Dear Michael,¹

“Liberation is closer to revolutionary politics than to national aggrandizement.”² You offered this astute observation a decade ago in The Paradox of Liberation (2015). Reading these words today reminds me that Palestine is inspiring a truly revolutionary politics, far beyond any aspiration for a state. As a delusion of safety, the state can only be a feigned island of freedom amid the ocean of horrors that is the world today. Since ancient times, the land of Palestine’s divine and diverse revelations have told us as much: liberation emanating from here can empower liberation elsewhere in the world.

Your book should matter today not only because it asks us to ponder a paradox of liberation, whether apparent or real. It also offers a certain edification. Read contrapuntally, as I do here, the book could even edify you. It calls upon you to no longer be “frightened” or “reluctant”³ to pursue liberation, your own included. As a Jew concerned with emancipation, you are fully welcome to join the globally unfolding intifada. Should you disabuse yourself of Zionism,⁴ you might discover that a greater understanding of liberation awaits you. This greater understanding would open onto a plurality of paradoxes of liberation, not only one. One such monumental paradox arises when liberation takes the form of its ostensible negation: submission.

On the occasion of your 90th birthday, I wish to offer you these words as a possible “new beginning,” of the kind that you identify as necessary for any liberation.⁵ Please read my words of intended hospitality with care and patience, so as not to misconstrue my honesty for hostility.

Helene Furani

An ancient adage in Arabic, as old as the desert, says the guest is a guest of God. As you are our guest, Michael, I shall strive to welcome you in this spirit. Where this adage still lives, acts of hospitality carry the sacred in them. I pray there will be future occasions for us to give you gifts of hospitality in good health and spirits, when the land, all the land, between and beyond the river and the sea is liberated for all its peoples. For as you crucially remind us: “no nation can live for long under a foreign rule.”⁶

My first welcome gift to you, fragile as it is, is truth. For if you know the truth, as one paradigmatic book of this ancient land teaches us, it shall set you free.⁷ As liberation struggles are our focus here it is incumbent on us to summon fearlessness, and I want to speak truthfully, in an act that our Greek neighbor-ancestors called parrhesia (fearless speech). Your colleague in the métier of political theory, Hannah Arendt, was fond of reminding us of the exhortation made by the Greeks’ imperial successors, the Romans: “Fiat veritas, et pereat mundus” (Let truth be done, though the world may perish).⁸

We are witnessing the world burning today, fires set off by a flood of truths and their suppression. And while you appear to be championing freedom in The Paradox of Liberation, I cannot but sense that you have been peddling enslavement, including your own. As I read the book in this diluvian moment, propelled into sadness, pain, and suffocation, the words of another poet, Mahmoud Darwish, come to mind. I hear him speaking as Chief Seattle from the Suquamish and Duwamish tribes, asking the Europeans who invaded and upended his world, “To what abyss are you taking your people and mine?”⁹

I say “another poet” because your chatty, attractive, disarming style—as described by Edward Said nearly four decades ago in his critique of your meditation on the biblical narrative of Exodus as “ahistorical cant”¹⁰ —compelled me to hear your book as a lullaby, composed to sooth us, to close our eyes, to put us to sleep. Like an effect of the oppression that you diagnose, this lullaby engenders “passivity, the quietude, the deep lethargy of the dominated people.”¹¹ Bringing “extremely severe excisions and restrictions”¹² to bear on reality, you echo Zionism’s lulling mantras about Israel: commitment to democracy, a success story, erecting a “sovereign state” against colonial rule, Jewish self-determination finally arriving after two thousand years of exile, five invading Arab armies as a “crucial reason” for continuing inequality among Arabs and Jews, and so on.¹³

Curiously, you also attribute the incompleteness of Palestinian liberation to its liberationists’ never having attended Israeli universities, as if they even could. For me, this is a new insight. Let me counter, indeed, that they have attended universities. They have attended those universities otherwise known as Israeli prisons, even completing proverbial doctorates there. In this brief letter, I cannot begin to correct what you refuse to see about us Palestinians. Plenty of others have spoken and written volumes doing so. I want instead to say a bit more about your eloquent lullaby. One melody especially stands out for me, the melody of Jewish supremacy.

In this melody, Jews have a higher morality, their lives matter more, and they even substitute themselves for God. You croon, “within Israel proper the worst forms of abuse have been avoided,”¹⁴ and “labor Zionists in power did better than [the Algerian] FLN in avoiding authoritarianism and brutality.”¹⁵ Only the FLN “terrorize[s],”whereas the loftier French “repress[],” and the barely reproachable labor Zionists can occasionally fall from grace into mere “militancy.”¹⁶

Could you instead sing about how Jews, like all people, are capable of diabolical as well as divine acts? Might your lullaby carry a melody that prevents you from hearing how all lives matter equally? Are Jews somehow not human? Or is there perhaps no working category of “human,” only Jew and gentile, with gentiles subdivided into “with us” and “against us,” the former worthy of life only insofar as they distinguish themselves from the latter, who are worthy only of death?

For me, the shrillest bar in your melody anoints Jews as the creators and originators whom others should imitate, as if offering a gift of secular theosis, perhaps we could call it jewosis. Here, Jews wrote the first liberation story as narrated in Exodus, “the earliest example… of liberation from foreign rule.”¹⁷ Was Pharaoh’s rule foreign to Egypt? The arrogance continues with the claim that “Palestinian national liberation… is the most authentic product of liberation movements such as Labor Zionism.”¹⁸ Oy vey!

You even go so far as to “invite” us Palestinians to “look[] on,” “do the same,” and “imitate,” cajoling us to imitate the imitators.¹⁹ Mein Gott! My most generous reading of your invitation is that your deification of “the Jews” has enslaved you, obfuscating your ability to see Zionism’s congenital moral travesty. But you may also truly mean that you think we should achieve our liberation by taking someone else’s bride: stealing another’s land, displacing its inhabitants, and founding a nation-state based on superiority over and exclusion of the natives. Allahu Akbar!

But your lullaby is not a complete retreat from reality. I have managed here and there to detect some truth in it. I agree that “liberation is an ongoing project” and “a very long process, not a single battle,” for “it does not happen all at once and for everybody in the world, it happens again and again.”²⁰ You are also heading in a helpful direction when you argue that “what we should talk about now is Palestinian national liberation.”²¹ But I would add that Palestinian liberation exceeds the “national” (“none of us are free until Palestine is free”), and we should be doing liberation, not only talking about it. Of course, Zionists have done, and especially undone, plenty, so permit me to thank you for letting us, Palestinians, “the group that comes next,” have a place in line.²²

Your main thesis that liberation struggles can give rise to a paradox is also insightful. Yet rather than “the paradox” that you identify as arising from your assumption that “the liberationists” are in conflict with “the traditionalists,” I see another one as far more fundamental. It can arise any time anyone striving for freedom builds a home with the master’s tools, such as when Zionism perpetuates domination every time it claims to seek its negation, an aping cautioned against by Ahad Ha’am well before the founding of Zionism’s calamitous state. But for the abject glee we have been witnessing among Zionists who revel in our humiliation and annihilation in the concentration camp that is Gaza, we might have seen this as only aping. Perhaps in this instance your elevation of Zionism is warranted, for it has outdone the aped.

As a “success” in obtaining “normalcy,” Zionism is perhaps better narrated not as an epic of liberation, but as a “larger, sadder story… of accommodation” to “foreign rule.”²³ By this I mean making normal a deadly delusion, namely the ideal, or rather the idol of political sovereignty.  Zionism’s founders may have left Europe, but they carried Europe “in their baggage.”²⁴ They carried that melancholy continent’s idols and maladies. In “negating” exile, Zionists adopted oppression including “auto-oppression”²⁵ and brought on themselves an even more nefarious exile, exile from theistic faith and its prophetic patrimony in pursuit of a new golden calf—“the coldest of all cold monsters”—political sovereignty in the form of the modern nation-state.²⁶

Though an avowed atheist, Ben Gurion declared, “The [British] mandate is not our bible. The Bible is our mandate.”²⁷ Thus he advanced a movement that has brought about the degradation of a vast living prophetic tradition. In your study of liberation, like Ben Gurion, you curiously seem to overlook the value of prophetic inheritance while adopting an “authoritative role”²⁸ in selling the cult of Zionism to “the masses”²⁹ in the service of imperial power, reminiscent of the “court Jew”³⁰ you so openly disparage.

Rather than a “return of the negated”³¹ —as you refer already in your subtitle to the “religious counterrevolution”—another paradox of Zionism may stem from its founding principle of violence. What we are witnessing today is only a more extreme iteration of violence repeatedly activated and reactivated, beginning with the rhetorical erasure of the people who lived on the land Zionism claimed for itself alone. The principle may already be turning against its principal, just as magic turned against the magicians in Pharaoh’s court.

The numbing conflation of “the tradition” with “religious faith”³² has led you to consider “politicized religion” (an unfortunate modern mis-description) a “pathology” by definition, whereas you only acknowledge that “national liberation” can possibly have a “pathology.”³³ In claiming that “transformation requires the defeat of the people’s religious leaders,” you leave out an entire slew of liberators, from Latin America’s liberation theologians to Sojourner Truth, from Martin Luther-King to Malcolm X, from Gandhi to Jeanne d’Arc, not to mention Islamic resistance. Would Moses have led his people out of Egypt without “politicized religion?” In your identification of pathologies, perhaps you should remember the historic fact that Nazism made a name for itself by championing  “nationalism” and not “religion.”

I have been striving to present you with the gift of truth, in Arabic haqiqah, but it has little merit without its constituent, haq, or justice. And so out of a hospitality attuned to the land’s prophetic patrimony, specifically its Noahic voice, I wish to offer you justice as well, braided with truth, made into a rope to lead you out of the deluge, to allow you to jump ship, should you, a youth of 90, decide to start anew.

You might discover a capacity for discernment and speak not of “the tradition” but of traditions in the plural, for even those who seek to defeat “the tradition” are inevitably working from within a specific tradition. Truth and justice intertwined might lead you to awaken from your lullaby, with its ensnaring duality, which pits “liberationists” against “zealots” and “traditionalists.” Should you hold onto this rope for long enough and begin to climb, you would find yourself leaving Zionism’s sinking ship and boarding the ark of Palestinian liberation. In this diluvian moment when no one is spared, Palestinian liberation can be your ark too.

You observe that liberation is “reiterative,”³⁴ so this ark may promise a greater liberation to come. Trusting God to lift the ark safely above a drowning flood, Noah represents one iteration of liberation. Recall another iteration from Hajar, the enslaved wife of Abraham and mother of Ismail. Under conditions of abandonment and loneliness, in a parched landscape, she sought to prevent Ismail’s dissolution and death. Her faith in God was her freedom. Hajar’s profound fidelity to God’s oneness and uniqueness, her radical trust that God would not forsake her and her child, liberated her. Neither deadly flood nor deadly thirst deprived Noah and Hajar from founding life anew. Both Noah and Hajar knew that through submitting to God, they put themselves on a path to freedom, freedom to forge life anew amidst menacing despair and death, perceptual, corporeal, and political.

In Mecca, Hajar’s striving is reenacted year in and year out. This truth is one that women (and men) stand to discover any time they enact Hajar’s paradigm of liberation, frantically scurrying between Mt. Safa and Mt. Marwa in search of water. In this Hajj ritual known as as-Sa‘ay (meaning striving, pursuing, scurrying), they remember this paradox of freedom with and through their souls and bodies. They live out Hajar’s freedom from fear and refusal to surrender to despair because her ultimate surrender was to God and only to God. To thus submit to the Creator propels the self to thinking and to action. Hajar’s story of ancient persistence in finding life-giving water coincides with the founding of a new life, as demanded of any liberation.

You also note how “the oppressed people [need] a new beginning,”³⁵ that they need their “consciousness” to be “raised.”³⁶ Yet because, as you say, national liberation is “partial and particular,” another gift is yours for the taking, the universal enterprise of emancipation known as Islam. You need not “look[] on” nor “imitate.”³⁷ You only need to look inside, within you, to the deep within you, and dedicate yourself to starting over. Once you do that, once you dedicate yourself to your awakening in God’s ultimate even unfathomable reality, all lullabies—and their ensnaring dualities—will sound superfluous and stupefying.

Upon waking, you will come to discover that you no longer need to deprive yourself of the genuine possibility of conceiving and experiencing “tradition” as potentially a space and time of freedom. As the annual “ingathering”³⁸ that is the pilgrimage to Mecca reminds us, liberation can look, sound, and feel like its ostensible opposite, namely, submission. In cultivated submission to the divine, people still momentarily gather as a composite into one human ummatic fabric.

You may be “frightened and reluctant” to board this ark of universal freedom that is Islam, for, as you say, “accommodating” elites are fearful in the face of a liberation whose initial attempts “are repressed, often brutally.”³⁹ But as it was for Hajar, the very thing you fear may enable you to walk a path to freedom, letting self-aggrandizement, national and otherwise, fall by the wayside.

Salamat,

Khaled

1. This letter was read aloud to Michael Walzer at a conference held in honor of his 90th birthday at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute on November 30, 2025. [↩]
2. Michael Walzer, The Paradox of Liberation: Secular Revolutions and Religious Counterrevolutions (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), 5. [↩]
3. Walzer, Paradox, 4. [↩]
4. You express “sympathy” for Zionism as a “transformative enterprise,” yet you seem to vindicate its 1948-1966 military governance of the Palestinians remaining inside the new Jewish state as a necessary post-liberation phase. Indeed, you go on to note that Israel met liberal “world standards” by having “opposition parties, a highly critical press, and free universities,” while adumbrating its ongoing subjugation of all Palestinians under its rule through a battery of emergency laws first enacted by Britain to quash the 1936-1939 peasant rebellion (Walzer, Paradox, 69). [↩]
5. Walzer, Paradox, 8. [↩]
6. Walzer, Paradox, 2. [↩]
7. John 8:32: “And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” [↩]
8. Hannah Arendt, “Truth and Politics” in Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (Penguin Classics, 2006), 224. [↩]
9. The full question, which I am paraphrasing, goes, “To where, O Master of the Whites are, you taking my people and yours, to which wide abyss are you, this robot loaded with fighter jets and aircraft carriers, ascending?” It appears in the poem “Khutbat ‘al-Hindi al-Ahmar’ ma Qabla al-Akhira Amama ar-Rajulli al-Abyad,” in Mahmoud Darwish, Ahada ‘Ashara Kawkaban (Dar al-‘Arabi, 1993), 51; my translation. [↩]
10. Edward W. Said, “Michael Walzer’s ‘Exodus and Revolution’: A Canaanite Reading,” Arab Studies Quarterly 8, no. 3 (1986): 295 [↩]
11. Walzer, Paradox, 2. [↩]
12. Said identified this form of obfuscation in Walzer’s work nearly forty years ago. See Said, “Michael Walzer’s ‘Exodus,’” 291. [↩]
13. Walzer, Paradox, 35, 100. [↩]
14. Walzer, Paradox, 98. [↩]
15. Walzer, Paradox, 97. [↩]
16. Walzer, Paradox, 14, 9, 61. [↩]
17. Walzer, Paradox, x. [↩]
18. Walzer, Paradox, 102. [↩]
19. Walzer, Paradox, 102, 75, 102. [↩]
20. Walzer, Paradox, 145, 132, 119. [↩]
21. Walzer, Paradox, 35. [↩]
22. Walzer, Paradox, 102. [↩]
23. Walzer, Paradox, 2. [↩]
24. Walzer, Paradox, 33. [↩]
25. Walzer, Paradox, 39, 1. [↩]
26. Friedrich Nietzsche, “The New Idol,” in Thus Spake Zarathustra, translated by Thomas Common (Wordsworth Classics, 1997), 45. [↩]
27. This quote is popularly attributed to David Ben Gurion, likely a paraphrase of comments he made before the Peel Commission on January 7, 1937. [↩]
28. Walzer, Paradox, 6. [↩]
29. Walzer, Paradox, 41. [↩]
30. Walzer, Paradox, 126. [↩]
31. Walzer, Paradox, 56. [↩]
32. Walzer, Paradox, 29, 133. [↩]
33. Walzer, Paradox, 102, 103, 102. [↩]
34. Walzer, Paradox, 102, 119. [↩]
35. Walzer, Paradox, 8. [↩]
36. Walzer, Paradox, 4. [↩]
37. Walzer, Paradox, 102, 45. [↩]
38. Walzer, Paradox, 129. [↩]
39. Walzer, Paradox, 4, 2. [↩]