On Divide, Conquer, and Crabs in the Bucket

Online activists that help bring down the loudest voices for Gaza

“There are too many idiots in this world. And having said it, I have the burden of proving it.”

- Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks

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The genocide in Gaza is approaching the three month mark. During this protracted stretch of unhinged inhumanity, the work of two postcolonial intellectual giants, Franz Fanon and Aimé Césaire, have renewed relevance.

In fact, reading them is as urgent as ever.

Putting two of their landmark works into conversation with one another, namely Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth and Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism, interrogates the ugly shortcomings of activists galvanizing against Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Gaza. Particularly, those who fall into the trap of undermining individuals committed to their same cause, playing cog in the colonial machine of “divide and conquer” that bludgeons every struggle for freedom.

There are too many case studies illustrating this. One recent example is Meta’s suspension of Shaun King, the social media activist who dedicated his entire account to Gaza for 82 days. In the aftermath of Instagram’s suspension of King, the scorn and condemnation rushed in. Not from pro-Israel voices, but from those on his side, the pro-Palestinian wing of the struggle.

Digital divide and conquer was at work. And continues onward. And the fools rushed in to accelerate this colonial objective on digital platforms.

In Wretched of the Earth, Fanon observes how the colonizer,

“Fabricate(s) a fake bourgeousie of colonized subjects in a system of divide and rule; elsewhere, it has killed two birds with one stone: the colony is both settlement and exploitation.”

Today, we see this unfold online, on platforms like X and Instagram. Namely, where self-righteous activists adorning themselves with robes of ideological purity occupy the role of the bourgeoisie, casting indictments and scorn on others that don’t rise to their impossible standard.

To them, they can do no wrong. Only others can and do.

They, unwittingly or knowingly, caste themselves as part of a political avant garde. A cast “exploited” to pass judgements and issue indictments from ideological perches built upon arrogance, impracticality, or even more vile incentives.

Many of these are bad-faith actors, paid to taint and derail the work of highly visible activists. But the majority are bad-intentioned elements advocating on behalf of Palestine, that focus more on short-term distractions than long-term aims. They then fall for the divide and conquer plot devised by pro-Israeli colonists.

Fanon knew this well. And anybody who has read Fanon that scans digital timelines today, can see it unfold in living color.

Sudanese artist Khalid Albaih noted on Instagram:

“The dismantling of the online support for Gaza started with shadowanning, taking out Shaun King and now they are working on Khaled Beydoun. It always comes from within that’s what they did historically with the Black Panthers, Malcolm X, Occupy Wall Street. Divide and conquer.”

While crafted in response to colonization in Africa, Fanon’s template on divide and conquer is powerfully relevant to the online fissures and fractures widening among pro-Palestine activists online. Illustrating, unfortunately, that there will always be a supply of idiots ready to carry forward the colonizer’s work.

Idiots that must be ignored or set aside, for the sake of carrying the work toward justice forward.

This brings us to Césaire.

In Discourse on Colonialism, Césaire turns the table on the colonizer. Instead of examining how colonization functions as a political and psychological project to dehumanize the natives, the poet and politician from Martinique centers the colonizer. He writes,

“In the process of dehumanizing the colonized subject, the colonizer himself is the one that is truly dehumanized. If you are looking for the true source of barbarism, brutality and incivility it lies with the colonizer and his actions against the people he has dehumanized.”

The epistemological campaign to caricature the colonized natives as subhuman, violent, and intractably inferior has been brilliantly articulated by a range of modern scholars, most notably Edward Said, Malcolm X, and Fanon. However, Césaire shifts the lens onto the colonizer, and powerfully argues how colonization has brought about their dehumanization.

How the discursive, political, and militaristic fronts against native peoples makes him everything he said the colonized are. We see this, poignantly and vividly, in Gaza right now, with the limitless savagery of Israeli soldiers posing in front of shattered classrooms, parading around nude Palestinian men as if cattle, and justifying the mass killing of unarmed civilians through a vapid conflation of everyday people with Hamas.

But Césaire’s analysis goes beyond this. In fact, the most powerful takeaway from Discourse on Colonialism is prescriptive. Namely, for the colonized to not capitulate to the colonial project of dehumanization, and thus, not make monsters of everybody on the other side. To flatten and caricature the colonized is to fall for their dictate, and to turn away from the very humanity that should drive any and every movement for liberation.

I am guided intellectually, and even spiritually, by Césaire’s dictate against dehumanizing the colonizer. I myself was attacked for maintaining my position of not caricaturing all racists or Zionists as “bad people,” rejecting the colonial project of capitulating to the dialectic of sub-humanities. Doing so is part of the colonial project, aimed to perpetuate a never-ending war that only brings about more death, more land grabs, and more neo-imperialism guised as “wars on terror” or “struggles against terrorism.”

Falling for this trap, combined with the divide and conquer strategy Fanon warned against, is pervasive across the movement to end the genocide in Gaza. Off, and especially online.

They are, in short, doing the colonizer’s work. Unthinking cogs in a colonial machine that turns them against pro-Palestinian voices already under tremendous attack and scrutiny, social media censorship and digital erasure.

Their is little strategy, just scorn. No prudence, just directionless rage and insolent malice.

Their mob mentality feeds on hate, attacking individuals they have never spoken to or met in person. It is hate, naked and unfiltered, harkening the insights of James Baldwin who observed, “hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the one who hated, and this is an immutable law.”

But few of them have cared to read Baldwin, Fanon, Césaire, or the postcolonial thinkers that warned against this divide, conquer, and inward-gazing idiocy. If so, they would have acted otherwise.

It’s never too late to pick up a book. And especially, the books from these two intellectual north stars that warned against vile elements that sink liberation movements southward.

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Khaled A. Beydoun is a law professor and author. He publishes his daily insights on his socials at @khaledbeydoun.