Revisiting the “No-State ‘Solution’”: Palestinian Futurity Beyond the Nation-State

In April 2014, Léopold Lambert and Sophia Azeb met for the first time to record an episode of The Funambulist’s podcast—about a year before the magazine even began to exist. The title and topic of this episode, “The No-State Solution” gives the title to this issue and it has remained a common thread of Sophia’s contribution to the magazine these past twelve years. In this following epistolary conversation, Rebecca Gross and she discuss this concept, as well as exile, diasporism, and liberatory futurities for Palestine.

Rebecca Gross: Sophia, it’s a pleasure to be able to speak with you almost twelve years after you sat down with Léopold to explore the idea of “The No-State ‘Solution’.” We are intellectual and political comrades, and together we think through questions of exile and diaspora, remembrance and futurity, and language, among other topics.

Your conversation about the “No-State ‘Solution’” remains deeply influential for me as I develop my work on “Radical Jewish Studies” vis-a-vis contemporary Jewish anti-Zionist arts, and also in my organizing in anti-Zionist Jewish contexts over the past few years, fighting against the Israeli genocide of Palestinians.

I became aware of your and Léopold’s conversation maybe four or five years ago now, before you and I met. Then, I took a graduate seminar with you on the theoretical and literary articulations of exile and diaspora: you wrote about your own experience teaching different iterations of this seminar in your last essay for The Funambulist, “We May Never Return Again (A Celebration of Our Aliveness)” (March–April 2025). For me, your course brought the relationship between the nation-State, exile, and diaspora into focus. I’ve come to see diaspora, exile, and the “No-State ‘Solution’” as imbricated in one another.
Exile requires a relationship to land, and a distance—whether spatial, temporal, psychological, or spiritual—from that land. Diaspora implies a building of one’s life with others outside the parameters of one’s homeland, a collective dwelling in displacement. But what becomes of one’s sense of belonging to homeland or nation when they are in exile? In diaspora? As subjects of the modern world, what does it mean to be in exile not only from one’s land, but also a State? What does it mean to bring up new generations in a State that feels alien to one’s own? How do we narrativize this experience, and what are the radical possibilities of leaving behind the State for other forms of identification, coalition, revolution? This is what the “No-State ‘Solution’” aims to address.

We’ve spent many hours discussing these questions in classrooms, on picket lines, and over shared meals. Together we’ve considered how the idea of a “No-State ‘Solution’” has evolved as time has passed, as Israeli State and settler violence has escalated beyond belief in Palestine, and as the Intifada has spread to global proportions. The conversation recorded here is a selection of thoughts about this from some of our discussions over the past few years.

Sophia Azeb: Thank you, Rebecca. I’m really grateful to be in conversation with you for the occasion of this issue of The Funambulist. It seems as critical as ever to me that Palestinians and our accomplices in pursuit of collective liberation seriously consider how such an aim might be realized in the midst of Israel’s genocide and wanton destruction of Palestinian life, land, and thought.

Is a Palestinian nation-State—the possibility of which can, in our most disconsolate moments, seem more unlikely than ever in the devastating context of the past two years—in any way a “solution” to our 78 years of displacement and dispossession, if it were possible?

To first address your framing of “exile” and “diaspora” as central to our previous conversations on the limitations of the nation-State, I consider “exile” much as one of our great Palestinian intellectuals, Edward Said, defined it throughout his vast body of work. As both an outcome of forced displacement and a framework of analysis, the exile’s past and personhood is annulled and cast out to a constant State of in between home and not-at-home. This experience is one of isolation, one described by Said as a “life led outside habitual order,” and cannot be entirely resolved by a nationalist reconstitution of a homeland that—by virtue of its dispossession—no longer exists as it once did. On the other hand (or, to be more precise, alongside this), diaspora can be understood as an adjacent analytical and experiential framework of displacement and dispossession that reconciles a shared identity with other diasporans not in relation to a particular homeland or nationalism, but in spite of such situated spatialities. Diaspora thus brings to the fore the historical categories of race, gender, and class and their differential significations among displaced communities, such as people of African descent, who consciously construct a group identity across these differences as well as their multiple sites of displacement.

I must also emphasize that I do not believe that thinking and acting diasporically necessarily precludes the possibility of return, nor do I feel that a nation-State is necessarily a precondition for our return.

RG: This framework of exile and diaspora that you’ve staged here so beautifully captures how exilic and diasporic subjectivities interact with each other, and the political possibilities that might be opened through identifying as both exilic and diasporic in the Palestinian context. It leaves me with questions, though, for other diasporic contexts. How do we think about exile across multiple generations, and multiple locations in which home (even if conceived of as temporary) is made? I’d be particularly curious to hear your thoughts on this as a scholar of Black Studies, given that many members of the Black diaspora, particularly in the Americas’ context, have no place to return to—and tens of generations that exist in the gap between the present and their opaque familial point of origin.

One of Kim D. Butler’s defining features of diaspora which I think you’re touching on here, too, is the idea that “homeland” can be real or imagined, to which I would add, it can also be multiple. And whether homeland operates as a real pin on a map is historically specific to each particular diaspora. This means that in the Jewish, Palestinian, and Black diasporic contexts, for example, those in each diaspora may have differing relationships to various homelands as either real or imagined. It seems to me that the principle of return depends on a relationship to a historical, real homeland, rather than an imagined or fictionalized one.
This leads to a question about what one does when in proximity to a real homeland that no longer exists as it once did. In the context of my own family, I might think of Eastern Europe in this way; in the context of yours, you would perhaps think about Palestine. We might think of these as “non-places” for each of us, to quote Mahmoud Darwish in The Presence of Absence. Of his concept of the non-place, Darwish writes: “If you say, metaphorically, that you are from no place, you are told: There is no place for no place. If you tell the passport official: No place is exile; he answers: We have no time for rhetoric, so if you like rhetoric, go to another no place.” So, for Darwish, then, non-place is in relationship to the State, not to the geographic location itself. The non-place is in relation to the passport official, who is in relation to the State, but may have no relationship to the land itself.

What does it mean to identify with the condition of “exile” if the place we are exiled from is no more; if the land is desecrated; if the people who once inhabited it have been removed, pushed out, and annihilated; if the place is now a State with a different flag and a different people and a different language?

SA: A few issues ago, The Funambulist asked twenty Palestinian writers, artists, organizers, and scholars to reflect on “Return” in the midst of the ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and throughout historic Palestine. In this issue, I wrote, “What my continued commitment to Black study allows me to understand most acutely in this moment is that a return to our Palestinian nation must also be, in the midst of our genocide, diasporic.” What this is to say is that whether or not Palestinians who have been displaced—sometimes many times over—within and beyond the place(s) within Palestine they know as “home” identify with either exile or diaspora as particularly resonant with their own experiences of dispossession… our recognition and ways of knowing place, home, belonging, and dispossession are not all the same.

Thinking thickly with and through Black study and Black diasporic intellectual and political traditions encourages us to engage in abstract and material collective imaginings of who we are as Palestinians, who we might become as Palestinians in the future, and what our divergent understandings of our ourselves and our Palestinianness means for our liberation. I have written before that “Palestinians are not ‘a people,’ not yet,” and what that means for me is that we have been compelled to live apart from one another and our land by the scourge of Zionist settler colonialism. This means we must contend with the abundance of difference that the multidirectionality of our thought amid this separation has produced. Inevitably, these myriad registers of knowing ourselves and one another will collide upon our return.

To say our many and multiple ways of knowing and thinking and being Palestinian will collide when we come together in liberation is not a warning. Collision does not equate to conflict! Collisions allow us to envision and articulate the gaps in our ways of knowing and seeing, and – at least in my own experience over these last two horrific years—wrench open critical space for us to translate and negotiate who we are and what a liberated Palestine might mean beyond the modern nation-State.

RG: Knowing that you, too, tend to be more compelled by diaspora than exile for thinking about Palestinian futurity, I want to say a bit about how I’m thinking with diaspora in the Jewish context of the 20th and 21st centuries. There are historical specificities which I argue make exile less politically apt for understanding the collective experiences of displacement in modern Jewish contexts. One of these specificities actually has to do with the word “solution,” which is of obvious relevance to this conversation.

It’s worth briefly digressing to consider how the word “solution” is problematic in a variety of ways that, I argue, traverse the Jewish and Palestinian diasporas.

In a Jewish diasporic context, “solution” has tended to be the word used to answer the “Jewish Question,” sometimes translated instead as the “Jewish Problem,” which emerged in Europe with the advent of capitalism.
For Christian Europeans, Jews were a problem that threatened Enlightenment thinking about the nation-State and modernization. Jews’ Otherness in Europe—their allegiance to a solar-lunar, non-Gregorian calendar, a different way of keeping time; their hybrid linguistic traditions, both of and beyond their regional non-Jewish language; and their matrilineal ways of conceiving the family, in contrast with the hegemonic patrilineal framing in Europe—threatened the project of European progress. And for Jews, European nationalism expressed itself as antisemitism; it was a problem that threatened their ability to live freely.

Both “problems” are framed in 19th century European literature as requiring a “solution,” but the proposed “solutions” among European Jews varied widely. Some Jewish liberals advocated for assimilation, transforming Judaism from a holistic way of life to a religion in parallel with Christianity. Other Jewish liberals and conservatives saw assimilating locally in Europe as impossible given European antisemitism’s violent ubiquity, and advocated for colonizing elsewhere: what we’d now understand as a forbearer to the political Zionism realized today in the Israeli State project, which we might understand as, ultimately, a form of ideological assimilation to Christian European epistemologies of nationalism, colonialism, and imperialism.

On the Left, European Jews such as the Jewish Labor Bund and Jewish anarchists practiced a kind of “hereness” rather than “thereness” as a “solution” to the “problem,” advocating for maintaining their Jewish difference and working locally and internationally in coalition with other marginalized groups against bourgeois nationalism. And on the non-Jewish European Right, extermination of Jews increasingly became a dominant “solution” to the “Jewish problem,” which would lead in obvious ways to what we know as Hitler’s “Final solution.”
What we end up with, as a “solution” to the “Jewish Question,” is the West’s creation of the Israeli State. This is a “solution” to the “Jewish question” in which the liberal European conception of the nation-State rode the coattails of the Nazi “Final solution” to win over other, non-statist alternatives. Israel, in effect, was and remains an outcome of the “Final solution,” by leaving European antisemitism intact and prompting the mass exodus of European Jews who survived the Holocaust.

What’s really striking to me is that despite this history which exposes major problems with the word “solution,” the word is taken up by the Left again and again. I’m thinking, for example, about the call-and-response chant that begins with the chant leader calling out, “There is only one solution.” For a brief moment before protestors respond with “Intifada, revolution!” we are left suspended wondering: what is this “solution”? Two States? One State? Resolving this question with “Intifada, revolution” mocks the idea that a “solution” needs to be found in a State. The “Intifada, revolution” is diasporic and internationalist, built from epistemologies of Third Worldism. However, framing revolution in parallax with “solution” still presumes there is a single solution to the exponential problems caused by European nationalism, and specifically its Zionist manifestation in the nation-State of Israel.
Jews who have tended to identify with exile, rather than diaspora, end up with the wrong “solutions” to the problem of displacement and structural antisemitism. I’ve found that identification with the condition of exile more often leads to the concretization of what should be understood as a figurative homeland, and the assumption that one is entitled to (falsely) “return.”

Conversely, Jewish diasporists understand their identity to be in relation to other diasporans on the ground—as you said, “not in relation to a particular homeland or nationalism, but in spite of such situated spatialities.” This inspires local and internationalist political action of “hereness” and “everywhereness” in the present, rather than a politics of “thereness” which assumes a position that looks backward in space and time.
Part of what we are doing with the “no-State ‘solution’” is disturbing this very singularity, and the assuredness that the past can be resolved. It leaves us open to futurity in this way.

SA: I share your skepticism of proposed “solutions” to the genocidal violence the very architects of such proposals espouse. In the case of Palestine, I firmly believe Statehood will simply not make way for our liberation, as even the most recent “recognitions” of a Palestinian State by the beleaguered leaders of a few Western nations demonstrate. These piecemeal announcements propose a Palestinian State that would exist in some impossible adjacency with the existing settler State of Israel (within which the Palestinian archipelago is laid bare) amid an active genocide of Palestinian life, land, and knowledge. Even the more lofty proposal of a single, democratic State in which Palestinians and their murderers live side by side is an absolute crock.

Any Palestinian nation-State that might exist would never fully achieve sovereignty. The Palestinian nation, therefore—that boundary-less, capacious reorienting of our ever-evolving relationalities across the diaspora—is how our liberation is practiced. It is geographic, in the sense that we do know where we come from, but it is not contained by an imperial cartography that insists on borders recognized by anointed members of the so-called “international community.” In this sense, the very Indigenous epistemologies of nationhood as a sovereign practice of relation with all life, including the land, that I invoked in my first conversation with The Funambulist over a decade ago intersects quite instructively with the Black diasporic practices I’ve more recently drawn into my approach to a no-State “solution.” Palestinian relation to the land is an inseparable part of our struggle for freedom, and remains so even among Palestinians refugees and Palestinians in the diaspora who may never have seen or touched our homeland as a result of the Occupation. Like many multiply-displaced societies, including many Black, Indigenous, and Black Indigenous communities, our knowing of the land is not through Euro-American, racial capitalist conceptions of ownership, but through the memories our kin carried and sustained from place to place.

This also brings to mind Katherine McKittrick and Nasrin Himada’s ongoing “Sylvia Wynter Through and With Palestine” workshop series and their urgent insistence on reading Black and Palestinian thought on place, time, homeland, belonging, difference, and similarities in relation which opened up for me entirely distinct ways of thinking about the nation and Statehood. Specifically, in one recent workshop in Toronto, Himada took the time to discern between “land” and “soil” in the context of Palestine: for Palestinian fellaheen (peasants and farmers), the soil is communally worked, and the land cannot be owned. Conversely, the intrusion of Euro-American conceptions of Statehood revolved entirely on ownership of land, which destroyed the once-rich (when allowed to fallow) soil. Alongside this attempted dominion over land, Israeli nationalist myth relies immensely on what the scholar Nasser Abourahme terms, “the violent creation of historical beginnings,” in the construction of a Zionist indigeneity to occupied Palestine. The Israeli State, in effect, is upheld by the attempt to dominate both land and time, and this domination risks instilling in us, the people it occupies, the desire to utilize these very same epistemes as a measure to combat our oppression.

We’ve already seen the danger of our reproducing the logic of the nation-State with the spate of “heritage studies” that “prove” Palestinian genetic autochthony to historic Palestine that arose across social media in response to post-October 7 Israeli insistence on their own indigeneity to the same land.

This is another sort of attempt to resolve the past, as you say, but it is likewise a false promise that must be unsettled. Our Indigenous kin globally—and especially where you and I are based, in North America—know well the violence of tracking bloodlines to prove or disprove belonging to a nation; whether the settler nation-States of Canada and the US or the sovereign nations dispersed and occupied by these settler States.

RG: You bring up the post-October 7 modes of producing an often fabricated relationship to Palestinian land. Zionism is a concretization of that false relation to the land in the form of a nation-State. Jewish avowals of being-in-diaspora (both politically and theologically) have played a significant role in the disavowal of Zionism, and this has become the subject of a wave of recent Critical Jewish Studies scholarship.

I want to address one of these texts in particular, which also uses the term “The No-State Solution”—the central reason we’re here today—as its title: Daniel Boyarin’s 2023 The No State Solution: A Jewish Manifesto. To my knowledge, Boyarin’s book doesn’t cite you—nor any Palestinian scholars who have engaged with the idea of the “no-State solution.” The book is about Jewish diasporism as a nationalist alternative to the violent nation-statism of Zionism, and in many ways reads as a celebration of a borderless nationalism. The monograph is not interested in how the “no-State solution” would affect Palestinians, which poses a sharp contrast, obviously, to your thinking.

I have some disagreements with how Boyarin’s book frames exile, diaspora, peoplehood, and nationalism; however, those are beyond the scope of this conversation. Instead, I’d rather hear from you about what you originally meant by the “No-State ‘Solution’” more than eleven years ago when you used the term, and whether your definition of the term has changed given our contemporary conjuncture? I’d also be curious whether you think the “No-State ‘Solution’” is specific to Palestine, or whether it extends to other diasporic contexts?

SA: I should first specify that I did not coin the term or concept of a no-State “solution,” but mobilized it in order to push against the very notion that a nation-State in its modern conception, the very cause of our dispossession, might be in any way a “solution” to what is, in fact, a long-entrenched outcome of racial capitalism: imperialism, in the form of a settler colonial State. Indeed, many revolutionaries and thinkers from a wide range of similarly colonized, racialized, and forcibly dispersed communities have explored the possibilities of liberation beyond a nation-State recognized by the same violent State-based entities that initiated their dispossession in the first place. Kurdish political leader Abdullah Ocälan and the Palestinian writer and PFLP spokesperson Ghassan Kanafani are among such figures who frequently mused on alternatives to the nation-State, and as you yourself noted, there is considerable Jewish anti-Zionist thought and practice that insists that diaspora is both a political and theological mandate.
As I’ve previously gestured to, my own conversation with Léopold on the Archipelago podcast in 2014 [The Funambulist’s podcast, prior to the creation of the magazine] focused largely on my own influences at the time, which were (and continue to be) Indigenous understandings of the “nation” as a set of sovereign relations distinct from the nation-State. We also discussed anarchist thought on alternatives to the architecture and logic of the modern nation-State: Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the 19th century French anarchist, argued the internal and international hierarchies of the nation-State corrupted and negated the aspiration for freedom from domination represented by the strive for nationhood. Generations of anti-colonial thinkers such as Frantz Fanon—far from an anarchist himself—echoed such analyses, contending that nationalism as a unifying force against colonial domination “stops short, falters, and dies away on the day that independence is proclaimed” unless it rapidly transforms into the building of a political and social consciousness.

RG: I identify more with a communist, rather than anarchist, political tradition; however, these two strands of political praxis have not always been as different from one another as they tend to be framed today. Even Marx and Engels imagined the “withering away of the State” as a necessary feature of the full transition from capitalism to socialism. But we don’t need to return to Marx and Engels to understand this strand of communism, which is much more sympathetic to an eventual Stateless society. Since we’re thinking today about the “No-State ‘Solution’” in the context of the struggle for Palestinian liberation, I’d rather draw on the wide breadth of thinking from the field of Palestine Studies.

Kanafani, who you’ve already mentioned, is a perfect example of a communist organizer who, while committed to imagining alternatives to the nation-State in what might be perceived as a more anarchical political tradition, was also deeply committed to working class internationalist struggle as conceived of by Marxist-Leninists (and it’s worth saying that the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine was a Marxist-Leninist organization). Kanafani, in this way, was born of and advanced a Third-Worldist approach to Marxism.

One way we might carry forward this approach is through attention to linguistic specificity when considering these questions of Statehood, nationalism, diaspora, and exile. I recently heard Amanda Batarseh speak about Palestinian literature produced in Al-Shatat—the Arabic word that connotes shattering, fragmentation, dispersal, and exile. “Shatat” evades neat translation into the English language. Using the Arabic, rather than the English “diaspora” with its Greek roots, the term becomes distinctly Arab, and we might even say uniquely Palestinian given the context of the Israeli occupation, ethnic cleansing, and genocide over the past 77+ years. What can a return to linguistic roots offer for our understanding of the specificities of each group’s collective histories of displacement? How might this specificity open up possibilities for disrupting the borders that the nation-State imposes?

In my own research on radical Jewish diasporism, I’ve been interested in contrasting the Hebrew “Galut” / Yiddish “Golus,” which imperfectly translates to “exile” / “diaspora,” with the Palestinian “Shatat” so I can more deeply understand how these two conceptions of Statelessness are multidirectionally in relation to each other. Golus (גלות) comes from the root G-L-H (גלה), which is also the root of words that have to do with discovery and revelation. We might, then, understand “Golus”—scattering, fragmentation, dispersal of the Jewish people again and again across multiple generations—to have something to do with revelation. In diaspora, there is something to be discovered.

Contrasting the idea of “discovery” the way we know it in the Americas, as an endorsement of a manifest destiny ideology, this type of “discovery” could be understood as a method of finding peace in the futurity of a local and transnational belonging that exceeds the State.

“Shatat” and “Golus” evoke specificity in our thinking about exile and diaspora while disrupting the geopolitical boundaries that have been imposed by the violence of the nation-State. Shared visions of liberation are embedded in the words themselves; they connote the non-static and non-statist conception of being in relation to land and others who share our land and a vision of collective stewardship that moves beyond solidarity—toward something that looks much more like fighting for collective community needs and demands.

Developing a vision of shared liberation, then, requires looking backward at our lexicons and our histories as a means by which we might imagine forward. In other words, this is a futurist project. I know you’ve done some thinking about Afro-futurism in your own work. I’m wondering if you have any thoughts about how the “No-State Solution” and Futurism might work in conjunction with each other? Relatedly, the nation-State tends to be thought of as operating on a spatial register; we understand the “State” as contained by geographic borders. But I’m wondering if you have any thoughts on how temporality, in addition to spatiality, plays a role in Statehood, or non-Statehood?

SA: I love this prompt because it allows me to draw on some recent work from some Black and Palestinian thinkers who are now offering urgent insight into the questions that arise when we consider Palestinian, Black, and Jewish pasts, presents, and futures in comparison.

I am thinking specifically of Nasser Abourahme’s book, The Time Beneath the Concrete: Palestine Between Camp and Colony, which has pushed me to consider how Palestinian futurity is always bound up in Palestinian ways of understanding and maneuvering time as an insistent refusal of Israeli settler colonial temporality. Abourahme observes that Palestinians have always lived outside of settler time, in that we have always lived as though the Israeli State is temporary. A primary currency of Zionism is the erasure of Palestinian pasts, hence the Israeli’s ongoing epistemicide (as Sherene Seikaly names it) as a crucial tactic of their genocide. The very real goal of eradicating Palestinian knowledge and history as a genocidal strategy has rightfully generated the question of how we reconstruct and preserve our past: not just in memory, as we have always done, but our archives, our libraries, our universities, our trade unions, our agricultural traditions, our language and our stories? I share these concerns and desires, but another question we must challenge to ask ourselves alongside them is: who are we reconstructing our history for?

If it is for ourselves, as it ought to be, then we continue as we always have. Yet I fear that the devastating lack of attention and action from the “international community” has sparked a desperate desire in many of us to make ourselves and our history, cultures, knowledges, and accomplishments legible to the very same nation-States that are either directly participating and enabling this genocide, or have willfully turned a blind eye to the horrors of Israel’s siege of Gaza. But this is our history, our stories, our memory work to carry, as the living descendants of the Nakba. We know who we are, in all our differences and distinctions. We live our history in our presence, with every loss not a closing, but an opening and continuation of our living practice of memory. The Martiniquan poet and writer Édouard Glissant proclaimed the “right to opacity” for the colonized people of the Caribbean as a refusal of the West’s demand for coherence and transparency: Statehood is a capitulation to this demand for assimilation into legibility.

There is clearly no conclusion to this discussion, as what form the sovereignty and freedom of Palestine and Palestinians might be beyond a no-State “solution” is the very horizon of our ongoing struggle for liberation, but perhaps I can close my part in it by turning to an observation of Katherine McKittrick’s in the aforementioned workshop on reading Sylvia Wynter with and through Palestine in Toronto this past December. Dr. McKittrick posed a question about what belonging means in terms of a homeland—a geography, a land, a soil—that can be touched, in comparison to a homeland that cannot be? She asked how we honour people in places that are not their homeland, but that they are indigenizing in the process of death?

These are the very questions I have as a Palestinian of the diaspora. My maternal grandparents, both of Bir Nabala, are not buried in Palestine. My grandmother’s father, several of my great-uncles and great-aunts and cousins, and my dear, late uncle, F, are buried far from home. They were Palestinian at birth, Palestinian in life, and Palestinian in death, but they are interred in the land and soil of another place that became home out of necessity. Their belonging to a Palestinian nation continued on and took shape in an entirely distinct geography, a space they built to sustain and broaden their relations in refusal of multiple and interlocking settler times and cartographies. These are the very diasporic practices that disrupt the inevitability of the nation-State entirely, demonstrating the differential imaginative and material bridges between belonging and nation, identity and homeland. The Palestinian nation we have sustained is a practice of relation that is continued at home and in diaspora, and does not preclude the possibility of our return. Our return is not, nor should we surrender to it being, predicated on the establishment and recognition of a nation-State. The long thought traditions of reimagining liberation in excess of the nation-State we’ve discussed today reverberates with relational practices of diasporic worldbuilding: though colonialism strives to alienate the colonized from themselves and their own ways of knowing, our insistence on reimagining how we know ourselves and one another across the violence of dispossession and dispersal demands that we continuously reimagine our past, present, and future relation in resistance and refusal: this is where and how our nation continues on. ■