The Palestine Resistance Festival in Brussels and the “right to be hostile”

The Palestine Resistance Festival in Brussels (June 6 -8), “a three-day celebration of culture, resistance, and solidarity, featuring political talks, an activist village, a book fair, food, drinks, music, DJs, performances, and exhibitions,” underscores the global reach of the Palestinian cause. Groups such as Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network and Masar Badil (Palestinian Alternative Revolutionary Path Movement) are involved in organizing festival events that call for global action.

Because the Palestinian cause draws parallels with anti-colonial, anti-apartheid, and anti-imperialist movements (e.g., South Africa, Vietnam, Algeria, Latin America and Indigenous movements), it resonates with oppressed peoples worldwide.

Israel’s occupation of Palestine is now linked to the global arms trade, especially U.S. weapons exports and surveillance technology like the Israeli Pegasus spyware tested on Palestinians. The BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement is global in scope; Black Lives Matter and climate justice groups see Palestinian liberation as tied to dismantling systemic violence worldwide. Russia, China, and regional powers like Iran and Turkey also engage politically, turning Palestine into a proxy battleground for global influence between East and West.

Additionally, there is the international legal dimension highlighted by South Africa’s ICJ case (2024) accusing Israel of genocide; the UN, ICC, and human rights organizations (Amnesty, HRW) have all condemned Israeli settlements and wall in the West Bank, its administrative detentions (there are over 10,000 Palestinians in Israeli prisons right now), the blockade of the Gaza Strip and Israel’s war crimes, thus framing the struggle as a global justice issue.

With all the above said, why is it then that, as historian Nur Masalha put it, “Many of us Palestinians do not realize the extent to which the Palestinian cause has become the center of the global conscience”?

Perhaps many don’t because the “global conscience” remains confined to grass-roots networks that continue to be brutally suppressed for their activism by Western powers and their allies. This suppression is rooted in a combination of geopolitical interests, historical alliances, and ideological frameworks that prioritize Israel over Palestinian existence and universal justice.

Western media and governments often dehumanize Palestinians, framing resistance as “terrorism” while legitimizing Israeli violence as “self-defense.”

Caption: Mohammad Khatib speaking at a rally in Brussels in 2023

The experience of Mohammad Khatib, the EU coordinator of Samidoun and a dynamic participant in the annual Palestine Resistance Festival in Brussels (the first festival was in May 2023), will illustrate the challenges Palestinians and their supporters face and how they continue to overcome them.

Khatib is a passionate and eloquent speaker and organizer. His role typically includes coordinating events that highlight Palestinian culture, resistance, and solidarity efforts. However, his participation has faced increasing scrutiny from Belgian authorities, who are attempting to revoke his refugee status by arguing that Khatib’s activism — including speeches supporting Palestinian armed resistance and his role in Samidoun, constitutes a “danger and disruption to society.”

The case is clearly a politically motivated smear campaign to silence Palestinian solidarity movements. It aligns with a broader context of repression on pro-Palestinian activists in Europe, including entry bans in Switzerland (10-year ban) and the Netherlands, police harassment in Belgium such as surveillance and arrests at protests, and Samidoun’s designation as a “terrorist entity” by the US and Canada in 2024.

Deportation for Khatib would be complicated as he is stateless like many other Palestinian refugees — born in Lebanon’s Ein el-Helweh refugee camp. Because the outcome of his case could significantly impact the rights of political refugees and activists across Europe, Samidoun and pro-Palestine allies are mobilizing international pressure as part of a global struggle against repression of Palestinian voices.

In his essay “The Right to Be Hostile,” Alex Gourevitch describes suppression of pro-Palestine protest as a “blueprint for counterrevolutionary crackdowns.” He undermines claims that such crackdowns are about “order” rather than politics and argues that, from labor strikes to civil rights protests, anger in activism is a response to systemic oppression. Historically, anger and hostility fuel social change.

Mohammad Khatib is righteously angry. What the Belgian government calls his “disruption” is essential to protest. Making people uncomfortable is often the only way to force institutions to acknowledge injustice.

Note: First published on Medium.

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Rima Najjar is a Palestinian whose father’s side of the family comes from the forcibly depopulated village of Lifta on the western outskirts of Jerusalem and whose mother’s side of the family is from Ijzim, south of Haifa. She is an activist, researcher, and retired professor of English literature, Al-Quds University, occupied West Bank.