No state has the right to exist.

Legally, morally, and ontologically, this is a fact.

States are instruments, not beings. They are abstractions maintained through coercion, territory, and recognition. They are not sentient; they do not breathe, suffer, or love. Only humans do. Thus, no state can posses a right to exist, only the power to impose its continued existence through violence.

Humans, however, do have the right to exist. This truth is inherent to all humans—buried deep within the very soul of each of us who claim to be human. To defend this truth is to live. To defend this truth is to resist.

Two years ago, on October 7, 2023, in defense of this truth, Palestinian resistance rose up against those who would deny them their humanity and right to exist. That morning, when I first read the headlines, my first thought was for the Israeli civilians caught in the violence. I mourned their deaths. I still do. But mourning can’t erase context.

Resistance never erupts from a vacuum. It grows in the soil of dehumanization—of Palestinians, of colonized people everywhere, of the Global South crushed beneath the Imperial Core. That moment, whatever else it was, forced the world to confront a question most would rather avoid: what does it mean to resist annihilation when annihilation is normalized?

I thus share again a post I shared two years ago by the now-deleted Instagram account @decolonizethisplace, which stated:

“When you hear about Israel this morning and the resistance being launched by Palestinians, remember against all odds Palestinians are fighting for life, dignity, and freedom — alongside others doing the same — against settler colonization, imperialism, capitalism, white supremacy, which the United States is a model. Let it be known the fight for Palestine, against colonization, is a fight for the imagination that other worlds are possible, that genocide should not be accepted, and that people always have the choice of refusal, and the right to resist. Free the land.”

That post remains one of the clearest things I’ve ever read. Because it refuses the myth of “terrorism” as a natural category. It sees resistance for what it often is: a human demand to be recognized as human.

The creation of Israel—its integration into the Western “family of nations”—was not an act of redemption for Jewish suffering. It was an act of empire. Without the assimilation of Ashkenazi Jews into whiteness, Israel could not exist as an arm of the Imperial Core. The same racial logic that dehumanized Jewish people became the justification to dehumanize Palestinians in turn. Empire simply rebranded one trauma into another occupation.

The Muslim Brotherhood, from which Hamas emerged, arose as resistance to a global economic and political structure denying Muslims and others in the Global South their right to self-determination—to exist with dignity. The same can be said of Al-Qaeda, whose violence on September 11, 2001, reflected not religious fanaticism alone but decades of geopolitical subjugation. This does not make me an Islamist apologist. I loathe all forms of religious nationalism—Christian Nationalism, Zionism, Islamism, Hindutva—for they all transmute faith into fascism.

I will always defend the right to resist dehumanization. I am not a Hamas apologist; I am a human apologist. Which, I suppose, makes me a resistance apologist. While I cannot dictate how the dehumanized should resist, I can affirm that they must have the right to resist.

Over the last two years, I’ve been called every name you can think of—terrorist sympathizer, antisemite, fanatic. I’ve been doxxed, smeared, silenced. But each attempt to strip me of humanity only reaffirms why I spoke in the first place: because the struggle to be seen as human is never abstract. It’s personal. It’s embodied. It’s lived.

Still, I remain human. I want liberation for all humans—to see every person recognized as fully human, entitled to dignity and existence. This includes every person who has wished harm upon me. You deserve to be humanized as much as I do. My refusal to be silenced is not simply self-defense, it is an insistence on our shared right to exist as whole beings.

Two years on, Gaza lies in ruins. The rubble is not history—it’s a mirror. It reflects what empire requires to sustain itself, and what humanity must become to survive it. Perhaps that is what resistance ultimately means: to keep insisting on the humanity of all, even when humanity itself seems impossible.

To remember October 7th is not to celebrate death. It is to recognize what life demands when denied the right to exist.