The Mask Has Slipped. Don't Let Them Put It Back On.

By Harry Z

In December 1964, in a fiery speech to the United Nations, Che Guevara undressed the hypocrisy of those who were attempting (unsuccessfully) to overthrow the Cuban Revolution: 

‘Western civilization’ disguises behind its showy facade a picture of hyenas and jackals … it must be clearly established that the government of the United States is not the champion of freedom, but rather the perpetrator of exploitation and oppression of the peoples of the world, and of a large part of its own population.

James Baldwin echoed Che, just a few years later:

All of the Western nations have been caught in a lie, the lie of their pretended humanism; this means that their history has no moral justification, and that the West has no moral authority.

The zionist assault on Palestine has once again exposed the dark underbelly of the west’s so-called free and democratic values. Their cynical idealism melts into hypocrisy with each American-made missile that obliterates a Palestinian neighborhood.

This hypocrisy proclaims the importance of the press while massacring scores of Palestinian journalists; extolls sovereignty in Ukraine while arming settlers in Israel; opportunistically “defends” women's rights in Afghanistan while bombing schools and hospitals in Gaza; cynically vetoes ceasefire resolutions supported by the vast majority of the world while supporting those who openly proclaim their desire to erase the Palestinian people from history.

The same self-righteous liberals who dutifully cheer on wars of aggression, from Iraq to Grenada, under the pretense of ”defending democratic values” — the same Americans who celebrate the slavers and perpetrators of a genocide who fought the British in a “Revolutionary War” — these hypocrites chastise the Palestinian people for resisting extermination with a revolutionary counter-violence of their own.

In their surrealist calculus, mass theft of land, concentration camp conditions, kidnapping and torture of political dissidents — these are valid, state-sanctioned violences.

But to throw a rock at a tank, to kill a settler, to dare protect your own dignity and humanity with violence of your own — that is terrorism.

A Yemeni blockade in support of a people on the brink of extermination is an unacceptable violation of international law, a terroristic campaign — yet the decades-long, murderously cruel blockades imposed on Cuba and Gaza, against the will of nearly all nations on earth, are barely worth a mention.

In these moments of heightened political consciousness, the empire stands naked, cowed, on trial before the world’s watchful masses. The stubbornness of the resistance brings an anxious sweat to their brow, the weight of a thousand genocidal lies forces their head to bow, and once again the mask slips.

In June of 2020, the empire and its domestic foot soldiers, the police, were similarly unable to hide behind their usual pretenses. In the face of a mass uprising which threatened their very existence, the police could only respond by brutalizing, kidnapping and denigrating the very people they claim to “protect and serve.” For a brief moment, it was eminently clear to all pragmatic observers that the police were not acting out — they were fulfilling their function, as they always have, of protecting capitalist property and disciplining the poor and racialized populations who resist the quotidian (and spectacular) horrors of racial capitalism.

But while it burned bright, this moment of radical possibility was crushed, co-opted and liberalized almost immediately. Five months after George Floyd was lynched by the state, millions of the same people who flooded the streets in June took to the polls to vote for one of the chief architects of mass incarceration and the war on drugs. The revolutionary horizon of abolition, initially propelled by the justified rage of the Black masses, was sanitized and co-opted by liberal politicians, artists and opportunists. Corporate diversity seminars and police “reform” bills took center stage. In most places, police budgets increased after the uprising.

Similarly, in the 1960s and 1970s, the FBI and local police departments mobilized in a previously unheard of manner to infiltrate and sabotage Black and brown revolutionary organizations — and to kidnap, torture, harass, stalk and assassinate their leaders. It’s always telling which movements face the most severe state repression, for those are the movements which threaten the very foundations of empire. 

These organizations posed an existential threat — as Hoover famously wrote, “the Black Panther Party, without question, represents the greatest threat to internal security of the country” — not only because of their commitment to domestic revolutionary practice, but because they viewed their work as deeply interconnected with the global third world struggle against imperialism. They understood that the capitalist and colonial imperatives which cripple the dreams and life chances of poor, racialized communities in the United States are the same forces which maintain apartheid states like Israel. The violent techniques of repression and eviction we’ve witnessed in Sheikh Jarrah and in the West Bank settlements are the same forces (police and property) viciously gentrifying our cities. Palestinians and Black Americans are victims of the same fascist techniques of police brutality, torture and incarceration. It’s no accident that revolutionaries like George Jackson found inspiration and common cause with the Palestinian struggle.

To make these connections and to organize on their basis is to strike at the very foundations of empire. When the leaders of the Black power movement aligned themselves with the leaders of socialist anti-colonial struggles across the Americas, Africa and Asia, they marked themselves for destruction. Faced with this existential threat, the US police state did not hesitate to reveal its fascistic character.

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In both of these moments, the mask slipped. The state could not hide its true function as the violent organizing institution of racial capitalism.

But, due to a combination of factors, chiefly state repression and careful ideological maneuvering, the mask was re-made — often incorporating crass representation of the groups it sought to repress and shallow nods to the symbolism of the movements it had just ruthlessly crushed — and donned once more. Black power came to be more closely associated with Black capitalism than revolutionary political practice. Nixon invoked the specter of Black nationalism and communism to rally southern whites around his revanchist political project. As Fred Hampton’s blood stiffened in his mattress, the long arc of neoliberalism, white power and mass incarceration took its vengeance. 

Armed with this history, we confirm that the death cult of empire is irreconcilable with our dreams of a just world. Its lofty ideals are no more than a charade, its claims to world leadership as fragile as Henry Kissinger’s rotting skeleton. 

With every stone, bullet and improvised bomb that the Palestinians hurl back at the occupying forces, with every market in Gaza that defiantly opens in the brief moments of quiet, with every doctor that works in the dark, against impossible odds, bandaging and stitching and mending while the occupation closes in, with every child that draws breath, in defiance of the wishes of the most powerful armies on earth —

With their humanity, their naked, honest humanity, the Palestinian people confirm that they — not the blood-soaked bureaucrats in Washington, nor the shameless journalists at the oh-so-revered New York Times, nor the murderous foot soldiers of global capitalism at NATO — are the true humanists, the real “leaders of the free world.” 

In Gaza, the empire faces its gravediggers.

And in each act of the resistance, a new world is born, kicking and screaming, fragile yet determined, beyond doubt, to survive. We don’t know what shape this world will take, or when it will mature, but we know that it will not emerge from Washington, London or Tel Aviv. Our new world will be nursed at a thousand sites of resistance, fed with the fruits of our labor which once swoll the bellies of our blood-sucking bosses, raised by freedom fighters in every corner of the world.

We owe it to the struggling masses of Palestine, of the Congo, of those in a thousand sites of resistance to the long tentacles of the US empire — and we owe it ourselves, to our domestic struggles for liberation — to never let those hyenas and jackals hide behind their false humanism again.

Before the forces of liberalism capture this moment, we must concretize our ideology, and hammer home that there is no reforming this beast which we are uniquely positioned to destroy. There is no humanistic mission to the US empire. There are no “mistakes” as we so often call our genocidal ventures into Vietnam or Iraq. 

To paraphrase the great Du Bois: This is not the United States gone mad; this is not aberration nor insanity; this is the United States; this is the real soul of empire — naked, drenched in blood, built by blood money; honest, for once.

The empire’s actions in Gaza are not tragedies or missteps but rather the predictable and historically consistent behavior of empire, from Wounded Knee to Jakarta, from My Lai to Attica — and with a Democratic president and “socialist” legislators in virtual lockstep with Israel’s genocide, we would be remarkably naive to pretend that the institutions of empire possess any capacity for reform. 

As just one example: we cannot return to a world in which The New York Times is regarded as the unbiased paper of record. The zionist mythology is nurtured and legitimized in their pages: the colonizer morphed into the victim, the colonized morphed into, at best, a historyless people, and at worst, a nation of terrorists. The ongoing Nakba — that ethnic cleansing by the Zionists, that cataclysm for the Palestinian people — erased from history, replaced with a collective amnesia about the violent foundations and maintenance of the Israeli state. And it doesn’t stop there:

From Korea and Guatemala in the 1950s, to Vietnam and Indonesia in the 60s, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Chile and Grenada in the 70s and 80s, Iraq, Afghanistan and the former USSR in the 90s and 2000s, Libya and Yemen in the 2010s — that deified rag has consistently ginned up support for US aggression and justified the tremendous violence we inflict on the rest of the world — crusade-like, in the name of anti-communism, democracy, human rights, “American interests” or whatever smoke screen our leaders and their loyal accomplices in the press concoct to distract us from the violence’s true function: the disciplining arm of global imperialism, the massacres, rivers of blood, tortures, loyally installed fascist dictators, carefully trained death squads, psychological warfare and sexual violence which puts anti-colonial, anti-capitalist movements to the sword for daring to challenge the profits and hegemony of Western multinational corporations.

These understandings have serious tactical implications. Our tactics must not, cannot stop with politicking and marches. As we have learned — including through the example of the Yemeni blockade — the cold heart of capitalist empire responds only to organized, frontal attacks on its economic organs and central nervous system. 

We cannot shame empire into a humanism it has never and will never possess. We cannot appeal to the conscience of a state which has none.

But we are uniquely positioned to strike at the soft underbelly of the beast. Israeli bombs, guns and tanks are designed by American engineers, who are trained in our schools and universities. These weapons are built by American workers, with American tax dollars, shipped through American ports and accrue huge profits to American capitalists. America’s vampiric financial institutions — Blackrock, Vanguard and State Street, namely — provide the blood money which fuels the US-Israeli war machine. It goes without saying that the Israeli Occupation Forces maintain bone-deep ties to both local American police forces and national intelligence agencies.. If we aren’t positioned to resist the American transnational war machine, who is? Our capacity to resist is a question of will, not opportunity.

And if we are to resist, if we are to truly call ourselves anti-imperialists, freedom fighters, workers and tenants and students in solidarity with the peoples of the third world — whatever our lofty aspirations may be — that must mean, we must accept, that we are not working to reform empire — we are at war with it.

The United States, as we know it, must die for the world to live.

Muslim and Arab-American Voters Show Black People How to Exercise Political Power

By Margaret Kimberley

Republished from Black Agenda Report.

Black voters feel trapped in the duopoly but other groups are giving a master class in political courage. The Abandon Biden campaign shows the way.

Face the Nation Host Margaret Brennan: Thasin, you did change your mind on the president. Why?
Thasin: I was a champion for Joe Biden until October 7. I feel he disowned us, disenfranchised us, with his stance on Gaza.
Brennan: What do you mean by that?
Thasin: He’s not listening to us. We’re asking for a cease fire at this time. It’s a humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza. Too many lives have been lost at this time. I was never a single issue voter and in fact I used to argue with people not to be single issue voters but for me this is a deal breaker. Way too many lives have been lost. 
Brennan: When you say “us” you’re Muslim, is that what you mean? You think the Muslim community here feels as you do?
Thasin: Yes. I think the vast majority of Muslims, Arab-Americans, progressives, I identify myself as a progressive, and many people I talk to in my circles are not going to be voting for Joe Biden.

- Michigan Voter Focus Group on CBS news program, Face the Nation

Historically, Black people in this country have allowed themselves to feel trapped by the racialized political duopoly. A feature of U.S. politics is to allow only two parties to play a decisive role in elections and for one of them to be designated as the white people’s party and the other as the Black party. 

Beginning after the civil war and until the 1960s, the democrats were the party of the segregated south, and thus the party for white people generally. Republicans, the party of Abraham Lincoln, became the de facto preference for Black people despite their willingness to shove Black interests under the bus when they felt the need to placate white voters. 

In 1872 Frederick Douglass spoke at the National Convention of the Colored People and famously spoke these words. “For colored men the Republican party is the deck, all outside is the sea.” Douglass and other Black people counseled continued support for the republicans, even when they made deals to withdraw federal troops from the south, or refused to codify the Civil Rights Act of 1875 into law after the Supreme Court declared it to be unconstitutional. 

Democrats were the party of the confederacy and thus could not be countenanced under any circumstance, even republican betrayals.

This dynamic played out for the next 100 years when the two teams made a switch which lasts until today. The last time a majority of white people supported a democrat in a presidential election was 1964. Ever since that time they have given a majority of their votes to republicans and Black people have done likewise with the democrats. 

Unfortunately the role that Black political action played in forcing democrat Lyndon Johnson to advocate for and sign the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Right Act of 1964 into law have been forgotten. Black people won legislative victory through their own efforts in creating a mass movement and a political crisis that brought about change. This era has been fetishized, without any understanding of its real importance and meaning. The truth has been turned on its head, and we are taught that Black people owe loyalty to democrats, when that party should reward loyalty with policies that Black people want to see enacted.

But every group in the country has not been cowed. Voters who identify as Muslims or who have Middle Eastern ancestry have put Joe Biden on notice that his aiding and abetting of Israel’s war crimes in Gaza will cost him politically. Michigan has the largest Arab-American community of any state and plays a pivotal role in presidential elections. Democrats take great care to mobilize voters in this key “swing” state. Hillary Clinton’s failure to do so in 2016 resulted in Donald Trump’s victory there by a small margin of 13,000 votes and he prevailed in the Electoral College when Pennsylvania and Wisconsin were also neglected by the democrats and flipped to the republican column. 

Joe Biden won in Michigan in 2020 by a 154,000 vote margin in a state where 200,000 registered voters identify as Muslim and 300,000 claim ancestry from the Middle East and North Africa. Michigan is not the only state Biden won by a small margin thanks to Arab and Muslim voters. In Arizona, Georgia, Minnesota, and Wisconsin he also owed his victory in part to members of this community.

A group of Muslim leaders in swing states are rightly using their electoral power with the #AbandonBiden campaign. They are not so frightened of a Trump presidency that they have allowed themselves to vote for the man who through his proxy Israel has killed some 24,000 people in Gaza and despite phony claims of “working behind the scenes” shows no inclination to change policy and save lives.

It is true that these communities do not share Black people’s history of enslavement and Jim Crow segregation. As such they have a greater willingness to show independence but there are lessons here for Black people in how to exercise their power.

Joe Biden and every democrat elected in the last 60 years owes his presidency to Black voters. The same is true of politicians in city halls, state legislatures, and in the Senate and the House of Representatives. Black people have political muscle but through a combination of misleadership chicanery and ignorance of the right lessons of history, act as supplicants instead of as political players.  

Arab-Americans have not forgotten Trump’s so-called Muslim ban, when citizens of Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen were barred from entering the country. Yet they do not act fearfully despite the fact that Trump is again a candidate for the office he once held and pledges to bring back the ban and even to deport people who protest U.S. policy towards Palestine.

Fortunately the #AbandonBiden campaign has shown no signs of letting up because its leadership knows how to get results and because they refuse to disrespect themselves and their people by rewarding a genocidaire with another term in the white house. How much could Black people achieve with similar determination?

In 2024 and beyond, the words “but Trump” should lose their power. How much has Biden done for Black people in the last three years? The covid era programs of small stimulus payments and the Child Tax Credit are over. Millions of people eligible for Medicaid and SNAP food benefits have been kicked off the rolls in many states with no intervention from the federal government. The pardon for federal marijuana convictions freed no one from jail. Police continue their killing spree with more than 1,300 victims in 2023. Mass incarceration continues as 1 million Black people are locked up, more than anywhere else in the world with the help of the most draconian sentences in the world. Of course Senator Joe Biden bragged about his role in the Clinton era Crime Bill which put so many Black people behind bars. There was good reason not to vote for him in 2020.

As it seems Black people have forgotten how to demonstrate political power, perhaps lessons from other groups are a means of regaining what has been lost. Black people can abandon Biden too, along with all of the democrats who owe their elected office to a group of people they routinely ignore or use for “dog whistle” politics appealing to white voters. 

Donald Trump is not the biggest enemy, he is just the loudest and the least refined. Abandoning Biden and his minions can be a reality which may produce some worthy result. Feeling trapped by the duopoly has been and continues to be a losing proposition.

Margaret Kimberley is the author of Prejudential: Black America and the Presidents . You can support her work on Patreon and also find it on the Twitter , Bluesky , and Telegram platforms. She can be reached via email at margaret.kimberley@blackagendareport.com

The History Behind the So-called "Israel-Hamas War"

(Photo by Ahmad Hasaballah/Getty Images)

By Dylan Jones

Where we start a narrative makes a big difference. If we start the narrative on October 7th, when Palestinian resistance launched rockets into Israel, then it’s easier to justify a military response from Israel. However, is this an honest place to start telling the story from? What different conclusions would we draw if we started the story from 75 years ago? Or thousands of years ago? Starting the narrative in a different place by adding historical context allows us to understand the obstacles to everyone's liberation in this situation.

First, I would like to acknowledge that there is no doubt important Jewish cultural and spiritual ties to Palestine. And indeed, before Israel was founded there were many Jews living peacefully alongside Muslims and Christians in Palestine. Palestinians have lived there since time immemorial, with genetic ties going back to the Canaanites[1]; they have social, cultural, and spiritual ties to the land. In this way, Palestinians are indigenous to the land. This is not to say that non-Palestinian Jews are not also Indigenous to Palestine, a question which I will show has absolutely no bearing on the current situation. An Indigenous person from a given area can also act as a colonizer/settler under the conditions of a settler colonial nation state such as Israel. This becomes clear when we analyze the last 75 years— since Israel’s founding.

The modern state of Israel has its roots in Western colonialism. Theodore Herzl in the 1800s defined the goal of today’s zionism, to create a home for white Ashkenazi Jews from Europe. He decided it could be in Argentina, Uganda, or Palestine. At this time, Britain controlled Palestine as a colony and, under the Balfour Declaration (1917), it promised an area of Palestine to the zionists in order to quell anti-semitism in Europe. Palestinians had no say in this decision. As tensions heightened due to Israeli settlers converging in Palestine and inevitably seizing property from its inhabitants, the U.N. announced a partition plan in 1947 which would designate over half of Palestine to establish the nation state of Israel. When Palestinians rejected the plan, Israel committed genocide to take it by force. In what is called the Nakba, Israeli military forces and vigilante settlers murdered 15,000 Palestinians overnight, displaced 850,000 people, and destroyed 550 villages. After this initial genocidal campaign, Israel took even more land than it was promised in the UN partition plan. To this day, Israel actively prevents those it displaced from returning. Israel meets protests asserting the right to return with violence.

Since the Nakba, over the course of decades, Israel has consistently evicted more Palestinians from their land, forcefully displacing families and entire communities. It arbitrarily imprisons Palestinians, including children. It has developed an apartheid system that denies basic human rights to Palestinians. There are policies of environmental racism such as not allowing Palestinians to drill for well water and spraying herbicide on Palestinian farms to destroy their sources of food and economic livelihood. This is state terrorism. This is a settler colonial state in operation. Israel is displacing, invading, ethnically cleansing Palestinians, and occupying more and more of Palestine in order to replace the existing society with its own.

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Israel regularly bombs Palestine, hardly warranting a few articles in mainstream news. But when the rockets launched on October 7th, mainstream news immediately stated condemnation. When a white Israeli citizen dies, it is news. When an Israeli bomb severs a Palestinian child’s head from their body, it is normal; we can immediately jump to justifications. Similar to its response to other Palestinian resistance, Israel is using October 7th to justify a second genocide, a second Nakba. Since October 7th, Israel has murdered more than 15,000 Palestinians, over 6,000 children, and over 4,000 women. They have blocked water and food. They have bombed schools, hospitals, and refugee camps. Israel has hundreds of child hostages but has the power to define them as prisoners. There are around 10,000 Palestinian hostages in Israel. Every hour, Israel drops 42 bombs and half of the population of Gaza is children.

According to Israeli officials themselves, the goal is not to hunt down Hamas but rather to seize this opportunity to murder and displace Palestinians living on the land Israel would like for its own. Netanyahu himself says “you must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our holy bible, we do remember,” referring to the ancient enemy of the Israelites in scripture. This references a call to exterminate the entire population of Amalekites—every man, woman, child, and piece of property.[2] A former Israeli intelligence chief, Rami Igra on CNN said, “the non-combatant population in the Gaza strip is really a nonexistent term. All of Gaza voted for Hamas and as we have seen on the 7th of October most of the population in Gaza strip are Hamas”.[3] Imagine if the same outrageous claim were made about Israelis having voted for Netanyahu. The Israeli Minister of Agriculture, Avi Dichter announces, “we are now rolling out the Gaza Nakba,” “Gaza Nakba 2023”.[4] In this way, Israeli officials are clear that the intention is not to hunt down Hamas, it is a campaign of ethnic cleansing and genocide. Despite how clearly Israeli officials admit genocide and ethnic cleansing, western media still focuses on the “hunt for Hamas” narrative. We must reject this narrative and when we are asked to condemn Hamas, we should say instead…

Israel—as a terrorist, settler colonial nation state—is dependent on violence against Palestinians and it thereby jeopardizes the health and safety of its own inhabitants, rather than protecting them. It supposes that one people’s self-determination, rights, and lives have to come at the expense of others. Among Zionists goals are creating a safe space for Jewish people and creating a relationship with an important spiritual place to Jewish people living around the world. There are peaceful ways to do this that respect the existing Palestinian society. Establishing the theocratic settler colonial ethnostate of Israel erases Palestinian society. Therefore, the dismantling of zionism is the only truly just and safe path for Palestinians and Jews. If the Palestinian resistance stops its resistance, Israel will only continue its occupation, annexing more land, extra-judicially imprisoning Palestinians—including children (read: taking as hostages), and bombing Gaza. This characterizes life under the boot of Israel since it was founded. This does not advocate violent resistance as the only option, but points out that the root of all the violence rests clearly with the settler colonial state of Israel. Free Palestine is not a cry for retribution. It does not advocate violence against Israelis. Free Palestine means dismantling the social and political project of zionism and moving toward liberation for everyone.

I believe most people have wondered what they would have done during the holocaust when Nazi Germany slaughtered millions of Jews, Romanis, Sintis, people with disabilities, and others. I say emphatically you do not have to wonder what you would have done. What you would have done is what you’re doing right now for Palestinians living in Israel’s death camps. Attend and/or uplift: rallies for a permanent ceasefire, vigils, assembly meetings, sit-ins, and shutdowns. Call legislators and demand a ceasefire. Advocate for Palestine among your friends and family. Whether we would like to be activists or not, our tax dollars are funding the bombs eviscerating Palestinian people. At a moral bare minimum, we are called to be activists now. I do not believe I would have come to support Palestine if it were not for the values for love and kindness that my family and friends taught me. Now I call on all my friends and family to live out these values. Long live Palestine! Long live Gaza! From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!

Notes

[1] https://www.brown.uk.com/teaching/HEST5001/Palestinians.pdf

[2]https://www.npr.org/2023/11/07/1211133201/netanyahus-references-to-violent-biblical-passages-raise-alarm-among-critics

[3]https://www.cnn.com/audio/podcasts/anderson-cooper-360/episodes/d61ee373-605b-4ec4-82dd-b0a9001d97a9

[4]https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/gaza-nakba-israels-far-right-palestinian-fears-hamas-war-rcna123909

Force Breeds Counterforce: On the Legitimacy of Resistance and its Methods

By Youssef Shawky

The widespread saying “to throw Israel into the sea” resonates with critics before advocates, and despite its unreasonableness in light of the current circumstances and arrangements, it carries within it a legitimate and logical right because Israel, since it has been invented, has been the one who always wants to throw the Palestinians into the sea. It seizes their land by implementing a depopulatory/substitutionary settler colonialism supported by a racist, religious ideology. As a result, resistance with a religious inclination is not only legitimate, but also a necessity in light of the cultural and historical characteristics of the Arab peoples and the ideological methods used by the occupation.

There is no escape from ideology; As it is the standard that classifies things and gives them different definitions and meanings. Humans, throughout their lives, indirectly interact with “reality,” resulting in a world of their own. That world is not the real world, but rather a world within which two types of relationships merge: imaginary relationships and real ones. If the individual is the first party in those relationships, the second party is the real material conditions of existence, which in turn consist of forces and relations of production, class, political and national power balances, etc. Thus, ideology is the expression of the relationship between the individual and her “world.”

Louis Althusser wrote that ideology is an imaginary representation of the imaginary relationships that a person gets into with the real conditions of her existence. Ideology is not an illusion, or a negative false consciousness, rather it effectively engages with real conditions.

This affirms that each conflicting party in any society formulates its own ideology in a way that serves the interests of the party in its conflict with the rest of the parties. The capitalists have their ideology, just as the proletariat has its ideology… and the two are in contradiction with each other. The same applies to the relationship of the colonizer with the colonized.

The ongoing genocide in Gaza and the explicit call for the displacement of Palestinians from Gaza to Sinai, or as the Zionist Finance Minister called, “dispersing them throughout the world,” has reminded many Arab writers of the term “depopulatory settler colonialism,” a colonialism which does not aim to exploit the local population in a system that appropriates surplus value and natural resources, as happened in South Africa and Algeria. Rather, it aims to seize the land of the indigenous people and displace or exterminate them to make space for settlers. Through this path, Zionist colonialism and the emergence of the State of Israel are similar to the emergence of the United States of America, with a clear historical difference that is not just several centuries separating the two events, but that Zionist colonialism occurred during the rise of national liberation movements, the awareness of the oppressed peoples about their rights including the Palestinian people, and the solidarity of the peoples of the Third World with them, especially the Arab peoples, who always emphasize the unity of their fate (and also their structural problems) with the fate of the Palestinian people. All of this created a strong ground for resistance, with which it is impossible for the fate of the Palestinians to be similar to that of native americans.

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The substitutionary nature of Zionist colonialism is the general framework within which the occupation operates from its beginning until now. It is the method that appears clearly in the defining moments in the history of the occupation. The first, of course, is the beginning of the Zionist gangs immigrating to Palestine and planning to gradually acquire the lands before eventually launching a war to establish a colonial state on 78% of Palestinian land. In 1967, the occupation adopted the method of displacement in the West Bank and the canal cities in Sinai and the Syrian Golan and, over the years, has gradually been fragmenting the West Bank with new settlements, aiming to finally annex it to the Jewish state.

This is what is happening today after the real threat that the occupation faced on October 7th. It is now trying to pressure the Palestinians of Gaza to migrate to Sinai or face the risk of genocide.

This does not cancel other frameworks of occupation that depend on the historical stage and the strategic goals implemented by the occupation towards the Palestinians and Arabs. There is an apartheid system within the occupied land of 1948, where the so-called “Israeli Arabs” are exploited and deprived of land and professional and social opportunities. There are also neo-colonial relations that include exploiting the natural resources of neighboring Arab countries and forcing them to open up to Israeli goods in a process of Unequal exchange through unfair economic agreements signed by local compradors.

As colonial methods diversify, ideologies accompanying them also diversify; from neoliberal ideology to pacification ones. This makes us wonder about the general ideology governing the course of occupation. Based on its depopulationary nature, this ideology is supposed to reject the existence of the Other, fundamentally. It does not just claim that the Other is less important or that she does not have the same rights, or is less intelligent, strong, civilized or beautiful...etc. All of this justifies subjecting the Other, exploiting her and denying her rights, but it does not stipulate the annihilation of the other or ending her existence. Rather, the “substitutionary ideology” necessarily rejects the existence of the Other because her existence constitutes a threat to the depopulationary entity.

The greatest representative of this tendency is the racist religious ideology that the Jewish state has espoused since its invention and is evident in all of its internal and external practices, laws, demographics, popular literature, daily conversations, and colonial ambitions, even in the state’s name, flag, and national anthem.

In fact, when Zionists kill Palestinians, they do not consciously believe that they are doing these actions “because they are substitutionary colonizers,” as this thought would reflect objective, concrete reality. They believe in something like: “We are defending our land, which is our right, based on the divine promise,” or “We are expanding our possession of more lands based on the same promise,” or “We must depopulate these Muslim Arabs who hate us so that we can protect ourselves” or that “we are God’s chosen people” and other religious racist ideas that are not just illusions but illusions that transform zionists into depopulatory colonizers.

While the diversification of colonial methods induce a parallel diversification in resistance methods, an armed resistance with military planning will always remain the most important and influential resistance. The other forms integrate with it, support it, and increase its strength and influence. When the general form of occupation is the genocidal substitutionary form that always and forever seeks displacement, settlement, and even mass murder, the only effective form of resistance to it is the military form.

Regarding the ideology of resistance, any party or group does not create its own ideology consciously and freely or choose from many alternatives. Rather, the ideology is formed simultaneously with the formation of the group. The nature and content of the ideology emerge due to several factors, the most important of which are the goals of the group, its cultural and social history, and the ideologies, goals, and strategies adopted by the surrounding groups (maybe conflicting ones). 

On this basis, we can understand why global Zionism has adopted Jewish racism as an ideological façade, and we can also understand the ideological nature of the resistance and its religious component. Just as substitutionary colonialism has a racist, religious face, it is not strange for the resistance to have a religious  “national liberation” face. This is not identity politics, as the religious aspect of the resistance did not discourage it from its liberation tasks, but rather an increased commitment to the tasks. The success of national liberation relies on formulating an ideology stemming from the characteristics and way of thinking of the resisting masses, and not in a condescending manner with imposing ideas on them, but rather by discovering the “special/local” way for the masses to be liberated so we, or they, can discover their own path of modernity.

This does not negate the attempts of islamists (originated from Al-Qaeda terrorist organization supported by US) to empty the Palestinian cause of its liberation content through the use of religion… but these attempts have so-far failed. The resistance axes, such as Hamas and Hezbollah, have engaged in armed conflicts with such Takfiri terrorists (ISIS, Al-Nusra Front, and Islamic State – Sinai Province). Hamas has officially separated from the Muslim Brotherhood since 2017 according to its charter, and much evidence supports that the religious-faced resistance has no relationship with political islamism, whatever its form.

Thus, the arab liberal intellectuals and some arab leftists who do not support the resistance under the pretext of its religious tendency suffer from a lack of understanding of the historical characteristics of their people, the way they think and feel, the time and manner of their movement and revolution, and the time of their latency and indifference. In doing so, many of them, who resemblr elitists rather than revolutionaries, play the role of cultural compradors hindering the organization of the Arab masses to liberate themselves from colonial and neo-colonial powers.

Building a Real Left: Not One That Condemns Resistance and is Without Palestinians

[Pictured: 500,000 people gathered in Washington, D.C. on Nov. 4 for a historic march that recognized the Palestinian right to resist]

By Ben Becker

Republished from Liberation News.

We are eight weeks into the war in Gaza and into a protest movement that has swept the country demanding justice for Palestinians. It is remarkable how much the political environment has transformed in the United States in general, and within the U.S. left in particular on account of the mass mobilizations organized by genuine anti-imperialist forces, both inside the United States and around the world. An honest reflection must admit, however, that eight weeks ago, many of the liberal leftists and “progressives” were paralyzed, bending to the pressures of bourgeois opinion, practically abandoning the Palestinian cause, and reserving their sharpest vitriol for anti-imperialists rather than apartheid Israel. 

From the very start, anti-imperialists rallied to the side of Palestine and so were called apologists for terrorism by mayors, governors, the White House and liberal leftist publications in one united chorus. While for a moment that meant the real, anti-imperialist left was demonized, caricatured and written off as a marginalized fringe by the liberal leftist organizations and some prominent liberal “influencers,” two months later there is now a mass anti-war movement taking the streets every night with anti-imperialist politics at the very center, and it is the liberals who are isolated.

The spineless “plague on both your houses” position held by liberal leftists and “progressives” collapsed within a week as Israel began its genocidal bombing, and as the broad spectrum of left forces and Palestinians united to demand an end to the siege of Gaza and a ceasefire. But the initial awful reaction from big sections of ostensibly “left” commentators should not be forgotten, and in fact should be learned from. It reflects a recurring line of division that will likely reappear as Israel’s siege enters a new murderous stage, especially if Palestinians begin to strike back outside of Gaza. This division is not about ideological minutiae but a fundamentally different approach to the colonial question. It speaks directly to the question of what type of movement we aim to build — either one that is tethered to a section of the liberal bourgeoisie, and so vacillates alongside it, or one that seeks to build anti-imperialist politics among the working class and is oriented towards unity with the Global South.  

To review: Four days into the genocidal bombing and siege of Gaza, with a massive ground invasion pending, the West’s most prominent left-liberal intellectuals stood up and spoke out against … the leftists on the streets for Palestine. Naomi Klein, Michelle Goldberg, and other self-proclaimed “left” writers immediately joined the ruling-class mob howling at those who had dared to demonstrate in solidarity with the Palestinian people, and their resistance, in the days after the Al-Aqsa Flood operation. They declared there can be no “credible” or “decent” left that does not condemn the tactics of the Palestinian resistance — and that by “valorizing terrorism, these voices on the left are effectively choosing to stop contending for power in a serious way.”

Goldberg proposed that the left should declare instead: “We are horrified by the murder of innocent people by Hamas and we want the United States to put maximum pressure on Israel to not to commit atrocities in Gaza.” The sentence is a marvel. The feelings of horror are reserved for the actions of Hamas — not Israel — while Israeli atrocities are presented passively, a potential thing of the future, which could be hopefully stopped by U.S. government “pressure.” Ignored are all the core questions: what about the longstanding Israeli atrocities and the fact that the United States has always facilitated and funded Israeli crimes? And what should the Palestinians do in the meantime? Apparently, anything but fight back.

For her part, Klein called for “An international left rooted in values that side with the child over the gun every single time, no matter whose gun and no matter whose child. A left that is unshakably morally consistent, and does not mistake that consistency with moral equivalency between occupier and occupied. Love.”

Sift through the poetics of this paragraph and this is essentially a call for the left to put equal distance from all the sides of the battle, so that it can achieve pure and unadulterated morality. How decent! Perhaps the Palestinians should lay down their arms entirely so the international left can keep our hands and reputations clean. Under this liberal position (using left phrases), it is fine to retain the moral and political position that Palestinians are in the right against occupation, but to be “consistent” this must be combined with a condemnation of Palestinians when they actually rise up against that occupation. This is nonsense: the “left” as an abstraction rather than a social force that accompanies the living struggles of our time and the real people fighting injustice. The true betrayal of left principles is to lapse into pure pacifism and abstract humanism so as to create distance from the oppressed.

That distance from the oppressed was made literal in the following days, when the protests with that political line were attended by shockingly few Palestinians and scarcely a Palestinian flag in sight. Meanwhile, the anti-imperialist forces who were so demonized and declared to not be “contending for power in a serious way” united a broad coalition rooted in the Palestinian and Arab community for the largest pro-Palestinian march in U.S. history, which was estimated at 500,000 people. That unity was not built by equivocating on the central issues of Palestinian self-determination, or pandering to the mood of the liberal bourgeoisie. Doing so would have not made the march bigger but actually doomed it. Instead, it put out a clear, unmistakable message that tapped into the mass mood of struggle and defiance felt by people of conscience from all communities. 

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Whatever initial isolation was necessary for anti-imperialists, the last month of mobilization has shown that a different type of broad unity can be built — not with bourgeois liberals — but by going directly to the base, and orienting to the majority sentiments of the Global South. Viewed from a global scale, it is the liberals who are isolated, and increasingly struggling to stay relevant. Look at the supposedly “decent” “left” represented by figures like Bernie Sanders and AOC: they have never been less relevant to the actual movement of history as now, when it counts the most. Sanders has stubbornly refused to even call for a ceasefire while AOC has scarcely been better – in two month’s time she has voiced support for the Iron Dome, then called for a ceasefire, and this week voted for a slanderous House resolution that equates anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. 

Klein, Goldberg and company focused their arguments after October 7 on the killing of Israeli civilians and noncombatants as war crimes. But this was just a convenient way to mask what was really a condemnation of Palestinian armed resistance as a whole. It’s not as if they defended under the rules of war the Al Aqsa Flood operation’s killing of an estimated 280 Israeli military personnel, or its taking dozens more soldiers and even generals as prisoners of war. What they really want is for Palestinians to remain peaceful and committed to nonviolent forms of protest. A more sophisticated and explicit version of this argument was presented at length in a New York Times essay calling for Palestinians to commit to “ethical resistance.”

Of course, Palestinian groups will debate among themselves what tactics and strategies are correct to advance their national liberation struggle, as they have in each phase of struggle. But not a single Palestinian party or faction (aside from the widely hated Mahmoud Abbas) condemned the Al Aqsa Flood operation — quite the contrary. Klein, Goldberg, et al should ask themselves why not. It is because the Palestinian people have attempted every type of march, protest and petition only to see the noose tighten around their necks. 

The Great March of Return consisted of weekly marches in 2018-19 at the Gaza border. Those mass marches, peaceful apart from mere rock-throwing, resulted in 223 Palestinian killed by Israeli sniper fire and thousands wounded. There was no international hue and cry; the settlements expanded and Israeli society shifted even further towards fascism. Now four years later, the Al Aqsa Flood fighters returned to those same border fences and bulldozed them. It is no wonder why three-quarters of all Palestinians explicitly support the October 7 attacks, and 89 percent support Hamas’s military wing. 

The Palestinian people as a whole, as a nation, understand that those who made nonviolent revolution impossible made the shift to full-fledged armed resistance inevitable. So in their insistence on an international left that condemns armed resistance, Klein and Goldberg are effectively asking for an international left without Palestinians. 

Without question, the experience of war is horrific, and no images shock the conscience quite like those of civilian casualties, especially women, children and the elderly. These images seem to require no context or explanation; they instinctively shape our emotions, stir our desire for justice, and compel us to show solidarity with the victims. But this is how and why imperialist war propaganda works time and again. Even though some people can in retrospect see the folly of many wars, in the moment of crisis they are selectively presented certain images, so that feelings of empathy and grief are easily instrumentalized as pretext for an invasion. The demand in a war fever is to feel anger and grief, to set aside analysis and critical thought. Hidden of course are the years of images of civilian death and mass destruction on the Palestinian side, the stories of trauma and terrorism they’ve endured, the names of their children. The whole world has never been instructed to join in their grief and to insist on their right to self-defense and retaliation against those responsible for that terrorism. 

War is always horrific and any student of military history knows the so-called “rules of war” are routinely violated – in fact they are not really considered at all by military strategists when they make their plans. Look at the US “shock and awe” bombing of Iraq, which was just another way of saying “strike terror” into the hearts of all Iraqi society. Look at Lyndon B. Johnson’s “Rolling Thunder” operation to completely destroy the northern part of Vietnam, killing an estimated 182,000 civilians in three years. Look at even the “good wars”  like World War II, when the U.S. carpet bombed cities in Japan and Germany that had no military purpose, intentionally causing mass civilian deaths as a way of psychologically terrorizing the enemy into surrender. But no one questions the righteousness and necessity of the war against fascism. Those U.S. leaders who directed those mass civilian deaths never faced a day in court for war crimes, but instead had schools and airports named after them. 

The Vietnam Memorial in D.C. lists out the names of 58,000 U.S. service member casualties in the war, an emotional display that stretches around 500 feet. But if it had the names of the Vietnamese deaths, civilian and combatant alike, it would stretch two miles. The way the war has been presented and is understood emotionally in the United States is, again, totally selective. The fiction is thus maintained that one civilized side wages war within the “rules” and only the “barbaric” wage war with terror. In fact, all modern war contains elements of terror.

For its part, Hamas officially says it upholds the rules of war and Islamic prohibitions on the targeting of women and children, disputing the dominant narrative of October 7, and says that the breaking down of the border fences allowed undirected groups of Palestinians to enter nearby Israeli settlements. 

But regardless of what exactly transpired, and who ordered precisely what, that cannot be used to confuse the basics of the Palestinian question. It is a struggle for national liberation against colonialism. It is not a war between two conventional armies. One side has a massive, high-tech and sophisticated military with advanced weapons systems, while the other side is a collection of guerrilla forces. The Palestinians have no military bases they control, no advanced weapons systems they can buy, no control over their own borders or airspace, no internationally legally recognized force to strike back against enemy states and to defend their population. This is a totally asymmetrical war, and for years it has been rocks versus tanks with nearly all the bleeding on one side. 

To win their national liberation struggle, Palestinians have tried general strikes. They have tried to get other Arab armies in the region to intervene. They have conducted dramatic hijackings to get worldwide attention, often designed for maximum spectacle with minimal civilian losses. They have tried peace agreements and negotiations (Hamas itself only turned to armed resistance after about a decade of this). They have tried international boycott, divestment and sanctions campaigns. They have gone to international courts and tribunals. The First Intifada was built on mass rallies and mobilization, largely led by the left, and it was only after the Israelis conducted a campaign of mass imprisonment and assassination of its leaders that the era of suicide bombings began. The failure of all the promised peace accords produced the Second Intifada, this time more violent. And now after years of losing more and more land, being asphyxiated by the millions, a new phase has opened. But it is one continuous national liberation struggle. 

The only real analogy left is that of the Native Americans or the Algerians, whose guerrilla struggles were not to win over the settler population — seeing that as impossible — but to strike back so that they might leave stolen lands and to show their own people through force that the enemy state was not invincible. Those battles too often involved the bloody deaths of non-combatants, and the anti-colonial fighters were called “savages” in the mass media of their day. But after years of broken promises and treaties, continuous encroachment on land, misery and humiliation, such armed resistance and violent eruptions became inevitable. And looking back, is there really any confusion about what was the side of justice?

As Israel begins a new round of murderous bombardment of Gaza, all responsibility for renewed bloodshed must be placed on the occupying power. The world sees clearly the genocidal and terrorist character of the Israeli armed forces. The task in the United States is to channel this into a mass social force that makes it untenable for the U.S. government to continue financing and arming the occupation. Out of the horrors of the present, many within the Palestinian community also believe they are entering a new phase of liberation struggle; this powerful movement must be prepared to stand with them.

What Would A Just Peace In Palestine Look Like?

By Chris Richards

A meme on Twitter has been asking "Where do the Israeli Jews go?" as if this is the supreme gotcha and this question completely invalidates all discussion of Palestinian liberation, as if Palestinian self-determination automatically means rendering the entire population of Israel homeless and stateless. This ignores the fact that the mere creation of Israel resulted in 750,000 to 1,000,000 Palestinians becoming homeless refugees. This also ignores the fact that, unless they have been naturalized as citizens in another country or are recognized as citizens of Israel, all Palestinians are stateless and have been for generations. The idea that justice for Palestinians automatically results in massive injustice for Israelis ignores that fact that restorative justice is in fact, not injustice at all. People whose homes were actually stolen when they were terrorized into abandoning them deserve their homes back.

The ethical gotcha behind "Where do the Israeli Jews go?" is that it would be unjust to put Israeli settlers in the same circumstances in which the Palestinians find themselves. This renders the vast injustice done to the Palestinians as a fait accompli that cannot be undone because it would cause even more harm. This would automatically eliminate the two state solution that American idealists and Israeli moderates have somewhat unrealistically clung to despite the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin and the unwillingness of any Israeli prime minsters who succeeded Rabin to risk the same fate. US President Joe Biden has been brandishing a two state solution as the ultimate and necessary solution to the "war" between the settlers and the Palestinians. Unfortunately for Joe Biden, if it is ethically beyond the pale to displace Israelis in the name of Palestinian liberation then any Palestinian state formed will be hopelessly undermined by hostile communities of settlers who will still see themselves as Israelis and reject Palestinian sovereignty over their communities. 

Let me repeat, as I said above, restorative justice is not injustice. This is not a question of generational guilt or punishing people today for crimes committed generations ago. The crime is still being committed. The crime is ongoing. The children of the thieves are not only living in stolen homes, but declaring their right to those homes and supporting the displacement or killing of more Palestinians so that more settlers can have homes. Former Prime Minister of Israel Naftali Bennett is the son of Americans from San Francisco who settled in Haifa after the Six Day War. It is not a coincidence that he advocates strongly for military expansionism. He was raised on a narrative of conquest and Israeli triumphalism. Well before the Nakba, Haifa was the scene of intense settlement by the Jewish Agency. A city that had 20,000 residents (of whom 6,000 were Jewish) in 1922 had a population of over 97,000 in 1948 ,and that larger population was 96% Jewish. The replacement of the Palestinian population with settlers didn't start during the Nakba. Ethnic cleansing is much older.

When this historical context is correctly understood then the following becomes clear: the two state solution requires an understanding that the Palestinians will not seek restorative justice past a certain point. The scope of justice allowed must be set by the party that did the harm and must commit to making restoration for justice to be possible. This is a dangerous situation that requires a maintained relationship of settler dominance and Palestinian acquiescence. If Palestinians do not acquiesce then their refusal to acquiesce puts us back in the same circumstances in which we began. The settler movement would have us believe that this is something for which the Palestinians, and not the settlers, are to blame. This is objectively false in the context of Palestinian history. The Palestinians are defending themselves from ethnic cleansing. Only sustained self-defense has prevented ethnic cleansing and population replacement at a faster rate.

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There is, of course, another obstacle to the practicality of a two-state solution separate from the question of its justice. This is the Israelis themselves.

The alleged centrist who succeeded Naftali Bennett as Prime Minister as part of a bizarre power sharing agreement between the Israeli far right and the so-called "moderates" called for a two-state solution at the United Nations. To Yair Lapid, a two-state solution depends on a "peaceful Palestinian state that does not threaten Israel."  This has generally been interpreted in policy terms by the so-called Middle East experts as a "demilitarized Palestinian state."  This means that the proposed two-state  solution proposed by many experts is one that is unacceptable to Palestinians because they would still have the IDF as a neighbor and a significant population of settlers, with no means to defend themselves. How is this fundamentally different than the existing occupation of the West Bank and containment of Gaza? Yet the Israeli state has the power to set the terms of the existence of the Palestinian state and the Palestinian people are supposed to accept this as established fact. If they do not, it is their fault.

Once more, with feeling: restorative justice is not injustice.

A real two-state solution, with a Palestine equipped to defend itself, is a surrender to the settler fait accompli in the first place. It requires an act of acquiescence to happen. If the Palestinians are unwilling to acquiesce to only partial justice then it is impossible. These are objective facts. When the settler movement is so powerful that the Israeli state cannot even propose a true two-state solution, but must instead add impossible demands that only make Palestinian acceptance less likely then we must accept that the Israeli state is not serious about a two-state solution. A serious effort would involve every possible concession that would make acquiescence more acceptable to the Palestinians. The Israeli state has never engaged in such a peace process.

This brings us to the question I ask in the headline. What does a just peace look like?

It also brings us to the question of the meme and the settler movement. Where do the Israeli Jews go?

Only the Palestinians can answer the first question. I am a white American, which makes me a settler myself. I can't tell Palestinians what a just peace in Palestine looks like anymore than I can tell the Modoc what a just peace with the US government would really look like. That's why I support the land back movement and believe that the United States should be legally forced to honor its treaties with Indigenous nations. We should reject the arrogance that might lead us to suggest or force a solution to the question of Palestinian liberation. We should instead support the Palestinians in their struggle against the settler movement. Only the Palestinians can determine what a just peace would look like and what they are willing to acquiesce to short of "from the river to the sea." If they're not, only they can make that decision. We should still support them.

Once again, restorative justice is not injustice.

The settler movement's question remains. Where do the Israeli Jews go?

Only the Israeli Jews can answer that question, and their answer has no authority to determine whether or not the Palestinians should acquiesce to anything less than their full liberation. Most white Rhodesians chose to go to the UK, Australia, South Africa or Latin America when the Bush War ended and Rhodesia became Zimbabwe. Most white Kenyans stayed in Kenya after Kenyan independence, at one point the Black Kenyan government made white man Richard Leakey the cabinet secretary and head of the civil service. Most white South Africans remained in South Africa after the legal end of apartheid and the institution of formal legal equality and liberal democracy within the South African state. Far too many Israelis will choose to fight for the Israeli state, at least in the near future. What they do when the Palestinian struggle is won is up to them. If they commit crimes against the Palestinians that make them unwelcome, whose responsibility is that?

I still believe peace in the Middle East requires justice in the Middle East.

Palestinian Resistance and the Crisis of Liberal Humanism

By Yanis Iqbal

Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, launched by Hamas on October 7, 2023, was a huge blow to the settler-colonial state of Israel: Al-Qassam Brigades captured 20 settlements and 11 military sites in merely a few hours. The attacks on Israeli civilian and military outposts destroyed the narcissistic sense of security associated with the carefully orchestrated narratives of Zionist dominance, surveillance and intelligence. In the words of Saree Makdisi, the breakout “smashed, hopefully once and for all, the very idea that the Palestinians can just be ignored, talked to, or talked about rather than talking for and representing themselves, their interests and their rights.” Earlier, it was Palestinians who had to explain their presence and prove their humanity. Now, it is they are setting the contours of the narrative. That’s why Zionists are terrified.

Unqualified solidarity with the anti-colonial violence of the Palestinian resistance has been hindered by liberal humanism, a bourgeois ideology that uses abstract slogans of peace to accelerate the genocide of Palestinians. There are two components in this ideology. First, the supreme value of human life is proclaimed as an unproblematic moral statement, which everyone has to support. While liberal humanists may admit that the Israeli occupation has given rise to Palestinian violence, they remain adamant that the death of individuals can never be justified. Judith Butler, for instance, criticizes those who blame Zionist apartheid for contemporary violence, saying that “nothing should exonerate Hamas from responsibility for the hideous killings they have perpetrated”.

In the above conception, violence is conceived as an infringement of the individual human body, whose sanctity is guaranteed by an unquestionable morality. The physiological and juridical body is innately exposed to physical, psychological and moral persecution. This kind of body has no positive project; it is entirely defined by its vulnerability to attacks, which requires protection. Christopher Caudwell traces this ethical ideology to the systemic logic of the capitalist economy. In the struggle against feudal fetters, the bourgeoisie saw freedom as the abolition of social organization, as the ability of every individual to pursue his own affairs and interests. This is articulated “in the absolute character of bourgeois property together with its complete alienability.”

On the ideological terrain, this gives rise to the “bourgeois dream – freedom as the absolute elimination of social relations,” by which is meant the absence of any restraint on the ownership, acquisition and alienation of private property. Here, private property isn’t considered as a social restraint that should be abolished, as the bourgeois project is inevitably bound to its particularistic interests. When assembled into ethics, the bourgeois dream translates into ultra-individualist pacifism, wherein the purity of the soul has to be guarded from the “heinous guilt” of the “sin” that is violence. Caudwell calls this “spiritual laissez-faire,” which uses the commercial mentality of capitalists – its concern with economic status – to proclaim the right of remaining preoccupied with one’s own soul.

When liberal humanists talk about mushy-mushy sentiments of individual human life, it is crucial to ask whether such an abstraction even exists in the horrors of Israeli barbarism. On one side, we have settlers, whose material security is guaranteed by an authoritarian state apparatus. On the other side, we have natives, whose wretchedness is maintained through incessant violence. In this scenario, I ask you: where is the pristine divinity that you label as “human life”? I can only see the all-too onerous divides constructed by Zionist settler-colonialism. Preaching a higher moral reconciliation beyond these divides, trying to organize a peaceful dialogue between two completely antagonistic camps, is a pathetic attempt that is bound to fail. In the open-air concentration camp that is Gaza, it is criminal to think that there is an ever-present and ready-at-hand reserve of morality that can calm the clamor of reality. We have to dive into reality, into its thundering materiality, if we want to shoulder the global responsibility of solidarity that has been forced upon us by the Palestinian resistance.

When an interviewer told Ghassan Kanafani that it would be better for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) “to stop the war to stop the death,” Kanafani said, “Maybe to you, not to us. To us, to liberate our country, to have dignity, to have respect, to have our mere human rights; these are something as essential as life itself.” By absolutizing life, liberal humanists ignore how such a life doesn’t exist in a settler-colonial society. The boundary between life and death is not clear-cut. Huey P. Newton said, “I tell the comrades you can only die once, so do not die a thousand times worrying about it.” Liberal humanists ignore how death already walks among the Palestinians. This allows them to construe life as a personal capacity, as a possibility, that can be realized through a dialogue between the colonizer and the colonized. For the colonized, life is never a possibility. Colonialism is the violent closure of possibilities for the colonized. In the words of Mehdi Amel: “It…became impossible to define the structure of the colonized countries’ specific trajectories of becoming except within the colonial relation. What was possible before this relation became impossible after. This is what is novel in the structure of these countries’ history.”

Kanafani dispels the naive hope of humanistic possibility in the colonial context, starkly portraying the inhuman impossibility of peace talks between Israel and Palestine as “a conversation between the sword and the neck”. There is no mention here of the personal, biographical details of an abstract human life; they are replaced by impersonal metaphors. Why so? Because the liberal focus on human life conveys an ambience of integrity and security in a situation that is marked by disorder and destruction. By preserving the edifice of individual, non-violent agency, liberal humanism says that violence is optional, it is a matter of condonation or denunciation. Kanafani explodes this pious optimism by depicting Zionism as a structurally violent tool that is indifferent to our subjective feelings. Between the sword and the neck, there lies no other possibility than death.

The elision of the historical depth of Zionist violence is a core component of liberal humanism. Slavoj Žižek denounced the “barbarism” of Hamas by writing that the choice is not between Palestinian anti-colonial violence and Zionist settler-colonial violence but “between fundamentalists and all those who still believe in the possibility of peaceful coexistence”. The ruse of humanist possibility allows him to frame violence as a simplistic choice, whereas the toothless policy of dialogue comes off as the superior, more complex option. According to Joseph Stalin: “the Communists regard the substitution of one social system for another, not simply as a spontaneous and peaceful process, but as a complicated, long and violent process.” Here, the order of valuation is reversed. It is violence which is accorded the dignity of historical complexity. It is liberal humanism which is faulted for uncritically regarding the peacefulness of human life as an immediate, incontrovertible fact.

Reading Žižek, one is reminded of people whom Vladimir Lenin called the “spineless hangers-on of the bourgeoisie with intellectualist pretensions”. These “tyrannized, shocked and scared” intellectuals “have been flung into consternation at the sight of this unprecedentedly acute class struggle, have burst into tears, forgotten all their premises and demand that we perform the impossible, that we socialists achieve complete victory without fighting against the exploiters and without suppressing their resistance.” Decolonization is imagined as a peaceful project that can be “introduced” into the settler-colonial society. Liberal humanists forget how decolonization is forged in the intensity of national liberation, in “the struggles, the exploiters’ gnashing of teeth, or their diverse attempts to preserve the old order, or smuggle it back through the window”. What accounts for this ignorance? It can be traced to the liberal humanist delusion that a higher unity might emerge from the Zionist machine, that there is an element that might immediately unify the colonial compartments, that there is a humanist sensibility that lies hidden beneath colonialism. There is no such sensibility. Colonial violence has to be broken.

Instead of framing resistance in terms of the individual metric of human life, we have to take recourse to discourses that stress the concrete realities of colonized society. By inflating human life into a mythical capacity, liberal humanism paradoxically reveals a fundamental disregard for the human realities present in concrete societies. In order to avoid this extra-human concept, we must begin from the anti-colonial struggle. Liberal humanists begin with spiritual wishes for peace, attempting to convince people of an ideal method of resistance that will involve the least amount of death and suffering. Marxism doesn’t have any place for such a higher level of reconciliation. Lenin notes that Marxists appraise resistance “according to the class antagonisms and the class struggle which find expression in millions of facts of daily life.” Freedom is not a ready-made skill that can be invoked “in an atmosphere of cajoling and persuasion, in a school of mealy sermons or didactic declamations”. Rather, it is formed in the “school of life and struggle,” wherein the interests of the colonizers are exposed to the counter-interests of the colonized. Lenin puts it expressively:

“The proletariat must do its learning in the struggle, and stubborn, desperate struggle in earnest is the only real teacher. The greater the extremes of the exploiters’ resistance, the more vigorously, firmly, ruthlessly and successfully will they be suppressed by the exploited. The more varied the exploiters’ attempts to uphold the old, the sooner will the proletariat learn to ferret out its enemies from their last nook and corner, to pull up the roots of their domination, and cut the very ground which could (and had to) breed wage-slavery, mass poverty and the profiteering and effrontery of the money-bags.”

In a colonial situation, resistance is evaluated not according to the ethical ideology of human life but according to the contribution it makes to the opening of historical possibilities. Amilcar Cabral notes, “Resistance is the following: to destroy one thing for the sake of constructing another thing.” This terse statement is instructive because liberal humanists think of colonialism as a malleable arrangement that can be re-jigged to allow for a better outcome. Cabral brooks none of this. He identifies the inertia of colonialism that has to be destroyed, not merely reformed, to emancipate the colonized. It is because liberal humanists think that the possibility for life remains intact under colonialism that they are unable to appreciate the fight for such a life waged by the colonized. That’s why it is so clarifying to read Cabral’s searing words on the objective of national liberation:

“At the end of the day, we want the following: concrete and equal possibilities for any child of our land, man or woman, to advance as a human being, to give all of his or her capacity, to develop his or her body and spirit, in order to be a man or a woman at the height of his or her actual ability. We have to destroy everything that would be against this in our land, comrades. Step by step, one by one if it be necessary – but we have to destroy in order to construct a new life…our work is to destroy, in our resistance, whatever makes dogs of our people – men or women – so as to allow us to advance, to grow, to rise up like the flowers of our land, whatever can make our people valued human beings.”

The Pogrom, Indians, and Genealogies of the Israeli Settler-Vigilante

By Gary Fields

Republished from Monthly Review.

On February 26th of this year, the world witnessed an outbreak of untold savagery in the Palestinian town of Huwara perpetrated against town residents by vigilantes from nearby Israeli settlements. During this mayhem, settlers set fire to cars, businesses, and homes of Huwara residents, and killed one resident by gunfire as Israeli soldiers looked on and even assisted the perpetrators in committing these crimes. So depraved was this settler rampage that the Israeli military commander in the West Bank, Yehuda Fuchs described it as a “pogrom.”

The choice of the term, “pogrom” to label the carnage committed by these Jewish settlers was poignant. History is replete with examples of such mayhem committed against Jews by anti-Semitic European Christians, but the irony of Jews animated by similar kinds of racist animus toward the Palestinian “other,” and enlisting the same types of brutality against innocent Palestinian civilians, was particularly jarring. Sadly, it is no secret that Israeli settler violence against Palestinians has become routine in the Palestinian West Bank, especially in rural areas where groups of settlers target Palestinian farmers, often at gunpoint, while uprooting and setting fire to Palestinian croplands, especially olive trees (Fields, 2012).

At the time of events in Huwara, Israeli settler violence, was already on the rise, emboldened if not encouraged outright by the most settler-friendly, and arguably fascist government in Israel’s history. Trending at three attacks per day in February, settler violence is now averaging 7-9 daily attacks as documented by the Israeli human rights group, Yesh Din—with nary a condemnation by Israeli officials, and virtually no effort by Israeli authorities to prevent and punish this criminality.

Currently, as this settler regime continues its vengeful bombardment of Gaza, settlers in the West Bank have become even more brazen in their brutality—with Huwara as a model. Palestinian houses and cars are now being routinely targeted, vandalized, and set ablaze, Palestinian croplands ripped up and burned, and bodily attacks against Palestinians, above all olive harvesters, appear daily on the inventory of settler misdeeds.

In just one of countless incidents since October 7th, settlers in the West Bank town of Qusra near Nablus, shot and killed three Palestinians, and the following day attacked the funeral murdering another two men, ramming their cars into the funeral procession before stopping and opening fire on the procession. It is now the olive harvest in Palestine and in town after town, olive harvesters seeking to pick the crop confront setters with guns who threaten these Palestinians and order them off their own lands. Arguably the most revealing of this vigilantism in terms of motivation, however, occurred in the small Bedouin village of Wadi Seeq 10 kilometers East of Ramallah where settlers succeeded in terrorizing the residents so completely that the latter abandoned the village, fearing for their safety and leaving behind houses, livestock, and crops. Settlers have now taken possession of the village in what is surely a signal of the end game in this sinister activity.

It is tempting to view this settler violence as something so macabre and sinister as to be unique. There is, however, quite another way of understanding the Israeli settler-vigilante. This actor is actually the modern-day mirror image of a certain settler counterpart from the American colonial past. This genealogy not only imbues the Israeli settler with an identity as an historical actor. It enables a different kind of question to be posed about Israel settler violence: In what way is the vigilantism of the Israeli settler embedded in past colonial settler societies, and who is the Israeli setter-vigilante as an historical actor?

The Israeli Settler as Colonial Actor

In most major media accounts of settler terror against Palestinians, Israeli settler-vigilantes invariably escape critical categorization beyond the moniker of “extremist.” Portrayals of these perpetrators of violence invariably focus on the theme of fanaticism while presenting these figures as unsavory if misguided fringe elements in Israeli society. Such characterizations are naïve and incomplete.

The Israeli settler is the modern-day counterpart of a recurrent figure in settler societies worldwide but one specific example from American colonial history stands out in connecting the colonial past to present day.

In the early 19th century, in the American Southeast, most notably in Georgia, groups of settlers, believing themselves to be the deserving inheritors of American bounty and the rightful stewards of land in America, took it upon themselves to rid the landscape of those who would stand in their way. Their mission was to evict from the land those already anchored to the landscape whom these settlers believed to be impediments to their imagined vision of themselves and their rightfully dominant place on the landscape as ordained by God. Their target was none other than the Indigenous inhabitants of the American Southeast.

Motivated by theories of entitlement to land in the tradition of John Locke, and sentiments of superiority deriving from destiny and God’s will, these 19th century brethren of today’s Israeli setters squatted on Indian lands, burned Indian homes and croplands, stole Indian livestock and horses, and harassed and even killed Indians who failed to vacate their properties. These settlers, however, did not spring to life from any spontaneous impulses of self-organization.

For years, federal and state government officials along with voices from the white intelligentsia had been advocating publicly for the removal of Indians from the land contributing to a formidable “removal discourse” in American political, legal, and cultural life. These voices not only tolerated, but applauded acts of vigilantism against Indian groups as a useful instrument for helping accomplish what they were ultimately seeking through politics and the law—the removal of Indians from the landscape. Settler violence was a complement to this political, legal, and cultural climate. There was, in effect, a groundswell of support for Indian removal from the land, and the transfer of this group across the Mississippi to lands in the West. Settler violence was destined to play an integral role. What were the drivers of this project of removal and its complement of settler vigilantism in evicting Indians from their land?

Land Grab, Slavery, and Indian Removal

In the wake of the victorious Revolution against England, American colonial settlers were poised to be free of restrictions on acquisition of Indian lands that the English Crown had imposed on them. Nevertheless, administrations from George Washington through John Quincy Adams retained similar prohibitions on private acquisition of Indian land. Settlers who had expected freedom, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness from the Revolution were furious at what they perceived as this betrayal.

Those in Georgia pressured the State into a “Compact” (1802) with the Federal Government in which the latter agreed to extinguish Indian title to lands in the State and reallocate the Indian lands to settlers. In the years that followed, settlers and state officials in Georgia, including the Georgia Congressional delegation as well as politicians from other federal and state jurisdictions, clamored for the Federal Government to act more decisively in extinguishing Indian title to land and evicting Indians from the landscape. Settlers, believed that they could hasten this process of displacement, and reap the bounties they believed themselves entitled to, by direct action on the land. What made conflict on the land seemingly more inevitable, however, and what elevated the role of settler violence against Indians in this conflict was an economy poised to transform not only the American South but the world economy as well.

In the early decades of the 1800s, following refinements in the cotton gin and newly developed hybrid strains of cotton, settlers, especially in Georgia, saw untold opportunities for cotton-growing with slave labor on plantations. Plantation agriculture, however, required land but much of the land in Georgia coveted by these would-be cotton growers was held by Creeks and Cherokees. Although the federal government was indeed securing land in Georgia from these tribes and reallocating it to settlers in the spirit of the Georgia Compact, settlers and politicians alike from the State demanded that the Government hasten the pace of these acquisitions and evict Indians from their lands. Finally, in 1828, settlers found a sympathetic voice in a fiery populist whose presidential campaign focused on a single issue—Indian removal. The candidate was Andrew Jackson.

A decorated army General who made a name for himself from campaigns against Indians, Jackson the populist also championed “states’ rights” when it came to Indian affairs. Following his election, Jackson in 1829 emphasized that if states themselves voted to extend their own laws over Indians, he would not enlist the power of the federal government to prevent it (Cave, 2003: 1332). Jackson was thus prepared to use both states’ rights and the federal government to remove Indians from their lands and transfer them to lands West of the Mississippi River.

Equally critical, Jackson was also amenable to direct action by settlers as a complement to an already well-established climate of fear associated with the campaign to remove Indians from their land and did not conceal his support for such efforts. In 1829, he famously signaled his advocacy of settler violence as a component of Indian removal when he suggested to a Congressman from Georgia who was irate at delays in extinguishing Indian title to land from the Georgia Compact: “Build a fire under them [Indians]. When it gets hot enough, they’ll move” (from Cave, 2003: 1339). Settlers who would build these fires had little reason to fear retribution from either federal or state authorities for their criminal actions.

In 1830, Jackson signed the legislation that defined his presidency and became the law of the land, the Indian Removal Act. Even before the Act became law, however, Cherokee and Creek Indians in Georgia, aware of the incendiary removal discourse within the halls of government and among the colonial population, alongside the violence being committed by settlers on Indian lands, began “voluntarily” removing themselves to lands in the West. In this sense, setter violence and intimidation was successful as a complement to the Law. One Cherokee chief, wrote to Andrew Jackson to complain that white settlers had invaded Indian country to “steal our property” and that federal soldiers in the area not only refused to help the Indians, but aided the vigilantes in hunting down and shooting Indians who resisted “as if…they had been so many wild dogs” (Cave, 2003: 1340).

The parallels with the actions of Israeli settlers are unmistakable. A highly charged legal and political climate, complemented by settler rampages on Indian lands in which authorities did nothing to stop these activities had rendered life impossible for Indians. The latter believed that they had little choice but to transfer themselves West and escape the violence.

Final Solution: Vigilantism and Transferring Populations

If settler violence prior to passage of the Indian Removal Act of 1830 was critical in creating splits among Creeks and Cherokees and compelling large numbers of these tribes to move West voluntarily, a vast array of vigilante groups, emboldened by passage of the Removal Law, emerged after 1830 to finish the task of evicting Indians from their lands. From horse thieves known as “The Pony Club,” to various paramilitary formations engaged in burning homes and crops and terrorizing Indians populations, settler vigilantism became even more widespread in the aftermath of the Removal Act as a weapon against tribespeople who tried to resist the Law and remain in their lands.

By 1838, even Cherokee who had resisted the Indian Removal Act and remained steadfast in their homes, conceded that the incessant settler rampages against them, along with inaction by the authorities, left them no choice but to accept removal and move West. What ensued under the auspices of the Federal Government was one of the sorriest criminal events in American history, the death march of 60,000 Indians from the Southeast to Oklahoma known as “Trail of Tears.”

In effect, settler violence had become an unofficial but acceptable expedient for carrying out a policy of forcing Indians from their land and insuring the promise of economic opportunity for Georgia’s white citizen-settlers (Pratt, 2022). In many ways, settler vigilantes in the West Bank are staking out a similar role for themselves in the model of Huwara and Wadi Seeq. These vigilantes are involved in an unmistakable effort to make life for Palestinians so unbearable that the latter imitate their Indian brethren from the American Southeast and leave their lands.

In the end, settler violence in the service of Indian Removal in Georgia reveals an unsettling resonance with the Israeli settler-vigilante of today. The pogrom in Huwara and the countless incidents of Israeli settler vigilantism, both urban and rural, are essentially historical mirror images of the White man’s vision in the American Southeast, differing in time and place but aligned in their mutual determination to drive the Indigenous from their lands. This symmetry emphasizes once again that Palestine is not alone in its encounter with settler colonialism and its impulses of dispossession and ethnic cleansing. From the West Bank and Gaza, these impulses to subdue and subjugate Indigenous people through the most hideous kinds of carnage are on full display for the world. It is incumbent upon the world to wake up to this lesson of history and stop the madness that is now fully transparent for all to see.

References

Cave, Alfred A. (2003). “Abuse of Power: Andrew Jackson and the Indian Removal Act of 1830.” The Historian. Vol. 65 (6): 1333-1353.

Fields, Gary (2012). “This is Our Land’: Collective Violence, Property Law, and Imagining the Geography of Palestine.” Journal of Cultural Geography. Vol 29 (3): 267-91.

Pratt, Adam J. (2022). Toward Cherokee Removal: Land, Violence, and the White Man’s Chance. Athens: The University of Georgia Press.

The Battle Of Algiers Shows How Decolonization Is A Bloody And Messy Affair

By Eamon Tracy

On October 7th a group of around 2,000 Hamas militants breached a security barrier on the Gaza border astonishing the world and forever changing Israel’s sense of security. In response to that brazen attack, Israel has ruthlessly targeted 2.3 million people in Gaza who faced a siege for weeks facing an endless barrage of bombardments - which have so far amassed more than 25 times the tonnage of ordnance dropped on Hiroshima - and are currently experiencing a ground invasion by the IDF. Now more than ever, The Battle of Algiers is worth remembering. Not only is it a searing testament to collective resistance against foreign occupation, but it is also a reminder that rebellions or decolonization are a bloody procedure unfortunately full of atrocities.

It has been 75 years since the Nakba incident permanently displaced 720,000 Palestinians carried out by Israelis which occurred upon the establishment of the Jewish State in 1948. Professor Rashid Khalidi writes in his superb book The 100 Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance 1917-2017,

WHAT HAPPENED IS, of course, now well known. By the summer of 1949, the Palestinian polity had been devastated and most of its society uprooted. Some 80 percent of the Arab population of the territory that at war’s end became the new state of Israel had been forced from their homes and lost their lands and property. At least 720,000 of the 1.3 million Palestinians were made refugees. Thanks to this violent transformation, Israel controlled 78 percent of the territory of former Mandatory Palestine, and now ruled over the 160,000 Palestinian Arabs who had been able to remain, barely one-fifth of the prewar Arab population. This seismic upheaval—the Nakba, or the Catastrophe, as Palestinians call it—grounded in the defeat of the Great Revolt in 1939 and willed by the Zionist state-in-waiting, was also caused by factors that were on vivid display in the story my father told me: foreign interference and fierce inter-Arab rivalries. These problems were compounded by intractable Palestinian internal differences that endured after the defeat of the revolt, and by the absence of modern Palestinian state institutions. The Nakba was only finally made possible, however, by massive global shifts during World War II.

Today, 2.3 million people have survived living in what some refer to as a concentration camp, or at the very least an open-air prison. 70 percent of the people residing in Gaza, which is 25 miles long and 5 miles wide, are refugees from the Nakba tragedy. Gaza is one of the most densely populated places on the planet. Most of the limited but necessary resources like electricity, gas, and water are controlled by the Israeli government. Around 70% of the well water is undrinkable. In Lowenstein’s excellent book The Palestine Laboratory published by Verso, he thoroughly details Israel’s local and global techno-fascistic rule. In the beginning, he bluntly states, Even the publisher of Haaretz, Israel’s most progressive, albeit Zionist, newspaper, admits it. “The product of Zionism, the State of Israel, is not a Jewish and democratic state but instead has become an apartheid state, plain and simple,” Amos Schocken wrote in 2021. And as Israel’s government moves further to the Right, while increasing Zionist settlements, Palestinians have been forced into a desperate corner.

Israel’s Zionist government was formed off the political project fostered by the activist Theodor Herzl. His project was founded on the principle of a Jewish supremacist state. At a fundamental level, this extends the colonial crisis beyond a territorial conflict into a larger issue that is both religious and ethnic. Over the decades of Israeli occupation a growing number of Ashkenazi Jews, from Europe or America immigrated to Palestine ultimately kicking more indigenous Palestinians off their lands. Some of these moments have been documented in viral videos, where settlers are seen callously taking grieving families’ homes.

After Algeria was suffering under French occupation for over one hundred and thirty years, The National Liberation Front, or FLN formed in 1954 as a paramilitary force to fight back. During colonial rule, a majority of the Arabs were treated as subjects with second-class status, and only a small minority able to transcend their lower status if they renounced their faith and culture. The FLN wanted a right to self-determination and self-governance following Islamic beliefs. Although religious, the ideology encompassed an inclusive Pan-Arab society. One which would not be prejudiced against any race or ethnicity. It even included the emancipation of Women and other values drawn from modernity. If you have a look at the daily lives and constraints of a citizen within Gaza, this second-rate status is all too familiar. 

An avowed Marxist, Italian director Gillo Pontecorvo wanted to capture the incredible true story of an occupied Algeria removing the yoke of colonial rule. Pontecorvo’s yearning for truth led him to film in a verite style with such stark realism, that it could fool a modern-day audience into thinking it is an old newsreel or documentary. Sharing screenwriting credit with writer Franco Solinas, the two Italians cared about international struggles and noticed their inherent underlying solidarity. In Sergio Corbucci’s The Mercenary, written by Solinas, his story centered on a Polish capitalist who has a road to Damascus moment where he teams up with a couple of proletarians and helps a revolt against the Mexican government during the 1910s. Pontecorvo and Solinas’s screenplay for Battle of Algiers was based in part on the memoirs of Yacef Saadi, who wrote them in prison after serving as a leader for the FLN.

The Battle of Algiers begins in 1957 where a group of revolutionaries are meeting their end. It opens with an Algerian man who is still recovering, having just been tortured by the French military. Enter, the commander Col. Mathieu (played by Jean Martin, the only professional actor in the entire cast) instructs the man to put on a French uniform. With tears in his eyes, the man does so begrudgingly. In the next scene, Col Mathieu is speaking to the revolutionaries led by Ali who are hidden in a wall. They are told to give up and the story cuts back to 1954.

Before the Algerian revolution was sparked, Ali was a hustler wielding cards to sucker unsuspecting French citizens. Subsequently getting into an altercation, he is sent upriver on a five-month stint in prison, where he witnesses an inmate being executed by guillotine. Upon his release, Ali is more than ready for revenge. In the wake of the attempted assassination of a French police officer being sabotaged, Ali discovers it was a test orchestrated by FLN leader El-Hadi Jaffar. Saadi Yucef who plays El-Hadi Jaffar and Samia Kerbash who plays Fathia were both actual members of the FLN. Upon passing this dangerous test, Ali is accepted into the organization. Then he is forced to navigate a world of violence, traitors, and a nation’s youth being exposed to traumatic experiences or mistakenly caught in the crossfire. His journey is nothing short of compelling - as are most of the fearless fighters showcased on screen. The targeted killings of military officers and police led the occupying force to inflict unbridled state-sanctioned pain against the Algerian rebels and noncombatants alike. In one scene a car full of French soldiers places a bomb outside a residential building killing scores who were sleeping inside their beds. Col Mathieu looks to ratchet up the unrest so he can give the French forces an excuse to carry out even more brutal retribution.

When exploring similar historical events, two of the foremost intellectuals W.E.B. Dubois and C.L.R. James both acknowledged the atrocities carried out by the likes of John Brown during his uprising that preceded the Civil War, and the Haitians during their Revolution against the French. Nat Turner, who inspired John Brown, was similarly a religious fanatic, whose gospel was also rooted in blood and brimstone. Both men were more than willing to take lives and a large number of innocent civilians were killed in the process. But Turner was enslaved and dehumanized along with other Blacks who were subjugated to some of the worst conditions known to humanity. His blind rage was not necessarily admirable, but it was understandable. And as Turner’s Rebellion killed around sixty people, two times as many Blacks were killed in response. Most of them uninvolved with Turner’s actions were nonetheless horribly executed by White mobs. In James’s Black Jacobins detailing the Haitian Revolution, the racism and extraordinary number of mass murders were appalling. In an even crueler twist of fate, Haiti has been ordered to pay France billions in reparations due to revenue lost for their slaves and colony.

Pontecorvo and Solina displayed an understanding of the consequences when targeting civilians going about their business in a public space. Especially in the iconic scene where a group of women remove their hijabs before cutting their hair - changing their appearance to look more like their European occupiers. Armed with explosives, they are instructed to blow up a cafe full of French civilians. It is a tough scene to watch yet these guerilla bombing campaigns of terror undoubtedly turned the course to the FLN’s strategic favor. These attacks combined with labor strikes were an attempt to hit the security and economic sectors hardest while promoting solidarity.

Since the blockade was placed on Gaza in 2007, only under extenuating circumstances, are Palestinians allowed to leave the open-air prison. Reports of cancer patients and other preventable diseases have led to unnecessary deaths that could have been avoided if they were allowed to travel to clinics outside Gaza. And a majority of young people have never experienced any life outside the towering 21-foot-high walls that surround them, chock full of surveillance, AI systems, snipers, or remote-controlled devices that can shoot citizens, as well as drones hovering overhead every moment. These capabilities are laid out, once again from The Palestine Laboratory,

The IDF uses extensive facial recognition with a growing network of cameras and mobile phones to document every Palestinian in the West Bank. Starting in 2019, Israeli soldiers used the Blue Wolf app to capture Palestinian faces, which were then compared to a massive database of images dubbed the “Facebook for Palestinians.” Soldiers were told to compete by taking the most photos of Palestinians and the most prolific would win prizes.48 The system is most extreme in the city of Hebron, where facial recognition and numerous cameras are used to monitor Palestinians, including at times in their homes, instead of the extreme Jewish settlers living there, who routinely express genocidal threats against the Palestinians. The IDF claimed that the program was designed to “improve the quality of life for the Palestinian population.” In 2022, Israel installed a remote-controlled system for crowd control in Hebron, a tool with the ability to fire tear gas, sponge-tipped bullets, and stun grenades. It was created by the Israeli company Smart Shooter, which claims to successfully use artificial intelligence when finding targets. Smart Shooter is a regular presence on the international defense show circuit and has sold its equipment to more than a dozen countries. Blue Wolf was a smaller version of the Wolf Pack database, which contained the personal details of virtually every Palestinian in the West Bank, including educational status, photos, security level, and family history. Soldiers in the West Bank were instructed in 2022 to enter the details and photos of at least fifty Palestinians into the Blue Wolf system every shift and were not allowed to end their shift until they did so.

In The Battle of Algiers, when a group of French civilians joyfully letting loose at a dance hall is suddenly cut short by an explosion inside the club, it was hard not to see the comparison between October 7th. On that day a music festival full of carefree civilians who consciously or unconsciously participated in an active occupation became both crossfire by the IDF and the intended targets by members of Hamas. Made up of mainly young men, who perhaps were unleashing decades of pent-up aggression. The actions are admonishable, the loss of innocent lives is tragic, and the horrific consequences are comprehensible.

Israel’s catastrophic response exposes how the manufactured so-called rules-based order on which there is a broad permissive framing of what are considered war crimes, historically leaves imperialists like them unpunished. Just the other day, National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby, when asked if the double-bombing of a refugee camp that killed one hundred and ninety-five people constitutes a war crime, said, “I'm not in a position to say if it is or it isn't”.

Because it does not fit the model of imperialist or colonialist propaganda, The Battle of Algiers is rarely shown on TV or streaming beyond the Criterion Channel. Thus, most modern audiences have not seen Pontecorvo’s masterpiece. And being in French, with subtitles filmed in black and white does not help it reach American viewers. But interestingly, The Battle of Algiers is one of the few films in Oscar history to be nominated in two separate non-consecutive years. Originally it was a foreign film nominee in 1966, and then again it was nominated for screenplay and direction in 1968. Furthermore, It was screened by the Pentagon in 2003 for officials and civilians to showcase the challenges of occupying a country that wanted anything but.

Following civil wars in the 80s against various Islamist groups, the FLN regained control of the country in 2002. To this day Algeria mostly remains a testament to a modern society and thriving culture - not being occupied by foreign powers trying to extract valuable resources and labor. Whereas Hamas was propped up by the Israeli government to undermine and destabilize the Palestinian Liberation Organization or the PLO. As usual with these Faustian arrangements - they come back to haunt you. Hamas is a religious fundamentalist organization with troublesome elements, yet it is also the only security force the Palestinians have to rely on. We do not need more religious fundamentalist countries but it should be up to the indigenous peoples to decide their future. The best hope we have right now is a ceasefire - and ideally a peaceful resolution that specifically addresses the decades-long, illegal Israeli occupation.

Germany Has a Historic Debt to the Palestinian People

By Marcel Cartier

The crimes of German fascism are of a magnitude so enormous that they are almost difficult to comprehend. Without question the most heinous in its breadth was the Holocaust, the systematic attempt by the Nazi regime to annihilate the Jewish people that ultimately led to the mass murder of around two-thirds of the European Jewish population. It is only correct that today’s German state would see itself as having a historic responsibility towards Jews, both at home and abroad. This point should be indisputable. However, there are divergent positions on what the nature of this responsibility should entail.

For the modern German state, being responsible means seeing the State of Israel as the primary representative of the Jewish people. It means muting any serious criticism towards Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. Germany refuses to retrospectively assess how the country was established through ethnic cleansing, and certainly doesn’t actively challenge today’s status quo in which an system of occupation and apartheid prevails.

That solidarity with the self-professed Jewish state today goes beyond placing Israeli flags outside of official government buildings, where they have flown in the aftermath of October 7. It also explains why it was inevitable that Chancellor Olaf Scholz would end up in Tel Aviv just over a week later to express his condolences and offer an increase in military support, saying Germany’s place in hard times was “by Israel’s side”. The German state’s notion of “Never Again Ever” means ensuring Israel’s stability and security as a Jewish homeland. It sees expressions of anti-Zionism as inherently anti-Semitic.

Contrary to this view espoused by the German government is that Israel does not necessarily represent the Jewish people. This perspective either holds that Zionism as an ideology is inherently racist and rooted in settler-colonialism, or at the very least that the State of Israel today is an entity that engages in dispossession and brutal oppression of the Palestinian people. This view places a distinction between critique of the Israeli state and anti-Semitism.

This position allows Jews themselves a sense of agency in being able to choose to either support Israel’s actions, or to stand firmly against the crimes that are carried out in their name. For those who agree with the latter, it means “Never Again Ever” applies equally to all scenarios that take on genocidal proportions, not merely to those claiming to safeguard the Jewish people.

Tough Times Opposing War Crimes in Berlin

These are difficult times in Berlin if standing up for Palestinian liberation – or even simply international law – are on your agenda.

Just after the bombs began being rained down on Gaza, Bernie Sanders visited Berlin to great fanfare. However, not pleased with his presence was the Social Democratic Party’s co-leader Saskia Esken, who cancelled an appearance alongside him. Why? Because he had the nerve to make a simple, humanitarian statement: “The targeting of civilians is a war crime, no matter who does it.” Apparently, Sanders – perhaps the most famous Jewish political figure in the western world - was displaying anti-Semitism by aligning with the Geneva Convention.

Demonstrations in support of Palestine, or those merely calling for a humanitarian pause or ceasefire, have been banned. In the German mainstream media, these protests have been billed as the work of “Hamas lovers” or “Jew haters.” In some cases, protests are literally banned minutes before they are set to begin, when hundreds have already assembled. When it comes to calling out war crimes, the German state has decided that the right to assembly that is enshrined in the country’s Basic Law can simply be ignored.

A cursory look at these illegal demonstrations over the last two weeks reveals that many Jewish organisations have also endorsed and actively participated in them, among them the Jewish Bund and Juedische Stimme. In fact, police have hauled off Jewish activists and arrested them, because Jews are not granted the agency to espouse their positions.

For those who are Palestinian, the ban on demonstrations by Berlin’s authorities means a complete targeting of their identity. When a German police officer arrests somebody for wearing a kuffiyeh, or schools in the capital ban the Palestinian scarf, they are saying the Palestinian identity is that of a terrorist.  

Palestinians are being threatened with deportation if they are proven to be supporters of Hamas, but also Samidoun - the Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network associated with the Palestinian left (both organisations have now been banned). This means the possibility of Palestinians being uprooted not once (from their historic homeland), but twice (now from Germany).

The Other Germany and the Palestine Liberation Organisation

Although Germany’s post-war history has been shaped by attempts to deal with the crimes of the Nazi regime, this hasn’t always meant that German state entities have taken the view that the current state does towards Israel. The history of the German Democratic Republic, or East Germany, offers a very different perspective.

First off, it’s necessary to understand that the GDR was created principally as an anti-fascist state, something that was considered even more important than the construction of socialism. Its top priority was indeed “Never Again Ever,” which is why a much more robust de-Nazification process happened there than it did in the western part of the country.  

The new Federal Republic of Germany set up by the U.S., Britain and France became a country where Nazi ideologues were not only allowed to join the government, but were actively sought out for participation in the Cold War. On the other side, much of East Germany’s leadership knew first-hand what is felt like to be hounded and targeted by the Nazis – we should remember that the first concentration camps, after all, were set up for communists, and that they were accused of being part of the global “Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy”.

In 1948, the newly created Socialist Unity Party that was operating in the Soviet occupation zone that would become East Germany the next year, backed the creation of Israel, saying "We consider the foundation of a Jewish state an essential contribution enabling thousands of people who suffered greatly under Hitler’s fascism to build a new life".

Once it became clear that the new Israeli state was actually a reactionary entity that refused the right of return for the 700,000 refugees it had created, and enacted martial law against the Palestinians who remained, the SED leadership changed its tune. It reverted to the position long-held by the communist movement in regards to Zionism, which is that it was an expression of a reactionary, bourgeois nationalism that always sought the patronage of colonial and imperialism powers.

In 1973, the GDR set up official relations with the Palestine Liberation Organisation of Yasser Arafar. That same year, it had supplied Syria with weaponry for use in the Yom Kippur War against Israel. In 1975, East Germany voted in favor of a UN resolution condemning Zionism as a form of racism and racial discrimination.

It is not merely coincidental that the PLO was supported by East Germany at the same time that another crucial liberation movement against minority rule, that of Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress, was also being given support from East Germany. The battle against apartheid was inextricably linked by the East German leadership to that of opposing settler colonialism in Palestine. This was all happening at the same time that West Germany held deep relations with the racist South African government, branding those who rebelled against this rule as “terrorists” - just as the Palestinians are referred to today. Given the similarities in their struggles, it’s no small wonder why Nelson Mandela once proclaimed upon the end of apartheid that, “our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.”

This history of the rival German states that existed for 40 years shows that there was no consensus on the question of whether Zionism could be seen as representing the legitimate aspirations of Jews as a whole.

Germany’s Dual Responsibility

It should be evident that today’s Germany has in fact not learned the lessons of history. It’s selective application of “Never Again Ever” is symbolic, but ultimately meaningless. It is complicit in Israeli war crimes, and those who espouse anti-fascist politics have a responsibility to stand against it. To fight against anti-Semitism should also mean fighting against imperialism, colonialism, and all forms of racial discrimination.

As the creation of Israel was agreed to by world powers against the backdrop of Nazi Germany’s attempt at exterminating the Jewish people, this means that the consequences – including the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian Arab masses from what became Israel – should also be laid at Germany’s feet. It means that not only does Germany have a responsibility to the Jewish people – it also has a responsibility towards the Palestinian people. Simply put, Palestinians should not have to suffer for the crimes of Hitlerite fascism, whether at home or here in Germany.