The Sword and the Neck - by Yanis Iqbal (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

The Sword and the Neck: Reading the al-Aqsa Flood is a militant work of philosophy that insists Gaza must be approached not as a humanitarian "exception," but as a primary terrain of proletarian and anti-colonial struggle. Writing in the immediate wake of the al-Aqsa Flood and the genocidal campaign unleashed against Gaza, Yanis Iqbal reconstructs the ideological architecture that licenses extermination: Zionism, liberal modernity, and a global consensus that treats Palestinian resistance as a metaphysical scandal rather than a political fact.

Across five tightly argued chapters, Iqbal stages a confrontation between Marxism and postcolonial theory around the problem of the colonial mode of production, developing sharp critiques of Slavoj Zizek and Étienne Balibar for the ways their "abstract negativity" and political quietism ultimately disarm solidarity with Palestinian struggle.

Drawing on Mahdi Amel, Fanon, Lukács, and Marx's own insistence that philosophy must become a practice of liberation, Iqbal argues that philosophy today either aligns itself with the physics of the oppressed-or becomes complicit with extermination. The Sword and the Neck thus reads al-Aqsa Flood as a concrete act of decolonization, a rupture in the spatial order of siege that transforms Gaza from a zone of managed death into a site of revolutionary initiative. The book is both an intervention in contemporary debates on Palestine and a poignant contribution to the renewal of Marxist theory under conditions of genocidal imperialism.