Mumia was participating in a conference entitled “From Partition to Solidarity” held on Wednesday, Dec. 3, 2025 at the behest of Professor Rabab Abdulhadi.
Mumia Abu-Jamal:
I greet you all, especially sister Rabab, who invited me to join you, all of you, several weeks ago. So, I greet you all. Marhaba.
When we think of Palestine today, our minds fly naturally to the last few years of carnage that has cost at the very least 70,000 lives, those of men, women and children, and over 90% of Palestinian buildings and structures in Gaza, destroyed by Israeli and U.S. bombs. But I think it important to turn our eyes away and turn back the clock and calendar almost 100 years ago, when the British gave its imprimatur to land transfers from Arabs to Jewish immigrants from Europe; when the British Empire held lands under its League of Nations trusteeship, the forerunner to the United Nations. There we see the Imperial beginnings to this crisis to come.
On, November 2, 1917, author James Balfour, the Earl of Balfour, wrote a letter to Lionel Walter, Lord Rothschild, the following. “His Majesty’s government view with favor the establishment, in Palestine, of a national home for the Jewish people and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object. It being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.” You’ve been listening to what has been called the Balfour Declaration of 1917.
At the time Britain held sway over one of the largest empires on Earth, with lands in North America, Africa and Asia, not to mention vast holdings scattered throughout the seas like islands. Does it not really surprise us that they offered not a foot of land in Europe? From that day to this, Palestinian lands have been stolen, their holdings denied, and their farmlands whittled away. It is impossible to look at this as anything other than an imperial and neocolonial conspiracy designed to prejudice the rights of the Palestinian people. How could Israel violate international law for almost a century with the United Nations looking the other way? This happens because we misunderstand the role really played by the UN, the successor to the failed League of Nations.
Fortunately, Frantz Fanon, in his Toward the African Revolution, explains, “We can say that two mistakes were simultaneously committed by the Africans. First of all, by Lumumba himself, when he asked for the intervention of the UN. The UN has never been capable of validly settling a single one of the problems raised before the conscience of man, by colonialism. And every time it has intervened, it was in order to come concretely to the rescue of the colonial power of the oppressing country.” That’s Fanon. Fanon, this man whose mind pierced into the very core of reality, understood the central nature of the UN and wrote as follows, “In reality, the UN is the legal card used by the imperialist interests when the card of brute force has failed.” – Fanon.
Fanon wrote these insights in the wake of the betrayal and assassination of Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba. Lumumba’s first great mistake, he noted, was his trust in the West and the UN. It cost him not only his life, but the collective lives and futures of the people of the Congo. We ponder these developments in light of the creeping occupation of Palestine and its territories, itself a violation of international law, as well as the emergence of Israel as a de facto regional hegemon in the Middle East. Some have likened the Zionist state to an aircraft carrier. Think of that, a weapon of war, indeed, a weapon of mass destruction in the region. The 1000 plus years of European oppression of Jews is being paid by Arabs in Palestine. For Europe is the site of repeated Jewish expulsion, traumatization, and, as the German experience has shown us, genocidal destruction of Jews en masse.
These historical experiences have created an intense otherness in Jewish consciousness that makes the extreme seem perfectly normal. For extremity has become normalized. This means that in order to mitigate its own otherness, the Jewish state had to make the leap from former British colony to an entity which exercised colonial power, which is to say it had to act like a European power. How was this done? They had to treat the Palestinians, the indigenous people of the land, as others. This they have done since, indeed before, the establishment of Israel in 1948. I suggest here that much of the psychological energy fueling Israel is a hunger to really become something that it never was in over a millennia in Europe – European. Much of that energy has been projected upon the Palestinians, rather than their true historical enemies – Europeans.
State power, supported by the purchase and manufacture of weaponry, has given it the ability to make psychological energy into reality in the real world today. Cameroonian scholar Achille Mbembe, in his now classic work, Necropolitics, examines the underlying conflicts between states and colonies thusly: “Colonies are similar to frontiers, inhabited by “savages.” Colonies are not organized as a state form and do not create a human world. The armies do not form a distinct entity, and their wars are not wars between regular armies. They do not imply the mobilization of sovereign subjects, what are called citizens, who respect each other as enemies. They do not establish a distinction between combatants and non combatants, or again, between an enemy and a criminal. Concluding peace with them is thus, impossible. In some colonies are zones in which war and disorder, internal and external, figures of the political stand side by side or alternate with each other. The colony is thus the site par excellence, where controls and juridical control and guarantees of judicial order can be suspended; the zone where the violence of the state of exception is deemed to operate in the service of “civilization” (Mbembe 77).”
What we see in Mbembe’s citation is the colonization, otherization and depersonalization of Palestinians, even as the state eats and encroaches on indigenous lands of Palestinian people. The recent war against Hamas was, in fact, a war against Palestinians as events by the death of some 70,000 souls in Gaza. That colonial versus the colonized dialectic discussed by Mbembe is the roadmap of a territorialization of oppression. For nearly a century, Palestine has been under attack. They are still under attack, just by more violent means today, They struggle on as they must do, even as their present life is truly the ‘wretched of the earth,’ and speaking of Fanon’s master work, the only solution to such a state is ceaseless struggle against the colonizer until it is no more, for only then can a new independent nation be born to give voice and place to the ‘wretched of the earth.’ With love, not fear. This is Mumia Abu-Jamal. Thank you.
These commentaries are recorded by Prison Radio.
