On behalf of Al-Rifaq Collective

The great communist philosopher Antonio Gramsci was once described as “that Sardinian hunchback … with the enormously powerful brain”. The description was that of none other than fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, who saw in the then leader of the Italian Communist Party a powerful enemy, and who took a personal interest in assuring the latter’s eventual and untimely demise. This is why, at the sham trial by a fascist tribunal that would condemn Gramsci to an excruciating and ultimately fatal decade in prison, the prosecutor famously stated: “for twenty years we must stop this brain from functioning”.

Fascism has always had, as an essential component of its structural matrix, an inbuilt drive to annihilate critical thought and intellectual work. In the past two years, we have witnessed in real time Israel’s systemic destruction of Gaza’s education system, including an elimination campaign targeting its intellectual stratas. As early as April 2024, therefore, the UN used the term “scholasticide” to describe this programme, a term that has been popularised across humanitarian and activist circles. While evocative, the term itself is far from novel. During previous invasions of the besieged enclave, Israel was variously decried by critics for engaging in “educide” and “epistemicide”. The cyclical reinvention and popularisation of such terms is a telling symptom of soft normalisation: the structurally conditioned acceptance and embrace of Israel as a member of the international liberal order and as a regional exception in the Middle East. Invocations of quasi-legal jargon to criticise Israel’s transgressions sanctify, by extension, its status quo as a military occupation and express an institutionalised refusal to acknowledge its fundamental nature: an inherently fascist project that, in both principle and practice, seeks to de-develop and decivilise the region as a whole.

In the Arab world, as elsewhere in the Third World, imperialism’s decimation of intellectual life is irreducible to cultural plunder and “brain drains”. Rather, it specifically has as part of its de-development and decivilising project the eradication of intelligentsia organically connected to and rooted in the region’s liberation struggles. Many of us in the West are familiar with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine’s Ghassan Kanafani and the Palestinian National Council’s Edward Said, but these great thinkers were but two of an extensive cadre of their time. Much as the socialist Arab republics sought to harness knowledge production to their national projects, Arab liberation movements have cultivated generations of dedicated young minds for whom study and intellectual work are indispensable to the defence of their people and lands. From the militant communists of Iraq and Lebanon to the Maoist student brigades of the Palestinian camps, these movements have so often demonstrated that rigorous analysis underwrite both their own efficacy and survival. 

Across Palestine and beyond, militant intellectuals continue to study the ongoing catastrophe despite Israel’s best efforts. This study and critical analysis has nothing to do with scholasticism. It reflects instead a conviction that we face not just a humanitarian crisis or even an exceptional historical crime, but the latest salvo in an ongoing war that will redraw battle lines and reorganise the terrain of struggle, on regional and even global scales. Mapping this terrain, documenting these developments, and examining the strategies of both enemies and allies are crucial tasks for the methodical diagnosis of what is taking place and in preparation for what is yet to come.

It is precisely the strategic and determined nature of this analysis that inspired our work on the Al-Rifaq project. During the late months of 2024, it was becoming readily clear to some of us that Gaza existed on two incommensurable planes: one which was transmitted in Arabic and the other in English. These planes, moreover, seemed to follow arcs that couldn’t be more different in character. One unfolds as a tragedy where Gaza is but an exception or historical anomaly, a framed stage for the West to rehearse its own barbarism and bemoan it too. In contrast, the other reads more like an epic wherein Gaza culminates a liberation struggle decades-long in the making. Al-Rifaq thus intends to make the latter accessible on its own terms, an act of translation that exceeds the attempt to bridge a linguistic divide, and seeks instead to fundamentally shift the way we relate to the struggle itself: a struggle that, through sheer force of its historical weight, insists that we rethink everything amid the unthinkable.

The unthinkable, after all, is what Zionist fascism and US imperialism excel at performing — with both indiscriminate savagery and surgical precision — and every act is intended to leave thought behind; stop thought dead in its tracks. Our comrades in Palestine and elsewhere bear witness to this and give it the lie at every turn: every horror show and show of cruelty; every new mechanism for murder, suffering, and demoralisation devised by the death-machine that is Zionism; all are studiously documented and diagnosed. Thought is therefore able to keep pace, and in doing so it charts a path for the only actions that can be adequate as response — all thanks to the indefatigable intellect of a generation reared on the political will to think and act in such times.

We’re lucky enough to call some of these very thinkers friends and collaborators, who have generously shared their work and even joined in the translation effort. The hope of this effort is to encourage readers to follow the arc of struggle that spans Gaza and its people; to inspire the reader to emulate the political will to think and act in these times, and to take seriously the urgent task of studying, with discipline and rigour, our own conditions here and everywhere and to subject them to the ruthless critique they deserve. Most importantly, the hope of this project is to instil in ourselves and in our readers the courage to not look away but to look more closely — to temper and sharpen one’s thought such as to cut through every live-streamed and thought-terminating procedure. Every drone footage of an assassination or satellite image of an obliterated landscape should bring to mind the eternal words of Frantz Fanon in A Dying Colonialism: “We must not simply fly over it. We must, on the contrary, walk step by step along the great wound inflicted on the Algerian soil and on the Algerian people. We must question the Algerian earth meter by meter”. As in Algeria, so in Palestine, and beyond.

It took a decade of torture and degradation before Gramsci’s body finally succumbed to his fascist tormentors, but during that time his mind refused to die. Instead, it produced through a herculean effort of preternatural magnitude what is now widely considered to be one of the most important and influential texts of the past century. The staggeringly voluminous Prison Notebooks continue to inspire generations of philosophers, militants, students, and radicals alike. As in Italy of yesteryear, the Arab world today marks the frontline of the war against fascism, and its thinkers and writers are currently forging and reforging tools from the crucible of that struggle, knowing as they do that it necessarily involves a war of ideas that must be waged on all fronts. Arming ourselves accordingly is not just a responsibility we bear as partisans of that struggle, but also a necessity in the face of the imperial boomerang that will surely follow its natural trajectory from periphery to centre. 

Of Weapons and Words is available and can be purchased via Al-Rifaq’s substack.