Blog • November 29, 2025 • By Anastasia
As Palestinians continue to resist the brutality of the Zionist colonial project, as they remain steadfast in their heroic struggle for freedom and unwavering in their resilience in the face of genocide, occupation and ontological erasure, I am reminded of Ghassan Kanafani’s analysis of peace as capitulation. I am reminded of the Thawabet: the right of resistance, the right to self determination, and the right of return as non-negotiable principles guiding the liberation struggle.
I don’t think that solidarity is possible without a firm understanding of the Thawabet and its principles. These principles necessitate a staunch opposition to settler colonialism and ethnonationalist supremacy in Palestine, but we would be remiss to not harness these principles as a guiding light to shape our solidarity with oppressed people everywhere. And I believe that when these non-negotiable principles are compromised in one context, these principles and rights enshrined therein become negotiable in the Palestinian context too.
Without an internally consistent decolonial position, our liberation movements are doomed. Claiming to stand with Palestinians in their liberation struggle, whilst compromising on other liberation struggles, reveals an internally contradictory position, and a meaningless “solidarity” merely concerned with optics, rather than with uncompromising principles. It also reveals support for indigenous people only insofar as they are seen as “victims”, as opposed to agents of full decolonisation.
It is my belief that when we compromise on the right of return, deem repatriation as “unrealistic”, and prioritise settler emotions over indigenous rights in one context, we create a precedent of selective return: we reduce the right of return to a mere privilege that can be negotiated away, and in doing so, normalise the imperial logic of permanent conquest in Palestine- the idea that once a colonial power changes the facts on the ground long enough, justice must yield to stability or realism.
It is also my understanding that when we look at a context outside of Palestine, and accept imperialist, externally-imposed solutions that treat partition as inevitable and final, we legitimize the logic that partition is inevitable in Palestine, and that a two state solution is the only realistic or viable outcome.
Inconsistency threatens genuine freedom everywhere. Because when we weaponise imperfect victimhood in one context, we affirm the idea that the right of return is negotiable when displaced Palestinians are not “progressive enough”.
And when we say “it’s complicated” or create exceptions to liberation in one context, we fracture the internationality of the anti-imperialist struggle, and create an ideological pretext for why Palestinians must also settle for less than liberation.
To be clear: when we chose the route of partitionist liberalism and capitulation in Cyprus, when we chose bizonality over true equality, we do not only compromise our own liberation, but also the liberation of Palestine and of all colonised nations across the globe. We cannot defend imperialist solutions in Cyprus without strengthening the underlying colonial logic that will inevitably be used to deny liberation in Palestine and elsewhere.
In this context, claims that Cyprus and Palestine are “too different” to be uttered in the same sentence is an ideological move in the service of imperialism, and is invoked precisely at the moment where drawing connections would expose the dangerous compromises so many of us are willing to accept in our own liberation movement. Invoking Palestine only as a colonial tragedy, whilst refusing to let its liberation principles challenge other situations of colonial oppression, is nothing more than an instrumentalisation and appropriation of the Palestinian struggle. Which leads me back to the definition of solidarity. Recognising the revolutionary potential of the Thawabet, and how it can inspire us all, means holding our own struggle to the same anti-imperialist principles and red lines that Palestinians themselves have demanded as non-negotiable. It means taking Palestinian political thought seriously enough to let it unsettle our own struggle and expose our own shortcomings. This is the essence of internationalist solidarity.
To clarify, drawing connections between struggles is not about collapsing difference, or about claiming identical histories and identical manifestations of occupation; it’s about identifying the shared imperial logics that operate across different contexts and ultimately shape these various material realities. In both Cyprus and Palestine, this shared imperial logic is unmistakable: it dictates how occupation is justified, how partition is sold as peace, and how settler feelings are elevated above indigenous self-determination. And so when people insist on the absolute uniqueness or exceptionalism of a struggle, what they’re really doing is removing it from any shared anti-imperialist political framework of solidarity. This fragmentation only serves empire: it prevents us from seeing colonialism as a system of recurring patterns, methods and justifications across space and time. If we can’t see these recurring patterns, we fail to realise that striking the system in one spot will weaken the system all over. And if we are unable to recognise the overarching system, we will compromise on liberation in one context, naively believing that this will not compromise liberation everywhere else.
