Hamid Dabashi, a Columbia professor who has previously faced backlash for his criticisms of Israel, says it is Shatz and Polgreen who get Fanon wrong. “Fannon cannot be neutralised,” he wrote in Middle East Eye this month. “He was a revolutionary thinker, committed to helping liberate colonised peoples from the savagery of colonial domination of the sort we see in full throttle in Gaza today … Instead of sophomoric speculation about Fanon’s theories on violence,” Dabashi wrote, “analysts need to start from the facts on the ground.”
Shatz says that while he stands by his LRB essay, he makes no excuses for Israel’s violence. He, too, looks to Fanon’s writings on Algerian resistance to make sense of the current onslaught in Gaza – in fact, he came to writing about Algeria through his interest in Palestine.
“The violence of the French army in Algeria, Fanon wrote, had acquired the air of a genocide, even if the purpose of the violence was to maintain French rule, not to exterminate Algeria’s Muslims,” Shatz says.
[Guardian Media – 27/12/2023 book review by Professor Benjamin Selwyn. Frantz Fanon: The Wretched of the Earth. National liberation and state capture. ]
You understand now, MrPooh? The proposition that reaction: is response to inaction/to state failure/to hostile occupation.