This piece appeared in the Fall 2025 issue of NACLA’s quarterly print magazine, the NACLA Report. Subscribe in print today!
“Where should we go after the last border?”
—“Earth Presses Against Us” by Mahmoud Darwish
His Kalashnikov was a ballpoint pen. Ghassan Kanafani (1936-1972), the Palestinian refugee, journalist, short story writer, and member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, waged revolution with his writing. In 1956, a young Kanafani wrote a short story in epistolary form titled, “Letter from Gaza.” The protagonist, addressing a dear Palestinian friend displaced to the United States named Mustafa, describes why he decided against joining him abroad despite their initial plans. He recalls preparing for departure from a bombed Gaza, “more cramped than the mind of a sleeper in the throes of a fearful nightmare,” when he received a tearful request to visit the hospital. Nadia, his 13-year-old niece, had suffered a brutal injury during the recent Israeli assault of the Strip. Discovering that his young niece had lost her leg, the letter writer decided to stay. Nadia suffered her injury because she had jumped on top of her younger siblings to protect them from bombs and flames. How could he leave, he writes to Mustafa, when Nadia had refused to do so? She had refused to run away from the bombs to save her family. Come back, Mustafa, he pleads. Return, “to learn from Nadia’s leg, amputated from the top of the thigh, what life is and what existence is worth” (emphasis added).
I learned from my comrade Louis Allday that acclaimed Palestinian poet Samih al-Qasim once wrote that with “Ghassan’s presence, we felt that someone cared about us.” Mossad agents assassinated him and his teenage niece Lamees Najim on July 8, 1972.
Decades later, there are tens of thousands of Nadias and Lamees in Gaza today, maimed or murdered by a genocidal Israeli state that is armed, financed, and protected by the bipartisan United States empire. A number of Palestinian babies, like Hani Ziyarah, have lost limbs in Israeli bombings before they learned to walk. Hani’s mother testified that her infant son cannot get access to urgently needed medical care and painkillers. “He is in awful pain all the time,” Laylah Ziyarah told a field researcher from B’Tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories. “He cries endlessly. I’m pleading for help. I must get him out of the Strip, to save his life.”
Hani is joined by thousands more. Under genocidal assault and starvation, Gaza has more child amputees than any other place in the world, according to UNICEF. What can we learn today about what life is and the worth of existence from their thousands of amputated limbs and genocided futures?
In our current time of monsters, the genocide in Gaza is the central contradiction, globally and at home.
Empire’s Boomerang
In our current time of monsters, the genocide in Gaza is the central contradiction, globally and at home. It has fully stripped away those post-World War II Global North masks called universal human rights, international law, “Never Again,” and the so-called “liberal international rules-based order.” These facades should have been discarded decades ago—in the killing fields of Algeria, Vietnam, Guatemala, Bangladesh, El Mozote—during the Cold War, which historian Odd Westad called “a continuation of colonialism through slightly different means.” After discarding these fictions, what is revealed is an older, imperialist civilization-versus-barbarism dyad that scholars like Linda Quiquivix and Adnan Husain date back to 1492 and 1095, respectively: the genocidal conquests and settler colonial dispossession of Abya Yala inaugurated by “Columbus and Them,” animated by the Crusader societies and ideologies unleashed against the people of West Asia in 1095. Columbus dreamed of reconquering Jerusalem. Hernan Cortés thought he saw mosques, “Moorish women,” and sultans amid the temples of Tenochtitlán.
To cast colonized peoples and their resistance to colonialism and dispossession as subhuman “barbarism” is to justify their extermination—what Joseph Conrad once called the effort to wipe out “all the brutes.” This sort of thinking links 1095 and 1492 to today.
Indeed, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has framed the genocide in Gaza as a civilizational battle—a Zionist fight for “Western civilization” against “barbarism” in West Asia. “If we don’t win here,” the prime minister warned in November 2023, “the scourge will pass [from] the Middle East to other regions.” German Chancellor Friedrich Merz recently concurred with Netanyahu when he asserted in June, after Israel bombed Iran with the hope of initiating regime change, that “this is the dirty work that Israel is doing for all of us.”
All of us—or rather, the heirs of Columbus and Them.
Merz’s remarks may have been limited to Iran’s alleged efforts to develop nuclear weapons as a potential existential threat to Europeans. But from his “dirty work” comment we can extrapolate an older structural and historical point—one that the 1955 Asian-African Conference in Bandung identified long ago. As the colonized Global South moved toward national liberation and self-determination in the years after World War II, the anachronistic establishment of a Zionist settler colony in West Asia at the expense of Palestinians represented “a bridgehead of Western colonialism.” Decades later, U.S. government officials confirmed this assessment. In the 1980s, Secretary of Defense Alexander Haig posited Israel as “the largest American aircraft carrier in the world which never could be sunk.” Joe Biden echoed this logic throughout his career, asserting for the first time in 1986 that “were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interests in the region.”
But now that dirty work has come home. For to militarily support, finance, and diplomatically cover Israel’s genocide against Palestinians in unconditional fashion requires shredding liberal laws and institutions in the West. And tearing apart the fabric of domestic legal, democratic, and moral frameworks has consequences; imperialism, past and present, is not cost free. As Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. taught us decades ago, “the chickens [come] home to roost” and “the bombs in Vietnam explode at home.”
In 1950, poet and playwright Aimé Césaire offered a different, compelling metaphor to understand the indelible connection between European colonialism and the rise of Nazism: that of a boomerang that traveled, gradually, from the colonies back to Europe. In his seminal essay “Discourse on Colonialism,” the Martinican poet argued that Europe’s colonizers were ultimately preparing their own undoing. “And then one fine day the bourgeoisie is awakened by a terrific boomerang effect,” he wrote, “the gestapos are busy, the prisons fill up, the torturers standing around the racks invent, refine, discuss.”
The Palestine-Mexico Border
The U.S. imperial boomerang has returned to one of its original launching points, the U.S.-Mexico border/frontier, our longest-running forever war. Except now that border is everywhere, extending from major U.S. cities, suburbs, and agricultural fields to university campuses and for-profit migrant concentration camps. Imperial war has come home, now fully actualized as a Palestine-Mexico border: a material, (bio)political, and ideological demarcation that separates those marked for life and those marked for disposability. Those who must live in an austerity-ridden, climate-catastrophic American hellscape patrolled by masked police, and those allowed to die while attempting to cross deserts and oceans, robbed of their right to stay home, resist genocide in Palestine by any means necessary, or simply live in Lebanese, Syrian, and Iranian cities bombed by Israel.
Imperial war has come home, now fully actualized as a Palestine-Mexico border: a material, (bio)political, and ideological demarcation that separates those marked for life and those marked for disposability.
Indeed, the disposability of populations deemed surplus within the United States came into sharp relief with Donald Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill,” passed by Congress in early July 2025. Even as he ordered the bombing of Iran with Boeing-made weapons that each cost hundreds of millions of dollars to develop, dropped by Northrup Grumman B-2 warplanes, millions of Americans were to be stripped of essential Medicaid and food benefits (SNAP). They will now be left to suffer slow violence/death, while the rich receive extensive tax cuts and the merchants of death get billions to create more bombs, more missiles, even a gringo version of the Israeli Iron Dome—more profit-generating death.
Additionally, the bill allocates extensive funds to expand the archipelago of migrant detention centers and the ranks of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Currently engaged in practices of enforced disappearance, extraordinary rendition, family separation, and racial profiling of migrant and brown communities, ICE agents use Israeli surveillance technology and border-control tactics learned first-hand in what Antony Loewenstein terms the “Palestine laboratory.” Agents have traveled to Israel to swap “best practices” at checkpoints, prisons, and settlements, the flow of weapons and ideology moving in both directions.
When combined with the nearly one-trillion-dollar National Defense Budget, the “Big, Beautiful Bill” exposes an empire in decay, baring its teeth at peoples and countries marked for disposability—at home and abroad. The bombs dropped in West Asia explode at home.
The Palestine-Mexico border is, in other words, the newest iteration of that older civilizational dyad, the line between “civilization” and “barbarism.” It is here that the Trump administration’s twin projects of ethnic cleansing and racialized dispossession converge, aimed at migrants of color, Palestinians, and anyone resisting the empire’s frontiers. It is also where today we most clearly see, perhaps feel, the existential choice offered by Rosa Luxembourg during World War I: socialism or barbarism. Or, as those stubborn Zapatistas put it in the midst of the “Fourth World War:” dignity and solidarity or the destruction of “humanness.”
Barbarism, it seems, cannot stop winning.
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Editor’s note: NACLA will engage these themes in detail in the Winter 2025 and Spring 2026 issues of the NACLA Report, on boomerangs of empire and borders/mobility, respectively.
Alexander Aviña is an Associate Professor of History in the School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies at Arizona State University. He is the author of Specters of Revolution: Peasant Guerrillas in the Cold War Mexican Countryside and a member of NACLA’s editorial committee.