Frantz Fanon once said that colonialism does not stop at convincing you that you are a slave, it also convinces you that you are unworthy of freedom. In the case of exterminationist Zionism, where colonial philosophy turns into a doctrine of ethnic cleansing and annihilation, you are not only unworthy of freedom, you are unworthy of life itself.
Religious fascism has been transformed from an individual belief into an official state ideology, from rhetoric into chariots thundering through history. Chariots that have been saturated with myths and blood of victims, proclaiming that freedom is not a destiny but a crime, and that the Palestinian is not a human being, but an excess to be erased. From the ashes of slavery that ignited the Haitian Revolution to the embers of Gaza, the same question keeps resurfacing unanswered: What kind of freedom is this, granted to some and denied to others?
That is why Gaza is being erased, time and time again. As if the invader is never content with killing the body once, but returns to mutilate it repeatedly, just like a savage cowboy emptying his bullets into a corpse to ensure its obliteration. In the scriptures of old colonialism, the chariot was a mark of power and awe. Today, it is the same mechanical face that crushes cities and villages, grinding bodies into dust. Gideon’s Chariots have not vanished, they have merely taken a form of modern tanks. The expansionist state draws inspiration from ancient texts, executing its plans with contemporary instruments of annihilation.
What changed is not the essence of the chariot, but the scope of its function. It is no longer just a weapon of war, but a symbol of an exterminatory philosophy that insists freedom is never granted, and life itself is subject to confiscation. Houses are destroyed, rebuilt, then destroyed again. Streets wiped from the map, neighborhoods besieged, it is as if time has become a closed loop of devastation. A loop revealing the profound colonial desire to kill the city, not merely geographically, but as a memory, a meaning, and an existence. And each time Gaza rises from beneath the rubble, the killer discovers that the body he sought to obliterate is still breathing.
From this open wound, from these recurring visitations from merchants of death, Gaza emerges today as a living embodiment of the human rights paradox. The West, which raises banners of freedom and equality, colludes in the destruction of an entire city, just as it once colluded in the extermination of the slaves who rose up in Saint-Domingue. From the ashes of Haiti to the embers of Gaza, the question persists: is freedom a right for all, or a privilege granted to some and denied to others?
When Enlightenment philosophers proclaimed human rights as natural and universal, it seemed as though humanity was entering a new chapter in history. When the French Revolution raised its famous triad “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,” many believed humankind had transcended the ages of discrimination and slavery. Yet history soon revealed that this universality was nothing more than a discourse reserved for the European center, excluding the peripheries. The liberty sung by Voltaire and Rousseau did not include African slaves in the Caribbean, or the colonized peoples in Asia and Africa, nor Indigenous populations in the Americas. The rhetoric was universal in language, but imperial in practice.
Today, the same contradiction is repeated in Palestine. How can those who call, morning and night, for recognition of a Palestinian state, simultaneously tolerate the destruction of its cities, the isolation of its villages, and the dispersal of its people? What kind of a state can rise from ashes and rubble, and what meaning can recognition have amid ethnic cleansing?
Haiti was the first to expose the falsehood of this rhetoric. In the late eighteenth century, Saint-Domingue was France’s richest colony and one of Europe’s main sources of sugar. But its wealth was built on the sweat and blood of half a million African slaves, living under conditions akin to a human grinding machine. In 1791, a slave uprising erupted, an event unimaginable to the European mind which considered Black people incapable of thought and organization. Yet, under leaders such as Toussaint Louverture, the uprising transformed into a social and military revolution that defeated the armies of France, Spain, and Britain alike, leading in 1804 to the declaration of the world’s first Black republic and the abolition of slavery by force of arms, not by decrees handed down from above.
In this way, the Haitians carried the slogans of the French Revolution from the realm of rhetoric into practice. They simply said: if liberty is a universal right, then it includes us too. In doing so, they inaugurated a new conception of freedom, not as a gift bestowed by enlightened elites, but as a right seized through struggle. Yet the colonial powers could not tolerate this upheaval. France imposed crushing “reparations” in exchange for recognizing Haiti’s independence, while the United States and Europe enforced a long political and economic blockade, a collective punishment and a deterrent message to the enslaved elsewhere: Whoever dares to seize his freedom will pay with blood.
The Haitian example has haunted the Western conscience and philosophical practices ever since. Historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot described the Haitian Revolution as an “unthinkable event” in the Western imagination, for it shattered the hierarchy that placed the white man as master and the Black man as slave. Susan Buck-Morss, meanwhile, linked the Haitian Revolution to Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, showing that freedom is not an abstract idea but a practice born out of bloody struggle between oppressor and oppressed.
Today, more than two centuries later, the same contradiction returns in Gaza. For over seventeen years, two million people have lived under a total siege that deprives them of the most basic conditions for life. Repeated wars, most recently the genocidal assault launched in 2023, have turned Gaza into a modern example of international law violation in its most brutal forms: bombing hospitals and schools, systematic starvation, deprivation of water, medicine, and electricity. And while the West raises the banner of human rights high in its discourse, it turns a blind eye to this catastrophe, feeding the genocide with weapons and political cover.
Yet again, the paradox is that Gaza, just like Haiti, is writing an alternative universality. It reminds the world that the besieged Palestinian is not merely a “humanitarian case” but a full human being with dignity, and that true universality is not forged in centers of power but born from the resistance of the enslaved.
What links Haiti to Gaza is a single, an unbroken line exposing the contradiction between a rhetoric of liberty and a practice of exclusion. The Black slaves, deemed “unhuman,” were the ones who forced the world to acknowledge their humanity. The Palestinians, consigned to exist outside of history, impose their presence on the world’s conscience through steadfastness. In both cases, humanity expanded only because of those deemed unworthy of it.
Culture plays a central role here. The Haitian Revolution lived not only in history books, but in Caribbean literature, through Aimé Césaire and others, who made it a symbol of Black liberation and the emancipation of marginalized peoples. Palestinians, in turn, have shaped through Mahmoud Darwish, Ghassan Kanafani, and others a poetic and narrative memory of Gaza and Palestine. They have turned tragedy into a part of the world’s consciousness instead of a fleeting political headline. Literature and art transform the wound into testimony, giving victims a voice that transcends the silence imposed upon them.
Thus, the universality of human rights is an ongoing battlefield. On one hand, there is a universality crafted by imperial centers to justify their domination, and on the other, there is a universality born from the struggles of the dispossessed, to affirm their right to exist. The former is governed by the language of institutions, the latter is written in blood, memory, and resilience.
What links Haiti to Gaza is that freedom is never granted, it’s always seized. True universality is not written in the statements of organizations and international conferences, but in what the enslaved force onto history through their struggle. Just as Haiti forced the world to recognize the Black slave’s humanity, Gaza will force the world to recognize that of the oppressed Palestinian. Freedom is either for all, or for none.
Marwan Abdel Aal
source: Al Akhbar