perspective, blame, and the discourse of “you Palestinians have paid the price for your actions” is one of the principal tools for cauterizing the consciousness of the colonized people. This is an old policy as old as Western colonialism, but Zionism has given it names since the 1920s like the “Iron Wall”[*]. Defeatist intellectuals intersect with Zionism in using the same tool, but for multiple parallel purposes.

التضحية بالنفس في سبيل قضية ومبدأ هي أعلى درجات السمو والشرف، ولن تجد أصدق وأكثر تجرداً من أغراض الدنيا ممن وهب نفسه للموت دفاعاً عن قضية عادلة.. لكن يجدر التذكير بأن التضحية تكون بالنفس فقط، لا أن ينتج عنها التضحية بآخرين لم يختاروا هذا الطريق، وربما لهم تصورات مُختلفة لحياتهم،…
— نواف القديمي (@Alqudaimi) January 18, 2025

The defeatist discourse considers that the resistance misjudged the Zionist “consequences” and “reactions.” There is a legitimate place for debating the strategy of liberation movements, but this differs fundamentally from defeatist narratives. The defeatist view treats the enemy’s actions as inevitable mechanical “consequences,” as if they were “natural” reactions rather than deliberate crimes. Consequently, the burden, weight of responsibility and blame falls on the “action” of the colonized Palestinian, not the “reaction” of the Zionist colonizer, such that the Palestinians’ action has invoked upon themselves the enemy’s massive crimes.

This is clear in the discourse of “sacrificing others.” In the defeatist narrative, the Palestinian resistance did not sacrifice itself but rather “sacrificed others” from outside its popular base. Thus according to this narrative, the resistance stripped others of their right to make an “appropriate decision in their lives.” The issue here is that this narrative directly contradicts the concept of genocide. The Zionist perpetrator here committed the war crime of genocide against the entire Palestinian people in Gaza, and it was the Zionists who stripped people of their right to make appropriate decisions about their lives, not the resistance. What the defeatist narrative is doing here is negating the collective and dividing the Palestinian people between the resistance and its base and those outside the base. This negation and division denies the historical reality of the Palestinian cause as an issue of settler-colonialism whereby the essence of Zionism is the genocide of all Palestinian land and people without exception.

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Based on this conceptual essence, there is space for discussing the Palestinian liberation movement’s work program, strategy and decisions. It is certainly responsible for its work program and strategy, and it has a moral duty to always consider its people’s lives. Our judgment of resistance action is whether this responsibility was considered or not. This is the core question of colonized peoples’ liberation—how can we liberate ourselves with a strategy where the cost to us is the lowest? This was at the heart of the October 7 strategy, where the resistance built its strategy not on nihilism and “suicide” (as Western Orientalism portrays the Arab as irrational,) but on a strategy of deterring the enemy through captives after taking them prisoner, based on the historical value of prisoners in the Zionist society which had been abandoned or marginalized in previous months in the entity itself.

Indeed a prime example of the resistance’s commitment to protecting civilian lives, and its need to adapt to the Zionist tactic of savage bombing of homes, was Abu Obeida’s recorded speeches where he announced that the bombing threatens the Zionist prisoners’ lives. This threat served as a strategy to protect the people. Ultimately, this demonstrated the resistance’s unwavering moral foundation. It stands as one of history’s most striking examples of a society maintaining its ethical principles even when confronted by Zionism, an ideological structure defined by its complete absence of moral values.

لا أميل عادةً لشرح الموقف والتفسير والتبرير لأي أحد،.. هي مجرد قناعات أكتبها وأمضي.. وسيؤوا الظن والشتّامون حتى لو شرحتُ لهم عشرين مرة فلن يجدي ذلك نفعاً.. وحسنوا الظن غالباً ما يعرفون مواقفك ولستَ مضطراً لأن تشرح لهم كل شيء في كل سطر تكتبه.. ومع ذلك سأشرح هذه المرة لمن التبس…
— نواف القديمي (@Alqudaimi) January 18, 2025

The other purpose of the blame policy in defeatist discourse lies in the blame falling on the Palestinian resistance due to its Arab and regional relationships, specifically the principle of the unity of fronts. The background of this blame testifies that defeatist discourse is a political position and not objective analysis. From a historical and objective analytical perspective, the unity of fronts during Al-Aqsa Flood, even considering its minimum level, represented an Arab historical precedent, expressed by Abu Obeida in his historical comparison with the state of martyr Abdul Qadir Al-Husseini in the 1940s versus the Al-Aqsa Flood’s opening of fronts at different levels along the Arab Mashreq in a new and important model for negating the concept of Arab borders and division. This is a model that must be evaluated with a critical spirit and must be built upon, and this is one of the most important challenges of criticism and study for the Palestinian resistance within the scope of its work program as a liberation movement.

However, the point here, once again, is that the narrative of defeatist discourse against the unity of fronts, and within the policy of blame, has two goals. First, destroying the experience rather than building on it as a model for cross-border participation against the Zionist project within the space of Palestine. Second, this discourse and the segment it represents aims to create a justification for inaction that eliminates their responsibility, by turning away from the question of their duty toward the Palestinian cause and genocide, their betrayal of Palestine throughout the war, and transferring it to the question that others’ actions were not enough. This brings us back to the fundamental political agenda behind defeatist discourse. The advocates of defeat aim to advance a political project that rejects resistance in favor of various forms of settlement, ranging from empty democratic rhetoric to outright normalization with the enemy.

The important issue here is that settlement and submission is part of the process of completing the historical Zionist genocide project of appropriating Palestinian land, and abandoning all tools of political power (armed movements), while Zionism completes its project of “cleansing the land” in the West Bank, after its failure in Gaza through the steadfastness of people and resistance on their land.

The other aspect is that these paths are a gateway for integrating the Israeli enemy entity into the region, which is something that we must confront in the next stage, specifically during Donald Trump’s four years in power. Away from the “defeatist current” narrative, the resistance narrative is based on the necessity of continuing to nullify the political and social effects that Zionism wants to achieve from the massive genocidal violence in Gaza, ambitions in the West Bank, and integration into the Arab Mashreq. This is exactly our point of collision with the defeatist current—not primarily about defining what happened, but fundamentally about the future and what will happen in the Arab homeland, the Palestinian cause, and the course of conflict with Zionism.

This battle certainly would not be easy, especially in the process of transforming it into a flood of consciousness as Abu Obeida indicated, in the face of the program of cauterization of consciousness intended by the defeatist intellectuals and the Zionist front.

Therefore, we must all entrench ourselves and mobilize media, awareness, humanitarian and political work, to create a flood of popular and cultural consciousness, representing continuity of Gazans’ sacrifices and their great victory and preservation of all martyrs’ blood so that it does not go to waste. It is a victory evidenced by our ability to imagine defeat: Zionist occupation of Gaza, displacement of its north, reaching the prisoners, ending the political existence of resistance, people’s surrender, and the enemy building a “comprador authority” that adopts its enemy’s narrative, denies the genocide of its people, arrests any resistor, rejects steadfastness and resistance to the occupiers, begs Arab and Western governments to save it, and reduces the “Arab” to one who leaves his ancestors’ legacy of pride in swords by throwing them away and surrendering them to his enemy. This is what did not happen in Gaza. And this is the major problem for both Zionism and the “defeatist current”—the defeat that they talk about is merely discourse and not reality, while our material witness to victory is that we can see it, not imagine it, in the political and militant resistance movement and its popular cradle, in the battlefields, and in the historical scenes of displaced people returning to northern Gaza.

*Translator’s Note: “Iron Wall” refers to a 1923 essay by Zionist Ze’ev Jabotinsky in which he argues that, because the indigenous Palestinian population would never voluntarily accept Zionist colonization, the Zionist movement needed to build a metaphorical “iron wall” of military force to impose Jewish settlement against Palestinian resistance and psychologically wear down Palestinian society to convince Palestinians that resistance was futile.

(Taqadoom Magazine)

Translation: Orinoco Tribune

OT/DZ/SC