Palestine in a World on Fire: The biggest crises of our time explored by the world's leading progressive thinkers

Much of the optimism in Palestine in a World on Fire, edited by Katherine Natanel and Ilan Pappé, makes for difficult reading.

While published in 2024, this anthology was composed at a different time, based on conversations that historian Ilan Pappé held in 2021 and 2022 with 11 famous thinkers: economists, authors, historians, politicians, and critics.

Back then, the world was certainly on fire — we had the emergence of COVID-19 and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine; wildfires in Greece and devastating monsoons in India; the Sheikh Jarrah evictions and Shireen Abu Akleh’s murder — but today, by comparison, it feels like we’re being thrown into the sun.

One of the few mentions of optimism that still rings true in 2025 comes from British sociologist Paul Gilroy.

The intensification of climate catastrophe displacement, he suggests, will lead to an intensification of racist, nationalist identities.

However, it will also boost “other kinds of attachments, new varieties of connectedness and association, new kinds of acting in concert [that] will become apparent to us as these pressures grow and intensify”.

One of these emerging attachments is surely what Ilan Pappé refers to in his afterword as “global Palestine”.

This, he writes, is “a coalition of civil societies from around the world” who fight for a just future and show deep solidarity with the Palestinian struggle against settler-colonial apartheid.

Yet while “global Palestine” is attacked in the streets and on college campuses, there is another collective that Pappé calls “global Israel,” which includes “most governments of the Global North, some governments of the Global South, dominant media, and mainstream academia, aided by multinational corporations, security companies, military industries, and other capitalist interests”.

If the world is on fire, then “global Israel” is spraying gasoline onto the flames. What then, Pappé asks the eleven thinkers, is it possible to do? How can we dampen those flames and create spaces for liberation, justice, and safety — for Palestinians and all of humanity?

Finding a way forward

Most of the thinkers in the collection struggle to articulate a positive way forward.

This struggle is particularly evident in Pappé’s conversation with former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, titled On Crisis and Disobedience.

Varoufakis left the government in 2015 just before his party surrendered to the International Monetary Fund, the European Bank, and the European Commission.

He notes that the Greek government not only agreed to these organisations’ financial demands but also “less than 24 hours after my resignation and our government’s surrender to the Troika, the Greek foreign minister arrived in … Tel Aviv to inaugurate a long, reprehensible love-in between Netanyahu and a Greek ‘leftist’ government that had hitherto pledged solidarity to the Palestinians[.]”

In his chapter, Varoufakis also gives a clear and useful explanation of the field of economics and why he believes we have moved away from capitalism and are living under an economic system he calls “techno feudalist”.

Yet despite the clarity, it is hard to see a way to rally against these powerful anti-democratic forces. He notes that while Greek “civil society is still very much pro-Palestinian”, the Greek government is, by contrast, one of the “best allies of Israel”.

He ends by asserting: “That we, the ‘little’ people, have the power.” Yet how? And by what means can we exercise it?

Pappé asks most of the thinkers what they recommend people do. Joining the movement for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions is mentioned by politician Mustafa Barghouti and several others.

Nadine El-Enany recommends that people in the UK refuse “everything that comes with the Prevent duty”, and Judith Butler suggests we push back against “forms of dehumanization”. Meanwhile, the late Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury says we need to find a “new beginning,” adding, “You need a dream.”

Each of these conversations focuses on a “global Palestine” through the lens of the speaker’s specialisation.

El-Enany, a poet and law professor, aims to reframe how we think about legality in her chapter, On Colonial Violence and Anti-Colonial Resistance.

Her chapter feels particularly relevant now, a year after the ICJ ruled that there was a plausible case for genocide, and several months after the ICC issued warrants for the arrest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. These unenforced rulings show the flimsiness of international law.

El-Enany reframes a discussion of the law. As she writes, it is “not some neutral thing that does the work of ‘justice’”. Rather, laws have been written to protect select interests and select “humans”.

For this reason, she says, we can’t make use of existing legal systems on their terms.

Instead, she suggests that we refuse the criminalisation of certain activities, such as irregular migration. Instead, she suggests, we should see this movement across borders as anticolonial resistance.

Whose human rights?

In her chapter, El-Enany also interrogates humanitarian law, asking, “Can we say for certain that we’re talking about the same thing when we say ‘human’?” Several other contributors question whether “human” and “human rights” are useful categories.

In her conversation, On Humanity, Violence, and Imagination, Judith Butler asks, “If Palestinians want to say, ‘Palestinians are humans just like everyone else,’ which version of human are we invoking at that moment?”

In Histories for the Future, Paul Gilroy outlines how human rights discourse in the West created different sorts of “human”.

Our idea of human rights solidified as the Enlightenment flourished, he writes, while it cast its shadow over “non-enlightened” spaces such as slavery and colonial rule.

“Human rights” discourse came into being along with the militarized borders of modern nation-states. Human rights are insiders’ rights.

Thus, a person might have human rights inside a certain set of borders, but not while they’re in a stateless space such as the Mediterranean, or a colonized one like Gaza or the West Bank.

As Gilroy notes, Western human-rights discourse “created categories of humanity and infrahumanity ‘over there’” — where “over there” could be a prison camp in Louisiana, a black site in Lithuania, or an entire postcolonial nation.

After reading Gilroy’s chapter, it is difficult to see how we could have any true human rights in a world with borders.

Instead, we have parochial local rights, where rights are only for people with certain citizenship. There are no “human rights” for student activists Mahmoud Khalil and Rumeysa Ozturk.

The 11 conversations in Palestine in a World on Fire provide important background on topics as varied as the limits of compassion, from Gabor Maté; the limits of the law from El-Enany; the field of economics from Varoufakis; and political realities from Mustafa Barghouti.

Still, for anyone looking to this collection for a way forward through the fire, it’s hard to find. Perhaps the most convincing optimism is Gilroy’s, when he discusses the “new kinds of acting in concert”.

“So I’m optimistic about that,” Gilroy says, after outlining the emergent alliances that might rise up in a burning world, “if it’s possible to be optimistic about something that’s so terrifying.”

M Lynx Qualey is a writer whose primary focus is Arabic literature and its translation. She publishes in The Guardian, Qantara, The Chicago Tribune and on the daily blog she edits, www.arablit.org

Follow her on X: @mlynxqualey