Kanafani’s insight was that in these situations only the resistant act or event could exceed the objectifying or depersonalizing effects of colonial domination and enable the possibility of subjective becoming. Only by punching a hole in the order of the given, only in the event might we become something new, something we did not know we were capable of. For Said in Returning to Haifa, the event is the armed insurrection of the Palestinian Revolution and the possibility that his son Khalid had joined the revolution. His subjective becoming, his appearance as a speaking subject, is his decision—on the edge of collapse—to be faithful to that event, to be a militant of its cause. He’s interpellated by it, he changes, he finds language and voice; Safiyya is temporarily taken aback: “What happened to you, Said?”

This was not Kanafani’s insight alone, of course. We see a similar insight in the 1973 memoir of his comrade in the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Leila Khaled. In My People Shall Live, Khaled recounts her rebellious childhood and path into revolutionary militancy in an acerbic, irreverent, and fierce text, brimming with her own brand of counter-modernist refusal of every social hierarchy around her: patriarchy, obscurantism, eurocentrism, individuality, bureaucracy. One of her turning points comes in 1968 during a conversation with a young American woman, Jane, hosted at Khaled’s family home in exile in Lebanon. The armed revolution had begun tentatively in 1965 and though it had many “defects and problems,” “[i]ts supreme virtue was incontestable: it was a fighting organisation in a time when others only talked about theories of war.” It hailed Palestinians to take up armed struggle; though she was active in the Arab Nationalist Movement, Khaled was not yet one of those who responded to the call: “Some did. I was not yet ready.”

It’s in conversation with Jane, the pacificist, liberal, color-blind missionary, “a typical Yankee do-gooder” as Khaled has it, that something shifts. Jane declares her desire for peace among “the semitic brothers” and lectures Khaled on the necessity of using analytical language and avoiding emotional and hyperbolic responses. Khaled flies into argument, insisting on “the legitimacy of revolutionary violence” and American complicity in arming the Israeli state. But then Jane points to the apartment Khaled and her family live in and asks whether Khaled expects to live in Palestine “more luxuriously than you are living here.” When Khaled responds that this isn’t important, Jane replies, “It is very important because you wouldn’t give up what you have here and you’re not doing anything personally to reach your goals.” Khaled is stumped. “Jane stunned me. My mind went blank.” She has to walk out onto the balcony to recompose herself. When she returns, she tells her younger brothers, also incensed at Jane, that they should all thank the American lady “for helping us expose ourselves to ourselves. We must act, not just talk and memorise the arguments against Zionism.” She turns to risk, action, wager, fidelity to the revolutionary call—the complete reworking of the ordinary way of living the situation. Then and there Khaled resolves to join the Popular Front.

These insights of the revolutionary tradition are very much still with us in various forms of the contemporary struggle. We see this insistence on the event, for example, in the work of Khalid Odetallah. Anticolonial uprisings, Odetallah tells us, are revolutions regardless of their outcomes, because they contain the possibility of the recovery of the human as subject in an age of technical determinism. “For revolutions,” he goes on, “are open historical processes inaugurated by a ruptural (khariq) foundational event, and then wagered on the struggle between those that declare their belonging (intima’) to the event and commit themselves to circulating its truth to every field of struggle, and those that attempt to nip it in the bud.” The striking resonances with Badiou are ultimately beside the point; these are insights already present in this tradition.

The same insistence on the primacy of the ruptural act as the condition of subjectivity is there in a last will attributed to Yahya Sinwar but almost certainly written by someone else. This last will circulated quickly and widely in late 2024. It too starts with a scene of becoming, this time as part of a childhood in occupied Gaza’s Khan Yunis Camp: “My will to you starts here from that child who threw the first stone at the occupier, who learned that stones are the first words we speak in the face of a world that stands silent before our wounds.” In this phrase—“learned that stones are the first words we speak”—is something much more than metaphor. It is also, again, the insight that the resistant act (the throwing of the stone) is the very condition of thought and speech; it’s not simply that stones are words, but that the stone enables the revolutionary word to be spoken. In turn, the stone enables not theory of the world, but theory in the world of struggle. This is, Stephen Sheehi tells us, precisely its challenge: Starting and staying with the scandalized image of Edward Said throwing a stone at Israeli border fortifications in southern Lebanon, Sheehi points out that it was precisely the sense of Said’s engagement, the notion that his thought might be part of political praxis, that was at the heart of the ensuing controversy.