Liberation is always within reach. In Greater than the Sum of Our Parts: Feminism, Inter/Nationalism, and Palestine, Nada Elia argues that the Palestinian experience is the experience of colonised and dispossessed peoples everywhere, who are fighting for shared struggles of freedom and self-determination. In her introduction, Elia writes that this is a hopeful book, outlining how organising strategies for collective liberation cannot just be anticolonial, but must also be decolonial. Tracing the genealogies of how struggles of oppression are interconnected globally against colonialism, occupation, imperialism, patriarchy, racism and state-sanctioned violence, Elia contends that oppressed peoples must unite in global intifada to sustain the planet and create a world that is just.
Drawing on Patrick Wolfe’s theory of “elimination”, Elia asserts that Israel is not only an apartheid state but is a settler colonial state. She outlines the difference between “franchise colonialism” and “settler colonialism”, noting that what is happening in Palestine is the latter. Franchise colonialism entails building infrastructure and colonial society for the benefit of the colonisers, but without them ever planning to settle there (examples include India and parts of Africa). Settler colonialism, where the colonisers intend to stay, “destroys to replace”.
In Palestine, this has taken such forms as the 1948 Nakba – “the Catastrophe” – when Zionist militias expelled more than 700,000 Palestinians from their homes and either killed or forced them to flee; destroying and burning historic Palestinian villages, which continues to this day; denying the right to return; and creating checkpoints to control Palestinian movement; all of which are used as attempts to “replace” the Palestinian society and homeland with Israeli settlers. Ultimately, Elia maintains that we cannot see the Zionist movement to establish Israel as a Jewish homeland as a redemptive project; it was always racist, supremacist and settler colonial, and it is supported by other settler colonial entities such as the United States of America.
Writing fervently about movements for abolition that dispossess and dehumanise, including that of police, military and border officials, Elia insists a better world is possible. Whether discussing freedom fighters in Sheikh Jarrah, organisations advocating against apartheid conditions globally, or Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women organisers, Elia intentionally lifts up stories of resistance to help us reimagine a decolonial future. These narratives justify why she calls Israel out as a settler colonial project and apartheid state and explicitly names what is happening in Palestine as a feminist issue.
The violence of Zionist settler colonialism is intergenerational, and the occupation is tied to questions of land rights and trauma. Elia recounts larger framings of Israel’s tactic of “redwashing”, in which it appeals to progressive politics and Zionism’s own claim to indigeneity to deflect from the harm it continues to perpetuate. Quoting Israeli prime ministers and officials who described Palestine as “a land without a people,” Elia describes how Palestine was rendered palatable for settler colonialism’s entry. She compares this to the USA’s retelling of holidays such as Thanksgiving, which aim to hide the massacres and violence against Indigenous peoples that caused their structural dispossession.
Most poignantly, the book critiques discourses that would posit Israel as a leftist, queer haven. Elia urges readers to remember that colonialism is always sexually violent, arguing that Israel’s Zionism wants Palestinian women and queers dead to eliminate them as demographic threats, or to harass them for information about resistance efforts. She brings to the forefront examples of women being interrogated, drugged, and forced into compromising bodily positions and blackmailed for the photos unless they provide such information. Similar blackmail tactics happen against queer Palestinians, with Israeli officials threatening to “out” them if they don’t provide details about resistance activities. Israel deploys these tactics to limit the possibility of radical change and to alienate Palestinians from their own communities. In detailing this, Elia confronts the notion of “progressive except for Palestine”, declaring that one cannot claim to be liberal while supporting Israel’s regime that attempts to strip people of their life, home and dignity.
The Palestinian relationship with the land includes sacred longstanding traditions, and settler colonial elimination of Indigenous land cultivation has threatened revitalisation efforts to keep the Earth alive. Elia notes the uprooting of olive trees in Palestine and compares it to the effects of the elimination of buffalo for Indigenous communities in the USA, who relied on the stock to survive. Similarly, through Israel’s “greenwashing” campaign, settlers planted masses of trees but later found they were the wrong trees for the land and expedited global warming in the area. Elia demonstrates that Indigenous nations around the world are acutely aware of the struggle to heal the Earth from colonialism.
Elia does a brilliant job of calling our attention to shared struggles against settler colonialism and insists that communities must stand together in global intifada. She stresses that the police today are reinforcing tactics reminiscent of the army and border patrol to eliminate Indigenous peoples, including incarceration of Black and brown communities. Elia claims that any attempted reform to an already violent, colonial, imperial system only reifies the system to be more oppressive.
Greater than the Sum of Our Parts: Feminism, Inter/Nationalism, and Palestine is a testament to the power of solidarity – and reading it at a time of movements such as Stop Cop City and Black Lives Matter, among others, speaks to the power of collective resistance. To quote Nada Elia herself: “Like abolitionists everywhere, we are busily thinking, organising, dreaming, beyond the dystopic present… and together, we are greater than the sum of our parts.”