Dylan Saba
The following is the text of a short lecture, delivered at the Creative Time Summit on September 21, 2024. The convening, titled States of Emergence: Land After Property and Catastrophe, gathered artists and thinkers engaging in political work.
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What is the difference between a structure and an event? I’d like to posit that this is a geological question, or better yet, that geology reveals this to be a non-question.
There are things that appear to be structures and yet, on further inspection, are revealed to be events. Let’s take, for instance, a mountain. At a given moment, for a given lifetime, a mountain is a structure: it is a massive, solid, immovable fixture of our ecology. But mountains are formed by tectonic plate convergence, land that crumples and folds as massive bodies of earth crash into each other. In geological time, a mountain is an event, a collision of objects in motion.
There are also things that appear to us as events that can only be properly understood as the product of structural forces. An earthquake: the shaking up of everything, a pure event of unmappable contingencies, apparently arriving from nowhere. But we know that earthquakes do not come from nowhere—they are the release of energy, from tectonic plates locked in structural relation, building up pressure over time until a quantitative threshold is crossed, causing a major qualitative shift.
We say the Nakba is a structure. Nakba is the Arabic word for catastrophe, and has a specific meaning for Palestinians: it refers to the dispossession caused by and essential to Zionism, the political project to establish a Jewish ethnostate on the land of historic Palestine. This dispossession, though, takes shape through particular events at particular times: 1948, 1967, 2023.
The purpose of calling it a structure is to name, not just the particular acts of violence, but the pressures that produced them. And what are they? In a word, colonialism: the conquest by the so-called Western world of non-Western lands, the extraction of natural resources and labor, the imposition of racial hierarchies to justify both, the cancerous reproduction of those hierarchies into all kinds of fascisms. Rule by the West over the rest, that matured into an imperial world-system under the aegis of its financial and military center, the United States. The free flow of capital and the strictly regulated movement of oppressed people.
The point is not to distinguish between causes and effects—which would be to reproduce the false distinction between structures and events—but to show that the constellation of forces through which causes and effects flow is nothing other than modernity itself.
This is the dilemma of Palestine: Its condition is the condition of the modern world. Colonialism produced Zionism and reproduces the dispossession of Palestine. That is not aberrant: colonialism remains the structure of the world order, and from the perspective of modernity Israel must survive and must win. This is the official lesson of modern history: the native does not win, and if the native somehow wins, they have in fact lost, and doubly so. This perspective can contain affective multitudes: perhaps it is a glorious modernity, perhaps a tragic one, often a combination of both. From the perspective of modernity, colonialism can be lamented, but never opposed.
How does one oppose the world? This is the question revolutionary Palestinians—in fact revolutionaries everywhere—have been asking for generations. At the risk of mixing metaphors, I’d like to introduce another way of conceiving the relationship between structure and event, which is the relationship between a sentence and its expression. Structure is the form of content, how the words fit together and relate to one another. Yet meaning can only be conveyed in time, through the experience of a sentence being heard or read as a chronological sequence of words. A sentence is both a structure and an event. And if modernity is a sentence, Palestine, and all colonized people, are those who have been sentenced. We are witnessing their sentencing, their condemnation. Ironic, right, being asked to condemn the Palestinians. Are they not already condemned?
If the Palestinian struggle is one for liberation, then, it is a struggle to destroy the world, to break the sentence into fragments, to break open the earth too, and to build from these shards of language and land a bridge to the future: a new world, with new meanings—new structures, expressed through new events.
The tools we have with which to usher in a new world are limited. Mine is primarily the pen, for others it may be a paintbrush, for still others an RPG. I was asked to speak about the law—I am an attorney by profession—and the most I can say about the law is that it is one of these tools. Like the other tools, it is itself limited by the pressures that produce it. The modern international legal system and its institutional framework were crafted to sustain the colonial world order and imprint Euro-American hegemony with moral legitimacy.
Thus the only way to squeeze real, revolutionary justice from it is to pervert it, to turn it against itself. Can you turn a sentence against itself? Can you turn violence against itself? The revolutionary asks, and history answers.
Several months ago, we tried to pervert the law. The International Court of Justice had ordered Israel to allow much needed humanitarian aid into the Gaza Strip, which is under military blockade, its people facing both starvation and the brutal armed assault of the occupation forces. The United States prevented any enforcement of this dictate at the Security Council. Hailing from around the world, a number of humanitarians, lawyers, activists, and journalists, myself included, joined the Freedom Flotilla Coalition in an attempt to carry out the law ourselves. We loaded up several ships with over 5,000 pounds of food, water and medicine and prepared to confront the Israeli military, who planned to raid our ship. But we were never able to set sail. Through diplomatic sabotage, the US and Israel prevailed and prevented our mission. We failed, and Palestine’s sentence remains intact for now.
But modernity cannot last forever, and the crises we see everywhere around us are important signs that the new world is aging fast. How we navigate the transition to what comes next—which revolutions we support, and which we oppose—will define the rest of our lives. Thank you.♦
