The Fanonian Specter in Palestine: Suicide Bombing and the Final Colonial War

Drawing upon Fanon’s central insights in Wretched of the Earth, this essay seeks to explore how Palestinian suicide bombers in the context of the Israel-Palestine conflict enact a biopolitical strategy, as part of an anti-colonial politics of struggle, to resist Israeli colonization. This biopolitical strategy of resistance views the act of self-destruction as paradoxically enabling the continuation of communal life; the decision to terminate an individual life, then, represents an affirmation of Palestinian communal life as it resists defeat, despair, and humiliation.