Adam Shatz: RESISTANCE TO INJUSTICE

Tessa Szyszkowitz in conversation with Adam
Shatz


RESISTANCE TO INJUSTICE
From Frantz Fanon to Solidarity Encampments at
US-UniversitiesLessons to learn from Protest Movements


When Adam Shatz, US editor of the London Review of Books,
researched his biography of Frantz Fanon “The Rebel’s Clinic”, he
could not have known how topical the exploration of the rebel’s
thinking would be in 2024. The psychiatrist and political
philosopher was a militant, opposing French colonial rule in
Algeria. A highly sensitive topic given the heated debate at
Western universities about October 7th and the war in Gaza. Fanon
died early at the age of 36, but his call for justice for the
oppressed of colonialist powers in his book „The Wretched of the
Earth“(in German “Die Verdammten dieser Erde”) is still heard,
whenever the question arises: How to oppose injustice?


Not with Hamas style violence, of course. There are other
powerful forms of protest. As Adam Shatz writes in The London
Review of Books in his recent essay “Israel’s descent” we now see
a new protest movement which might be the most consequential wave
of resistance so far as it happens in the middle of Western
society: Among the students are many young Jews who do not want
to identify with an explicitly illiberal state like Israel. While
Shatz is aware of the danger of radicalization among the
protesters, he states: “The birth of a global movement in
opposition to Israel’s war in Gaza and in defence of Palestinians
rights, is, if nothing else, a sign that Israel has lost the
moral war among people of conscience.”


Adam Shatz is an author, the US editor of The
London Review of Books and a contributor to The New York Times
Magazine, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker,
and other publications. He is also a visiting professor at
Bard College, and the host of the podcast “Myself with Others,”
produced by the pianist Richard Sears.


Tessa Szyszkowitz is an Austrian journalist and
author. A UK correspondent for Austrian and German publications
such as Falter or Tagesspiegel, she curates Philoxenia at
Kreiskyforum and she is a Distinguished Fellow of the Royal
United Services Institute in London.