A (Counter)Insurgent Craft

In his article, Notes on Craft: Writing in the Hour of Genocide, Fargo Tbahki asks in his “What does Palestine require of us, as writers writing in English from within the imperial core, in this moment of genocide?”. To answer this question Tbakhi unsettles the notion of our writing “craft,” conceptualizing its dominant form as “a machine built to produce and reproduce ethical failures;…a counterrevolutionary machine”… a “network of sanitizing influences exerted on writing in the English language: the influences of neoliberalism, of complicit institutions, and of the linguistic priorities of the state and of empire” (para. 2). Despite the contributions of anticolonial thinkers such as Frantz Fanon’s poetic prose that disrupted the lifeless text of social scientists and detached abstract language of philosophers, the dominant craft and its conventions still have the power to seduce even the most radical thinkers who are unwilling to name things for what they are in a time of genocide and fascist repression. There’s still a risk of becoming what Rabea Eghbariah (2023) referred to as the “scholars [who] tend to sharpen their pens after the smell of death has dissipated and moral clarity is no longer urgent” (para. 7).

It’s undeniable that writing is intimately entangled with power. I’m not the first to say this nor will I be the last. In Western institutions, such as universities and academia writ large, there exists “a set of regulatory ideas which curtail forms of speech that might enact real danger to the constellation of economic and social values which are, as I write this, facilitating genocide in Palestine and elsewhere across the globe.” The academic writing craft commodifies, dilutes, and defangs the radical aims of theories and concepts once they are institutionalized. It is all too common for academics to believe that their work is, in and of itself, liberatory, that their articles are examples of decolonization, that their books are THE struggle. As Tbakhi writes, “We play with toy hammers and think we can break down concrete. We think a spoon is a saw.” Our words don’t cut deep enough.

The dominant craft is what seduces us into acquiescence and complacency, which makes us unwilling to put our bodies and “peace of mind on the line.” It exerts a pressure to compel us to avoid speaking on what matters most, on the most urgent matters such as genocide. This craft is so calculated at times that it allows for the most dehumanizing rhetoric to pass as journalism and academic rigor, whereby Palestinians can be described as human animals or the children of darkness. It is this craft that demands that we first condemn armed resistance before speaking of the incalculable violence in Gaza, that we avoid using genocide to refer to the systematic killing of Palestinians, that we use the passive voice to describe the people who are killed without a clear image of the perpetrator, and that we ultimately transform our writing into genocide apologia that absolves those who are responsible. It is this cold-blooded and cruel craft, as Dabashi writes, that is expressed in a pernicious prose that justifies genocide. To destroy the counterinsurgent craft that invalidates resistance and gives legitimacy to settler colonialism, we must challenge the “regulation, estrangement, sanitization” academia requires of us. This demands “a commitment to constant and escalating betrayals” of academic forms of writing that value method and jargon over life itself, that dismisses the power of the essay and poetic prose that grips the readers, shakes them, and wakes them from their complicit slumber. It demands, in other words, “that we poison and betray Craft at all turns.”

To write with urgency, to write poetically, to write with affect that moves the reader to action requires giving up the careerist and opportunist game academia loves to play as the world burns around its ivory towers. It means willing to make sacrifices, to give up the comfort we enjoy, to refuse being captured by institutions who will commodify every spoken and written word if let them. To write insurgently intervenes in the counterinsurgent machine we refer to as the university that will one day value the work of academics who will edit special issues and publish books on the Palestinian genocide. Mohammed El-Kurd states, that these same academics will one day lecture the world about genocide in the past tense when in fact they said and did nothing while it unfolded for their unwilling eyes to see. These vultures, as El-Kurd labels them, are in our midst. We can probably picture one or more colleagues who are unbothered by genocide today yet will likely write about it when the literal “dust settles”—when the bodies buried under the rubble are reduced to footnotes in yet another published book, when making land acknowledgements can be made on Palestinian land without consequences. These vultures will one day romanticize what they once condemned, what they did not defend, and what they enabled through their silence. They will not only romanticize the past but also depoliticize, mystify, and commodify it. El Kurd states that these “vultures will make sculptures out of our flesh” so that the past can be frozen in time in some museum. That’s exactly how counterinsurgent craft functions.

What purpose does our writing serve in the hour of genocide, when bombs continue to drop, when mangled bodies are strewn in the streets, where paramedics constantly carry real beheaded babies for the world to see? When our writing actively unsettles colonial projects, we must be ready to make sacrifices by writing unequivocally about Palestinian liberation and by unapologetically critiquing Zionism, which, as some of us personally have experienced, can easily jeopardize our careers.

No matter the consequences, we must write as if life depended on it because that’s exactly what’s at stake. As Salamanca et al. (2024) inquire:

How does one write in the midst of an ongoing genocide? When the contours of Palestine are being redrawn in blood, and when unconscionable images of starving, injured, and dead children, women, and men have become our daily breakfast? What’s our task as scholar-activists, as human beings, when we become witnesses and thus unwilling accomplices to the ravaging of an ancient people and geography that has stood tall for generations as a cradle of civilisation? (para. 1)

Elsewhere, I’ve tried to explore these questions. I’ve advanced the notion of a decolonial theoretical intifada—a shaking off of and uprising against the dehumanizing racial theories, narratives, and myths that shackle and thus limit our interrogation of and collective action within the modern/colonial world. A decolonial theoretical intifada or insurgent decolonial mode of theorizing extends far beyond accepted notions of academi ; it necessarily means that, as intellectuals, we collectively act as much as we like to critique (Abu Zuluf et al., 2025).

Mohammed El-Kurd (2024) suggests that there is much more than colonial reality and that it’s tempting to only focus on loss. It’s more difficult to pinpoint the possibilities as a genocide is taking place. What once appeared to be seemingly invincible is now revealing its weaknesses, fissures, and cracks, which will only grow until its inevitable collapse. In other words, Zionist settler colonialism’s vincibility has created the conditions to think anew and to dream and build a world free of domination where new life springs from the rubble. As El-Kurd put it, “As deadly and treacherous and unrelenting as it is, the Nakba won’t last forever. The world is changing because it must. If seeds can germinate in the inferno, so can revolution.”