Muhannad Ayyash, Lordship and Liberation in Palestine-Israel: The Promise of Decolonial Sovereignties (Columbia University Press, 2025).
Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?
Muhannad Ayyash (MA): As a Palestinian scholar, I view it as my duty and obligation to produce and advance knowledge on and for the Palestinian struggle for decolonial liberation. I write in the hope that it can play a small role in illuminating the Palestinian struggle. I do not subscribe to a Western European and USian type of thinking that alleges that “a book can change the world.” I subscribe instead to the more accurate idea of collectively cultivated knowledge, which is produced and advanced by communities, oral histories, artists, academics, political leaders, everyday discourse and interactions, activists, revolutionaries, and so on. This type of knowledge can and does indeed change the world.
J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?
MA: Essentially, the book does two things. First, it presents a paradigm that illuminates settler-colonial sovereignty and the structure of Israeli settler-colonial violence. This is the only paradigm that enables us to properly understand and better explain the current path of settler-colonial genocide and war. This is the path that we have been on for over one hundred years in Palestine and which has been further intensified during the last two years. Second, the book illuminates an alternative path forward, one that draws lessons and insights from the long history of Palestinian resistance to show how decolonial sovereignties can offer all of us a more dignified and free future.
More specifically, the book makes the case that “lordship” (as a particular kind of claim on the relationship between people and land and among people) constitutes the core of settler-colonial sovereignty, which, in its aspirations and to some extent practices, posits the sovereign as indivisible, absolute, and omnipresent. In contrast, “land as life” constitutes the core of decolonial sovereignties, which are in both aspiration and practice, layered, shared, and multiplying.
Combining theoretical analysis with historical and political analysis, the book situates the case of Palestine-Israel as a struggle between these two general opposing paths. The book concludes that the option before us is one between the continuation of the Israeli settler-colonial project in particular and the project of colonial modernity in general, or the commencement of a decolonial age in Palestine-Israel and indeed beyond. The book’s message is that a better world is not only possible, it is waiting.
As a social and political theorist, I write books that bring together various strands of theory from different disciplines in an effort to shed a novel light on phenomena that have been extensively theorized and studied. In this book, I mostly focus on the question of sovereignty. I found that most theorizations of sovereignty assume that its conventional form—with its aspirations for indivisible, absolute, and omnipresent power, which we find across the globe today—is the only way we can theorize it. Some scholars may acknowledge that so-called pre-modern societies practiced different forms of sovereignty, but then they shift back to the idea that the form we have today is the sort of last stage of development for sovereignty in concept and in practice. I wanted to show that the conventional form is specifically a settler-colonial form of sovereignty, and that not only do alternatives exist and are practiced today as well as in recent history, but that they offer us a better future. So, I engage a lot with decolonial theory and Indigenous theory to emphasize the importance of thinking about Palestinian liberation from a decolonial lens, where liberation does not simply mean that Palestinians would be free when they attain a modern nation-state with a modern form of sovereignty; rather that Palestinians can carry forward a new vision and practice of sovereignty altogether—a decolonial one. In a nutshell, I think we should think of the Palestinian struggle not as one that seeks to achieve for Palestinians what other nations around the world at least theoretically already have, but rather as one that can revolutionize social and political life as such.
J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?
MA: This book builds on the work in my first book, A Hermeneutics of Violence, where I advanced a four-dimensional conception of violence. In this book, I connected my theorization of sovereignty with my previous theorization of violence in order to illuminate the structure of settler-colonial violence, how it operates, how it may be opposed, what is its true alternative, and how its cyclical propagation may be broken. Part of what I argued in this book, which is a bit different from the first one, is that the cycle of violence in settler-colonial contexts is not born out of an exchange of violent acts between Israelis and Palestinians, but is rather a cycle that emerges from within the settler-colonial structure of violence. Essentially, every act of settler-colonial violence begets the next act of settler-colonial violence, and on and on it goes, until that cycle is broken by a dismantling of settler colonialism and all of its structures and logics. This may sound like a tall order, and of course, in practical terms, it is; but it is also not just a dream imagined by theorists. Rather, I argue that we have seen examples in the long history of Palestinian resistance that show us a way to break this cycle and usher in a new and better world. In this book, I focus on the popular committees of the first intifada as an example of this decolonial alternative world.
J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?
MA: The book is theoretically dense, particularly the first half of the book, so I think it is more for an academic audience, but parts of it will be accessible to general readers, and certainly to those who have dedicated their lives to serving the Palestinian struggle. When I finish any piece of writing, I hope that its impact will be to contribute to that collective body of knowledge, and that it plays its small role in advancing it. For me, a book is like a drop of water in a vast ocean, no one can really tell its impact as an individual drop, but it can play its role in generating a tidal wave that revolutionizes social and political systems and institutions.
J: Why do you include a hyphen between Palestine-Israel in the title of the book?
MA: I do this for one main reason. As I argued in my first book, violence forges enemies into enemy-siblings, creating a dash between the sides that makes it virtually impossible to think of one without the other. I use the hyphen in this book to speak to the interlocking of enemy-siblings as enemy-siblings. This kind of interlocking has been happening for decades, and it comes into being through violence. It has become cemented in the very foundation of the Israeli state and all of its institutions. What essentially defines this kind of interlocking of enemy-siblings is that the very core of the Israeli subjectivity is one of lordship where Israeli violence continuously produces Israelis as “lords of the land” who seek to expel the Palestinian from existence. Israeli subjectivity, in other words, is defined and marked, not by Jewish freedom and liberation as Zionists allege, but rather by a never-ending effort to eliminate the Palestinians. We cannot put our heads in the sand and act as if this interlocking has not happened. This ground cannot be wished away. We have to acknowledge it as the ground that must be defeated, dismantled, overcome, transformed. Therefore, for me, the hyphen in the title and my use of it in parts of the book are alluding to this reality created by violence.
In short, the hyphen in this book opposes the erasure of Palestine and makes clear that there can never be an Israel that has definitively and conclusively erased Palestine. More importantly, I make it very clear that this hyphen, constituted by Israeli settler colonialism as an interlocking of enemy-siblings, is the main problem, and one that must be opposed. It is only when the expulsion of Palestine and Palestinians not only ceases but is reversed and undone as a structure of violence, that we can begin to say that we have commenced on a path of decoloniality, and hopefully the ushering of a new kind of hyphen and interlocking altogether.
J: What other projects are you working on now?
MA: Right now, I am writing an article on Palestinian-Indigenous solidarities in the settler colony of Canada. These solidarities have been growing over the last decade, and they have become especially visible during the last twenty months of the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people. I interviewed almost thirty activists in Toronto and Ottawa, and explored a number of themes with them. Amidst the unspeakable death and destruction that we are all witnessing today in Gaza and indeed parts of the West Bank, I found hope in this project, that at the very least, people power is still alive and is still willing to risk a lot for a more dignified and free human life. Especially empowering to see is that no matter how much power Israel and the United States have, no matter the vast resources they throw at manipulating public narratives in media, politics, and culture, no matter how hard they try to shift public opinion in their favor through a carrot and stick approach, people still have the ability to see through their lies and mystifications, call genocide by its name, and fight for an alternative future.
Excerpts from the book
[from Chapter 2, pages 86 to 88]
In its settler colonial form, the land/people fusion as lordship is marked by a structure of expulsion that seeks to destroy, definitively and absolutely, alternative configurations of a people/land relationship, and institute a lordship configuration of people/land. This deconstruction/construction is construed as a matter of survival: only in the acquisition of land in the manner of lordship, can the settler colonial state exist as a state. Lordship over land becomes, not just a matter of owning an object (which can then be sold, exchanged, kept, and so on), but more importantly the very sign of the existence of the lord as lord, the settler state as state; in short, of the sovereign as sovereign, as possessing no equal or even a challenger.
…..
Henceforth, the posture of lordship speaks, not to a particular legal doctrine, political order, or socioeconomic system whose genealogy we may trace in order to understand the legal machinations through which Indigenous peoples are dispossessed; rather, it reveals the violent machinations through which Indigenous peoples are robbed of their sovereign claim. Instead of a genealogy of law, politics, and society, it shifts our attention to the brute violences that establish and maintain settler colonial sovereignty and directs our analytical gaze toward the raw force which gives legal and political machinations, regardless of their specificities, the power of knowing and doing. Lordship over land is a particular way of conceptualizing land as an object which can only attain significance and meaning when it is lorded over; and it is only in lording over land—constituting a specific area of land as an object under lordship—that a lord can gain meaning and significance. Without the fusion of people/land as lordship, neither lord nor land/people can attain (within the world of settler colonial sovereignty) substance in their meaning, neither enters history. This is what this posture’s fundamental conceptions of the human, space, and time asserts and attempts to constitute as “real,” and upon which massive social, political, cultural, and economic structures have been constructed. Furthermore, as indicated in the epigraph, the posture of lordship is also intimately connected with a warrior class. I am less interested in this group as a specific historical class and more concerned with the idea that lordship is the purview of those for whom war and warfare is an integral part of their being. The fusion is wedded to warriors, to war, to the forceful taking of land, making land one’s exclusive domain through force, maintaining the domination and lordship of and over the land by force, ensuring the submission of people by force, protecting the people with force, and so on. Succinctly put, we cannot theorize the fusion without understanding the violence that establishes, secures, sustains, and expands it as a fusion—not in the Eliasian sense of how violence became monopolized or in Brunner’s sense of delineating the complex medieval legal, social, and political structures of governance within which violence appears, but in the sense that violence forges the elements of land and people as a particular kind of fusion. Such forging unfolds in the four-dimensional operation of violence that (contra Elias, Brunner, and others) moves far beyond the instrumental logics of the state as well as non-state actors who continuously fight to seize the monopoly of violence.
[from Chapter 6, pages 255 to 258]
As this epigraph from Fanon states, the colonized “are the truth in their very being.” The truth of colonized Palestinians is rather simple: across their fragmented land and people, against their isolation from one another and from the world, and despite their dehumanization, Palestinians remain a people who claim and practice decolonial sovereignties that refute lordship. In this chapter I examined the popular committees as a particularly promising formation of decoloniality, exemplified by the women’s movement and the critical role they played in creating and shaping the popular committees. The demise of the popular committees does not mean the demise of the Palestinian commitment to decolonization and the effort to bring about an alternative decolonial world. So long as Israeli settler colonial violence and domination continues to colonize Palestine and Palestinians, the Palestinian people will remain the truth of decolonization and decoloniality in their very being.
To accentuate the ongoing nature of Palestinian decolonial resistance and Palestinians’ continued embodiment of the truth of decoloniality, I want to conclude this chapter by briefly highlighting how we saw this truth manifest in the spring of 2021 in what Palestinians have called the “Unity Intifada.” Palestinians crossed colonial borders, walls, barriers, and asserted decolonial sovereignties, not on, but of the land. Even if for brief moments, Palestinians in lands colonized in 1948, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, and Jerusalem, descendants of Palestinian refugees and exiles in Lebanon, Jordan, Canada, the United Staes, the United Kingdom, and across the world, all joined together through marches, demonstrations, crossings, advocacy campaigns, and actions, in expressing their, not claim to the land, but their very existence as being of the land.
Palestinians in the Gaza Strip affirmed that their struggle is not unique but is rather the same as the struggle of all Palestinians against fragmentation, isolation, and dehumanization. Their demand for “collective Palestinian rights” across all the fragmented and isolated lands and people were critical in “exposing Israel’s long-standing strategy of exceptionalizing Gaza’s difference as an attempt to disconnect the territory from the wider Palestinian struggle.” Palestinians in the West Bank and Jerusalem, in calling for the revitalization of the national movement, the reunification of political factions, and the redemocratization of the PLO, named, exposed, and opposed the Palestinian “infrastructure of struggle” that has been tragically turned through the PA to a tool that is used “to contain anti-colonial capacities and aspirations rather than to cultivate and develop them” as this infrastructure was built to do over many decades. The language and actions of Palestinians in Jerusalem and beyond also captured the ongoing nature of the Nakba, and therefore the ongoing character of Palestinian resistance: their refusal to be erased and colonized, refusal to participate in their own subjugation and colonization, and refusal to simply being recognized, and instead articulated their place in the long continuum of the Palestinian desire and aspiration for decolonial liberation. In their actions, slogans, manifestos, and demonstration, 1948 Palestinians rejected what Lana Tatour rightly calls the liberal path which seeks to incorporate Palestinian “citizens” of Israel “within the ambit of Israeli politics,” and instead formulated and followed a decolonial path that emphasized the necessary unity of all Palestinians in their joint “effort to dismantle Israeli settler colonialism.”
Historically, “land for Palestinians,” argues Abdo, “was the space on and from which they produced and reproduced themselves as an agricultural people.” Land remains for Palestinians, even as many are no longer like the agricultural people of the past, that which allows for their (re)production as a people.
The enduring nature of Palestinian longing and belonging to the land across their fragmentation, isolation, and dehumanization under lordship sent a clear message of defiance and rejection of the violences of expulsion. After decades of overwhelming Israeli violence and force, bare Palestinian bodies remain Indigenous to the land, even when and where they no longer remain on the land. This is what being of the land means: the connection between people and land need not be forged through force and violence, it simply exists. It is there, enduring, steadfast, in defiance of the settler colonial violences that have expelled the people from the land. There is nothing manufactured in this connection. State structures, empires, and global (neo)colonial orders are not required to build and sustain the relationship to the land. No advanced armies or nuclear arsenals are necessary to cement the relationship. No official papers and international legal regimes are needed to officiate the existence of the relationship or the manner of its operation. In short, there does not exist a need for a claim to indivisible sovereignty; but not only that, such an indivisible claim is revealed for the real chimera that it is in decolonial sovereignties.
It is not a chimera because the practice of sovereignty fails to reach the mythical ideals of settler colonial sovereign aspirations toward indivisibility, absoluteness, and omnipresence. As I argued in chapter 1, this misses the structure of expulsion in settler colonial sovereignty, whose aspiration for indivisibility, absoluteness, and omnipresence continuously engenders, drives, and animates its divisible and limited operations. In remaining intact, the aspiration ensures the continuous violences of expulsion, making such a claim far from a chimera insofar as it continuously leads to violent expulsions. In decolonial sovereignties, the chimera of settler colonial sovereignty is revealed as a claim that is based on a shallow and empty relationship to the land, even if and when this relationship is achieved or rendered achievable—why? Because it is a claim that is only possible through force, war, and ever-continuous settler colonial violence. In contrast, decolonial sovereignties are simply of the land and do not require, need, or necessitate a settler colonial type of sovereign claim.
In letting go of the aspirations toward absolute, indivisible, and omnipresent power and domination, decolonial sovereignties engender a critique of the settler colonial violence of expulsion, challenging fragmentation, isolation, dehumanization, and lordship. Decolonial sovereignties are not an external force that shapes and molds the land/people fusion, as does settler colonial sovereignty; rather, they remain the foundational unsaid beneath life on the land, or land as life.