Outside In
Palestine in South Africa
nick malherbe and SHAHNAAZ SUFFLA
Our inner worlds are made in large part by the world around us. What is outside is constitutive of what is inside. This rather ordinary insight is of concern to psychoanalysts who take seriously what happens when the subject represses the traumatic traces of the outside world, traces that—if acknowledged—affect how the subject understands the world and their position in relation to it. The entwining and enmeshment of the outside and the inside is especially acute during atrocity. In treating the “war neuroses” experienced by soldiers returning from the First World War, Freud and his colleagues saw firsthand how the outside gets in. So did Fanon, who analyzed how the brutality of French imperialism shaped the psychic lives of Algerian nationalists and French colonists. In an especially unsettling case study, Fanon recounts how a French police inspector tasked with carrying out torture repeatedly acted violently towards his family. The inspector sought treatment so that he could continue torturing undisturbed. He was in effect demanding the impossible: a therapeutic intervention that would bar the outside from entering in.
Separating the outside from the inside has long been part of settler-colonial border-making. By violently imposing borders onto lands and bodies, settler-colonial powers seek to determine an outside that cannot be tolerated from within. The border imposed between the outside and the inside represents a fixing into place of colonial logic. At the border, “Rigidity means death,” as Gloria Anzaldúa teaches us. Accordingly, emancipation is made beyond the border, outside of false distinctions between the inside and the outside. Fredric Jameson writes that “it is not too much to say that the concept of freedom thus permits us to transcend one of the most fundamental contradictions in modern existence: that between the outside and the inside, between public and private, work and leisure, the sociological and the psychological, between my being-for-others and my being-for-myself, between the political and the poetic, objectivity and subjectivity, the collective and the solitary—between society and the monad.” Refusing settler-colonial logic is, then, to refuse to look away from the enmeshment of the inside and the outside.
Zionist ideology has long claimed that Palestinians are never inside, casting them as a perpetually outside people. Palestinians have never believed this claim, and if those of us outside of Palestine ever did, it has become nearly impossible to continue doing so. For over seventeen months, we have watched a genocide take place in Palestine. We have been confronted with what Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian speaks of as ashlaa’: scattered body parts, the dismembered flesh/body of the colonized. “The ashlaa’,” Shalhoub-Kevorkian insists, “defy settler colonialism by reflecting back its racialized violence and the ossified structures and relations that accompany and foster it.” Ashlaa’ refuse Zionism’s corporal and material erasure of Palestinians. Ashlaa’ make visible to all of us the violence of the Zionist entity, violence that was never outside of this entity.
The genocide has made its way into many psychoanalytic consulting rooms outside of Palestine, a rightfully unsettling and insistent presence that rightfully refuses to go unheard. In therapy, people the world over are mourning the tens of thousands being murdered in Palestine. Some of us come into the consulting room with an unshakable sense of hopelessness. Some with anger. Others bemoan feeling intensely alienated from loved ones who remain silent or in support of the genocide. Of course, the struggle of the Palestinian people is interior to therapy rooms in Palestine. Many times, quite literally. In Psychoanalysis Under Occupation, Lara Sheehi and Stephen Sheehi offer an account from a clinician working in Bethlehem whose therapy session was penetrated by teargas being used by Israeli soldiers against Palestinians—the outside announcing itself with a suffocating insistence.
For those of us committed to an emancipatory political program, or even the vaguest sense of social justice, the genocide has placed Palestinian liberation at the forefront of our freedom dreams. It has become difficult to dream of anything but Palestine. Palestine is everywhere. All around the world, we are seeing strikes, protests, vigils, encampments, demonstrations, and teach-ins for Palestine. We are also seeing murders, assaults, imprisonment, dismissals, deportations, smear campaigns, and other forms of persecution against those who refuse to be complicit in the repression of the Palestinian people, who are unable to bear having Palestinians cast outside of humanity.
The genocide in Palestine reveals something about the context in which people find themselves. We write from South Africa, where the legacies of colonialism’s inside/outside border-making remain clear for all to see. Spatial apartheid continues to impose a hierarchical grid on life in South Africa, with food, water, health, shelter, and land denied to large swaths of the country’s mostly Black population. Mass insurgency, organized abandonment, and violent state repression are defining features of contemporary South African life, with poverty and inequality becoming further entrenched with each passing year. One might assume that South Africa’s own domestic circumstances would preclude South Africans from looking beyond themselves, from letting the outside in and collapsing colonial border logics. And, indeed, this is sometimes the case, as exemplified by disheartening instances of violence against foreign nationals living in South Africa. But in large part, this has not been the case with Palestine.
Over the last seventeen months, collectives like the Palestine Solidarity Alliance, South African Jews for a Free Palestine, the South African Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) Coalition, and Africa4Palestine have organized marches, boycotts, demonstrations, labor actions, cultural events, encampments, and educational sessions in solidarity with the Palestinian people. For each week of the genocide that passes, people in South Africa have shown up in their dozens, their hundreds, and sometimes their thousands for Palestine. And while the scale and the consistency of this solidarity have been extraordinary—if also, at times, uneven—solidarity with Palestine is not new in South Africa. Already in the 1950s, anti-apartheid movements like the African National Congress—now the country’s ruling party—and the Black Consciousness Movement stood defiantly with Palestinian freedom fighters. The dismantling of South African apartheid in 1994 did not diminish solidarity among South Africans committed to dismantling Israeli apartheid. Workers, students, trade unions, and civil societies in post-1994 South Africa have, in different ways, remained in solidarity with Palestine.
Since the onset of the genocide, it has been almost impossible to ignore Palestine in South Africa. Keffiyehs, Palestinian flags, watermelons, and images of Handala adorn community assemblies, cultural gatherings, and family homes. Buildings, vehicles, and monuments across the country have been covered in murals, stickers, and paintings in support of Palestine. And of course, Palestine looms large in South Africa’s activist spaces. Climate justice rallies, union meetings, urban and rural struggles for land, feminist teach-ins, and community-building workshops have all taken up Palestinian solidarity in different ways. It is with Palestine that social movements across the country appear to have committed themselves to localized struggles with renewed, internationalist vigor. The message seems clear: to repress the global dimension of colonial capitalism is to weaken our domestic struggles for liberation. The inside strengthened by way of an embraced outside.
We might ask ourselves why South Africa’s solidarity with Palestine has endured like it has. One answer to this question was recently offered by Sisonke Msimang: “South Africans often talk about the debt we owe to those who fought and died for our freedom. To this we must add a new set of responsibilities. We must now begin to ask what we owe those who live in conditions of oppression and injustice to which we are so highly attuned. We must ask too, what we owe to the future.” Freedom disappears if it is confined to the inside, if it represses the outside to which it owes its existence. Today, it is in Palestine—in our responsibility to the future—that we in South Africa are confronted with an image of unfreedom, an image marked by a fundamental uncanniness which speaks to “that species of the frightening that goes back to what was once well known and had long been familiar.”
There is, of course, a portion of the South African population that remains committed to the repression of the Palestinian people; South Africans who insist that Palestine be cast aside, kept outside. This too is not new. Resemblances between apartheid legislation in South Africa and Israel are striking. As Haidar Eid observes: “Every law enacted during the South African apartheid system has a corresponding law in Israel.” The two apartheid states would eventually collaborate on economic and military fronts in the 1970s, despite global sanctions against South Africa at the time. In contemporary South Africa, it is certainly commendable that the presidential cabinet has publicly denounced the genocide; however, there is much more to be done as BDS has not yet been taken up in official policy and Israel also remains one of South Africa’s key trading partners. Perhaps most perniciously, South Africa is responsible for enormous coal exports to Israel, coal that is in effect “used to fuel genocide.” And despite the strong support for Palestine demonstrated by the South African public, many of the leading political parties in the country’s 2024 national election were either vague or altogether dismissive about the Palestine cause. If Palestinian liberation has left its mark on South Africa, so, too, has the oppression of Palestinians.
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Since the genocide began, South Africa’s most visible display of solidarity with Palestine has been at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), where legal experts and government officials charged Israeli leaders with genocide and war crimes in Gaza. The lawyers were steadfast in connecting Palestinian oppression to the broader colonial project, the same project under which the majority of South Africans suffered and against whose enduring legacy they continue to struggle. Throughout the court proceedings, the lawyers repeatedly used the word “apartheid.” As both Israel’s and South Africa’s apartheid states were founded in 1948, this signifier made clear that these two regimes form part of a single colonial logic, with neither state being outside of the other. Of course, evoking apartheid also calls forth the anti-apartheid struggles of South Africa and Palestine. These struggles, forged inside of these outsides, have long drawn inspiration from one another, connecting through shared experiences of racial, land-based, and state oppressions, with each struggle reminding the other of its incompleteness.
It would be a mistake to consider South Africa’s legal team as representative of the South African government. Many of the lawyers at the ICJ have been thorns in the side of the South African state, demanding land redistribution, insisting on free public education and healthcare, and fighting parliamentary corruption. Further underscoring its role as an outside force operating from within state apparatuses, South Africa’s legal team was joined by an Irish barrister. The image of South Africa, Ireland, and Palestine standing alongside one another served as a visceral invocation of anti-colonial internationalism. Later, in an effort to protect the ICJ rulings, several Global South nations joined South Africa to found what became known as the Hague Group: a unity of colonized and formerly colonized outsides.
Back in South Africa, few of us believed that the ICJ case would end the genocide in Palestine, let alone the occupation. The struggle continues, as it always has. Yet, many of us also understood the case as a corollary of our solidarity and mobilization efforts. Across the country, people exhibited a kind of pride that, although not nationalistic, seemed rooted in ideas and aspirations of what the nation could become. South Africans tend to reserve this sort of pride for sporting events, but even these were no longer as they once were. A few months after the initial ICJ hearing, the Palestinian men’s national football team played an exhibition match in Cape Town. Athlone Stadium was awash with hundreds of flags, banners, and signs in support of Palestine. As Ron Krabill and Herman Wasserman wrote: “It might as well have been a home game.”
People in South Africa have remained in solidarity with the people of Palestine. So have others from around the world, many of whom have been punished for doing so. The genocidal slaughter in Palestine has continued unabated. What has not continued, though, is the ideological strength of an imagined—and desired—division between anti-colonial resistance efforts, of an unbreachable separation between what is outside and what is inside. The idea of an unrupturable border that isolates struggles for liberation from one another is a fallacy now more apparent than ever, jettisoning illusions of divisibility and insular sovereignties. This insight was won through collective struggle, not psychoanalysis. Regardless, for some, psychoanalysis may offer tools for understanding, probing, and unsettling coloniality’s violent disavowal of the outside.
Freud undoubtedly offers us a number of important tools for assessing the intractability of the inside and the outside. Freudian psychoanalysis in many regards pivots on revealing the inexistence of a self-contained inside. That which is, is always undermined or structured by that which is without, many times unconsciously so. Yet, at the same time, interrogating the borders that colonial powers set up between the inside and the outside compels us to go beyond Freud. As Edward Said made clear, “Freud was deeply gripped by what stands outside the limits of reason, convention, and, of course, consciousness: his whole work in that sense is about the Other, but always about an Other recognizable mainly to readers who are well acquainted with the classics of Graeco-Roman and Hebrew Antiquity and what was later to derive from them in the various modern European languages, literatures, sciences, religions and cultures with which he himself was well acquainted.” Struggles for liberation are always outside struggles. To read these struggles solely in relation to self-contained familiarity—in relation only to what is inside—is to miss what these struggles teach us about freedom. It is to miss their emancipatory insistence on the outside within.
To resist oppression under the sign of Palestine calls on us to resist all oppression. It is to resist collectively, and it is to resist with an internationalist insurgent consciousness. It is also to resist bravely and in a manner that makes us brave. It is sometimes to resist with hope, but it is very often to resist hopelessly. Reflecting on the defiance exhibited in Mpondoland, South Africa, Hugo ka Canham writes: “We witness a hopelessness that does not surrender to helplessness.” The same might be said of those fighting for the indivisible liberation of Palestine. For those of us outside of Palestine, this is not a fight to determine the future of Palestine from the outside, but to insist that Palestinians have the right to live, to breathe, to love, and to forge their own futures from within conditions of their choosing. From within planetary conceptions of decolonization. From the river to the sea.